Flashmans' Lady

Explanatory Note

Since the memoirs of Flashman, the notorious Rugby School bully and Victorian military hero, first came to light ten years ago, and have been laid before the public as each successive packet of manuscript was opened and edited, a question has arisen which many readers have found intriguing. The five volumes published so far have been in chronological order, spanning the period from 1839, when Flashman was expelled and entered the Army, to 1858, when he emerged from the Indian Mutiny. But not all the intervening years have been covered in the five volumes; one gap occurs between his first meeting with Bismarck and Lola Montez in 1842-3, and his involvement in the Schleswig-Holstein Question in 1848: yet another between 1849, when he was last seen on the New Orleans waterfront in the company of the well-known Oxford don and slave-trader, Captain Spring, MA, and 1854, when duty called him to the Crimea. It has been asked, what of the "missing years"?

The sixth packet of the Flashman Papers supplies a partial answer, since it deals with its author's remarkable adventures from 1842 to 1845. It is clear from his manuscript that a chance paragraph in the sporting columns of a newspaper caused him to interrupt his normal chronological habit, to fill in this hiatus in his earlier years, and from the bulk of unopened manuscript remaining it appears that his memoirs of the Taiping Rebellion, the US Civil War, and the Sioux and Zulu uprisings are still to come. (Indeed, since a serving officer of the United States Marines has informed me that his Corps' records contain positive pictorial evidence of Flashman's participation in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, there is no saying where it may end.)

The historical significance of the present instalment may be thought to be threefold. As a first-hand account of the early Victorian sporting scene (on which Flashman now emerges as a distinguished if deplorable actor) it is certainly unique; on a different plane it provides an eye-witness description of that incredible, forgotten private war in which a handful of gentlemen-adventurers pushed the British imperial frontier eastwards in the 1840s. Lastly, it sheds fresh light on the characters of two great figures of the time - one a legendary Empire-builder, the other an African queen who has been unfavourably compared to Caligula and Nero.

A small point which may be of interest to students of Flashman's earlier memoirs is that the present manuscript shows signs of having been lightly edited - as was one previous volume - by his sister-in-law, Grizel de Rothschild, probably soon after his death in 1915. She has modified his blasphemies, but has not otherwise tampered with the old soldier's narrative; indeed, she has embellished it here and there with extracts from the private diary of her sister Elspeth, Flashman's wife, and with her own pungent marginal comments. In the presence of such distinguished editing, I have confined myself to supplying foot-notes and appendices, and satisfying myself of the accuracy of Flash-man's account of historical events so far as these can be checked.

G.M.F.