ABSTRACT
Post-war nuptial celebrations are strangely lacking where we might expect to find them, however, or the celebrations that do occur begin to look very strange. A crucial form of cultural perplexity in 1815 is the intractability of one of the key narratives necessary to make sense of the war. For Wordsworth, the war ended with a wedding - but it was, characteristically, a ceremony he did not attend. He was, however, the father of the bride. On 28 February 1816, Caroline Wordsworth-Vallon, the twenty-four-year old daughter of Annette Vallon and William Wordsworth, married Jean-Baptiste Baudouin in Paris. In his correspondence, Wordsworth remarks that the poem prominent in his mind at this very time was Spenser's Epithalamion. Instead of writing an explicit nuptial celebration for his daughter, however, he composed a set of Waterloo victory odes and other miscellaneous pieces that were published in May 1816 in a thin octavo volume titled Thanksgiving Ode.
