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Disasters Drawn: The Illustrated London News in the Mid-19th Century

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08949468.2015.973287

1545-5920

Paul Hockings,

Australian History and Society

Abstract Herbert Ingram launched a new kind of newspaper in 1842, The Illustrated London News. Its numerous drawn illustrations supported a formula that was rapidly copied in other countries, and always ensured circulation success for Ingram and those who followed him. When we look at some of the drawings made to present the Great Famine in Ireland and, a decade later, the Indian Mutiny, we clearly see that disasters such as starvation, violence, fires, crimes and warfare were the stuff of newsworthiness then as now, and sentimentality was a trusted handmaiden. While the immediate concern of this publication was to purvey an outline of all the news in its weekly issues, a long-term effect was to present the reading public in Britain and North America with stereotypes that helped the burgeoning middle class grapple intellectually with the wealth and diversity of information that was becoming available to them in the modernizing world. Evangelicalism, utilitarianism, industrialization and stereotyping were all part of the process, themes that were at the same time being explored in the novels of Charles Dickens. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to Joanna Kirkpatrick and Drid Williams for their useful comments on a draft of this article; and to the former proprietors of The Illustrated London News, who in 1968 provided me with the drawings reproduced here. Images from The Illustrated London News may now be obtained from the Mary Evans Picture Library (www.maryevans.com). Notes The Illustrated London News was published from 1842 until 2003, always from Elm House in London. Editorial control remained in the Ingram family until the editorship of Hugh Ingram (1963–65). The paper's frequency varied: weekly, 1842–1971; monthly, 1971–89; bi-monthly, 1989–94; then twice yearly, 1994–2003. The entire archive is available through many libraries, and is of course an invaluable source of historical illustrations from 1842 onwards. Today specific images from the ILN may be obtained from the catalog of the Mary Evans Picture Library, at www.maryevans.com/search.php. Ingram was said by those who knew him to be short, broad-shouldered, dark complexioned, untidy and careless of appearance, but with fine intelligent eyes, a genial smile, kind-hearted and generous; a pleasant enough man. He died rather dramatically at the age of 49, himself becoming the victim of a major disaster, along with his eldest son Herbert, while touring around Lake Michigan in the “Lady Elgin,” a paddle-steamer that sank near Chicago after a collision (8 Sept. 1860), with huge loss of life. He was described in the ILN obituary, a single column without illustration [29 Sept. 1860: 285], as an “M.P., the founder and sole proprietor of the ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS”; and the following issue carried a portrait of him [6 Oct. 1860: 306]. The term “middle class” appeared around 1815, after the national triumph over Napoleon that was the Battle of Waterloo, and that class was in process of differentiating itself from the laboring class. By mid-century the total population of England, Scotland and Wales stood at 21 million, of whom well over 2 million were children in school. The 1851 Census was the first indication that a larger part of the British population lived in towns than in the countryside, a correlate of rapid industrialization. By then middle-class respectability was becoming a worldwide commodity, which helps explain, inter alia, the contumely in which British women who perforce had been taken as wives by Indian mutineers (it was said) were held forever after. Respectability was becoming universal. We can even read in an American book on seagoing etiquette, Ocean Notes for Ladies, “a body washed ashore in good clothes, would receive more respect and kinder care than if dressed in those only fit for the rag bag” [Ledoux 1877 Ledoux , Katharine R. 1877 Ocean Notes for Ladies . New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons. [Google Scholar]]. We might note that by the time of World War I the upper reaches of the “respectable” had crystallized in British slang as posh, a word that had already existed since 1890 to mean a dandy. This neologism has a telling folk etymology that is, lexicographers say, without foundation (see below): some anonymous booking-clerk, it was claimed, had invented the term as an acronym for “P[ort cabin] O[utbound], S[tarboard] H[omebound],” in reference to the best accommodation on a P & O liner going from England to India and Ceylon, since it would avoid some of the tropical heat. True or not, this reflected the fact that some years after the Suez Canal was opened (1870) large numbers of young English and Irish women, contemptuously known as the “fishing fleet,” began going to India or Ceylon for the winter season, for hunting, courting and gossip. Their quarry was not mahseer but district officers. One young Cambridge student, obviously