![]() ![]() ![]() Fraser’s genius was in demonstrating how such a lowlife came to be a British military hero, winner of the Victoria Cross, knighted, friend of both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. He appeared briefly in Thomas Hughes 1856 novel, "Tom Brown’s Schooldays," as a bully, coward, and drunk who is eventually discovered. ![]() Lately, I’ve been watching the PBS series “Victoria,” and I keep looking for Harry Flashman to show up.įlashman was not Fraser’s creation. I became addicted to these books, waiting impatiently for the next one to appear and was sorely disappointed that Fraser died before he could write the “big” book on Flashman’s adventures in the American Civil War, about which he dropped hints in many of the others. They were written in the first person, they were footnoted by the “editor” of the manuscript (Fraser) and when the first one, titled "Flashman," appeared in 1969, it fooled fully a third of the newspapers, magazines, and TV reporters who reviewed it, including the Today show and the Washington Post, all of whom thought they were authentic memoirs. The books, presented in the form of a long, previously unknown memoir by Flashman, “discovered in the sale of household furniture in Ashby, Leicestershire in 1965,” detail his life from the 1830s when he was expelled from Rugby School up to roughly the First World War, when he was in his 90s. Sir Harry Flashman was the hero of 12 books by a Scottish journalist named George MacDonald Fraser, published between 19 (Fraser died in 2008). ![]()
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