The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography: Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China 9780773558052

Table of contents :
Cover
THE GLOBAL FLOWS OF EARLY SCOTTISH PHOTOGRAPHY
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Titles, Dates, and Transliterations
Introduction
1 At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk
2 A Wilderness of One’s Own
3 Upriver and Down
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Citation preview

THE GLOBAL FLOWS OF EARLY SCOTTISH PHOTOGRAPHY

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Martha Langford and Sandra Paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peerreviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered. The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet

Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong

Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney

Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth

I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada Kristina Huneault

Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena Howard Shubert For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Erin Morton Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 Anne Whitelaw Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World Edited by Martha Langford Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney

The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China Anthony W. Lee

THE GLOBAL FLOWS OF EARLY SCOTTISH PHOTOGRAPHY Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China

anthony w. lee

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston

London

Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019 isbn 978-0-7735-5713-0 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-5805-2 (epdf) Legal deposit second quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the support of Mount Holyoke College.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The global flows of early Scottish photography : encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China / Anthony W. Lee. Names: Lee, Anthony W., 1960– author. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history. Description: Series statement: McGillQueen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190054719 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190054794 | isbn 9780773557130 (hardcover) | isbn 9780773558052 (epdf) Subjects: lcsh: Photography—Scotland— History—19th century. | lcsh: Photographers—Scotland—History—19th century. | lcsh: Photography—Technique—History—19th century. | lcsh: Globalization—History—19th century. | lcsh: Scotland—Pictorial works. | lcsh: Canada—Pictorial works. | lcsh: China— Pictorial works. Classification: lcc tr61 .l44 2019 | ddc 770.941109/034—dc23

For Catherine I know where love lives

CONTENTS

Titles, Dates, and Transliterations xi Introduction 3

1 At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk 11 2 A Wilderness of One’s Own 93 3 Upriver and Down 181 Conclusion 286 Acknowledgments 291 Notes 295 Index 327

TITLES, DATES, AND TRANSLITERATIONS

Many of the images that appear in this book either were untitled or had several titles during the photographers’ lifetimes, making naming them a less-than-straightforward affair. To complicate matters, the institutions that now hold the prints have frequently assigned new titles. In the captions, I have followed the conventions of the lending institution. The same goes for the dates, and therefore, readers will occasionally note discrepancies in the titling and dating (including, sometimes, no dates affixed at all) of closely related works. In chapter 3, as much as possible, I have followed the pinyin system of romanization of Chinese words, as opposed to Wade-Giles or other makeshift versions frequently used during the nineteenth century (for example, “Fuzhou” instead of “Foochow,” “Guangzhou” instead of “Canton”). The exceptions are when I refer to an original passage or title (Foochow and the River Min instead of Fuzhou and Minjiang). In certain cases I use the original romanization followed by the pinyin version in parentheses.

THE GLOBAL FLOWS OF EARLY SCOTTISH PHOTOGRAPHY

I.1 William Notman, Skating Carnival, Victoria Rink, Montreal, qc, 1870, n-0000.116.21.1, McCord Museum, Montreal

INTRODUCTION

In early 1870, the Scots-Canadian photographer William Notman put an ad in a Montreal newspaper announcing a new project. Queen Victoria’s third son, Prince Arthur, was being stationed in the city to fulfill his military duty in the local rifles brigade, and a costumed skating carnival – the sort of winter event that society Montrealers revelled in – was being staged in his honour. Never one to turn down the chance for profit, Notman thought the whole thing was an opportunity to make a large commemorative picture, something suitable as a souvenir for the many who would attend. But there were practical problems. Although he had a big glass plate camera and a full set of lenses, the exposure was agonizingly slow; and the ambition to photograph people actually skating was mostly out of the question. Furthermore, although it could swallow a large space with a wide-angled lens, the camera could still not comfortably accommodate the number of Montrealers he thought might attend. If the lights at the rink were exceptionally bright and he was lucky with the emulsion and shutter, he might be able concoct a half-usable image that he could crop, but not without sacrifice. Some skaters would inevitably fall out of focus, others would be halfhidden, and still others might be caught in blurred or graceless poses as they stumbled this way and that across the ice. But what if he invited them to the studio, took their pictures as if they were in elegant motion, and collaged each and every one of them, flatteringly, into a composite photograph? Certainly the plan was gimmicky, and it required his full army of assistants to carry it off – but it was also strikingly novel. The approaching carnival at the Skating rink is likely to be one of more than ordinary interest from the fact that His Royal Highness Prince Arthur is expected to grace the occasion with his presence. I have therefore selected this opportunity as one offering many advantages, to carry out what has long been my intention; To get up an effective picture of the rink, for which purpose I beg to request that you will give me a sitting, before or soon after the event as possible, in the Costume you intend to use on the occasion.1

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Whatever expectation Notman might have had, the turnout surely surpassed it. More than 150 people showed up at the studio – the lines must have been out the door; this, in miserably cold February – and the result was a scene the photographer could only have dreamed of. The men and women heeded his call and came in peculiar costumes: as Elizabethan ladies, pilgrims, Greek goddesses, Russian peasants, Turkish soldiers, British sailors, hardscrabble fur trappers, an Aboriginal shooting a bow and arrow (in the final photo, at lower right), a woman straight out of a Dutch painting (off to the left), a man looking for all the world like a sitter for Frans Hals (at the far right), a French habitant (at left-centre in the middle distance, a bold gesture in Quebec), and others dressed in characters from their favourite Shakespeare play. In the composite picture, they all skated with style and polish; they remained tightly massed but did not obscure, and they were each most definitely in focus. Only the poor prince and his retinue, at the far left, remained soberly dressed. What he thought of all the primping and make-believe in both the composite and the actual event is hard to say – he left no account of either, and his portrait has a notably bored look – though the eccentricity and occasional lunacy of upper-crust airs must have struck some wry note. What Notman thought is equally unknown – what his assistants thought can be guessed: Greek goddesses frolicking in the Canadian winter, their lips turning blue? madness! – but the picture brought a handsome profit, and it would spur him to a long line of other composites. He derived an enormous income from them and, although an immigrant barely more than ten years in the city, sealed his reputation as the photographer of Montreal society. Among the skaters there was no shortage of men in tartans and kilts. One makes eyes at a Scottish lass in the immediate foreground; another shows off his skating skills to a young blonde in the middle distance on the right; and a third peers around the corner at the far right, taking in the spectacle before him and spying where the warrior will land his love arrow. To judge by the strange demographic, they were outnumbered in the foreground only by Elizabethan courtiers. But even more Scots dot the crowd behind – they must not have paid enough or were not deemed important enough to get a front row – and it’s clear they have all washed their clothes and learned how to wrap the great cloak, pin the polished brooch, and dangle the fancy sporran just so. They were Scotsmen come to rub elbows with the prince, after all, and it wouldn’t be proper to be thought of as sloppy or inexpert. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, they were arriviste Montrealers garbed in the most clichéd guises associated with British identities. Especially in the case of

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Introduction

the Highlander outfit, they dressed as characters that had come to be prized in the provinces as recognizably imperial. this book is about the interplay between the uses of “Scottishness” and the forces of globalization as it shaped and was shaped by photography over a thirty-year period. It considers three sets of photographers: first, the pioneering Edinburgh partnership of D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson; then two Montreal-based practitioners and Canada’s first great photographers, Notman and Alexander Henderson; and finally, the globe-trotting Hong Kong- and London-based John Thomson and also some of his Chinese contemporaries. Given the photographers’ origins – with the exception of the Chinese, all were born and raised in the Scottish Lowlands – and also given this book’s title, there is something a little perverse about a study that begins by introducing a zany picture like Notman’s, in which Scottishness is linked to a mad spectacle, and puts into immediate doubt its central motif as nothing more than a haberdasher’s dream. So perhaps I ought to explain straightaway my concerns, which are, I think, best conveyed by a little closer scrutiny of the key words in the title. As the lineup of photographers suggests, the book begins in but pushes out from Scotland to places along the imperial trail in a “global flow,” ending in the far reaches of the British empire at the edge of China.2 Thus the book is about aspects of nineteenth-century globalization and early photography’s relation to it. I refer to the great movements of people, both voluntary and involuntary; the felt interconnectedness between different parts of the globe through new means of communication, travel, and – with the camera – visualization; and the seepage of knowledge, culture, and capital across international borders by means of trade, diplomacy, and violence. To these more general subjects, we can add others concerning the photographers at hand: the historical developments concerning migration to and from a modernizing Scotland; the expansion of British trade and trading practices as part of an emerging Victorian world order; the dispersal of a particular set of Western camera habits and photographic ideas; and, perhaps most importantly, the economic and cultural impact on ordinary people who were touched by the forces of British-style imperialism. Of these, it is the last that is, for me, most interesting and informative. The “ordinary people” included the sturdy fishermen and fisherwomen in the towns ringing Edinburgh, the hardscrabble immigrants and settlers of Lower Canada, and the peasants and migrants along the rivers and coastlines of China. That’s to say, as much as the book is about Scottish photographers and their work, it is equally about the

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encounters with others and the effects of those on pictures. Getting anywhere near the complexity and also the productivity of those encounters will involve elaborating in some detail the character and quality of the relations between very different kinds of people. And so, in addition to interpreting pictures, the chapters spend considerable time unpacking the social and economic lives of the people the photographers met, and comparing and contrasting the impact of worldwide trade in different parts of an empire. The chapters raise and assess the various migrants’ experiences and, equally, measure those experiences in light of economic opportunities, social restrictions, cultural conflicts, and the call of “home.” In no way passive subjects to the photographers’ gaze, the people represent something like a reverse pressure on the forces of imperial globalization, of populations that had their own needs and answered back.3 My charge is to connect picture-making and cultural encounter as more than a simple correspondence. In fact, I will come to argue that the people’s presence and pushback were much more than merely incidental to the photographers’ projects and helped to structure some of early photography’s most innovative work. I look at some of the photographers’ key projects: Hill and Adamson’s sundry pictures of the fisherfolk, a hunting series by Notman, an early set of landscape views by Henderson, and two very rare books by Thomson – though I should say immediately that, although valued and canonical today, they were probably not the ones the photographers themselves would have nominated as their signature works. In all these, I am concerned with works that were not part of the photographers’ daily routines and therefore did not so easily get smoothed over by habit, or when the struggle to represent did not too quickly succumb to a comfortable pattern. Or, to put it another way, we will look at photographic projects in which the challenges to belief systems, prevailing attitudes, or orthodox points of view were more apparent, and when the strategies the photographers usually adopted were laid a little more threadbare. The question of how the photographers accommodated the points of view or experiences of others recurs, and we will have recourse to seeing them as an affect or sometimes a disturbance in normal practices. More than a few times, I will think of these things as “seismic,” in the way that the movement of the ground, though largely unseen, can be everywhere felt. This is not intended as a new methodology of photographic interpretation but rather a simple, graphic, perhaps even familiar shorthand to think historically about pictures. It will come in especially handy when thinking about how the points of view or experiences of others informed photographs that ostensibly have no “others” in them. Interpreting in such a way requires that we remain ever more vigilant about the contexts within which pictures were made, in which indirect forces had very direct effects.

