ABSTRACT
What remained true throughout the years of warfare against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, however, was the plight of the veteran and his family - to which Upton alludes already in 1781 - which often resulted in the decimation of that family. This chapter examines what was unique both about the women poets' perspective on war and about the circumstances of their authorship and publication. By 1801, in spite of the losses it had sustained in the West Indies and elsewhere, the army had reached a force of some 150,000. When the Peace of Amiens was signed in 1802, however, Britain reduced its regular army to some 40,000 men, an action which the nation rued when the war's resumption in 1803 made it necessary abruptly to mobilize a whole new armed force. The deadly burden of all this worldwide war-making fell with particular devastation upon those least able to cope with it: the poor.
