The Crimean War and Its Afterlife by Lara Kriegel (review)

Reviewed by: The Crimean War and Its Afterlife by Lara Kriegel Katherine Voyles (bio) The Crimean War and Its Afterlife by Lara Kriegel; 340 pp. Cambridge UP, 2022. $137.95 cloth. The Crimean War and Its Afterlife, by Lara Kriegel, is an affecting book. Its persuasiveness partially resides in the rich detail it arrays as evidence and in the innovative handling of its parts and chapters. And while these are deeply compelling, the book is especially impressive in the depth of its capacity to make meaning of the many shifting and even contradictory meanings of that conflict, its legacy, and how it is memorialized. Kriegel's topic is the importance of the Crimean War during the time it was waged, and how time and events intervene to alter, but also stabilize, that importance: "The war provided an occasion to express, generate, and legitimate a set of Victorian values. … If wartime played its part in developing and institutionalizing these ideals, the Crimea's afterlife provided occasions to sustain and rework them" (12). She is especially attuned to how subsequent conflicts torque previous understandings of the Crimean War; she also deploys her considerable energies on how large-scale shifts in British culture and society reshaped the meanings of the war. And she insists on the significance of the everyday, the quotidian, the hardest of the hard to see precisely because it is ordinary. For Kriegel, the everyday is a site of the making and remaking of the war's significance. She effectively nuances and finesses the multiple kinds of significance of the Crimean War through her approach to the book's chapters. The book is organized into three parts: "Persistence," "Avatars," and "Angels." By naming the first section after a virtue and the final two after types or classes of people, Kriegel signals that part of how to understand the meanings of the war is through understanding the relationships between a virtue and a type. These relationships—between groups of people and the characteristics they display—are drawn out in the chapters within the parts. Part of what makes Kriegel's book so moving is how she dramatizes the relationships between individuals, groups, and idealized types. How people embody abstract concepts and how the meaning of those abstract concepts changes is a story of the pressure exerted by war on individual men and women, and how those men and women shaped the significance of that war. In part 1, Kriegel's historical analysis unfolds across two chapters, "The Adventurers" and "The Dutiful." Kriegel explains her designations. About "The Adventurers" she writes, "I employ this term to encapsulate the taste for alterity and the inheritance of Orientalism among Crimean-bound voyagers at different points. There is a touch of irony in my usage" (22). "The Dutiful" centres on both the event of the Charge of the Light Brigade and the men who participated in it. Part 2 is made up of "The Brave" and "The Custodians"; the first is about the the Victoria Cross military award and the men who were awarded it. The second is about the caregivers of the dying, [End Page 331] the dead, and their memorials. Part 3 is divided into "The Heroine," which refers to the work and figure of Florence Nightingale in her lifetime as well as the tending of her legacy, and "The Foremother," which focuses on Mary Seacole, the Jamaican-born woman who wrote the story of her time as a hotelier and nurse tending to British soldiers during the war. By braiding together groups of people, individuals, and their signal characteristics, Kriegel imbues portraits with the traits of their subjects. She anchors each chapter in the mid-Victorian period and then propels that chapter through the rest of the century and into the twentieth before ending in the present. In this way, Kriegel animates what the war meant in its own day, how that meaning was shifted by the reality of other wars, and how those meanings persist even now in a cyclical, not linear, way because she constantly returns to the nineteenth century before moving forward through time. For a book about meaning and its persistence, this approach is quite effective. There are...

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