|
Point of order: I imagine 'at Reform' means the 1832 Great Reform Act and he was formerly MP for a rotten borough.
|
#
¿
Jul 21, 2019 20:20
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 10:59 |
|
|
PupsOfWar posted:excited to get to the bit where Flashman is in scotland Anywhere outside of London is notoriously some far-flung foreign locale for many people from London to this day.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2019 11:42
|
|
|
Veni Vidi Ameche! posted:I am enjoying this thread. I am not familiar with these books, but I like what I'm reading here. I wonder if Lord Flashheart has roots in this character. I guess not, since Flashheart is brave and likes real soldiering, but he's also a womanizing psychopath with "Flash" in his name. Probably an inspiration for the name at least. Note that, if you had met Flashman rather than reading his private memoirs, he too would appear brave and as if he likes real soldiering.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2019 11:44
|
|
|
Beefeater1980 posted:Mr Morrison has a large house in Renfrew. Mr Morrison is Flashman’s host while he is in Scotland (soldiers not in barracks at the time would be imposed on local families It was not popular with the locals when this happened, by the way, which is why the Third Amendment to the US Constitution exists. That said I think it would have been more likely in this case that they were put up in local inns if no barracks was available - still would not have been popular though because having a bunch of drunk and disorderly squaddies on the town makes for aggro both then and now. Flashman wouldn't have been imposed on the local bigwig per se, of course; it would have been more of a social obligation to host him.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2019 15:57
|
|
|
Beefeater1980 posted:Apart from the inconvenience of having a wife for a young soldier who just wants to play around, this is a big problem for him socially too. For all their wealth, the Morrisons aren’t gentry - Flashman is marrying down, at a time when there are real social consequences for doing so. Large parts of society that a respectable wife would have given him (business owners and lawyers are not socially respectable at this time) are now closed off. In particular, the smart set he used to run with will not understand or approve. That said, financially hard-up gentry marrying the daughters of rich businessmen was kind of A Thing at the time (there's an episode of the 18th century series of Blackadder where that's the plot); it wouldn't have been particularly shocking. Typically the aristo gets a bunch of money while the businessman's family gets to rise socially; however, do note that Flashman isn't being offered a dowry or anything here... Also, there are many fine gradations of poshness in Victorian society, and while one marry into trade and still be posh, one cannot do so and be completely top drawer, and Cardigan only wants the poshest of the posh. quote:The couple pass a pleasant honeymoon with a lot of pleasant sex, and Elspeth proves very willing to learn Josette’s (remember her?) “French Tricks”. This probably specifically means blowjobs, which were considered pretty drat dirty/racy at the time compared to now; there were even whorehouses that specialised in them. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Jul 31, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2019 11:58
|
|
|
The Rat posted:Yeah I phrased it too quickly when I was phone posting earlier. When I say less of an overt piece of poo poo in the later books, I don't mean that he's any less of an immoral turd. It's more that a lot of the time, it's less an example of Flashman being a standout piece of poo poo like when he rapes Nareeman later in book one Um. It's not called out as explicitly as Nareeman was but wait til you read about what he does to one of the women on that slave ship.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2019 14:22
|
|
|
Ccs posted:drat this really makes me want to read more about the history of Britain’s imperialism. I mean, if you read the Flashman series, that's basically exactly what you'll get.  (with a bit of diversion into the antebellum US, which spoiler warnings is also pretty loving terrible)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2019 11:31
|
|
|
Jezzails, incidentally, being long muzzle loading rifles, continued to be used in Afghanistan right up until the Soviet invasion of the country in the 1980s (!). Dr Watson of Sherlock Holmes fame was invalided out of the British Army after being shot by one in 1880.