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Introduction

While “global flows” can be a capacious category, with “Scottish” one can be a little more specific. As the events at the skating rink might suggest, “Scottish” is in no way meant as a description of the essential nature or vital characteristics of actual Scots, still less of an absolute or enduring aspect of camerawork coming out of Scotland. Rather, it refers to an imaginary representation drawn mostly from Highland cultures and, in the nineteenth century, developed into a particularly powerful symbol of nationalism. Its historical enigma is that it evolved as a fashion among the political, cultural, and economic elite most vividly at a particular juncture when modernizing Scotland was, in fact, eradicating its Highland societies, and Lowlanders were becoming increasingly folded into the ambit of British imperialism – when kilts became part of the wardrobe next to Elizabethan collars, so to speak. Highlanders, once the scourge of landlords and the English, had become fanciful personalities and could safely skate alongside Greek huntresses, Dutch burghers, Aboriginal warriors, and even French habitants, and like them, were almost entirely hollowed of any contemporary sociological referents. One needed only an invitation, some spare change, and the photographer’s services to don the fashion and play the role. Certainly the hyperbolic forms associated with this kind of Scottishness – kilts, earasaids, tartans, and the like – make their appearance in the chapters that follow, but even more important are their cognates, of ideas and forms having to do with rusticity, the beautiful countryside, the pre-modern home, and especially the Scottish pastoral. We will observe how these forms and their underlying meanings helped photographers find their way through the opportunities offered by empire. Kilts and collars were not the same, of course; neither were Scotsmen and Englishmen in an intensely hierarchical British social order. In the view from London, Scots remained, still, a peripheral people in comparison to the English. They were doubtlessly more preferable than the Welsh, to say nothing of the poor Irish Catholics, but they were hardly the sort of people with the bloodright of those born within sniffing distance of Belgravia. The clichéd representations of Scottishness had, in fact, a double aspect, something nicely encapsulated in a phrase coined by the historian Graeme Morton: “unionist-nationalism.”4 Lowland Scots trumpeted symbols associated with an indigenous Celtic culture as a nationalist culture at the same time that they wanted union with London: a separateness and togetherness all at once. Their English employers and betters were absolutely fine with the arrangement; it included Scotland’s particular resources but kept the Scots separate. We will have opportunities to expand on the sources and fortunes of such a model and explain how it impacted photographers. For example, for many Lowland Scots, the promise of the full privileges that union with England seemed to offer was a goal worth pursuing. Whether

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they achieved anything like that is another matter, and the gap between promise and fulfillment could be a source of anxiety and drive, and sometimes a spur toward creativity. Especially in the cases of Notman and Thomson, we will observe some energetic social climbing. “Early photography” corresponds to the era between 1843 and 1873, bookended by the year in which Hill and Adamson first began their partnership and when Thomson published his extraordinary book of pictures, Foochow and the River Min.5 To put it another way, it is marked at one end by the introduction in Edinburgh of the first workable negative-positive process, the calotype, and at the other by the experimental use of printing methods that allowed photographs to be photo-mechanically reproduced between covers and distributed widely. The rapid shift from the calotype to the photo-mechanical print is indicative of just how plural, searching, and changeable the early profession and its equipment and outcomes were. Indeed the relentless pace at which the methods and machinery expanded in such a short time is one of the period’s most remarkable features. There was no shortage of enthusiastic experimentation in the darkroom and also, truth be told, amateurish and sometimes reckless handling of chemicals. The magical quality that practitioners frequently expressed about their pictures was a response to not only photography’s utter newness in a world accustomed to other media but also the relief they sometimes felt when all the fiddling with toxic chemicals actually worked. Chemicals presented only one of the myriad challenges. Glass plates pitted and cracked all the time. Wooden cameras warped. Bellows sprang leaks. Bugs nested and infested. The whole practice was sometimes a continuous adventure into the unknown. In the field especially, the learning curve was steep. The portable darkroom was noxious and suffocating, as photographers quickly found out. Clean water was usually hard to come by. In the early 1870s, the time between beginning the procedure to make a wet plate negative and the end result of a fixed image on a glass plate was still about forty-five minutes. The mishaps that could happen at any time during that process were legion. “Liquid froze on its surface and hung in icicles around its edges,” Thomson once described a glass plate during a winter expedition.6 He had to find a local hut and thaw the plate over a charcoal fire to try to save the precious image. In the trial-and-error tinkering that characterized early practices, photographers were amateur scientists, not necessarily artists, and spent much of their time simply trying to get halfway consistent negatives. “I was then a beginner,” Henderson admitted to his colleagues about his fumbling with chemicals, and he claimed it without embarrassment or apology.7 As he knew, all of them were beginners in one way or another, and in a practice without a long tradition

9

Introduction

of institutional know-how, they all depended on knowledge of each other’s discoveries and solutions – composites! – and also reports of adventures in the field in their efforts simply to get a picture. I try to keep some of that quality of testing, mistake, instruction, and invention alive. They are integral to any sense of early achievements. This does not mean that the science of photography ruled the day and that pictures were merely the end result of technological grit. One of the other remarkable aspects of early photography was how some photographers found a means, through their daily grappling with the demands and limitations of the equipment, of developing a visual intelligence. We may even call it a photographic intelligence, of a sort that grew out of the camera’s and darkroom’s idiosyncratic qualities. On the one hand, there were photographers like Hill, who was hardly a cameraman at all and preferred to let his partner, the younger and more technologically nimble Adamson, take care of the process. He preferred to choreograph in front of the lens and, once a usable negative was gotten, enlist some of his skills as a painter to help transform the image into a tactile print. Photography’s intelligence, in his case, was painterly, achieved by importing the habits in front of the easel into the darkroom. On the other hand, there were photographers like Henderson, who found in the camera and its prints a set of features peculiar to them, of continuous tone, for example, or the sparkling quality of reflected light, or the subtle information in shadows, or the delicate quality of the grey-scale. Today, these are familiar characteristics to any student of black-and-white photography, but I will try to recall a time when some of its earliest practitioners first found in them a means of expression. It took putting aside the normal ways in which meaning was usually conveyed and tackling the implications of an expressly visual knowledge of the world. The achievement was stunning but also fragile and fleeting, and for all kinds of reasons, mostly having to do with their status as Scots in a British empire, the photographers themselves mostly balked at following up on the consequences of their efforts. The period is haunted by photography’s efforts to become efficiently reproducible and generously public. In this, photographers frequently took their cues from the medium that was already both, namely the book, and we will discover that the photographers pursued their most ambitious projects with the book in mind. Certainly Lowland Scots were, on the whole, a more literate population than many in Western Europe. Except for the poorest, almost everyone could read and recite from the Bible; they knew some Shakespeare; they had a taste for Robert Burns and Walter Scott; some probably looked forward to the many satirical periodicals like Blackwood’s being regularly pumped out in Edinburgh. They wrote and received countless letters and

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understood that places like the Scottish courts asked for and kept a long documentary trail for even the most seemingly trivial matters. We will have ample opportunity to follow some of them. Simply put, the population was a wordy one. No wonder the book was prized. As photographers were trying to find their footing, they frequently turned to the book’s familiarity as a means to think through and disseminate their work. Hill and Adamson early on conceived of some of their projects in book form, and when Hill finally got around to assembling a luxurious photobook in 1859, the captions he attached to the pictures were drawn from Burns, Scott, and Shakespeare. As Notman organized his series of hunting pictures, he thought in terms of plot, protagonists, settings, climax, and conclusion. Even Foochow and the River Min, a work devoted to the primacy of pictures, was shaped through Thomson’s use of many familiar features of a book’s structure – sequence, direction, narrative drive, and point of view. The thirty-year period can be characterized by the way photographers took the book’s structure and means of expression and, as the chapters explain, tried to make them over into photographic terms. and so, even with such a capsule summary of the book’s scope and concerns, the colourful costume drama that took place on the skating rink and in the photo studio might seem a little less absurd as a starting point. The men and women who dressed up were no doubt looking for lighthearted pleasure; they wanted to fulfill any curiosities and paparazzi-like fascination with the prince; and they unquestionably wanted to distinguish themselves as Montrealers who rubbed elbows with royalty. But they were also aspirants in the empire wanting some connection with, and validation from, the centre. They were provincials and, on the whole, recent Scottish immigrants themselves. They dressed in the costumes of people they wanted to be, or needed to be, or sometimes were asked to be. They staged a play of social relationships between a variety of peoples, including those wanting to colonize and those being colonized, and transformed a whole range of unresolved historical struggles into carnivals put on for officialdom. Those requirements, too, were encouraged by the forces of migration and encounter, as the many peoples tried to carve out their rank in a less than settled social order. Notman knew he had the right formula. In his composite photograph, he created an ideal world in which everyone had a graceful place, everyone could be seen, and everyone (or at least the paying people) belonged. It just took a little studio ingenuity, a darkroom sleight of hand, and the camera’s special powers. What follows are case studies of just such creations, the contexts they grew out of, and the complications they faced.

1 AT THE SHORELINE OF THE FISHERFOLK

What William Ramsay thought of all the choreography and commotion as he stood before the camera is not entirely known. Neither he nor any of his fellow fishermen – nor their wives, sons, or daughters, many of whom, at one time or another, stood before the same camera – left a written account on the matter. But all the same, we may surmise that it must have been an unusual experience for its sheer weirdness. It was unusual in at least two ways. First, the situation was utterly unlike anything in his daily routine. He was a working fisherman in the middle of a long and sometimes trying fishing season, and though such a professional life brought its share of variety, funny or awkward circumstances, even some surprises, it most certainly did not include the peculiarities of photography. The command to strike a pose, pantomime a gesture or behaviour, and stand rigidly for what must have seemed like an eternity (it was probably a couple of minutes) ran counter to the regular habits of an active, working body. Neither at rest nor in action but somewhere distressingly between, the posed body – the arrested body – tenses the muscles in a way that, even over a brief time, can tax and fatigue. Fingers begin to twitch; arms and legs shudder almost imperceptibly; the neck tightens; the head teeters; the body asks for release. Workingclass models quickly learned that feeling of strain and slippage, and just as quickly learned how to comport themselves for the temporary grind; but whether workingclass fishermen immediately recognized how to cope with that aspect of artistic practice is another matter. The photographers suspected as much: they frequently brought head braces and other makeshift immobilizing devices to their picture sessions. Certainly, throughout much of the nineteenth century there were various masquerades, tableaux vivants, and poses plastiques, during which stylized actors, models, and also ordinary folks posed carefully and in motionless “attitudes” for a curtained performance. Sara Stevenson, the pioneering scholar of the photography team of D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson, points to just such a cultural practice as an important influence on their work. Hill and Adamson’s usual subjects – writers, ministers,

