The Illustrated London News, founded in 1842, was the first pictorial newspaper in the world.¹ New wood-engraving technology allowed picture and letterpress to be printed on the same page, resulting in a major transformation in the way that the news was visually conveyed. Illustrated newspapers were disposable paper items that came and went with each renewed news cycle, and would therefore seem to court obsolescence and oblivion. In this chapter, however, I look to the Victorian illustrated newspaper as a crucial and influential visual paradigm for rendering the reality of “the world” as readers understood it—a paradigm that hovered uneasily between art and fact in an era before mass photojournalism. In particular, the illustrated newspaper served as a crucial site for the development of realism as an aesthetic practice. While most studies of nineteenth-century realism have focused on novels, paintings, or photographs, realism was in fact a multimedia style formed across a range of visual and verbal genres. Nineteenth-century audiences would have experienced realism within a vastly expanded cultural field, especially in the era’s new visual media—not just in photographs, but also in engravings, lithographs, and illustrated newspapers, not to mention the more large-scale illusionism practiced by panoramas and world exhibitions.

The chapter studies realism as a series of modes operating at the nexus of theory and history. While these modes recur across history in Western representational artifacts, they took distinct forms in the nineteenth century, influenced by the particulars of new technologies, newly invented media, and new norms of objectivity. They also emerged, as Franco Moretti and George Levine have argued, out of the great social transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the ascendance of the middle classes and the relative decline of aristocratic power.² They appeared in both verbal and visual arts. And they emerged in mid-century visual journalism in response to a specific historical crisis—the Crimean War (1853–6)—whose traumas necessitated new representational techniques. I designate these realist modes as the descriptive, the authentic, the everyday, and the plausible. Consolidating ideas from previous scholars, I track how each mode is interrelated and yet at times contradictory: these modes sometimes overlap or occur simultaneously, suggesting that they are not completely distinct. The descriptive mode produces a close, indexical account of details and surfaces, often a rigorous mapping of a scene or landscape. The authentic mode testifies to the sincere truth of an eyewitness, usually foregrounding the felt experiences of an on-the-spot reporter. The everyday mode focuses upon mundane, routine temporalities, featuring ordinary kinds of characters, especially those belonging to the working class. And the plausible mode affirms what an audience already expects of the real, basing its sense of reasonableness in known types and conventions.³

The chapter studies these effects, first, in the visual journalism reporting on the Crimean War, dubbed by scholars the first “media war” for its unprecedented newspaper coverage. Artists and reporters invented a new visual vocabulary to convey the war’s dark realities, especially in the unwarranted suffering of working-class soldiers doomed by an incompetent British leadership. The chapter then tracks these reality effects into George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede (1859), published just a few years after the war, and famous for its manifesto demanding a turn toward realist subjects, characters, and practices. While Eliot’s high-flown pastoral novel might seem distant from newspaper accounts of Crimean battlefields, the book in fact retells the newspaper narrative of the war in miniature, using the same realist techniques as those found in the new visual journalism. It is no coincidence that the decade witnessing Britain’s first dedicated war reportage also saw the first use of “realism” as a term of literary criticism: the mid-century realist aesthetic emerged from transforming representational norms across media and genres.⁴

The Crimean War was a global conflict whose unfolding provoked new representational modes and possibilities. A war will always be a test case for realism: it pushes artists, writers, and reporters to the extreme limits of representation, compelling us to think about what is allowed to be shown, and what it is possible to show. The Crimean conflict has been called both the first “modern war” and the first “media war”: new technologies such as the telegraph and the steamship allowed British audiences to see, for the first time, a war playing out almost in real time.⁵ This was the first war to be documented by independent war correspondents, on-the-spot sketch artists, photographers, and illustrated newspapers at home. During previous wars—the Napoleonic were the most recent in British memory—news had come in from soldiers’ letters, which took months to arrive. Now, special correspondents sent reports and drawings from the front that London newspapers published within two weeks. The war vastly expanded the audience for the ILN, which marketed its copy with sensational news accounts, especially news of the war’s mismanagement.⁶ Some of the newspaper’s war images depicted scenes unprecedented in a collective visual culture—damaged male bodies, piles of corpses, amputees. Many of these images functioned under realist codes that did not, as the chapter pursues, correspond perfectly with facts on the ground. Although the newspaper operated within a realm of fact ostensibly distinct from the realm of art, its pictures created ephemeral reality effects that served to link this visual reporting to more aesthetic, fictional realms.⁷

The war started over Russia’s aggressive moves into territory then occupied by the waning Ottoman empire. In response, Britain and France created an unlikely coalition with Turkey to repel the Russian invaders. Britain was especially motivated to protect its trade route to India, and the Russian stronghold of the Crimea became the major theater of battle. Russia was eventually defeated and forced to withdraw its forces from the Black Sea, but not without the allies suffering horrendous casualties. The war became a media sensation owing to the shocking revelations of incompetence by British military officials. This was the war that saw the notorious “Charge of the Light Brigade,” when the British cavalry made a foolhardy assault against Russian guns with calamitous results. Tennyson memorialized the battle in his famous poem: “Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die.” More disastrous, however, was the failure of British leaders to effectively clothe and feed the army during a harsh Russian winter: heavy casualties from disease and starvation far exceeded deaths in battle, with as many as 80 percent of the 21,000 British and Irish casualties attributable to causes outside of combat.⁸ These atrocious conditions inspired the appearance of Florence Nightingale, who pioneered modern nursing practices in Crimean hospitals.

The chapter moves through a series of templates for Victorian war pictures, exploring some of the recurring spaces, subjects, and character types portrayed in the illustrated newspaper. They include the map, the panorama, “the Valley of Death,” scenes in the trenches, the war reporter, the battle’s aftermath, the amputee, and the nurse. Realism became an especially apt visual mode for Crimean journalism in representing the war’s many failures. British audiences were forced to confront narratives of shame and defeat following the mistakes made by leaders who didn’t know how to win battles, orchestrate supply lines, or care for the wounded. John Peck suggests that the scathing journalistic accounts written by W. H. Russell in The Times unfolded along the lines of a realist novel, revealing hard truths to a previously ignorant British audience.⁹ The war’s narrative in the newspapers took on a strongly moral tone in their critiques of aristocratic leaders, aligning these journalistic accounts with two of British realism’s defining traits, namely, its middle-class character and its emphasis on true vision as a moral imperative.

These traits differ from those of realist art in nineteenth-century France, and a comparison is instructive. French artists penned realist manifestoes in militant, uncompromising terms, reacting against the conservative strictures of the académie. “In reality nothing is shocking; in the sun, rags are as good as imperial vestments,” Louis Duranty announced in his periodical, Le Réalisme.¹⁰ Flaubert’s realist novel Madame Bovary (1857) incited a trial for its outrage to public morals; although Flaubert was acquitted, the judgment nevertheless accused the novel of producing “a vulgar and often shocking realism.”¹¹ While French realists rebelled against authority with a willful turn to the taboo, British realists eschewed revolutionary fervor or a desire to shock. The mid-century British theorists of realism—John Ruskin, in Modern Painters (1843–59), George Henry Lewes, in “Realism in Art” (1858), and George Eliot, in Adam Bede (1859)—were not self-defined rebels protesting conservative art styles. These authors outlined aesthetic values that were inclusive to their audience, aiming to embrace rather than offend, and invoking Victorian middle-class values of care and moral good. If British realists turned viewers’ eyes toward unsightly truths, they did so in the name of a unifying social justice rather than out of a desire to transgress and potentially alienate audiences. Realism’s claims in Britain often implicitly based themselves in an idea of community, in middle-class moral narratives celebrating family, country, and spiritual goodness, evincing an educated sensibility based in science and fact.¹² This was the realist optimism that inflected British newspaper accounts of the Crimean War, as we will see, even when events on the ground pointed in more nihilistic directions.

While French painters organized into a distinctive “Realist” movement, one that was debated and defended in the press, Britain had no analogous movement in the visual arts. Scholars seeking to understand British realism as a visual phenomenon have mostly focused on photography.¹³ British paintings did evince a range of reality effects, but these artworks were not understood by contemporaries to be making a radical turn toward “the real,” any more than they are studied as such today.¹⁴ (To note just one complicated example: Pre-Raphaelite painters used techniques of startling verisimilitude to portray subjects that were medieval, mythical, or fantastical.)¹⁵ The chapter thus makes an intervention in accounts of British nineteenth-century art by arguing for a key site of visual realism beyond painting and photography. Newspaper illustrations themselves did not invite realist manifestoes or declarations of intent by their makers. Yet the chapter will trace striking similarities between their journalistic visual strategies and those outlined by the British theorists of aesthetic realism, especially George Eliot, who conspicuously turned to visual models when announcing to the world what novels should aim to do.

Though a newspaper might seem like a distant medium from a classic realist novel, the chapter will show how both kinds of representational objects participated in a world-building enabled by similar kinds of reality effects.¹⁶ The chapter develops its multimedia account of realism by looking to Eliot’s Adam Bede, not only for its famous realist manifesto, but also for its engagement in novelistic modes of the descriptive, the authentic, the everyday, and the conventional. Adam Bede is set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars; the international warfare between empires becomes a fitting analogy for the smaller tragedies of the domestic, rural, and provincial. That Eliot chooses a Dutch painting as the ultimate symbol for a new realist art highlights the way that visuality itself worked to construct the realist project across genres: novelistic realism manifests as a gaze that combined objectivity with morality, with at times contradictory results. British realism across media entailed the superimposition of moral values onto a fact-based vision, recuperating grim scenes of working-class suffering into community-building imagery for a sympathetic, middle-class audience.

The chapter’s conclusion looks to one key afterlife of realism in war representation. I examine a popular BBC Three television documentary series, Our War (2011), to explore how a modern documentary continues to deploy familiar realist techniques. Even while the chapter notices likenesses across a range of dissimilar representational forms, however, it does not assert an imprecise equality between them. Each medium moves according to its own distinct generic rules and conventions. Moreover, while the analysis shifts from the factual realm of newspapers and documentaries to the fictional realms of novels and art, I don’t subscribe to a postmodern idea that understands all representation as text, endlessly referring to itself, and gaining no ontological purchase on a concrete reality. An external world does exist, with a different ontological status than that of fiction or art. The historical event is real: truths and facts are real. Yet the chapter will suggest that once the event enters into the realm of representation, the techniques used to narrate it share qualities with those of the realms of art.¹⁷ Those techniques, values, or clusters of metaphors themselves have a history, reinvented with each new medium. Traditional disciplinary scholarship has often insisted on generic differences as definitive; this chapter instead looks across media to track reality effects at a crucial moment in aesthetic, cultural, and technological history.

Representations of war make for a compelling case study in seeking to understand how realism works. The extremity of wartime experience, its stripping-away of civilized custom and accepted moral codes, its political complications and rhetorical usages, lend an intense, freighted charge to any realistic depiction. It is no wonder, then, that questions of how to represent war touch so closely upon questions of representation itself. This analysis ultimately thinks about realism as an aesthetic idea beyond high art, as a series of philosophical propositions rendered aesthetically, a vision both troubling and necessary in the journalistic portrayal of war.

Reading the Illustrated Newspaper

The aesthetic, fictionalizing realms of novels and paintings today seem distinct from the more objective, fact-based realms of journalistic media. That sense of divide, however, might feel increasingly thin in the current media landscape of partisan television channels and “fake news.” Likewise, tracing the divide between art and journalism in the nineteenth century is a similarly complicated task, especially in the earlier part of the century, when the norms of newspaper journalism were still inchoate. Readers did not yet presume, when the Illustrated London News began publication in 1842, that newspapers were organized around points of hard fact. The medium had been transforming itself since the early nineteenth century, moving from patchy news coverage, small print runs, expensive cost, and infrequent publication to a more genuinely mass phenomenon with broader news coverage, larger circulation, cheaper prices, and daily publication. Censorship and government control at the turn of the nineteenth century had given way to the ideal of a free press, subject to market forces.¹⁸ The full-time profession of “journalist” only emerged in the 1830s. Before this time, as Matthew Rubery writes, “there had been only a loose connection between journalists and the news.”¹⁹ Victorian newspapers continued an eighteenth-century tradition of expressing strong political opinions in editorial columns. But the invention of the electric telegraph in 1836 and Isaac Pitman’s perfection of shorthand in the 1840s led to a new reportorial investment in qualities of immediacy, transcription, and the eyewitness account.²⁰ Anthony Smith argues that a universalized system of shorthand, in particular, transformed reporting into a kind of observational science, promising readers “the complete recovery of some semblance of reality.”²¹ The shift in values toward journalism as an objective kind of witnessing led to the first independent foreign correspondents being sent abroad to report back to English newspapers. The Crimean War was the first to be covered by “special correspondents” sent to document the battle. Journalists at mid-century numbered with scientists and ethnographers as new occupational identities whose professionalization depended on innovative forms of detached observation. These identities, however, did not yet cohere under a distinct ethos of objectivity.