feedmegin fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Aug 12, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2019 21:31
|
|
|
The Rat posted:There are a couple different narrators and they seem to all do a good job of getting in Flashman's character. Which includes being utterly pathetic when he's afraid. Highly recommend the audiobooks for long drives. Possibly not with (unprepared) company given the n-bombs, though (!)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2019 10:58
|
|
|
Salisbury Plain, incidentally, is an area of southern England used for military exercises, in particular artillery. Only since 1898 though so this may be a rare case of GMF slipping up... Also re: school it's not that we do freshman university year at school in the sense everyone goes to uni at age 19; it's more that (in the modern day) we specialise earlier and thus have shorter, 3 year degrees. Also the sixth form is actually two years, upper and lower sixth, from ages 16 to 18, for reasons. In US terms it's sophomore/junior/senior. In the current UK system middle and high school are the same place (caveat: sixth form colleges). feedmegin fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Aug 15, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2019 19:10
|
|
|
Beefeater1980 posted:Off the top of my head, I think Fraser writes him as having enthusiastic consent at the point of actual sex in all future cases, although 19th century power dynamics being what they were, in the absence of the enthusiasm, the consent itself would be pretty iffy in a lot of those cases. I mentioned this earlier, but I'm pretty sure the slave on the slave ship in Flash for Freedom wasn't depicted as consenting even given the (extreme!) power dynamic between, y'know, a slave and the crew of a slave ship. It just isn't called out explicitly.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 19, 2019 13:33
|
|
|
1994 Toyota Celica posted:Well it's not as though Victorian gentlemen were stinting on the pedophilia themselves, good English public-school fellows that they were Nof in Flashy's case if you read the original Tom Brown's Schooldays. Though if I recall he does set fire to Tom Brown's bum.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2019 23:18
|
|
|
Beefeater1980 posted:But what happens when it’s not clear if the state actually can enforce that monopoly? Something like what’s happening in Kabul in this section. Of course, the State isn't interested in enforcing its monopoly in this case. That's the Afghan government. These instead are foreign occupiers of Kabul. Re-reading this passage reminds me quite a lot of how Vilerat died, incidentally, for those of you who've read the details. 
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2019 12:26
|
|
|
OctaviusBeaver posted:How does the rest of the series stack up to the first one? I just finished book 1 and enjoyed it but it's a little bit exhausting to read because he is just such a bastard. I don't see how it can not get repetitive. He's generally a lot less of a bastard (as opposed to a coward) in the later books, except to people who had it coming. What aspect of repetition worries you?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2019 12:53
|
|
|
zhuge liang posted:I remember reading an old Fraser interview where he said that Flashman's thoughts are his thoughts. Hopefully he did not mean that 100% literally. I have bad news about his views later in his life
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2019 21:11
|
|
|
Nessus posted:lacking Flashman's exciting opinions about ethnic groups. Flashman is actually very liberal by the standards of his time in that respect. 'They're savages but I respect them and so are we sometimes' is hippy as gently caress for 1845. The people with exciting opinions at the time literally thought black people were monkeys not humans. Like even when GMF started writing in the 60s, Flashman's views were probably I dunno kind of centrist for a white Britiish guy of the time? By the time he died in 2008, uh not so much. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Sep 30, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2019 22:41
|
|
|
aphid_licker posted:Okay it seems p obvious how this ends, good ol Flashy found grasping the flag by the relieving British, with everyone else dead. Ain't that a bummer. It's like you're psychic.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2020 22:26
|
|
|
Angrymog posted:There are a couple of Flashman books set in the States iirc. One where due to Flash's ability? to tan pretty dark, he ends up at the pointy end of the slave trade a couple of times. Only after a) being supercargo on a slave ship (and raping one of the slaves) and then b) a slave driver (and raping more slaves). He could probably have done with more of the pointy end. That said, given that a slaves status followed that of their mother, by the 1850s there were slaves who basically looked white anyway; abolitionist propaganda of the time made use of that.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2020 20:53
|
|
|
'Ougoumont is of course https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hougoumont - this chap was at the Battle of Waterloo.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2020 13:09
|
|
|
aphid_licker posted:Feels a bit weird to use a guy who actually existed as a character like this. Strap yourself in, it's kind of a Thing in the series. The woman in the carriage also actually existed btw.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2020 23:45
|
|
|
quote:You haven’t heard the news, of course. Berlin is alive with alarms, it seems. The revolution’s coming, my boy; the student rabble and the rest will have the King of Prussia off his throne in a week or two. So dear Otto has other fish to fry for the moment. Oh, it’s not only in Germany, either; I hear that France is up in arms, and Louis-Phillipe’s deposed, they say. This of course is the series of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, which in Germany attempted to create a unified German state. Didnt pan out, King of Prussia was fine in the end, Germany eventually becomes unified 22 years later under Prussian hegemony and his son becomes Emperor. But yeah Louis-Philippe is toast, briefly replaced by a republic and then later by Napoleon III (who promptly loses a war against Prussia, hence said aforementioned unification). The Communist Manifesto is written at this time too! 
