Flashman, Harry Paget (Fictitious character)

Sir Harry Paget Flashman is a fictional character created by Thomas Hughes (1822–1896) in the semi-autobiographical Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and later developed by George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008). Harry Flashman appears in a series of 12 of Fraser's books, collectively known as The Flashman Papers, with covers illustrated by Arthur Barbosa and Gino D'Achille. Flashman was played by Malcolm McDowell in the Richard Lester 1975 film Royal Flash. In Tom Brown's School Days (1857), Flashman is portrayed as a notorious Rugby School bully who persecutes Tom Brown and is finally expelled for drunkenness, at which point he simply disappears. Fraser decided to write the story of Flashman's later life, in which the school bully would be identified as an "illustrious Victorian soldier", experiencing many of the 19th-century wars and adventures of the British Empire and rising to high rank in the British Army, to be acclaimed as a great warrior, while still remaining "a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady." In the papers—which are purported to have been written by Flashman and discovered only after his death—he describes his own dishonourable conduct with complete candour. Fraser's Flashman is an antihero who often runs away from danger. Nevertheless, through a combination of luck and cunning, he usually ends each volume acclaimed as a hero.