Myth, Memory, and Empire: Reading Napoleon through Turner and Romantic Literature

Abstract

This article examines the cultural afterlives of Napoleon in early nineteenth-century Britain through the interwoven responses of literature and visual arts, with particular attention to J.M.W. Turner’s paintings The Field of Waterloo (1818) and War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet (1842). Napoleon was not merely a historical figure but a cultural text, endlessly reimagined in poetry, satire, and art. Romantic poets like Southey, Wordsworth, and Scott celebrated his downfall at Waterloo as a providential triumph, while Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and women writers such as Felicia Hemans and Louisa Costello offered more sceptical or tragic reflections on the immense human cost of war that ended his reign. Turner’s canvases situate themselves within this contested literary field. The Field of Waterloo, directly referencing Byron’s stanzas, rejects triumphalist commemoration by foregrounding suffering and grief rather than national glory. Two decades later, War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet revisits Napoleon as a diminished yet haunting presence, aligning with Romantic irony, and echoing the ambivalent imagery of contemporary caricatures and poems of exile. Together, these representations show how the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon’s figure became symbolic sites for negotiating questions of empire, masculinity, domestic loss, and national identity. By situating Turner alongside Romantic poets, women writers, and popular caricatures, this study demonstrates how visual and literary texts fashioned Napoleon into a volatile cultural symbol whose shifting meanings expose the contested identities of post-Waterloo Britain.