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physicians, painters, and sculptors – no doubt had seen and perhaps even participated in tableaux, and came to the camera and responded to the commands with, if not complete comfort, at least some familiarity as to what was demanded of them. Indeed, the photographers relied on sitters who could be “expressly relaxed” in their paralysis.1 But these tableaux were decidedly bourgeois affairs, entertainment for the stage or fancy parlour room, places and fashions to which men like Ramsay had little access. For him, standing somewhere on a beach in Newhaven in front of the lens, there was no similar cultural inheritance to fall back on. Second, photography itself was a newfangled thing. The camera’s appearance on the landscape was radical, and the enterprise of its users – in this case, the older and ebullient Hill, who stood to the side and beckoned sitters into position, and the younger and quieter Adamson, who hid behind the box and manipulated the lens and cap – and also the hubbub they must have caused, were things rarely seen before. What on earth were they doing, we can imagine the fishermen asking themselves, and for what ends? As in the case of the tableaux, there were some traceable precedents for those in the know. For example, almost as soon as the daguerreotype arrived in Scotland, mere months after its unveiling in Paris in 1839, what few sets of imported cameras were available sold out in a matter of days. Their buyers must have immediately set up makeshift studios and prowled about the environs to try out the new gadgets. In late 1839, an ambitious painter-turned-photographer named James Howie could already advertise an exhibition of his work in Edinburgh’s New Town. By the early 1840s, there were enough cameras based on the Parisian prototype scattered around the Lowlands that itinerant daguerreotypists, with investments to recoup, had begun roaming from town to town in search of clients. By 1841, Edinburgh already boasted a resident optician who made camera lenses and possibly, too, metal cameras.2 The budding practice no longer needed to rely on the pace and supply of imports (or, to the relief of some, the tariffs that came with them). Two years later, the competing calotype, derived from William Henry Fox Talbot’s negative-positive process, arrived on the scene. In 1843, a group of about fourteen amateur enthusiasts, each with a calotype camera, had organized into an informal club, the Edinburgh Calotype Club, one of whose purposes was to provide a venue to exchange ideas about how to get the new machines to work their magic and also to swap the experimental pictures they were beginning to make.3 But just as in the case of the tableaux, it was those with means who got involved in the nascent business of “photography” – let us call it that for now; given the various ways one could obtain an image, it had many names at its beginnings. The Calotype Club, for instance, was almost entirely comprised of men with

1.1 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Alexander Rutherford, William Ramsay, and John Liston (Newhaven 32), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland

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free time. Indeed, as an original member recalled, the “ministers [of the club] thought their greater leisure would aid them” in outdoing the other enthusiasts, physicians and lawyers especially.4 That’s to say, despite the flurry of this eager, energetic, even hectic activity, it would be wise for us to keep in mind the camera’s utter newness for most common folk, even for those accustomed to the comings and goings of people and the appearance of strange cargo in a port town. If William Ramsay had seen such a contraption before – there is no evidence that he had, though gossip in the village and the experiences of some of the fisherwives may have cued him to its existence – he would almost certainly have seen it from the point of view of a gawking and somewhat uncomprehending bystander. What was this thing, how does it work, and what should I do? Those would have been fair questions. Although he left no written account of his reactions, the fisherman Ramsay most certainly left a photographic account. For surely the picture for which he posed (figure 1.1) is as much a representation of his experience as it is the photographers’ directions. He stood between two of his colleagues, Alexander Rutherford on his right (our left) and John Liston on his left. They were in “shore” clothes, the white trousers and dark boots put on in favour of the tall waders they wore at sea, suggesting that the job on the water was over for that day. The orientation of the sun would seem to confirm that; it floats off somewhere to the upper left, most likely the west, meaning the prime morning fishing hours were already well past. It was a time to recuperate in preparation for the next morning’s strenuous effort. After a vigorous day at sea, Ramsay might be forgiven for the slight shake of his head. Against the demands of the long exposure, he could not remain perfectly still; his eyes and the bridge of his nose betray a tiny movement while the shutter was open. Whereas Liston’s hat cast enough shadow to protect his eyes from the western sun and Rutherford simply looked away from it, Ramsay faced it almost straight on and squinted. The camera demanded a minimum of bright light, of course, but it didn’t make posing in the face of it any easier. He had to lean on the boat behind, one of the familiar yawls that he and others daily rowed and sailed.5 It was not a particularly deep boat; those were reserved for deep-water fishing for herring off the outer coast. It was instead shallow-hulled, more suited to line fishing for haddock in the Forth or, in the spring and summer, oyster dredging. For the purposes of the camera, its shorter profile came in handy as something more comfortable to lean on. From one point of view, there is something stiff and faintly comic about the three fishermen’s poses, especially their combination in a row. Rutherford seemed to have had no clear idea what to do with his arms, so he folded them (or was told to), at the same time that he strode. Liston tried to effect something more casual, though the

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At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk

1.2 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, James Ballantine, Dr George Bell and David Octavius Hill. Known as Edinburgh Ale (Group 27), National Galleries of Scotland

sequence of head-on-hand, hand-on-waist, leg crossed, and toe tapped may strike us as something of an overproduction. Ramsay fell somewhere between, neither the stiff striding of Rutherford nor the hyperbole of Liston. His left hand searches for a pocket, his right finds Rutherford’s arm, a gesture of familiarity and friendship, perhaps, but also simply a place to wedge it. The rest of him tries to remain as upright as possible, though his head angles to try to find the right spot for comfort. The poses all seem so obedient and also eerily unnatural, something like those found in the tableaux but with not nearly the expressly relaxed comportment of the practiced sitter. We can imagine Hill trying for a composition that suggested a level of spontaneous chumminess among the men, as he would offer of himself and two friends in another photograph called Edinburgh Ale (figure 1.2), though the results aren’t nearly the same.6 Instead, the photograph of the fishermen may end up being as much about the gap between the photographers’ wishes and the men’s efforts to

1.3 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, print by Michael and Barbara Gray from the original negative, Group of Newhaven Fishermen, possibly William Ramsay, Alexander Rutherford and a boy, 2002, National Galleries of Scotland

comply as it is about either of the two. That is, it is a picture of earnestness, maybe even goodwill, but also separateness. Whether we call such a photograph successful is a matter of opinion. When Hill and Adamson organized their pictures into albums and selected from the series of Ramsay and his friends, they invariably chose it, to judge by the albums that have survived.7 Compared to a companion work (figure 1.3), the differences are dramatic and suggest aspects of the photographers’ value system. Liston has gone missing, replaced instead by a boy with a tam-o’-shanter. Ramsay has faded to the background. His hands continued to search for pockets or some other fulcrum to anchor them, although they have lost whatever hint of familiarity and friendship their searching once implied. The sou’wester on his head was tucked down to shade his eyes better, but in the process he has become almost unrecognizable. Rutherford continues to stride and has found other purposes for his arms and hands. But whereas in the first picture, his pose can be readily compared with those of his companions – a survey

17

At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk

of arms and legs and affected gestures across the picture’s surface – in the second, he becomes the leading edge around which the rest of the scene pivots, something like the prow of a boat, as if the human complement to the piercing prow in the distance. It is a picture more squarely concerned with Rutherford and also more suggestive of movement, of advancing to the camera, perhaps of men finishing their day and coming ashore. Despite its potential narrative appeal, compared to the first photograph it was found wanting, inferior to another representation of the men and their appearance. Why, we might ask? Why did those aspects of the first photograph – of request and awkward compliance, of competing ambitions and experiences, of “attitudes” and their like, and of separateness – seem more suitable when it came to giving an account of the fishermen? These are among the general questions this chapter takes up. It is concerned with the photographs of fishermen and fisherwomen and the fishing villages taken by Hill and Adamson, the two great early calotype photographers in Edinburgh. It focuses on the images taken in Newhaven but also in other port villages associated with the fishing cultures of the Firth of Forth and its environs, including Leith, Prestonpans, and St Andrews, as well as pictures taken by the team in their studio on Calton Hill when the fisherwomen visited them. As the discussion of Ramsay, Rutherford, and Liston might suggest, the chapter is as interested in the lives on the other side of the lens as it is in the aspirations and enthusiasms of the photographers. Or, perhaps it is better to say that it is interested in the meeting of the two, of sitters and photographers, and the choices they made. Sussing out the lives of the former requires a bit of social history and also, it’s important to stress again, reading pictures somewhat differently than has been normally tried in assessing Hill and Adamson’s work: reading seismically, to feel the pressure these sitters put on a photographic practice, even one only beginning to take shape. It also requires paying attention to the increasingly global aspects of the fishing industry and the stresses they put on the fishing societies of the Forth. Scotland’s first flowering of photography was impacted, both directly and indirectly, by international market pressures at its outset. First, we will give ourselves a measure of Newhaven, its port culture, its economy, and the variety of professional opportunities for its residents. Following that, we will survey what others thought of Newhaven, how they represented it, what larger ideas about a working people these representations belonged to, and why that mattered. All of this prepares the way for closely assessing the photographs themselves – their concerns, effects, and uses.

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newhaven’s internationalism was almost immediately apparent at the village’s founding at the turn of the sixteenth century. Nestled in a small coastal area about two miles north of Edinburgh Castle and immediately west of the city’s main port of Leith, the village had probably been settled much earlier by fishermen who had tried to take advantage of the shoreline’s long sandy beach and comparatively deep water. A much later painting by the Edinburgh artist William Smeall (figure 1.4), though generic in all kinds of ways, gives an indication of the manner in which the shallow waters in the foreground could quickly give way to depth, where in the middle distance a larger single-masted boat finds anchor. Another painting by Smeall (figure 1.5) shows how the boats, reminiscent of those used by Ramsay and his friends, could be parked conveniently and with little to-do. With such a deep shelf, it was easy to manoeuvre yawls on and off the beach and hit navigable water without needing a dock. The village had no name – at least none recorded – but was merely a dot on a map. The few crude maps of Edinburgh drawn later in the century, including those drawn with more cartographic wherewithal, occasionally locate Leith but leave the area immediately to its west as a terra incognita. One imagines it might have been referred to as “north Leith,” as it was frequently called in later centuries. With far more clout and money, Leith was and remained the central port for the entire metropolis. Newhaven was merely next door. That relative anonymity changed when James IV came to the throne in 1488 and began to assemble a navy to rival those of the Dutch, English, French, Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish. The king’s shipbuilders deemed Leith as having too shallow a port to assemble the kind of large, deep-hulled, seafaring vessels James wanted, but the nearby fishing village fit the bill, so beginning the unnamed spot’s quick ascension into a royal shipyard. By the early sixteenth century, the area, now christened Newhaven, complete with a stone chapel given by the king himself, was home to an increasingly large population devoted to the shipbuilding trade. The skilled labour and specialized materials came from seemingly everywhere in western and northern Europe: craftsmen from Denmark, Flanders, France, and Spain; sails and rigging from Rouen and Dieppe; mast poles from Norway; copper sheathing from Antwerp and Cornwall; heavy anchors from Cadiz; even timber from the Baltic after the local supply was exhausted. In order to get these necessities, Scotland sent hides and wool from the Lowland farms, salted fish from the Forth, and probably coal and fleece. Bruges and Rotterdam had long served as conduits for Scottish exports, especially the much sought-after coal for the breweries; and the king’s traders were happy to comply. The burst of energy and swapping across the North Sea were all for the construction of a

1.4 Top William Smeall, Harbour Scene, n.d., The City of Edinburgh Museums and Galleries: City Art Centre 1.5 Bottom William Smeall, Boats on Sand, n.d., The City of Edinburgh Museums and Galleries: City Art Centre