The nineteenth-century newspaper also approached the precincts of art with the inclusion of illustrations. Although photographic technologies transformed publishing practices throughout the century, newspapers did not mass-reproduce actual photographs until early in the twentieth century. Newspapers like the ILN employed “special artists” who traveled to battlefields or other newsworthy locales and took pencil sketches on the spot. The artists then worked them up to more finished versions after the fact, sometimes washed with watercolors. The drawings were then sent from the Crimea to London on steam packet boats that also transported the British army’s mail. ILN staff artists transferred the drawings onto wood-engraving blocks, where they were engraved by a team working at maximum speed.²² With its hand-drawn, hand-engraved images, the illustrated newspaper occupied a nebulous borderland between journalism and art. That nebulosity is evident in Charles Baudelaire’s designation of Constantin Guys as “The Painter of Modern Life” (1859–63)—celebrating Guys for sketches he published while working as a war reporter for the ILN. Baudelaire’s essay, one of the nineteenth century’s most famous aesthetic manifestoes, bases its claims on images published in an illustrated newspaper. The confusion speaks to the way that early visual journalism did not yet connote the ideas of strict objectivity or even anti-aesthetics that distinguishes journalistic professionalism today. Early illustrated newspapers sometimes drew on photographs as models, offering a finely grained visual field and an unfiltered mass of details signifying an indexical relation to the subject pictured. More often, though, the illustrative sketch was selective and subjective in style, with personalized and often conventional choices by both artist and engraver about the image’s contents.²³

The illustrated newspaper combined word and image to convey the presence of the present, the world “burst on the senses” with ever-increasing plausibility effects.²⁴ The pictures in the Victorian illustrated newspaper offered a patchwork of small architectural windows opening onto the constructed topoi of readerly interest—newly built ships, bridges or trains; Parisian fashions; disasters, fires, earthquakes; wars; the Queen’s appearances; paintings at the Royal Academy; urban poverty; rural poverty; foreign ethnographies; local color.²⁵ The newspaper’s heterogeneous yet not quite random version of “the world”—the types and conventions of its worldedness—transformed the unruly developments of the news into a series of pristine engraved views.²⁶ Bolter and Grusin, in Remediation, note how the tricks of perspectival painting extended from the Renaissance to the modern computer screen, making picture space continuous with the spectator’s space and “promis[ing] immediacy through transparency.”²⁷ They trace perspectivalism directly from painting to photography, but the nineteenth century’s plausibility effects also emerged from printing technology, from engravings and lithographs crafting boxes of the real before photography came to the fore as a mass medium. The illustrated newspaper, with its hectic, encyclopedic, spectacular jumble, strikes a resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s phantasmagoria, the entrancing lightshow symbolizing modernity’s spectacles, especially the array of industrialized commodities. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin writes of the urban phantasmagoria as “now a landscape, now a room.”²⁸ The flicker between room and landscape also seems a perfect way to capture the small box of the newspaper picture, offered at hand size to be viewed in a private space, but opening up onto the world with a tantalizing illusion of depth and distance.

These phantasmagoric effects suggest how the illustrated newspaper’s realism was adjacent to its sensationalism. Its pictorial effects were pleasurable and entertaining, as seen in related phenomena like the panorama, diorama, photograph, and other mechanized lights and shadows. One popular London panorama depicted the city itself, intimating the way that the pleasure lay in mere illusionism. Visual effects of depth, surface, texture, light, space, height, and perfect sight—all functioned as attractions that appealed to the body and to the sensorium, especially the eyes. The thrill of the real helped to sell newspapers, pointing to a defining conflict at the heart of the modern newspaper’s existence, in reporting the news as a public good while also functioning as a commodity selling pictures.

The illustrated newspaper’s aesthetic qualities have led some scholars to see the medium as a successor to the history painting, as both are artistic conveyors of visual news—a genealogy that might renovate our sense of history painting as an obsolescent medium of faded grandeur.²⁹ The history painting, for all of its allegorical styles, epic heroes, and bids for permanence, also served as the communicator and disseminator of an era’s contemporary events and political crises. The “history” label downplays the extent to which these massive canvases might have served as news for those who consumed them. A useful comparison is offered by a famous war painting of the seventeenth century, Charles Le Brun’s Franche-Comté Conquered for the Second Time (1674) (Fig. 2.1). The painting appears on the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, commissioned by Louis XIV to commemorate the French victory over the Dutch. It celebrates the king as a divinely appointed, heroic individual, mingling with gods and allegories. He wears classical garb, channeling a divine favor that transcends any specific time. The territory he has conquered does not appear in any detailed sense. The painting instead dwells upon the figure and body of the king, a commanding, mythic presence amid a whirl of supplicating or violently subjugating figures.³⁰ The discussion below will highlight the contrasts of a new visual realism invested in qualities of surface detail, of authentic spectatorship by a professionalized, detached observer, of everyday persons and prosaic temporalities, and of newly familiar war types and templates. Yet even while the illustrated newspaper projected an innovative, middle-class realist ethos, it still engaged, like the history painting, in narrating a story about power, violence, and national unity, using aesthetic means.

Fig. 2.1 Charles Le Brun, Franche-Comté Conquered for the Second Time. Ceiling painting at the Palace of Versailles, c. 1674. © Photo Josse/Bridgeman Images.

By the time of the Crimean conflict, the epic mode had come to seem both nostalgically desirable and hopelessly outdated for relating world-historical events. Tennyson published the first part of his Idylls of the King in 1859, allegorizing British social conflicts by looking back to Arthurian legend. But a commentator in Blackwood’s during the Crimean War satirically underscores the way that epic forms were being supplanted by works of a new temporality: “Fancy … the white-haired Nestor, and the sage Ulysses, reading, towards the close of the first year of their sojourn before Troy, the first book of the Iliad, to be continued in parts as a serial.”³¹ In the new time scale of journalism, historical events and their media coverage radically converged. The Blackwood’s critic humorously deflates lofty epic traditions by invoking the busy modernity of Victorian warfare and commercial print culture. His comment suggests the way that a war’s narrative flow invites aesthetic treatment, even while acknowledging the incongruity between grand historical events and their representation in Victorian new media.

The critic intuits a similar insight to that proposed by Benedict Anderson, who also studies newspapers as media comparable to novels or paintings, especially in their creation of phantasmagoric effects. Anderson argues that the modern nation emerges as a mirage generated by the illusionary world-building of both novels and newspapers. The newspaper’s endlessly renewing temporality of “the now” contributes to a mass ritual, an almost hallucinatory experience of national belonging:

The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing … creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption (‘imagining’) of the newspaper-as-fiction. … [This mass ceremony] is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.³²

Though our modern-day sense aligns newspapers with the realms of fact and objectivity, Anderson instead describes “the newspaper-as-fiction,” a printed object that serves, like a talisman, as a source for the human experience of ritual and myth. The imaginary community of the nation emerges from “the lair of the skull,” both fictitious and profound. Anderson argues that both newspapers and novels create their imaginary shared communities using new, stable, measurable coordinates of space and time. But his account ultimately sees the newspaper as a representational artifact holding mythic and even quasi-religious import—not unlike a premodern history painting. In the sections that follow, I will examine the illustrated newspaper’s creation of reality effects that partake of both the concrete and the metaphysical, tying ephemeral or ideological effects to the particulars of the realist image.

Descriptive Realism: Surface and Map in the Valley of Death

Verisimilitude is an optically oriented mode focused on the scrupulous reproduction of details. Svetlana Alpers studies this mode in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), looking for meaning in the painting’s surface, in “what the eye can take in—however deceptive that might be.”³³ Dutch paintings, known for their subtle light effects and minutely rendered surfaces, emerged, Alpers notes, from a new cultural investment in visual objectivity and experimental science. Objects represented within this descriptive mode do not appear framed and positioned so much as transcribed, as though seen through a camera obscura. In fact, as Alpers suggests, this painterly mode in Dutch art anticipates the indexical action of photography, or the “indexical sign” theorized by Charles Peirce (44). The pictured world seems to exist and expand beyond the frame, seen from the perspective of an unspecified observer. Verisimilitude is an effect that accords with the modes of scientific objectivity studied by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, in which scientists attempted to develop machines that would replace flawed, unsteady hands and eyes.³⁴ Alpers aligns the descriptive mode with maps and a “mapping impulse” in Dutch landscape paintings, as these emphasized qualities of “surface and extent” while diminishing the human presence (139). In literary texts, critics have located verisimilitude effects in moments of verbal description. Roland Barthes observes how a text’s inclusion of a seemingly inconsequential detail—a barometer atop a piano, in Flaubert’s novella Un Coeur Simple—exists for the sole purpose of weaving a fabric of reality. Lacking any symbolic import, the barometer sits amid a jumble of apparently meaningless objects in a bourgeois parlor; its sheer triviality ensures its “reality effect,” creating the surface of believable life and concretizing the novelistic world. As Barthes writes: “Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door, finally say nothing but this: we are the real.”³⁵

The descriptive mode appeared in the ILN’s portrayals of the Crimean landscape, the territory over which the war was fought. The newspaper published numerous maps of the Crimean peninsula, offering audiences at home a sense of the war’s terrains, boundaries, and sightlines. A map is a spatial analogue to a clock or a calendar, applying rational norms of measurement about which a spatially literate audience might gather and agree.³⁶ A landscape scene rendered with a maplike sensibility presents a bird’s-eye view, a phrase indicating no particular viewer or viewpoint, “but rather,” says Alpers, “the manner in which the surface of the earth has been transformed onto a flat, two-dimensional surface” (141). Even while maps abstracted the ILN reader away from a corporeal real of wartime bodies and sensations, they registered a descriptive realism that conveyed a visual experience of territorial presence and concreteness. A view of the siege of Sebastopol, from November 1854, offers a landscape recognizable as the same one transcribed in a map of February 1855 (Figs. 2.2 and 2.3). The landscape view oscillates uncertainly between two and three dimensions, relinquishing volumetric solidity in favor of a sweeping breadth of surface. Natural features of water and steep cliffsides outline the land’s borders and dwarf the human presence, suggesting a world that expands beyond any individual measure. Only in the image’s center do we make out the tiny, besieged city of Sebastopol. While the scene was distant to the lived world of British audiences, the maps and maplike views invited them to see the Crimea as a realm in which they implicitly participated, as viewers sharing in the same lucid coordinates of space and shape.

Fig. 2.2 “Plan of Sebastopol, Shewing the Forts & Public Buildings, the Position of the Allied Armies in Winter Quarters, and the Present State of the Siege Works.” Illustrated London News, February 14, 1855.

Fig. 2.3 “General View of the Siege of Sebastopol.” Illustrated London News, November 11, 1854.

The ILN also pictured Crimean territorial views in the form of panoramas. These were large, sometimes fold-out scenes depicting a tracery of the horizon, labeled with different strategic points: English Fleet, Heights of Inkerman, Russian Encampment, and so on (Fig. 2.4). The panoramic fold-out in the magazine derived its name and concept from the popular London entertainment, first conceived in the 1790s, a massive, 360-degree painting, which spectators perused from a viewing platform in a purpose-built, circular space. Panoramas offered an immersive, engulfing experience, usually (again) a bird’s-eye view of a foreign place. Despite their unwieldy size, panoramas served as a form of early-nineteenth-century reportage: unlike history paintings, which aimed for a stately permanence, panoramas often depicted scenes that were topical and newsworthy, patriotic battles or naval scenes, or a recent revolution in France. Panorama entrepreneurs competed to be the first to depict an event, such as the 1834 burning of the Houses of Parliament. A panorama was a news source; as such, it was a vast form of ephemera, which is one reason why so few of these giant paintings still remain intact. The panorama and the illustrated newspaper were complementary media—in fact, the pictorial newspaper was one nail in the panorama’s coffin. The London entertainment had mostly died out by the end of the 1850s, and the Crimean War was one of the last to be dramatized in panorama form.³⁷ When the ILN announces, in its 1842 inaugural issue, that it intends “to keep continually before the eye of the world a living and moving panorama of all its actions and influences,” the newspaper compares its own parade of pictures to the vast London technology, offering a timely, synthesized, and immersive version of “the world.”³⁸

Fig. 2.4 “Panoramic View of Sebastopol Sketched from the Heights of Balaclava by Captain E. A. Hawker, 21st Fusiliers.” Illustrated London News, January 20, 1855.

The panorama was, like the maplike landscape, another fictive mode of looking that employed verisimilitude effects. It offered the illusion of full presence, a perfect 360-degree vision conveying the mastery of the all-seeing view. The panoramic view is both above and embedded, with a sense of rotation conveying a plenitude of horizontal visual information. The ILN’s full-spread panorama of the Crimean landscape serves as a rather boring war picture. Once again, the human scale is diminished in favor of sweeping landforms, a topographic arrangement of mountain, sea, and hillside. The human presence is barely visible, with tiny ships at sea and miniature encampments locatable only with the aid of the caption underneath. The image superimposes the reader’s gaze upon that of a military leader surveying the scene, presenting a sanitized war theater and an illusory sense of visual mastery.

A similar descriptive logic underlies Crimean scenes of the famous “Valley of Death.” The ravine became famous, in Tennyson’s lyric, as the site of a brutal massacre: “All in the valley of Death/Rode the six hundred.” Yet the imagery does not portray a battle. Roger Fenton’s iconic war photograph of the terrain presents a muddy hillside strewn with cannonballs (Fig. 2.5). While Fenton’s photograph sold for an expensive 21 shillings—it emerged in the years before photography became a mass medium—the Valley of Death also appeared in cheaper, more mass-circulated media, such as in the ILN, and in war lithographs by William Simpson. Simpson’s version includes tiny men bearing a wounded soldier on a stretcher, the humans miniaturized against the towering hillsides. The ILN’s version, absent of soldiers, shows only a few scattered bones and a buzzard circling overhead (Fig. 2.6). It is striking that the newspaper allotted a full-page spread to a scene of vast emptiness, land and sky. The biblical title of “the Valley of Death” added a layer of allegorical grandiosity to pictorial content that was in fact new and unprecedented. Rather than portraying warriors clashing in combat, the imagery instead pointed viewers’ attention to the ground, to the vast and depopulated ravines, rocky, scrubby, and barren. The details of hillside and cannonball, minus the heroes, conveyed a descriptive effect of realism, a sense of reality ensured by the scene’s seemingly trivial surfaces. Refusing to center on heroic human actors, these scenes focused the eye on the details of a desolate, noneventful space that extends into a world beyond the frame. If a nihilistic view of war death hovers here in the implication that imperial nations sacrifice soldiers while contending for patches of dry earth and buzzards, that nihilism is dispelled by a faith in the vision itself, whose penetrating realism signifies a triumph of Western analytical perception.

Fig. 2.5 Roger Fenton, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Fenton Crimean War Photographs.

Fig. 2.6 “‘The Valley of Death’ Before Sebastopol.” Illustrated London News, June 30, 1855.

