ABSTRACT
A new style of military memoir appeared with the publication of Moyle Sherer’s Recollections of the Peninsula and George Gleig’s The Subaltern. As Gary Harrison and Jill Heydt-Stevenson have observed, the picturesque extended a ‘complex and extensive influence’ on matters of taste and aesthetic appreciation across the Romantic period. The picturesque fostered an understanding of the land as an aesthetic commodity that could be marketed through tours, guidebooks and travelogues for consumption by a largely middle-class audience. In adapting the picturesque to his military memoirs, Sherer similarly sought to cultivate his readers’ aesthetic appreciation of, and to some extent their vicarious participation in, scenes of war. Sherer’s Recollections transposes the picturesque to his account of travelling with the army through Portugal and Spain. Despite the irreducible presence of war’s suffering, Sherer’s and Gleig’s writing was nonetheless instrumental in shifting a sentimental tradition of military memoirs into what could be termed a Romantic tradition.