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sixty-gun warship called the Great Michael, designed to be the largest ship of its day. (The vessel is still commemorated in the village today, in “The Great Michael Close,” a small alley that connects the shoreline to Newhaven’s Main Street.) A no less important by-product was the transformation of a once-sleepy fishing village into a locale on the northern shipping routes, the point of entry and exit for domestic as well as international consumables, and an entire society – of bakers, blacksmiths, carters, innkeepers, leather merchants, money lenders, tanners, tavern masters, woollen traders, and of course smugglers – to support the shipbuilding industry. A variety of languages filled the air, and a complex array of subcultures and social relations took root. Within a half-generation, Newhaven had developed a port economy with a port culture to match. As it happens, the Great Michael, rather than portending the continued construction of a vast fleet at the village, became something of a one-off. Eventually, the royal shipyard was dismantled and the major shipbuilding returned to Leith. (In addition to James IV dying in battle only a year and a half after the ship’s launch, the massive size of the Great Michael, lumbering like a woolly mammoth across the Channel and the North Sea, gave it an ambivalent fame; it was soon spurned in favour of smaller, lighter, faster, and cheaper warships. It was sold off to the French, who left it to rot.) Newhaven became, again, a more secondary locale on the shoreline, with its economy and culture attuned again to fishing and also, at least by this early date, oyster dredging, of which more later. But something of the larger recognition of the village’s favourable shoreline topography and nearness to Edinburgh, its easy northern reach, and, importantly, the connections made through trade across the sea continued to have relevance. We easily find their effects in the years immediately before Hill and Adamson’s visit. First, although catching and selling fish and oysters drove much of the economy, it was by no means the only source of income.8 Though never the size or having the infrastructure of the nearby Leith docklands, Newhaven continued as a trading port, with goods from across the Forth unloaded on its smaller pier, occasionally stored for safekeeping, and shuttled on to Edinburgh. A map from 1804 (figure 1.6) illustrates a proposal to expand the docks at Newhaven to accommodate the increasing number of ships, barrels of merchandise, and calls for storage. At the upper edge, the mapmaker, John Ainslie from Jedburgh in the borderlands, outlined a series of harbours and docks extending from a pincer-like opening at Newhaven and extending eastward in a series of rectangles, the largest a wet dock with the capacity to hold 80 ships and, with the others adjacent to it, 160 in all. This was to be a sizable port, larger than most

1.6 John Ainslie, Old and New Town of Edinburgh and Leith, 1804, reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland

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anything in all of Scotland. One could enter the sheltered docks from the east end, too, on the Leith side, though its mouth paled in size (how the Leith merchants must have cringed at that). Of note is the long stretch of land that separates the wet docks from the Forth and forms a man-made land bridge between Newhaven and Leith, nearly a thousand yards of usable space set aside for warehouses. Though the plan was never adopted, clearly shipping was good, merchandise piled up, and trade was assumed to get better. In 1812 the steam-powered ferryboat arrived and brought a noticeably upward swing in deliveries, increasing not only the quantity of goods coming from the north but also the sheer number of passengers – an early version of commuters into the metropolis. Within a year or two, the demands for the ferry had gotten so great that Newhaven began running regular daily service to Aberdour, four trips to Burntisland, four to Pettycur, and three more to Kirkcaldy and Dysart. (There is no record of how either Hill, originally from Perth, or Adamson, from St Andrews, first arrived in Edinburgh, though if they were like most passengers coming from across the Forth, they would’ve taken one of the steamers through Newhaven.) A watercolour from a few years later (figure 1.7), of nearby Leith with Newhaven silhouetted in the distance,

1.7 Unknown artist, after William Daniell, Leith, after 1814, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

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At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk

already imagines commuters and their like everywhere lounging on the docks and watching other passengers arriving. They are dressed in travelling clothes (there are no actual dockworkers present) and find nothing so pleasant as to promenade along the shoreline. How they climbed from the decks to the stone pier is left undeclared in the watercolour, a detail that needn’t worry such leisurely travel. In addition to moving people, the steamships moved huge amounts of goods. The London Steam Packet Company set up shop and ran cargo ships twice weekly to the English capital. The UK Steamship Company quickly followed suit with a weekly sailing. By the early 1820s, steamships were venturing further out of Newhaven, up the eastern coast of Scotland to Arbroath, Stonehaven, Aberdeen, Inverness, and as far as Orkney. Ships to Holland and the Baltic soon followed. As with the arrival of the railway in the Lowlands in 1831 and the intercity rail between Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1842, the daily ferries, Forth shuttles, and longer voyages up the coast and across the North Sea organized a port culture set by the clock. The arrivals and departures became increasingly predictable, such that coach services for passengers and wagon services for goods ran dozens of transports between the shoreline and Edinburgh’s New Town. The Royal Mail found the schedule reliable enough that all mail service to and from the north of Scotland passed by ferry through Newhaven. The shuttle traffic across the Forth was good for the local economy, even encouraged a bit of tourism, as the watercolour tries to show, and provided a wide range of jobs. Increasingly, though, it also brought a nightmare of congestion – a good problem to have, we might think, but all the same, a nuisance. Just as we might liken the mass of passengers on the steam ferries to early commuters, so we can describe the watery congestion of so many ships coming and going as an early version of the traffic jam. This was especially the case at low tide when steamships with deeper hulls or heavier cargo couldn’t get close enough to the pier and had to anchor further from shore, the cargo and passengers having to wait for smaller boats – the yawls of the Newhaven fishermen, often smelling like bait or catch – to fetch them. If the tide stayed out, the number of moored ships, all jostling for space, cluttered the water for about a mile out. To some observers, it seemed like the expanding economy, in many ways so modern and powered by steam, was at key points still dependent on the fisherman’s timetable and priorities – for the arrival of shoals, for example, or time set aside for baiting hooks, mending nets, or “redding the line,” as Hill and Adamson later named one of their pictures (figure 1.8). Read an exasperated report from 1835 decrying all the delays and inconveniences:

1.8 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Willie Liston ‘Redding the Line’ (Newhaven 3), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland

[At low tide] cargoes and passengers are therefore put into open boats a mile from shore, the unpleasantness of which has been felt by all who have travelled by the steam vessels; females in particular complain that they sometimes suffer more annoyance between leaving the vessel and landing, than on the passage from Blackwall to the moorings off Newhaven. In very rough weather passengers cannot embark or land – hence irregularity and delay … When there is not water in the harbor the other companies’ steam vessels are liable to like inconvenience, and they must either wait for high water to enter or land their passengers by boats, their vessels paying the docks rates in addition to the harbor and shore dues … The treatment of goods by the London steamers is little better than that of passengers.9

So the yawls were smelly and, as other reports implied, the fishermen indecorous or just plain rude, the extra fees adding up and cutting into profits, the handling of goods blasé and sometimes negligent, and the carefully timed schedules upon which the capital’s economy increasingly depended subject to irregularity and delay. With so much competition and urgency to get their goods and passengers to shore, the companies were willing to pay more to those running the yawls, though the fees sometimes seemed exorbitant, bordering, in some opinions, on extortion. There were suspicions of bribery, coercion, and payoffs. A couple of pence here and there to help

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At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk

usher the goods to shore a little quicker or to take this ship’s perishables and not that one’s – the temptations were great for all parties. If one company succumbed, it seemed like all would need to. “I happened to be at Newhaven pier when some goods were being landed,” the exasperated author of our report went on, “the style of doing the work and the accommodation for it were more like the running of a smuggled cargo.” What was needed, he concluded, was a longer pier, the further it could reach into adequately deep water, the easier for ships to dock at low tide, and (though it was never said so brazenly) the better to cut out the surprises and shakedowns, so as to eliminate the bit players and centralize profit. A slightly earlier report came to the same conclusion and was only a little more polite. Despite the steam-powered bustle and all the advanced infrastructure of roads, ferry stations, and carriage services it spawned, the “present communication across the Forth is,” it proclaimed, “altogether inadequate to the advantages which might otherwise be derived from it, as a thoroughfare for the trade and intercourse betwixt the south and north.”10 It didn’t help that official intercourse was regularly marred by bamboozlement and the like. There was tacit acknowledgment of an active trade in contraband, smuggled items, and an entire grey market that eluded the big companies. Indeed, the Newhaveners supplied all kinds of brandy, gin, tobacco, spices, lemons and oranges, and various wines (“whatever else the better classes, the lairds, the magistrates, the merchants, the clergy and their ladies might fancy,” an observer later put it).11 They regularly moved gunpowder – by one enthusiastic report, some seventy tons during one transaction.12 Running gunpowder wasn’t technically illegal, though to whom it went could be a source of anxiety. If the trade of goods, both legal and illegal, and the transport of people across the Forth brought more variety to Newhaven’s economy, another source was the expansion of the fishing industry itself. Of course the fisherman’s skills at sea as oarsmen had traditionally provided all sorts of opportunities beyond the usual work on the lines or nets. There was always the chance to hook on with whalers bound for Greenland or Spitsbergen and, for some willing to travel further and push their backs harder, to the Davis Strait between Greenland and Canada’s Baffin Island. These were annual affairs: a whalemaster’s house was permanently set up in the village and a more or less permanent part of the population dedicated to them. But the whalers also provided temporary work; when the local fishing season was skimpy, they gave fishermen another chance to augment the family purse. It wasn’t just labour the men were providing, either; for a lucky (or conniving) few, they might take a share of the spoils. Huge cargoes of blubber were brought back to port, boiled in vats (the 1804

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map shows the location of the vats, “Whale Bank,” just below the dry harbour, though during the putrid boiling season nobody needed to be pointed to where it was), and sold to make soap and lamp oil. There were times when schools of whales reached the cold waters outside the firth, and if there were no whalers in port, the opportunistic fishermen used their own boats or, after the ferries had arrived, contracted the larger vessels. The local historian Tom McGowran reports that in 1843, the year of Hill and Adamson’s first photographs of the fishermen, a massive whale ventured into the estuary near Queensferry, just west of Newhaven, which brought out “ferrymen” with harpoons – more likely, the fishermen who could handle such a catch.13 They struggled with the beast for an hour before killing it and dragging it to shore. While these “fishing” skills – of rowing, harpooning, or simply tolerating the hazards of the deep sea – had always provided the chance for extra income, beginning in the 1820s, the traditional industry itself began to mutate and provide other avenues to make money.14 And once again, international trade was the culprit and the networkings to London and the ports of the Continent entirely responsible. Previously, most of the fishermen’s catch was brought to shore and transported quickly for a very local market. After a brisk walk uphill to Edinburgh, the fishwives’ creel, or open-mouthed wicker basket, full of the day’s catch could be readily emptied. There was little processing of the fish – perhaps occasionally gutting and scaling for a particular market. Instead, they were wrapped in paper scraps, slime and all, and bartered to any customer who had a few coins for them. In turn, the wrappers were recycled by the poor living in Old Town, who tracked down and collected them to sell back to the fishwives; it was a tight, local economy.15 With the arrival of the larger steamships, the potential markets increased exponentially; the demands for Scottish fish from London, the ports around the Mediterranean, and especially Stettin, Hamburg, and the wide swathe of the Rhineland grew enormously. The Germans, in particular, developed a taste for pickled herring, a cheap foodstuff that became both a delicacy and a relish. And in a curious juxtaposition of class taste, the English bought it by the boatload to ship to the West Indies to feed slaves.16 Suddenly, the business of the village expanded to include pickling, smoking over peat or different kinds of wood (and the middlemen to get them), and other forms of curing and salting, as well as icing and packing (the ice having to be brought from Norway via another trade). Each adjacent job in the preparation of the fish brought opportunities, specializations, and even attempts at monopoly. Newhaven alone couldn’t begin to supply such an enormous demand and quickly found nearly all the fishing villages around the Forth angling into the market. Once

