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Moss Adams Heart Disease in infants Children and Adolescents Including the Fetus and Young Adult Robert E. Shaddy
Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature is a comprehensive study of the family in Anglophone children’s and Young Adult literature from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Written by intellectual leaders in the field from the UK, the Americas, Europe, and Australia, this collection of essays explores the significance of the family and of familial and quasi-familial relationships in texts by a wide range of authors, including the Grimms, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Rudyard Kipling, Enid Blyton, Judy Blume, Jaqueline Wilson, Malorie Blackman, Melvin Burgess, J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, and others. Author-based and critical survey essays explore evolving depictions of LGBTQIA+ and BAME families; migrant and refugee narratives; the popular tropes of the orphan protagonist and the wicked stepmother; sibling and intergenerational familial relationships; fathers and fatherhood; the anthropomorphic animal and surrogate family; and the fractured family in paranormal and dystopian YA literature. The breadth of essays in Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature encourages readers to think beyond the outdated but culturally privileged ‘nuclear family’ and is a vital resource for students, academics, educators, and practitioners.
Eleanor Spencer is Principal of Janet Clarke Hall at the University of Melbourne, where she is also an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communications, teaching on the English and Theatre Studies programme. She is the recipient of a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship and was Visiting Fellow in the Department of English at Harvard University. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first-century British and American poetry, and children’s and Young Adult fiction. Her recent publications include the New Casebook on American Poetry since 1945 (2016), and essays in Sylvia Plath in Context (2019) and A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry 1960−2015 (2020).
Jade Dillon Craig is Associate Professor of Children’s Literature and Young Learners at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. Her research interests include children’s literature, Alice studies, visual texts, cinema tography, and gender studies. She has published book chapters in volumes with Palgrave Macmillan, Peter Lang, and McFarland. Her most recent publication features in Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research. Jade is a project leader for eBLINK (engelske bildebøker i norske klasserom) and co-founder of the Children’s Literature Education and Research group at NTNU (with Alyssa Magee Lowery).
Children’s Literature and Culture
Jack Zipes, Founding Series Editor
Philip Nel, Series Editor, 2011-2018
Kenneth Kidd and Elizabeth Marshall, Current Series Editors
Founded by Jack Zipes in 1994, Children’s Literature and Culture is the longest-running series devoted to the study of children’s literature and culture from a national and international perspective. Dedicated to promoting original research in children’s literature and children’s culture, in 2011 the series expanded its focus to include childhood studies, and it seeks to explore the legal, historical, and philosophical conditions of different childhoods. An advocate for scholarship from around the globe, the series recognizes innovation and encourages interdisciplinarity. Children’s Literature and Culture offers cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections considering topics such as gender, race, picturebooks, childhood, nation, religion, technology, and many others. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Next-Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction
The Seeds of Memory Mateusz Świetlicki
Age in David Almond’s Oeuvre
A Multi-Method Approach to Studying Age and the Life Course in Children’s Literature
The right of Eleanor Spencer and Jade Dillon Craig to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-1-032-21704-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-21709-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-26966-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003269663
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For Stephen and Wolfe
ES
For Marcus, my love
JDC
1 Where Are They Now? Manifestations of (Monstrous)
2 Perspectives on Fathers and Fatherhood within Children’s Literature: A Case Study of Katya Balen’s ‘October, October’
RICHARD CHARLESWORTH
3 ‘Shrewd sound-hearted maiden aunts’: The Aunt Figure in Children’s Literature
JANE SUZANNE CARROLL
4 ‘What’s the point of grandpa?’: Grandparents in Children’s
VANESSA JOOSEN
14 Queering the Family in Young Adult Literature: Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End, Familial Disruption, and the Space of the Home
ANGEL DANIEL MATOS
15 Lost Boys, Found Boys: Masculinities and Families in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter
ELEANOR SPENCER
16 Unhomely Domestic Spaces in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline
JADE DILLON CRAIG
17 Apple to Pomegranate: Vampires and Families in the Twilight Saga
LISA NEVÁREZ
18 Breeders, Rebels, and Warriors: The Oppression of Adolescent Mothers in the Young Adult Dystopias The Lone City Trilogy and Gather the Daughters
Contributors
Malin Alkestrand is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Linnaeus University. Her doctoral research explored how fantasy can be used to teach about democracy, human rights, and multiculturalism. She leads the Centre for Childhood Research in Literature, Language, and Learning. She is the author of Mothers and Murderers: Adults’ Oppression of Children and Adolescents in Young Adult Dystopian Literature (Makadam, 2021).
Evelyn Arizpe is Professor of Children’s Literature at the University of Glasgow and Leader of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree programme ‘Children’s Literature, Media and Culture’. Her research examines picturebooks alongside themes of migration, conflict, and peacebuilding. She is President of the International Research Society on Children’s Literature (IRSCL).
Jane Suzanne Carroll is Ussher Associate Professor in Children’s Literature at Trinity College Dublin where she is a co-director of the MPhil in Children’s Literature. Her teaching and research interests centre on landscape, spatiality, and material culture in children’s fiction. She has published on Susan Cooper, Terry Pratchett, J.R.R. Tolkien, M.R. James, and Jules Verne. Her latest book, British Children’s Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption, 1850-1914 was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.
Richard Charlesworth is an Assistant Head Teacher and Teaching and Enhancement Lead of English at a primary school in West London. He has a masters in Children’s Literature from Goldsmiths, University of London and is passionate about the development of a more creative English curriculum in schools. He is the London representative for the UK Literacy Association (UKLA). He has spoken at various conferences exploring creative writing, picture fiction, using graphic novels in the classroom, and reading for pleasure.
Contributors xi
Jade Dillon Craig is Associate Professor of Children’s Literature and Young Learners at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. Her research interests include children’s literature, Alice studies, visual texts, cinematography, and gender studies. She has published book chapters in volumes with Palgrave Macmillan, Peter Lang, and McFarland. Her most recent publication features in Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research. Jade is a project leader for eBLINK (engelske bildebøker i norske klasserom) and co-founder of the Children’s Literature Education and Research group at NTNU (with Alyssa Magee Lowery).
Macarena García-González is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Incoming Fellow at University of Glasgow. She investigates the shifting relationships between literature, culture, and childhood working with transdisciplinary concepts and methods. She is co-editor of Children’s Literature in Education and member of the executive board of the IRSCL.
Elisabeth Gruner is Professor of English at the University of Richmond and past President of the Children’s Literature Association. Her publications include Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction (Palgrave, 2019) and research on Victorian and Edwardian literature and contemporary children’s literature, in a variety of journals.
Blanka Grzegorczyk teaches at the University of Cambridge and Manchester Metropolitan University and is the author of Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2015) and Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2020).
Vanessa Joosen is Professor of English Literature and Children’s Literature at the University of Antwerp. There she leads the project ‘Constructing Age for Young Readers’, funded by the European Research Council, and organises the annual Children’s Literature Summer School. She combines research on children’s literature and fairy tales with theories and methods from age studies, gender studies, translation studies, and digital humanities. She is the author of, among others, Adulthood in Children’s Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018) and edited the volume Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media (University Press of Mississippi, 2018).
Angel Daniel Matos is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. His research and teaching interests include queer young adult literature and media, teen cinema, video games, Latinx cultures, and theorisations of time and space. His work
primarily explores the queer possibilities and limitations in texts and media created for teen audiences. He has published articles in Children’s Literature, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and Research in the Teaching of English. He is the co-editor of Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures with Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula Massood (Duke University Press, 2021).
Alyson Miller is Senior Lecturer at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, where she teaches writing and literature. Her research interests include prose poetry, gender and feminism, dystopian literature, and post-atomic memorialisation. She is a co-editor of The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections (Lexington Books, 2018) and the author of Haunted by Words: Scandalous Texts (Peter Lang, 2013).
Lisa Nevárez is Professor of English at Siena College. Her publications include the edited collection The Vampire Goes to College: Essays on Teaching with the Undead (McFarland, 2013) and articles on the Twilight Saga and vampires in Latinx graphic novels, as well as Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In and King’s ‘Salem’s Lot. She is a cochair of the Vampire Studies Area at the Popular Culture Association.
Phyllis Ramage has worked in libraries for over 20 years and currently works as a school librarian in Islington, London, UK. From 2009-2021 she was an Associate Lecturer with The Open University, teaching on the Children’s Literature module. After gaining a Bachelors in Information Studies at the University of North London in 2000, she studied Masters degrees in Children’s Literature at University of Surrey and English at The Open University.
Karen Sands-O’Connor is British Academy Global Professor of Children’s Literature at Newcastle University. She is an internationally recognised expert on Black British children’s literature. She works with British children’s book organisations, including Seven Stories, CLPE, CILIP and the British Library on racial diversity in children’s books. In 2022, she published British Activist Authors Addressing Children of Colour (Bloomsbury) and Diversity and Inclusion in Young Adult Publishing, 1960-1980 (Cambridge Elements).
Claudia Schwabe is Professor of German at Utah State University. She is the author of Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Pop Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2019), editor of The Fairy Tale and Its Uses in Contemporary New Media and Popular Culture (2016), and co-editor of New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales (University Press of Colorado, 2016).
