A review of ITV's Hornblower series

This video is a fascinating account of the production of the ITV television version of C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels. It also brings out some of the real historical events and characters which iknspired both the books and the TV series.

The Horatio Hornblower books were, of course, one of the inspirations for David Weber's Honor Harrington novels, as David Weber has made quite clear.

One thing which struck me on watching this video was that the duel at the climax of the fourth Honorverse novel, "Field of dishonour" has some significant similarities, although the plot is not identical, to the ITV version rather than Forester's original version of the duel in "The Even Chance."

The video ends with a comparison between the Hornblower books ad TV series, and the Richard Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell and the TV series made of those books.

The comparison is well done but misses one significant trick. C.S. Forester, the author of the Hornblower novels, also wrote a novel about a rifleman like Sharpe, which was published as "Death to the French!"

Bernard Cornwell has confirmed that C.S. Forester's novel Death to the French (also published as Rifleman Dodd) was a significant influence on his Sharpe series. 

Cornwell admired Forester's Hornblower novels and wanted to create a similar series for the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars on land.

The influence is most explicitly seen in the character of Rifleman Matthew Dodd, whom Cornwell incorporated into his own novels - Rifleman Matthew Dodd appears as one of Sharpe's "Chosen Men" in several early books, notably Sharpe's Escape.

In Sharpe's Escape, Dodd is separated from the company during a retreat, at which point Cornwell states that the character's adventures continue as described in Forester's original novel, Death to the French.

Cornwell intended this to be the same individual, effectively a direct homage and a way to bridge the two literary worlds. 


Anyway, the video linked to below is well worth a watch, especially if you are fascinated by stories of the golden age of fighting sail, also known as the age of wooden ships and iron men.


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