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At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk

among the dominant fishing villages, under the pressures of market expansion it now competed with more than twenty others: Berwick-upon-Tweed, Burnmouth, Eyemouth, and Coldingham on the outer coast to the south; Cove, Dunbar, and North Berwick in East Lothian; Cockenzie, Prestonpans, and Fisherrow on the scoop of shoreline to the immediate east; Inverkeithing, Burntisland, Kirkcaldy, Dysart, Buckhaven, and more across the Forth, even St Andrews on the far side of Fife, to say nothing of the many fishing settlements up toward Aberdeen and beyond. None had the pedigree or attraction of once being the royal shipyard for the Great Michael, but that didn’t stop the populations in those towns from exploding or the locals investing in even more fishers. In Cellardyke on the opposite side of the Forth, the number of herring boats launching from its small beach – a smidgen of land with many fewer topographical advantages than Newhaven – had grown to 140 in 1837, nearly threequarters the total out of Newhaven.17 There weren’t enough residents to man them all, so like many other villages with ambitions, its fishermen hired day labourers – young men from around the Forth who didn’t own their own boats or who were usually occupied in other parts of the economy. By then, describing all these many small vessels flowing out from the ports as a “herring fleet” was actually apt. The international demand brought the level of specialization in the Forth to a new sophistication. Professional curers appeared on the scene to dress and preserve the fish headed for other ports. They opened kippering yards in the villages and also frequently developed an itinerant processing plant that could be relocated quickly, moving rapidly up and down the coast depending on where the herring were found. They hired coopers to make the barrels and local fishwives to do the work of gutting, cleaning, curing, and packing. In turn, the fishwives travelled with them when curers followed the shoals, sometimes to the distant northeast of the country where the cold coastal waters and deeper shelf attracted the fish. In these moves, the women comprised a distinct population on the Forth that was seasonally migratory; the men, too, migrated, leaving for the herring spots, both in their own boats and as hired hands, and staying there for weeks at a time to exhaust the waters. There is a humorous but telling passage in a novel by Charles Reade called Christie Johnstone (1853), about Newhaven’s fishing cultures. He had gone to the Forth in the late 1840s for some reconnaissance, and it’s clear what he found. The novel’s protagonist, a fisherwoman named Christie Johnstone, is in the middle of a conversation with a love-interest when suddenly she learns that a herring shoal has been spotted. She at once and enthusiastically drops everything, and the love-interest is left to wonder at her sudden departure and seeming rejection of him. He calls after her to sit for a spell, but she

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quickly dismisses him. “‘Set!’ cried she. ‘When there’s nae wark to be done stanning.’ And with this she was gone.”18 Herring beckoned; romance was for another day. In many ways merely middlemen, curers came to dominate the flow, direction, and ratios of the industry’s merchandise, making connections with both the fishermen and the merchants and acting as the key go-between to determine where goods would go and for how much. The competition between curers became fierce, and they often resorted to incentives, familiar today but largely unheard of before then, to get hold of the choice herring. For instance, they contracted with the fishermen at the beginning of the season, before a single boat had been launched, promising to pay a weekly stipend in return for a monopoly or maybe just first dibs on the catch.19 They sometimes invested in the boats and owned a share. If they could not invest, they curried favour by lending money when the fishermen needed funds to repair boats or get more equipment – and we can surmise the countless small bribes and under-thetable dealings. As with the arrival of curers to fill a need, so too came net makers and menders. With the invention of the net-making machine in 1820, a sort of fancy loom adapted for heavier material, what had once been a household occupation got farmed out to factories sprouting in the Lothians and Fife.20 A net factory opened in Granton to the immediate west of Newhaven and employed locals from the surrounding villages, including the unmarried girls of Newhaven.21 It was sometimes simply more cost effective for the fishermen to outsource their daily tasks, especially the mending and barking of nets to preserve them from deterioration in the salt water. Rather than set wives and daughters to the chores, the family could make more money having them do other jobs, including working at the very mills where the nets were taken. As was there international demand for herring and, to a lesser extent, haddock and cod, so, too, was there a call for oysters. Once a cheap food dredged from the muck of the sea floor – a “dirty” food eaten mostly by the poor, its pundits declared – oysters began to ascend on the list of middle-class menu items in London and Paris in the first third of the nineteenth century. One example of many can provide a vivid picture of their market’s local impact. In 1843, the year in which Hill and Adamson made their first Newhaven pictures, William Ramsay, Alexander Rutherford, and John Liston spent much of that spring dredging for oysters. The harvest was not large by previous years’ standards, and given the exorbitant rent they had to pay to work the scalps belonging to the Duke of Buccleuch (20 shillings each for the season), the men had to make decisions about where to send their oysters to maximize their profits. Initially, all three kept mostly to the local market. Ramsay, for example, sent a barrel and a half to

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At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk

London, which brought him 1 shilling and 6 pence (1s.6d); the rest he sent to town.22 It was a modest sum from London but at a rate that, over the course of the season and combined with what he might hope from the local market, would meet the rent and provide a living wage. The other two sent all their oysters to town, hoping for the same. However, it seems clear that the money the fishwives could make in town, even with all the haggling for which they were notorious, brought a pittance in comparison. Beginning with the second cargo, Ramsay chose to send nearly all of his harvest abroad, exporting a total of eighteen barrels (for 18s) in March. Rutherford demurred and sent only six and a half barrels. Liston, by contrast, remained stubborn and loyal to the local streets. By April, however, two of them had mostly given up on Edinburgh, Ramsay exporting over forty barrels (about 49s) to London, Rutherford over thirtyfive barrels, and even Liston about twenty-one barrels. In the half month of May, Ramsay sent more than fourteen barrels (14s), Rutherford more than twelve, and Liston, in a last flurry trying to recoup, fifteen barrels. By then, the rental agreement had run out. (There are suggestions that the men sometimes paid no heed to the end date and kept dredging. The next year, in 1844, the duke’s agent sent a terse letter to the fishermen wondering if they were “intending to standing out longer for more money or not.”23 The men seem to have ignored it and, even bolder, pushed beyond the rental grounds, prompting another letter two months later threatening them that the agents had obtained the names of several boats that were dredging illegally and “if the same should happen again, the said parties shall be handed over … to the public authorities.”24 By then, too, Ramsay was no longer merely an independent oysterman but had been elected the preses, or president, of the fishermen’s society; he had to deal with the complaints and threats directly.) The men’s choice to send their barrels primarily to London came with a clear benefit. Ramsay made more than 72 shillings that season, a nice profit that went a long way toward keeping his family fed. What Edinburgh thought of all this is not clear, though it is surely more than a coincidence that, only a few years before, the Edinburgh Corporation, the city’s administrative arm, decided to rent its scalps to an enterprising Englishman rather than the local Newhaveners. If he didn’t provide oysters to the city, at least he paid them handsomely. From the Corporation’s point of view, the Newhaveners were doing neither satisfactorily. Suffice to say that all this international marketing and trading had a profound effect on the local community. The villagers’ lives were as bound to the desires, tastes, and competition of those who lived elsewhere as they were to the Scots they met face to face in their daily routines. Increasingly, their clients and competitors became anonymous – they met only the agents who came to the docks and fish markets – and

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yet that faceless population drove their circumstances. It was not an easy realization to digest completely. As the differing strategies of Ramsay, Rutherford, and Liston suggest, even in the early 1840s some of the fishermen had a hard time letting go of the old-fashioned community production, where all transactions and communications were within a tight, knowable set of social relations and the commodity had not yet become a fetish. A report in 1846 by Henry Dempster, a huge advocate for the fishermen who also understood the new nature of international trade, is remarkable for both its breadth of comparative thinking and its urgency – the modernity of the globalized marketplace, we might say – to push those remaining provincial Newhaveners and their colleagues around the Forth to think in broader terms and adjust their practices to match. They were not the only ones feeding the Continental taste for herring and oysters, he told them. The Dutch, in particular, were dangerous competitors and finding more efficient – and also tastier – ways to bring their harvest to market. And lest the fishermen considered this airy, bookish speculation, he got down to the nittygritty. The Dutch didn’t wait for the fish to get to the shore and the curer’s kippering yard, he shamed them; that was already an outmoded, retardataire practice, and the villages of the Forth were woefully behind the times: Gutting, gilling, and bleeding with a knife [are] done cleanly and efficiently on board ship … [The fish] are cured with Mediterranean Bay salt, and a salt prepared in Holland, which gives them an excellent flavour. The Dutch are particular about the wood their barrels are made of, choosing well-seasoned oak before any other, as they think other descriptions of wood give to the pickle a bitter taste. In packing the herring, the Dutch are also particular: they wish to retain their full plump shape as much as possible. They don’t squeeze them into the barrels. In all foreign countries, herrings are mostly eaten in a raw state, so that a full plump, clean-looking appearance is a recommendation to the Dutch cured herring. The Dutch get high prices for their early-caught herrings in the Continental markets.25

So the Dutch took precautions to prepare the best fish, and the Scots of the Forth squeezed their stale catch into awful, unseasoned barrels. It was the Scottish way, and it was backwards. In addition, neither the Dutch nor any of the others, Danes and Germans especially, were simply waiting for the Newhaveners and their colleagues to find the fish in the waters in and around the Forth and send them to their markets. They sent their own vessels, venturing as far from their own ports as Shetland in the

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At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk

north of Scotland and scouring the coastline and deep waters all the way south. They came not in twos and threes, or even hundreds, but “above one thousand … Those vessels are called busses [and] are from sixty to eighty tons burden. They are decked, strongly built, and carry a crew from fourteen to twenty hands. The busses are regularly fitted out with every requisite material … [The hands] become sailors, fishers, curers, and coopers by turns.”26 The threat of so many big ships and so much flexible specialization must have sent a shiver down some Newhaveners’ spines; the Dutch boats were so enormous they were not even called vessels but busses!27 Always attentive to the international market, William Ramsay heeded the warnings, but it seems enough did not. Twenty years later, Dempster was still urging: “The men of Newhaven may find the medicine bitter to taste, but I have no doubt [my warnings] will clear their intellect, and show them how far they are astern in the race – astern of men who had not half their advantage twenty years ago, but who now rank fair higher in the social scale than they do, or can ever expect to do, until they follow their example.”28 buoyed by continental trade, the economic life of Newhaven in 1843 was still sufficiently diverse to sustain a variety of ambitions and facilitate a complex culture and society – that much is clear. Within the fishing societies, men like Ramsay and Rutherford could, if they so chose, find different ways to survive, piecing together jobs that might arise – a bit of ferrying here, a gamble with grey-market brandy there – in addition to tending to their main business of dredging oysters or chasing herring. They were not without anxieties. Even with the curers’ loans, their boats were no small outlay and required regular maintenance, which diverted a substantial amount of their finances. The two of them were also boat owners and so had to worry about finding a crew, splitting the catch judiciously, and also maximizing their investment of the boats over the course of the year. A quaint image like Hill and Adamson’s Newhaven Beach (figure 1.9), if indicative of more than a temporary situation when boats were hauled onto the sand for only short periods, would have caused enormous worry for its owners. The international market was increasingly complex, and one had to keep up with the competition to provide a desirable commodity. One had to find other means to make money if the season was poor, the market bad, the rent too high, or the competition (the Dutch!) more brutally competent. But other Newhaveners – many others – could venture elsewhere along the shoreline, perhaps take to the mills, try their hand at ice trading, have a go at elbowing into the lucrative business of passing gunpowder or the even more lucrative business of

