Technology and Innovation

Waters, Catherine

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03861-8_3

Catherine Waters⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media ((PSHM))

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Abstract

Like the railroad, photograph, or telegraph, with all of which it was closely associated, the journalism of the Victorian special correspondent brought the world closer, shrinking space and time in conveying readers imaginatively to distant places. Indeed, they reported the very developments in transport and communications technology upon which the delivery of their own graphic news coverage depended. This chapter examines two major enterprises—the 1859 maiden voyage of the Great Eastern and 1865 Atlantic Telegraph cable expedition—both marred by failure, but which provide illuminating case studies illustrating the shifting relationship between old and new transport and communication technologies in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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Notes

1.
Wemyss Reid, ‘Some Reminiscences of English Journalism’, Nineteenth Century, 42 (1897), 55–66, 59.
2.
Reid, 61.
3.
Reid, 61–2.
4.
‘Opening of the Main Drainage by the Prince of Wales’, Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1865, 5.
5.
‘Opening of the Metropolitan Railway’, Daily Telegraph, 10 January 1863, 3.
6.
Ralph Straus, Sala: The Portrait of an Eminent Victorian (London: Constable, 1942), p. 168.
7.
George Augustus Sala, Dutch Pictures, with Some Sketches in the Flemish Manner and Pictures Done with a Quill (London: Vizetelly, 1883), p. xii.
8.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Inauguration of the Suez Canal’, Times, 7 December 1869, 7–8, 8.
9.
‘The Inauguration of the Suez Canal’, 7.
10.
Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt, ‘Foreword’, in Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy, ed. Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt (London: The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2016), pp. 3–7, p. 6.
11.
John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 9; p. 16.
12.
From Our Own Correspondent, ‘The Departure of the “Great Eastern”’, Illustrated London News, 10 September 1859, 241.
13.
‘The Departure of the “Great Eastern”’, 10 September 1859, 241.
14.
Henry Vizetelly, who was covering the launch for the Illustrated Times, later reported that he was accompanied by Nicholas Woods for the Times, George Augustus Sala for the Daily Telegraph, ‘Murphy’ for the Daily News, John Hollingshead for All the Year Round and E. J. Reed for the Mechanics Magazine. Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1893), 2: p. 62. I have been unable to identify ‘Murphy’.
15.
‘Trial Trip of the Great Eastern’, Daily News, 9 September 1859, 4.
16.
From Our Own Reporter, ‘Departure of the Great Eastern’, Times, 8 September 1859, 7–8, 7.
17.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Departure of the Great Eastern’, Times, 9 September 1859, 7–8, 7.
18.
From Our Own Correspondent, ‘The Trial Trip of the Great Eastern’, Morning Chronicle, 12 September 1859, 5–6, 5.
19.
‘Success of the “Great Eastern”’, Illustrated London News, 17 September 1859, 265.
20.
‘Success of the “Great Eastern”’, 17 September 1859, 265.
21.
‘The “Great Eastern”’, Illustrated London News, 17 September 1859, 263–64, 263.
22.
‘Latest Intelligence’, Times, 10 September 1859, 7. By Electric Telegraph, ‘Progress of the Great Eastern’, Daily Telegraph, 10 September 1859, 3. ‘Telegraphic Intelligence’, Daily News, 10 September 1859, 4.
23.
See Catherine Waters, ‘“Doing the Graphic”: Victorian Special Correspondence’, in Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 165–81.
24.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Trial Trip of the Great Eastern’, Daily Telegraph, 12 September 1859, 5–6, 5.
25.
From Our Special Reporter, ‘The Trial Trip of the Great Eastern’, Daily News, 12 September 1859, 5–6, 5.
26.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph: Arrival of the Great Eastern’, Illustrated London News, 19 August 1865, 151–2, 151.
27.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph: Arrival of the Great Eastern’, 151.
28.
[Wemyss Reid,] ‘Modern Newspaper Enterprise’, Fraser’s Magazine, 13 (1876), 700–14, 701–2.
29.
John M. Picker, ‘Atlantic Cable’, Victorian Review, 34 (2008), 34–8.
30.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph Cable’, Illustrated London News, 1 July 1865, 621–22, 622.
31.
[Henry Silver,] ‘Neptune to the Mermaids’, Punch, 5 August 1865, 46.
32.
‘American Indifference to the Cable – the Reason of It’, New York Times, 19 August 1865, 4.
33.
