Dickens Quarterly

This is an exemplary study of a thoroughly specialized subject. Its achievement is to combine prodigious authority in its field with continual reaching out to broader fields and to a broader, nonspecialist readership. Unlike a few of the sources it quotes, seemingly bent on identifying angels dancing on the head of various pins conjured up by the institution of nineteenth century media studies, it sails confidently past the pitfalls of the tendency in contemporary humanities research to overspecialize, and provides us with a broad, coherent, enjoyable narrative account of its subject.

"Special correspondence," it becomes clear in the introduction, is a distinctive feature of the period that the book delimits. In a certain sense, [End Page 277] it is pre-technological, occupying a space prior to the widespread use of the telegraph in the reporting of domestic and foreign use that begins in 1870 with the Franco-Prussian war, though with considerable justification Waters considers "special correspondence" itself as a form of technology. Its cover bears a satiric image of the doyen of the specials, W. H. Russell, hero of the Crimea, the American Civil War, and many other assignments, riding through a "valley of death" of exploding shells as he writes his report of the battle on the back of his horse. But as Waters demonstrates, if war correspondence was the most celebrated (and dangerous: then as now, reporters might be killed, as Edmund O'Donovan was in Sudan in 1883) form of "special correspondence," there were many others to turn a hand to in times of peace. She details travel, royalty, technological innovation and other Home News amongst these, and devotes a chapter to each.

The term that is used by Waters to characterize the distinctive specialness of "special correspondence" is "word-painting," taken over from contemporary commentary on the genre. It denotes a style of impressionistic fine writing whose vividness aims at creating an illusion of presence, in order to invite the reader to participate vicariously in the scenes witnessed at first hand by the journalist himself. Through its aperture we have a first opening out to broader issues, here specifically literary and narrative ones, and it can be loosely subsumed under the broad umbrella of the aesthetics of realism. "Special correspondence" aims to amuse and entertain or provide memorable aesthetic experience as well as to instruct. But, just as painting gives ground to photography in the later nineteenth century, word-painting is also increasingly marginalized at the expense of writing that privileges the conveying of "information" over personal impressions.

Waters' choice of specific examples to illustrate the various subgenres of special correspondence, as well as her judicious use of quotation throughout, is well-nigh impeccable. The saga of the unsuccessful laying of the Atlantic telegraph cable in the chapter "Technology and Innovation" is followed in a degree of detail that is thoroughly justified, both by the aim of demonstrating the uneven, one step forward, two steps back introduction of new technology in the period, and by another aspect of that reaching out beyond the sphere of academically specialized discussion that characterizes the book. I am thinking here of its stress on the way in which special correspondence ushers in the modern sociological phenomenon of the habit of armchair consumption of news stories, as in her quotation from the Saturday Review: "the course of the adventure had been watched with the same anxious interest with which a nation awaits the reports of a pending battle, or the bulletins from the sick-bed of a man whom the public cannot spare" (84). The story of the mistaking of specials for Prussian spies during the Franco-Prussian war is another first-rate example, this time offering vicarious fun rather than anxiety [End Page 278] and frustration, as the special artist William Simpson evades suspicion by using cigarette papers for his sketches of the scene and then smoking them, if need be, in...