1.9 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Newhaven Beach (Newhaven 62), National Galleries of Scotland

smuggling, even taking jobs that had no direct relationship to fishing at all. There were positions in town to service the population and day visitors. When Hill and Adamson arrived, the village had fourteen taverns alone and on the beach two or three places set aside for sunbathers. The official fishermen society’s own secretary was, it turns out, not only a fisherman but a grocer and a spirits dealer, too.29 Housekeeping and kitchen jobs could be had in the nearby wealthier towns, Trinity especially, which in the early nineteenth century developed into a mansion-house district and needed domestics.30 There was a lucrative glassworks factory less than a mile east, a soap-making factory even closer, an ancient leadworks even closer than that, and nearly a hundred warehouses for brandy and wine further down the Water of Leith. The growing numbers of omnibuses running to and from Edinburgh, some lines as frequently as every five minutes, continued to create opportunities. In a related context, the historian Malcolm Gray reports that the entire countryside outside of Edinburgh was so intertwined between agriculture and the various branches of industry that farmers could be factory workers one day and farmers the next and that the family subsistence was brokered by all kinds of mixed-and-matched means.31

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At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk

How surprising it is, then, that visitors who descended on Newhaven and offered descriptions may mention some of its bustling and varied life but quickly pass over it. There were about 2,000 residents when Hill and Adamson visited; only about 200 were directly involved as fishermen and even fewer as boat owners. The rest? One imagines the many visitors were like the people pictured in the watercolour of Leith (figure 1.7), out for a stroll and wholly unbothered by residents. They were simply invisible, or so one could believe. Something of this will-to-not-see underwrote many of the descriptions of the place. Above all, it is striking how consistent they are about what, in fact, they should see. Read, for example, a long account from 1795. It is concerned with more than Newhaven, focusing on the many parishes surrounding Edinburgh that formed the outskirts of the metropolis and supplied the city with goods and labour. Of the seaports to the north and east of the city, from Newhaven to Fisherrow, it observes: The fishwives, as they are all of one class, and educated in it from their infancy, are of a character and manners still more singular … and particularly distinguished by the laborious lives they lead. They are the wives and daughters of fishermen, who generally marry in their own cast, or tribe, as a great part of their business, to which they must have been bred, is to gather bait for their husbands, and bait their lines. Four days a week, however, they carry fish in creels (often baskets) to Edinburgh; and when the boats come in late to the harbour in the forenoon, so as to leave them no more than time to reach Edinburgh before dinner, it is not unusual for them to perform their journey of five miles, by relays, three of them being employed in carrying one basket, and shifting it from one to another every hundred yards, by which means they have been known to arrive at the Fishmarket in less than ¾ths of an hour … Their manner of life, and the business of making their markets, whet their faculties, and make them very dexterous in bargain making. They have likewise a species of rude eloquence, an extreme facility in expressing their feelings by words or gestures, which is very imposing … Some of them have been brought to bed, and have gone to Edinburgh on foot with their baskets within the week. It is perfectly well ascertained, that one, who was delivered on Wednesday morning, went to town with her creel on the Saturday forenoon following. There is a charm in the free and active life they lead, which renders them averse to all sedentary employments. They never wear shoes or stockings but on Sundays, which is not to be attributed to their poverty, but to the nature of their employment.32

Perhaps the writer could be forgiven for focusing on the fishwives. They were, certainly, among the most visible labourers from the ports in Edinburgh, who daily

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(or four times a week, according to the report) arrived in the city with creels loaded with fish. They travelled in groups, sharing the load, and formed a peculiar sight since they walked barefoot (visitors from the “south” – he means Londoners – were “disgusted at this practice,” the writer also allowed). They spoke frankly, if also imposingly, and they most certainly bargained hard. Although “singular,” the women seemed the most representative characters of the villages along the coast, being both hardy (they apparently give birth to children and rush off to their creels with little pause) and also the product of a noticeable insularity; indeed, they are bred for the job, the result of intermarriage and being educated in a fisherwomen’s life “from their infancy.” Perhaps, too, the writer could be forgiven because, in 1795, the steamships had yet to arrive, the net factories had not yet sprouted, the shipping companies from London had yet to open offices, and the curers, though beginning to appear, were hardly the indispensible force they would soon become. How interesting, then, in 1832, after all of the preceding developments had clearly taken place, we find the following report: The male part of the inhabitants supply the fresh fish consumed in Edinburgh and Leith, while the females transport them to market or sell them through the streets. These fishwives are of an exceedingly robust frame and constitution, and usually carry loads of from one to two hundredweight upon their backs, in creels or willow-baskets, and evince a masculine degree of strength, which is not unaccompanied by manners equally masculine … These singular Amazons dress themselves in a style which, if coarse, must also not be uncostly. They are unable to wear any head-dress, excepting a napkin, on account of the necessity of supporting their back-burdens by a broad belt which crosses the forehead, and must be slipped over the head every time they take off their merchandize. They usually wear, however, a voluminous and truly Flemish quantity of petticoats, with a jerkin of blue cloth, and several fine napkins enclosing the neck and bosom. Their numerous petticoats are of different qualities and colours; and it is customary, while two or three hang down, to have as many more bundled up over the haunches, so as to give a singularly bulky and sturdy appearance to the figure. Thirty years ago they wore no shoes or stockings, but cannot now be impeached with that defect, so often imputed to Scottish women by travellers. In their mercantile capacity these robust persons are not very distinguished for conscientious dealings, it being very difficult to make a proper bargain with them.33

So the women had donned shoes and stockings, much to everyone’s relief, especially Londoners, but they were otherwise largely the same: “singular,” “robust” (even masculine), and extraordinary hagglers. They wore mountains of clothes that had

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At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk

an exotic or Flemish look to them, which seemed to have a functional necessity. But the larger point is that, when describing the character of Newhaven, it was the fishwives who seemed most worth remarking on. At least the fishermen are mentioned in 1832, if only in passing. Within a few years, the curiosity surrounding the fishwives grew to include more detail about their spare headdress and mountainous outfits. From an 1837 report we learn: A cap of cotton or linen, surmounted by a stout napkin tied below the chin, composes the investiture of the head; the more showy structures wherewith other females are adorned, being inadmissible from the broad belt which supports the “creel,” that is, fish-basket, crossing the forehead. A sort of woollen pea-jacket of vast amplitude of skirt conceals the upper part of the person, relieved at the throat by a liberal display of handkerchief. The under part of the figure is invested with a voluminous quantity of petticoat, of substantial material and gaudy colour, generally yellow with stripes, so made as to admit of a very free inspection of the ancle [sic], and worn in such immense numbers that the bare mention of them would be enough to make a fine lady expire. One-half of these ample garments is gathered up over the haunches, puffing out the figure in an unusual and uncouth manner. White worsted stockings and stout shoes complete the picture. Imagine these investments indued [sic] upon a masculine but handsome form, notwithstanding the slight stoop forward which is almost uniformly contracted – fancy the firm and elastic step, the toes slightly inclined inwards – the clear eye of robust health – and the ruddy complexion resulting from hard exercise, perhaps sometimes from dramdrinking – and you have before you the beau-ideal of fishwives.

And of the previous mention of their exotic, Flemish qualities, even their foreignness: The characters, habits, and personal aspects of these women, are so unlike those of the neighbouring rural population, that some believe them to be a peculiar race, descended from foreign settlers, whose manners they still retain. But, though this is the case, we believe, with the inhabitants of the fishing village of Buckhaven in Fife, it is not so … In their case, it is obvious that the character is modified, like that of every other class, by their occupation … Perhaps too the circumstance of their marriages being confined chiefly within the limits of their own caste, may conduce to the same result.34

A year later, the focus on the fishwives, and eventually their husbands, had become reflexive. “Though Newhaven is now a place of considerable importance in its way,”

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the artist, writer, and publisher Hugh Paton wrote in 1838, “and can boast a population greatly exceeding the number employed in fishing … [it is] the fishermen [who] pride themselves on the exclusive intercourse which has distinguished their community from time immemorial.” Suspicions about the foreignness of the people continued, worrying some that there was something unseemly about so much focus on a community, even an immemorial one, that was not of real Scottish stock; and Paton wanted to assure his readers: “The Buckhaven fishermen, on the opposite coast, are said to be descendants of settlers from the Netherlands; and even yet they adhere to the wide trousers and long boots of the Dutch; but there is no reasonable ground for believing that … the fishers of … Newhaven derive their origin from a foreign stock.” And of the fishwives, whose “Flemish” style was the original source of appeal and anxiety, the inventory was getting stock: “Stout, clean, and blooming, if they are not the most handsome or comely of Eve’s daughters, they are at least the most perfect pictures of robust and vigorous health; and not a few of them, under the pea-jacket and superabundance of petticoat with which they load themselves, conceal a symmetry of form that might excite the envy of a Duchess. Neither are they ‘shrill and fierce in accent.’ Their cry, though not easily understood, especially by our southern visitors, has a fulness [sic] of sound by no means unpleasant to the ear.”35 The poor people of Buckhaven regularly came in for rough handling in the comparison, and Londoners were still called upon to express incomprehension and mock horror. The rhetorical strategies repeat, description has more than a familiar ring, and even some of the exact same words and phrases are resuscitated to explain the brawniness, straightforwardness, attractiveness, and homegrown-ness of the women. These many descriptions of Newhaveners comprised a corpus whose value as a resource was that it could be plumbed again and again by those who needed some way to get hold of the place and its people in the midst of so much transition. In some cases, they preceded any first-hand observation by visitors or travellers or, eventually, guidebook writers. Glancing at the many texts and their happy repetition, a reader might have justifiably wondered if some of the authors had in fact visited the port or were simply cutting and pasting from the library shelves. In other cases, the descriptions formed a body of cultural representations that cued actual visitors about what was worthwhile to see. It should be no surprise that when the fine ladies and duchesses got around to venturing out, their attentions were directed and their observations took on a recognizable gloss. The fishwife was a “lovely blooming creature, with a complexion … of which our aristocracy are most proud,” Elizabeth Rigby (later Lady Eastlake) observed in summer 1843. “She was laden with clothes,

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At the Shoreline of the Fisherfolk

1.10 Queen Victoria, Sketch of a Newhaven fishwife illustrating her journal entry for Saturday, 3 September 1842, Royal Archives ©Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018

petticoat over petticoat, striped and whole colour … also a tremendous serge coat with long sleeves, that hung flat upon her back, over it a striped butcher’s apron ‘To wipe ma haunds’ – and she made a graceful gesture over her shoulder with a fine pair full in the palm and slender in the fingers – perfect pictures.”36 The women were indeed “perfect pictures” to an observer keen about images; Elizabeth Rigby was a friend and frequent sitter for the photographers. When the queen herself visited the year before, in 1842, the urge to picture the fishwives could not be resisted, and she drew a small image of them in her journal, making sure to note the simple cotton caps, striped dresses, butcher’s aprons, and of course the layers upon layers of petticoats that others had so frequently observed (figure 1.10). They were “somewhat Dutch like,” she thought.37 as with the writers’ attentions, so, too, with the artists. The painters and sketchers who took the port cultures surrounding the Forth as their subject matter were not nearly as plentiful, at least not prior to the 1820s and 1830s when the steamships and ferries changed the economy. However, two artists, whose works were published in the years immediately before Lady Eastlake’s, the queen’s, and the photographers’ visits, are notable. John Kay had originally been a barber when he first settled in Edinburgh in the early 1770s but soon found an outlet for his wry observations of the city and its people when he became a miniaturist, printmaker, and, to the delight of his supporters and ire of his victims, a caricaturist.38 He died in 1826, but in 1837, his sketches and caricatures, by then numerous and notorious, were collected and published in a popular two-volume set.