Joseph Michael Sommers is Professor of English at Central Michigan University where his research interests include the work of Neil Gaiman, children’s and Young Adult literature, popular culture, and illustrated texts (comics, graphic novels, and picture books). He is the author of The American Comic Book (Grey House Press, 2014) and Conversations with Neil Gaiman (University Press of Mississippi, 2017). He is Editor of Children’s Literature Quarterly and a devoted husband and father of two.
Eleanor Spencer is Principal of Janet Clarke Hall at the University of Melbourne, where she is also an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communications, teaching on the English and Theatre Studies programme. She is the recipient of a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship and was Visiting Fellow in the Department of English at Harvard University. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first-century British and American poetry, and children’s and Young Adult fiction. Her recent publications include the New Casebook on American Poetry since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and essays in Sylvia Plath in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and the Blackwell Companion to British and Irish Poetry 1960-2015 (Wiley Blackwell, 2020).
Nicholas Tucker is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. A former teacher and then an educational psychologist, he lectured in educational psychology, cultural studies, and children’s literature. Tucker is a regular broadcaster and contributes to The Guardian, The Independent, The New Statesman, and The Times. He is the author of The Child and the Book: Psychological and Literary Exploration (Cambridge University Press, 1981; 1990) and Family Fictions; Contemporary Classics of Children’s Literature, with Nikki Gamble (Continuum, 2001).
Kay Waddilove has research interests in the twentieth and twenty-first-century popular writers for children, with a focus on domestic narratives. She has published on Enid Blyton, Noel Streatfeild and M.E. Allan, on gender issues in children’s texts; the societal position of women; career novels for girls; food in children’s literature; and representations of motherhood.
Foreword
Ann Alston
The family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape.
—Dodie Smith
Smith’s observation draws on the ever-present conundrum of family: it is something we are simultaneously drawn to and away from, and it seems we can never quite work out which way to run. Indeed, when it comes to family, many of the phrases, quotations, and cliches that come to mind nod to this conflict, from the desire to stay to the need to escape. In our house we misquote Philip Larkin’s famous first line to ‘This Be the Verse’: ‘They [t]uck you up, your mum and dad’. But this is not just wordplay, it is an acknowledgement that parenting is a delicate and powerful business and one in which we are all destined to fall short of expectations, and the foundations for such expectations, I contend, were laid out in part by our own childhood reading. To ‘tuck up’ properly, parenting mantras have informed us, means to do so with a story, but as this collection crucially reminds us, what that story has to say about the world, our cultures, and families within it, is much more impactful than simply passing five minutes before turning off the light.
This collection provides a very welcome and timely interrogation of where the family now sits in children’s literature. It has always puzzled me that while the family is central to children’s stories, from fathers behind newspapers to squabbling siblings and doting grandmothers, it has not enjoyed quite the same level of attention within children’s literature criticism. Back in 2008, I argued that the construction of the family in English children’s literature was at heart conservative with writers and readers ‘almost obsessed with the family that ideally should exist’ (12) and while several essays in this collection continue to challenge this same notion, others acknowledge and celebrate a landscape that is beginning, finally, to shift. When it comes to family, we all have, not just one, but several stories to tell. This collection both reconsiders the old and traditional with
essays on Enid Blyton and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and the ‘vinegar’ and ‘auntly’ aunts of nineteenth and twentieth centuries and celebrates and acknowledges twenty-first century families with essays on contemporary texts such as Sophie Anderson’s The Girl Who Speaks Bear (2019), Areli Morales’ Areli Is a Dreamer (2021), Katya Belen’s October, October (2020), and Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End (2017) to name but a few. These essays bring together a plethora of voices and texts to showcase how children’s literature constructs families from the nineteenth century to the modern day, from picture books to young adult literature, from domestic to fantasy, to interrogate secrets, what is said, and, more tellingly, what is not said, to include those families who have in the past been overlooked, ignored, or indeed silenced.
Kay Waddilove in her contribution on mothers in Jacqueline Wilson’s texts argues that ‘Beyond lived experience, children’s primary source of information about family life is through stories – fiction can provide “mirrors and windows” as Rudine Simms Bishop famously observed’. Children’s literature though has certainly not always told stories that reflect the rich diversity of family experiences and as Karen Sands O Connor and Phyllis Ramage conclude ‘It’s taken time for sympathetic and positive depictions of African and Caribbean families to appear more regularly in children’s novels published in Britain’. The construction of the family in the literature that we pass on to our children is far from ideologically neutral, and the image of all white, nuclear, heteronormative family sitting at the table with a Welsh dresser in the background, that was part and parcel of children’s literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is finally, albeit slowly, the essays in this collection suggest, beginning to be accompanied by a whole collage, or even kaleidoscope, of different family make-ups.
If literature is, in Foucauldian terms, a ‘disciplinary discourse’, then the representation of the family within children’s literature must be continually charted and interrogated by collections such as this. Eleanor Spencer argues here that Harry Potter’s quest is not simply to defeat Voldemort but to ‘fight in order to win the right to an ordinary family life’, and this demonstrates the ideological weight of the family in children’s fiction; Harry from his cupboard under the stairs, with his own less-than-happy experience of family, both desires and feels compelled to try to emulate the ‘ideal’. The conclusion of the ‘Harry Potter’ series reminds readers, both children and adults of the type of family children’s literature dictates they should be striving for. Shari Thurer in her pioneering work, The Myths of Motherhood, argues that a ‘sentimentalized image of the perfect mother casts a long, guilt-inducing shadow over real mothers’ lives’ (xi), and the same can be said for images of the family in children’s literature. If readers only see one type of what it dictates to be ‘good’ family then children’s literature, it seems, is not playing entirely fairly.
There is much ink left to spill on how children’s literature constructs families as we progress through the twenty-first century. This collection of diverse essays critiques stereotypes found in both old and new texts, commends shifting cultural perspectives and interrogates how families are framed in the literature that we deliver to the next generation. It marks an important step in ensuring that we celebrate and applaud the diverse families that we increasingly encounter in contemporary children’s literature. The following pages chart the latest insights on family, and these initial critical conversations will doubtless inspire countless others to ensure that we as critics, continue to be vigilant to how family is framed for the next generations. Because families might be problematic, and are rarely easy, but the way they are represented within our children’s and young people’s literature matters.
Works Cited
Alston, Ann. The Family in English Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2008. Hearne, Betsy and Marilyn Kaye. Celebrating Children’s Books. Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1981. Larkin, Philip. ‘This Be the Verse’. Collected Poems. Faber and Faber. 1971/2014. Kindle.
Smith, Dodie. Dear Octopus. Samuel French, 1938/2016. Thurer, Shari. Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother. Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Introduction: Exploding the Nuclear Family
Eleanor Spencer and Jade Dillon Craig
‘In the beginning there is light and two wide-eyed figures standing near the foot of your bed, and the sound of their voices is love’. So begins Love (2018) by Newbery Medal-winning author Matt de la Pena and illustrator Loren Long. The bestselling picture book ends with the lines,
So when the time comes for you to set off on your own … [y]our loved ones will stand there like puddles beneath their umbrellas, holding you tight and kissing you and wishing you luck. But it won’t be luck you’ll leave with. Because you’ll have love. You’ll have love, love, love.
(de la Pena)
However, the course of true (familial) love rarely did run smooth. Fairy tales may end with ‘happily ever after’, but they decidedly do not begin that way. Fictional families, like families in real life, seem to be brittle and precarious things, prone to fracturing and fragmenting. Whilst there are obviously examples of happy, healthy nuclear families in children’s literature from all decades, it is clear that from the mid-twentieth century onwards, authors of children’s and young adult literature have sought to reflect with greater verisimilitude the realities of family life in all its varied shapes and forms.
In her seminal 1990 article ‘Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors’, Rudine Sims Bishop suggested that children’s books may function either as ‘mirrors’, allowing readers to see their own lives reflected, or ‘windows’, affording them a view of a reality different from their own:
Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience
DOI: 10.4324/9781003269663-1
Eleanor Spencer and Jade Dillon Craig and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.
(Bishop ix)
Bishop’s article focuses on the invisibility of ‘so-called minority groups— Latinos, Afro-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans’ in U.S. children’s literature before 1990, but her argument applies equally to the cultural dominance of the (white, of course) nuclear family in children’s books (ix). For many decades, only a narrow range of familial experiences was ‘reflected’ in children’s literature, denying many children the affirming experience of seeing families just like theirs. Bishop notes that ‘when children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part’ (ix). Whilst children from white heteronormative nuclear families (and, conversely, orphaned children) have long been able to see their familial situation reflected in children’s books, they, too, have suffered from the paucity of titles offering imaginative access to the lives of non-white, nonnuclear families. The essay in this volume by Karen Sands-O’Connor and Phyllis Ramage, ‘A Gift to the Family of Britain: Depictions of African, Caribbean and Black British Families in British Children’s Literature after 1970’ argues for the importance of the children’s book as ‘mirror’, allowing the children of minority ethnic families in Britain to see themselves as effective and affective protagonists. Whilst in books written by white authors, the Black family is often depicted as ‘broken’ and ‘in need of white British aid’, in works by Black authors the Black family is stable, loving, and supportive. Similarly, in their essay ‘Kinning with Picturebooks about La Frontera’, Macarena García-González and Evelyn Arizpe illustrate that picture books about families’ experience of border crossing by Latin-American or Latinx authors in the U.S. can powerfully counter the negative discourses that many children—both those who belong to migrant families and those who do not—will likely be exposed to in the U.S media. Using Signe Howell’s concept of kinning, they consider how border crossings both challenge and affirm the metaphorical concept of ‘nation as family’.
