“Before the Eye and into the Heart”: The Lindsays of Balcarres and the Mediascape of the Crimean War

Like many British soldiers stationed at the Crimean front, Lieutenant Robert James Lindsay (1832–1901) spent much of his free time reading and writing letters. The frequent correspondence with his family at home was part of a broader phenomenon of the Crimean War that witnessed the transfer of tens of thousands of letters and personal items to and from the battlefront. Yet the Lindsay family archive deserves attention for more than its insights into the campaign of a young soldier whose actions would be honored with the Victoria Cross, awarded for exceptional acts of valor in combat.‍[1] As an aristocratic family renowned for their artistic interests, the Lindsays were particularly attuned to the use of visual and textual practices as interconnected forms of personal exchange and collective authority; their letters referenced all kinds of visual materials and events, whether in public or private circulation, and often included complementary pictorial objects. During Robert’s two-year campaign, the family made frequent and productive use of these affinitive practices to cope with separation and the anxieties generated by the conflict.‍[2] This article contends that their engagement with the broad mediascape of the war sought to navigate their social position and emotions amid a potential rupture between Robert’s sudden fame and the invisibility of his actual fraught conditions at the battlefront.

By examining the Lindsay family correspondence, I aim to question two prominent orthodoxies about the Crimean War. The first concerns the view that the conduct of the war, its logistical chaos and inept military and civilian governance, represented a crisis of aristocratic authority. To be sure, press criticism of the mismanagement of the war was commonplace, but this historical truism has hindered consideration of the responses and debates that the war prompted among the British nobility and landed gentry. The second, by extension, argues that this “attack on aristocratic privilege” entered public discourse through the new media of correspondents’ reports, illustrated newpapers, prints, photographs, panoramas, and other popular visual forms deemed inimical to the governing class.‍[3] “Artists and reporters invented a new visual vocabulary to convey the war’s dark realities,” literary scholar Rachel Teukolsky has recently stated, “especially in the unwarranted suffering of working-class soldiers doomed by an incompetent British leadership.”‍[4] Scholars have tended to presuppose the governing elite as fixed and unified in their resistance to this public criticism, disregarding the possibility of critical aristocratic voices and their sustained attention to the war’s popular visual culture. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s embrace of new media to reformulate public perceptions of the royal family as empathetic and humanitarian, epitomized in their visits to the returned veterans and the hospitalized of the war, furnished a conspicuous model for other aristocrats.‍[5] Yet the emotional stakes were inevitably higher for those families with loved ones stationed on the front line. Driven by profound anxieties and fears for their son’s well-being, the Lindsays provide an important example of an aristocratic family’s outspoken response to the unfolding public scandal of the war that did not shirk condemnation of their own peers or societal censure. Throughout the war, the Lindsays constantly engaged with the war’s visual products and their potential meanings in order to reformulate the self-perceptions and social projections of their class identity.

Recent scholarship has emphasized the significance of the war in the public circulation and expression of private emotion, exemplified by the publication of soldiers’ letters in newspapers and the regular exchange of personal objects.‍[6] The war made distinctions between the personal and the public more malleable and ambiguous, and visual materials were no less prone than correspondence to familial deployment and reinvestment in their production, exchange, display, discussion, and intervention. But whereas scholars often cite published letters and diaries for their content, the Lindsays’ correspondence demonstrates letter writing and image making as complementary practices of cultural work that served to modulate and reform class position and identity. I interpret these family letters in conjunction with their associated visual materials and references in terms that emphasize this aristocratic family’s critical engagement with the war and its popular forms of new media and spectacle. The materiality and orthography of these family letters, often cross-hatched and written hastily in time for the next post, are intrinsic aspects of their meaning, exceeding their literal content no less than visual materials do their subject matter. The Lindsays prized, copied, shared, and archived their letters and images, accruing and transforming their potential meanings beyond the initial intentions of sender and receiver. For the Lindsays, such practices and intermedial exchanges were central to their shared identity and agency.

The primary materials central to this article are the poignant unpublished letters between Robert in the Crimea and his mother Anne in Scotland, written between 1854 and 1856. From her writing desk at Balcarres, the family seat near Colinsburgh in rural Fife, Anne orchestrated an impressive campaign of her own intelligence-gathering and lobbying that sought to communicate support to her son, fulfill the family’s duties to the national cause, and act on their own private anxieties in the face of mounting casualty lists and grievous press reports. To achieve these ends, the Lindsays paid great attention to the war’s media products and exhibits. Anne was deeply conscious of the associative roles of pictures and letters in the maintenance of emotional ties throughout the war, as exemplified in the following lines to her son:

I hope you have some artists still out there for some day when this is all over every sketch – every anecdote – every portrait will be worth its weight in gold – It is wonderful how the power of the pencil & the pen has brought before the eye & into the heart of every one at home every incident of this terrible war. There has hardly been a hardship suffered, or a danger encountered that we in England have not shared with you.‍[7]

Written in the aftermath of the disastrous winter siege of the Russian stronghold of Sevastopol, during which thousands of ill-equipped British troops died of exposure and disease, Anne succinctly states the affective value of image and text in the national trauma of the war. These emotional resonances were profound for the family, especially since Robert’s heroic portrayal in battle scenes was instrumental in his national fame. By attending, corresponding, purchasing, and, not least, questioning these visual reenactments, Anne and her husband James sought to mediate the porous boundaries between their private concerns and anxieties and their son’s public embodiment of masculine valor. The Lindsays’ social class required articulation through their collective intervention in the meanings of the war’s cultural products.

For art historian Sean Willcock, the Victorian war artist aimed to “regulate affective responses to violence by metabolizing the shock of corporeal vulnerability into the familiar spectacle of heroic masculinity.”‍[8] The battlefield pictures examined in this article might well support this observation. Indeed, Robert’s portrayal as a national hero would become particularly freighted in the Victorian public sphere, given the concurrent antiaristocratic criticism of the logistical mismanagement of the war.‍[9] As spectacular acts of military daring, they helped ameliorate the public’s shock at the daily reports. And yet, I want to emphasize the partial, unstable realization of this metabolizing work by shifting attention from artistic agency to the subject of those representations. For the Lindsays, Robert’s conversion into a spectacle of heroic masculinity came with caveats, since it threatened to dissociate representation from the concurrent realities of his actual conditions, which included life-threatening bouts of dysentery. For Anne and James, the representation of the war was not determined and immutable but subject to their own interventions and interpretations that maintained some semblance of familial agency at a time of its evident limitations. Yet however much they asserted their own representational and social authority, vulnerability remained intrinsic to their wartime experience and separation.

The Family’s Campaign

Robert’s status as a war hero derived from his actions at the Battle of the Alma on September 20, 1854, when he carried the Queen’s colors under heavy fire and rallied the troops against the Russian defenses.‍[10] As reports of this first major battle of the war reached Britain, Robert’s near-miraculous survival gained nationwide acclaim, becoming an inescapable topic for family members. In a postscript to a letter addressed to Robert, Anne’s brother-in-law, George Thomas Keppel, 6th Earl of Albemarle, informed his nephew of the sudden fame that these reports had elicited in Britain:

Your mother has given me the remainder of this half sheet to fill up, but at present I can only think of & speak upon a subject which must begin to pall upon you, the conduct of my nephew Bob on the Heights of Alma, the subject of almost every newspaper I have taken up for the last fortnight, as well as the topic of every dinner table. It is rare that the feats of an Ensign form so universal a theme.‍[11]

Even outside the polite society of the dinner engagement, the Lindsay family became subjects of public attention in the verbal, textual, and visual networks of Victorian Britain. Pictorial representations, press reports, and private correspondence circulated and initiated social exchanges that constituted the fabric of public discourse about the war. Writing to her mother Anne from London, Mary Holford recounted the interest that her presence in public attracted: “I receive no end of congratulations about Robin even in shops: ‘Are you the sister of Mr. Lindsay who behaved so gallantly?’ – ‘yes I am.’ ‘Madam, I congratulate you!’”‍[12] Such accounts testify to the sudden alteration in the circumstances of the family as subjects of intense public scrutiny and interest.

