Henry and Louisa

Dated ‘1809’ in heading of Esd and probably written after the initial break with Harriet Grove in September; Charles Henry and Louisa were the names of Harriet’s younger brother and sister (the latter died on 19 June 1810). But the anti-religious theme which emerges very abruptly at the end of Part One only to submerge again in Part Two seems adventitious to what is essentially an attack on accepted military ideals, and may well have been inserted in 1811 or later. S.’s retrospective note shows that he had become critical of this first ambitious narrative poem. Cameron (Esd Nbk 265–6) notes that ‘Henry and Louisa’ would fit either of two British campaigns in the Napoleonic Wars, the capture of Alexandria from the French in 1801 or the reverse at Rosetta against the Turks in 1807, preferring the latter on grounds of topicality and because the religious issue is then more meaningful. But ‘the Tyrant of the World’ (72) must be Napoleon, and the naval contenders in 171–4 seem both to be from the ‘Boreal’ north. The night battle of Alexandria, though hailed as a great victory, cost 1500 casualties (Annual Register (1803) 948–56). The influence of James Montgomery’s poem ‘The Battle of Alexandria’, published in The Wanderer in Switzerland, and Other Poems (1806), is also clear. Apparently S. was not concerned to depict a specific battle, and may be conflating the two campaigns. The names ‘Afric’ and ‘Britannia’ may derive from Montgomery’s fierce attack on slavery in his poem The West Indies (1809). The motif of a woman rinding her dying lover on the battlefield was a commonplace: see e.g. Campbell’s popular ballad ‘The Wounded Hussar’ (1797) in which the war-casualty is also named ‘Henry’ as he is too in Scott’s ‘Maid of Toro’ (1806) and in Janetta Phillipps’s Poems (Oxford 1811) 24. Cp. also Joseph Cottle, Malvern Hills and other Poems (3rd edn 1802) 83–90; Thomas Penrose, Poems (1781), ‘The Field of Battle’; and ‘The Triumph of Death’ in Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative, ed. Thomas Evans (1810) iv 176–84. King-Hele (The Essential Writings of Erasmus Darwin (1968) 172) cites Darwin’s Loves of the Plants iii 263–308, where ‘Eliza’ (a similar-sounding name to ‘Louisa’) seeks her dead husband after the Battle of Minden (1759). In Montgomery’s ‘Battle of Alexandria’ a distracted war-widow bids ‘her orphan child / Seek his sire among the slain’. But S.’s poem, as its epigraph asserts, serves a new motive of moral choice between ‘Love’ and ‘Glory’.