Serjeant Munday
William Howitt had some advice for Victorian tourists hoping for an authentic experience at the battlefield of Waterloo.
1815
King George III 1760-1820 to Queen Victoria 1837-1901
William Howitt had some advice for Victorian tourists hoping for an authentic experience at the battlefield of Waterloo.
1815
King George III 1760-1820 to Queen Victoria 1837-1901
The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 created a tourist attraction for patriotic Englishmen hoping to connect with the Duke of Wellington’s legendary victory. Some tour guides, Charles Dickens cautioned, were inclined to fantasise, but happily an authentic voice was on hand.
THE Belgian guides are great dealers in manufactured relics, and one man professes to have been the guide of Lord Byron — at which time the said precocious guide must have been just three years old!*
If you visit the field, Serjeant Munday is your man. He is about sixty; hale, fresh, frank; upwards of six feet in height, and a gentleman in manners. He has none of the showman about him. You go over the ground feeling as if you had fallen in with a well-informed yeoman of the neighbourhood, who is delighted to conduct you over that most impressive scene, and tell you all that he knows of it.
While he is zealous to state the real facts of the real history, no man will ever hear him utter a word injurious to the honour of the French; on the contrary, he is the first to bear cordial testimony to their bravery and spirit.
Dickens’s article appeared in 1851. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale (1788-1824) died in Greece in 1824, nine years after the Battle of Waterloo, supporting the revolution against the Ottoman Empire: see Byron and Hercules. On the battle itself, see The Battle of Waterloo.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
How was Sergeant Munday different from other guides to the battlefield?
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
The idea might come to visit the Waterloo battlefield. One could be there twenty-four hours later. Charles Dickens said so in 1851.