Robert’s actions at the Battles of Alma and Inkerman received widespread public attention in Britain, especially as the winter siege of Sevastopol brought graphic accounts of the lack of basic provisions and the outbreak of disease on the front line. He became a feted national hero in prints, in panoramas, and in absentia, just as the family received increasingly concerning and intermittent letters home of his own deteriorating health from dysentery. As early as November 28, 1854, Robert confided in an ominous letter to his mother about the horrendous conditions at the camp at Sevastopol:

The last few days I have been down here [at Balaclava], on board ship in the Harbour. I got rather knocked up with the hard work after the battle of Inkermann, and being on an advanced piquet the night of that tremendous storm, I got thoroughly wet and chilled with wind and snow – and this finished me off with a feverish cold. I am quite well again now and am going back to camp in a day or two. I am rather loathe to leave the comfortable and warm quarters on board ship for the cold and wretched camp. It is useless talking about its discomforts but its wretchedness cannot be conceived. The weather is incessantly bad, and not a bit of winter clothing have we got.‍[13]

Unlike the vast majority of rank-and-file soldiers, Robert’s aristocratic position granted him the privilege of recuperation in the relative comforts of the British supply port in the Crimea at Balaclava. Nonetheless, his account evokes the atrocious conditions and trauma, corporeal and psychological, that he had already experienced on frontline duties. Worse was to come, as the logistical chaos and rampant illness of the winter undermined the privileges of junior officers. However wide the class differences, Robert’s use of the pronoun “we” implies his identification with the ordeals of the regular troops. His letters home expressed increasing disdain for the senior generals, perhaps having realized that his social class no longer safeguarded him from the realities of the winter siege. He would be fortunate to survive the war, unlike thousands of other predominantly working-class soldiers.‍[14]

Fig. 1, Captain William James Colville, The Trenches, January 1855, 1855. Watercolor and ink on paper. National Army Museum, London. Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of the National Army Museum.

Robert’s words find their pictorial counterpart in the sketches undertaken by some of his fellow officers in the trenches. Among his close friends, Captain William James Colville (1827–1903) of the Rifle Brigade captured the desperate circumstances that the troops endured that winter in his sketch The Trenches, January 1855, depicting an anonymous soldier standing stoic and alone in tattered garments, turned against the driving wind (fig. 1). Colville’s sketch implies the intractable deadlock of a war to be suffered in isolation rather than fought against a visible, corporeal opponent. With its limited colors, watercolor wash, and abridged outlines and modeling, the sketch shares the same techniques that illustrated press artists adapted for use in the extreme conditions.‍[15] The very scarcity of the material means of the sketch connotes the paucity and fragility of existence for its subject amid the lack of basic provisions and relentless cold.

At Balcarres, the press reports of such conditions at the front only exacerbated the family’s distress. Anne disclosed in a letter to Robert that his sister Margaret, known as Minny or Min, “sheds many tears over the [soldiers’] letters in the Papers” and that his father James “can neither eat nor sleep.”‍[16] The Lindsays were well aware of the dangers of the war, having received the devastating news that close family friends—their neighbors the Anstruthers of Balcaskie, the Grants of Kilgraston in Perthshire, and the Custs of Belton in Lincolnshire—had each lost a son in battle or from disease in the Crimea.‍[17] For a few anxious weeks that winter, Anne and James were conscious of the gulf between their son’s vulnerability—and of illness interrupting or, worse still, permanently severing communication—and his concurrent rise to prominence in the public sphere at home as the fearless embodiment of British masculine valor. These public representations could offer solace, filling the void between postal deliveries and functioning as surrogates for family dialogue, but they also triggered profound anxieties and criticism of their fanciful basis. The family sought to manage these ambivalent feelings through their close engagement with and deployment of visual and textual materials, even extending to the use of private correspondence to lobby government ministers.

In this regard, Robert’s letters home attest to the pliancy of purported distinctions between private fears and public functions. While important first-person testaments of the war and the family’s involvement in its visual culture, these letters were also embroiled in the political agendas of the Lindsays. The private thoughts and fears shared between mother and son circulated among social peers and even functioned as semiofficial reports, demonstrating that the meanings and purposes of these materials were neither fixed nor confined to the family. Unaccustomed to the role of helpless bystanders, Anne and James had selections of their son’s correspondence sent to prominent friends and politicians through trusted intermediaries. Anne and her daughter Mary loaned the prized letters to close friends including Lady Harriet Overstone, Lady Charlotte Canning, and the latter’s younger sister, the artist Louisa Beresford, Marchioness of Waterford.‍[18] By doing so, these letters also became available to their husbands, suggestive of the political influence of aristocratic women’s networks operating in the vast liminal zone between public and private life in Victorian Britain.‍[19] James also sent transcriptions of two letters from Robert, along with his own blunt assessment of the widely reviled British commander in the Crimea, Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, Lord Raglan, to the family friend and banker Samuel Jones Loyd, Lord Overstone. “Death seldom reaches those in power,” James wrote of Raglan’s command, in a sentence that evokes the press denunciations of aristocratic privilege in the Crimea.‍[20] By sending his son’s letters, James sought his friend’s intervention with government officials in response to the unfolding crisis. As a result, copies of Robert’s private letters circulated among government ministers, given heft by the concurrent fame of the hero correspondent.‍[21]

James’s exasperation culminated in an excoriating letter to Lord Overstone which advocated the recall of Lord Raglan and the placing of the British army under the French allied commander François Certain de Canrobert. Desperate circumstances demanded immediate steps or, James warned, “the Gallant army will vanish as the snow in spring.”‍[22] As familial and national crises merged, James felt direct intervention had become imperative; by the end of January 1855, he had left Balcarres for London on a mission to lobby government ministers.‍[23] His arrival in the capital coincided with the collapse of George Hamilton-Gordon, Lord Aberdeen’s coalition government, brought about by a no-confidence vote triggered by the Crimean debacle. Amid this political turmoil, James met separately with the politicians Sidney Herbert and William Gladstone, declaring in correspondence to his son that he had “spoken out my thoughts cautiously, but most decidedly.”‍[24] That James was confronted during a dinner party at the residence of Lord Charles John Canning and Lady Canning as to whether he maintained his view on the necessity of French command in the Crimea suggests that his lobbying became societal gossip and was considered by some of his social peers as unpatriotic if not treasonous. “I saw immediately that it had been told,” James wrote to Anne, “as all eyes turned toward me.”‍[25] James held firm to his view but the episode testified to the societal risks of his actions in the febrile aftermath of the collapse of the government.

Contrary to an oft-stated view that the newspapers expressed middle-class dissatisfaction with aristocratic privilege and governance, James and Anne also supported the press coverage of the war.‍[26] The Lindsays received four national broadsheets at Balcarres, including The Times, whose war correspondent, William Howard Russell, published influential accounts of the dire conditions and mismanagement in the Crimea.‍[27] Yet regardless of the criticism of aristocratic command, the Lindsays resolutely espoused the public relevance of the press. In another letter to Lord Overstone dated January 12, 1855, James was unequivocal at a time when such statements had political intent: “There is a struggle at present going on between official men & the press, the sad state of our troops in the Crimea being the subject of it. The press has taken the surest grounds by the publication of facts, & these are so numerous & monstrous, that they have forced public attention to them.”‍[28] James opposed those “official men” whose refusal to concede the necessity for urgent action threatened to exacerbate the ongoing misery in the Crimea, endangering his own son in the process. Some months later, Anne also praised the press in correspondence with Robert: “Your condition would not have been improved as it has been without them.”‍[29] The Lindsays’ support for their reportage underlines the fact that editorial denunciations of the governing elite did not necessarily correlate with predictable responses along class-based lines.

