Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

War Correspondence

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850–1886

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

  • 218 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter considers war correspondence through a case study of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71. Ever since William Howard Russell’s famous dispatches from the Crimea for the Times served to diminish the distance between the home front and remote battlefields in the 1850s, the British reading public had come to demand reports from ‘Our Special Correspondent at the seat of the war’. While the Civil War in America had a significant impact upon the development of special correspondence in American newspapers, it was the Franco-Prussian war that marked a watershed in war reporting in Britain. It represented a turning-point in the careers of Russell and Archibald Forbes, as old and new transport and communication technologies competed to deliver the latest intelligence.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘The Pen in Wartime’, reprinted in Western Mail, 26 April 1877, 3.

  2. 2.

    As discussed in Chap. 1, Sala enumerates these in ‘The Special Correspondent: His Life and Crimes’, Belgravia: A London Magazine, 4 (1871), 211–22, 220–21.

  3. 3.

    John Augustus O’Shea, Leaves from the Life of a Special Correspondent, 2 vols (London: Ward and Downey, 1885), 2: p. 239.

  4. 4.

    ‘The Rise and Fall of the War Correspondent’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 90 (August 1904), 301–10, 301. See also the list of requirements provided in Henry H. S. Pearse, ‘War Correspondence’, The Journalist, 15 October 1886, 9–11, 9.

  5. 5.

    Pearse, 9. Russell’s memorial in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral describes him as the ‘first and greatest of war correspondents’.

  6. 6.

    Russell , however, was not the first to report from the seat of war for a daily newspaper. Archibald Forbes assigns that honour to G. L. Gruneison who was sent to Spain to cover the Peninsula War (1835–37) for the Morning Post. Archibald Forbes, Memories and Studies of War and Peace (London: Cassell, 1895), p. 217.

  7. 7.

    ‘The Rise and Fall of the War Correspondent’, 302.

  8. 8.

    Even today, according to Kevin Williams, ‘who counts as a war correspondent is far from straightforward’ given the different types of reporters involved. Kevin Williams, ‘War Correspondents as Sources for History’, Media History, 18 (2012), 341–60, 354.

  9. 9.

    Rollo Ogden, Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 1: p. 100.

  10. 10.

    Ulrich Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 2001), p. 71.

  11. 11.

    Keller, p. 28.

  12. 12.

    Keller, p. 34.

  13. 13.

    Rachel Teukolsky, ‘Novels, Newspapers, and Global War: New Realisms in the 1850s’, Novel, 45 (2012), 31–55, 34.

  14. 14.

    ‘Three War Correspondents’, Graphic, 11 February 1871, 130–31, 130.

  15. 15.

    ‘The Special Correspondent’, Saturday Review, 10 September 1870, 325–26, 325.

  16. 16.

    Edward Dicey, ‘Journalism Old and New’, Fortnightly Review, 77 (1905), 904–18, 911.

  17. 17.

    ‘The Rise and Fall of the War Correspondent’, 302.

  18. 18.

    ‘The Rise and Fall of the War Correspondent’, 302.

  19. 19.

    W. Hamish Fraser, The Wars of Archibald Forbes (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2015), p. 5.

  20. 20.

    See, for example, Alan Hankinson, Man of Wars: William Howard Russell of ‘The Times’ (London: Heineman, 1982); Philip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Mythmaker from the Crimea to Kosovo (London: Prion, 2000); Joseph Mathews, Reporting the Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1957); 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).

  21. 21.

    Joel H. Wiener, The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s-1914: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism (Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 80.

  22. 22.

    Knightley, p. 47.

  23. 23.

    Harold King, ‘Four and Twenty Hours in a Newspaper Office’, Once a Week, 26 September 1863, 369–73, 373.

  24. 24.

    Peter Johnson, Front Line Artists (London: Cassell, 1978), p. 63.

  25. 25.

    ‘Paterfamilias on the War’, Punch, 27 August 1870, 88.

  26. 26.

    ‘London, Thursday, July 21, 1870’, Times, 21 July 1870, 8–9, 9.

  27. 27.

    Arthur William à Beckett, The à Becketts of ‘Punch’: Memories of Father and Sons (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1903), p. 266.

  28. 28.

    Wilkinson-Latham, p. 109.

  29. 29.

    O’Shea, Leaves from the Life of a Special Correspondent, 2: pp. 261–62. According to Sala, Azamat Batouk was the nom de guerre of Nicolas Thiéblin ‘who was the correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette’. George Augustus Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala (London: Cassell and Company, 1896), p. 536.

  30. 30.

    Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, p. 534.

  31. 31.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘On the War Path’, Daily Telegraph, 30 July 1870, 5. Straus identifies Sala as the ‘special’ here in the clippings of articles by Sala included in the George Augustus Sala collection held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  32. 32.

