author
Joseph Jocelyn Anderson
1790–1877
A British army officer turned memoirist, he left behind a vivid firsthand account of campaigns from the Napoleonic era and of life in the far reaches of the British Empire. His writing feels close to lived experience, with the detail and immediacy of someone who was there.
1 Audiobook
Recollections of a Peninsular Veteran
by Joseph Jocelyn Anderson
About the author
Born in Scotland in 1790, he entered the British Army very young and served for more than four decades. Reference sources describe a long military career with the 78th, 24th, and 50th Regiments, including service in the Mediterranean, the West Indies, and the Peninsular War, before later work in Australia and on Norfolk Island.
He is best known to readers today for Recollections of a Peninsular Veteran, a memoir drawn from his own experiences and published after his death by his grandson, Acland Anderson, in 1913. The book has endured because it offers a direct, personal view of campaigning, military routine, and imperial service in the early nineteenth century.
Later in life, he was also active in colonial public life in Victoria. He died in 1877, leaving behind both an unusually wide-ranging military record and a memoir valued for its eyewitness perspective.