Joel Wiener argues that it had ‘less of an immediate impact on journalism in Britain in part because London newspapers such as the Times and Daily News, while seeking to disseminate news at speed, were not engaged in as intense a competitive rivalry for control of the print market’. Joel H. Wiener, The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s-1914: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism (Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 67.
34.
William Beatty-Kingston, A Journalist’s Jottings, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), 2: p. 361.
35.
Beatty-Kingston, 2: p. 360.
36.
Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 72.
37.
‘The Diary of the Cable’, Illustrated London News, 26 August 1865, 181–2, 182.
38.
Accompanying the Great Eastern was one of the possible commissions considered by Sala in 1865, as already noted in Chap. 2; the prohibition meant he would not have been able to go in any case. But it did not stop one enterprising journalist from fraudulently attempting to gain a passage, according to the special correspondent of the Daily News, as ‘at the eleventh hour it was heard in London that one of the subordinate electricians who had been sent on board as assistant to a gentleman acting for the Atlantic Company, was not merely the special correspondent of a daily contemporary, but had engaged to supply two weekly journals, the one with pictorial the other with descriptive matter. This startling news was telegraphed by the secretary of the company to Mr Glass, who sent out a letter by the Hawk, on Sunday, with orders to Captain Anderson [aboard the Great Eastern] that the correspondent in question should be sent back.’ (From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Atlantic Telegraph Expedition’, Daily News, 28 July 1865, 5–6, 6.) He was duly despatched with such promptitude that his bag and baggage went on without him to America.
39.
Bern Dibner, The Atlantic Cable (Norwalk, Conn.: Burndy Library, 1959), p. 57; p. 58.
40.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘Messages from the Great Eastern’, Punch, 29 July 1865, 35.
41.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Atlantic Cable Expedition’, Standard, 15 July 1865, 6.
42.
‘The Atlantic Cable Expedition’, 15 July 1865, 6.
43.
Simon Schaffer, ‘Babbage’s Dancer and the Impresarios of Mechanism’, in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, ed. Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (London: Faber, 1996), pp. 53–80.
44.
‘The Diary of the Cable’, 26 August 1865, 181.
45.
‘Register! Register! Register!’, Punch, 7 October 1865, 135.
46.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Atlantic Telegraph Expedition’, Daily News, 22 July 1865, 5–6.
47.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph Expedition’, 22 July 1865, 5.
48.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Atlantic Telegraph Expedition’, Times, 22 July 1865, 9.
49.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Atlantic Cable’, Daily Telegraph, 22 July 1865, 5.
50.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Atlantic Telegraph Expedition’, Daily News, 24 July 1865, 5.
51.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Atlantic Telegraph Expedition’, Daily News, 25 July 1865, 5–6, 6. This letter was reprinted a week later in the New York Times on 7 August 1865.
52.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Atlantic Cable Expedition’, Standard, 25 July 1865, 5–6, 5.
53.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Atlantic Telegraph Expedition’, Times, 25 July 1865, 9.
54.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph Expedition’, 25 July 1865, 9.
55.
[W.H. Russell,] ‘The Atlantic Telegraph’, Cornhill Magazine, 12 (September 1865), 364–73, 367–8.
56.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Atlantic Telegraph’, Daily News, 21 August 1865, 5. Several copies of this lithographed ‘Diary of Events’ associated with ‘The Laying of the Atlantic Cable’ are extant.
57.
See Susan Shelangoskie, ‘The Network Speaks: Public Discourse and the Failure of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 38 (2016), 209–18.
58.
‘The Atlantic Cable: Official History of the Grand Experiment’, New York Times, 27 August 1865, 1. The reproduction of the ‘Diary’ in the New York Times illustrates the distinctive use of bold headlines and crossheads in the American press that would later be adopted in Britain by the New Journalism. After headlines such as ‘Minute Account of Each Day’s Progress’, ‘How Joyfully the Great Work Was Begun’ and ‘How Crushingly Came the Final Failure’, crossheads—including ‘The Track Buoyed’, ‘The Splicing of the Cable’, ‘The Shore is Speaking’ and ‘How the Fatal Accident Occurred’—were introduced into Russell’s text, presumably by a subeditor.
