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Camp Life: News Pictures of Military Men and Domesticity in British and French Imperial Armies c.1870 to c.1900

Contribution and context: The chapter contributes to a book about representation of both high- and low-intensity military conflict which uses analytical frameworks beyond the paradigm of trauma and its repression and return. Gretton looks not at oppositional or alternative practices, but at mainstream illustrated magazines ‘of record’ before the irruption of photography into mass media. This essay looks not at battle pictures in these titles, but at military genre, at the imagery of camp life, meals, games and other homosocial leisure activities on campaign in Madagascar, Egypt or South Africa. The consideration of these campaigns of Gretton’s essay extended the geographical reach of the volume.

Research imperatives and process: Systematic studies of the iconographical preferences of these magazines are rare, and this essay explores them as a crucial ideological underpinning of 19th-century imperialism. Drawing on an extensive archive, it offers a comprehensive comparative survey of this aspect of the reporting of British and French imperial wars, rather than concentrating on particular incidents or campaigns. The work and the extent of Empire was represented in these magazines overwhelmingly through the reporting of wars and campaigns: how in these circumstances of violence and destruction, to represent Empire as civilisation? The theme of men grooming, relaxing, playing games or eating meals, men tending their wounded fellows or paying respect to the fallen functioned to represent the spread of empire as the spread both of civilisation and of civilised domesticity, thus promising a future in which imperial peace will map gendered roles neatly both onto sexes and onto races.