The verisimilitude effects of scenes in the “Valley of Death” did not necessarily coincide with the war’s reality. In fact, cannonballs flew into a number of Crimean ravines, and each picture potentially captures a different geography. Fenton’s valley of death is not the location of the ill-starred Charge of the Light Brigade hymned in Tennyson’s poem. Errol Morris recently accused Fenton of fakery for moving the cannonballs in his photo; in the original picture, the cannonballs had collected in the ditches along the road, a visual fact confirmed by newspaper imagery of the same scene.³⁹ While the actual Crimean ravines served as the sites of violent butchery, or the mindless destruction wrought by an errant cannonball, the Victorian pictures of the empty ravines offered themselves as descriptive realist geographies signifying a truer truth of warfare, both unadorned and unspeakable, stripped down and existentially true.

Authentic Realism: Eyewitnessing and the Special Correspondent

Another key reality effect conveys a sense of authenticity. This mode sacrifices precise details in order to render a subjective, first-person account. It implies a close alignment between the artist’s experiences and the scene portrayed; it often uses techniques of visual distortion or dissolution in order to express a sense of immediacy or “on the spot” experience. A classic example is J. M. W. Turner’s 1842 painting of a ship in a snowstorm, whose full title broadcasts its investment in authenticity: Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the ‘Ariel’ Left Harwich (Fig. 2.7). An apocryphal account suggests that Turner was lashed to the ship’s mast. The painting conveys a sense of firsthand experience by omitting concrete details, choosing instead a bewildering swirl of grays to evoke the storm’s icy churn. The authenticity effect appears in modern-day films and TV shows that employ a shaky hand-held camera, constraining audience perception.⁴⁰ In literature, authenticity effects can be found in stream-of-consciousness techniques or in the exuberant, subjective mediations of gonzo journalism. This mode often entails the communication of the maker’s subjective presence, whether as an adventurous artist or ethnographic observer. It became especially important in the nineteenth century with the ascendance of traveling journalists, whose truth-telling depended on communicating an on-the-spot account to readers and viewers back home.

Fig. 2.7 Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the ‘Ariel’ Left Harwich. Oil on canvas, 1842. © Tate, London 2019.

The ILN foregrounded the presence of its “special correspondents” and “special artists” on the Crimean battlefield, highlighting the novelty of this journalistic identity.⁴¹ The letterpress in an 1855 article describes how a pictured winter scene is not as detailed as it might have been owing to frost cramping the artist’s fingers. “You may depend on their [these sketches’] exact truthfulness: the want of finish to be found in them may be laid to my scarcely being able to hold a pencil in my hand from excessive cold.”⁴² The picture’s truthfulness is authenticated by the artist’s corporeal presence, resulting in a less precise rendering. The accompanying illustration uses minimal strokes to portray the huddled soldiers waiting in the snow (Fig. 2.8). One of the newspaper’s defining war images is “Our Artist on the Battlefield of Inkerman” (Fig. 2.9).⁴³ The image is clearly fantastical, since the artist cannot be documenting a scene in which he himself is a participant. Yet a sense of realism inheres in his authenticity as an eyewitness; the word “correspondent” itself connotes subjective eyewitnessing, with its roots in letter-writing. The ILN image implicitly aligns the journalist with the foot soldiers, walking his horse rather than riding it. (This imagery also would have resonated with the gruesome particulars of the Battle of Inkerman, whose hard-won victory was achieved through the efforts and brutal deaths of the Allied soldiers on foot.) The reporter is a kind of warrior for the truth, conveying his vision of the war “on the spot.” His gaze looks to the ground, which is littered with corpses. The phrase “taken on the spot” appeared throughout ILN war coverage: the concept represented a new idea in communications, describing truth as a function of a particular spatio-temporality, in which an eyewitness reproduced a view of a place within a precipitous moment of time.

Fig. 2.8 “Outlying Picquet of the 90^th Regiment in the Snow, in the Middle Ravine, Before Sebastopol.” Illustrated London News, March 10, 1855.

Fig. 2.9 “Our Artist on the Battlefield of Inkerman.” Illustrated London News, February 3, 1855.

Punch understood the appeal of this kind of authenticating, eyewitness imagery and parodied it in their own version of “Our Artist in the Crimea” (Fig. 2.10).⁴⁴ Here an “obliging Aide-de-campe” positions the visiting artist knee-deep in water, in the Balaclava harbor. The image mocks the suffering that the journalist has to undergo in the name of on-the-spot reporting—a tradition still very much in place today, as journalists position themselves in the heart of dangerous storms, raindrops hitting the camera, in order to authenticate their account of dangers braved while pursuing the story. The Punch cartoon also has a political undertone, implying that the artist has been moved out of range by military authorities who want to undermine his too-acute vision of the war’s disasters.

Fig. 2.10 “Our Artist in the Crimea.” Punch, January 6, 1855. Courtesy University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center.

The Crimean War witnessed the invention of a new kind of journalistic identity in the form of the deeply individualistic reporter who travels for truth and takes risks to find it—as embodied by special correspondents like W. H. Russell of The Times, whose fiery attacks on the military establishment helped to bring down the British government. This identity also accrued to the photographer Roger Fenton, even though his occupation was not coded as “journalistic” at the time. Fenton had been sent to the Crimea by the Manchester-based publishers Thomas Agnew and Sons in order to provide photo portraits as the basis for a history painting by Thomas Barker.⁴⁵ His images became interwoven with journalistic enterprise when some of them were engraved for the Illustrated London News. The newspaper printed an iconic image of the new photographic visual reporter, “Mr. Fenton’s Photographic Van.—From the Crimean Exhibition” (November 10, 1855) (Fig. 2.11). The picture reproduces a Fenton photograph that appeared in a London exhibition of his Crimean work. Fenton developed his Crimean negatives inside a darkroom “van” that had been jerry-rigged from a carriage. The picture portrays the adventurous photographer quite literally as a traveler for the truth, journeying atop his mobile darkroom.⁴⁶ (Again, factual details mitigate somewhat against this mythic portrayal: the man seen driving the van is in fact Marcus Sparling, Fenton’s assistant, a subordinate whose photographic contributions have largely been lost from the historical record.)⁴⁷

Fig. 2.11 “Mr. Fenton’s Photographic Van.—From the Crimean Exhibition.” Illustrated London News, November 10, 1855.

The new reportorial identity of special artist or special correspondent gained its power from the realist effect of authenticity, a truthfulness guaranteed by a journey and the communication of a first-person presence. We can observe a similar identity-formation in Henry Mayhew’s three-volume London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a contemporaneous work of innovative ethnography that also combined words and images. Collecting Mayhew’s newspaper articles from the 1840s, the volumes offered a detailed account of different types of London workers, accompanied by illustrations engraved after daguerreotypes. In the preface, Mayhew highlights the novelty of his project and announces himself as “the traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor.”⁴⁸ He analogizes his project to that of a daring explorer, implying that his account is authenticated by the journey itself. Tim Barringer argues that Mayhew’s illustrated Londoners shared a similar exoticism with the African natives pictured in the travel narratives of Speke and Livingstone. As Barringer notes, Mayhew’s travel metaphors reflected those of the Victorian adventurer abroad, lending an authentic veneer to what was often a subjective visual account of otherness and difference.⁴⁹ An engraving of chimney-sweep children at home portrays them with blackened faces, making the chimney sweep into its own racial category (Fig. 2.12).⁵⁰ For all of Mayhew’s ostensibly scientific language and objective taxonomy, Barringer shows how many of his images are indebted to an urban Gothic imaginary, of the kind found in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Mayhew’s image of the blackened chimney sweeps affirms its own authenticity with its caption: “The Sweeps’ Home. (From a sketch taken on the spot.)” The eyewitness account “on the spot” testifies to what might seem a strange or even unbelievable sight, in this case the racial darkening of British children in London.

Fig. 2.12 “‘The Sweeps’ Home.’ (from a sketch taken on the spot).” Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 2, 1861–2. Courtesy Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives.

In the evolving figure of the traveling correspondent, then, this authentic, first-person traveler came to be associated with a certain kind of challenging subject-matter, previously unknown, exotic, alluring, and risky to observe. The Crimean War provided many opportunities for this kind of reporting, since it offered the spectacle of a range of diverse peoples, with soldiers who were British, French, Turkish, Russian Croat, Montenegrin, Zouave, and Tartar. One striking ILN illustration, rendered by an on-the-spot observer, presents a powerful scene of suffering and otherness. In “Turks Conveying the Sick to Balaclava” (Fig. 2.13), Turkish soldiers carry wounded men on their backs, while a dead horse lies in the snow and vultures circle overhead.⁵¹ The image emphasizes the soldiers’ Turkishness with their hoods and distinctive, mustachioed physiognomies. The letterpress conveys the authentic feelings of the eyewitnessing special artist: “‘It is one of the most heart-rending sights,’ says our Correspondent, ‘to see these unfortunate fellows carried on the shoulders of their poor comrades, who have sometimes to pay dear for their sympathy.’” The letterpress goes on to meditate on the Turkish character more broadly in comparison to the French and English, especially in its greater tolerance for pain and capacity for endurance.⁵² (As a matter of fact, however, the manual mode of transport was adopted by the British as well as the Turks, since British forces also lacked necessary ambulances.)

Fig. 2.13 “Turks Carrying the Sick to Balaclava.” Illustrated London News, March 17, 1855.

While this imagery in the first instance works to divide the civilized observer from the more primitive ethnographic subject, one implication is that the new traveling correspondent is a liminal figure who takes on some of the dangerous, savage, and alluring qualities of the people he documents. These stereotypical qualities attain even today, in the type of the hardened, masculinist traveling correspondent or photojournalist, whose edgy, on-the-spot adventures testify to the authenticity of his reporting. This idea is encapsulated in the famous self-portrait taken by photographer Roger Fenton in Zouave costume (Fig. 2.14). Fenton took the picture in his London studio after the war, as part of a series of photographs on “Oriental” themes.⁵³ The Zouaves were a French unit of Algerian soldiers famed for their ferocity in battle. They appeared as frequent objects of ethnographic curiosity in the ILN, reflecting the broader British fascination with the racialized, subject peoples who served as the mercenaries of Western empires.⁵⁴ Although Zouave regiments by 1853 largely consisted of men of French European descent who had served in Algeria, these soldiers still connoted captivating qualities of savagery, primitivism, and racial otherness.⁵⁵

Fig. 2.14 Roger Fenton, Self-Portrait in Zouave Uniform, 1855. GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

When Fenton pictures himself as a Zouave, he participates in an enduring Romantic tradition—familiar from Byron’s portrait in Albanian costume—of the artist identifying as exoticized outsider, heightening his identity as a unique, privileged kind of creative person. These associations inform the modern idea of the war correspondent, who risks his life to report from the field. Fenton, of course, made his self-portrait as Zouave in his London studio, far from the Crimean dangers. Nevertheless, his image gains its power by implying a mirroring between the special artist and his exotic subjects. The foreign correspondent is a boundary-crossing person uniquely equipped to translate exotic ethnographies for an audience back home. Truth itself becomes both expedition and trophy, a thing to be observed and claimed at a particular moment in time, by a special kind of person, using his own authentic voice, and conveying his own distinctive vision.

Everyday Realism: War Labor in the Trenches

A third realist mode entails the turn to the common and the everyday as the concerns of representation. While this mode appears to deal with subject-matter rather than style, the two aspects are deeply entwined in the portrayal of the habitual, the ordinary, and the routine, as opposed to the extraordinary, the heroic, or the romantic. The realist mode of the ordinary features the repetition inherent to practices of everyday life, as well as the passing of fleeting, ephemeral moments: both of these time-forms oppose the temporalities of the eternal or permanent associated with more elevated art styles.⁵⁶ Linda Nochlin, in her study Realism, points to Baudelaire’s famous definition of modernity as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent” in her assessment of realist temporality.⁵⁷ For many scholars, realism’s turn to the common and the everyday coincided with the rise of capitalism, as the new middle classes patronized artworks that portrayed their own rhythms of daily life.⁵⁸ Yet Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis argues that realism’s modes are transhistorical stylistic choices stretching all the way back to the Bible. He contrasts Homeric realism—portraying elevated characters who are externalized, brightly visible, and unchanging over time—with a biblical realism portraying everyday kinds of characters who are psychologically deep, and who exemplify “the concept of the historically becoming.”⁵⁹ For Auerbach, the most compelling mimetic style engages in a historicist accounting of character, by which characters change over the course of their lives, and struggle with the conditions of their particular historical moment. Auerbach aligns this historicist realism with the lives of insignificant persons, a tradition beginning with the Christian emphasis on humility and the humble life. I follow Auerbach, then, in distinguishing a historicist realism that implicitly looks to more everyday kinds of persons and practices, and is rendered within the temporal parameters of the routine or the contingent.

In ILN reporting, effects of historicist realism surrounded the unprecedented Crimean imagery of the life of the working-class soldier. Previously, war portraiture had focused exclusively on generals and officers whose names were recorded in the annals of military history. This portraiture continued to be popular; the ILN printed many elaborate portraits of Crimean generals, and many of Fenton’s photographs depicted officers, perched atop the status symbol of the horse. Yet a huge gulf divided aristocratic officers from the men they commanded, soldiers who were recruited from impoverished rural villages, some fleeing the law. The rank-and-file soldier represented the most destitute and uneducated of the British and Irish male poor. Their reputation before the war, in the words of the Times, was that of “savage, murderous, ravaging and destroying creatures.”⁶⁰ These were the men depicted manning the trenches in newspaper images of the siege of Sebastopol, in winter scenes from 1854–55.

