Introduction

Waters, Catherine

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03861-8_1

Introduction

Catherine Waters⁵

Chapter
First Online: 07 February 2019

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

Abstract

Using nineteenth-century accounts of special correspondence, memoirs of journalists, surveys of the ‘fourth estate’ and data on individual specials, together with the work of contemporary media historians and theorists, the introduction provides an overview of the role of the special correspondent and his writing in the context of developments in the Victorian periodical and newspaper press. It considers problems of definition, the nature of special correspondence as a recognisable genre and sources for the specials’ distinctive style. Seeking to account for both its popular appeal as well as the controversy it generated, the chapter argues that special correspondence and the journalists who wrote it are best understood as together constituting a new media technology that emerged in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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Notes

1.
W. F. Butler, ‘The War Campaign and the War Correspondent’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 37 (March 1878), 398–405, 398.
2.
I have given the by-line, if supplied, in place of the reporter’s name in the first citation of a newspaper report throughout.
3.
The keyword search was undertaken by Angela Dunstan at the commencement of this project in 2014 and results have been compiled in a database available at: https://research.kent.ac.uk/victorianspecialsdatabase/
4.
Catherine Waters and Angela Dunstan, Victorian Specials Database: Journalism on the Move, University of Kent https://research.kent.ac.uk/victorianspecialsdatabase/ [accessed 17 September 2018].
5.
Harold King, ‘Four and Twenty Hours in a Newspaper Office’, Once a Week, 26 September 1863, 369–73, 373.
6.
‘Our Own Correspondent’, Leisure Hour, 1 January 1868, 53–55, 54.
7.
James Grant, The Newspaper Press: Its Origin, Progress and Present Position (London: Tinsley, 1871), p. 248.
8.
Alfred Baker, The Newspaper World: Essays on Press History and Work, Past and Present (London: Pittman, 1890), p. 56.
9.
‘Our Own Correspondent’, Saturday Review, 17 November 1855, 44–46, 45.
10.
Even a simple corpus analysis tool like Google’s Ngram viewer suggests as much in illustrating the sharp increase in the appearance of the term ‘special correspondent’ from 1850 and its steady rise throughout the second half of the nineteenth century – albeit in books written in English rather than newspapers. By 1882, the short-hand term ‘special’ was in use, the OED citing a comment on Archibald Forbes – ‘To number among its enterprising band of correspondents the famous special of the Daily News’ – from Charles Pebody, English Journalism and the Men Who Have Made It (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin and Co., 1882), p. 147.
11.
John Black Atkins, The Life of Sir William Howard Russell: The First Special Correspondent, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1911), 2: p. 372.
12.
George Augustus Sala, ‘The Special Correspondent: His Life and Crimes’, Belgravia: A London Magazine, 4 (1871), 211–22, 220–21.
13.
Sala, ‘The Special Correspondent’, 220–21.
14.
Sala, ‘The Special Correspondent’, 220.
15.
‘A Versatile “Special”’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, 20 September 1873, 597–98, 597.
16.
Barbie Selizer discusses the history of journalistic ‘eyewitnessing’ in ‘On “Having Been There”: “Eyewitnessing” as a Journalistic Key Word’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 24 (2007), 408–28.
17.
John Carey, The Faber Book of Reportage (London: Faber, 1987), p. xxix.
18.
‘Current History’, Saturday Review, 29 June 1861, 664–65, 664.
19.
Baker, p. 60.
20.
Sala , ‘The Special Correspondent’, 214. Sala was responding here to Arnold’s satiric attack upon the special correspondents under the guise of a ‘Young Lion’ from the Daily Telegraph in the Pall Mall Gazette for what he saw as their populism and sensationalism, designed only to sell newspapers.
21.
Dallas Liddle, The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), p. 153. As Liddle argues in outlining the efficacy of a Bakhtinian methodology for the study of Victorian periodicals, ‘The purposes of most scholarly investigations will be much better served by maximising our knowledge of the historical discourse genres published in periodicals – the forms taken by articles themselves.’ Liddle, p. 155.
22.
