Scribblomania

Abstract

The end of the Napoleonic Wars coincided with a phenomenal rise in the number and variety of war memoirs being written by veterans of all ranks, yet historians have mostly argued that these books made little impact on the general reading public. This chapter overturns that idea. It uses research into publishers’ archives, library catalogues, and later editions of Peninsular War memoirs to demonstrate that these soldiers’ tales sold well, made significant profits for their editors and publishers, and became increasingly imitated and parodied as the nineteenth century went on (including by Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle). It argues that these books should be seen as part of a commercial genre of war writing, with the curated representations of conflict they contained being deliberately marketed to different readers via cheap or luxury editions, illustrations, and decorative bindings.