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2020 20:27
|
|
|
Beefeater1980 posted:
I mean there's a difference between believing that and being ok with slavery. Most 19th century abolitionists including Lincoln also belIeved black people were inherently inferior, just not that they should be property.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2020 23:16
|
|
|
joat mon posted:Fraser had Flashman live from 1822 to 1915. Note that very specifically 1915 can be taken as the end of Victorian/Edwardian England. 1914 was still open warfare and 'we'll be home by Christmas'. 1915 is when everyone settles into the trenches.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2020 22:55
|
|
|
Cobalt-60 posted:So is Flashman any less racist than his contemporaries? Because he seems every bit as dismissive and contemptuous of the "natives" wherever he goes, he's just better at evaluating potential threats. He isn't, though, or not always, and that absolutely makes him better than some of his contemporaries. Shows up more in the later books than the earlier ones I think. Note that 'being better at evaluating potential threats' and 'being less racist' track pretty well with each other in most of the places Flashman ends up in trouble, kind of by definition.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2020 15:39
|
|
|
Xander77 posted:I'm not exactly a huge fan of the glorious Romanov dynasty, but it's important to note Fraiser is only expressing disgust with the dreary landscapes of the Russian empire and its ape-like common folk because that's the political enemy du jour. Had he lived to present day, he would just as happily be castigating the barbarous and cunningly cruel Arabs, who would menace Flashman with the scimitars and kidnap his lady for their harem. Maybe? This is one of the early books, hes discussing Imperial Russia not the Soviet system and hes British which was a bit more chill about the Soviets postwar than the US was. I wouldn't assume hes going vintage chud on this for certain.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2020 23:03
|
|
|
Lobster God posted:It's also worth noting that several of those wars were fought largely or entirely by the East India Company's army, the First and Second Anglo-Sikh Wars for example. Note that these specific guys are not available for the Crimean war as suggested earlier because they still belong to the East India Company. They are a private army, not the British government's (till the Mutiny a few years later. Which of course Flashman is involved in).
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2020 23:20
|
|
|
Xander77 posted:So Flashman is writing his memoirs before 1861? Sometime between the death of Victoria in 1901 and the outbreak of war in 1914 iirc.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2020 23:45
|
|
|
Cobalt-60 posted:Not a particularly cruel method of execution, but certainly a...spectacle. Its instant and hard to gently caress up. Actually quite humane compared to hanging, really.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 16, 2021 23:33
|
|
|
Xander77 posted:It's incredibly formulaic "sure, I was scared the whole time. I was no hero - I was just doing my job, looking out for my buddies who were depending on me" stuff. (That's "Quartered Safe Out Here" - his adventures with the Scottish comic relief troop are combat-free) Errr except for about every 20 minutes he turns into that weird UKIP guy down the pub ranting for a few pages about how the Empire has gone downhill or how much he enjoyed shooting fleeing Japanese soldiers in the back. This becomes more true you get further into the book, it's fairly 
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2022 19:59
|
|
|
poisonpill posted:Not disagreeing since I haven’t read it, but how does this square with the Flashman presentation of the Empire as a rapacious amoral greedy violent machine? You will note the later the book, the more he tends to be sympathetic to it (while still acknowledging its flaws)
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2022 23:33
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 10:59 |
|
|
Norwegian Rudo posted:Lambeth Palace is the residence of the head of the Church of England, so he's suggesting Josiah will either be Archbishop of Canterbury or in prison. Also Parliament though, the Lords specifically, ex officio.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2023 01:16
|
|