The Recollections of Rifleman Harris

The Recollections of Rifleman Harris is a memoir published in 1848, which claims to reflect the experiences of an enlisted soldier in the 95th Regiment of Foot in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars. The eponymous soldier was Benjamin Randell Harris, a private who joined the regiment in 1803 and served in many of the early campaigns in the Peninsular War. In the mid-1830s, Harris was working as a cobbler in London when he met an acquaintance, Captain Henry Curling, who asked him to dictate an account of his experiences of army life. This account was then held by Curling until 1848,^{[citation needed]} when he succeeded in getting the manuscript published, preserving one of the very few surviving accounts of military service in this era that claims to have originated with a private soldier. However, as Harris himself was illiterate, it remains unclear how far the text reflects his own views, and how far it reflects the views of Curling, the author of the written account. Even the description of the text's origins comes from Curling, meaning that it is impossible to know what Harris himself actually said or felt about the events which the diaries describe.