Romantic Strife: The First Carlist War (1833–1840) in British Fiction
Abstract
British volunteers fought on both sides of the First Carlist War (1833–1840), the dynastic struggle between the liberal factions that championed Isabella II and the reactionary forces that supported Don Carlos’s claim to the Spanish throne. Despite British intervention, the conflict did not arouse as much interest in Britain as the Peninsular War (1808–1814), but it served as the setting for several English literary works that reconstructed it from different perspectives. These fictional texts include George Ryder’s Los Arcos (1845), Frederick Hardman’s The Student of Salamanca (1845–1846), and Edward Augustus Milman’s The Wayside Cross; or, the Raid of Gomez (1847). This paper analyses these texts focusing on their representations of Spain and the First Carlist War and shows that they mostly ignore British intervention in the conflict and perpetuate the romantic image of Spain that had emerged in Britain during the Peninsular War.
Downloads
References
Alger, J. G. (1890). Hardman, Frederick. In L. Stephen & S. Lee (Eds.), Dictionary of National Biography (Vol. 24) (p. 347). London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Almeida, J. M. (Ed.). (2010). Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Anonymous. (1837). The Maid of Toledo. The Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, Music and Romance, 9, 417–421.
Anonymous. (1838). English Officers in the Carlist Camp. Fraser’s Magazine, 18, 220–234.
Beatty, B. & Laspra Rodríguez, A. (Eds.). (2019). Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution: British Views on Spain, 1814–1823. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Beller, M. & Leerssen J. (2007). Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Brett, E. M. (2005). The British Auxiliary Legion in the First Carlist War, 1835–1838: A Forgotten Army. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Canal, J. (2000). El Carlismo. Madrid: Alianza.
Capistegui Gorasurreta, F. J. (2008). Between Repulsion and Attraction: Carlism Seen through Foreign Eyes. Revista Internacional de los Estudios Vascos, Extra 2, 119–143.
Coletes Blanco, A. & Laspra Rodríguez, A. (Eds.) (2013). Libertad frente a tiranía: poesía inglesa de la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–1814): antología bilingüe. Barcelona: Espasa y Fundación Dos de Mayo, Nación y Libertad.
Coletes Blanco, A. & Laspra Rodríguez, A. (Eds.). (2019). Romántico país: poesía inglesa del Trienio Liberal. Estudio crítico y corpus bilingüe anotado. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca.
Dendle, B. J. (1991). The Romance of War, or, The Highlanders in Spain: The Peninsular War and the British Novel. Anales de Literatura Española, 7, 49–64.
Gallardo, A. (1978). Britain and the First Carlist War. Norwood: Norwood Editions.
García Castañeda, S. (2017). “Cosas de España”: Frederick Hardman y la Revolución de 1854. In J. M. González Herrán, M. Sotelo Vázquez, M. C. Carbonell, H. Gold, D. Thion Soriano-Mollá, B. Ripoll Sintes & J. Cáliz Montes (Eds.), La historia en la literatura española del siglo XIX (pp. 443–448). Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona.
Hardman, F. (1845–1846). The Student of Salamanca. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons.
Howarth, D. (2011). The Invention of Spain: Cultural Relations between Britain and Spain, 1770– 1870. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Iarocci, M. (2006). Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of Empire. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Lawrence, M. (2012). Peninsularity and Patriotism: Spanish and British Approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14. Historical Research, 85(229), 453–468. doi: 10.1111/j.14682281.2012.00594.x
Lawrence, M. (2014). Spain’s First Carlist War, 1833–1840. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Milman, E. A. (1847). The Wayside Cross; or, The Raid of Gomez, a Tale of the Carlist War. London: John Murray.
Perojo Arronte, M. E. & Flores Moreno, C. (Eds.). (2022). British Periodicals and Spanish Literature. Mapping the Romantic Canon. Berlin: Peter Lang.
Rodríguez Alonso, M. (1991). Gran Bretaña y España: Diplomacia, guerra, revolución y comercio (1833–1839). Madrid: Actas.
Ryder, G. (1845). Los Arcos: A Spanish Carlist Romaunt. With Notes by George Merry. London: David Bogue.
Ryder, G. (1858). Gillian; And Other Poems. Philadelphia: Charles Desilver.
Saglia, D. (2000). Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Saglia, D. (2019). European Literatures in Britain, 1815–1832: Romantic Translations. Cambridge: CUP.
Saglia, D. & Haywood, I. (Eds.). (2018). Spain in British Romanticism, 1800–1840. Gewerbestrasse: Palgrave Macmillan.
Santacara, C. (2015). La primera guerra carlista vista por los británicos, 1833–1840. Boadilla del Monte, Spain: Machado Libros.
Santamaría López, M. A. (2011). British Auxiliary Legion. Aportación británica a la primera guerra carlista. Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. Retrieved September 10, 2022 from https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/british-auxiliary-legion-aportacion-britanica-ala-primera-guerra-carlista/
Stanhope, P. H. (1888). Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington. 1831–1851. New York: Longmans.
Valdés Miyares, J. R. (2016). Eloquent Silence: The Transformation of Spain in British Balladry between the Peninsular War and the Carlist Wars. The Grove. Working Papers on English Studies, 23, 171–181. doi: 10.17561/grove.v23.a12
Valladares, S. (2015). Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatre (1807–1815). Farnham: Ashgate.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The works published in this journal are subject to the following terms:
1. The Publications Services at the University of Murcia (the publisher) retains the property rights (copyright) of published works, and encourages and enables the reuse of the same under the license specified in item 2.
2. The works are published in the electronic edition of the magazine under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 4.0.
3.Conditions of self-archiving. Authors are encouraged to disseminate pre-print (draft papers prior to being assessed) and/or post-print versions (those reviewed and accepted for publication) of their papers before publication, because it encourages distribution earlier and thus leads to a possible increase in citations and circulation among the academic community.
RoMEO color: green
