The public appetite for vivid descriptions of the Crimean campaign was insatiable. War tourists like Fanny Duberly had a ready readership for their eyewitness narratives. But the greatest interest was reserved for visual images. Lithographs were quick and cheap enough to reproduce in periodicals like the Illustrated London News, which enjoyed a huge boom in its weekly sales during the Crimean War. Photographs aroused the interest of the public more than anything – they seemed to give a ‘realistic’ image of the war – and there was a substantial market for the photographic albums of James Robertson and Roger Fenton, who both made their names in the Crimea. Photography was just entering the scene – the British public had been wowed by its presentation at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – and this was the first war to be photographed and ‘seen’ by the public at the time of its fighting. There had been daguerreotypes of the Mexican-American War of 1846–8 and calotypes of the Burmese War of 1852–3, but these were primitive and hazy images compared to the photographs of the Crimean War, which appeared so ‘accurate’ and ‘immediate’, a ‘direct window onto the realities of war’, as one newspaper remarked at the time. In fact they were far from that. The limitations of the wetplate process (which required the glass plate to be exposed for up to twenty seconds) made it virtually impossible to photograph movement (though techniques improved to make this possible by the time of the American Civil War in the early 1860s). Most of Robertson’s and Fenton’s photographs are posed portraits and landscapes, images derived from genres of painting appealing to the tastes and sensibilities of their middle-class market. Although both men had seen a lot of death, neither showed it in their photographs – though Fenton referred to it symbolically in his most famous picture, Valley of the Shadow of Death, a desolate landscape strewn with cannonballs (which he clustered together to intensify the image) – because their pictures needed to be reconciled with Victorian society’s prevailing notions of it as a just and righteous war. The sanitized depiction of war in Robertson’s work had more to do with commercial pressures than with any censorship, but in the case of Fenton, a royal photographer who was sent to the Crimea partly to counteract the negative depiction of the campaign in The Times and other newspapers, there was certainly an element of propaganda. To reassure the public that the British soldiers were warmly dressed, for example, Fenton took a portrait of some soldiers dressed in good boots and heavy sheepskin coats recently dispatched by the government. But Fenton did not arrive in the Crimea until March 1855, and that portrait was not taken until mid-April, by which time many lives had been lost to the freezing temperatures and the need for such warm clothing had long passed. With April temperatures of 26 degrees, Fenton’s soldiers must have been sweltering in the heat.32
Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855)
Men of the 68th Regiment in Winter Dress (1855)
If Fenton’s camera lied, the same could not be said of William Russell’s reports in The Times, which did more than anything to inform the British public of the true conditions of the war. Russell was the most important and widely read reporter from the Crimea. Born in 1820 into an Anglo-Irish family near Dublin, Russell began working for The Times in 1841, during the general election in Ireland. He had covered only one small border war between Prussian and Danish troops in 1850, when he was sent by John Delane, the paper’s editor, with the Guards Brigade to Malta in February 1854. Delane promised the army’s commander-in-chief that Russell would return before Easter, but the journalist spent the next two years with the British army, reporting on an almost daily basis on the latest news from the Crimea, and exposing many of the failures of the military authorities. Russell’s Anglo-Irish background gave his writing a critical detachment from the English military establishment, whose incompetence he never hesitated to condemn. His sympathies were clearly with the ordinary troops, some one-third of them Irish, with whom he had a relaxed manner that encouraged them to talk. Henry Clifford described him as
a vulgar low Irishman, an Apostate Catholic … but he has the gift of the gab and uses his pen as well as his tongue, sings a good song, drinks anyone’s brandy and water, and smokes as many cigars as foolish young officers will let him, and he is looked upon by most in Camp as a ‘Jolly Good Fellow.’ He is just the sort of chap to get information, particularly out of youngsters.33