Bishop’s model of ‘windows’ and ‘mirrors’ owes something to Roland Barthes’ theory of plaisir and jouissance (Barthes 1975). Barthes posits that plaisir (‘pleasure’) is experienced by a reader when reading a text that conforms to their cultural norms and confirms their own assumptions about the world they inhabit. Jouissance (‘bliss’), on the other hand, is the more exhilarating but less comfortable response to a text that disrupts a reader’s
expectations, challenging their understanding of the world around them and forcing them to consider alternative possibilities. As Bishop concludes, books that expose children to families of different shapes and sizes may ‘help us to understand each other better by helping to change our attitudes towards difference’ (xi).
In her 1992 article, Suzanne Bunkers noted that images of non-traditional families in U.S. children’s books had actually increased significantly in the previous decade, ‘mirroring the greater visibility of non-traditional families in our culture’ (116). Like Bishop, she concluded that ‘this development [was] a healthy one’, writing ‘I believe it’s worthwhile for children to be exposed to more than one “script” for life’s relationships’ (128). It is clear that ‘different’ is in fact the new normal when it comes to family structures. In 1987, Jean Belovich identified the 12 types of families most prevalent in the U.S.:
There is the traditional family, where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work; the Dad-stays-home-and-Mom-works family; the bothspouses-work family; the single-parent family; the remarried family; the homosexual family; the unwed-teenager-with-child family; the nonmarital family; the foster care family; the interreligious family; the interracial family; and the communal family. (xv)
In the nearly 40 years that have elapsed since Belovich’s taxonomy, every family type bar ‘the traditional family where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work’ has increased in prevalence. A 2014 Pew Research Center analysis of American Community Survey (ACS) and Decennial Census data revealed that less than half (46%) of U.S. children younger than 18 years of age were living in a home with 2 married heterosexual parents both in their first marriage. This represented a marked change from 1960, when 73% of children were raised in nuclear families, and 1980, when 61% were. The same analysis found that 41% of children were born outside of marriage, up from just 5% in 1960 and that 34% of children were living with an unmarried parent, compared to just 9% in 1960 and 19% in 1980. Five per cent of children were not living with either parent. In most of these cases, they were living with a grandparent, a phenomenon that became much more prevalent since the 2008 economic recession (Livingston).
The social dominance of the neat nuclear family of Judith Kerr’s picture books and U.S. TV shows like Leave It to Beaver is long gone. In fact, the author of the report, Gretchen Livingston, suggests that ‘in a lot of ways the 1950s and 1960s were an anomaly in family structure; the birth rate was uncommonly high, people married young. So even though people
Eleanor Spencer and Jade Dillon Craig
think of that as the traditional image of the family … it was actually [an] anomaly’ (Marcotte). Indeed, as David Brooks insists,
that 1950–65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family … We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.
(Brooks)
By the mid-1970s, the fleeting golden age of the nuclear family was already coming to an end. Brooks notes that
young men’s wages declined, putting pressure on working-class families in particular. The major strains were cultural. Society became more individualistic and more self-oriented. People put greater value on privacy and autonomy. A rising feminist movement helped endow women with greater freedom to live and work as they chose.
(Brooks)
Over the last century, there has in Western societies been a steady attenuation of familial ties: between different generations of the family and between siblings as adult children became more likely to move permanently away from home to pursue their education or find work; between spouses as divorce became easier and less socially deleterious; and between co-parents who became statistically less likely to be married both before and after the birth of children. Brooks writes that we have
moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options.
(Brooks)
These small, self-contained nuclear families are particularly vulnerable to further fragmentation into single-parent families, or, in the worst-case scenario, no-parent families.
The orphan protagonist is a stock character in children’s literature. Many of the canonical or ‘classic’ children’s stories focus on the trials and triumphs of one or more orphaned (or at least bereaved) children. In her essay, ‘Families Formed, Found and Fractured in the Children’s Novels
of Frances Hodgson Burnett’, Elisabeth Rose Gruner looks at three texts, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911) to seek meaning in this pattern. Positing that the fractured, unstable, and vulnerable family is a metaphor for both nation and empire, she contends that colonial children possess a ‘vital energy’ that may allow them to create a new familial structure and a new home in an unfamiliar culture and country.
If the orphaned child in literature is afforded the dubious privilege of (re)constructing their own chosen family, then the ‘feral child’ is the trope of the orphaned child taken to its imaginative extreme. Jessica Straley’s essay, ‘The Feral Child and the More-than-Human Family’, offers us the concept of a ‘family’ that transcends differences of race, nation, and species to encompass all those with whom we share our home on earth. She explores the feral tale as a means to understand multi-vocal and inter-species bonds and argues that these stories offer a space for protagonists far removed from our heteronormative, hegemonic, and capitalistic matrices of power and influence.
The absence of the parent or parents is a narratological imperative in Burnett’s novels and in many works of children’s and YA literature. Even in fantasy literature, it would stretch a reader’s credulity too far to expect them to believe that a parent would allow their child to cavort with wolves and bears in the jungle, work as a teenage spy for MI5, rob priceless artworks from the great museums of Europe, or fight the most powerful dark wizard of the age. Instead, parents must be either physically absent or, at the very least, emotionally distant. Often this narratological imperative is achieved even before the narrative is begun or in its very first pages. There exists, then, a very practical understanding between authors and readers; parents must be disposed of, ideally swiftly and with no questions asked. In Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (1961), for example, young James’ parents are dispatched with ruthless and comic summariness:
Then, one day, James’ mother and father went to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo.
As the narrator reflects, ‘Their troubles were over in a jiffy. They were dead and gone in thirty-five seconds flat’, allowing the real story (‘Poor James … was still very much alive, and all at once find himself alone and frightened in a vast unfriendly world’) to begin in earnest (James and the Giant Peach 1). In Dahl’s The BFG, there is not even so much as an unfortunate
Eleanor Spencer and Jade Dillon Craig
parental encounter with an angry rhinoceros, as the ‘norphan’ Sophie’s parents are so long gone that she cannot even remember them:
‘I don’t have a mother and father,’ Sophie said. ‘They both died when I was a baby’.
‘Oh, you poor little scrumplet!’ cried the BFG. ‘Is you missing them very badly?’
‘Not really’, Sophie said, ‘because I never knew them’.
(The BFG 30)
The only good parent in some children’s literature, it seems, is a dead parent, preferably one that died long enough ago to allow any inconvenient grief work to have been satisfactorily completed. In a 2010 article in Publishers Weekly, children’s book editor Leila Sales reported, ‘Dead parents are so much a part of middle-grade and teen fiction at this point, it’s not even the “in” thing. It’s not “au courant” or “en vogue.” It’s just an accepted fact: kids in books are parentless’. She decries the recourse to what she calls ‘The Ol’ Dead Dad Syndrome’ as ‘lazy writing’ and encourages authors to explore alternative ways of liberating child protagonists from parental supervision:
Set the book at boarding school, summer camp, or another parent-free zone. Create parents who are clueless or uninvolved, à la Harriet the Spy. Fade their role into the background. Write parents who actually have something to contribute to the story, who aren’t just a barrier between the kids and fun.
(Sales)
From the school stories of Angela Brazil (1906–1946); the Billy Bunter series by Charles Hamilton, writing as Frank Richards (1908–1940); Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers (1946–1951) and St Clare’s (1941–1945) series; Anne Digby’s Trebizon series (1978–1994); and, of course, the more recent success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007), the boarding school narrative has long enjoyed popularity with young readers. The boarding school appears to function as a wish fulfilment for many children, allowing them to imagine being temporarily free from the strictures of parental supervision without having to confront that most frightening of prospects—parental death and orphanhood. Nicholas Tucker’s essay ‘Bowlby, Blyton and childcare issues in The Famous Five series’ explores Blyton’s child characters’ separation from their parents in the context of contemporary concerns over the long-term psychological effects of the evacuation of tens of thousands of children from British cities to the countryside during World War II. Tucker notes that Blyton, then Britain’s
best-selling children’s writer, took the robust view of the young common to the upper classes, writing ‘I only wish that we had big camp-schools for children, so that we might always have all our children in the country going home for weekend and holidays. Perhaps we shall some day’.
Bunkers’ 1992 article noted that whilst there were many examples of recent children’s books which featured single parent, divorced, and stepfamilies,
Stories dealing with gay and lesbian families [were] not often found in bookstores or libraries. Apparently, few major publishing houses [were] willing to take the risk of publishing overtly gay and lesbian stories for children. Similarly, many bookstores and libraries [were] reluctant to stock such stories, fearing negative response from homophobic customers.
