Abstract
The Victorian special correspondent was distinguished by his mobility, readiness to be despatched and liability to turn up anywhere in order to provide eye-witness accounts of unseen places and events to readers seated comfortably at home. George Augustus Sala was identified by his contemporaries as the ‘chief of travelled specials’ and therefore forms the focus of this chapter. Moving from a consideration of Sala’s apprenticeship under Dickens on Household Words, it goes on to examine the special correspondence he sent to the Daily Telegraph from many parts of the world, including America, Algeria, and a host of European countries, and considers the ways in which it sought to provide readers with an experience of armchair travel that could surpass the value of an actual journey.
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Notes
- 1.
Charles Pebody, English Journalism and the Men Who Have Made It (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin and Co., 1882), p. 142.
- 2.
‘The Pen in Wartime’, Western Mail, 26 April 1877, 3. The Australasian made a similar point when Sala toured down under in 1885: ‘Mr Sala has every right to be a member of the Travellers’ Club – even to be its president. He has never been to Khiva, like poor Fred Burnaby [special correspondent in Soudan for the Times in 1885], nor through Africa, like Stanley, but of the civilised world he has visited most parts.’ ‘Town News’, Australasian, 21 March 1885, 572.
- 3.
See Catherine Waters, ‘RSVP 2009 Robert L. Colby Scholarly Book Prize Lecture “Much of Sala, and but Little of Russia”: “A Journey Due North,” Household Words, and the Birth of a Special Correspondent’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 42 (2009), 305–23.
- 4.
Ralph Straus, Sala: The Portrait of an Eminent Victorian (London: Constable, 1942), p. 121.
- 5.
[Walter Bagehot,] ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’, National Review (October 1855), 253–84, 256.
- 6.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
- 7.
Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–14, p. 5.
- 8.
Clare Pettitt, ‘Exploration in Print: From the Miscellany to the Newspaper’, in Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World, ed. Dane Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 80–108, p. 82.
- 9.
Pettitt, pp. 82–3.
- 10.
See Catherine Waters, ‘Dickens’s “Young Men”, Household Words and the Development of the Victorian “Special Correspondent”’, in Reflections on/of Dickens, ed. Ewa Kujawska-Lis and Anna Krawczyk-Laskarzewska (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), pp. 18–31.
- 11.
Richard Whiteing, My Harvest (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), p. 73.
- 12.
George R. Sims, My Life: Sixty Years’ Recollections of Bohemian London (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1917), p. 327.
- 13.
P. D. Edwards, Dickens’s ‘Young Men’: George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates and the World of Victorian Journalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), p. 103.
- 14.
‘Jupiter Junior’, Saturday Review, 28 March 1863, 400-02, 401. According to T. H. S. Escott, Charles Austin coined the term ‘Jupiter Junior’ for the Daily Telegraph and thus may be the author of this article. T. H. S. Escott, Masters of English Journalism: A Study of Personal Forces (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911), pp. 120–21.
- 15.
‘Sala’s Rome and Venice’, Saturday Review, 15 May 1869, 655–56, 655.
- 16.
[George A. Sala,] ‘A Journey Due North: Gostinnoi-Dvor. The Great Bazaar’, Household Words, 22 November 1856, 445–53, 447.
- 17.
Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 40.
- 18.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 416.
- 19.
[Sala,] ‘A Journey Due North: Gostinnoi-Dvor’, 446.
- 20.
Edwards; Peter Blake, George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: The Personal Style of a Public Writer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015).
- 21.
[Sala,] ‘A Journey Due North: Gostinnoi-Dvor’, 452.
- 22.
‘Sala’s Journey Due North’, Saturday Review, 11 September 1858, 262–63, 262.
- 23.
‘A Journey Due North. Being Notes of a Residence in Russia in the Summer of 1856. By George Augustus Sala. (Bentley)’, Literary Gazette, 21 August 1858, 233–35, 233.
- 24.
Edwards, p. 108.
- 25.
Robert Dingley, ‘Introduction’, in The Land of the Golden Fleece: George Augustus Sala in Australia and New Zealand in 1885, ed. Robert Dingley (Canberra: Mulini Press, 1995), pp. vii–xxvi, p. ix.
- 26.
Straus, p. 171.
- 27.
‘My Diary in America in the Midst of the War’, Saturday Review, 13 May 1865, 573–74, 573.
- 28.
From Our Special Commissioner, ‘America in the Midst of War’, Daily Telegraph, 15 March 1864, 5.
- 29.
‘America in the Midst of War’, 15 March 1864, 5. Sala would return to the subject of boots and shoes in his correspondence from Bau Farik, where he complained about the impossibility of keeping his feet cool: ‘Try the lightest shoes, the thinnest elastics, the breeziest Alberts, the softest white jean bottines of the tropics, and on the cruel sands or the crueller dusty or sandy roads of Numidia your unhappy hoofs will broil, and bake, and fry, and at last calcine.’ From Our Special Correspondent , ‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, Daily Telegraph , 17 May 1865, 5–6, 5.
- 30.
‘From Waterloo to the Peninsula’, Saturday Review, 12 January 1867, 55–56, 55.
- 31.
George Augustus Sala, My Diary in America in the Midst of War, 2 vols (London: Tinsley, 1865), 1: p. 13. Italics in the original.
- 32.
‘America in the Midst of War’, 15 March 1864, 5.
- 33.
‘America in the Midst of War’, 15 March 1864, 5.
- 34.
From Our Special Commissioner, ‘America in the Midst of War’, Daily Telegraph, 17 March 1864, 5.
- 35.
‘My Diary in America in the Midst of War. By George Augustus Sala’, Athenaeum, 28 January 1865, 117–18, 118.
- 36.
Peter Blake, ‘George Augustus Sala and the English Middle-Class View of America’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 9 (2009), 1–23.