Although the result of James’s political overtures in London was inconclusive, his military connections at the battlefront proved more beneficial to his son. On March 15, 1855, Robert accepted an offer of aide-de-camp to General James Simpson, whose benefaction provided him with posts of relative safety for the remainder of his campaign.‍[30] That the Lindsay family made use of their social connections and status to solicit on behalf of their son comes as no surprise. Their strategic use of textual and visual materials to achieve their aims reveals their consummate skill in the political function of cultural products. Private correspondence became part of confidential, semiofficial petitions, representative of their use of materials across malleable divisions between private and public. The family correspondence highlights their dissent toward the command structures and conduct of the war and their support for the press, complicating neat, class-based readings of the war and revealing the anxieties of Robert’s parents just as their son’s image came to public prominence. Far from being passive recipients or bystanders to unfolding events, the Lindsays sought to reestablish their authority through their collective participation in and circulation of visual and textual materials.

Fig. 2, Coutts Lindsay, Robert James Lindsay, 1854. Chalk drawing with white chalk highlights. Private collection. Artwork in the public domain; image © Balcarres Heritage Trust.

Intimacies and Mobilities of the Sketch

How did the family make use of visual materials to maintain emotional ties through the war? One means was to invest private portraits with personal values and associations. Robert had departed for the Crimea as a twenty-one-year-old ensign attached to the Scots Fusilier Guards in February 1854.‍[31] Shortly before his embarkation, Robert’s elder brother Coutts completed a chalk sketch of him in military uniform (fig. 2).‍[32] With the help of Anne’s daughter Margaret, a photographic reproduction of this portrait took pride of place at Balcarres. “My dearest Bob,” Anne wrote to her son, “The picture Coutts did of you before you left London or rather the Daguerrotype [sic] from it is become most valuable – Minny and I have put it into a magnificent frame and it stands in the Library – I really think it more like every day.”‍[33] Robert was also informed by his cousin Louisa Keppel, then on a visit to Balcarres, that the portrait “stands on one [of] the library tables.”‍[34] Robert’s youthful portrait was in essence a family affair that demonstrates the material mediations of private thought and activities, including the artistic skill of his brother, the portrait’s technological reproduction, and its transportation north for the mother and daughter’s ornamentation and domestic display. Anne’s letter continues the chain of media transformations and returns the portrait in textual form to its subject, connecting the family members across geographies and experiences through personal objects of exchange. Anne invests the portrait with increased value with these material and spatial transformations and, by describing its newfound home, invites her son to imagine their shared domesticity.

This example foregrounds the family’s sophisticated use of modern media and the infrastructures of communication to maintain personal ties between the Fife countryside and the Crimean front. Anne and Robert referred to works of art and exchanged visual materials throughout their wartime correspondence. On May 21, 1855, Anne acknowledged receipt of another portrait in a letter to her son addressed from London. On this occasion, Anne was with her younger daughter Mary Holford, known to her intimates as May: “I thank you most heartily for the little sketch of you. I can recognise & so can May a great deal of you in it – tho’ I do not suppose it is a very strong likeness the attitude & general air are like. . . . It seems very well drawn if an amateur did it.”‍[35] A returning officer served as the courier on this occasion, indicative of the unofficial networks that vastly supplemented the exchange of personal materials and correspondence to and from the Crimea. According to Sir James Fergusson, Captain Colville was the regimental artist responsible for the sketch whose skills have already been demonstrated in the abovementioned The Trenches, January 1855.‍[36] Anne’s language politely implies, however, that the sketch of her son did not entirely satisfy her desire for visual fidelity. The suspicion remained that the sketch was not “a very strong likeness,” and its subsequent description indicates that the setting for the portrait consisted of “little things in the tent,” including a “picture of Balcarres.”‍[37]

Anne’s account suggests that this portrait depicted her son among the domestic comforts of his quarters, including sketches and other memorabilia received from home. Several letters attest to the family’s efforts to sketch portraits and domestic scenes to be sent to the Crimea, with the sequence of letters building anticipation of their eventual arrival. On December 20, 1854, Anne informed Robert of her intention that Margaret sketch a portrait “of me to send to you if it will go in a letter.”‍[38] By December 29, Margaret had begun to draw her mother’s picture.‍[39] Just over a fortnight later, Anne sent “a little likeness of me” enclosed with another letter to her son.‍[40] Finally, on February 4, 1855, Robert received “a magnificent square letter” at the camp and wrote the same day to Margaret to acknowledge its safe delivery: “I directly suspected what was in it, and sure enough there was Mama’s portrait, very pretty and so like. My dear Min I am so pleased with it. It must have cost you a great deal of work.”‍[41] Over the coming weeks, Robert received additional pictures of Balcarres by Anne and Margaret, ensuring that sketching, writing, and displaying became interdependent activities integral to the maintenance of familial bonds and affections.‍[42]

Robert clearly prized these sketches, decorating his quarters with them and sending them to his father for safekeeping toward the end of his campaign.‍[43] He informed the sender of a sketch’s place in his lodgings and its intended future purpose, associating the current circumstances with the prospect of the family’s imagined reunion. “My dearest Mother,” Robert wrote on March 24, 1855, “The mail before last brought your picture of the drawing room, [which] I think a wonderful performance. At present it adorns my hut. Whenever we move I shall send it home to you to stick it on the screen where it will be as much admired as it has been out here.”‍[44] As Robert proposed, some of the sketches in his possession eventually found their way onto a five-panel screen comprised of contributions by several family members and friends that Anne had initiated in his honor.‍[45] Like other cultural activities that winter, the screen project was a useful distraction from the worries of the war that paradoxically owed its inception to those same inescapable concerns. Anne commissioned photographic copies of these screens, the first panel of which possibly reproduces her sketch of the drawing room at Balcarres as the third image down from the top right corner (fig. 3).‍[46] If this conjecture is correct, Robert’s prophecy of the sketch’s eventual use after the war was realized. These circulations and contextual alterations emphasize the importance of visual materials and practices in the exchanges between the home front and the campaign hut. Long after hostilities had ceased, the visual products of the war constituted the domestic interiors and archives of family life.

Fig. 4, John Dalbiac Luard, A Welcome Arrival, 1855, 1857. Oil on canvas. National Army Museum, London. Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of the National Army Museum.

During the war, however, Robert’s display of sketches and prints was a common means to personalize the otherwise rudimentary living quarters. Officers’ pictorial adornment of their domiciles was a practice commemorated in John Dalbiac Luard’s A Welcome Arrival, 1855, in which three soldiers unpack a box of provisions received from Britain (fig. 4). The men enjoy a moment of repose before a mess-hut wall festooned in press engravings, at least one of which derives from a war report published by the Illustrated London News.‍[47] The visual culture of the illustrated press literally constitutes the collective environment of these officers. Yet the putative distinction between the comforts of home and the campaign front does not adequately address the mediating role of such visual circulations and displays. The personal and the professional, the domestic and the military, became increasingly interwoven with the mutual flows of private and mass-produced illustrations. If Robert made use of family sketches to domesticate his quarters, his description of their display ensured the military realities of daily life remained irrefutable. In a letter to Anne, Robert characterized the display of his sketches in avowedly military terms: “I have your picture of the drawing room & Minnies of the corridor & yourself – the two former occupy flanking positions in the hut supported by strong detachments from Old Illustrated London News – the latter remains in reserve in my writing case.”‍[48] However comical the intent, Robert’s analogy between his arrangement of pictures and the terminology of the battlefield mobilized these sketches as components of an imagined cartography of warfare.

Anne orchestrated those closest to her in the production, exchange, and display of sketches as part of her effort to maintain familial bonds. Robert reciprocated by sending sketches and gratefully acknowledging the visual materials received from home. Insofar as these sketches bore the aura of their makers and sitters, they functioned in conjunction with handwriting to uphold shared intimacies and subjectivities across distance and experience. That Robert kept Margaret’s portrait of their mother in his writing case implies that it was often close at hand in the act of writing home. On sending their mother’s portrait, Margaret had informed her brother that her first sketch had depicted Anne “sitting at her writing table writing to you.”‍[49] Only its size prevented its being sent rather than a smaller portrait considered more practical for postage and mess-hut display. This first portrait made explicit the promissory feedback of the gifted family sketch, binding sender and recipient in perpetual exchanges of letter writing and reading, sketching, and describing. These were deeply intertwined dialogical practices that connected their respective environments. Yet these material exchanges did not verify an immutable private realm interrupted by warfare so much as underline its reliance on the agency of image making and letter writing. And as the next section outlines, Robert’s emergence as a national hero engaged the family in yet further practices of collection and appraisal that sought to articulate their own narratives to one another amid the charged national crisis unfolding that winter.

