How we beat Napoleon

It feels the height of ingratitude to blame Jane Austen for anything, but it probably is her fault that most people seem to think that the only impact that the Napoleonic War had on British life was to bring Mr Wickham and the militia into the lives of the Bennet girls. It is certainly true that the outcome of Persuasion revolves around the huge amount of prize money that a frigate captain could make out of the war, but with the exception of a few teasing remarks from Henry Tilney at Catherine Morland’s expense in Northanger Abbey you could read all Jane Austen’s works and still not know that she had spent virtually the whole of her adult life in a country locked in a war that  was ‘total’ in the same sense that the two world wars of the 20th century were total wars.

It did not matter whether you were rich and subject to new taxes or poor and subject to the press gangs, whether you were waist-deep in the cold waters off the Hebrides farming kelp or shopping for ribbons in Meryton, whether you had been driven off the land to make way for sheep or bankrupted by a government contract, war and the economic consequences of war touched every life. ‘The whole air was filled with war,’ James Nasmyth, the great Victorian engineer, would recall of his childhood in Edinburgh more than 60 years later:

Troops and bands paraded the streets.  Recruits were sent away as fast as they could be drilled. Everybody was full of excitement. When the great guns boomed forth from the castle, the people were first startled. Then they were surprised and anxious. There had been battle and victory! Who had fallen? was the first thought in many minds. Where had the battle been, and what was the victory? Business was suspended.