59.
‘The Diary of the Atlantic Cable’, Times, 19 August 1865, 8–10, 8.
60.
‘The Breaking of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable on Board the Great Eastern’, Illustrated London News, 26 August 1865, 181–2, 182.
61.
‘The Diary of the Atlantic Cable’, 9.
62.
‘Mr W. H. Russell’s Narrative of the Atlantic Telegraph Disaster’, Pall Mall Gazette, 19 August 1865, 4.
63.
‘The Diary of the Atlantic Cable’, 9.
64.
‘The Diary of the Atlantic Cable’, 9.
65.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph Expedition – from Sketches by Our Special Artist’, Illustrated London News, 2 September 1865, 221.
66.
[Shirley Brooks,] ‘Messages from the Great Eastern’, Punch, 26 August 1865, 73.
67.
‘A Few Lines for a Cable’, Fun, 16 September 1865, 2.
68.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph’, 21 August 1865, 5.
69.
There is some speculation as to how Russell’s copy could have been got so quickly to London. As Bill Burns argues, at over 12,000 words and filling eight columns of the Times, it seems unlikely that Russell could have telegraphed the full text, for although the ‘importance of the story would certainly have justified the time and cost involved, … the transmission would have taken many hours and would have been subject to errors’. A more feasible explanation, he suggests, is that the diary may have been sent via a canister dropped from the Great Eastern to a waiting steam-tug as she passed off Plymouth on the Friday, and transported by express train, or possibly a ‘special’ train hired by The Times, to London. Bill Burns, ‘1865 Great Eastern Diary’, History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications, http://atlantic-cable.com/Article/1865Diary/index.htm [accessed 17 March 2017]
70.
‘The Atlantic Cable’, Saturday Review, 12 August 1865, 192–93, 192.
71.
‘London, Friday, August 18’, Daily Telegraph, 18 August 1865, 4. The ‘unsatisfactory’ description referred to here was the official account provided by Samuel Canning, Chief Engineer of the Construction Company, in a telegram published in the same issue of the paper: ‘The Atlantic Cable’, Daily Telegraph, 18 August 1865, 5.
72.
‘London, Monday, August 21’, Daily Telegraph, 21 August 1865, 4.
73.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph’, Saturday Review, 19 August 1865, 223–24.
74.
For a fascinating analysis of emigrant shipboard newspapers, see Chapter 2 of Fariha Shaikh, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
75.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph’, 21 August 1865, 5.
76.
Willoughby Smith, The Rise and Extension of Submarine Telegraphy (London: J.S. Virtue and Co., 1891), p. 137.
77.
J.D. is presumably John Deane, who also kept a diary of the voyage which was subsequently published in Macmillan’s Magazine. According to Steven Roberts, Deane (1816–1887) was a close friend of Russell, who seems to have taken him along on the journey ‘as amanuensis’. He became Secretary of the Anglo-American Telegraph Company before joining the final expedition in 1866. Steven Roberts, ‘John Connellan Deane’, History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications, http://atlantic-cable.com/CablePioneers/Deane/index.htm [accessed 17 March 2017]
78.
Smith, p. 345.
79.
‘Our Library Table’, Athenaeum, 20 January 1866, 93.
80.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph’, Reader, 30 December 1865, 741–42, 742.
81.
‘Miscellanea’, Reader, 23 December 1865, 711–12, 711.
82.
Susan Shelangoskie, ‘“Nerves of the Empire”: Submarine Telegraph Technological Travel Narratives as Imperial Adventure’, in Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Texts, Images, Objects, ed. Kate Hill (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2016), pp. 91–108.
83.
‘The Atlantic Telegraph Cable’, 1 July 1865, 622.
84.
Charles Pebody, English Journalism and the Men Who Have Made It (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin and Co., 1882), p. 139.

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School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Catherine Waters

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Waters, C. (2019). Technology and Innovation. In: Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850–1886. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03861-8_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03861-8_3
Published: 07 February 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03860-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03861-8
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