Heroic Spectacles

As Robert’s public profile increased and reports of winter conditions at the front worsened, the Lindsays intensified their engagement with visual depictions of the war. On February 25, 1855, James wrote to Robert, ruminating in a memorable passage on his son’s metropolitan fame in terms redolent of a parental skepticism towards its representation. James summarizes the recurrent aspects of the works he had encountered during his visit to London:

And so it is that the Colours, the Heights of the Alma and the Lindsay Boy are so associated in the minds of the People of England, that it has made you the Hero of the battle in the minds of the mass – It always so happens, a little incident, anecdote, or even a word, becomes the representative of a great fact, as it were the Hierogliphic of the tale.‍[50]

James interrogates, and invites interrogation, of the representational mechanics fundamental to his son’s apotheosis to national war hero. Four months after George Thomas Keppel and Mary Holford had written of the public zeal that reports of Robert’s actions had incited, James recognized its consolidation into a patriotic image removed from the wider circumstances of the war (what he describes in linguistic terms as “the Hierogliphic of the tale”). By underlining several key words, James called his son’s attention to the recurrent motifs of the battle scene, the pervasive knowledge of viewers of its subjects, and the inviolate historical event as interdependent aspects of a national mythology. Each underlined term functioned as its own “hieroglyph,” simultaneously embedded within and extricated from the text and inviting the reader’s critical reflection on the associative operations of representation, audience reception, and the cult of heroic masculinity.

James’s month in London was largely occupied lobbying government officials, attending dinner parties, and, not least, encountering representations of his son and the war. Within days of his arrival, Anne wrote to her husband, issuing instructions with her customary directness:

Dear James, will you go to Leicester Square, & see the Panorama of the Battle of Alma, in which Robert is a prominent figure, at Wildes [sic] Globe also; Lindsay says there is a model to be seen, of the whole ground upon which the camp stands and the hills round it. I should think it would be very interesting.‍[51]

Fig. 5, Designer and engraver once known, Mr Wyld’s Model of the Earth—Sectional View, 1851. Wood engraving. Published in Illustrated London News, June 7, 1851, 511. Artwork in the public domain; digital image © Victoria and Albert Museum.

Anne refers to two exhibits that had opened shortly before Christmas of 1854 in response to public interest in the ongoing war. Each initiative was on display for several months at rival enterprises that had contributed to Leicester Square’s popularity as one of the main entertainment districts of London in the 1850s. Combining techniques of modern cartography and collective entertainment, Wyld’s Great Globe was a unique rotunda complex built by the entrepreneur and geographer James Wyld (1812–87) in 1851 (fig. 5).‍[52] On entering the globe itself, visitors ascended a series of stairwells connecting four platforms, from each of which could be viewed cartographic displays of the continents and oceans of the world on the building’s inner walls. Wyld’s topographical model of the Crimea, presented in an adjacent gallery for an additional six-pence entrance fee, shared the emphasis of the main complex on a collective form of geographical spectatorship and imaginative travel. An accompanying guidebook featuring a foldout map and index of the model instructed audiences on the positions of the opposing armies, the main fortifications, and infrastructure of the ongoing siege.‍[53] The model also underwent regular updates based on the latest reports.‍[54]

Fig. 6, Designer and engraver once known, Exposition du plan en relief du siége de Sébastopol, par M. Wyld, dans les salons de M. Hamilton, boulevard des Italiens (Exhibition of a Sculptural Model of the Siege of Sebastopol by Mr. Wyld, in the Salons of Mr. Hamilton, Boulevard des Italiens), 1855. Wood engraving. Published in L’Illustration, March 24, 1855, 180. Artwork in the public domain; digital image © Victoria and Albert Museum.

Although only written descriptions are known of the model at Leicester Square, the French journal L’Illustration depicted a replica on display in Paris with bystanders crowded around on all sides (fig. 6). On the left, two men handle firearms confiscated as booty in the aftermath of battle, emphasizing the associations of vision and touch in these popular shows.‍[55] For all its multisensorial tactics, however, Wyld’s model promoted an anonymized perception of the war as a struggle between imperial powers. The model encouraged a detached viewpoint outside and above the lives of the soldiers: camps served as abstractions of the rival imperial forces; and map, guidebook, and model referred to each other in a circuit of representations removed from actual conditions. According to the accompanying guidebook, on the outcome of “the present war in the Crimea depends the future fate of Europe.”‍[56] Such pronouncements invited viewers to assess the war’s geopolitical stakes rather than the personal experiences of individual soldiers.

The second exhibit was no less spectacular in its response to the war but differed in its painted depiction of a battle scene directly relevant to the Lindsay family. The popular enterprise of Robert Burford (1791–1861) had its origins in the late eighteenth century and had become a permanent attraction, with regular panoramas of distant and topical localities exhibited in a purpose-built building.‍[57] Its latest exhibit was a rousing, all-around panorama of the Battle of the Alma representing “the moment when the three battalions of the Guards, having overcome every obstacle, are victoriously driving the enemy from their posts.”‍[58] Burford reportedly painted the scenery, with his longtime collaborator Henry Courtney Selous (1803–90) responsible for the numerous figures. A detailed guidebook described for visitors the principal soldiers and events and included a foldout key to the main protagonists and regiments of the panorama (fig. 7).‍[59]

Fig. 8, After Robert Burford and Henry Courtney Selous, Detail of View of the Battle of the Alma, 1854. Foldout key. Published in Description of a View of the Battle of the Alma, Fought on the 20th Sept. 1854, between the Allied Armies of England and France and the Russians; Now Exhibiting at the Panorama, Leicester Square: Painted from Accurate Drawings, by the Proprietor, Robert Burford; the Figures by Mr. H. C. Selous (London: W. J. Golbourn, 1854), frontispiece. Artwork in the public domain; digital image © Victoria and Albert Museum.

For all its explanatory detail and claim to be based on “accurate drawings,” Burford’s panorama conflated reports of different temporal incidents from the battle. As the reviewer for the Morning Post acknowledged, the panorama “realises to the eye all that has been made familiar to the ear for sometime past by descriptions from ‘our correspondents,’ ‘our special correspondents,’ and ‘communications from other sources.’”‍[60] Those reports that had hailed the actions of Robert and his fellow comrade-in-arms Arthur Thistlethwaite constituted the narrative and pictorial apogee of the battle scene, with the two men shown at its center about “to plant the standard on the redoubt just wrested from the hands of the Russians.”‍[61] The guidebook key corroborates this account, albeit in a schematic, handheld format that only hints at the theatrical impact of the lost panorama. On the upper section, Lindsay and Thistlethwaite are identified in sketch outline by the number twenty-two flying the colors before the Russian defense at the midpoint of the left-hand side of the panorama (fig. 8). Robert, then, was prominent in print and paint as an embodiment of allied triumph and individual action in a war otherwise mired in controversy. Visitors to the panorama would have known that the battles that autumn had been far from decisive and had led to the intractable, ongoing siege.

