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On his famous European travels of 1816, which included the story-telling competition that gave birth to Frankenstein and The Vampyre, Lord Byron and his travelling companion Dr John Polidori made a tour of the battlefield of Waterloo, where Napoleon had been defeated just the year before.
“We got out at the monuments,” Polidori wrote. “Lord Byron gazed about for five minutes without uttering a syllable; at last, turning to me, he said – ‘I am not disappointed. I have seen the plains of Marathon, and these are as fine. Can you tell me,’ he continued, ‘where Picton fell? Because I have heard that my friend Howard was killed at his side, and nearly at the same moment.’ The spot was well known, and I pointed with my finger to some trees near it, at the distance of one hundred and fifty yards: we walked to the spot.”
Byron and Polidori were far from the only British tourists eager to see the battlefield. A wave of British tourists swarmed the site in the years after the great English victory.
The victory was immediately canonized into national myth, and everyone wanted to see the plain of Britannia’s triumph. Thackeray wrote that ships were “sailing every day, filled with men of fashion and ladies of note… going not so much to a war as to a fashionable tour.”
Even if you couldn’t afford the trip, history was brought home to you. Napoleon’s carriage was taken on a tour from London to Edinburgh; a print by George Cruikshank shows sightseers swarming over it like rats. A shilling would buy you the chance to stand in a panorama representing the battle, and enjoy the sight of a “mass of 50,000 French… in great confusion.”
Meanwhile, at the battlefield itself, eager tourists surveyed what was little more than a charnel house.
One early visitor, the novelist Charlotte Anne Eaton, recounted:
On the top of the ridge… we traced a long line of tremendous graves, or rather pits, into which hundreds of dead had been thrown… The effluvia which arose from them, even beneath the open canopy of heaven, was horrible…The fresh-turned clay which covered those pits betrayed how recent had been their formation. From one of them the scanty clods of earth which had covered it had in one place fallen, and the skeleton of a human face was visible.
Even long after, macabre reminders of mass death remained. It was said that crops grew more luxuriantly over the mass graves.
Meanwhile, enterprising locals began scavenging and hawking grisly souvenirs. These included bullets, buttons and even “letters taken from the pockets of the dead”.
Most people took home stray bullets and buttons, but one poet claimed to know “one honest gentleman, who has brought home a real Waterloo thumb, nail and all, which he preserves in a bottle of gin.” Sir Walter Scott, it appeared, made off with the skull of one “poor fellow,” the deceased corporal John Shaw […]
Scott recounted that a veteran in his party was rather disgusted with how eagerly the rest of the visitors snabbled up these trifles.
Local grave-robbers weren’t entirely insensitive to the necessities of canny marketing. They sold ‘French’ skulls to British tourists, and ‘British’ or ‘Prussian’ ones to the French.
By the 1830s, there were rumors that factories were churning out “authentic battlefield souvenirs” by the thousands. No other than P T Barnum, himself no stranger to chicanery, was taken in:
Several months subsequent to our visit to Waterloo, I was in Birmingham, and there made the acquaintance of a firm who manufactured to order, and sent to Waterloo, barrels of ‘relics’ every year. At Waterloo these ‘relics’ are planted, and in due time dug up, and sold at large prices as precious remembrances of the great battle. Our Waterloo purchases looked rather cheap after this discovery.
Very little indeed was safe from the grasp of the tourism economy.
One chapel on the battlefield was so frequently scrawled with visitors’ names that it had to be fully whitewashed every 5 years. The Waterloo Elm, under which the Duke of Wellington planned his strategy, survived the battle and became a symbol of enduring hope — but by 1830, it had been chopped down and converted into memorial snuffboxes and toothpick cases.
Which kind of puts modern battlefield tourism into perspective.