The war’s stark class divide lent trench imagery a volatile political charge. Whereas the elite Crimean war officer enjoyed a luxurious life of horse races, local tourism, balls, and champagne feasts, the rank-and-file soldier executed the manual labor of the war, maintaining the siege line, enduring regular bombardments and the frigid weather.⁶¹ When illustrated newspapers moved to portray nameless soldiers in the trenches, this imagery accompanied an often explicit political critique, as the newspapers lauded the lowly soldier in accusations against incompetent military leaders who allowed these men to die. The road from Balaclava harbor to the front line was six miles long; it became almost impassable in the winter, and boatloads of supplies, food, and winter coats lay useless in the harbor with no way to transport them. The ILN scenes “in the trenches” depicted nameless men shivering in snow, huddled behind fortifications, enduring the long winter (Fig. 2.15). Punch published a cartoon in 1855 whose winter war imagery borrowed directly from that of the ILN (Fig. 2.16). Two soldiers converse in a snowy camp; one says, “We’re to have a medal.” The other replies, “That’s very kind. Maybe one of these days we’ll have a coat to stick it on?”⁶² Centering on the mundane circumstances of working-class men trapped in the cold, these images invoked a historicist realism, portraying a suffering that was both prosaic and infuriating.

Fig. 2.15 “Scene in the 21st Battery.” Illustrated London News, March 10, 1855.

Fig. 2.16 John Leech, “The British Forces and the Crimean War.” Punch, February 17, 1855.

In depicting the temporality of siege labor, trench imagery mostly eschewed the drama of battle scenes. A siege by its very nature entails boredom and waiting around, as soldiers perform the routine work of war maintenance. In the ILN’s “siege supplement” of November 1854, an image captures the mundane quality of the war’s everyday life: men are arranged around a quiet cannon in postures of relaxation and repose, chatting with each other in easy camaraderie, one with his head resting on his hand.⁶³ Fenton’s version of this imagery, titled “A Quiet Day in the Mortar Battery,” portrays two napping soldiers and a lookout at the wall, showing his ungainly backside. Trench imagery engaged the codes of a historical realism by turning our eye to the average soldier as he performed daily routines, many of them undignified and unheroic. Viewers in the 1850s would have been struck by how these images differed from more traditional war pictures depicting singular, peak events. Trench scenes captured the incipient conditions of modern war, portraying soldiers waiting in limbo while exposed to dangers that were invisible, unpredictable, and abruptly violent. War’s temporality under codes of historicist realism becomes contingent and momentary, rather than glorious and epochal.

If the trench came to signify a new site of war realism, its effects were both historicist and also, I would suggest, authentic. The phrase “in the trenches” today gestures beyond wartime, describing any kind of deep presence based on experiential immersion. A person working “in the trenches” gains authentic knowledge guaranteed by firsthand experience, elevated by the intimation of suffering. When the ILN depicted the working-class soldiers fighting in the trenches, it created a new kind of authenticity effect, one that has become familiar to us today. The novelty of the idea in 1855 is clear in the way the ILN puts the phrase “in the trenches” into quotation marks in an article illustrating siege labor. “What are the trenches?” asks the letterpress, explaining to readers at home all of the dangerous yet routine siege actions and movements.⁶⁴ As the OED notes, new compound phrases with “trench” entered the English language in the 1850s, among them “trench fighting” (1855), “trench life” (1855), and “trench grave” (1854). The ILN’s trench imagery united the everyday with the authentic, demonstrating how multiple reality effects can occur together, making them at times not completely separable or distinct.

A historicist realism also characterized the ILN’s new imagery of war death. While some Crimean imagery did represent battles in a traditional, heroic mode, with soldiers rushing forth in grand costumes and pennants flying, more haunting and original pictures depicted the battle’s aftermath. The temporality of the posthumous governed grim scenes of battlefields strewn with corpses, both human and equine. The Illustrated Times, one of the ILN competitors, published an aftermath scene depicting a mass grave, with a pile of bodies, both human and horse, waiting to be interred.⁶⁵ The mere portrayal of a corpse is not in itself inherently realist: Christian art had long portrayed martyrdoms that were typically grand, sacred, and eternal. But Crimean visual journalism handled the corpses in a new way, rendering the postures of death according to more everyday codes (Fig. 2.17). A scene in the ILN depicts “The Morning after the Battle of Inkerman” with corpses littered across the battlefield in various postures of casual carnage.⁶⁶ Soldiers do not appear in meaningful or sublime poses, as would befit a sacrifice for a glorious cause. Instead, we see bodies draped carelessly across the earth, many of them face-down, like anti-portraits, a blatant sign of the destruction of the individual. These poses would have spoken powerfully to Victorian viewers accustomed to expressive, theatrical gestures. The vision presented is of mundane death, an aggregate of sad facts, rather than an elevated or transcendent event. War death becomes a subset of Baudelaire’s modernity, transitory, fugitive, and contingent, a part of war’s predictable ritual.

Fig. 2.17 “Sandbag Battery Defended by the Guards—Sketched on the Morning after the Battle of Inkerman.” Illustrated London News, December 16, 1854.

These ILN battlefield scenes produced reality effects with an important afterlife. I would argue that this imagery informed the notorious, corpse-strewn American Civil War photographs taken by Mathew Brady and his team in the early 1860s. Brady’s images became possible in the wake of quick-moving technological innovations: whereas, in 1855, photographs were still expensive and difficult to reproduce—Roger Fenton’s Crimean photographs were elite, precious, and limited-edition—by 1863, photography had become a new mass medium, with cheap cartes de visite and stereoviews circulating in the millions.⁶⁷ Civil War battlefield scenes, such as a famous 1863 photo of the Gettysburg battlefield (Fig. 2.18), appeared as stereoviews under the seal of Mathew Brady’s huge commercial photography operation, which used corpses to mass-market photographic commodities. These photos subordinate the corpse to the landscape in a remarkably similar manner to the ILN reportage. They produce casual postures of death, in which bodies are scenic parts of a picturesque countryside, rather than centering their own transcendent drama. Photography historian Alan Trachtenberg argues that Brady’s photographs performed a “staged informality” reminiscent of the hand-drawn sketch, as seen in the title of the book where some photographs appeared, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War.⁶⁸ (Again, a reality effect without the real: Trachtenberg uses the word “staged” to describe the way that some Civil War photographers moved corpses to create their elegant compositions. At times, the corpses were played by living actors.) The hand-drawn sketch would have been a familiar style of visual reportage for American viewers perusing their own illustrated newspapers, such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly. These American newspapers all imitated the visual formulae developed by the ILN. In fact, Frank Leslie, the impresario of American pictorial journalism, was an Englishman who had managed the ILN’s engravings department before moving to the US in 1848.⁶⁹ In other words, the famous Civil War battlefield photographs can be seen as modeling their depictions of war death on the Crimean War visual reportage inaugurated in British newspapers. Nameless soldiers featured in scenes of carnage both well composed and casual.

Fig. 2.18 James F. Gibson/Alexander Gardner, On the Battlefield at Gettysburg. Stereoview, 1863. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-18,947.

Neither British nor American photographs were able to depict battles while they occurred in the nineteenth century; photo technology would not be able to capture the instantaneous action of wars until the twentieth century. In the pre-photographic moment of realist reportage, the battlefield’s posthumous temporality—war action finished, stilled now, quiet with corpses—expressed itself in the visual conventions of the landscape sketch, merged with the realist interposition of dead figures. These corpses might be arranged gracefully within the landscape according to picturesque conventions, scattered near and far; but their inanimate, dumb postures violated the norms of portraiture, invoking a new temporality of war death, and a new historicist reality effect, bringing death into the realm of the everyday.

Conventional Realism: Amputees, Nurses, and other War Types

The fourth and final realist mode I consider operates by creating a sense of plausibility based in established convention. Readers or viewers evaluate an artwork’s realism by comparing it with their own expectations of the world. Christopher Prendergast writes that the mimetic sense in literature depends on “stocks of knowledge” shared by writer and reader: realism within the world of the plausible depends on “a circular principle of reciprocity” such that the reader believes the text’s mimetic claims because these affirm readerly expectations.⁷⁰ The plausible mode of realism might not seem realistic at all, since it bases itself in prejudices and assumptions rather than in observed experience. Yet many critics have argued that a sense of conventionality underlies all the modes of realism. E. H. Gombrich, in Art and Illusion (1960), suggests that visual mimeticism is purely stylistic, as artists evoke reality by recourse to established visual schema that change over time, from Egyptian art to the present day.⁷¹ In literary criticism, Lukács argues that characters in nineteenth-century novels seem realistic owing to their “typicality,” for the way they mediate between a particular person and a general type.⁷² Lukács puts a positive spin on this realist action, since a novel’s masterful blending of individual and type—in Balzac, for example—allows the novel to reveal the stark dialectics of political economy underpinning social life. But other critics have strongly critiqued realism’s dependence on convention, accusing it of bad faith and deceptive practices—from Barthes, to Terry Eagleton, to Fredric Jameson.⁷³ Eagleton, reviewing Auerbach’s Mimesis, censures Auerbach for being optimistically conventional in presuming that representations of everyday life are more real than, say, depictions of kings or manor houses. “Cucumber sandwiches are no less ontologically solid than pie and beans,” Eagleton writes.⁷⁴ The plausibility effect, in many ways describing the conventionality of conventions, exists at a different ontological level than the other three modes discussed in the chapter. All three are underwritten in some sense by this final realist mode of conventionality or plausibility, destabilizing their relationship to any actual reality.

Crimean war reportage introduced a series of types and templates that have since become familiar in war reporting. One new and incendiary type was that of the soldier amputee, a figure mobilized by the newspapers in their attacks on military and government incompetence. Amputees themselves were not new to the British military visual tradition, as mass-circulated images of Admiral Nelson had celebrated the one-armed naval hero of the Napoleonic era. But Nelson’s portraits tended to focus on his impressive spangled uniform, highlighting his heroic public persona. Likewise, British veterans of the Napoleonic Wars appeared as heroic, domesticated figures, symbols of British triumph and national pride rather than shame or defeat. These figures did not call for any new grim vision of war and its victims. By contrast, images of Crimean amputees depicted unknown soldiers from society’s lowest echelons, fighting a losing war. During the spring and summer of 1855, as Britain came to reckon with the consequences of the war’s disastrous winter, the ILN published a series of illustrations engraved from photographs taken by Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett at British veteran hospitals. In an image from July 1855, rows of grim-faced, stoic men pose with their numerous crutches (Fig. 2.19).⁷⁵ Two men on the right stand with arms buttoned conspicuously under their coats, implying the limbs in slings underneath. The poses are casual yet dignified; one seated man’s leg is missing. Although the men have been grievously injured, they still maintain a masculine dignity, with their upright bearing and buttoned greatcoats.

Fig. 2.19 “Invalided Soldiers in the Garden of Fort Pitt, Chatham.” Illustrated London News, July 21, 1855.

The imagery combines a number of reality effects—verisimilitude, in the engraving from a photograph, recording the discomfiting truth of a soldier’s maimed body; and mundanity, in the choice of humble soldiers as the subjects for a portrait. The amputee also became a new, conventional type in Crimean War imagery, defined by his lowly character, his humble suffering, and his heroic masculinity, affirmed despite his injuries. There was no idea that these veterans might be returned “as good as new” to a British workforce.⁷⁶ They existed instead as objects of extreme public curiosity, sentimentalized bearers of visual pleasure, even erotic interest, with their taboo wounds tucked discreetly behind folded shirt-sleeves and pant-legs. The ILN used the realist type of the heroic amputee as ammunition in the middle-class periodical’s moral assault on aristocratic privilege. Appearing on the front page of the ILN on February 3, 1855 (Fig. 2.20), a picture of an amputee at a British veteran’s hospital accompanies news of the fall of the Aberdeen government, due to the war’s abysmal failures. The touching, vulnerable, handsome masculinity of the amputee signifies his heroic sacrifice for the nation, superimposing his body onto the body politic, and relocating the sense of national belonging away from inept military leaders. These kinds of politicized images worked to incite professionalizing reforms in the military and civil service after the war. A trenchant Punch cartoon of 1855 generates a gallows humor by inverting the expected types of military heroism. In “Grand Military Spectacle: The Heroes of the Crimea Inspecting the Field Marshals” (Fig. 2.21), wounded soldiers stand in manly, honorable postures—with visible bandages, crutches, and missing limbs—while they survey a crew of seated, sickly looking generals.⁷⁷ The new realist type of the veteran, with his admirable suffering and still-potent masculinity, appeared in publications like Punch and the ILN to function as a sign of the newspaper’s moral gaze, testifying to its evolving role as a government watchdog in prosecuting a case against incompetent and immoral leadership.⁷⁸

Fig. 2.20 “Fall of the Aberdeen Administration” and “Scene in the Military Hospital, at Haslar, [UK].” Illustrated London News, February 3, 1855.

Fig. 2.21 “Grand Military Spectacle: The Heroes of the Crimea Inspecting the Field-Marshals.” Punch, November 3, 1855.

While journalistic images of nameless or working-class wounded men were in many ways unprecedented, these Crimean portraits still adhered to Victorian visual conventions. Their conventionality becomes striking when we turn for comparison to the amputee photographs taken by Reed Bontecou during the American Civil War. Bontecou photographed veterans to help them in pursuing pension claims; the images never circulated in a newspaper, being instead intended for an audience of surgeons and government officials. The photos depict wounded soldiers lifting their sleeves and pant-legs—or even appearing unclothed—in a graphic, undisguised portrayal of wounds and stumps, the body deformed (Fig. 2.22).⁷⁹ These pictures functioned as documentary proof, depicting humans as specimens; they made no explicit moral claims upon their audience. By comparison, the ILN amputee portraits seem polished and positively staged. The lone soldier portrayed on the ILN’s front page in 1855 appears amid the domestic peace of his hospital bedroom, bed neatly made, inspirational quote pinned to the wall, and greatcoat discreetly covering the absent leg. He stands upright, his head bowed with humility; any gruesome details have been carefully omitted. Because veterans were often portrayed in domestic hospital settings, they signified an especially sentimental form of mid-Victorian masculinity, both courageous and vulnerable, needing of feminine care.⁸⁰ This soldier appears as a masculine type deeply sympathetic to a British audience.

Fig. 2.22 Reed Bontecou, Private Samuel Shoop, Company F, 200th Pennsylvania Infantry. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1865. © Stanley B. Burns, MD & The Burns Archive.