(Bunkers 119)
Happily, thirty years later, there is a rapidly growing number of fictional same-sex families who are becoming familiar to young readers. Whilst many of these books, like Miriam B. Schiffer’s Stella Brings the Family (2015), Lesléa Newman’s Mommy, Mama, and Me (2009), and Jodie Lancet-Grant’s The Pirate Mums (2021), are clearly intended as teaching aids to help parents and educators start conversations about alternative family structures, there are now increasing numbers of books in which the child protagonist’s same-sex parents are not the focus of a didactic narrative, but rather just an unremarkable part of the furniture, in the way that heteronormative parents often are in children’s literature. Jennifer Bryan’s The Different Dragon (2006) and Elisabeth Kushner’s The Purim Superhero (2012) normalise same-sex parents in narratives about a child’s discovery and celebration of their own individuality. In his essay, ‘Queering the Family in Young Adult Literature: Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End, Familial Disruption, and the Space of the Home’ Angel Daniel Matos performs a critical analysis of Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End (2017) to consider how queer YA novels complicate and challenge normative ideologies relating to familial belonging and bonding. Matos’ interest in the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, media, and Latinx studies creates a compelling critical framework, as the spatiality of home and culture is considered.
Despite the fact that in the twenty-first century, children are far less likely than their forebears to live with or even near to their grandparents or other extended family members, there are numerous examples of children’s books which focus on the burgeoning or established relationship between child and grandparent. Karen Ackerman’s Song and Dance Man (1988), Daniel Gray-Barnett’s Grandma Z (2018), and Harry Woodgate’s
Eleanor Spencer and Jade Dillon Craig
Grandad’s Camper (2021) all reveal these elderly relatives to be surprising, complex, and relatable individuals who have lived full lives and have a wealth of experience to share with their grandchildren. Indeed, if in children’s literature parents are the ‘barrier between the kids and fun’, very often grandparents are the enthusiastic enablers of mischief, adventure, and in the case of David Walliams eponymous Gangsta Granny, even daring jewellery heists:
‘I was about your age when I stole my first diamond ring’, said Granny … ‘I know you look at me with my Scrabble and my knitting and my fondness for cabbage, and think I am just some boring old dear’
‘No …’ said Ben, not entirely convincingly.
‘But you forget, child, that I was young once’. (68)
Using age studies as a theoretical framework, Vanessa Joosen’s essay ‘“What’s the point of grandpa?”: Grandparents in Children’s Literature’ focuses on the representation of grandparents and the language of age as a signifier of position within the family unit. Joosen explores the narrative function of grandparents in children’s literature, based on a digital research method to identify patterns relating to the intersections of gender, race, age, and narrative role within a selection of texts from Flemish, Dutch, and British children’s literature. Similarly, in her essay, ‘Shrewd sound-hearted maiden aunts’: The Aunt Figure in Children’s Literature’, Jane Suzanne Carroll considers the elderly great-aunts found in M.L. Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock (1877), in Noel Streatfeild’s The Growing Summer (1966), and in Penelope Lively’s The House in Norham Gardens (1974). Because they are at a crucial remove from both direct heredity and parental responsibility, Carroll posits that these aged, often eccentric women create a space, both physical and psychological, for child characters to grow and to begin to think critically about family and heritage.
In 1998, Christina Hardyment heralded the evolution of ‘the new model family’, borne of an ideologically and financially driven rejection of the individualistic and isolationist social policies of the post-war period:
What form will it take? Typically it will have a long, four-generational stem and an unpredictable accumulation of lifelong friends; in-laws left over from first marriages, new half-kin from remarriages; godparents and godchildren. Let’s take an image from folklore and call it the ‘maypole family’: long and thin, and with any number of strands winding and unwinding around it.
(Hardyment)
This is a return in kind to the extended, multi-generational family of old, with the crucial difference that generations will be less likely to co-habit, and parents may well marry more than once in their lifetime. Due to both financial imperatives and cultural norms, though, children from ethnic minority immigrant backgrounds are still more likely than their white peers to co-habit with grandparents and other older family members (Cohn and Passel). In Alice Pung and Sher Rill Ng’s bilingual English and Mandarin Be Careful, Xiao Xin! (2022), for example, we see an extended family household in modern-day Melbourne in which grandparents are integrally involved in the daily rearing of the aspiring young Fire Warrior. Pung explains, ‘the English and Chinese storylines are specifically written to be slightly different in subtle ways, to speak directly to those children and parents who understand both languages and cultures’ (Pung). Similarly, in Eve Bunting and Ronald Himler’s A Day’s Work (1997), Francisco’s Spanish-speaking abuelo arrives in California to live with his grandson following the death of the boy’s father. The usual generational differences between children and their grandparents are thrown into sharper relief for two-culture children and first-generation immigrant grandparents by differences of (sometimes mutually incomprehensible) language, culture, and experience. In both of these books, however, the different generations come to care for, and learn from, one another. Perhaps more important than what sociologists or literary critics think about the family, though, is what children themselves think. In 1998 a U.K. research study by Virginia Morrow revealed that though ‘the image of “the family” as nuclear remain[ed] pervasive’ in media and culture (v), ‘overall, children appeared to have an accepting, inclusive view of what counts as family and their definitions did not centre around biological relatedness of the “nuclear” form’ (vi). Morrow noted that, unsurprisingly, older children and young teens demonstrated a greater ability to think more expansively about the concept of ‘family’ compared to younger children:
Children’s definitions were more complex the older they were. When children were asked about their beliefs as to what counted as ‘family’, younger children were more likely than older children to see children, marriage, and physical presence as being the key components of a family. Older children were more likely to see the nature or quality of the relationships between family members as being the key defining characteristic of whether or not a particular configuration constitutes a family.
(vi)
For example, thirteen-year-old Tara suggested that ‘a family is a group of people which all cares about each other … They can all cry together, laugh
Eleanor Spencer and Jade Dillon Craig together, argue together and go through all the emotions together. Some live together as well. Families are for helping each other through life’. (27) Clearly, at the turn of the millennium, living under one roof was regarded as a possibility rather than a necessity for family life.
Fiction written specifically for Young Adult readers—defined by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) as being between 12 and 18 years of age—is necessarily more nuanced and less ‘black and white’ in ethical and moral terms than fiction written for young children. YA fiction may also venture into territory likely uncharted even in contemporary children’s literature: domestic violence, sexual abuse, drug or alcohol addiction, and mental illness. Judy Blume’s seminal YA novels controversially explore bullying, family breakdown, menstruation, masturbation, and bereavement, and Joseph Michael Sommers’ essay, ‘From First Born to Second Fiddle: Empathy Is an Argument if Your Name Is Peter Hatcher in Judy Blume’s Fudge Books’ asks whether the depictions of family life in Blume’s works accord with or pose a conscious and principled challenge to the late twentieth-century American sociocultural context in which she was writing. Sommers considers the character of Peter Hatcher from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972) as a counterpoint to Margaret Simon (Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, 1970), whereby Peter offers a younger, male perspective on complicated family dynamics.
Meanwhile, Alyson Miller examines the depictions of the nuclear family as a dysfunctional space in the work of controversial YA author, Melvin Burgess in her essay, ‘Chasing the Dragon’: The Anxieties of Family in the Fiction of Melvin Burgess. This chapter offers critical readings of Junk (1996), Doing It (2003), and Kill All Enemies (2011), revealing the centrality of the displaced child and the generational trauma that cycles throughout the individual narratives. She notes that Burgess’ stories depict the broken and irreparable relationships between adults and children and function as powerful metaphors for broader social fractures and failures. Blanka Grzegorczyk’s ‘A Taste for the Secret: Tracing Secretive Families in Malorie Blackman’s Fiction’ suggests that it is precisely this kind of toxic legacy of repressed and secreted personal and family truths that often results in individual and communal acts of transgression. Grzegorczyk further argues that many of Blackman’s characters are forced to face these truths as a means of traumatic self-transformation which sheds light on social, political, and familial traumas.
Despite the significant changes brought about by female emancipation since the 1970s—married women entering or remaining in the workforce in increasing numbers and the rise of the ‘working mother’—Morrow’s study found that ‘gender roles between parents are clearly differentiated’ (vi). She reports that ‘Mothers are clearly important to children, especially to girls, for “listening to their problems”’ and are responsible for
‘the provision of emotional support in families’. Conversely, boys ‘tend to describe “doing things” with fathers’ (22). Interestingly, it was only those boys without mothers or mother-figures in the home who reported that their fathers were responsible for their physical and emotional care. Fourteen-year-old Jack said of his father, ‘he is the only parent I have got left and he struggles to look after me so I help as well. He is very caring’ (23). In ‘Lost Boys, Found Boys: Masculinities and Families in J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter’, Eleanor Spencer suggests that whilst the heteronormative nuclear families in the heptalogy tend to produce aspirant hegemonic males, alternative family structures, for example, single-parent families, foster, or surrogate families, appear to offer different characters opportunities for socialisation and a more generous set of possibilities for how young readers might navigate boyhood and manhood.
Fathers have traditionally been at best distant and at worst entirely absent or indifferent in many classic children’s texts. One might think of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930) in which the Swallows request their Naval Officer father’s permission to sail to Wild Cat Island. Stationed in Malta, and about to sail for Hong Kong, he blithely replies with the telegrammed pronouncement, ‘BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON’T DROWN’ (12). Though, as Morrow notes, boys tend to value ‘doing things’ with their fathers, in Ransome’s novel, as in many others, it is the absence of the father that is the necessary pre-condition for the child protagonists’ adventure and achievement. In his essay, ‘Perspectives on Fathers and Fatherhood within Children’s Literature: A Case Study of Katya Balen’s October, October’, Richard Charlesworth looks at a relatively recent character type in children’s literature; the physically and emotionally present father. Charlesworth presents a critical framework for examining fatherhood as a concept, focusing specifically on a gender-specific coding frame developed by John Macionis and argues that the father figure in Kayta Balen’s October, October (2020) offers a principled corrective to the culturally pervasive trope of the unavailable or uninterested father.
