Landor on The Crimean War: "Alas! poor England!"
Autograph Manuscript signed ("Walter Savage Landor") of an untitled essay on the CRIMEAN WAR, probably intended as a Letter to the Editor of THE ATLAS newspaper.
N.p. [Bath?]: dated May 1 [1855].
Price: $1,500.00
About the item
One page, working draft, densely written in ink on one side of single sheet of foolscap, with several deletions and corrections. Docketed at bottom in a different hand: "Atlas Newspaper, May 5th, 1855". 1 vols. Folio. Landor on The Crimean War: "Alas! poor England!" Very good. cf. Wise, A LANDOR LIBRARY, p. 82, No. 10, for a similar letter of April 7.
Item #222497
A scathing attack on the conduct of the Crimean War, "one of many letters addressed by Landor to the London newspapers during the Crimean War", according to T.J. Wise.
The tenor of it can be gleaned from the following extract:
"Who could have doubted it? By whom was it unexpected? The siege of Sevastopol is raised, or, if the word sounds better, suspended. Happy is it for the bravest of our surviving men, who have performed their part gloriously, and for whom nothing was left but to die in the trenches, knee-deep in mud, without clothing and without food ... Happy is it also for England, now so very unlike the progeny she sent forth, and having lost all sense of humiliation and disgrace, all sense of national honor, too dim-sighted to danger near ... Alas! poor England! ... "