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They were assembled and annotated by none other than Hugh Paton, the author of the “stout, clean, and blooming” description of the fishwives we observed earlier. It would be too much to say Kay focused intently on the cultures of the ports; he was a devoted commentator of Edinburgh and its personalities. Yet from his wanderings around the city’s streets, he drew an image that confirmed the attentions lavished on the fishwives that were, by his time, becoming commonplace in the texts (figure 1.11). In his mind, the fisherwoman was best illustrated as laden with both creel and basket, fish and oysters at once, the better to indicate her industry. The simple cotton cap would not do; it became polka-dotted. And the many stripes of the petticoats were best accentuated by going busily this way and that. In good caricatural fashion, he accentuated her stoutness. In contrast, Walter Geikie spent far more time observing the people on the shoreline, but he, too, thought them best described by their fisherwomen and also, in a less common choice for his contemporaries, the fishermen. Deaf from a very early age, Geikie became intensely interested in the working classes in and around Edinburgh, which he drew incessantly.39 His small genre scenes – for that is what the drawings are most like, especially in comparison to Kay’s work (figure 1.12) – had a freshness and attentiveness, a “marked observational subtlety,” which most observers describe as escaping the controlled, high-minded, moralizing habits of academic genre.40 There is, to be sure, a strong influence of Dutch genre painting in the drawings, in their fascination with humour, bawdiness, and drunkenness.41 His men booze and guffaw; his women cackle with delight at a good joke. Even the children are the subjects of slapstick, stuffing their mouths with oysters and roaring with laughter. But we would do well to remember that such observations were drawn from not only a painterly tradition but also the cultural fascination already attending the fishing cultures of the Forth. The fishwives had a “rude eloquence” and “an extreme facility in expressing their feelings by words or gestures.” They spoke frankly, even a bit crassly. They liked their “dram-drinking.” And, in a new twist to the observation, they were “somewhat Dutch like.” Whatever freshness and observational subtlety they exhibited, the drawings were equally remarkable for their overall logic. Taken together, the fascination with the fishermen and women was also a fascination with the labour to bring fish and oysters from sea to market. It began with the fishermen in their yawls returning to port, where they are met by the women (figure 1.13). The men pull their boats onto the beach (and keep this in mind: a trio remain inside their boat and affect a posture

1.11 John Kay, Wha’l o’ Caller Oysters, 1812, from A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings by the Late John Kay, with Biographical Sketches and Illustrative Anecdotes, 1837–38 1.12 Below Walter Geikie, Newhaven Fisher Families Outside their Cottages – A Good Joke, National Galleries of Scotland

1.13 Walter Geikie, Fishermen Returning, Newhaven, National Galleries of Scotland

1.14 Walter Geikie, Fishermen on the Shore, One Looking through a Telescope, National Galleries of Scotland

as if they are still out at sea) (figure 1.14). After the catch has been unloaded, they tend to their equipment while the women take over the business of the catch. The fishwives divide the fish and fill their creels; they pick up their enormous loads and prepare for the long uphill ascent to town, where they arrive at the fish market and unload their treasures. They bargain with customers – by the looks of it, the return of change to the purchaser is meted out carefully, slowly (figure 1.15). They even stay late into the night when the sales demand it (figure 1.16). Along the route, we are treated with a keenness to the particulars of the routine. In one drawing (figure 1.17), Geikie noted the men still in their waders, not the white trousers of shore time – the catch is that fresh. The women, too, are already in travelling clothes, and one has already lifted her creel into place on her back. She has strapped it across her shoulders and upper arms (recall that the texts remarked with wonder at the way the women strapped them across their foreheads), a subtle distinction that Hill and Adamson, too, made sure to picture (figure 1.18). Geikie exhibited some of his drawings in New Town in 1837, the year of his death, but like Kay’s work, the huge inventory was assembled and published posthumously, in 1841.42 It proved enormously popular, continually expanded and republished in new editions for the next several decades. Some painters occasionally sought the wider environs of the shoreline for views. Geikie himself painted such a scene. But in all these, including his, the distinction between the busy, varied life of the port villages and the fishermen and women who made up a portion of them persisted. For example, the London-based artist William Henry Bartlett visited Newhaven around the time of the report that complained about the ferries’ “irregularity and delay” and made sketches of what he saw of that

Clockwise 1.15 Walter Geikie, Bargaining for Fish, National Galleries of Scotland 1.16 Walter Geikie, Women Selling Fish by Candlelight, National Galleries of Scotland 1.17 Walter Geikie, A Group of Fisherfolk and Fishwives, National Galleries of Scotland 1.18 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Unknown woman (Newhaven 18), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland

42 1.19 William Henry Bartlett, Newhaven Pier (Frith of Forth), 1842, private collection 1.20 Opposite Unknown photographer, Chain Pier, Newhaven, 1850, The City of Edinburgh Council

commotion. A few years later, in 1842, the year before Hill and Adamson descended on the town with their camera, he published a print based on one of them (figure 1.19). In his view, the steamships plow cheerily across the Forth, at least one, on the left, heading to the docks, three more in the distance heading out to sea for the upper coast or maybe eastward to the foreign ports or southward to London, and one more about to launch, its smoke billowing near the small lighthouse, its prow pointed to the waters ahead. Other three-masted ships are moored in the waters off the shoreline. The single-masted yawls, their sails up to catch the wind, ply back and forth. They could be fishing; the sun in the distance is just peeking over the horizon. It is early morning and prime catching hours, but there is no clear sense of the yawls’ activities. Bartlett was correct to notice the relatively new chain pier in the foreground, built in 1821 to accept the new ferries, and the stone pier in the middle distance mostly for the fishing boats – there are already a number quietly docked – and the occasional steamship at its tip. Trees frame the scene; a grassy knoll above the harbour provides a particularly good vantage. Even the locals cannot resist the temptation to pause from their labours and take in the vista and its harmonious activities. A fisherwoman, with a creel on her back, stands on a small rise. Her companions, a fisherman in tam-o’shanter and another in sou’wester, relax before the pleasant view. Even Highlanders have come down from the north – they are on the far right – to luxuriate in the scenery. They are all observers of the port’s modernity. In Bartlett’s view, the busy industry of Newhaven made for a picturesque tableau. There is traffic but no congestion, trade but no hiccup; and there are definitely no inconveniences, indecorousness, or delays caused by the meeting of steam power and the fishermen.

A member of the Calotype Club also ventured to the shoreline and brought his camera with him. The amateur photographer pointed his camera at the chain pier from roughly the same angle as Bartlett had taken (figure 1.20). He did not have the advantage of distance or the knoll, and so his picture could capture only the pier and none of its larger environment. Of course the early camera had limitations, which made complicated vistas difficult; and the photographer had to rely on the perspectives afforded by good light. Despite these constraints, he was able to catch the stark contrast between the pier and its watery surrounds. He arrived at a good time, when a steamer was at port. While he could not capture all that Bartlett was able to concoct and his camera imposed severe limitations on his ability to picture all that was there, his photograph proposed a fundamental similarity. There were no fishermen in the business and structures of modern trade. why does it matter that the fishermen and women of Newhaven were made representatives of the port? Why was it important to maintain a rigid distinction between them and their labour and any of the other populations and professions in the village? Why was this distinction proposed as a natural state of affairs? (As Hugh Paton imagined, the “marked distinction … betwixt the two classes” was not something imposed by observers but upheld by the people themselves.43) Why was it

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essential to maintain that the fishermen and women were an ancient people and, in their insularity, obstinance, and tribalism, maintained the dress and habits that, with the exception of shoes and stockings, had not changed? (As Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, the early collector and publisher of Walter Geikie’s work and someone who knew better – he was a member of the country’s modern Herring Fisheries Board – wrote, the “march of time has left upon these fishing populations little mark.”44 Or elsewhere, even more emphatic in his refusal of the effects of the international marketplace and all the infrastructure for herring it required, he proclaimed that in spite of “trawlers, railways, fish markets, and fish companies, [the fishwife] holds on the even tenor of her way.”45) And finally, why was it also necessary to raise the spectre of the people’s foreignness, if only to quash it? These are key questions in the cultural inheritance surrounding the people of Newhaven and are addressed in order. Suffice it to say that answering them helps explain the pressures and seismic effects on the photographs. But for now, we are finally able to introduce the photographers Hill and Adamson more fully into our account. the story of how Hill and Adamson came together as calotype photographers is the stuff of legend and can be rehearsed quickly. In early 1839, Sir David Brewster, the wide-ranging intellectual and scholar based at St Andrews, received examples of photogenic drawings from Fox Talbot. The two were colleagues and friends and, like many gentlemen-scientists, kept a lively correspondence.46 The images met with more than a little enthusiasm and set off several years of experimentation among Brewster and his circle. The circle was small – Brewster was a difficult man and Fox Talbot notoriously wary about the distribution of his calotype process – but it included John Adamson, a physician recently settled in St Andrews after a brief career as a ship’s surgeon in the China Seas. Adamson seems to have been one the more dogged of the experimenters; he had, as Alison Morrison-Low once put it, a “measure of spare time,” or as his obituarist put it less delicately, “he had the fag-end of the [medical] practice.”47 Sometime in summer 1842, he produced the first successful calotype in Scotland. Along the way, he shared the process with his younger brother, Robert, and by late 1842, the brothers had so sharpened their abilities with the equipment and chemicals that Brewster could write, in a now-famous letter to Fox Talbot, that the younger Adamson “has arrived at great perfection in the art,” obtaining images that, for many observers, surpassed even Fox Talbot’s.48 Of poor health, failed at a career as a millwright and engineer, and badly needing a profession, the younger Adamson, with a new-found set of photographic skills, was sent to Edinburgh to begin a career as a