Whilst all readers, children and adults alike, are familiar with the stock character of the wicked stepmother from fairy tales like Snow White, Rapunzel, and Cinderella (not to mention their Disney adaptations), there are few genuinely cruel natal mothers in children’s literature. Indeed, as Claudia Schwabe explains in her essay ‘Where Are They Now? Manifestations of (Monstrous) Mothers in Fairy Tales’, when Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm set about collecting and their now canonical German fairy tales in the early nineteenth century, they silently excised any ‘bad’ mothers, replacing them with cruel, scheming, and even murderous stepmothers to preserve what she terms the ’sanctity of motherhood’. Whilst mothers may be incompetent, incapacitated, or inattentive, a truly wicked
Eleanor Spencer and Jade Dillon Craig
natal mother is, it seems, a taboo too far (even Mrs Wormwood in Roald Dahl’s Matilda is stupid, selfish, and uncaring rather than actively malevolent and Mary’s cruel mother in Jacqueline Wilson’s The Diamond Girls is revealed to be suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness.) Interestingly, in her essay, ‘Unhomely Domestic Spaces in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline’, Jade Dillon Craig suggests that Gaiman’s vicious maternal proxy, the ‘other mother’, functions as a ‘psycho-antagonist built out of Coraline’s unconscious mind to renegotiate and rebuild the relationship with her real mother’. As Julie Just notes in The New York Times, ‘in the metaphoric language of fantasy, Gaiman’s ultimate message is that parental perfection is an illusion. Real parents may ignore you and serve bad food, but at least they won’t rip out your eyes and leave you to rot behind a wall’ (Just).
Because mothers are in the majority of families the primary caregiver, an absent, incompetent, or incapacitated mother often results in what psychologists term a ‘parentified’ or ‘parental child’, a term first introduced by the family systems theorist Salvador Minuchin in 1967. Whilst Wendy Darling happily becomes ‘mother’ to Peter Pan’s horde of Lost Boys in Neverland in J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play and 1911 novel, psychologists are clear that parentification is potentially psychologically damaging for children. Perhaps the most notable examples of parentified children can be found in the novels of Jacqueline Wilson, including The Bed and Breakfast Star (1994), in which Elsa contends with a violent stepfather and her family’s precarious financial situation; The Illustrated Mum (1999) in which Dolphin and Star’s mother, Marigold, suffers with bipolar disorder and alcoholism; and Love Frankie (2020) in which Frankie’s mother has debilitating multiple sclerosis. Kay Waddilove’s essay ‘“Mum’s no fun now”: Constructing the Maternal in the Family Fictions of Jacqueline Wilson’ discusses Wilson’s cultural significance in the canon of children’s literature and considers the wide range of familial patterns that are presented in her controversial novels. Similarly, Liza Nevarez suggests in her essay, ‘Apple to Pomegranate: Vampires and Families in the Twilight Saga’, that Bella Swan is another parentified child with a ‘loving, erratic, hare-brained mother’, whose assumption of financial and domestic responsibility at a tender age leads her to crave the security and orderliness offered by the Cullens, who, despite their vampirism, maintain an enviably affluent allAmerican lifestyle (Meyer 4).
Whilst Wilson’s and Stephanie Meyer’s protagonists are obliged to become mature beyond their years, the young women discussed in Malin Alkestrand’s essay ‘Breeders, Rebels and Warriors: The Oppression of Adolescent Mothers in the Young Adult Dystopias The Lone City trilogy and Gather the Daughters’ are forced against their will to become mothers when they are barely more than children themselves. Alkestrand explores the intersections of youth, motherhood, and gender to discuss how these
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[Prior to the engagement, the French fleet had met and was convoying to port 180 vessels from America with food-stuffs of which France was then in dire need. The British fleet encountered the French 400 miles west of Ushant on May 28, and in the four days of maneuvering and pursuit which followed, Howe displayed marked energy and tactical skill. Though the French fleet was defeated in the ensuing battle, it covered the escape of the convoy.—E .]
The French admiral on the evening of the 29th saw that he now must fight, and at a disadvantage; consequently, he could not hope to protect the convoy. As to save this was his prime object, the next best thing was to entice the British out of its path. With this view he stood away to the north-west; while a dense fog coming on both favored his design and prevented further encounter during the two ensuing days, throughout which Howe continued to pursue. In the evening of May 31 the weather cleared, and at daybreak the next morning the enemies were in position, ready for battle, two long columns of ships, heading west, the British twenty-five, the French again twenty-six through the junction of the four vessels mentioned. Howe now had cause to regret his absent six, and to ponder Nelson’s wise saying, “Only numbers can annihilate.”
This time for maneuvering was past. Able tactician as he personally was, and admirable as had been the direction of his efforts in the two days’ fighting, Howe had been forced in them to realize two things, namely, that his captains were, singly, superior in seamanship, and their crews in gunnery, to the French; and again, that in the ability to work together as a fleet the British were so deficient as to promise very imperfect results, if he attempted any but the simplest formation. To such, therefore, he resorted; falling back upon the old, unskillful, sledge-hammer fashion of the British navy. Arranging his ships in one long line, three miles from the enemy, he made them all go down together, each to attack a specified opponent, coming into action as nearly as might be at the same instant. Thus the French, from the individual inferiority of the units of their fleet, would be at all points over-powered. The issue justified the forecast; but the manner of performance was curiously and
happily marked by Howe’s own peculiar phlegm. There was a long summer day ahead for fighting, and no need for hurry. The order was first accurately formed, and canvas reduced to proper proportions. Then the crews went to breakfast. After breakfast, the ships all headed for the hostile line, under short sail, the admiral keeping them in hand during the approach as an infantry officer dresses his company. Hence the shock from end to end was so nearly simultaneous as to induce success unequalled in any engagement conducted on the same primitive plan.
Picturesque as well as sublime, animating as well as solemn, on that bright Sunday morning, was this prelude to the stern game of war about to be played: the quiet summer sea stirred only by a breeze sufficient to cap with white the little waves that ruffled its surface; the dark hulls gently rippling the water aside in their slow advance, a ridge of foam curling on either side of the furrow ploughed by them in their onward way; their massive sides broken by two, or at times three, rows of ports, whence, the tompions drawn, yawned the sullen lines of guns, behind which, unseen, but easily realized by the instructed eye, clustered the groups of ready seamen who served each piece. Aloft swung leisurely to and fro the tall spars, which ordinarily, in so light a wind, would be clad in canvas from deck to truck, but whose naked trimness now proclaimed the deadly purpose of that still approach. Upon the high poops, where floated the standard of either nation, gathered round each chief the little knot of officers through whom commands were issued and reports received, the nerves along which thrilled the impulses of the great organism, from its head, the admiral, through every member to the dark lowest decks, nearly awash, where, as farthest from the captain’s own oversight, the senior lieutenants controlled the action of the ships’ heaviest batteries.
On board the Queen Charlotte, Lord Howe, whose burden of sixtyeight years had for four days found no rest save what he could snatch in an arm-chair, now, at the prospect of battle, “displayed an animation,” writes an eye-witness, “of which, at his age, and after such fatigue of body and mind, I had not thought him capable. He seemed to contemplate the result as one of unbounded satisfaction.” By his side stood his fleet-captain, Curtis, of whose service among the floating batteries, and during the siege of Gibraltar, the governor
of the fortress had said, “He is the man to whom the king is chiefly indebted for its security;” and Codrington, then a lieutenant, who afterwards commanded the allied fleets at Navarino. Five ships to the left, Collingwood, in the Barfleur, was making to the admiral whose flag she bore the remark that stirred Thackeray: “Our wives are now about going to church, but we will ring about these Frenchmen’s ears a peal which will drown their bells.” The French officers, both admirals and captains, were mainly unknown men, alike then and thereafter. The fierce flames of the Revolution had swept away the men of the old school, mostly aristocrats, and time had not yet brought forward the very few who during the Napoleonic period showed marked capacity. The commander-in-chief, Villaret-Joyeuse, had three years before been a lieutenant. He had a high record for gallantry, but was without antecedents as a general officer. With him, on the poop of the Montagne, which took her name from Robespierre’s political supporters, stood that anomalous companion of the generals and admirals of the day, the Revolutionary commissioner, Jean Bon Saint-André, about to learn by experience the practical working of the system he had advocated, to disregard all tests of ability save patriotism and courage, depreciating practice and skill as unnecessary to the valor of the true Frenchman.