As with the model at Leicester Square, Anne sent her husband to view the panorama having already been informed of its existence by relatives in London. In this instance, Anne’s brother-in-law George Thomas Keppel had visited the panorama and sent her the guidebook. In the circuits of representation and material exchange between siege camp, metropolitan exhibit, and rural abode, Anne then forwarded the guidebook’s foldout key to Robert in the Crimea:

I send you a little picture out of the Panorama book in Leicester Square. Your Uncle George went there and sent me the book – You will see that you and poor Thistlethwaite occupy a very important place in it. I wish I could see it. There is a grand explanation of all the exploits in the texts, but I need not send you that – It is satisfactory to think that thousands of people see it every day.‍[62]

Then as now, the “little picture” certainly required imagination to envision the vast panorama and its bustling metropolitan crowds at Leicester Square. Nonetheless, Robert would have grasped its importance as evidence of his rapid installation in the pantheon of national heroes. Yet, as I contend, both parents’ letters communicate a critical skepticism that distinguishes between an iconography of individual military action as national collective balm to the ongoing horrors reported daily in the press and their concern for the on-the-ground realities of their son’s actual conditions. Anne’s reference to “poor Thistlethwaite” is a reminder, as both sender and recipient knew, that many more were dying of disease and exposure than from combat.‍[63]

Wyld’s model and Burford’s panorama are representative of the ephemeral exhibits through which metropolitan audiences envisioned the Crimean War. Both exhibits provided guided tours and epic scale, but their means of engaging visitors were otherwise fundamentally distinct. Whereas the model encouraged a practice of detached distant oversight and strategic evaluation of the ongoing siege, the panorama immersed the viewer within the turmoil of a battle and the reported actions of its combatants on a particular day. In each case, scale functioned diametrically in relation to proximity and distance to determine the viewer’s relation to the represented subject. But if most visitors attended these exhibits for their topical interest and spectacular amusement, James’s response to his wife Anne underlines the potential differences these exhibits could elicit in those for whom the ongoing conflict and its representations were deeply felt. In the case of Wyld’s model, James attended much less to the model than “the earnest gaze of a very lovely young face whose thoughts seemed far far away.”‍[64] Unmoved by the topographical model, James romanticized the quiet contemplation of a young woman in order to project human drama and intrigue onto an otherwise didactic display. When Anne, later that summer, visited the model with her husband, she remained resolute in her critique: “There was a most delectable wretch with a stick in his hand explaining it all with a number of well prepared jokes at proper intervals who kept us a whole quarter of an hour before we could ask a single question.”‍[65] Anne always had an inquisitive disposition that had little time for incidental episodes or entertainments.

Whereas James had little to report on Wyld’s model, Burford’s panorama triggered an emotional response of a father unprepared for the patriotic depiction of his absent son. On February 14, James finally responded to Anne’s directive that he visit the panorama:

I did not know till this morning that I was troubled with tender feelings, or delicate sympathies, or liable to make a fool of myself from such causes – But I went today to see the Panorama of the Alma, and as I first looked on the representation of that bloody field, the guards in the foreground and so many of them lying prostrate, soldiers and officers, and our gallant Boy the prominent figure in the foreground, rearing the Standard of England in the midst of the fight looking boldly aloft in contempt of the danger surrounding him, I began to see indistinctly, and walked away to the other side of the room.‍[66]

Victorian Britain valued art for its ability to elicit the sentiments of the viewer, but written accounts of such raw affective responses to artworks in public, particularly from elderly men, are exceptionally rare for the period.‍[67] That the artwork triggered emotions that literally made it temporarily unviewable highlights the potential for representations to propel private fears and anxieties into the public realm of the exhibition space. James was not, however, at the emotional mercy of a combination of personal fragility and subject matter that made pictorial attention to composition incidental to his teary-eyed state. Whereas Wyld’s topographical model kept the viewer at a distance, James’s account is mindful of the panorama’s immersive techniques of scale and composition and of a proximity that brought the pictured events all too near. The passage opens and ends by recognizing his own physical presence in the exhibition room, framing a description that then accounts for the pictured bodies in terms of pictorial proximities and relative elevations. He references the foreground twice in rapid succession and distinguishes between those “lying prostrate” and the heroic son “looking boldly aloft.” Put otherwise, James was conscious of the panorama’s enactment of a relational mode of proximate viewing that brought the personal nature of the subject too close to him. As James’s vision became indistinct, he “walked away to the other side of the room.” The choice of verb and position here is telling: James did not look away but removed himself physically from the painting’s proximate hold; he did not leave the room but remained at a distance, the implication being to compose himself and, by doing so, potentially to look again from a position of relative affective safety.

In fact, James did not quietly exit the gallery but chose to address an attendant. His letter to Anne continues:

This episode of the Standard seems to be the favourite portion of the Shewman’s story, and which he seems to have taken from Mr. Burford who was anxious to make this the point – Before leaving the room I told him I was the Boy’s father at which he almost fell down to worship me, [and] followed me down stairs to tell Mr. Burford I was there – but he happened to be out, so I promised to return again to see him and explain all I knew.
The Panorama is well done and will create a sensation in summer weather, when people can go and see it. There are not too many incidents, and the country is beautifully painted, especially the River on which they have taken a little license.
I know of no way to gain temporary celebrity so great as being made prominent in a Panorama, with the exception of history, but that tells our deeds usually after death.‍[68]

This is not an account of a passive visitor rendered introspective by an emotional response to the triumphant portrayal of his son. By introducing himself to the attendant, James intervenes in the regular business of mass spectacle. He declares his intention to meet the artist and proprietor, passes judgment on the panorama’s content and handling of paint, and expresses a view on the format’s capacity to foster modern fame. Whereas history in the form of biography or academic-style painting extolled the deceased subject as moral exemplar, the ephemeral newsworthiness of the popular panorama tallied with the transitory state of Victorian celebrity. James suggests that his son’s rise to national prominence was indivisible from such popular forms of mass entertainment as the panorama.

James felt compelled to communicate these experiences to Anne. Writing provided a means to ruminate on the visit and consider the panorama’s strategies of viewer engagement. To interpret James’s account as a personal response to the panorama evades the intellectual engagement with the artwork evident in the letter’s careful attention to spatial and relational devices, aesthetic features, and social relevance to modern society. Whatever the actual circumstances of this visit, the panorama enabled the private expression to his wife of mutual parental fear and pride in their son’s military service amid his tentative recovery from the winter’s illness. The letter acknowledged private pain in a public setting. Yet, however intense the parents’ fears and anxieties, the emotional stakes did not preclude their shared commitment to the critical appraisal of the national apotheosis of their son.

Bringing the War Home: Lithographs and Traveling Shows

Anne and James’s correspondence foregrounds the family’s efforts to engage public shows and new forms of mass spectatorship for their own personal agendas. Although the sheer material size of London’s popular shows often precluded their transportation to the outlying regions, the Lindsay family were regular travelers at ease with modern forms of communication and the infrastructures of travel, and attuned to mobile media and their suppliers. The relative rural isolation of Balcarres correlates with the family’s frequent travel, use of the postal service and the railway, engagement with mobile arts such as photography, lithography, and letter writing, and extensive social and commercial networks, including those of metropolitan suppliers of prints, photographs, and books. Along with other affluent rural families of the era, the Lindsay family’s engagement with these interconnected pursuits contributed to the transformation of the cultural geography of nineteenth-century Britain.

Whereas scholars have largely examined the multisensorial exhibits of London in terms of their techniques of immersive spectatorship, I want to emphasize the social and material networks that sought to translate and transfer these metropolitan exhibits onward to other members of the family. Anne’s letter forwarded information to her husband about the two exhibits at Leicester Square that she had received from George Thomas Keppel and Margaret’s husband Alexander William Crawford Lindsay, known as Lord Lindsay. Alexander and Margaret attended these exhibits, raising the issue of their engagement with contemporary forms of visual media and spectacle.‍[69] Alexander has received extensive art historical and bibliophilic attention for his collecting practices, but Margaret, like her mother Anne, has been almost entirely neglected as an art collector and advocate of the visual arts.‍[70] Margaret undoubtedly made a major contribution in her own right to the art and book collections amassed and credited to her husband. The lack of attention directed to their shared engagement with popular visual forms such as topographical models, panoramas, prints, photographs, and other reprographic media has only exacerbated this glaring discrepancy.