    G. T. Robinson, The Fall of Metz: An Account of the Seventy Days’ Siege and of the Battles Which Preceded It (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1871), p. viii.

  33. 33.

    ‘The Special Correspondent’, 326.

  34. 34.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘Arrest of Englishmen’, Standard, 23 July 1870, 6.

  35. 35.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Great War’, Standard, 25 July 1870, 5.

  36. 36.

    Although identified only by the by-line ‘From Another Special Correspondent’ in Metz, my attribution is based upon comparison of this letter with O’Shea’s later published reminiscences, Leaves from the Life of a Special Correspondent, 2: pp. 266–69.

  37. 37.

    From Another Special Correspondent, ‘The War’, Standard, 27 July 1870, 5.

  38. 38.

    From Another Special Correspondent, ‘Metz July 24’, Standard, 28 July 1870, 5.

  39. 39.

    O’Shea, Leaves from the Life of a Special Correspondent, 2: p. 264.

  40. 40.

    O’Shea, Leaves from the Life of a Special Correspondent, 2: p. 265.

  41. 41.

    ‘Arrest of Our Artist at Nancy’, Graphic, 6 August 1870, 140–41, 140.

  42. 42.

    ‘Illustrations of the War’, Illustrated London News, 20 August 1870, 201. The incident was also reported by Henry Mayhew in the Globe: From Our Special War Correspondent, ‘The Perils of a “Special”’, Globe, 11 August 1870, 5.

  43. 43.

    William Simpson, ‘The Special Artist’, Illustrated London News, 14 May 1892, 604.

  44. 44.

    Peter Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the ‘Illustrated London News’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 30.

  45. 45.

    Magazines of the Illustrated London News genre regularly presented landscape-format pictures by rotating them 90 degrees and thereby inscribing the body of the reader-viewer within the page design, according to Tom Gretton . In this case, where the landscape-format rotated picture occupies only half a page, the void-filling text-matter and smaller sketch have been rotated too. Tom Gretton , ‘Inscribing the Body as Active: Rotated Pictures and Rotated Texts in Magazines of the Illustrated London News Genre c. 1850-C. 1890’, paper presented at the RSVP/VSAWC conference The Body and the Page in Victorian Culture, University of Victoria, 26–28 July 2018.

  46. 46.

    Quoted in ‘War Pictures at the Crystal Palace’, Daily News, 3 October 1870, 2.

  47. 47.

    ‘The War Sketches at the Crystal Palace’, Times, 3 October 1870, 12.

  48. 48.

    W. F. Butler, ‘The War Campaign and the War Correspondent’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 37 (March 1878), 398–405, 401.

  49. 49.

    ‘The Perils of a “Special”’, 11 August 1870, 5.

  50. 50.

    Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, p. 542.

  51. 51.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘Paris in a State of Siege’, Daily News, 15 August 1870, 5.

  52. 52.

    ‘Paris in a State of Siege’, 5.

  53. 53.

    ‘Paris in a State of Siege’, 5.

  54. 54.

    ‘Correspondents and Spies’, Saturday Review, 20 August 1870, 235–36, 236.

  55. 55.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘Spies in Time of War’, Daily Telegraph, 25 August 1870, 2.

  56. 56.

    ‘Spies in Time of War’, 2.

  57. 57.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘In Prison as a Spy’, Daily Telegraph, 9 September 1870, 5.

  58. 58.

    ‘In Prison as a Spy’, 9 September 1870, 5. Judy McKenzie reports Swinburne’s comment in a letter to Charles Howell: ‘have you seen the statement in the papers that poor Sala … has been “subjected to terrible and painful outrages” by the mob at Paris as a Prussian spy? Can this imply that his personal charms were too much for some countryman of the citizen Sade (ci-devant Marquis) who exclaimed to an ardent and erect band of his fellows—“Foutons, foutons ce cul divin, qui nous promet mille fois plus plaisir qu’un con.”’ Judy McKenzie ed. Letters of George Augustus Sala to Edmund Yates (St Lucia: University of Queensland, 1993), p. 134, n3.

  59. 59.

    Ralph Straus, Sala: The Portrait of an Eminent Victorian (London: Constable, 1942), p. 196.

  60. 60.

    Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, p. 553.

  61. 61.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The War’, Times, 19 August 1870, 7.

  62. 62.

    ‘The Special Correspondent’, 326.

  63. 63.

    ‘The Special Correspondent’, 325.

  64. 64.

    Quoted in Hankinson, p. 214.

  65. 65.

    ‘Jenkins at Versailles’, Saturday Review , 3 December 1870, 714–15, 714. ‘Jenkins’ is slang for a lackey.