- 37.
‘America in the Midst of War’, 17 March 1864, 5.
- 38.
‘America in the Midst of War’, 17 March 1864, 5.
- 39.
Marysa Demoor, ‘Waterloo as a Small “Realm of Memory”: British Writers, Tourism, and the Periodical Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48 (2015), 453–68, 455.
- 40.
‘My Diary in America in the Midst of the War’, 573.
- 41.
Straus, p. 176.
- 42.
[George A. Sala,] ‘Yadacé’ , Household Words, 5 May 1855, 319–23, 319.
- 43.
George Augustus Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala (London: Cassell and Company, 1896), pp. 410–11.
- 44.
George Augustus Sala, A Trip to Barbary by a Roundabout Route (London: Tinsley, 1866), p. 1.
- 45.
Sala, A Trip to Barbary, p. 2.
- 46.
‘Algeria’, Pall Mall Gazette, 1 June 1865, 4. From Our Own Correspondent, ‘Foreign Intelligence: France’, Daily Telegraph, 6 May 1865, 5. Significantly, all of the special correspondence concerning the Emperor’s Algerian visit that was reprinted in the provincial press seems to be Sala’s.
- 47.
Sala, A Trip to Barbary, p. 16.
- 48.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, Daily Telegraph, 2 May 1865, 7.
- 49.
‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, 2 May 1865, 7.
- 50.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, Daily Telegraph, 4 May 1865, 5–6.
- 51.
‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, 4 May 1865, 6.
- 52.
‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, 4 May 1865, 6.
- 53.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1865, 7.
- 54.
‘A Trip to Barbary’, Saturday Review, 23 December 1865, 792–93, 792.
- 55.
‘A Trip to Barbary by a Roundabout Route, by George Augustus Sala (Tinsley Brothers)’, Athenaeum, 30 December 1865, 918–19, 918. Sala’s chosen title may also reflect a general debt to Thackeray (whose ‘Roundabout Papers’ appeared in the Cornhill Magazine), as discussed in Chap. 1.
- 56.
‘Sala’s Rome and Venice’, 655.
- 57.
‘From Waterloo to the Peninsula’, 56.
- 58.
‘A Trip to Barbary by a Roundabout Route, by George Augustus Sala (Tinsley Brothers)’, 918.
- 59.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, Daily Telegraph, 15 May 1865, 5.
- 60.
‘London, Thursday, May 11’, Daily Telegraph, 11 May 1865, 4.
- 61.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, Daily Telegraph, 2 June 1865, 7–8, 7.
- 62.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, Daily Telegraph, 6 June 1865, 5.
- 63.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, Daily Telegraph, 19 June 1865, 7–8, 7.
- 64.
‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, 2 June 1865, 7.
- 65.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, Daily Telegraph, 10 May 1865, 7–8, 7.
- 66.
It would take another century for independence to be achieved.
- 67.
‘A Trip to Barbary by a Roundabout Route, by George Augustus Sala (Tinsley Brothers)’, 918.
- 68.
Edwards, p. 111.
- 69.
‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, 2 June 1865, 7.
- 70.
Edwards, p. 111.
- 71.
‘A Trip to Barbary’, 792.
- 72.
‘From Waterloo to the Peninsula’, 55.
- 73.
[George A. Sala,] ‘A Journey Due North: I Pass the Custom-House and Take My First Russian Walk’, Household Words, 25 October 1856, 348–55, 351.
- 74.
‘The Emperor’s Visit to Algeria’, 19 June 1865, 7.
- 75.
‘A Trip to Barbary’, 792.
- 76.
‘Rome and Venice, with Other Wanderings in Italy, in 1866–7. By George Augustus Sala (Tinsley Brothers)’, Athenaeum, 15 May 1869, 659–60, 659.
- 77.
Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, p. 435.
- 78.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘The Austrians in Venice’, Daily Telegraph, 27 April 1866, 5.
- 79.
Dingley, p. xxi.
- 80.
‘The Austrians in Venice’, 27 April 1866, 5.
- 81.
‘The Austrians in Venice’, 27 April 1866, 5.
- 82.
‘The Austrians in Venice’, 27 April 1866, 5.
- 83.
Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala , p. 438.
- 84.
By Our Special Correspondent, ‘From Trieste to Vienna’, Daily Telegraph, 10 May 1866, 5.
- 85.
‘From Trieste to Vienna’, 10 May 1866, 5.
- 86.
Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 413.
- 87.
‘Rome and Venice, with Other Wanderings in Italy, in 1866–7. By George Augustus Sala (Tinsley Brothers)’, 659.
- 88.
Edwards, p. 102.
- 89.
From Our Special Correspondent, ‘Entry of the King of Italy into Venice’, Daily Telegraph, 12 November 1866, 5.
- 90.
‘Entry of the King of Italy into Venice’, 12 November 1866, 5.
- 91.
Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala , p. 174.
- 92.
‘Sala’s Rome and Venice’ , 655. Sala himself claimed that the contents represented ‘scarcely a fourth part of [his] original correspondence’. George Augustus Sala, Rome and Venice, with Other Wanderings in Italy, in 1866–7 (London: Tinsley, 1869), p. v.
- 93.
‘Rome and Venice, with Other Wanderings in Italy, in 1866–7. By George Augustus Sala (Tinsley Brothers)’, 659.
- 94.
PENNA, ‘George Augustus Sala’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 April 1885, 8.
- 95.
The phrase comes from a review of Sala’s Dutch Pictures . ‘Dutch Pictures with Some Sketches in the Flemish Manner. By George Augustus Sala’. Athenaeum, 12 October 1861, 470–72, 472.
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Waters, C. (2019). Armchair Travel. In: Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850–1886. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03861-8_2
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