Victorian gender conventions played a key role in familiarizing the new visual vocabulary of the war, for both men and women. An iconic female type originating in the Crimea was that of the nurse, incarnated by Florence Nightingale, “the Lady with the Lamp.” On the one hand, these images were again without precedent: in an era when no respectable woman worked for money or left the home, Nightingale and her cohort created a new profession for women in the public sphere. Yet despite Nightingale’s radical adventures in a Victorian warzone, newspaper illustrations and lithographs framed her according to traditional codes of femininity. Numerous scenes portrayed her as a young beauty ministering to wounded men in their hospital beds in the Crimea (Figs. 2.23 and 2.24). These images are among some of the most patently fictitious of the war: the main hospital at Scutari, where Nightingale worked, was built atop an open sewer, festering with disease, obscenely overcrowded, lacking beds, with one nurse or male orderly for every forty or fifty patients.⁸¹ One nurse wrote in her memoir of removing maggots from men’s wounds by the handful.⁸² Yet the pictorial accounts of Nightingale depict a domestic bedroom scene, unmistakably erotic, as the pretty nurse attends to wounded men in their beds.

Fig. 2.23 “Miss Nightingale, in the Hospital, at Scutari.” Illustrated London News, February 24, 1855.

Fig. 2.24 (After) Joseph Austin Benwell, Florence Nightingale in the Military Hospital at Scutari. Colored lithograph, c. 1856. Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.

Depictions of both nurses and veterans helped to re-establish gender roles that the war in fact had deeply disrupted. Wounded veterans who might have embodied a defeated, effeminized, or even castrated masculinity were reinscribed as manly heroes. And nurses who were creating a new profession for women were reinscribed as saintly, ministering angels. These war figures exceeded mere conventionality to achieve a realist conventionality, in their taboo, challenging, potentially unsightly associations. Yet their conventionality ultimately worked to reinscribe them within familiar Victorian codes. The iconography surrounding the Lady with the Lamp is especially ironic, given that one of Florence Nightingale’s major contributions was to the field of statistics; she was in fact a master statistician, an innovator in the field, a fact that still surprises in the twenty-first century. Yet the nurse and the veteran became conventional types, shoring up Victorian expectations regarding the masculine and the feminine, and registering a reality effect by conforming to the expectations of newspaper readers at home.

The imagery surrounding Florence Nightingale, I would suggest, made her into a figure for mid-century British realism itself. “The Lady with the Lamp” always appeared appointed with her light-source, shining illumination on the wards of wounded men. She became a conventional type for moral looking, the true sight defining British realism as an aesthetic practice. The beam of light emitted by the Lady’s Lamp figuratively imbued the visual sense with curative powers, a restorative gaze superimposed upon that of the newspapers who disseminated her image. In fact, Crimean War imagery produced a number of conventionalized figures for the sympathetic feminine spectator, emphasizing her virtuous gaze. Queen Victoria was molded by newspapers into this type as she appeared in numerous journalistic images interacting with wounded veterans in England. The Queen personally “inspected” the veterans in public rituals at England’s military hospitals: images of these inspections portrayed her less as a queen and more as a wife and mother, her children usually in attendance with her (Fig. 2.25).⁸³ (Queen Victoria, known for her canny publicity moves, deftly aligned herself with popular middle-class sympathy for the veterans, while distancing herself from the reviled generals—even while she also embodied the old class hierarchies that positioned royalty on top.) The ILN pictures of these inspections make the Queen’s gaze mirror that of the newspaper’s readers: we, too, inspect the troops on the page, looking for the signs of their injury. The Queen functions as a stand-in for the British home audience, proffering a sympathetic look as a form of engaged spectatorship. Realism’s ethical function here is channeled through the moral, visual prerogative of Victorian womanhood.

Fig. 2.25 “Her Majesty Inspecting the Wounded Guards in the Grand Hall of Buckingham Palace.” Illustrated London News, March 10, 1855.

While I have focused on the amputee and the nurse as new, distinctive war types in the 1850s, Crimean reportage innovated or reproduced a range of conventionalized war templates. To mention just one example, the officers’ graveyard on Cathcart hill in the Crimea was always depicted with respectful mourners paying homage, suggesting a form of tasteful grief analogous to modern-day scenes of flag-draped coffins returning home, surrounded by ritualized mourners in uniform (Fig. 2.26). The conventionality of newspaper war scenes expressed a form of political conservatism: even while the newspapers were highly critical of the government, they never criticized the war itself or Britain’s reasons for fighting it. Britain’s imperial project and the dignity of its military adventures remained intact in journalistic critiques. The type of the wounded, suffering, working-class soldier was crucial to Crimean War depictions—as it continues to be today—since it portrayed soldier-protagonists as moral actors rather than brutal killers. The success of this journalistic typing is clear in the outpouring of charitable feeling that the soldiers inspired. Working-class men, who had only recently seemed like dangerous members of Chartist mobs, now became the objects of Victorian philanthropy. When The Times issued a call to readers in October 1854 to support a charitable fund for Crimean soldiers, the paper raised £10,000 over the course of just a few days.⁸⁴ All of the conventionalism underlying the Crimean newspapers’ realist effects went toward normalizing a war effort—never questioning the class divides between the war’s soldiers and the newspaper’s readers, or the costs of empire, or the waste of life any war entails. War realism worked to bring a new visibility to the suffering of working-class men, even while implicitly justifying the root cause of their harm.

Fig. 2.26 “The Officers’ Cemetery, Cathcart Hill, Before Sebastopol.” Illustrated London News, June 16, 1855.

George Eliot’s Realist War Novel

Visual journalism in the ILN produced its realist effects as part of a broader, multimedia aesthetic that also transformed objects ranging from paintings and novels to newspapers and panoramas. I turn now to study how these effects operated in a text often taken as an exemplary realist novel, George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). Published just a few years after the war’s end, the novel at first glance seems distant to the worlds of international combat or illustrated journalism, with its pastoral, almost premodern setting in the English countryside. (Surprisingly few novels of the 1850s portrayed the Crimean conflict directly: most of the war’s literary output came in the form of poetry, of which Tennyson’s “Charge” is the most famous example.)⁸⁵ Yet despite the apparent contrast between Eliot’s pacific English landscape and the wartorn Crimean battlefield, I will show here how both places were represented according to the same, often contradictory realist effects, juxtaposing qualities of the descriptive, the authentic, the plausible, and the mundane. Eliot’s novel evocatively retells the newspapers’ narrative of the Crimean War in miniature, proposing a new, working-class masculine heroism in the face of aristocratic ineptitude and callousness. Many of her techniques and values echo those proposed by the illustrated newspaper, a coherence that testifies to some of realism’s transmedial characteristics in the 1850s. These qualities include the importance of visual modes and metaphors to the realist project; the British investment in humanist ethical frameworks, often figured as a gaze or a look; a turn to the representation of working-class experience; an investigation of taboo, traumatic, or violent subjects offensive to middle-class sensibilities; and an emphasis on ethnography, witnessing, and sincere objectivity. While these elements distinguish a range of nineteenth-century novels, Adam Bede stands as exemplary for its striking, famous manifesto, often anthologized as a definitive statement of the realist aesthetic.

Set in the year 1799, Adam Bede unfolds against the backdrop of the global Napoleonic wars. The setting implicitly invokes the later, mid-century international wars of the reader’s own moment.⁸⁶ The novel implies that large-scale, inter-imperial violence has its analogue in the small-scale, localized violence of the countryside, whose significance takes on tragic proportions. Military metaphors and allusions elevate the novel’s everyday tragedy of a shattered provincial life. Adam Bede tells the story of the aristocratic Arthur Donnithorne, a military officer, who carelessly impregnates a country girl, Hetty Sorel, and ruins her life. His irresponsible behavior contrasts with that of the stoic Adam Bede, a country carpenter whose coarse manners are belied by his kind deeds, and who emerges as the novel’s hero. These two male characters enact the newspaper story of the Crimean War with their respectively despicable and admirable traits. While Arthur is a gentlemanly officer of a slightly effeminate type, “well-washed, high-bred, white-handed,” Adam has the more tough, masculine “air of a soldier standing at ease.”⁸⁷ A traveler visiting Hayslope marvels at Adam’s martial bearing, praising the “tall, broad-shouldered fellow with black hair and black eyes, marching along like a soldier. We want such fellows as he to lick the French.”⁸⁸ The novel’s partiality toward Adam affirms the realist principles outlined in chapter 17, diverting reader preference away from idealized upper-class types and toward the more lowly, uneducated peoples of the countryside. The heroic working-class man emerges as a model of puissant masculinity, contrasting the ineffectual and morally compromised aristocrat, in a storyline imitating that told by newspapers about the Crimean War.

If Adam Bede’s narrative trajectory reproduces that of the war’s reportage, the novel’s techniques of realism also reproduce the models deployed by the illustrated newspaper. Where Crimean journalism resorted to realist styles to narrate the story of a war gone wrong, Eliot’s novel likewise employs realism to narrate the taboo story of a rural woman’s exploitation and infanticide. The newspapers did not exercise a straightforward influence on the novel: rather, I would argue, both kinds of media deployed similar reality effects in order to represent uncomfortable subjects for British readers while laying upon them a moral claim. In Adam Bede, the novel’s famous realist manifesto in fact mingles together many reality effects in contradictory ways. For one, Eliot proposes that novels should aim for a new level of verisimilitude, relinquishing typical beauty in favor of a more accurate view.⁸⁹

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion.

The real lion signals an aesthetic of the indexical, as opposed to the griffin’s aesthetic of the fantastical. Eliot’s pre-eminent icon of artistic verisimilitude is the Dutch painting, distinguished by its “rare, precious quality of truthfulness.” The ugly visages of Dutch peasants certify the imagery’s accuracy, the “very irregular noses and lips” contrasting the unreal, shapely forms of angels and heroes. Eliot uses metaphors of drawing and painting to propose an expansive theory of visual-verbal representation, reflecting realism’s visual emphasis across genres in this mid-century moment. In Adam Bede’s well-known opening passage, a pool of ink in a sorcerer’s hand morphs into the ink at the tip of the narrator’s pen: the idea figures novelistic world-building as the magical transmutation of image into word. Eliot’s emphasis on visuality and ocular verisimilitude accords with the historical emergence of new mid-century visual technologies and media that ranged from photography, to illustrated journalism, to the Great Exhibition’s glass-plate architecture. Each new technology promised newly crystalline sight and penetrating vision.

Yet Eliot’s ringing call for more verisimilitude in literature sits uneasily alongside her equally pronounced desire for authentic witnessing. The paradoxes come to the fore in her choice of a mirror as a realist symbol. While the reflective device would seem to indicate a descriptive mode, Eliot’s terms suggest otherwise:

[M]y strongest effort is … to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.

Rather than aiming to hold a truthful mirror up to the world, the novelist instead aims for a faithful rendering of her own mental picture. The “witness-box” testimony of sworn truthfulness is ultimately compromised by the defects in the mirror, “disturbed” and “confused” by the author’s own subjective view.

Eliot’s idiosyncratic mirror imagery, proposed to defend the novelist’s authentic eyewitnessing, stands in stark contrast to another famous novelistic mirror, this one appearing in Stendhal’s realist manifesto in Scarlet and Black (1830). Stendhal makes a defiant claim for realism when the narrator asserts, memorably, that

a novel is a mirror journeying down the high road. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure blue of heaven, sometimes the mire in the puddles on the road below. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror reflects the mire and you blame the mirror! Blame rather the high road on which the puddle lies.⁹⁰

Stendhal figures the novelist as merely “the man who carries the mirror in his pack,” coolly distant from “the mire” that his mirror-novel might reflect. By contrast, Eliot locates the mirror within the subjective confines of her own mind, with its unique, colored perspective. For Eliot, that slant transforms the act of reflection into a passionately moral act of sympathetic generosity.

These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people—among whom your life is passed—that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love.

While Stendhal makes realism a matter of muddy puddles and problematic morals, Eliot shifts the metaphoric register toward a benevolent, inclusive humanism. Echoes of Florence Nightingale’s lamp resonate here, shining a light both truthful and compassionate. Adam Bede’s realist ethical project blends together the desire for a more accurate descriptiveness with the desire for the unique, authentic views of a sympathetic spectator, two ideals whose aims are not wholly compatible.

In turning the reader’s eyes to the peasants of Dutch painting, Eliot’s manifesto invokes values promoted by Erich Auerbach in his claims for biblical realism, hailing the everyday, the mundane, the working-class, the humble. The narrator praises “the faithful representing of commonplace things,” celebrating paintings that depict “those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world.” These mundane qualities become striking in the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of Hetty, the farm girl impregnated and abandoned by her aristocratic lover. A late section of the novel tracks her fate as she sets out on a grim journey to find Arthur, burdened with a “swift-advancing shame.” She experiences starvation, terror, loneliness, and “agony,” as she wanders the countryside and sleeps outdoors. She delivers a baby in secret far from her own home. This section inspired one reviewer of Adam Bede to recoil from what he deemed “the startling horrors of rustic reality.”⁹¹ Like the Crimean War’s newspaper figure of the amputee, Adam Bede portrays working-class wounding and victimhood via Hetty’s fate—a death sentence, commuted to transportation—and in the corpse of her dead baby. The physical trauma suffered by these bodies becomes a kind of event horizon of the real, calling upon the sympathy of middle-class readers who might otherwise have been prejudiced against lowly kinds of characters.

