Depictions and Images of War in Edwardian Newspapers, 1899-1914 (review)

This book contributes significantly to the debate on how far cultural explanations may account for Britain's entry into the First World War, including the mass popular enthusiasm for war displayed in 1914. Taking evidence from the South African Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902, and the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905, plus the four British expeditions into Somaliland, 1901-1904, Younghusband's Tibet Expedition, 1903-1904, the Turco-Italian War, 1911-1912 and the First and Second Balkan Wars, 1912- 1913, Wilkinson examines how the major British newspapers, supplemented by a range of popular and local dailies and weeklies, presented warfare to their readers, examining these newspapers in their entirety, including reporting by war correspondents, editorialising, photographs and illustrations, and even cartoons and newspaper advertisements..

The book's perhaps surprising conclusion is that newspaper depiction of all these wars was highly uniform. With few exceptions, almost regardless of the newspaper's political stance and class market, of whether the war involved British participation, or whether the depiction came from the prose of a reporter or the visual imagery of an advertisement, the result tended in all cases to accentuate war's positive and attractive aspects while using euphemism and metaphor to distance the reader from its unpleasant realities. In support of this thesis, Wilkinson devotes a short chapter each to five main themes. First is the newspaper portrayal of belligerents, in which he concludes that British troops were depicted as carrying out a civilising mission, and other nations were judged by the extent to which they conformed to the British model. The next chapter, examining the depiction of the use of force, concludes that newspapers portrayed violence in war as a natural and desirable activity, beneficial to the rejuvenation of the British race and comparable to the enforcement of law or justice. The third—and best—chapter shows the very wide use of sporting imagery, including the priceless nugget that upper-class newspapers were more likely to employ foxhunting metaphors, while downmarket newspapers used imagery from angling, then rising in urban working-class popularity. Next Wilkinson considers the distancing effect of the metaphor of war as theatre, and imagery drawn from play-acting and spectacle. Finally he discusses images of death and wounding, arguing that newspapers glossed over the brutal and destructive nature of war with euphemistic language and stylised visual depictions.

At best, Wilkinson's analysis is thought-provoking, despite his own often opaque prose style. But some of his arguments appear very forced, such as the newspaper line "the war has begun dramatically" (p. 95) bearing interpretation as a theatrical metaphor, or that the description of a battlefield as an "abattoir" can be linked to the late Victorian establishment of regulated abattoirs rather than home killing of meat, and so is evidence of reporters hiding the reality of death in battle. One of his problems is a lack of a wider perspective, attributing solely to Edwardian Britain views that have a more general circulation: e.g., he does not recognise "last argument of kings" (p. 44) as a quotation. Another is the absence of any discussion of how the British public received or interpreted these newspaper descriptions of war, and the real attitudes of soldiers in 1914-1918. In the debate between cultural theorists and military historians over the nature and imaginative perception of the First World War, Wilkinson's claim that "It is this 'imagining' that is important," so that "what modern revisionist historians now see as the 'reality' of real soldiers" (p. 11) may be ignored, places him at the far extreme of the cultural camp. This dismissive attitude has resulted in a number of errors, perhaps inevitably. Some of these are merely unfortunate, such as his invention of an entire Highland division fleeing in panic at the battle of Magersfontein. But others severely weaken the book's argument, among them the assertion that newspapers represented...