  66. 66.

    A Young Lion, ‘Correspondence: A Sad Story’, Pall Mall Gazette, 29 November 1870, 3.

  67. 67.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Battle of Sedan’, Times, 6 September 1870, 7.

  68. 68.

    ‘The Battle of Sedan’, 7.

  69. 69.

    ‘The Special Correspondent’, 326.

  70. 70.

    From Our Own Correspondent, ‘Latest Intelligence: The Battles before Sedan’, Times, 3 September 1870, 5.

  71. 71.

    From Our French Correspondent, ‘The War’, Evening Standard, 5 September 1870, 4.

  72. 72.

    Forbes, Memories and Studies of War and Peace, pp. 220–21.

  73. 73.

    ‘The Battle of Sedan’, Pall Mall Gazette, 5 September 1870, 3.

  74. 74.

    Forbes, Memories and Studies of War and Peace, p. 221.

  75. 75.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The War’, Times, 24 September 1870, 10.

  76. 76.

    ‘“Our Own Correspondent” and Count Bismark’, Saturday Review, 8 October 1870, 448–49, 449.

  77. 77.

    ‘The War: The Interview between the King of Prussia and the Emperor Napoleon’, Standard, 4 October 1870, 6.

  78. 78.

    ‘Count Bismark and Mr Russell’, Times, 14 October 1870, 9.

  79. 79.

    ‘Count Bismark and Mr Russell’, Times, 22 October 1870, 5.

  80. 80.

    ‘“Our Own Correspondent” and Count Bismark’, 449.

  81. 81.

    Forbes, Memories and Studies of War and Peace, p. 222. Edmund Yates later identified these instructions as ‘mark[ing] an epoch in the history of journalism’. Edmund Yates, Celebrities at Home (London: Office of ‘The World’, 1879), p. 45.

  82. 82.

    Forbes, Memories and Studies of War and Peace, p. 222.

  83. 83.

    ‘The Surrender of Metz’, Times, 1 November 1870, 11.

  84. 84.

    Forbes, Memories and Studies of War and Peace, pp. 223–24.

  85. 85.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Siege of Paris’, Times, 22 October 1870, 9.

  86. 86.

    Forbes, Memories and Studies of War and Peace, p. 227.

  87. 87.

    John Black Atkins, The Life of Sir William Howard Russell: The First Special Correspondent, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1911), 2: p. 220.

  88. 88.

    Quoted in Atkins, 2: p. 201.

  89. 89.

    Atkins, 2: p. 216.

  90. 90.

    Forbes, Memories and Studies of War and Peace, p. 225.

  91. 91.

    Breaking the siege and scoring an important propaganda coup, some 67 manned balloons were successfully launched from inside Paris between 23 September 1870 and 28 January 1871. The first balloon out carried an open letter from Nadar to the Times that, as Richard Holmes explains, was copied at Tours, sent on by train to Le Havre, put on a cross-channel steamship, and then taken by the Royal Mail express train to London for publication in the first edition on 28 September ‘a mere five days after it had left Nadar’s bell tent on the place Saint-Pierre’. Richard Holmes, Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (London: Harper Collins, 2013), p. 270.

  92. 92.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘From inside Paris’, Illustrated London News, 15 October 1870, 390–91, 390. The special correspondent is probably Henry Vizetelly and the artist M. Jules Pelcoq. Vizetelly later recalled that Pelcoq remained in Paris throughout the siege and made ‘some thousands of drawings’ for the Illustrated London News. Each sketch was ‘photographed several times by Nadar, after which the original and the various copies were sent off by successive balloons’. Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1893), 2: pp. 340–41.

  93. 93.

    The Illustrated London News used this by-line to authenticate its correspondence and the sketches provided by its special artist throughout the siege, sometimes even identifying the name of the balloon used for transportation. The Graphic published a dramatic cover-page illustration of a night ascent of a balloon from the ‘Chemin de fer du Nord’ on 21 January 1871, explaining that the sketch upon which it was based was itself ‘sent by one of these useful machines’. ‘Departure of a Balloon from Paris’, Graphic, 21 January 1871, 3. Chambers’s Journal published a two-part article on ‘The Balloon and Pigeon Posts’ in March 1871 and All the Year Round was still responding to popular interest with an article on the ‘Aerial Postal Service’ in March 1873.

  94. 94.

    Wilkinson-Latham, p. 112.

  95. 95.

    Elisabeth Jay, British Writers and Paris, 1830–1875 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 185.

  96. 96.

    ‘New Books’, Illustrated London News, 11 March 1871, 247.

  97. 97.

    Diary of the Besieged Resident, ‘War News: Inside Paris’, Daily News, 30 December 1870, 5–6, 6.

  98. 98.