[James Fitzjames Stephen,] ‘Journalism’, Cornhill Magazine, 6 (1862), 52–63, 55.
23.
[Stephen,] 61.
24.
[Stephen,] 61.
25.
Antonia Harland-Lang, ‘Thackeray and Bohemia’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2010), p. 164.
26.
Harland-Lang, p. 173.
27.
Harland-Lang, p. 164.
28.
Lawson uses the phrase to describe the ‘parade of expressive tricks and marvels’ and the ‘complex interplay between editor, writers and readers’ in J. F. Archibald’s Bulletin. Sylvia Lawson, The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship (Ringwood: Penguin, 1983), p. xi, p. 154.
29.
Mark Turner, ‘Review of Andrew Griffiths, The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900’, Media History, 22 (2016), 135–42, 135.
30.
See Joseph Mathews, Reporting the Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1957); Philip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Mythmaker from the Crimea to Kosovo (London: Prion, 2000); John Peck, War, the Army and Victorian Literature (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998); and Robert Wilkinson-Latham, From Our Special Correspondent: Victorian War Correspondents and Their Campaigns (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979).
31.
Baker, p. 56.
32.
Joel H. Wiener, The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s–1914: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism (Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 61.
33.
Wiener, pp. 3–4.
34.
Andrew Griffiths, The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 52.
35.
Griffiths, p. 22.
36.
My focus on developments in Britain means that the work of a famous special like Henry Morton Stanley is beyond the scope of this study. Although born in Wales, Stanley earned his name as special correspondent for the New York Herald.
37.
See Wiener, Chapter 3.
38.
Evelyn March Phillipps, ‘The New Journalism’, New Review, 75 (1895), 182–89, 182.
39.
Sala was an enthusiast for Lamb, writing a long introductory essay on him for a projected complete edition of his works in 1868.
40.
Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and The Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 73.
41.
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, tr. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), p. 35.
42.
According to Raymund Fitzsimons, ‘[s]o many editions of these titles were published that it is impossible to say how many thousands of copies were sold.’ The Baron of Piccadilly: The Travels and Entertainments of Albert Smith 1816–1860 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967), p. 64.
43.
See Catherine Waters, ‘Sketches of the Metropolis: Pub-Crawling with George Augustus Sala in Household Words’, Dickens Quarterly 30 (2013), 26–42.
44.
On the European spread of the physiologie, see Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and Its ‘Physiologies’ 1830–50 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
45.
[Walter Bagehot,] ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’, National Review (October 1855), 253–84, 256.
46.
‘Speaking to the Eye’, Economist, 17 May 1851, 533. Although a few journalists, such as Sydney Prior Hall, served in both capacities, detailed attention to the special artist is beyond the scope of this study. On the work of the special artists see Harry V. Barnett, ‘The Special Artist’, Magazine of Art, 6 (1883), 163–70; Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885); William Simpson, ‘The Special Artist’, Illustrated London News, 14 May 1892, 604; and Catherine Waters and Ruth Brimacombe, Picturing the News: The Art of Victorian Graphic Journalism, University of Kent https://research.kent.ac.uk/victorianspecials/. On the war artists see Peter Johnson, Front Line Artists (London: Cassell, 1978). Ruth Brimacombe has analysed the special artists’ coverage of the Prince of Wales’s tour of India in ‘The Imperial Avatar in the Imagined Landscape: The Virtual Dynamics of the Prince of Wales’s Tour of India in 1875–76′, in Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies, ed. Veronika Alfano and Stauffer Andrew (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 189–214.
47.
Peter L. Shillingsburg, Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and William Makepeace Thackeray (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. 36.
48.
William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo’, in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray: Sketch Books (London: Smith, Elder, 1898), pp. 583–733, p. 713. I am grateful to Robert Dingley for drawing my attention to these parallels.
