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ABSTRACT
This article explores Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett’s little-known photographs of wounded soldiers taken during the Crimean War (1854–1856). These images are an important source in the history of war representation, following Charles Bell’s vivid paintings of gunshot wounds in the wake of the Battle of Waterloo and preceding World War One images of facial mutilation. Commissioned by Queen Victoria during her publicized visits to military hospitals at Chatham and kept for posterity in a royal album entitled ‘Crimean Portraits 1854–6ʹ, Cundall and Howlett’s photographs reveal the monarchy’s close interest in the wounded.
I explore royal motives for memorializing rank and file soldiers and their injuries, arguing that the images are shaped by humanitarian and medical interests, as well as royal desire to commemorate survival and bodily resilience. I consider the photographs alongside contemporary reports and prints in newspapers and medical journals depicting the wounded, to give a sense of the cultural significance of the wounded soldier during the Crimean War. By situating Cundall and Howlett’s photographs against the political and emotional conflicts of the war and examining the representation of the individual sufferer, I ask to what extent they participate in, and challenge, wider narratives of healing.
Acknowledgments
The research for this article was carried out as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award on the Crimean War and its afterlives. I am indebted to Phil Shaw and Joanna Wilson-Scott for their insightful observations and comments on this piece. I wish to thank the National Army Museum, the Royal Collection Trust, and the Royal Archives for granting permission to reproduce the images. Images from the Royal Collection have been made and reproduced by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Emphasis original.
2. For a fuller exploration of the Queen’s personal relationship with the Army and its political symbolism, see Bates (Citation2015).
3. There are few copies of the photographs outside the Royal Collection. Royal exhibitions have increased awareness of the photographs, e.g. ‘Crown and Camera’ (Buckingham Palace, 1987) and ‘A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography’ (Getty Museum, 2014). Two of the photographs are included as illustrations in the Wellcome Trust’s exhibition guide (Monem Citation2008).
4. In the UK, the sketches can be viewed via ‘Queen Victoria’s Journals’, <http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do> [accessed 1 August 2018].
5. This weaving together of public and familial responsibilities was a powerful way of expressing Victoria’s passion for her ‘cause’, but also served a political dimension in asserting the monarchy’s control over the Army.
6. The Hunterian Museum has addressed this problem of representation by displaying a section of discoloured intestines from a dysentery fatality.
7. While the Art Journal and The Critic praise Cundall and Howlett’s ‘Crimean Heroes’ series, only The Critic comments on the photographs of the Crimean wounded, although simply in order to commend Howlett’s use of light and shade (The Critic, 15 January 1857). The absence of any comment on the subjects of the photograph is notable, indicative perhaps of the timing of the exhibition, changes in public mood, and the complex cultural work this photograph performs.
8. Correspondence in the Royal Archives also reveals that the Queen secured employment for a small number of individuals in the Office of Works and the Royal Parks, as well as giving occasional cash bounties.
9. Tiffany Watt Smith observes how patients are deployed in an ‘atmosphere of cure’ in her analysis of World War One film footage of traumatized patients (Watt Smith, 176–77).
10. See for example the work of Mary Favret (Citation1994) on the spaces of Romantic war, Michael Paris’s (Citation2000) exposition of war culture in Britain, and Ingrid Hanson’s (Citation2015) study of Boer War peace campaigner William Stead and his use of war language.
11. For a detailed account of this overlooked phenomenon, see Holly Furneaux’s work on military masculinities during the Crimean War (Furneaux Citation2016).
12. Joanna Bourke, ‘Pain and the Politics of Sympathy, 1789 to the Present’, lecture given at IHR Anglo-American Conference Health in History (July 2011).
13. The Queen did encounter wounded officers at special receptions known as levées, but there are no comparable representations of wounded officers during the Crimean War. In Jerry Barratt’s painting The Mission of Mercy (1857), the wound of the officer raised on a stretcher is hidden from view and he is shown upright and alert, pointing in an attitude of command. Prints of the wounded Colonel Thomas Troubridge, of the 7th Fusiliers, receiving his Crimean Medal from the Queen in a bath chair were popular during the war, but the extent of the Colonel’s bodily loss is concealed by his smiling countenance and a luxurious blanket neatly tucked round the lower body (Bates Citation2015, 20).