    ‘The War History of the Newspaper Correspondents’, Glasgow Herald, 11 January 1871, 6.

  99. 99.

    ‘London, Friday, Sept. 30’, Daily News, 30 September 1870, 4.

  100. 100.

    ‘New Books’, 247.

  101. 101.

    Jay, p. 28.

  102. 102.

    Jay also notes that Matthew Arnold and George Eliot ‘now counterbalanced their reading of W. H. Russell’s Times reports from the front with Labouchere’s accounts in the Daily News of the conditions inside Paris’. Jay, p. 42.

  103. 103.

    From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The War: Journal of the Siege of Paris’, Standard, 15 October 1870, 5.

  104. 104.

    ‘The War: Journal of the Siege of Paris’, 27 December 1870, 5.

  105. 105.

    John Augustus O’Shea, An Iron-Bound City: Or Five Months of Peril and Privation, 2 vols (London: Ward and Downey, 1886), 2: p. 310.

  106. 106.

    O’Shea, An Iron-Bound City, pp. 316–17. A reviewer of Thomas Gibson Bowles’s republished correspondence on the siege , The Defence of Paris: Narrated as it was Seen (1871), similarly observed: ‘it is to be feared that the work of that veracious gentleman [the ‘Besieged Resident’] will have forestalled most, if not all, of Mr Bowles’s possible share of popularity’. ‘The Defence of Paris. Narrated as It Was Seen by Thomas Gibson Bowles, Special Correspondent of the Morning Post in Paris During the Siege’, The Spectator, 17 June 1871, 743.

  107. 107.

    ‘London, Saturday, November 5’, Standard, 5 November 1870, 4.

  108. 108.

    Fraser, p. 50.

  109. 109.

    ‘London, Saturday, Feb. 4’, Daily News, 4 February 1871, 5.

  110. 110.

    From Our Special Correspondent with the Headquarters of the Crown Prince of Saxony, ‘War Letters: Paris after the Capitulation’, Daily News, 4 February 1871, 5.

  111. 111.

    ‘Diary of the “Besieged Resident”’, Daily News, 4 February 1871, 5–6, 6.

  112. 112.

    ‘War Letters: Paris after the Capitulation’, 4 February 1871, 5.

  113. 113.

    Archibald Forbes, My Experiences of the War between France and Germany, 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1871), 2: pp. 326–27.

  114. 114.

    ‘London, Monday, Feb. 6’, Daily News, 6 February 1871, 4.

  115. 115.

    Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217–51, p. 237.

  116. 116.

    Butler, 399–400.

  117. 117.

    William Howard Russell, ‘The Last Great War: Passages from My Private Diary’, Army and Navy Gazette, 7 October 1871, 625–26, 625. His target here was Forbes, whose ‘full and particular account of a very remarkable event in the war … which made such an immense sensation was “a work of art”—fiction that “might have been” founded on fact’. Although it is not clear which ‘event’ he is referring to, Forbes’s readiness to sacrifice eye-witness reporting for being first with the news was anathema to Russell.

  118. 118.

    ‘The Sorrows of Correspondents’, Star, 4 August 1870, 4.

  119. 119.

    ‘The Sorrows of Correspondents’, 4.

  120. 120.

    ‘The Sorrows of Correspondents’, 4.

  121. 121.

    Alexander Innes Shand, On the Trail of the War (London: Smith, Elder, 1870), p. 5.

  122. 122.

    Shand, p. 9.

  123. 123.

    Shand, p. 11.

  124. 124.

    Shand, pp. 11–12.

  125. 125.

    Shand, p. 20.

  126. 126.

    ‘The War Sketches at the Crystal Palace’, 12.

  127. 127.

    Punch captured this commercial success in facetiously suggesting that the ‘Word-Painters at the Wars’ should guard against being mistaken for spies by ‘going about with the broadsheet of his particular journal affixed to his shoulders, or walk in a sort of tabard, formed by a couple of its bill-boards’. [Percival Leigh,] ‘Word-Painters at the Wars’, Punch, 24 September 1870, 127.

  128. 128.

    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, pp. 176–77.

  129. 129.

    See Forbes’s vigorous denunciation of such ‘polluted journalism’ in his letter to the Daily News: Arch. Forbes, ‘Lord Chelmsford’s Speech at Capetown: To the Editor of the Daily News’, Daily News, 28 August 1879, 5. His objections to the new regulations governing correspondents accompanying the army were outlined in Archibald Forbes, ‘War Correspondents and the Authorities’, Nineteenth Century, 7 (1880), 185–96.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Catherine Waters

Authors
  1. Catherine Waters
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Catherine Waters .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Waters, C. (2019). War Correspondence. 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_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03861-8_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03860-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03861-8

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation