The anatomy of a hero

The first word of Edgar Vincent’s biography of Nelson is not encouraging. It is ‘Jump!’, which is what a sailor is supposed to have shouted to young Horatio as he boarded the boat that was to take him out to his first ship. How does Mr Vincent know that the sailor shouted that? He might have said, ‘Mind the gap.’ Happily this is the only invented dialogue and only occasionally does the author let his imagination loose in describing how somebody walked, or seabirds wheeled, or what a gun-deck looked like after receiving a broadside. He uses colloquialisms, too: spin, networking and icon, but, in the context, these are appropriate.

Almost all other quotations come from printed sources – particularly the voluminous Nicolas and Morrison collections – but this is not to say that there is little that is new. Most will come fresh to his readers and a little documentary research adds spice, such as Countess Spencer’s worries about Nelson: ‘The dear little creature puts me in a fidgit about his health’, from the Althorp Papers in the British Library. But it is a pity that he has not quoted from the Fanny Nelson letters, which the National Maritime Museum bought at Sotheby’s last year.

There is such a richness of material because Nelson was a hero to his contemporaries and his letters were kept, his sayings remembered. A tireless letter-writer, he was a phrase-maker (‘I am all soul and sensibility’) and handy with a quip, as when warning a sporting friend of the approaching French with, ‘If they come up the Mediterranean and you have a mind for a shooting party, come with your frigates.’

The Nelson industry is gearing up for the bicentenary of Trafalgar in two years’ time and more biographies are on the way.