If Adam Bede shows a new interest in the mundane lives of humble characters, it also enacts a more complicated historicist realism through its vexed engagement with modernity. Using a series of direct addresses to the presumed audience, the narrator insistently juxtaposes the old world of 1799, the world inhabited by provincial characters like Adam, Dinah, and Hetty, with the new world of the 1850s, the audience’s urban world, defined by a fast-paced and superficial modernity. These digressions dwell upon the new timescales of the nineteenth century, new routines and speeded-up temporalities that make the old provincial world seem quaint and outmoded. In one long passage, the narrator pays ironic tribute to “Old Leisure,” a stately gentleman who used to engage in long walks and ride on “slow waggons”: Old Leisure is gone now, replaced by “excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels.” Old Leisure “read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time.” The passage ironically celebrates the premodern world of country pleasures and slow time, contrasting these with the newer timescapes defined by the routinized periodicity of newspapers. “Leaders,” the fiery editorial columns in papers like The Times—editorials that helped to bring down the government during the Crimean War—are the sign of a degraded modern print culture, creating sensation for the sake of a sale. While on one level the passage looks back nostalgically to antique customs, it also treats the past with ironic condescension, figuring Old Leisure as a dim-witted old man who is “happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves.” In the novel’s own probing narrator, Adam Bede exemplifies the kind of critical consciousness that it ostensibly disdains here. (And, it’s worth noting, for all of the narrator’s attacks on modern print, Eliot herself was deeply involved in the periodical culture of the 1850s, both as a prolific reviewer and as an editor of the Westminster Review.)⁹² Historicist realism in Adam Bede thus works at two levels, telling a story of humble provincial characters while also subtly limning a middle-class readership caught up in the new urban routines of everyday life. This dual timescale underscores the way that mid-century realism was a distinctly middle-class aesthetic, displaying the spectacle of working-class people for the consumption of a bourgeois audience.

These elements motivate us to return to Eliot’s manifesto for a closer look at her choice of a Dutch painting as the paramount symbol of realism. Why, after all, does she choose a peasant in a painting as her symbol for the unsung laborers of the world, when a more apt realist figure would have been an urban factory worker, depicted in an illustrated newspaper? Adam Bede’s pastoral investments in fact show a remarkable contrast with the other quintessential mid-century sites of realism—in the new urban realities portrayed by Mayhew, Gaskell, and Dickens, in the grim testimony of Blue Books, or in the war-torn pages of the illustrated newspaper. The techno-enhanced revelations of realism, in newspapers and novels, are presentist and modern—a truth that Adam Bede acknowledges in its narratorial asides, over and against the famous Dutch painting imagery. The painting, however, performs important ideological work for Eliot’s aesthetic theory: it describes an analogy between nature and a certain kind of authentic culture, an organic artform true and worthwhile.⁹³ The painting retains an aura of the singular and the premodern, in pointed contrast to the debased world of modern print and visual culture. It thus becomes a metaphor for Eliot’s own kind of realist storytelling, rooted in the landscape, an authentic truth-telling signifying “the thing itself.” Chapter 17 proposes the realist novel as a form whose print modernity might mimic the aura of an old painting, which in turn gains authenticity from being embedded in pastoral soil. The Dutch painting stands in contrast to the inauthentic modes of modern urban life, whose stories can only serve as pale imitations (or mechanical reproductions) of “real life.” Adam Bede, then, creates an ongoing authenticity effect through its digressive comparisons between past and present, rural and urban, peasant and bourgeois, an authenticity effect epitomized by the auratic painting.

While the novel’s focus on the past would seem to contrast the urgent presentism of the illustrated newspaper, in another way the novel reproduces the newspaper’s innovative interest in “on the spot” reporting. Much of the novel’s first section is focalized through the point of view of a “traveller,” an outsider who observes Dinah delivering a Methodist sermon on the town green. The traveler serves as a kind of special correspondent and ethnographer, quietly scrutinizing the unfamiliar rituals of the locals.⁹⁴ He also stands in as a figure for the reader, as we too are introduced to the exotic world of provincial life. This figure is analogous to the journalist traveling to the Crimea, or Mayhew penetrating into London’s slums, sending back visual evidence of foreign customs taken on the spot. Late in the novel, the narrator merges into the figure of the traveler, serving as a witness to Hetty’s suffering in the countryside.⁹⁵ This male character is partly real and partly hypothetical: his point of view merges with that of the narrator and the implied audience to convey values of mobile cosmopolitanism and scientific objectivity. At the novel’s end, we learn that the traveler is in fact a magistrate, meaning that he holds local political and legal power. (Dinah Morris, seeking entry at the door to Hetty’s jail, beseeches an “elderly gentleman”—who recognizes her as the female preacher on Hayslope Green, and whose magistrate status will gain her admittance.) The traveler embodies the qualities Eliot praises in her 1856 essay “The Natural History of German Life,” admiring the German ethnographer Wilhelm Riehl for his realistic study of German peasants. The detailed work of the ethnographer becomes a model for politicians, scientists, and artists alike: “wise social policy must be based not simply on abstract social science, but on the Natural History of social bodies.”⁹⁶ The politician must use the discerning eyes of a scientist to truly see his subjects, in all their peculiar singularity. Eliot’s ethnographer, in both “Natural History” and Adam Bede, occupies a many-sided identity, poised between artist, scientific observer, and political leader. This figure resonates with the new, truth-telling “special artists” deployed to battlefields to convey a vision of the truth that is both artistic and political, both objective and “special,” authentic to the eye of the adventurous observer.

If Adam Bede creates reality effects of the descriptive, the authentic, and the everyday, it also produces a realism based in conventionality and typing.⁹⁷ Ruth Yeazell notes that Eliot’s novel shares with seventeenth-century Dutch painting an interest in “realistic incarnations of moralized prototypes.”⁹⁸ Raymond Williams, in The Country and the City, praises Eliot’s early fiction for expanding the novel’s “knowable community” to include working-class characters; but he ultimately faults Eliot for not individuating rural characters convincingly, depicting them in generalizing ways or “as a landscape.”⁹⁹ Williams points especially to the contrast between the narrator’s high-flown speech and the rural characters’ uneducated dialect. The novel’s insistent digressions, addressed directly to the reader, often make a realist claim based in a sense of readerly recognition—as when Arthur is introduced as an English type “whom you have met with in a foreign town, and been proud of as a fellow-countryman.” Adam Bede’s penchant for typing clashes with its claims to authenticity, as seen in chapter seventeen, when the narrator’s ironic tone both idealizes and ridicules the peasant-figures at its center, “those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house.” The novel’s layer of unrealistic conventionality, especially in its rural types, echoes claims made by George Henry Lewes in his essay “Realism in Art” (1858)—published during a decade when the word was still a neologism in literary criticism. Lewes opposes a beneficial “Realism” to a dire “Falsism,” exemplified when

our painters represent peasants with regular features and irreproachable linen; when their milkmaids have the air of Keepsake beauties …; when Hodge is made to speak refined sentiments in unexceptionable English, and children utter long speeches of religious and poetic enthusiasm.¹⁰⁰

Even while the passage demands “the utmost fidelity” in depicting peasant characters, it also still reproduces prejudicial stereotypes about what those realist representations would actually look like. Lewes still invokes the familiar types of the peasant, the milkmaid, and the clownish agricultural everyman, “Hodge.” (Note, too, how Lewes once again mingles visual and verbal examples.) His comments point to realism’s recurring problem in truly escaping preconceived formulae, especially those based in distinctions of social class.

The realist character types in Adam Bede resonate with those emerging from Crimean War journalism—not just in the working-class soldier and the callous aristocrat, but also in the compassionate nurse, incarnated by Dinah Morris. Especially in the novel’s late section, she becomes a Florence-Nightingale type, caring for the suffering Hetty in jail. Like the daring nurses of the Crimea, Dinah embodies a potentially radical femininity as a female preacher, projecting herself into the public sphere in the name of an ethics of care. And like the other female war types, Dinah’s radical possibilities are also foreclosed, as the novel relegates her to the private sphere. In the end, she gives up preaching to become Adam Bede’s wife and the mother to his children. When we align the novel’s character types with the templates emerging from Crimean War journalism, there is a satisfying logic to the novel’s union of the working-class soldier figure with the caring war angel. Adam’s wounds in the novel are more metaphysical, as he must lose Hetty and give up his romantic dreams of her. But we feel reassured of Dinah’s abilities to cure him of his suffering.

For all of the novel’s various reality effects, and despite its stated investment in hard truths and ugliness, there is much that the novel does not show. Adam Bede shies away from depicting directly the sights most offensive to middle-class Victorian sensibilities, such as Hetty’s pregnant body, or the baby’s dead corpse. In many ways, in fact, Eliot’s delicacy might be compared to that of the photographer Roger Fenton, who also was received in Britain as the portrayer of brutal war realities, despite the absence of these things from his images. This comparison supports the notion of realism pursued in this chapter, in which a philosophy devoted to a metaphysics of visual truth also often omitted the actuality of that truth. Adam Bede’s chapter 17 contains a harsh denunciation of “picturesque sentimental wretchedness,” but Eliot often seems to engage in the very kind of picturesque idealization that her own novel apparently rejects. In a passage describing Hetty’s agony in the wilderness, the narrator speaks of the “despairing human sob” hidden within scenes of “joyous nature.” The passage doesn’t so much critique picturesque traditions as remake them, inserting the possibility of human tragedy into a natural scene still found to be beautiful. The novel’s combination of the picturesque with the anti-picturesque resonates with nineteenth-century war depictions in which a perfectly framed and composed landscape is littered with human corpses. For all of the elements of artfulness informing mid-century realist works, however, these diverse multimedia successfully conveyed powerful reality effects, testifying to the way that a truth might be sacrificed to enable the powerful artistic representation of reality.

Our War: War Realism Today

This chapter has particularized four reality effects to the 1850s, charting a shift in aesthetic values as newspapers responded to a dire historical event. George Eliot herself understood that a war invites a special relationship to the arts of representation. As she observes, archly, in The Mill on the Floss (1860): “War, like other dramatic spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a ‘public.’” Eliot’s insight into the spectacular nature of war, its fundamental dependence upon modes of representation, echoes the modern truism that a war’s events are increasingly inseparable from the media that covers them. Hence Vietnam is known as the “television war” and Iraq the “web war.”¹⁰¹ We can look back to the Crimean War, and its newspaper coverage, as an inaugural moment in this tradition entwining the historical event with its media representation.

Debates continue to rage about how and what to show the public in violent international conflicts. Representing war is not merely a political problem for an audience whose government’s choices have led to the deaths of soldier-citizens. It is also a problem for the realms of representation, whether fictional or nonfictional, since wars produce scenes that trouble visual and verbal norms—images of professional murderers, maimed bodies, ruthless violence, and potentially nihilistic scenes of meaningless destruction. The depiction of a war raises fundamental questions about humanness and an audience’s relationship to a possibly amoral agent acting violently in the name of nation and empire. At the same time, wars are also sites of desire and fantasy, shaping phantasmatic ideals of masculinity and heroism. Wounded bodies and brutal behavior are the alluring subjects of middle-class taboo, ensuring that wartime violence—“justified,” legal violence—exerts an enduring fascination for Western audiences. War realism today emerges from this fascination, as new technologies continue to bring wars to spectators with ever-increasing reality effects. But realistic representations of war must thread a moral needle, framing scenes of a taboo desired violence within familiar honorable narratives of family, community, spirituality, and nation.

In the midst of this complex calculus, realism is still an ongoing code of war coverage that continues to test the limits of representation, but which also quickly falls apart when we consider the magnitude of what we don’t see in contemporary visual media outlets. While we might feel a moral imperative behind the desire to “truly see” the action of modern wars, the limits of realist vision soon become apparent. Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), notes that war photography, no matter how gruesome or stirring, never succeeded in stopping a war, and indeed often worked to incite more violence.¹⁰² Sontag effectively dismantles the notion that, if people really knew what war was like, they would never want to fight one.

This fact seems especially pointed in a moment when we are witnessing new extremes of war realism, when a camera attached to a soldier’s or journalist’s helmet conveys a sense of immediate experience avidly consumed by audiences back home. A popular 2011 BBC Three documentary series, Our War, conspicuously recapitulates many of the reality effects produced by the war journalism of the Illustrated London News. Assembled from the helmet and camera footage of British soldiers fighting in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in 2007, the documentary creates a suspenseful account of a battle gone wrong. As with the disasters of the Crimean War, the missteps of the Afghan War provide ample fodder for dramatic television. Once again, the documentary embraces techniques of verisimilitude, describing the war’s territory with maps and virtual landscape views. These are now enhanced with sophisticated, three-dimensional computer simulations, tracking the movements of the heroes and the enemies through a labyrinthine orchard where a battle takes place. The show also foregrounds its authenticity effects, as the voice-over announces: “Young soldiers take their own cameras to the front line and film the war as only they can see it.” The rank-and-file soldier has now merged with the special correspondent, producing his own authenticity effect: he is a special kind of person with unique access. The helmet camera renders the familiar, shaky, off-kilter viewpoint, grainy and sometimes hard to follow, offered by a participant-observer embedded in the action. Embeddedness itself is a realist concept, capturing the intersection of first-person experience with hectic, imperiled, on-the-spot reporting from the trenches.

Our War also follows in the Crimean War’s tradition of historicist realism by focusing on the foot soldiers whose labor and sacrifice fuels the war’s actions. Many of the soldiers speak in distinctive English working-class accents. The show portrays them relaxing in their uncomfortable lodgings, setting up routine patrols; one scene shows a grinning soldier getting a haircut. War as everyday life turns into war as everyday death when the troops embark on a mission into Taliban territory. The ensuing ambush leads to the death of the British soldier described in the first episode. Yet even in the midst of the climactic temporality of battle, mundane details produce a reality effect, as the battle’s action is rife with the sense of confusion, randomness, and contingency surrounding this soldier’s death—a sense that the documentary both amplifies and contains with the framing by the voice-over narration.

