Vengeance Touched with Ambivalence: Reporting and Re-Reporting the Mutiny in The Times, Punch, and the Illustrated London News

Press coverage of the Indian Rebellion of 1857/58 captured British imaginations with its reports of calamities, atrocities and self-sacrifice. It was also one of the first wars to rely heavily upon regular on-the-spot reportage. Mass circulation images and impressions of the Rebellion which were intended for the middling classes were not limited to text: the events of 1857-58 featured prominently in the sketches carried in the pages of the Illustrated London News and the cartoons published in Punch. The combination of mixed media, an emerging mass market, and the appearance of immediacy produced a very different journalistic environment from what had been experienced by earlier generations.

The Rebellion coincided with one of the major imperial crises of the nineteenth century. Vivid and impassioned writings bolstered Victorian tendencies of viewing their empire in largely militaristic and gendered terms. Pictures in the Illustrated London News reasserted these militaristic themes as well as helping to embed them more firmly within an environment that came to be both familiar and exotic to its viewers. A fascination with the news coming from India was also a feature of Punch during this period. The depiction of rebel leaders, the Rani of Jhansi in particular, is frequently ambivalent: in her case, analogies are often drawn to Joan of Arc. Fitting the Rani of Jhansi into this narrative landscape was a challenge for contemporary writers and illustrators. A comparison of how particular moments in the Rebellion were treated in The Times with the visual images and accompanying text in the Illustrated London News and Punch will allow us to probe more deeply into the imperial context in which they were operating, and thereby help draw out the characteristics of an imperial culture that was simultaneously enabled and constrained by the critiques made of it.