Two hundred years on… 1812-2012
It’s hard to escape the fact that this is Charles Dickens’s bicentenary. And any music lover knows that Tchaikovsky wrote an overture about Napoleon’s disastrous advance on Moscow in 1812. Anniversaries are fascinating: they make us look back and see ourselves in perspective. But it’s even more interesting to ask the question, what else was going on in the year that Dickens was born – unremarked at the time by any except the Dickens family – and in which Jane Austen was dotting the last i’s in Pride and Prejudice, sensationally published the following year.
As it happens, 1812 was one of those years. Britain was lurching towards final victory in the wars against France which had already lasted nearly twenty years. The Duke of Wellington, taking advantage of Napoleon’s distractions in Russia, beat a French army at Salamanca and entered Madrid. Concerned that the soldiers’ feet were suffering from all that marching, Marc Brunel, the French émigré engineer and father of Isambard, was given an order to manufacture boots for the army in a factory which was a marvel of the age (he went bust after Waterloo three years later).
Across London plain Mr Humphry Davy, third son of a Cornish cobbler, became Sir Humphry for his services to science, having discovered half a dozen new elements in a dazzling decade of experimentation (and injury). He celebrated by marrying a wealthy Edinburgh bluestocking, retiring from the Royal Institution and going on honeymoon – to France, where he was given the Napoleonic Gold medal. In doing so he missed a rather important letter which arrived too late on his doorstep. The letter reported a terrible disaster which had occurred in May in the Northern coalfields. Ninety-two men and boys perished in an explosion at Felling Colliery on Tyneside and a group of concerned gentlemen formed the Society for the Prevention of Accidents in Mines as a result. Would Sir Humphry come to the aid of the miners and invent a lamp that would help them to see underground without the risk of exploding methane? The famous safety lamp had to wait till his return two years later; and that’s another story entirely.
If you think all that’s pretty momentous, enough to fill a year, think again. For 1812 also saw the only assassination of a British Prime Minister: Spencer Perceval, killed by a disgruntled banker. In other faint echoes of our own times, radical journalists Leigh and John Hunt were imprisoned for some very rich remarks about George, the unlovely Prince Regent, made in their paper, the Examiner. And then there is the small matter of the United States of America declaring war on Britain. It was a small war, as these things go; but still.
Looking back two centuries it feels sometimes as if the world has changed irrevocably. Then again, one is inclined to think that Britain’s ancient antagonists the French have it right when they say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.