Conventionality too underpins much of what Our War depicts, with types and templates familiar to war reporting. The Crimean war’s heroic amputee, portrayed in domestic or familial settings, reappears here in the form of a soldier with PTSD, seen with his daughter in front of his house. The corpses on battlefields appear in realist yet conventional poses—here we glimpse a soldier’s bloody red arm wound, destroyed by shrapnel—but the show halts at the door of the real by refusing to depict the corpse in full. Despite the tragic loss of a British soldier’s life, the platoon ultimately emerges triumphant, reclaiming the territory and witnessing the rebirth of a bustling Afghan town. The show does not probe the larger murky questions hanging over the war’s purpose, nor does it allude to any potential tenuousness in the immediate British victory in Helmand Province. It does not interview any members of the Taliban, nor the families of the twenty-two Taliban men who died in the battle where one British soldier was lost. The fact of the war itself is a convention that goes unchallenged. The series’s title, “Our War,” offers a striking echo of the notable ILN caption, “Our Artist on the Battlefield of Inkermann.” In both cases, the word “our” does deep ideological work, linking together diverse entities united by their Britishness—soldiers, reporters, media producers, and the audience at home. “Our” war also describes the new intimacy of the medium, an up-close possessiveness made possible by the advances in visual technology that have brought the war to “us.”

Theorists of documentary films have described reality effects similar to the ones I discuss in this chapter—from the objective to the subjective, from the dispassionate to the authentic.¹⁰³ As Bill Nichols points out, even while documentaries portray a nonfiction world of real-life historical actors, their methods often draw upon techniques from the imaginative realms of art, literature, and fictional cinema. Documentaries have also invited some of the same controversies as those raging around realist novels. Nichols notes that the expository documentary—known for its “voice-of-God” narrator—is buttressed by “epistemic knowledge in Foucault’s sense,” reproducing universalized certainties “accepted as given or true in a specific time and place.”¹⁰⁴ Nichols’s account resonates with hostile literary criticism of the Victorian realist novel: the novel’s didactic claims have at times made it seem like an apologia for the status quo, enforcing the confining norms and hierarchies of the European middle classes.¹⁰⁵ What these shared critiques of realism reveal, across genres, is that any “realistic” representation of the world invites political trouble, since it intrinsically works to confirm that world’s established givens, even when it is ostensibly highlighting political problems. Realistic portrayals of a war perhaps incarnate this problem in its most concentrated form, as seen in Crimean War journalism—where reporters launched a progressive critique of the war’s inequities and leadership, even while a realistic representational style affirmed the basic fact of war as a legitimate mode of international problem-solving.

A striking counterpoint to the realist tradition considered here is Errol Morris’s documentary film The Fog of War (2003). The filmmaker serves as interlocutor to a sole figure of interest, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War.¹⁰⁶ Morris seems deeply aware of the templates and traditions that have defined typical nonfiction war depictions, and the film consequently avoids almost all of the tropes I have explored in this chapter. The Fog of War largely consists of close-ups of McNamara’s face, concentrating on the visage of a war criminal as he discusses the choices that led to the deaths and atrocities of the Vietnam War. The film is interspersed with suggestive poetic visuals, evoking the themes that legitimate a war’s prosecution. Many of these images emphasize visuality itself, in clips of soldiers looking through binoculars, or peering through submarine scopes. Surreal cityscapes flow with ghostly pedestrians, dissolving into human eyes crowding the screen. The imagery alludes to the millions of civilians murdered in firebombing tactics inaugurated in World War II; but it also describes how figures of true sight underpin common notions of war, in the arrogance of commanders who use reason and technology to achieve victory through mass death. (These figures of puissant vision seem especially ironic given that the Vietnam conflict ended, for American forces, in defeat.) Morris’s critique of both “rational” warfare and the visual technologies that support it are manifest in the film’s title, The Fog of War. The cliché usually describes both the murky, hectic experience of battle and its moral erasures, which are implicitly condoned.¹⁰⁷ But Morris undercuts these clichés, offering a metaphorics of “fog” whose confusions define warfare at all of its levels, from the death-dealing computations of immoral commanders to the complacent ignorance of home audiences consuming war’s spectacle. Contrary to a war machine that justifies the efficient killing of millions of civilians, Morris proposes “fog” as the irrational, ambiguous truth underlying all wars, an anti-realist account making fictionality itself the basis for a war’s prosecution. Even while Morris satirizes the role that techno-enhanced visuality has played in war’s imagery, however, his film still operates in the visual realm, implicitly advocating for the moral possibilities of the optical, filmic medium despite its complicit traditions.

The problem of war realism has no easy answer—it seems unsatisfying simply to declare all realistic war depictions as inherently bad faith and immoral. In many ways, the problem of war representation is also the problem of realist representation more broadly: to convey reality effects is to participate in the known world and its givens, with all the world’s established violences and inequalities. Yet this chapter has attempted to bring nuance to a difficult subject. In the end, realism appears not as a monolithic moral or political style, but rather as a series of possible effects and metaphors, an array of possibilities, whose uses point in diverse, contradictory directions.

Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media. Rachel Teukolsky, Oxford University Press (2020). © Rachel Teukolsky.

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198859734.001.0001

¹ While previous newspapers had printed images on special occasions, the Illustrated London News (hereafter ILN) was the first to do so on a regular basis. Herbert Ingram, the founder of the ILN, had noticed that newspapers such as the Observer and Weekly Chronicle sold more copies when they included engravings. He decided to found a paper whose “pictures” were its “chief attraction.” See Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885), 284.

² Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 4–5; and George Levine, “Literary Realism Reconsidered: ‘The world in its length and breadth,’” in Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 13–32: 23–4.

³ I frame these categories using a range of theorists on realism, cited below. The terms also riff on ideas suggested by a conversation with Matthew Potolsky, the author of Mimesis (New York: Routledge, 2006). I’m grateful for his thought-provoking comments. Potolsky’s book defines two realist modes, contrasting Platonic versus Aristotelian concepts of mimesis. He adapts his categories, in turn, from Stephen Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Art and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), which contrasts Plato’s “world-reflecting” versus Aristotle’s “world-simulating” models of representation.

⁴ Pam Morris, in her contribution to Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series, Realism (New York: Routledge, 2003) cites two examples of the earliest use of “realist” in a literary-critical sense (88). In 1851, Fraser’s Magazine describes Thackeray as “chief of the Realist school” (“W. M. Thackeray and Arthur Pendennis Esquires,” Fraser’s Magazine 43 (January 1851), 75–86: 86. And in an 1853 review of “Balzac and his Writings,” The Westminster Review recognizes Balzac as “head of this realist school” in France (Henry Sutherland Evans, “Balzac and His Writings: Translations of French Novels,” Westminster Review, New Series 4 (July 1853), 199–214: 203. The OED suggests that the first literary-critical instance of “realist” occurs with Swinburne in 1868, but Morris’s examples clearly pre-date those cited in the OED. For “realism,” the OED cites Ruskin’s Modern Painters III (1856) as the first literary-critical usage. Raymond Williams outlines some of realism’s shifting definitions over time in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, [1976], 1983), 257–9.

⁵ Orlando Figes, in The Crimean War: A History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010), writes of the conflict as the first “truly modern war” (xix). Many scholars describe the conflict as the first “media war”; see especially Stefanie Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3. Markovits focuses on the role played by The Times in covering the war, especially in W. H. Russell’s reportage and letters written by soldiers from the front. I discuss W. H. Russell’s reporting in “Novels, Newspapers, and Global War: New Realisms in the 1850s,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45:1 (Spring 2012), 31–55.

⁶ As cited by the newspaper itself, weekly circulation of the ILN rose from 100,000 at the start of the war (April 8, 1854, Vol. 24, p. 309) to 130,700 at the end of the war (June 30, 1855, Vol. 27, p. 286).

⁷ My analysis is indebted to two excellent books whose arguments are diametrically opposed. Matthew Paul Lalumia, in Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1984), argues that Crimean War imagery produced a new “Realism” that he does not define or theorize. This newly unfiltered vision of warfare, available in illustrated newspapers as well as in paintings, signified a democratic triumph over antiquated, aristocratic modes of seeing and ruling. Ulrich Keller, in The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 2001), assails Lalumia for his false consciousness, arguing that the veneer of realism in Crimean arts and visual culture disguised lies at every turn. In fact, argues Keller, Crimean war imagery extended many earlier anti-real visual traditions, just as it continued to fête aristocratic leaders and ideals. It told bold visual untruths in every medium, even while it projected a mythic “Authenticity” of realism aligned with middle-class subjectivity (38). Both of these scholars are art historians, and both organize their books by medium, with chapters on painting, photography, and so on. By contrast, I approach the topic by theorizing different reality effects, comparing types across media, while focusing on the illustrated newspaper. I conclude that realism’s effects are too ambiguous and complex to merit either wholesale celebration or condemnation.

⁸ See Guy Arnold, “Casualties,” in Historical Dictionary of the Crimean War (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 38–9.

⁹ John Peck, War, the Army, and Victorian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1998), 30.

¹⁰ Quoted in Linda Nochlin, Realism (New York: Penguin, 1971), 33.

¹¹ In French, “un réalisme vulgaire et souvent choquant”: quoted in Jonathan Culler, “The Realism of Madame Bovary,” Modern Language Notes 122:4 (September 2007), 683–96: 685.

¹² Ian Watt grounds his history of realism in the Enlightenment turn toward science, secularism, and individualism, in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Further scholarship is cited below.

¹³ See Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Daniel A. Novak, Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

¹⁴ While a full account of realism in nineteenth-century British painting is beyond the scope of the chapter, helpful sources include: Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Julian Treuherz, Victorian Painting (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993). Linda Nochlin mostly focuses on French painting, but her book Realism (New York: Penguin, 1971) is still a definitive and magisterial account of the subject, and includes British examples. Andrea Korda focuses on a subset of British painters in the 1870s who practiced “social realism” in Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015).

¹⁵ See Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) and Marcia Werner, Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

¹⁶ Matthew Rubery also links newspapers to novels in The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). He explores the way that nineteenth-century novels incorporated newspaper forms into their plots, ranging from the shipping news to agony columns. Dallas Liddle, by contrast, argues that Victorian fiction was defined by its conflict and competition with journalistic discourse, in The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).

¹⁷ An influential early proponent of this idea is Hayden White, in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). White studies how history-writing, for all of its accounts of real-world events, draws upon narrative techniques (or “emplotments”) familiar from literary genres, including romance, comedy, satire, and tragedy.

¹⁸ Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 25–34.

¹⁹ Rubery, Novelty of Newspapers, 86.

²⁰ Kevin Williams, Read All About It! A History of the British Newspaper (London: Routledge, 2010), 100.

²¹ Anthony Smith, “The Long Road to Objectivity and Back Again: The Kinds of Truth We Get in Journalism,” in Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, ed. G. Boyce, J. Curran, and P. Wingate (London: Constable, 1978), 161.

²² The process is described in Lalumia, Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War, 54–5.

²³ Some ILN engravings were copied after photographs, but the newspaper’s printing process did not use photographic technology until the 1870s. Thierry Gervais highlights the differences between journalistic engravings and photographs in “Witness to War: The Uses of Photography in the Illustrated Press, 1855–1904,” Journal of Visual Culture 9:3 (2010), 370–84. See also the essays collected in Jason Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

²⁴ Kevis Goodman uses the phrase “burst on the senses” to describe the sensory effect of late-eighteenth-century newspapers, before illustration, in Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69.

²⁵ Peter W. Sinnema describes some of the ILN’s typical subjects in Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998). His study focuses on the first ten years of the newspaper’s publication, 1842 to 1852.

²⁶ Siegfried Kracauer writes scathingly of illustrated newspapers in the twentieth century that their photographic plenitude comes to stand in for “the world” as we know it: “the world itself has taken on a ‘photographic face,’” with the result that “[n]ever before has a period known so little about itself.” Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 47–63; 58–9.

²⁷ Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 24–25.

²⁸ Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10.

²⁹ Andrea Korda argues that the ILN was a successor to the history painting genre, though her analysis emphasizes the differences between the two media. See Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London, especially p. 27.

³⁰ A more developed account of early history painting and war might also include works such as Benjamin West’s The Death of Nelson (1806), with its careful array of officer portraits; or Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), with its idealized, neoclassical bodies. History painting’s representations of warfare were inflected by the heroic, timeless ideals of Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses. See, among others, John Bonehill and Geoff Quilley, eds., Conflicting Visions: War and Visual Culture in Britain and France c. 1700–1830 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005).

³¹ E. B. Hamley, “Poetry of the War: Reviewed before Sebastopol,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 77 (May 1855), 531–5: 531.

³² Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. (London: Verso Books, [1983], 2006), 35.

³³ Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xxiv. Further citations will refer to this text parenthetically.

³⁴ Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

³⁵ Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), 141–8: 148.

³⁶ For a foundational work of critical cartography, see J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26:2 (1989), 1–20.

³⁷ Richard Altick describes the panorama’s news function in The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 173–83. He writes of the panorama’s demise, in competition with the illustrated newspaper, on 480–1. Lalumia mentions Crimean-themed military panoramas on 113–14; Keller describes them on 55–61. A useful source is Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (London: Zone Books, 1997).

³⁸ “Our Address,” ILN 1 (May 14, 1842), 1.

³⁹ Errol Morris, “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? (Part One),” The New York Times, September 25, 2007.

⁴⁰ Matthew Potolsky, in Mimesis, notes that hand-held cameras and grainy footage create reality effects in film (62).

⁴¹ “Special artists” depicted events for newspapers until World War I, when photojournalism finally replaced the hand-drawn image in visual reportage. See Paul Hogarth, The Artist as Reporter (London: Studio Vista, 1967) and Pat Hodgson, The War Illustrators (New York: Macmillan, 1977).

⁴² ILN 26 (March 10, 1855), 233.

⁴³ ILN 26 (February 3, 1855), 116.

⁴⁴ “Our Artist in the Crimea,” Punch 28 (January 6, 1855), 12.

⁴⁵ Sophie Gordon, Shadows of War: Roger Fenton’s Photographs of the Crimea, 1855 (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2017), 43. The volume provides many images and informative details relating to Fenton’s London exhibition in 1855.

