Spending more time than desirable behind the wheel of a car, audio books have become important.  Last year an Audible subscription brought the option to choose the books to which I wished to listen, along with some bonus choices.

The £7.99 a month cost seemed good value compared with the cost of most other entertainments.  On Boxing Day, I paid £19 to stand on the terraces at Yeovil Town to watch a poor quality National League football match, tickets for rugby matches are more and tickets for music concerts considerably more again.  Listening to books being well read seems a very good buy.

Driving from Somerset to Dublin today, David Copperfield was the companion. The Audible version runs to 36 hours so has become a familiar friend in the last few weeks.

On the M11 motorway north from Co Wexford, there was a moment that did not seem quite right.  Had the text used for the recording been changed from the original, for there seemed an anachronistic reference.  A check of the original verified that the reading had been faithful to the source:

I thought it my duty to hint at the discomfort my aunt would sustain, from living in a continual state of guerilla warfare with Mrs. Crupp; but she disposed of that objection summarily by declaring that, on the first demonstration of hostilities, she was prepared to astonish Mrs. Crupp for the whole remainder of her natural life.

‘A continual state of guerilla warfare?’ From where would Dickens have derived such a reference?

In the history of the Boer war that I learned, the British struggled because the Boers used guerilla tactics.  However, if Betsy Trottwood and Mrs Crupp could be engaged in an antagonism reminiscent of guerilla warfare in the mid-19th Century, how could such tactics have come as a surprise half a century later?

A check on the origin of the term revealed that it had originated in the Peninsular War against Napoleon, so would have been available to Dickens and was obviously a phrase in such common usage that it could be included in a novel for popular consumption.

It is baffling then that armies continued to fight wars as if the Trottwood-Crupp tactics of sudden and surprise verbal attacks could not be replicated on the battlefield.  If guerilla warfare was deemed a tactic by which one might conduct a campaign of attrition against one’s adversary, how did the disastrous campaigns of the Great War proceed as they did?