Like her sister, Mary also reported new depictions of her brother in battle to her parents. On November 10, 1854, Mary wrote to her father from London:

There has been I hear a spirited drawing made by an artist who’s [sic] name I forget of him [Robert] defending his colours surrounded by Russians. It is of course an ideal picture – I was anxious to see it but it had been sent to the Queen at Windsor. I shall see it on Saturday evening and as it is to be lithographed if I like it I shall take a copy and send one to you.‍[71]

Mary’s familiarity with the circulation of the drawing underlines her awareness of its path to commercialization. This passage adds to the overall impression of the family’s collective attention to new representations and their comprehension of the visual economies that were transforming a beloved son and brother into a public symbol of masculine heroism. By characterizing the work as “an ideal picture,” Mary adjudged the representation to be generic in comparison to the family’s private keepsakes, such as the framed photograph of Coutts’s portrait of her brother in the library at Balcarres.

Three months later, Mary’s parents had not forgotten this planned lithograph. On James’s mission to London, Anne instructed him to acquire a copy: “Do you think you could find that print of Bob’s defending the Colors that May spoke of – If it could be got I should like to have it.”‍[72] Matters were moving fast, independent of this request. The next day, on February 8, 1855, Anne wrote once again to her husband in London:

The Print of the Alma is not arrived – I long to see it – I hope it may come by coach to night for Minny has a letter from the Print Seller Mr Welch saying he has despatched it. Was the artist in the Crimea – and did he even see Bob[?] You will know this, if, as you intend, you go to see him. How kind of Col Moncrieff to send it to you.‍[73]

Fig. 9, Alexander Laby (lithographer), after Alfred Frank de Prades, An Episode at the Battle of the Alma, 20th Sep. 1854. Lieutenants Lindsay and Thistlethwaite of the Scots Fusileer Guards, having with their Sargeants become separated from their Battalion, bravely defended their Colours from an Attack by a Body of Russians, but being ably assisted by Captain Drummond, whose horse was at that moment shot under him, the Gallant Bearers of the Standards succeeded in planting their Colors on the Heights of Alma, 1855. Colored lithograph. Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library, Providence. Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of Brown Digital Repository.

James had yet to visit the shows at Leicester Square, but his wife and daughter were not waiting for his reply. As Anne’s instructions were conveyed south, Margaret arranged for the London printseller and publisher, Joseph Sandell Welch, to send the print in question to her mother at Balcarres. This print can be firmly identified and, unlike the temporary exhibits at Leicester Square, survives in several collections (fig. 9).‍[74] An Episode at the Battle of the Alma, 20th Sep. 1854, was published in London on January 23, 1855, by “J. S. Welsh [sic], 24, St James’s Street.”‍[75] The print was also available for purchase at Stannard and Dixon in Poland Street, London.‍[76] Lithographed by Alexander Laby (1814–99) after a lost painting by Alfred Frank de Prades (1825–85), the lengthy description on the mount identifies the main protagonists of the battle scene, Lieutenants Lindsay and Thistlethwaite, as the two soldiers depicted back-to-back holding aloft the regimental colors and fending off adversaries from all directions. These details concur with the print dispatched north by Welch.

Anne’s letter also implies that her relatives did more than simply purchase the lithograph. Given the short walking distance between Leicester Square and St James’s Street, Alexander and Margaret presumably visited the printseller’s shop—either on the same occasion or independent of the Crimean shows—and arranged for the lithograph to be sent to Balcarres. About the same time, James also received the lithograph from Colonel George Moncrieff (1805–69), presumably in gratitude for the Lindsays’ hospitality on his recent stay at Balcarres.‍[77] For his own part, James sent copies of the print to Lady Canning and Jane Smith, née Maberley.‍[78] As an object of gift giving and receiving, the lithograph facilitated shared familial and social interactions between these correspondents, highlighting the intimate associations of letter writing and visual media in Victorian Britain.

Welch’s print is illustrative of the rise of color lithographs as a medium of the Crimean War. Compared to the technical limitations of wet-plate photography, the lithograph’s capacity to render the impression of dynamic movement and the visual effects of battle in large editions of near-permanent and consistent quality ensured its market preeminence. Welch’s lithograph, printed on a mount measuring 17 7/8 x 24 3/8 in. (45.2 x 62 cm), was of an impressive size that was nonetheless still convenient for postage. The addition of hand-applied colors and its fine print quality resulted in a lithograph at the top end of the market.‍[79]

If Anne and James came into possession of the lithograph through gift and purchase, their evaluation of the battle scene did not accede to their parental pride in its purported representation of their son’s actions. Anne’s question to her husband, “Was the artist in the Crimea – and did he even see Bob[?],” attests to a critical skepticism that pitted their personal concerns for their son against his public rise into a personification of British heroic manliness. Rather than show physiognomic likeness, the lithograph’s identification of specific protagonists relied on a web of semantic correlations with the press reports and the lengthy explanatory text on the mount. In fact, Anne’s question acknowledges her suspicion of her potential lack of recognition of her son in the lithograph. Her next sentence was calculated to encourage her husband to proceed in his plan: “You will know this, if, as you intend, you go to see him.” Whether or not the proposed meeting with the artist took place, James and Anne upheld the primacy of their private knowledge ahead of the public function of the lithograph and, to the extent of questioning the artist, scrutinized the basis for its claim to historical accuracy. Their encounters with the sudden vogue for pictorial renditions of their son remained resolutely interrogative, questioning the lithograph, the artist, and even their own responses. Insofar as such images—panorama, lithograph, and painting—remained subject to their intercession, the family seemed reticent to cede their bonds and remembrances of their son to a public trope of imperial manhood as the protagonist of history.

Burford and Selous’s panorama, Prades’s lost oil painting, and Laby’s colored lithograph are three examples of the rapid proliferation of Robert’s image as implacable hero in the immediate months after the battle. The Lindsay family assiduously monitored, collected, and discussed each representation that entered the public domain, seeking in the process to navigate the sentiments that attended the circulation of these battlefield scenes. Anne and James were acutely aware of their son’s sudden fame and the increased scrutiny this brought to the family at a time of public controversy about the war. Two days after his unexpectedly emotional encounter with the panorama at Leicester Square, James wrote once again to inform Robert of his newfound status as war hero:

You stand prominent in the Print shops, and Prominent in the Panorama, and prominent in the mouths of gentlemen, that you are as modest as you are brave and deserving, this last praise is the best by far – and yet further, I would have you to be even the humblest supplicant for grace from that Almighty God who has placed you in this position, who as he gives, so can he remove – as he raiseth up, so can he cast down.‍[80]

Notwithstanding its couching in religious terms, the implicit warning to remain out of trouble—on the reputational front as much as the battlefront—underscores the aristocratic anxieties that sometimes accompanied the diffusion of popular imagery and media.‍[81] The Lindsays, however, reveled in the diverse pictorial media and technologies of spectacle of the era. James was a keen observer of, and apparent urban eavesdropper on, the metropolitan interest in his son’s actions on the battlefront. The printshop window, the exhibited panorama, and the overheard conversation vividly evoke the mesh of visual and aural networks that spanned the inner-city spaces of mid-century London. And yet the call for modesty signals the father’s ambivalence about the rapid rise and extent of this public acclaim, perhaps aware that the same structural pathways and modes of distribution could just as readily function for scandal and censure.

