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Thomas Jackson's autobiography provides a colourful account of his
experiences as a militiaman, Coldstreamer, and Chelsea pensioner.
Son of a Walsall bucklemaker, Jackson joined the Staffordshire
Militia aged 17 and spent a decade on home service, much of it
passed at Windsor Castle and Weymouth guarding King George III. As
a sergeant in the Coldstream Guards, he served in Sir Thomas
Graham's 1813-14 campaign in the Netherlands and was wounded and
captured during the storming of Bergen-op-Zoom. Jackson provides a
harrowing account of this failed assault, the ensuing amputation of
his right leg, and his subsequent year-long convalescence. While
many military memoirs end with news of peace or discharge, Jackson
also chronicles his post-war life as a Chelsea pensioner and war
amputee, describing his struggles raising a family amidst economic
turmoil and cholera outbreaks. Jackson provides a fresh and often
critical perspective on service in the ranks. Embittered by the
loss of his leg, he laments the plight of army veterans, doomed by
an ungrateful nation to lives of 'pinching poverty'. His memoir
also does not shrink from graphically describing the horrors of
combat. Indeed, Neil Ramsey, author of a recent comprehensive study
of military memoirs, wrote that Jackson's story deserved 'far wider
attention as one of the most harrowing accounts of war's miseries
to be written in the nineteenth century'. Yet despite the clear
merits of his testimony, Jackson's Narrative has never been
reissued since its initial publication. Enhanced with additional
research and commentary by historian Eamonn O'Keeffe, this new
edition makes Jackson's lively and invaluable autobiography
publicly available for the first time in 170 years.
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