49.
Thackeray, p. 711.
50.
George Augustus Sala, Dutch Pictures, with Some Sketches in the Flemish Manner and Pictures Done with a Quill (London: Vizetelly, 1883), p. xii.
51.
Thackeray, p. 732.
52.
T. H. S. Escott later noted that it became ‘a singularly effective training-ground for the rising generation of newspaper writers’. T. H. S. Escott, Masters of English Journalism: A Study of Personal Forces (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911), p. 209.
53.
Walter Bagehot, ‘Charles Dickens’, in Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Collins (London: Routledge, 1971), pp. 390–401, p. 392.
54.
George Augustus Sala, Things I Have Seen and People I Have Known, 2 vols (London: Cassell and Company, 1894), 1: pp. 77–8.
55.
John M. L. Drew, Dickens the Journalist (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 182.
56.
‘London, Monday, April 25’, Daily News, 25 April 1881, 4–5, 5.
57.
‘Life in Spain, Past and Present. By Walter Thornbury’, The Economist, 17 December 1859, 1405–06, 1405.
58.
‘Mr Sala on Life in London’, Saturday Review, 3 December 1859, 676–78, 677.
59.
Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz, ‘General Introduction’, in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, ed. Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 1–10, p. 6.
60.
Rhoda L. Flaxman, Victorian Word-Painting and Narrative: Toward the Blending of Genres (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), p. 9.
61.
‘Our Own Correspondent’, 45.
62.
Sala, Dutch Pictures, p. x.
63.
‘Dutch Pictures’, Critic, 26 October 1861, 425.
64.
‘Literature’, Illustrated London News, 19 October 1861, 413.
65.
For a recent overview of these developments, see Amy R. Wong, ‘Victorian Media Studies, History, and Theory’, Literature Compass, 15 (2018), 1–9.
66.
Richard Menke, ‘The Wordsworths’ Daffodils: On the Page, Upon the Inward Eye, in Their Media Ecology’, in Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 23–41, p. 23.
67.
Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 102.
68.
[Stephen,] 61.
69.
Helen Groth, ‘The Soundscapes of Henry Mayhew: Urban Ethnography and Technologies of Transcription’, Cultural Studies Review, 18 (2012), 109–30, 110.
70.
Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013).
71.
George Augustus Sala, India and the Prince of Wales, special extra number of the Illustrated London News, 16 October 1875, 3–44, 7.
72.
J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), p. 28.
73.
Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, tr. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 51, p. 49.
74.
See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, tr. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). I am indebted here to Geoffrey Winthrop-Young’s account of Kittler, Kittler and the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), pp. 63–4.
75.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217–51, p. 237.
76.
For an account of the transition from wood engraving to halftones in the illustrated press that made photojournalism possible, see Christoph Raetzsche, ‘“Real Pictures of Current Events”: The Photographic Legacy of Journalistic Objectivity’, Media History, 21 (2015), 294–312.
77.
‘London, Friday, July 25’, Daily News, 25 July 1879, 4–5, 4.
78.
‘London, Friday, July 25’, 5.
79.
‘The Special Staff’, Chambers’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art, 11 January 1873, 17–20, 17.
80.
Michael MacDonagh, ‘Our Special Correspondent’, in Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory (London: C. Mitchell, 1903), pp. 90–91, 91. ‘The Special Staff’, 17–18.
81.
The foundational account of the prosthetic function of technology is Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Corte Madera: Ginko, 2003).
82.
‘Our Own Correspondent’, 55.
83.
See Byerly; Susan Zieger, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); and Veronica Alfano and Andrew Stauffer eds. Virtual Victorians. An important exception is Ruth Brimacombe’s work on the special artists (cited above, n42), which is directly complementary to my work on the special correspondents.
84.
Harry Furniss, My Bohemian Days (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1919), p. 136.

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Waters, C. (2019). Introduction. 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_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03861-8_1
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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