How we beat Napoleon

It feels the height of ingratitude to blame Jane Austen for anything, but it probably is her fault that most people seem to think that the only impact that the Napoleonic War had on British life was to bring Mr Wickham and the militia into the lives of the Bennet girls. It is certainly true that the outcome of Persuasion revolves around the huge amount of prize money that a frigate captain could make out of the war, but with the exception of a few teasing remarks from Henry Tilney at Catherine Morland’s expense in Northanger Abbey you could read all Jane Austen’s works and still not know that she had spent virtually the whole of her adult life in a country locked in a war that  was ‘total’ in the same sense that the two world wars of the 20th century were total wars.

It did not matter whether you were rich and subject to new taxes or poor and subject to the press gangs, whether you were waist-deep in the cold waters off the Hebrides farming kelp or shopping for ribbons in Meryton, whether you had been driven off the land to make way for sheep or bankrupted by a government contract, war and the economic consequences of war touched every life.