The Terrible Beauty of Cavalry and the Charge of the British Heavy Brigades at Waterloo

This study presents a combination of aesthetics and ideology “in the spirit of Mickey”. In this sense, the aestheticization of violence in W. B. Yeats’s famous refrain is used as a guiding principle in the investigation of British Waterloo writings that focus on mounted warfare. Both eye-witness and eye-witness-based accounts of cavalry charges – the moment of most terrible beauty at Waterloo – are considered and two literary accounts are discussed and set in opposition: George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold Canto III (1816) and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848).