Abstract
Mary Howarth’s short story ‘The Telegram,’ published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1896, is unusual as it is a piece of fiction illustrated by a series of photographs that were interspersed with the letterpress. The story begins with two friends by a cosy fireside: Horace Keith, whose father owns the (fictional) radical daily the Meteor; and Laurence Morris, a painter who is about to depart on a commission to paint a portrait of the Prime Minister. The portrait has been delayed as the Prime Minister has been ill and Keith asks Morris to telegram him immediately should the Prime Minister die so the Meteor can run the exclusive. Keith’s father, the owner of the paper, is the Prime Minister’s estranged half brother and, by coincidence, is also in Brighton having just finished a rather spiteful obituary of the Prime Minister before leaving London. Horace Keith receives the telegram from his artist friend Morris saying the Prime Minister is dead and so runs the obituary by his father in a special edition. However, the telegram has been mistranscribed and the Prime Minister and Keith’s father are at that moment resolving their differences in Brighton. Laurence Morris, having finished his portrait, returns to London and, seeing the notices of the Prime Minister’s death, quickly realises the error. When the news of the Prime Minister’s supposed death reaches Brighton, Horace Keith’s father realises that his spiteful obituary of his brother will have been published and, feeling that he has betrayed him, rushes back to the Prime Minister’s hotel. Luckily, the Prime Minister died shortly after Keith’s father had departed, and so passed away oblivious to the debacle.1
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Notes
Mary Howarth, ‘The Telegram’, Pall Mall Magazine, 6, July 1895, pp. 355–64.
For the Strand Magazine see Reginald Pound, The Strand Magazine 1891–1950 (London: Heinemann 1966)
Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain 1880–1910 (Aldershot: Ashgate 2001).
See David Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States, 1880–1960 (London: British Library 1997).
See Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2005).
For instance see Roy M. MacLeod, ‘The “Bankruptcy of Science” Debate: the “Creed of Science” and Its Critics, 1885–1900’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 7, 1982, pp. 2–15.
Margaret Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden (London: Macmillan 1990), pp. 19–32.
Margaret Beetham, ‘Open and Closed: the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 22, 1989, p. 99.
Mark Turner, ‘Periodical Time in the Nineteenth Century’, Media History, 8, 2002, p. 191.
For the notion of abundance see Ronald Schleiffer, Modernism and Time: the Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000).
Turner 2002, p. 193 and Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910 (London: Palgrave 2001), pp. 11–26.
See for instance Jeff Wright, ‘The Myth of the Mirror’, British Journalism Review, 14, 2003, pp. 59–66.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘Victorian Observing Practices, Printing Technology, and Representations of the Solar Corona (I): the 1860s and 1870s’, Journal of the History of Astronomy, 25, 1994, p. 267.
A.C. Ranyard, ‘On the Distribution of the Stars in the Milky Way’, Knowledge, 13 July 1890, pp. 174–75.
This was controversial. See Mussell 2007, pp. 42–55 and William Sheehan, The Immortal Fire Within: The Life and Work of Edward Emerson Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995).
E.A. Butler, ‘The Common Flea. II’, Knowledge, 13 January 1890, p. 41–43.
John Plunkett, ‘Celebrity and Community: The Poetics of the Carte-de-visite’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 8, 2003, p. 68.
Isobel Armstrong, ‘The Microscope: Mediations of the Sub-Visible World’, in Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2002), pp. 30–54.
Edward H. Robertson, ‘Gossip about Foraminifera’, Science-Gossip, 25 January 1889, p. 13.
Mary B. Morris, ‘Jottings Concerning Certain Fruit Trees. Part VI–The Chestnut Tree’, Science-Gossip, 26, April 1890, p. 80.
Ranyard 1890, p. 174. He repeats this claim when he returns to the subject the following year. See A.C. Ranyard, ‘The Milky Way in the Southern Hemisphere’, Knowledge, 14, 1891, p. 50.
H.G. Wells, ‘Popularising Science’, Nature, 50, 26 July 1894, p. 301.
For a similar argument using the same language see Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (London: Walter Scott 1892), pp. 9–15.
Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain 1880–1910 (London: Ashgate 2001), p. 116
Reginald Pound, The Strand Magazine 1891–1950 (London: Heinemann 1966), p. 64.
William G. Fitz Gerald, ‘Illustrated Interviews. No. 1. Sir Howard Grubb, FRS, FRAS, Etc, Etc’, Strand Magazine, 12 October 1896, pp. 369–81.
William G. Fitzgerald, ‘Some Wonders of the Microscope’, Strand, 12, August 1896, p. 210.
Alfred W. Porter, B.Sc., ‘The New Photography’, Strand, 12 July 1896, pp. 107–117.
Julie F. Codell, ‘The Aura of Mechanical Reproduction: Victorian Art and the Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 24, 1991, p. 6.
Especially in portraiture, as much of the late nineteenth-century photographic press will reveal. See for instance John Werge, ‘Three Aspects of Photography. Part 3. The Future’, The Practical Photographer, 4, December 1893, p. 312.
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Mussell, J. (2009). Science and the Timeliness of Reproduced Photographs in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press. In: Brake, L., Demoor, M. (eds) The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230233867_12
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