ABSTRACT
The Romantic period military memoir began as an adaptation of themes associated with the story of the suffering traveller within the framework of the impersonal campaign narrative. Subsequent to the success of Moyle Sherer’s and George R. Gleig’s picturesque approaches to writing of war in the mid 1820s, however, the military memoir flourished as an instructive and enjoyable type of literature. While the military memoir was preferred to more formal historical military writing, by the mid-1830s it was losing its cultural prominence. Military memoirs continued to be published, but as a genre they largely ceased to attract any particular attention, and, with its veterans aging, accounts of the Peninsular War almost ceased to be published between the 1850s and 1890s. The military memoir was no longer presented as a counter-narrative to war, but was increasingly offered as a supplement to an official and established military history.
