He joins the 11th Regiment of Light Dragoons commanded by Lord Cardigan, to whom he toadies in his best style. The history in these books is largely accurate most of the prominent figures Flashman meets were real people.įlashman's expulsion from Rugby for drunkenness leads him to join the British Army in what he hopes will be a sinecure. It also contains a number of notes by the author, in the guise of a mere editor of the papers, providing additional historical glosses on the events described.

It details his life from 1839 to 1842 and his travels to Scotland, India, and Afghanistan. The subsequent publishing of these papers, of which Flashman is the first instalment, contrasts the public image of a (fictional) hero with his own more scandalous account of his life as an amoral and cowardly bully.įlashman begins with the eponymous hero's own account of his expulsion from Rugby and ends with his fame as 'the Hector of Afghanistan'. The papers were supposedly written between 19. The papers are attributed to Harry Paget Flashman, the bully featured in Thomas Hughes's novel, who becomes a well-known Victorian military hero (in Fraser's fictional England). The book begins with a fictional note explaining that the Flashman Papers were discovered in 1965 during a sale of household furniture in Ashby, Leicestershire. Presented within the frame of the discovery of the supposedly historical Flashman Papers, this book chronicles the subsequent career of the bully Flashman from Tom Brown's School Days. Flashman is a 1969 novel by George MacDonald Fraser.

Flashman fraser