Notes and Thoughts Researching Victorian-Era Soldier "breakdowns"

Throughout the last year of my undergraduate degree, I have been working through a

wide range of sources for Dr. Milne-Smith to help develop her future project that focuses on

Victorian soldiers' “breakdowns.” This research became a major part of my last year as an

undergraduate student at Laurier, as it pushed me to develop stronger skills in analyzing sources and gave me a clearer sense of the kind of work I hope to continue in my Master’s and beyond.

Over the course of working with Dr. Milne-Smith on this project, I examined three main sources in the research process: Poor Law letters, parliamentary papers on army enlistment, and statistical and sanitary reports on army medical matters. What stood out most across all of them was how differently soldier “breakdowns” were understood, depending on the source.

I started with analyzing Poor Law letters through the “Voices of the Victorian Poor”

database, using the filter “references to military service.” My task here was to examine letters written by soldiers in workhouses and their families. I initially expected to find mostly letters written by actual soldiers discussing injuries and other ailments; however, after going through many of the letters, a lot of them were written by soldiers' wives and widows. These women were often writing on behalf of men who were no longer able to support themselves, asking for financial assistance or relief. In many cases, they described their husbands as being unable to work, physically weak, or mentally unstable, though not always in medical terms.

Another aspect I found particularly interesting was the language of the letters themselves.

Many were written with inconsistent spelling and grammar, which at times made them difficult to read but also highlighted the illiteracy prevalent at the time. In some cases, the people writing letters needed help writing them or had them written on their behalf. These details add another layer to the sources that I found very interesting personally.

The fact that so many of these letters came from wives and widows also shifts how we can understand soldier “breakdowns.” These were not just individual experiences, but family

crises. A soldier’s inability to work affected his entire household and affected things like whether his family could easily access relief, enter a workhouse, or survive financially. Here, breakdowns were not only individual but also something that could affect a soldier’s whole family negatively. There were complaints of children starving as they didn’t have enough money for food, numerous injuries that families had to deal with alone, and limited amounts of work and money-making opportunities for former soldiers.

From there, I moved on to parliamentary papers, including House of Commons & House

of Lords debates, covering army enlistment and administration between 1858 and 1902. This

section took the longest, and I did a lot of reading, reviewing more than 700 documents over the winter months. Compared to the Poor Law letters, these sources were far more distanced from actual experiences of soldiers suffering “breakdowns.” It was very interesting to compare the language of these documents, which was far more formal and structured, with the more personal and sometimes unintelligible writing found in the letters. Rather than personal accounts, I was reading and highlighting key sections of debates on costs, recruitment, desertion, and the army's overall efficiency.

In these documents, soldiers who had “broken down” were rarely discussed directly;

instead, there were many themes and ideas about soldiers in the army. One recurring theme was the challenge of retaining experienced soldiers. Some officials suggested that increasing pay might encourage re-enlistment, while others focused on attracting recruits and questioned whether the army was getting the “best” recruits. There were also concerns about desertion rates, the costs associated with losing men in the ranks, and the conditions of the army itself.

Finally, I examined statistical and sanitary medical reports to gather statistics on recorded

illnesses, hospitalization, and mortality across regiments and regions between 1860 and 1900. These records, compared with earlier sources, focused on larger figures rather than individual stories, debates, or discussions about soldiers and army enlistment. The thing I found most interesting in looking at these reports was how they developed over time, with different classifications of diseases and injuries, as well as the growth in numbers. For the first nine years, between 1861 and 1868, there were only five broad classes used to categorize hospital admissions, such as Class I (Miasmatic, Enthetic, Dietic, and Parasitic) and Class II (Diathetic and Tubercular). These categories were fairly general and, at times, unclear. From 1869 onward, however, the system became more structured and specific, with classification terms such as “General Diseases,” “Local Diseases,” “Conditions,” “Poisons,” and “Injuries.” This shift in terminology reflects advancements in the medical field, aimed at better standardizing and defining illness.

Whether through categorization of illness, families seeking relief, or officials debating

enlistment and manpower, this project showed me three distinct types of sources to draw on and showed me that “breakdowns” can be described in many different ways. I really enjoyed

researching all three sources and learning more about Victorian soldier “breakdowns.” During the Fall semester, I took a class on the History of Madness, and analyzing these sources helped me better understand both the content learned in that class and Victorian history in general.

Looking at all these different types of sources also taught me a lot about what kinds of sources are available when conducting primary research, and I hope to take these skills with me in all my future endeavours.