As her husband’s health waned over the coming months, Anne’s talents as a highly resourceful orchestrator of the family’s public image and patronage of the arts came to the fore. Her correspondence testifies to her strong engagement with, and support for, the visual arts throughout her life and her formative role in the artistic pursuits of her children. Anne’s local initiative is evident in the continuation of the letter to her husband, quoted earlier in this article, of February 6, 1855:

There is a man come to Colinsburgh with a sort of Raree show – transparencies of Sevastapol the Battles of Alma & Inkermann Constantinople Balaclava etc. These he shows with a lecture upon them in a Gardeners’ Hall. All the servants are going to see it. And there is to be a cheap exhibition of it tomorrow for the children of the village at 1p a piece. I went today to Colinsburgh and saw Mackay the Schoolmaster and gave him five shillings to treat all the children, of which he has now only about 60 in the school to this show – and he is to tell them that it is that they may see where Captain Lindsay is – He was quite charmed with this, and said that he would also give them a half holiday. He told me that he had seen the Bishop of London’s prayer for the soldiers in the newspapers & had made several copies, which the children had learned by heart & how every morning it is said in the School by every one of them like a song all together even the little ones – I was quite pleased to hear this.‍[82]

The raree show was a kind of traveling peep show popular with rural children, which provided “an important source of information and wonder concerning the wider world.”‍[83] Although children had to wait their turn to view the transparencies, the operator enhanced the collective anticipation of the event with highly performative accompanying narrations. Anne’s intervention also reveals how such topical performances could be adapted to local circumstances and demands. Her directions to the schoolmaster and the use of civic spaces indicate that rural class structures and interests on occasion mediated the content and reception of these performances. Anne was clearly aware of the different kinds of performance that the operator delivered—a “lecture” for the servants and “a cheap exhibition” for the schoolchildren—and used her patronage to adapt each to her family’s own concerns.‍[84] In turn, the schoolmaster’s desire to communicate the innovation of a classroom morning prayer was surely calculated to engender a favorable impression.

Anne’s letter illuminates the extent to which she was prepared to intervene in local matters to ensure the family’s interests were upheld. That all the servants went to the lecture reveals the entanglement of the domestic and the public spheres, and the historical complexity of aristocratic women’s mediation of visual knowledge and education. Anne and James’s correspondence between Balcarres and London highlights their awareness of the visual economies within which their son had become a desirable subject of representation and their active concern for the meanings, makers, and audiences of these pictorial products. While James had cautioned Robert to remain modest in response to his media celebrity, Anne supported local shows that promoted the family’s wartime service and aristocratic duty to the nation. Both parents and son engaged with the war’s popular media in response to their own distinct personal and familial circumstances and expectations. However justified the press criticism of social class privilege in the Crimea, the Lindsays revised the association between their aristocratic public image and the new media of Victorian Britain. Whether by way of prints, panoramas, topographical models, or raree shows, members of the family avidly engaged and sometimes intervened in such visual shows and publications, visiting exhibitions, purchasing prints, speaking with artists, guides, and proprietors, and even funding the entrance fees for local children to attend performances.

On Not Being Photographed

To this expanding list of visual products, photography and the illustrated press can also be added. On March 28, 1855, Anne wrote to Robert with a special request:

If there should be a Photographer in the Crimea which I believe there is you might make me such an acceptable present if you would get a likeness made of yourself for me that would come come [sic] in a letter. I should like three or four copies, one for Min & one for May, and if you would have a profile and a full face done. I would willingly pay the price four times over to have them. Will you do this for me dear? You do not know how much pleasure it would give me. You might send them in three different letters. What an extraordinary fine artist the Illustrated London News has out there – His pictures are perfect poems. Some day you will look at them with the greatest interest.‍[85]

Fig. 10, Constantin Guys (designer) and once-known engraver, Our Artist on the Battle-field of Inkerman, 1854. Wood engraving. Published in Illustrated London News, February 3, 1855, 116. Artwork in the public domain; digital image © Victoria and Albert Museum.

It comes as little surprise that Anne received the Illustrated London News at Balcarres and that she appreciated the work of the unnamed illustrator, most probably the French artist Constantin Guys (1802–92). His illustrations featured prominently in the form of wood engravings in issues of the newspaper at this time and exemplified the “budding ethic” of press illustrators to “factual accuracy and disinterested reportage.”‍[86] Anne may have had in mind such recent illustrations after Guys’s sketches as “Our Artist on the Battle-field of Inkerman,” published in the February 3, 1855, issue of the Illustrated London News (fig. 10).‍[87] By projecting himself into his sketch leading a horse across the battlefield, Guys ensures his integration into the narrative of the war for attentive readers such as Anne. Her characterization of such illustrations as “perfect poems” stresses the need for visual literacy, implying that their interpretation functions within a word-and-image economy fundamental to the Victorian illustrated periodical. Anne’s comments underscore the emergent significance of the press illustrator in the production of permanent visual records that were collected, archived, and invested with personal reminiscence, often alongside photographs and other media in family scrapbooks and albums. Anne also had issues of the Illustrated London News sent to her son, which presumably comprised the “strong detachments” of engravings displayed in his hut.‍[88] Coming immediately after the reference to a photographer’s presence in the Crimea, Anne confirms the parallel relevance of other media to the tasks of public reportage and family remembrance.

Yet the primary significance of Anne’s letter resides in its directions, in terms at once beseeching and insistent, for photographic portraits of her son to be taken at the front. The order, in its dual meanings, was precise, with words underlined to stress the specifications: “three or four prints” in profile and frontal format, destined for the sisters Margaret and Mary, with payment and postal arrangements outlined to ensure compliance and safe passage. Although Anne does not identify the photographer by name, she was certainly referring to the well-connected and eminent Roger Fenton (1819–69) who had arrived three weeks earlier in the Crimea on assignment for the Manchester publishers Thomas Agnew and Sons.‍[89] That Anne was aware of Fenton’s recent arrival at the front highlights her attention to the movement of individuals back and forth from the Crimea. It seems improbable that she came to this knowledge from public sources, as Fenton’s departure was not widely publicized.‍[90] Rather, the information probably reached her through the family’s social contacts, such as with Secretary of State for War Henry Pelham Clinton, 5th Duke of Newcastle, who had arranged the photographer’s outward passage aboard a supply ship.‍[91]

In response, Robert dutifully acknowledged his mother’s request and his intention to oblige: “There is a Photographic Artist in the Camp and I will get my picture done for you.”‍[92] Much to Anne’s annoyance, however, the desired photographs never eventuated. Both sitter and photographer had potential reasons to disregard her petition. For Robert, the nature of the requested photographs might have been construed as unusual, with full-frontal and profile likenesses more akin to the conventions of identification than intimate portraiture. Given his recent recovery from dysentery, he conceivably did not wish to forward home corroborative evidence of his emaciated condition. Some support for this thesis emerged when Robert could no longer deny his physical state to his family. With the death of his father James at Genoa on December 5, 1855, Robert was granted a month’s leave to visit his family in Italy.‍[93] On January 14, 1856, Robert sent a short note to his sister Margaret, addressed from a hotel in Florence, on their imminent reunion after almost two years’ separation. Robert finally concedes his physical transformation wrought by the long campaign and, by referring to himself in the third person, an apparent self-consciousness of the discrepancy between the written accounts of his condition while on campaign and the realities of his corporeal presence:

My darling Minnie,
You will be rather astonished at an individual who will present himself shortly. I thought it best to write you a line for fear of frightening Mama by a too sudden appearance. I shall be with you in half an hour.
Your most affect[ionate] brother,
Robert J. Lindsay.‍[94]

Fig. 11, Leonida Caldesi, Major Lindsay, Grenadier Guards, 1858. Salted paper print. Royal Collection Trust, Windsor. Artwork in the public domain; digital image © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.

This note, written and sent at the latest possible moment before the family reunion, admits to years of placated concern and denial in response to inquiries about his health. It suggests that the internalization of corporeal vulnerability was a persistent state that manifested in an unease with his own appearance. Robert’s absence from Fenton’s portfolio, then, conceivably suggested a desire not to be presented as the hero of Alma and Inkerman. Even three years later, Robert’s thin build and sullen facial features are apparent in Leonida Caldesi’s (1823–91) three-quarter-length portrait of the veteran, dressed in the uniform of the Scots Fusilier Guards (fig. 11). Unusually for Caldesi, the lack of a defined space or studio furnishings and the pallid facial features and dissolution of the lower body into the expansive monochrome void intensifies the ethereal presence of a sitter seemingly prone to fade from visibility.‍[95] In addition to the near-profile, upright stance of the subject and the sharp outline of the upper torso, these visual strategies accentuate the slender frame of the sitter. Regardless of the availability of photographers in the Crimea, Robert may have had personal reasons to disregard his mother’s request so soon after his illness.‍[96]

Although Robert’s heroic appeal back home made him an attractive subject for photographic portrayal, Fenton was also restricted in his practice by finite supplies and the need to fulfill his commission. One of London’s leading art dealers, Thomas Agnew and Sons, had contracted the photographer to furnish visual source materials for a planned painting of the campaign, Thomas Jones Barker’s The Allied Generals with the Officers of Their Respective Staffs before Sebastopol (1856; private collection, London).‍[97] Fenton returned home with about 360 glass negatives, several of which provided the basis for Barker’s painting of the allied commanders and principal officers. Despite his social status and public renown, Robert was still only a recently promoted captain and thus outside the photographer’s list of portrait priorities.‍[98] His absence from Fenton’s portfolio and letters home indicates the limited military circles within which the photographer moved during his three months in the Crimea. Even if Robert had sought out the photographer, Fenton rebuffed requests for portrait sittings during his stay, seeking only those in positions of command for his portfolio.‍[99] Nonetheless, Fenton did make available a few of his photographs to an officer in the Crimea, William Pechell of the 77th Regiment, who forwarded them home in correspondence to his family.‍[100] Anne’s request was therefore not beyond realization.