posh (lady students at Cambridge were a rarity in those days), recalled her visit in 1894 as a “frivol.” But she too, like so many others, returned home once the hot weather arrived, each having failed to find the man of her dreams; and while logic alone dictates that such a forlorn young lady was usually a “soph,” such unfortunates, mingling on board with the returning missionaries and retirees, were cruelly referred to, like bottles, as “returned empties” in those days. As for the etymology: could “posh” be a bad anglicization of les potes, turn-of-the-20th-century French slang for “Parisians”? Moore's novels showed an untimely willingness to broach such tabooed topics as extramarital sex, prostitution and lesbianism, inter alia. By chance in the 1880s his publisher was that same Henry Vizetelly who had started off as Ingram's first engraver on the ILN in 1842. Now he was issuing mass-market translations of French novels that were seen as endangering the moral and commercial influence of British circulating libraries, temples of provincial respectability. In 1888 these libraries encouraged parliament to implement laws against “the rapid spread of demoralising literature.” Vizetelly was charged in court by the National Vigilance Association for “obscene libel,” owing to his publication of Émile Zola's La Terre in English. A second case was soon brought to stop the sale of all of Zola's works. Moore stayed loyal to his and Zola's publisher, and just before the trial wrote a letter [22 Sept. 1888] in The St. James Gazette, suggesting that Vizetelly's fate should be decided not by a jury of twelve tradesmen but by three novelists. Moore pointed out that the National Vigilance Association could make the same claims against such books as Madame Bovary, as their morals are much the same as Zola's, though their literary merits might differ. The libraries prevailed, so Vizetelly was fined and jailed for three months. Mr. O'Bleary appears in “The Boarding House,” where he, “a perfectly wild Irishman,” hopes to make his fortune by marrying Mrs. Bloss, and meanwhile is constantly extolling the dubious virtues of Dublin over those of London. The stage Irishman, as national stereotype and literary cliché, can be traced all the way from the 12th-century Giraldus Cambrensis to Old Mother Riley (Arthur Lucan, 1887–1954; born, it chanced, in the same small town as Herbert Ingram). Parenthetically it was in 1845, at the very onset of the Great Famine, that Andrew Jackson died: he was America's seventh President (1829–37). Jackson was born in Waxhaw, North Carolina, in 1767, two years after his Irish parents had emigrated from Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim. In his final year he became the first U.S. President ever to be photographed. In those days, when all men's shoes and boots, and most women's, were made of leather, polish or blacking was widely used and in great amounts. It was only in 1881 that flogging was banned as an Indian Army punishment [Roberts 1900: 13–14]. Joanna Kirkpatrick kindly drew my attention to an instance of Hindus honoring the British visually during the Mutiny. At a temple in Kanpur, in the center of these mutinous activities, there are effigies of British people on the tower of a temple that was donated by a Hindu contractor, Sri Bhagvatdas. He is thought to have built the temple to commemorate a certain Capt. Stewart, who intervened during the Rebellion to save Hindu temples destined to be razed in order to construct defenses at the river. Stewart was under the command of Gen. Sir Henry Havelock (both of whom died in 1857), who had retaken Kanpur (or Cawnpore) from the Indian rebels. Later on, Stewart was put in charge of a government factory, which allowed him to favor many Indian contractors, among them Bhagvatdas. These effigies show the promoted Col. Stewart's wife, son and dog, Gens. Havelock and Neill (both of whom died in 1857), and the military doctor with his wife [Stokes 1935 Stokes , W. 1935 British Effigies in a Cawnpore Temple . Asia and the Americas , 35 ( 8 ): 502 . [Google Scholar]: 502]. Shortly afterwards, Atkinson became famous throughout India and Britain too for his book Curry and Rice [1859 Atkinson , George Francklin 1859 "Curry & Rice”, on Forty Plates; or, The Ingredients of Social Life at “Our Station” in India . London : Day & Son . [Google Scholar]], which presented 40 large colored satirical sketches of Indian “types”—the cook, the washerman, etc.—as well as their rather preposterous British “masters” in a small, fictional Indian town: a delightful collection of stereotypes visualized. The phrase “willy is dead” lends itself to an uncomplimentary Freudian interpretation—that Father is impotent. See note 2. Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul HockingsPAUL HOCKINGSis the editor of Visual Anthropology. He holds degrees in Anthropology and Archaeology from the Universities of Sydney, Toronto and California. He has done fieldwork in Ireland and India, and has taught in China and the United States. He is now Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. His latest book is So Long a Saga: Four Centuries of Badaga Social History [2013].