As the British line drew near the French, Howe said to Curtis, “Prepare the signal for close action.” “There is no such signal,” replied Curtis. “No,” said the admiral, “but there is one for closer action, and I only want that to be made in case of captains not doing their duty.” Then closing a little signal book he always carried, he continued to those around him, “Now, gentlemen, no more book, no more signals. I look to you to do the duty of the Queen Charlotte in engaging the flagship. I don’t want the ships to be bilge to bilge, but if you can lock the yardarms, so much the better; the battle will be the quicker decided.” His purpose was to go through the French line, and fight the Montagne on the far side. Some doubted their succeeding, but Howe overbore them. “That’s right, my lord!” cried Bowen, the sailing-master, who looked to the ship’s steering. “The Charlotte will make room for herself.” She pushed close under the French ship’s stern, grazing her ensign, and raking her from stern to stem with a withering fire, beneath which fell three hundred men. A length or two beyond lay the French Jacobin. Howe ordered the Charlotte to luff, and place herself between the two. “If we do,” said
Bowen, “we shall be on board one of them.” “What is that to you, sir?” asked Howe quickly. “Oh!” muttered the master, not inaudibly. “D—n my eyes if I care, if you don’t. I’ll go near enough to singe some of our whiskers.” And then, seeing by the Jacobin’s rudder that she was going off, he brought the Charlotte sharp round, her jib boom grazing the second Frenchman as her side had grazed the flag of the first.
From this moment the battle raged furiously from end to end of the field for nearly an hour,—a wild scene of smoke and confusion, under cover of which many a fierce ship duel was fought, while here and there men wandered, lost, in a maze of bewilderment that neutralized their better judgment. An English naval captain tells a service tradition of one who was so busy watching the compass, to keep his position in the ranks, that he lost sight of his antagonist, and never again found him. Many a quaint incident passed, recorded or unrecorded, under that sulphurous canopy. A British ship, wholly dismasted, lay between two enemies, her captain desperately wounded. A murmur of surrender was somewhere heard; but as the first lieutenant checked it with firm authority, a cock flew upon the stump of a mast and crowed lustily. The exultant note found quick response in hearts not given to despair, and a burst of merriment, accompanied with three cheers, replied to the bird’s triumphant scream. On board the Brunswick, in her struggle with the Vengeur, one of the longest and fiercest fights the sea has ever seen, the cocked hat was shot off the effigy of the Duke of Brunswick, which she bore as a figure-head. A deputation from the crew gravely requested the captain to allow the use of his spare chapeau, which was securely nailed on, and protected his grace’s wig during the rest of the action. After this battle with the ships of the new republic, the partisans of monarchy noted with satisfaction that, among the many royal figures that surmounted the stems of the British fleet, not one lost his crown. Of a harum-scarum Irish captain are told two droll stories. After being hotly engaged for some time with a French ship, the fire of the latter slackened, and then ceased. He called to know if she had surrendered. The reply was, “No.” “Then,” shouted he, “d—n you, why don’t you fire?” Having disposed of his special antagonist without losing his own spars, the same man kept along in search of new adventures, until he came to a British ship totally dismasted and otherwise badly damaged. She was commanded by a captain of
rigidly devout piety. “Well, Jemmy,” hailed the Irishman, “you are pretty well mauled; but never mind, Jemmy, whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”
The French have transmitted to us less of anecdote, nor is it easy to connect the thought of humor with those grimly earnest republicans and the days of the Terror. There is, indeed, something unintentionally funny in the remark of the commander of one of the captured ships to his captors. They had, it was true, dismasted half the French fleet, and had taken over a fourth; yet he assured them it could not be considered a victory, “but merely a butchery, in which the British had shown neither science nor tactics.” The one story, noble and enduring, that will ever be associated with the French on the 1st of June is in full keeping with the temper of the times and the enthusiasm of the nation. The seventy-four-gun ship Vengeur, after a three hours’ fight, yardarm to yardarm, with the British Brunswick, was left in a sinking state by her antagonist, who was herself in no condition to help. In the confusion, the Vengeur’s peril was for some time not observed; and when it was, the British ships that came to her aid had time only to remove part of her survivors. In their report of the event the latter said: “Scarcely had the boats pulled clear of the sides, when the most frightful spectacle was offered to our gaze. Those of our comrades who remained on board the Vengeur du Peuple, with hands raised to heaven, implored, with lamentable cries, the help for which they could no longer hope. Soon disappeared the ship and the unhappy victims it contained. In the midst of the horror with which this scene inspired us all, we could not avoid a feeling of admiration mingled with our grief. As we drew away, we heard some of our comrades still offering prayers for the welfare of their country. The last cries of these unfortunates were, ‘Vive la République!’ They died uttering them.” Over a hundred Frenchmen thus went down.
Seven French ships were captured, including the sunk Vengeur. Five more were wholly dismasted, but escaped,—a good fortune mainly to be attributed to Howe’s utter physical prostration, due to his advanced years and the continuous strain of the past five days. He now went to bed, completely worn out. “We all got round him,” wrote an officer, Lieutenant Codrington, who was present; “indeed, I saved him from a tumble, he was so weak that from a roll of the ship
he was nearly falling into the waist. ‘Why, you hold me up as if I were a child,’ he said good-humoredly.” Had he been younger, there can be little doubt that the fruits of victory would have been gathered with an ardor which his assistant, Curtis, failed to show.
23.
N ’ S C [67]
[In 1800 Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, under the manipulation of Napoleon, formed a “League of Armed Neutrality” to resist British restrictions on their trade with France. To reinforce diplomatic pressure, Great Britain sent against the league a fleet of twenty ships, of which Nelson was second in command under Sir Hyde Parker. Throughout the campaign, writes Mahan, Nelson “lifted and carried on his shoulders the dead weight of his superior.”—E .]
The fleet sailed from Yarmouth on the 12th of March, 1801; and on the 19th, although there had been some scattering in a heavy gale, nearly all were collected off the Skaw, the northern point of Jutland at the entrance of the Kattegat. The wind being north-west was fair for going to Copenhagen, and Nelson, if in command, would have advanced at once with the ambassador on board. “While the negotiation is going on,” he said, “the Dane should see our flag waving every moment he lifted his head.” As it was, the envoy went forward with a frigate alone and the fleet waited. On the 12th it was off Elsineur, where the envoy rejoined, Denmark having rejected the British terms.
This amounted to an acceptance of hostilities, and it only remained to the commander-in-chief to act at once; for the wind was favorable, an advantage which at any moment might be lost. On this day Nelson addressed Parker a letter, summing up in a luminous manner the features of the situation and the different methods of action. “Not a moment should be lost in attacking,” he said; “we shall never be so good a match for them as at this moment.” He next hinted, what he had probably already said, that the fleet ought to have been off Copenhagen, and not at Elsineur, when the negotiation failed. “Then you might instantly attack and there would be scarcely a doubt but the Danish fleet would be destroyed, and the capital made so hot that Denmark would listen to reason and its true interest.” Since, however, the mistake of losing so much time had been made, he seeks to stir his superior to lose no more. “Almost the safety, certainly the honor, of England is more entrusted to you than ever yet fell to the lot of any British officer; ... never did our country depend so much on the success of any fleet as of this.”
Having thus shown the necessity for celerity, Nelson next discussed the plan of operations. Copenhagen is on the east side of the island of Zealand, fronting the coast of Sweden, from which it is separated by the passage called the Sound. On the west the island is divided from the other parts of Denmark by the Great Belt. The navigation of the latter being much the more difficult, the preparations of the Danes had been made on the side of the Sound, and chiefly about Copenhagen itself. For half a mile from the shore in front of the city, flats extend, and in the Sound itself, at a distance of little over a mile, is a long shoal called the Middle Ground. Between these two bodies of shallow water is a channel, called the King’s, through which a fleet of heavy ships could sail, and from whose northern end a deep pocket stretches toward Copenhagen, forming the harbor proper. The natural point of attack therefore appears to be at the north; and there the Danes had erected powerful works, rising on piles out of the shoal water off the harbor’s mouth and known as the Three-Crown Batteries. Nelson, however, pointed out that not only was this head of the line exceedingly strong, but that the wind that was fair to attack would be foul to return; therefore a disabled ship would have no escape but by passing through the King’s Channel. Doing so she would have to run the gantlet of a line of armed hulks, which the Danes had established as floating batteries
along the inner edge of the channel—covering the front of Copenhagen—and would also be separated from her fleet. Nor was this difficulty, which may be called tactical, the only objection to a plan that he disparaged as “taking the bull by the horns.” He remarked that so long as the British fleet remained in the Sound, without entering the Baltic, the way was left open for both the Swedes and the Russians, if released by the ice, to make a junction with the Danes. Consequently, he advised that a sufficiently strong force of the lighter ships-of-theline should pass outside the Middle Ground, despite the difficulties of navigation, which were not insuperable, and come up in rear of the city. There they would interpose between the Danes and their allies, and be in position to assail the weaker part of the hostile order. He offered himself to lead this detachment.
This whole letter of March 24, 1801,[68] possesses peculiar interest; for it shows with a rare particularity, elicited by the need he felt of arousing and convincing his superior, Nelson’s clear discernment of the decisive features of a military situation. The fame of this great admiral has depended less upon his conduct of campaigns than upon the renowned victories he won in the actual collision of fleet with fleet; and even then has been mutilated by the obstinacy with which, despite the perfectly evident facts, men have persisted in seeing in them nothing but dash,—heart, not head. Throughout his correspondence, it is true, there are frequent traces of the activity of his mental faculties and of the general accuracy of his military conclusions; but ordinarily it is from his actions that his reasonings and principles must be deduced. In the present case we have the views he held and the course he evidently would have pursued clearly formulated by himself; and it cannot but be a subject of regret that the naval world should have lost so fine an illustration as he would there have given of the principles and conduct of naval warfare. He concluded his letter with a suggestion worthy of Napoleon himself, and which, if adopted, would have brought down the Baltic Confederacy with a crash that would have resounded throughout Europe. “Supposing us through the Belt with the wind first westerly, would it not be possible to go with the fleet, or detach ten ships of three and two decks, with one bomb and two fireships, to Revel, to destroy the Russian squadron at that place? I do not see the great risk of such a detachment, and with the remainder to attempt the
business at Copenhagen. The measure may be thought bold, but I am of opinion the boldest are the safest; and our country demands a most vigorous exertion of her force, directed with judgment.”
Committed as the Danes were to a stationary defense, this recommendation to strike at the soul of the confederacy evinced the clearest perception of the key to the situation, which Nelson himself summed up in the following words: “I look upon the Northern League to be like a tree, of which Paul was the trunk and Sweden and Denmark the branches. If I can get at the trunk and hew it down, the branches fall of course; but I may lop the branches and yet not be able to fell the tree, and my power must be weaker when its greatest strength is required”[69]—that is, the Russians should have been attacked before the fleet was weakened, as it inevitably must be, by the battle with the Danes. “If we could have cut up the Russian fleet,” he said again, “that was my object.” Whatever Denmark’s wishes about fighting, she was by her continental possessions tied to the policy of Russia and Prussia, either of whom could overwhelm her by land. She dared not disregard them. The course of both depended upon the czar; for the temporizing policy of Prussia would at once embrace his withdrawal from the league as an excuse for doing the same. At Revel were twelve Russian ships-of-the-line, fully half their Baltic fleet, whose destruction would have paralyzed the remainder and the naval power of the empire. To persuade Parker to such a step was, however, hopeless. “Our fleet would never have acted against Russia and Sweden,” wrote Nelson afterwards, “although Copenhagen would have been burned; for Sir Hyde Parker was determined not to leave Denmark hostile in his rear;”[70] a reason whose technical accuracy under all the circumstances was nothing short of pedantic, and illustrates the immense distance between a good and accomplished officer, which Parker was, and a genius whose comprehension of rules serves only to guide, not to fetter, his judgment.
Although unable to rise equal to the great opportunity indicated by Nelson, Sir Hyde Parker adopted his suggestion as to the method and direction of the principal attack upon the defenses of Copenhagen. For this, Nelson asked ten ships-of-the-line and a number of smaller vessels, with which he undertook to destroy the floating batteries covering the front of the city. These being reduced, the bomb vessels
could be placed so as to play with effect upon the dockyard, arsenals, and the town, in case further resistance was made.
[The fleet entered the Sound and anchored off Copenhagen on March 26. On April 2 Nelson attacked from the southward as he had suggested, and after a hard-fought battle forced a fourteen weeks’ armistice which practically secured the British aims, since it gave opportunity to proceed against Sweden and Russia. Nelson was given chief command on May 5, and two days later sailed for Revel, but the death of the Czar Paul had already brought a favorable change in Russia’s policy and made further action unnecessary.—E .]
24. E ’ F L
D [71]
[After the Copenhagen campaign, for a brief period in 1801, Nelson commanded the naval defense forces in the Channel. When, after two years of peace, hostilities were renewed in 1803, he sailed in the Victory to take command in the Mediterranean. During the following years of the war, “The British squadrons, hugging the French coasts and blocking the French arsenals, were the first line of defense, covering British interests from the Baltic to Egypt, the British colonies in the four quarters of the globe, and the British merchantmen which whitened every sea.”[72] E .]
Meanwhile that period of waiting from May, 1803, to August, 1805, when the tangled net of naval and military movements began to unravel, was a striking and wonderful pause in the world’s history. On the heights above Boulogne, and along the narrow strip of beach from Étaples to Vimereux, were encamped one hundred and thirty thousand of the most brilliant soldiery of all time, the soldiers who had fought in Germany, Italy, and Egypt, soldiers who were yet to win, from Austria, Ulm and Austerlitz, and from Prussia, Auerstadt and Jena, to hold their own, though barely, at Eylau against the army of Russia, and to overthrow it also, a few months later, on the bloody field of Friedland. Growing daily more vigorous in the bracing sea air and the hardy life laid out for them, they could on fine days, as they practised the varied maneuvers which were to perfect the vast host in embarking and disembarking with order and rapidity, see the white cliffs fringing the only country that to the last defied their arms. Far away, Cornwallis off Brest, Collingwood off Rochefort, Pellew off Ferrol, were battling the wild gales of the Bay of Biscay, in that tremendous and sustained vigilance which reached its utmost tension in the years preceding Trafalgar, concerning which Collingwood wrote that admirals need to be made of iron, but which was forced upon them by the unquestionable and imminent danger of the country. Farther distant still, severed apparently from all connection with the busy scene at Boulogne, Nelson before Toulon was wearing away the last two years of his glorious but suffering life, fighting the fierce north-westers of the Gulf of Lyon and questioning, questioning continually with feverish anxiety, whether Napoleon’s
object was Egypt again or Great Britain really. They were dull, weary, eventless months, those months of watching and waiting of the big ships before the French arsenals. Purposeless they surely seemed to many, but they saved England. The world has never seen a more impressive demonstration of the influence of sea power upon its history. Those far distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world. Holding the interior positions they did, before—and therefore between—the chief dockyards and detachments of the French navy, the latter could unite only by a concurrence of successful evasions, of which the failure of any one nullified the result. Linked together as the various British fleets were by chains of smaller vessels, chance alone could secure Bonaparte’s great combination, which depended upon the covert concentration of several detachments upon a point practically within the enemy’s lines. Thus, while bodily present before Brest, Rochefort, and Toulon, strategically the British squadrons lay in the Straits of Dover barring the way against the Army of Invasion.
The Straits themselves, of course, were not without their own special protection. Both they and their approaches, in the broadest sense of the term, from the Texel to the Channel Islands, were patrolled by numerous frigates and smaller vessels, from one hundred to a hundred and fifty in all. These not only watched diligently all that happened in the hostile harbors and sought to impede the movements of the flat-boats, but also kept touch with and maintained communication between the detachments of shipsof-the-line. Of the latter, five off the Texel watched the Dutch navy, while others were anchored off points of the English coast with reference to probable movements of the enemy. Lord St. Vincent, whose ideas on naval strategy were clear and sound, though he did not use the technical terms of the art, discerned and provided against the very purpose entertained by Bonaparte, of a concentration before Boulogne by ships drawn from the Atlantic and Mediterranean. The best security, the most advantageous strategic positions, were doubtless those before the enemy’s ports; and never in the history of blockades has there been excelled, if ever equalled, the close locking of Brest by Admiral Cornwallis, both winter and summer, between the outbreak of war and the battle of Trafalgar. It excited not only the admiration but the wonder of contemporaries.[73] In case, however,
the French at Brest got out, so the prime minister of the day informed the speaker of the House, Cornwallis’s rendezvous was off the Lizard (due north of Brest), so as to go for Ireland, or follow the French up Channel, if they took either direction. Should the French run for the Downs, the five sail of the line at Spithead would also follow them; and Lord Keith (in the Downs) would in addition to his six, and six block ships, have also the North Sea fleet at his command.[74] Thus provision was made, in case of danger, for the outlying detachments to fall back on the strategic center, gradually accumulating strength, till they formed a body of from twenty-five to thirty heavy and disciplined ships-of-the-line, sufficient to meet all probable contingencies.
Hence, neither the Admiralty nor British naval officers in general shared the fears of the country concerning the peril from the flotilla. “Our first defense,” wrote Nelson in 1801, “is close to the enemy’s ports; and the Admiralty have taken such precautions, by having such a respectable force under my orders, that I venture to express a well-grounded hope that the enemy would be annihilated before they get ten miles from their own shores.”[75]
25. T B
T [76]
[While Napoleon’s plans for control of the Channel underwent many changes, the movements actually carried out were as follows: On March 27, Villeneuve with eighteen ships left Toulon and sailed for the West Indies, arriving at Martinique May 12, where he was to be joined by the Brest fleet. Baffled at first by head winds and uncertainty as to the enemy’s destination, Nelson reached Barbados twenty-three days later.
Learning of his arrival, Villeneuve at once sailed for Europe, on June 9, again followed, four days later by Nelson. The brig Curieux, despatched by Nelson to England on the 12th, sighted the enemy fleet and reported its approach to the Admiralty, thus enabling Calder to meet Villeneuve in an indecisive action on July 22 off Ferrol, Spain. Nelson steered for Gibraltar, and thence, having learned that Villeneuve was to the northward, for the Channel, where on August 15 he left his ships with the Channel fleet under Cornwallis.
The French now had twenty-one ships at Brest and twenty-nine under Villeneuve at Ferrol, while Cornwallis stood between with
thirty-four or thirty-five. An effective French combination was still possible, especially as Cornwallis made the cardinal error of dividing his fleet. Accordingly, Villeneuve, under an imperative summons from Napoleon, left Ferrol on August 13; but, with his ships demoralized by their long cruise, with head winds, and disturbed by false reports from a Danish merchantman regarding the British strength, the French admiral two days later turned for Cadiz. Here he was watched by Collingwood; and on September 28 Nelson, after three weeks in England, took command of the blockading fleet. “Thus ended, and forever,” writes Mahan, “Napoleon’s profoundly conceived and laboriously planned scheme for the invasion of England. If it be sought to fix a definite moment which marked the final failure of so vast a plan, that one may well be chosen when Villeneuve made signal to bear up for Cadiz.”[77] On August 25 the Boulogne army broke camp and marched against the Austrian forces advancing toward the Rhine.—E .]
The importance attached by the emperor to his project was not exaggerated. He might, or he might not, succeed; but, if he failed against Great Britain, he failed everywhere. This he, with the intuition of genius, felt; and to this the record of his after history now bears witness. To the strife of arms with the great Sea Power succeeded the strife of endurance. Amid all the pomp and circumstance of the war which for ten years to come desolated the Continent, amid all the tramping to and fro over Europe of the French armies and their auxiliary legions, there went on unceasingly that noiseless pressure upon the vitals of France, that compulsion, whose silence, when once noted, becomes to the observer the most striking and awful mark of the working of Sea Power. Under it the resources of the Continent wasted more and more with each succeeding year; and Napoleon, amid all the splendor of his imperial position, was ever needy. To this, and to the immense expenditures required to enforce the Continental System, are to be attributed most of those arbitrary acts which made him the hated of the peoples, for whose enfranchisement he did so much. Lack of revenue and lack of credit, such was the price paid by Napoleon for the Continental System, through which alone, after Trafalgar, he hoped to crush the Power of the Sea. It may be doubted whether, amid all his glory, he ever felt secure after the failure of the invasion of England. To borrow his own vigorous words, in the address to the nation issued
before he joined the army, “To live without commerce, without shipping, without colonies, subjected to the unjust will of our enemies, is to live as Frenchmen should not.” Yet so had France to live throughout his reign, by the will of the one enemy never conquered.
On the 14th of September, before quitting Paris, Napoleon sent Villeneuve orders to take the first favorable opportunity to leave Cadiz, to enter the Mediterranean, join the ships at Cartagena, and with this combined force move upon southern Italy. There, at any suitable point, he was to land the troops embarked in the fleet to reinforce General St. Cyr, who already had instructions to be ready to attack Naples at a moment’s notice.[78] The next day these orders were reiterated to Decrès, enforcing the importance to the general campaign of so powerful a diversion as the presence of this great fleet in the Mediterranean; but, as “Villeneuve’s excessive pusillanimity will prevent him from undertaking this, you will send to replace him Admiral Rosily, who will bear letters directing Villeneuve to return to France and give an account of his conduct.”[79] The emperor had already formulated his complaints against the admiral under seven distinct heads.[80] On the 15th of September, the same day the orders to relieve Villeneuve were issued, Nelson, having spent at home only twenty-five days, left England for the last time. On the 28th, when he joined the fleet off Cadiz, he found under his command twenty-nine ships-of-the-line, which successive arrivals raised to thirty-three by the day of the battle; but, water running short, it became necessary to send the ships, by divisions of six, to fill up at Gibraltar. To this cause was due that only twenty-seven British vessels were present in the action,—an unfortunate circumstance; for, as Nelson said, what the country wanted was not merely a splendid victory, but annihilation; “numbers only can annihilate.”[81] The force under his command was thus disposed: the main body about fifty miles west-south-west of Cadiz, seven lookout frigates close in with the port, and between these extremes, two small detachments of ships-of-the-line,—the one twenty miles from the harbor, the other about thirty-five. “By this chain,” he wrote, “I hope to have constant communication with the frigates.”
“The Nelson Touch”[82]
At 6 P.M. of Saturday, September 28, the Victory reached the fleet, then numbering twenty-nine of the line; the main body being fifteen to twenty miles west of Cadiz, with six ships close in with the port. The next day was Nelson’s birthday—forty-seven years old. The junior admirals and the captains visited the commander-in-chief, as customary, but with demonstrations of gladness and confidence that few leaders have elicited in equal measure from their followers. “The reception I met with on joining the fleet caused the sweetest sensation of my life. The officers who came on board to welcome my return, forgot my rank as commander-in-chief in the enthusiasm with which they greeted me. As soon as these emotions were past, I laid before them the plan I had previously arranged for attacking the enemy; and it was not only my pleasure to find it generally approved, but clearly perceived and understood.” To Lady Hamilton he gave an account of this scene which differs little from the above, except in its greater vividness. “I believe my arrival was most welcome, not only to the commander of the fleet, but also to every individual in it; and, when I came to explain to them the ‘Nelson touch,’ it was like an electric shock. Some shed tears, all approved—‘It was new—it was singular—it was simple!’ and, from admirals downwards, it was repeated—‘It must succeed, if ever they will allow us to get at them! You are, my Lord, surrounded by friends whom you inspire with confidence.’ Some may be Judas’s; but the majority are certainly much pleased with my commanding them.” No more joyful birthday levee was ever held than that of this little naval court. Besides the adoration for Nelson personally, which they shared with their countrymen in general, there mingled with the delight of the captains the sentiment of professional appreciation and confidence, and a certain relief, noticed by Codrington, from the dry, unsympathetic rule of Collingwood, a man just, conscientious, highly trained, and efficient, but self-centered, rigid, uncommunicative; one who fostered, if he did not impose, restrictions upon the intercourse between the ships, against which he had inveighed bitterly when himself one of St. Vincent’s captains. Nelson, on the contrary, at once invited cordial social relations with the commanding officers. Half of the thirty-odd were summoned to dine on board the flagship the first day, and half the second. Not till the third did he permit himself the luxury of a quiet dinner chat with his old chum, the second in command, whose sterling merits, under a crusty exterior, he knew
and appreciated. Codrington mentions also an incident, trivial in itself, but illustrative of that outward graciousness of manner, which, in a man of Nelson’s temperament and position, is rarely the result of careful cultivation, but bespeaks rather the inner graciousness of the heart that he abundantly possessed. They had never met before, and the admiral, greeting him with his usual easy courtesy, handed him a letter from his wife, saying that being entrusted with it by a lady, he made a point of delivering it himself, instead of sending it by another.
The “Nelson Touch,” or Plan of Attack, expounded to his captains at the first meeting, was afterwards formulated in an Order, copies of which were issued to the fleet on the 9th of October. In this “Memorandum,” which was doubtless sufficient for those who had listened to the vivid oral explanation of its framer, the writer finds the simplicity, but not the absolute clearness, that they recognized. It embodies, however, the essential ideas, though not the precise method of execution, actually followed at Trafalgar, under conditions considerably different from those which Nelson probably anticipated; and it is not the least of its merits as a military conception that it could thus, with few signals and without confusion, adapt itself at a moment’s notice to diverse circumstances. This great order not only reflects the ripened experience of its author, but contains also the proof of constant mental activity and development in his thought; for it differs materially in detail from the one issued a few months before to the fleet, when in pursuit of Villeneuve to the West Indies.
MEMORANDUM
(Secret)
Victory, off C , 9th October, 1805.
Thinking it almost impossible to bring a Fleet of forty Sail of the Line into a Line of Battle in variable winds, thick weather, and other circumstances which must occur, without such a loss of time that the opportunity would probably be lost of bringing the Enemy to Battle in such a manner as to make the business decisive, I have therefore made up my mind to keep the Fleet in that position of sailing (with
the exception of the First and Second in Command) that the Order of Sailing is to be the Order of Battle, placing the Fleet in two Lines of sixteen Ships each, with an Advanced Squadron of eight of the fastest sailing Two-decked Ships, which will always make, if wanted, a Line of twenty-four Sail, on whichever Line the Commander-in-Chief may direct.
The Second in Command will, after my intentions are made known to him, have the entire direction of his Line to make the attack upon the Enemy, and to follow up the blow until they are captured or destroyed.
If the Enemy’s Fleet should be seen to windward in Line of Battle, and that the two Lines and the Advanced Squadron can fetch them, they will probably be so extended that their Van could not succor their Rear.
I should therefore probably make the Second in Command’s signal to lead through, about their twelfth Ship from their Rear, (or wherever he could fetch, if not able to get so far advanced); my Line would lead through about their Center, and the Advanced Squadron to cut two or three or four Ships ahead of their Center, so as to ensure getting at their Commander-in-Chief, on whom every effort must be made to capture.
The whole impression of the British Fleet must be to overpower from two or three Ships ahead of their Commander-in-Chief, supposed to be in the Center, to the Rear of their Fleet. I will suppose twenty Sail of the Enemy’s Line to be untouched, it must be some time before they could perform a maneuver to bring their force compact to attack any part of the British Fleet engaged, or to succor their own Ships, which indeed would be impossible without mixing with the Ships engaged.
Something must be left to chance; nothing is sure in a Sea Fight beyond all others. Shot will carry away the masts and yards of friends as well as foes; but I look with confidence to a Victory before the Van of the Enemy could succor their Rear, and then that the British Fleet would most of them be ready to receive their twenty Sail of the Line, or to pursue them, should they endeavor to make off.
If the Van of the Enemy tacks, the Captured Ships must run to leeward of the British Fleet; if the Enemy wears, the British must
