ABSTRACT
John Pearman wrote a life story that was framed and bound by public events. He described his passage from railway servant, to soldier, to policeman as a ‘Public Service of 40 years in uniform’, [‘Memoir’, p. 159] and the format of the military memoir that he partially used as a model in the first half of the notebook dictated this narrative allegiance to the public drama of wars, and battles, and the appropriation of great tracts of land under hot and distant suns. But within the conventional framework of nineteenth-century military and working-class autobiography, we should notice the oddness and particularity of the radical soldier’s tale.
