I. Rostron
The field of Waterloo (extract from Childe Harold): notes and explanations
Manchester: Parr and Knowles et al. , [1888]
1888.9.27, recto

It may always have been an exaggeration to claim that every British schoolchild knew the date of Waterloo, but the battle’s importance to the country’s sense of its past in the late nineteenth century is clear. Through Byron’s narrative poem Childe Harold’s pilgrimage, Waterloo entered the classroom as a subject for English literature as well as history. This ‘poetry card’ provided an exegesis of the section of Canto III which concerns the battle. In common with a surprising number of nineteenth-century sources it misdated the Battle of Quatre Bras to 15 June.