Missing letters: reading the interstices in archival correspondence from the Napoleonic Wars and in Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major

An epistolary cache held in London’s National Army Museum is notable for letters which are expected but not written. Lieutenant Edward Teasdale, deployed to Jamaica in 1807 as part of the British forces fighting the French in the Napoleonic Wars, wrote home repeatedly to his mother in Yorkshire, pleading with her to correspond with him. But he only ever received one letter from her. The lack of letters nonetheless produces a palpable sense of desire, hope and expectation. The same phenomenon is also evident in Thomas Hardy’s novel The Trumpet-Major, published in 1880 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. Reading the interstices – the places where letters should be but fail to be – reveals the importance of ‘phantom-narratives’ in life writing and war writing. Phantomnarratives not only reveal otherwise unarticulated hopes and desires but also vary the epistemological texture of the novel.