The Crimean War (1853–56) has long been credited as an instigator of a wide range of political and administrative reforms in mid-Victorian Britain, as well as a pivotal moment in reshaping the nineteenth-century international order. But the war, argues Stephanie Markovits, also had a more pronounced influence on the literature and art of the era than has been recognized by previous scholars. Markovits, a literary critic who previously wrote The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Columbus, OH, 2006), dissects and synthesizes a range of mostly familiar texts in order to demonstrate that representations of the war helped to reshape prevailing ideas of heroism and patriotism. In addition, she shows, intriguingly, that responses to the Crimean War exhibited “nascent signs of ironic technique” (6) that have generally been associated with the Great War.

Following a brief introduction, Markovits provides separate chapters on journalism, novels, poetry, and visual art. In each she combines close textual (and contextual) readings with extensive use of the critical literature. Her chapter on journalism focuses, for good reason, mostly on The Times and its “special correspondent,” William Howard Russell. If, as John Plunkett has argued, Queen Victoria was the “first media monarch,” Markovits asserts that the experience of the Crimean War was “to an unprecedented degree” mediated through journalism (13). Russell's method combined immediate telegraphed messages with more measured, researched accounts that followed a couple of weeks later. The latter, giving the participating soldiers a voice and revealing the war's management, helped to ensure that the war would dominate political discourse at the time. In addition, by combining the paper's own leading articles with the “ostensibly private correspondence of soldiers” (19), The Times blurred the line between the public and private spheres. A similar blurring occurred in Russell's correspondence, which foregrounded his own reportorial authority in the more public stories he told.

In her textual analysis of war correspondence, Markovits likens it generically to novels. But this relationship worked in both directions; hence, her chapter on “novelistic responses” (63) emphasizes novelists’ borrowing from journalism's conventions. More important, she argues that several novels of the mid-1850s, including some not normally considered “Crimean War novels,” blurred the line between masculine epic and feminine sensationalism in a way that reshaped the notion of the heroic. Markovits shows, for example, that the 1840's “condition of England” narrative in Gaskell's North and South (1855) addresses the Crimean theme of national disunity through a domestic context. On the other hand, in the novels of Charles and Henry Kingsley, which “attempt to redefine male heroism by engaging relatively directly with the events of the war,” the heroes “end up surprisingly domesticated” (69). Markovits argues that while the experience of the Crimean War may have undermined a “very muscular form of heroism” (122), heroines of the war novels offer an alternative vision of national healing.

A chapter on the poetry of the Crimean War argues that “earnestness generally precluded irony in favor of outrage” (123) but at the same time sees incipient manifestations of irony. Unlike the poets of the Great War, those of the Crimean War were not participants, a fact that handicapped them in an environment in which journalists’ and soldiers’ portrayals dominated the public sphere. In addition to this constraint, war poets faced a “deeper epistemological problem” (125) resulting from the sharp disjunction between the prewar visions of the heroic and the experience of the war itself. Many poems got around these issues by focusing on the home front, consistently with the much-criticized growth of “spasmodic” (or inward-looking) poems in the 1850s. Against this backdrop, the heart of this chapter focuses on Alfred, Lord Tennyson's “Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) and Maud (1855). Markovits reads the former as a response constituting “bewilderment”—far from the celebration of glory that is sometimes thought. Similarly, through a particularly imaginative reading, she presents Maud as a more ambivalent and complicated, and less bellicose, poem than was generally thought by contemporaries (including, for example, Gladstone).

The fourth main chapter focuses on visual representations of the war, particularly the works of John Leech and John Everett Millais. The entire book is amply illustrated, but this chapter in particular provides numerous images that Markovits compellingly analyzes. One of the key themes of this chapter is “remediation,” the ways in which these paintings and cartoons referenced other media, such as newspapers, in ways that “oddly combined the realistic with the artificial and the contemporary with the ahistorical” (168–69). As in previous chapters, the overall message is that the response to the war was ambiguous and complicated, presenting its confusions and destabilizing effects.

This is a highly stimulating book that offers an innovative and generally convincing account of mid-Victorian culture, combining textual analyses and comparisons with evidence of influence and authorial intent taken from (published) letters and diaries. While most of her space is devoted to close readings of a relatively small number of texts (but several more than I have been able to convey here), these analyses are contextualized with briefer forays into a much wider range of sources, giving the reader a clear impression of the literary landscape. In addition, although each chapter can be read alone, she makes frequent very helpful links between them, showing convincingly that the experience of the Crimean War easily crossed media and was intertextual. Occasionally she overgeneralizes or makes too much of a pun; is it really true that the British sense of heroic that includes being “notoriously ‘good losers’” has been passed down from the Light Brigade to today (as she seems to imply) or that this is “perhaps, a particularly important ‘value’ for a nation of shopkeepers to uphold” (159)? In such cases, it is not always easy to tell if she is simply being clever or is making a serious argument. More significantly, while she draws extensively on recent literary criticism, her historical contextualization does not always engage the most current scholarship. This is, though, a first-rate study that demands the attention not only of literary critics but of cultural historians interested in modernity, representations of war, or the nineteenth century.