The Crimean War

by

Tai-Chun Ho

• LAST MODIFIED: 20 August 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0216

Introduction

The Crimean War (1853–1856)—in which Britain forged an alliance with France to defend the Ottoman Empire (later joined by Sardinia-Piedmont) against Russia—is the only major European conflict between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. It is often dubbed the first “modern war” or “media war”: the first to be reported by correspondents, illustrated by artists, and recorded by photographers in war zones. The armed conflict had a global reach and fighting occurred on several fronts, although the British media coverage was preoccupied with the allied campaign on the Crimean Peninsula. Newspapers were instrumental in shaping mid-Victorian reimaginings of and engagements with the events unfolding in the Crimean theatre of war. For the first time the British reading public could learn of the condition of the army and observe the government’s military campaign as it was being waged abroad. By exposing to public scrutiny soldiers’ sufferings caused by the mismanagement of the war, the Times correspondents and leader writers sparked a furore against the aristocratic leaders (which toppled the Aberdeen government in February 1855), prompted debates about the war, and generated a range of civilian responses to the conflict (including Florence Nightingale’s nursing mission and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”). As the unprecedented newspaper coverage of the campaign emerged as a dominant form of war representation, it in turn influenced the production and reception of literature and art at the time. The demand for news from the East and the need to honor and commemorate the heroics of the combatants, doctors, and nurses involved in the campaign fueled the publication of soldiers’ letters, eyewitness accounts, travel writing, and the auto/biographies of Crimean heroes and heroines. Yet the dominance of journalism also placed pressure upon established literary forms. For mid-Victorian writers and artists, the newspaper text often served as a source of anxiety and frustration on the one hand, and of creativity and political intervention on the other. Until the 1990s, the study of the Crimean War mainly attracted the attention of military historians whose work narrowly focused on the origins, diplomacy, strategies, and campaigns of the conflict. Since the 2000s scholars across disciplines have adopted an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating the various strands of the military-, art-, and media-histories, as well as gendered and “racial” histories of the belligerent nations in order to examine the conflict’s modernity, impact, legacies, and afterlives. As Crimean War studies flourish and expand, new territories such as the global perspectives of the conflict and the relationship between race and empire have also been explored (as in the case of Mary Seacole, who has been recovered in recent decades as a Crimean heroine and as a national exemplar). This article documents a rich and growing body of work that addresses the military, literary, and cultural aspects of the Crimean War.

General Overviews

This section is intended to offer a selection of online and printed texts which serve as good starting points for students and scholars approaching the history, literature, and various facets of the Crimean War. Tate 2019, which explores the role played by representations of war throughout society, provides a concise and highly accessible guide to the Crimean and Baltic campaigns, as well as the impact of the conflict itself. It is usefully supplemented by Anderson 1967, which analyzes the impact of the conflict on British political and economic policy. Adams 2009 offers a short account of models of heroism in mid-Victorian literary works. Richardson 2013 presents an account of the failed attempts to revive or appropriate classical legacies during the conflict. Bates, et al. 2015 features open access articles on military, medical, and cultural dimensions of the conflict; BRANCH contains a number of open access articles on the Crimean War; and Mawby 2022 offers a concise introduction to the works of women writers who traveled to the Crimea.

• Adams, James Eli. “Crimea and the Forms of Heroism.” In A History of Victorian Literature. By James Eli Adams, 156–164. Chichester, UK: James Wiley & Sons, 2009.

  DOI: 10.1002/9781444305944

  Discusses how Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1857), Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855) responded to government incompetence in the Crimea; and how different kinds of heroism were reimagined in Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1853); Diana Mulock’s John Halifax, Gentleman (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1856); and G. A. Lawrence’s Guy Livingstone (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1857).

• Anderson, Olive. A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics during the Crimean War. New York: St Martins, 1967.

  A somewhat dated, yet still valuable homefront study of the impact of the war on constitutional government, radicalism, reform movements, and economic policy.

• Bates, Rachel, Holly Furneaux, and Alastair Massie, eds. Special Issue: Charting the Crimean War: Contexts, Nationhood, Afterlives. 19 Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 20 (2015).

  Contains an introduction; three articles reassessing how the conflict was fought by Britain, France, and Russia; five articles dealing with various cultural representations (the Queen, the war-broken soldier, the Balaclava bugle, Captain Hedley Vicar, and the fall of Sebastopol); and one article discussing the popularity and legacies of the conflict. Available online.

• BRANCH.

  Created by Dino Franco Felluga, this innovative online website provides a compilation of free, accessible articles by Victorian scholars and features a number of articles on topics within the Crimean War.

• Mawby, Darcie. “The Crimean War.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. Edited by Lesa Scholl and Emily Morris, 353–358. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

  DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-78318-1_353

  Highlights the intervention of women’s writing as a distinguishing feature of the conflict, introducing a number of soldiers’ wives and female nurses who published their experiences during and after the conflict.

• Richardson, Edmund. Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of Antiquity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139208598

  Chapter 3 tells the stories of failed attempts to revive the ideals of the ancient world and to engage with antiquity during the Crimean War. It focuses on the army doctor and archaeologist Duncan McPherson, who wished to find classical remains in the Crimea, and the revolutionary Robert Brough, who appropriated the legacy of antiquity in his political work to challenge the aristocracy.

• Tate, Trudi. A Short History of the Crimean War. London: I.B. Tauris, 2019.

  DOI: 10.5040/9781788316347

  Drawing on a range of sources, “the newspapers, memoirs, poetry, and photography, as well as eyewitness reports in letters and diaries” (p. 3), Tate examines the powerful, yet ambivalent cultural representations of the Crimean conflict, relates Britain’s military campaign in the Crimea and naval battles in the Baltic, and highlights both the modern and old-fashioned elements of the conflict.