After Fenton’s return to England, Agnew and Sons organized a series of exhibitions of the Crimean photographs that toured at least twenty-six venues throughout Britain.‍[101] The inaugural exhibition of 280 photographs opened at the Water Colour Society in Pall Mall, London, in September 1855.‍[102] Anne attended the exhibition soon after its opening, her frustration with the absence of her son from the portfolio all too evident in her correspondence. On October 11, 1855, Anne wrote from Grosvenor Square to Robert:

Talking of Photographs I was so angry with you for not having your Photograph done along with all the others by the man in the Crimea – They are all exhibited in Pall Mall East and the whole world goes to see them – I went full of expectation to find you – and L[ad]y Canning told me she looked evry where for you to show the Queen who has got copies of almost all of them – There are three of General Barnard. I cannot say any are very like but they have an air of the person – What a fancy little roly poly Col[onel] Pélissier is.‍[103]

By this time Robert had been stationed well over a year in the Crimea, and so his mother’s disappointment at the absence of his likeness is understandable, amplifying her sense of distress. Yet Anne’s rebuke is not simply a personal matter; she also implies that his lack of representation mattered to the networks of photographic exchange fundamental to public recognition and social position. Her statement that “the whole world goes to see them” vividly captures the public enthusiasm that greeted the exhibition.‍[104] The phrase also served to admonish her son for his exclusion from the portfolio. Anne understood that to be photographed, exhibited, and acquired, not least by Queen Victoria, was its own form of social currency.

Fig. 12, Roger Fenton, Lt. General Barnard and Staff, 1855. Salted paper print. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Artwork in the public domain; digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

By contrast with her son’s absence, Anne refers to two generals whose multiple presence in the exhibition underscored the rarified and stratified social hierarchies of the portfolio: William Henry Barnard of the Grenadier Guards and the commander of the French forces Aimable-Jean-Jacques Pélissier. Fenton dedicated several photographs to these two generals whose convivial hospitality he had enjoyed in the Crimea.‍[105] Barnard featured in the exhibition in at least three photographs and Pélissier in another five, either in single or group portraits or on horseback. Their presence was also extended through photographs of subjects associated with them such as their cavalry horse or officers under their command (fig. 12). Even granted the overwhelming preponderance of figure studies that constituted the portfolio, Barnard and Pélissier were amply represented. By referring to “those of General Barnard,” Anne tacitly acknowledged the sitter’s frequency of portrayal without specifying any portrait; no one photograph was “very like” but their collective affect left “an air of the person.” This assessment, ambiguous at best, hardly concurs with the otherwise effusive press reviews of the exhibition. Despite Fenton’s celebrity status, Anne’s failure even to record the photographer’s name in her correspondence denotes her ambivalence toward the exhibition.

Fig. 13, Roger Fenton, The Council of War Held on the Morning of the Taking of the Mamelon, 1855. Salted paper print. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Artwork in the public domain; digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Anne admits to her frustrated expectations and personal grievance, but this does not discount the acuity of her observations. On the contrary the social expectations of aristocratic motherhood attuned her to the visual politics of the era and drove her engagement with its practitioners, markets, exhibitions, and products. Anne’s brief references to Barnard and Pélissier are germane not only because their photographic proliferation contrasted with her son’s absence, but because their mode of authority implied a war of commands rather than battlefield actions. For example, Pélissier and his allied counterparts, Lord Raglan and Omar Pasha, featured together in a photograph that claimed to represent a historical event: The Council of War Held on the Morning of the Taking of the Mamelon (fig. 13).‍[106] Fenton depicts the allied commanders during a strategic meeting, the assigned title retrospectively anchoring the photograph to the morning of the attack against the Russian defense on June 7, 1855. Unlike the other photographs grouped under the category “Historical Portraits,” Agnew and Sons marketed this photograph for independent sale. Subsequent reproductions in various media affirmed its popularity as representative of the tripartite alliance.‍[107]

In an analysis of The Council of War, art historian Ulrich Keller has argued that Fenton “helps to confer to Planning a new status as an historical act worthy of pictorial commemoration” and, by doing so, “the historical moment begins to dematerialize behind constant reenactments and anticipations.”‍[108] As we have seen, Robert’s military exploits had already become the subject of numerous reenactments in popular panoramas and prints. The Council of War supplanted such visual testaments of acts of valor and instead relocated historical consequence and agency elsewhere at the generals’ quarters. Fenton’s portfolio displaced Robert twice from representation: first, as a subject of portraiture, and second, for the actions that had brought him national fame. Notwithstanding the enormous public attention to, and popularity of, the portfolio, Anne’s correspondence suggests her critical awareness of the exhibition’s limited social and representational scope.

Robert’s exclusion from Fenton’s portfolio has had profound implications on the subsequent lack of critical attention directed toward his visual role in the British reception of the Crimean War. Despite ongoing efforts to expand the material parameters of debate, Fenton’s portfolio remains the primary means through which photographic historians and curators have assessed the war. This approach has separated the photograph from other media and privileged its public circulation—as commissioned, exhibited, marketed, and purchased—ahead of the private exchanges and personal meanings of photographs.‍[109] It has also valorized the photographic object as the completed outcome of an event rather than photography as a historical subject of desires, enthusiasms, exchanges, and requests. The act of being photographed was not a benign social obligation, and especially not for a young officer aware, through private correspondence, foldout keys, and reports from home, of his newfound public status in battlefield panoramas and prints. Robert’s correspondence with his family highlights their shared investment in the emotional resonances of visual and textual materials. At its most tactile this found expression in the exchange of physical items and sketches, but the family correspondence is also replete with evocations and descriptions of all kinds of visual products, including those that were never realized. Anne’s disappointment at the absence of her son’s likeness at the exhibition was a measure of the degree to which such encounters with photographs mattered in the mediation of absence and social status.

Conclusion

By examining the Lindsays’ sustained engagement with the broad mediascape of the Crimean War, this article has foregrounded their creative participation in, and critical interrogation of, its visual materials, audiences, and responses. Far from being passive, individual recipients or heroic subjects of these popular images, the Lindsays scrutinized the meanings and claims of veracity that accrued to these products and asserted their agency as the arbiters of their representation. Their authority resided not in the denial or dismissal of popular visual forms and spectacular urban displays but in their vigilant participation in its products that ultimately disputed any meanings divorced from their own evaluations and investments. Nor was this participation restricted to belated, secondary recodings of representations in public circulation; they sketched, commissioned, displayed, and shared their own pictorial materials and, through their extensive correspondence, informed and encouraged each other in these associative visual practices and appraisals. Pictures accrued meanings specific to their new conditions, binding sender and recipient in mutual forms of intimacy and affection. Rather than relinquishing their son to the mass spectacles and national agendas of heroic masculinity, the Lindsays demonstrated a sustained and sophisticated comprehension of its mechanisms of representation and questioned its makers, consumers, and markets. By so doing, the family affirmed their collective arbitration of the war’s visual meanings and legacies.