Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England's response to the Duke's death.

The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington's spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852—an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London—as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High-Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented.

Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, Sinnema examines the various assumptions behind, and implications of, the Times's celebrated claim that the Irish-born Wellington “was the very type and model of an Englishman.” The dead duke, as Sinnema demonstrates, was repeatedly caught up in interpretive practices that stressed the quasi-symbolic relations between hero and nation.

The Wake of Wellington provides a unique view of how in death Wellington and his career were promoted as the consummation of a national destiny intimately bound up with Englishness itself, and with what it meant to be English at midcentury.

Download The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852

PDF format, 2.8MB, 200Pages. Thanks to Ohio University Press.

Peter W. Sinnema
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 
www.ohio.edu/oupress

CONTENTS
Chapter One Aftereffects: Wellington and Englishness
Chapter Two First Rehearsal: Exhibition
Chapter Three Second Rehearsal: Simplicity
Chapter Four The Waiting Game: Selling Wellington and Crowd Anxiety
Chapter Five Obsequies and Sanctification
Chapter Six Irish Opposition
Chapter Seven Epilogue: The Hyde Park Corner Controversy

INTRODUCTION
This is a book about the First Duke of Wellington’s posthumous symbolization as a rallying sign for the English nation. It examines the duke’s legacy as it was constructed, amplified, defended, and contested in Britain in and after 1852, the year of his death and his extraordinary state funeral.

I am not interested in writing another True Book about Wellington, reconstructing a subject whose as yet neglected biographical features wait in the margins of or at the interstices between the extant publications and manuscripts.

Rather, I want to annotate what might be called the “Wellington effect,” the way in which the heroic individual’s eminence was persistently identified with national destiny.

Such a project inevitably confronts Wellington’s fundamentally typological composition. The dead duke was repeatedly caught up in interpretive practices that stressed the quasi-symbolic relations between hero and nation. ...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter W. Sinnema is an associate professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is author of Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News and editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles.

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