Harry Paget Flashman

Brigadier-General Sir Harry Paget Flashman is a fictional character originally created by the author Thomas Hughes in his semi-autobiographical work Tom Brown's Schooldays, first published in 1857. The book is set at Rugby School, where Flashman is a notorious bully who persecutes its eponymous hero, Tom Brown. In Hughes' book, Flashman is finally expelled for drunkenness.

Flashman Stories

To date the following extracts from the Flashman Papers have been published:

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• Flashman (1969) — the First Anglo-Afghan War
• Royal Flash (1970) — a pastiche of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda set during the Revolutions of 1848, featuring Lola Montez, and Otto von Bismarck as major characters.
• Flash for Freedom! (1971) — the pre-Civil War slave trade and the Underground Railroad.
• Flashman at the Charge (1973) — the Crimean War's Charge of the Light Brigade and Tuva
• Flashman in the Great Game (1975) — the Indian Mutiny
• Flashman's Lady (1977) — Cricket, James Brooke in Borneo and queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar
• Flashman and the Redskins (1982) — the Forty-niners, the American West, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
• Flashman and the Dragon (1986) — the Anglo-Chinese Second Opium War and Taiping Rebellion
• Flashman and the Mountain of Light (1991) — the Koh-i-Noor diamond and the First Sikh War
• Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (1996) — John Brown and the Harper's Ferry Raid.
• Flashman and the Tiger (1999) incorporating:
• The Road to Charing Cross — the Congress of Berlin and the Emperor Franz Josef
• The Subleties of Baccarat — the Tranby Croft card scandal
• Flashman and the Tiger — The Adventure of the Empty House and Rorke's Drift
• Flashman on the March (2005) — invasion of Abyssinia, 1868

Flashman also plays a small part in Fraser's novel Mr American. His father has a similar cameo appearance in Black Ajax.

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Fraser has confirmed that Flashman died in 1915, but the exact circumstances of his death have never been related. An apocryphal version popular among Flashman fans has it that after the events of 'Mr American' in 1914, where the elderly General Flashman passed water in Buckingham Palace, an incandescent King George V had him posted to the Western Front. Rumour has it that a stray shell hit the bordello he was in, just behind the front line. This has never been confirmed or denied in any Flashman book.

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