⁴⁶ Roger Fenton has proved a controversial figure for modern scholars. Lalumia writes that Fenton “was amply exposed to the realities of warfare, which he refused to record with his camera” (120). Keller describes how Fenton ingratiated himself with the war’s officers, in a striking contrast to The Times’s W. H. Russell, who was shunned by the war’s commanders. Keller provides the most in-depth analysis of Fenton’s Crimean war photography, pp. 128–58. Markovits omits consideration of Fenton in The Crimean War, dismissing him in a footnote for his failure to truly depict the war (p. 256). While Fenton’s politics aligned him with aristocratic and conservative interests—an alignment that seems repellent, given the war’s turn of events—his Crimean War photographs have had an undeniably outsized afterlife. Indeed, these pictures have emerged as the defining imagery of the war today, in part due to his use of a painterly eye to shape the careful compositions. For discussions of Fenton’s career, aesthetics, and relation to painting, see the essays collected in the exhibition catalogue edited by Gordon Baldwin, Malcolm Daniel, and Sarah Greenough, All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

⁴⁷ Keller discusses Sparling’s role in Fenton’s operation in The Ultimate Spectacle, 122–3, 149.

⁴⁸ Henry Mayhew, “Preface,” London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 1 (London: Griffin, Bohn and Co., [1851], 1861–2), iii.

⁴⁹ Tim Barringer, “Images of Otherness and the Visual Production of Difference: Race and Labour in Illustrated Texts, 1850–1865,” in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1996), 34–52.

⁵⁰ “The Sweeps’ Home.” Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 2 (London: Griffin, Bohn & Co., 1861–2), facing p. 244.

⁵¹ “Turks Conveying the Sick to Balaclava.” ILN 26 (March 17, 1855), 260.

⁵² “The Turk” had been stereotyped since the eighteenth century as a figure of despotic sadism and Eastern cruelty, usually serving as a foil for British enlightenment. But Crimean imagery rewrote the script to make Russia into the despot, while Turkey now became a weakened partner in need of rescue. See the Tenniel Punch cartoon “A Good Joke” (July 23, 1853), which personifies each nation in the Crimean conflict: a tiny Turkish Pasha turns for help to French and British sailors while menaced by a bullying Russia.

⁵³ See Gordon Baldwin, Roger Fenton: Pasha and Bayadère (Los Angeles: Getty Museum Studies on Art, 1996).

⁵⁴ Numerous regiments around the world adopted the “Zouave” name and costume throughout the nineteenth century, testifying to the figure’s global popularity. “Zouave” units were known to fight on both sides of the American Civil War.

⁵⁵ The original Zouave regiment, formed in 1830, combined Berber, Arab, European, and black-African fighters; by the 1850s, however, the group had been restricted to soldiers of European descent—who were nevertheless racialized due to their service in Africa. The racialization of the Zouaves, despite their French European ancestry, reflected the common nineteenth-century mode of racial thinking in which climate and geography shaped body and identity.

⁵⁶ Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, observes a contrast between ancient and modern ideas of time: whereas Plato saw the concrete world as underpinned by timeless, static “Forms or Ideas” (21), a more modern conception sees time as shaping the particularities of an individual’s life and story (23)—as reflected in the eighteenth-century novel.

⁵⁷ Nochlin, Realism, 28. Nochlin doesn’t address the irony that, although Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern life” theorizes some key aspects of nineteenth-century realism, the French poet was also famously hostile to the realist art movement, especially in realism’s links to photography.

⁵⁸ Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, suggests that the protagonist of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is the paragon of the “homo economicus” and an “embodiment of economic individualism” (63).

⁵⁹ Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 23.

⁶⁰ Leader, Times, Oct 12, 1854, p. 6.

⁶¹ Keller provides details of the war’s class differences and winter conditions, 7–21; Lalumia describes the gruesome winter conditions on 45–47.

⁶² Punch 28 (February 17, 1855), 64.

⁶³ “The Siege of Sebastopol—Gordon’s Attack with a Lancaster Gun,” ILN 25 (November 11, 1854), 473.

⁶⁴ “‘In the Trenches’ before Sebastopol,” ILN 26 (March 10, 1855), 233.

⁶⁵ “Battlefield of the Tchernaya—Burying the Dead,” Illustrated Times (September 15, 1855). The Illustrated Times began publishing as a competitor to the ILN in June 1855, spurred by the commercial appeal of war journalism and also by the abolition of the newspaper tax. The paper’s rise and fall are described in C. N. Williamson, “Illustrated Journalism in England: Its Development.—II.” Magazine of Art 13 (1890), 334–40.

⁶⁶ “Sandbag Battery Defended by the Guards.—Sketched on the Morning after the Battle of Inkerman.” ILN 25 (December 16, 1854), 628.

⁶⁷ My account diverges from that of Helen Groth in “Technological Mediations and the Public Sphere: Roger Fenton’s Crimea Exhibition and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (July 2002), 553–70. Groth argues that Fenton’s images, along with Tennyson’s poem, should be understood within a larger culture of mass visuality comprised of dioramas, panoramas, and stereoscopy. Yet Fenton’s Crimean images appeared in the early years before photography became a mass medium. As such, they would be more comparable to paintings than to mass visual media. Groth does not mention illustrated newspapers or the ILN.

⁶⁸ Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History from Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), 83–4. For meticulous studies of American Civil War photographs see William A. Frassanito, Gettysburg: A Journey in Time (New York: Scribner’s, 1975) and Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day (New York: Scribner’s, 1978).

⁶⁹ Joel H. Wiener, The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s–1914: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 74.

⁷⁰ Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37.

⁷¹ E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1960).

⁷² Lukács writes that the literary type is that in which “all the humanly and socially essential determinants are present on their highest level of development, … rendering concrete the peaks and limits of men and epochs.” Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 6.

⁷³ Fredric Jameson, summarizing his own career-long critique of realism, calls it a “hybrid concept, in which an epistemological claim (for knowledge or truth) masquerades as an aesthetic ideal, with fatal consequences for both of these incommensurable dimensions.” Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 5–6.

⁷⁴ Terry Eagleton, “Pork Chops and Pineapples,” London Review of Books 25:20 (October 23, 2003), 17–19.

⁷⁵ “Invalided Soldiers in the Garden of Fort Pitt, Chatham,” ILN 27 (July 21, 1855), 69.

⁷⁶ By contrast, as David Serlin argues in Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), Americans after World War II saw veteran amputees as directly representative of the nation and its labor force, creating anxieties about the damaged male body and waning productivity.

⁷⁷ Punch 29 (November 3, 1855), 179.

⁷⁸ Thomas Delane, editor of The Times in the 1850s, strongly promoted the idea that newspapers should serve as an independent watchdog over government actions. See Kevin Williams, Read All About It!, 106–7.

⁷⁹ On Reed Bontecou, see Kathy Newman, “Wounds and Wounding in the American Civil War: A (Visual) History,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6:2 (1993), 63–86.

⁸⁰ See Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

⁸¹ Lalumia describes Nightingale’s role, and the horrors of Scutari hospital, on pp. 86–91, in the context of analyzing Jerry Barrett’s painting The Mission of Mercy (1857). Keller analyzes the war’s nursing imagery on pp. 107–18, highlighting the familial aspects of the Crimean hospital scenes. He sees this imagery as deeply fictitious, highly allegorical, and partaking of neither realism nor reality.

⁸² Elizabeth Davis, The Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis, a Balaclava Nurse, ed. Jane Williams, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1857), 2:129.

⁸³ Lalumia studies Crimean depictions of Queen Victoria while analyzing John Gilbert’s watercolor Her Majesty the Queen Inspecting Wounded Coldstream Guardsmen in the Hall of Buckingham Palace (1856) (pp. 76–86). Gilbert first depicted the event as an engraving for the ILN in March 1855 (78). Keller discusses Queen Victoria as part of the “home front” imagery (pp. 173–222), including her albums of amputee photographs. Neither scholar links Victoria directly to Nightingale.

⁸⁴ The Times charity funds in the 1850s are described in “The People’s Almoner,” The London Review 6:142 (March 21, 1863), 300–1.

⁸⁵ Stefanie Markovits argues that certain novels of the 1850s responded to the Crimean War more indirectly. She suggests that the war transferred ideas of heroism to women, as modeled by Florence Nightingale. Hence novels of the 1850s that depicted female heroes in the midst of social turmoil—such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South—can be read as responses to the Crimean War. See Markovits, The Crimean War and the British Imagination, 63–122.

⁸⁶ In War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), Mary A. Favret argues that the Napoleonic wars offered a paradigmatic model of “war at a distance” for readers and artists back home in Britain. Favret highlights the affective toll wartime takes on those far from the battlefield, especially as voiced by Romantic poets. She insightfully shows how the Napoleonic wars inaugurated our modern geographic notion of “total war,” stretching across large portions of the globe. Yet her analysis is deliberately ahistorical in much of its account, leaping from the early 1800s to the twenty-first century without describing the profound changes that transformed modern media culture. I would point to two key developments in the 1850s that differentiate the mid-century British sense of wartime from that of the Napoleonic era. First, new media technologies speeded up reporting from the battlefield, allowing British audiences at home to react to leaders’ decisions in real time. Second, Victorian culture-producers—whether war journalists or novelists like Eliot—seem more self-conscious than Romantic writers about the class distinctions separating different kinds of soldiers, or, crucially, separating the reading public from the mass of suffering bodies abroad. (By contrast, Favret suggests that Cowper’s phrase “Universal soldiership” expands to include “the poet who is holding a pen in his fingers” (67).) The Victorian writers, artists, and journalists studied here depend not on models of identification but on models of sympathy for a sufferer who differs from oneself.

⁸⁷ Quotes from Adam Bede are taken from the Project Gutenberg edition, <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/507/507-h/507-h.htm>.

⁸⁸ John R. Reed also ties Adam Bede to the Crimean War in “Soldier Boy: Forming Masculinity in Adam Bede,” Studies in the Novel 33:3 (Fall 2001), 268–84. Reed similarly sees the novel reflecting the political critiques of the war’s mistakes in Eliot’s preference for working-class Adam over aristocratic Arthur. Reed focuses especially on issues of masculinity in Adam Bede; he does not consider Eliot’s relation to realism, visuality, or war journalism.

⁸⁹ Ian Adam studies Eliot’s investment in verisimilitude, tracking Adam Bede’s discursive moves through time and space to reveal how the novel creates an illusion of reality. Ian Adam, “The Structure of Realisms in Adam Bede,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30:2 (September 1975), 127–49.

⁹⁰ Henri Marie Beyle Stendhal, Scarlet and Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Margaret R. B. Shaw (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, [1831], 1953), 365–6.

⁹¹ Review of Adam Bede. Saturday Review 7 (February 26, 1859), 250–1. Reprinted in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. David Carroll (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 75.

⁹² Dallas Liddle, in Dynamics of Genre, argues that Eliot renounced her journalistic self in 1857, evincing a hostility to the dogmatic, “standard-issue authoritative voice of the anonymous Victorian ‘man of letters’” (101). I would suggest that Eliot held a more equivocal view, however, since journalism was a key part of the enlightened public sphere defining a cosmopolitan Victorian readership.

⁹³ My analysis of the Dutch painting’s ideological function contrasts with the more art-historical account provided by Ruth Yeazell in Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Yeazell studies the way that Eliot’s “early fiction is filled with scenes that prompt comparison to Dutch painting,” noting that Adam Bede “itself offers a rich catalogue of such pictures” (101). In tracing links between Eliot’s novel and actual Dutch paintings, Yeazell notes that both kinds of objects take “ordinary scenes” to “double as religious images” (112).

⁹⁴ James Buzard writes briefly of Adam Bede’s traveler as a figure for what he calls “autoethnography,” a tendency in the nineteenth-century British novel to juxtapose qualities of the global and the local via the engaged spectatorship of a “Participant Observer.” In Eliot’s fiction, this ethnographic figure imparts moral lessons about how a cosmopolitan viewpoint can lead to benevolent local actions. See James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 172–73.

⁹⁵ The narrator merges with the traveler in a passage describing Hetty’s journey. The narrator uses the first-person “I” to describe finding roadside crucifixes while traveling in foreign countries. The narrator then shifts into the traveler’s third-person point of view: “surely, if there came a traveller to this world who knew nothing of the story of man’s life upon it, this image of agony would seem to him strangely out of place in the midst of this joyous nature.”

⁹⁶ George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” in George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), 107–39: 131.

⁹⁷ A long strain in Eliot criticism has observed how the novel does not live up to its own ideals. U. C. Knoepflmacher argues that Eliot’s realism “fails” because her early novels still work to abstract and idealize, despite their hard-nosed claims. U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

⁹⁸ Yeazell, Art of the Everyday, 114.

⁹⁹ Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 168.

¹⁰⁰ George Henry Lewes, “Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction,” Westminster Review, New Series 70 (October 1858), 488–518: 493.

¹⁰¹ See Jan Mieszkowski, Watching War (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

¹⁰² Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).

¹⁰³ Bill Nichols outlines six overlapping modes of documentary filmmaking. The expository mode (associated with the “voice of god” narrator) features in most television news programming. The observational, “fly-on-the-wall” mode is exemplified by the institution-themed documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. The poetic mode, favoring image and emotion rather than logic or objectivity, is epitomized by the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl. In the participatory mode, the filmmaker becomes involved in the events she or he portrays—most famously, in the works of Michael Moore. Two additional modes are the “performative” and the “reflexive.” See Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd edn. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), especially chapters 6–7.

¹⁰⁴ Bill Nichols, “Documentary Modes of Representation,” in Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 32–75: 34–5.

¹⁰⁵ D. A. Miller makes a classic critique of the Victorian realist novel as enforcer of middle-class hegemony in The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

¹⁰⁶ Nichols categorizes The Fog of War as a “participatory” documentary, since Morris appears as a character onscreen, interviewing McNamara. Yet I would argue that the film also qualifies as what Nichols calls a “reflexive” documentary, one that works to foreground the artifice of film conventions and to question some of the tropes of the documentary form.

¹⁰⁷ The “fog of war” image was first introduced by the Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz in his treatise On War (1832; trans. J. J. Graham (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1873): “War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth” (Book 1, chapter 3).

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Realism

Realism’s War Pictures: Reality Effects in the Illustrated Newspaper