Jonathan Strange, Mr. Norrell, and the Napoleonic Wars

One of the more interesting things about Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is the choice of period – whereas the overwhelming majority of fantasy works are set in a medieval period (something I wrote about way back when I was but a neophyte blogger), Susanna Clarke puts her novel in the Georgian and Regency period. This allows for new themes and new literacy styles that don’t really fit with the medieval, but it also means that Clarke (and her adapters) has to grapple with the Napoleonic Wars.

And this isn’t easy, because magic (especially the kind often found in fantasy genre works) can create difficulties for stories that involve war. As George R.R Martin argued, “I think if you put too much magic in your fantasy it overwhelms the plot, and it starts to make the plot nonsensical. If you do have a sorceress or a wizard who can speak a word and wipe out an army, why would you even assemble an army?” Clarke’s difficulty is that she has to make it work, because she’s decided to tell a story about two magicians and set it during the middle of one of the most famous wars in European history.

So how does Clarke et al. make it work?

To begin with, Clarke makes the war a driving force to the plot, even when the war is happening off-screen. When John Segundus asks why magic is no longer done in England, he asks why magic is not seen “on the street, or on the battlefield.” When Mr. Honeyfoot signs the contract of the Yorkshire Society, he does so in the hope that Norrell will “use his powers for the good of the nation in this time of war.” Likewise, while Mr. Norrell’s aim is to make magic respectable, his desired means of doing so is to approach the ministers of government and lend his powers to the war effort.

And that help is badly needed, because as Sir Walter Pole the Secretary of State for War (standing in here for either or both the Viscount Castlereagh or the Earl of Liverpool, who held that post during this period of the Napoleonic Wars) states in Episode 2:

“The Government’s situation is, I’m afraid, madam, about as bad as it could possibly be. The French are everywhere, triumphant. Our allies have discovered their mistake and become our enemies. Trade is ruined by the war. The harvest has failed for two straight years and the King has gone mad again.”

Now, the show is not as specific as the books when it comes to dating when things are happening, but certainly the period between Mr. Norrell’s Miracle at York (which in the books is dated as happening in 1806) and Jonathan Strange’s use of the Horse Sand to save the beached ship the False Prelate (which likewise is dated to 1810), saw horrible reverses for the British on the continent. 1806 saw the total collapse of the Third Coalition (Britain, Russia, Austria) following Napoleon’s masterwork of the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz, which forced Austria and Russia out of the war, ended the Holy Roman Empire, and gave France control of Italy and western Germany. The Fourth Coalition (Britain, Russia, Prussia) only lasted a year (1806-7), with Napoleon crushing the Prussian army at Jena-Auerstedt and the Russians at Friedland, France seizing eastern Germany and Poland, and Russia switching sides to ally with France’s Continental System, an economic blockade of Britain designed to force the island nation to capitulate to economic pressure. The Fifth Coalition (Britain, Austria, Spain) also only lasted a year (1809), and saw the Austrians not only defeated by the French but allied and married to the Emperor Napoleon (in the person of Marie Louise of Austria), and Spain occupied by France.

So it’s actually really sensible that Mr. Norrell’s first works of magic done for the government are all naval in character – the rain-ships which blockade the French navy, allowing the British navy and merchant marine to evade the Continental System’s blockades, and Mr. Norrell’s “sea beacons, magical defenses to ensure that these islands can never be invaded again.” (attempts were prepared in 1798 and 1803-5, and we have to keep in mind the attempted French landings in Ireland in 1796 and 1798). Likewise, when Mr. Norrell receives his accolades from Parliament, one of the things they ask for first is to bring back “Nelson, for another resurrection,” because up until that time, Admiral Nelson had been the only British commander to defeat Napoleon (even by proxy) at the Battle of the Nile and at Trafalgar, the former of which forced Napoleon to abandon his army in Egypt, the latter of which blocked those prepared invasions of England.

By contrast, when Jonathan Strange is asked to contribute to the war effort, he lends his powers not to the Navy but to the Army – reflecting both his differences of thought and temperament with Norrell and the historical tensions within the British political elite over whether Britain should focus on a naval strategy aimed at seizing France’s overseas colonies in the Caribbean and India or a land-based strategy aimed at re-establishing a military foothold on the continent.  And the major phenomenon that provided support to the latter strategy was the career of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington. Because it was only with Sir Arthur’s arrival in Portugal in 1808 that the British Army began to consistently defeat French armies in the field, starting with the Battles of Rolica and Vimerio, and continuing through the famous Battle of Talavera.

However, when Jonathan Strange arrives, Wellington is on the defensive, hunkered down by the Lines of Torres Vedras (where the two actually meet), three lines of interconnecting forts and redoubts created by Wellington to block the French from advancing on Lisbon and throwing the British out of the Iberian Peninsula, with Wellington using his defensive advantage to bleed the French dry despite being massively outnumbered. Meanwhile in Spain, the term guerrilla war is coined, as the populace of Spain (aided with British gold and British guns) strikes at full force against the French occupier.

And what I love about JS&MN is the way in which magic plays a role in the Peninsula – because what ultimately makes Jonathan Strange useful to Wellington isn’t the grand acts of magic we’re familiar with from the Lord of the Rings, where magic is used to batter armies into submission, but rather something more subtle. When Strange suggests plagues of locusts, something on that epic scale, Wellington insists that “what I chiefly require, sir, is more artillery and more men” – something that only industrial production and organization can accomplish, rather than magic. It’s only until Jonathan Strange listens to the needs of the British soldier that he becomes useful to the war effort – which makes a lot of sense, militarily. There’s an old adage that bad generals think in tactics, good generals think in strategy, and great generals think in logistics; well, the creation of straight roads through the difficult Spanish terrain is precisely the kind of thing that wins wars, by allowing British armies to move faster than their enemy and creating opportunities for victory.  At the same time, thematically, this kind of magic doesn’t overwhelm the war – it can help armies, but it can’t replace them.

At the same time, however, the war also changes magic. When Jonathan Strange hits on the idea of raising the dead Neapolitan soldiers – again, to accomplish the very mundane purpose of Wellington getting his hands on a set of stolen artillery – it forces him to break out of the confines of respectability. Strange complains that he is “at the limits of my magic,” Wellington orders him to “find other magic,” and Strange turns instead to the magic of the Raven King – beginning a process that will profoundly reshape his understanding of magic and his relationship with Mr. Norrell. And there is a deeper parallel here: revealingly, Jonathan Strange says “I suppose a magician might [use magic to kill]… but a gentleman never could,” but as I say on the podcast, there is nothing gentlemanly about necromancy. At the same time, for all that the British like to tell the history of Britain’s role in the Napoleonic Wars as one of strategic geniuses like Nelson and Wellington or British valour (those thin red lines holding against French columns and cavalry charges), the Peninsular War forced the British to fight in a very ungentlemanly fashion. The guerrilla war may be rather romantic in the abstract, but in the particular, it was a deeply ugly process of insurgency and counter-insurgency, which the British kept stoked with gold and guns as the body count mounted. Likewise, when Wellington began the process of pushing back the French from his Lines, he did so in a series of bloody sieges that sometimes ended in brutal sackings, as at Badajoz and San Sebastian.

And so when Jonathan Strange comes back from the wars, he comes back a little like Wellington himself, no longer entirely a gentleman – at least in the way he approaches magic.