Faces in the crowd: as Napoleon roamed, the home front was feverish

Uglow’s subject is the everyday life of those who stayed behind, for whom the 22 years of conflict were experienced in terms of boredom, bad weather, missing fathers, sons or brothers, the price of bread, failed harvests, mourning, making money and, overwhelmingly, reading the newspapers.

By Frances Wilson

(Photo By Marching on his stomach: a volunteer in Thomas Rowlandson's Private Drilling (1798))

In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815
Jenny Uglow
Faber & Faber, 740pp, £25

“Jane Austen never heard the cannon roar at Waterloo,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1940. Nor did Walter Scott see “sailors drowning at Trafalgar”. Austen had two brothers in the Royal Navy and lived, said Woolf, “very close to the life of [her] time” but in neither her novels nor those of Scott can be found a direct mention of the Napoleonic wars.