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professional photographer. The ambition must have been tinged with expectation and also fraught with anxiety; there was, of course, no such thing as a “professional calotype photographer” in the city, or indeed the entire country, prior to this. In late spring 1843, he set up a studio at the so-called Rock House on Calton Hill, the highest neighbourhood in New Town. It had good light and also a toney address. At the same time, the artist David Hill was plying his trade in Edinburgh as a professional landscape painter and secretary to the Royal Scottish Academy, a post he had held since 1830.49 While Adamson was young and just beginning a career (almost any career, one suspects), Hill was established, married with a young daughter, and socially well connected. If he knew anything of the calotype, it was probably by hearsay. He may have initially known more about the rival daguerreotype process, given the presence of James Howie, the painter-turned-photographer who had exhibited his pictures as early as 1839, and of the itinerant daguerreotypists roaming the Lowlands.50 Hill was forty-one when he met Adamson; the young photographer was twenty-two. The meeting was brokered by none other than Brewster, eager to see the calotype and also Adamson succeed. The circumstances that brought about the meeting are well known. On 18 May 1843 – only days after Adamson had arrived in Edinburgh – dissenting ministers of the Church of Scotland, eager to be free from the control of an authoritarian, statemanaged church, marched out of a meeting of the General Assembly at St Andrew’s Church in New Town and reassembled down the road at Tanfield Hall in Canonmills. The high-profile departure, preceded by a reading of an act of protest, had been planned well in advance and was meant to draw attention to the cause of separation. The first publicly rebellious act in an event known as The Disruption, it culminated a decade’s worth of division within the established church of the country and brought about the founding of a rival, the Free Church of Scotland. The initial number of dissenters was a little less than 200, only about a sixth of the ministers belonging to the official church, and they certainly needed good press. The choreographed spectacle succeeded; it evidently drew the passions of Hill, who witnessed it and took it upon himself to commemorate it with a large history painting. The fact that he was primarily a landscapist didn’t cause hesitation, at least at first, though in the practical matter of composing a picture of so many ministers, many of whom abruptly left Edinburgh, problems quickly arose. Enter Brewster, who suggested to Hill that he visit Adamson and use the calotype as a way to get portraits that could be used as studies for the large painting. Lucky for Adamson: there are suggestions that Hill originally thought to enlist the more prevalent daguerreotype.51 Whatever the appeal – perhaps the youth

1.21 David Octavius Hill, A Fishing Village, National Galleries of Scotland 1.22 Opposite left David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, ‘A Newhaven Pilot’ (Newhaven 6), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland 1.23 Opposite right David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Rev. Andrew Gray, 1805– 1861. Of the West Church, Perth, Free Church minister, National Galleries of Scotland

and eagerness of Adamson, or just as likely the more painterly qualities of the calotype compared to the exacting images of the daguerreotype – the brokered meeting worked.52 In another now-famous letter to Fox Talbot, Brewster wrote in July, “Mr D.O. Hill, the Painter, is on the eve of entering into partnership with Mr Adamson and proposes to apply the Calotype to many other general purposes of a very popular kind, [and] especially to the execution of large pictures representing diff[erent] bodies [and] classes of individuals.”53 In less than two months, what had been in Hill’s mind the role of the camera as an aid to painting, and probably not much else, had become a partnership devoted to picturing segments of contemporary society. They were soon photographing Newhaveners and had made enough pictures that first season and the next that they could advertise the following year a proposal for a book, tentatively called The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth.54 While the story of the calotype’s introduction to Edinburgh and the circumstances of Hill and Adamson’s coming-to-partnership are known, the reasons they chose to photograph the fisherfolk as opposed to other “classes” are much murkier. Perhaps it was the experience of having arrived through the ferries’ piers as commuters and taken one of the standard carriages to town that joggled their memories about the place and the relative convenience of getting their equipment there. Maybe the queen’s visit to the docks in the previous year, and all the commotion it caused among the many townspeople trying to get to the shoreline to see her, kept the memories vivid. Perhaps, too, the fascination with fishing villages traced back to John Adamson who, in his capacity as a physician, had once taken an interest in the fishermen and women of St Andrews, their unsanitary lifestyle, and the filth of their neighbourhood. He had enlisted his younger brother for the cause of inspection and reform, and in 1842 Robert ended up taking at least one or two early photographs of the place and learned

something of the challenges.55 Perhaps it was the fact that Hill had previously painted landscapes in and around Newhaven and knew its conduciveness to artistic activity. In 1835, he had exhibited at least three paintings concerning Newhaven at the Royal Academy. They do not seem to have survived, but judging from their titles – Evening: Scene on the Beach at Newhaven–Painted on the Spot, The Peacock Inn–Sketch at Newhaven, and Sketch of an Oyster Boat Painted on Newhaven Beach – they were the kind of landscape pictures for which he was then known. A sketch by him, A Fishing Village (figure 1.21), may give some indication what they looked like, with its fascination in the long shoreline, the low-slung clouds, the effects of sunlight on the singlemasted yawl off to the right and on the houses perched close to water on the left. Fishing villages, it seems, gave opportunities for quiet reveries. But while all of these are likely factors, we may also point to the many representations in word and image that gave the place a very large cultural resonance and beckoned urbanites to see it closely for themselves. Pictures of the fishermen certainly lent themselves to the photographers’ early habits with the camera. As a team, Hill and Adamson were fundamentally portraitists who initially came together for the express purpose of making study portraits of The Disruption’s ministers. What is probably one of their earliest photographs in Newhaven, of a pilot (figure 1.22), has all the earmarks of their more recognizable studio style.56 Compare it, for example, to their

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portrait of the Reverend Andrew Gray (figure 1.23), one of the studies used for the eventual painting. The study portraits of the ministers had two simple jobs: the sitters needed to be identifiable (it helped that they might have a recognizable attribute – a book, a clergyman’s robes), and they needed to be comported in a way that accommodated the fiction that they were participating in an act of protest. In both pictures, the men wear their professions; in addition, they are shown to be observing something – in Gray’s case, history in the making at Tanfield Hall; in the pilot’s, it’s unclear. How that second part of the portrait imperative got translated into Newhaven was surely a question and must have caused inquiry and hypothesis. Yet the photographers thought enough of the compatibility of these two pictures that they exhibited them together a short time later in 1845. At some early point in the business of photographing on the shoreline, the portrait imperative concerning the Newhaveners became manifestly clear. The Newhaveners could be shown participating in the many tasks to bring fish and oysters from the Forth to market. Indeed, Walter Geikie’s example was enormous. It was important, for instance, to show the fishermen arriving on their boats from a morning out at sea. The photographers didn’t have the ability to picture a subject so full of motion and incidence, still less to load their heavy camera and necessities onto a boat and follow the men offshore; but they could, as Geikie proposed (figure 1.14), arrange such a scene by using one of the boats on the beach and having the men sit inside as if they were on the water (figure 1.24), the sail raised as if to catch the sea breeze, the oars extended to row.57 They could show the men arriving on the beach and unloading their baskets of catch (figure 1.25). They could show the women receiving them and bringing in the catch (figure 1.26). The women shucked oysters (figure 1.27) and laid out fish (figure 1.28). In the meantime, the men and boys tended to the equipment, taking down sails and rigging and cleaning baskets. Then the fishwives loaded their creels (strapped properly across their upper arms) and headed to town (figure 1.18). There they met customers and drove hard bargains (figure 1.29). When business was slow or they got tired from all the walking, the women parked themselves on the streets of New Town waiting for a passing patron (figure 1.30), just as Geikie also imagined them (figure 1.31). The orchestration to get such pictures must not have been easy. The exposure was slow, the camera finicky in the quality and direction of light it needed, the focus and depth of field far from flexible. Composing required the participation, patience, and goodwill of a very busy people. There are times when the photographers searched – awkwardly, it seems – for the best way to picture the scenes they imagined. Sometimes

1.24 Top left David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Oyster dredging boat sailing (Newhaven?), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland 1.25 Top right David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, ‘Just Landed.’ Two Newhaven fishermen and two boys grouped around the prow of a boat, National Galleries of Scotland 1.26 Bottom left David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, print by Michael and Barbara Gray from the original negative, Newhaven – bringing in the catch, 1991, National Galleries of Scotland 1.27 Bottom right David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Mrs Barbara (Johnstone) Flucker (Newhaven 11), National Galleries of Scotland

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they tried including strategies from the study portraits they knew so well, including the gestures and affectations of thought ascribed to the ministers (figure 1.32). In our example, the unknown fishwife on the left appears ready with her creel for the long walk to market, the one on the right, eyes mostly closed and her head cradled in seemingly thoughtful repose, as if in meditation and reflection. It is a strange pairing. They tried out stock poses drawn from elsewhere and, in the process, came upon others more interesting. And now and then the pictures, for all kinds of reasons, both technical and compositional, failed miserably. One particular set of pictures gives us a good sense of the trial-and-error process and also a glimpse into the kinds of thematic possibilities that arose in the sessions. The pictures all involve two women, one tentatively identified as Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall. She appears on the left in figure 1.33. Hill and Adamson had evidently arranged for her and a companion to pose for the camera within an enclosed corner – from the looks of it, a passageway lined with bricks on one face and limestone or concrete on the adjacent wall. The floor must have been swept, any brica-brac removed, and the props brought in. The photographers also brought studio equipment for the job, including at least two neck braces to hold the women still; we can spot one of them behind the woman on the right – the tripod legs, the tall shaft, and the vice grip holding the cotton cap – and the top-end nub of the other just over the left shoulder of Elizabeth Hall on the left. The photographers must have known that the poses they would ask of the women would require braces so they could hold

1.28 Top left David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Jeanie Wilson and Annie Linton (Newhaven 24), National Galleries of Scotland 1.29 Top middle David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Two unknown women and Mrs Barbara (Johnstone) Flucker (Newhaven 37), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland 1.30 Top right David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Two unknown women (Newhaven), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland 1.31 Bottom right Walter Geikie, Three fishwives, National Galleries of Scotland 1.32 Bottom left David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Two unknown women (Newhaven – not illustrated in Catalogue), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland

Clockwise 1.33, 1.34, and 1.35 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Two Unidentified Women, n.d., University of Glasgow Library Special Collections

Clockwise opposite 1.36 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Two Newhaven Fishwives, perhaps Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall on the right (Newhaven 28), National Galleries of Scotland 1.37, 1.38, and 1.39 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Two Unidentified Women, n.d., University of Glasgow Library Special Collections

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such awkward and uncomfortable positions. At least in this case, the tools didn’t do their job; Elizabeth Hall’s head shook while the shutter was open. It was a hard pose to keep, this bent-over, peering-back, twisted thing. She was counting oysters or lining her basket with the catch and then also attending to her companion, or so the pose was meant to convey. Her friend’s hand reaches out – was it a gesture meant to convey “interruption” or “intimacy”? Whatever its intent, the photograph did not seem to work. Hill and Adamson seem not to have used it; they did not mask or paint out the neck braces’ presence back in the darkroom, as they would for more desirable pictures. At some point in the session – the precise sequence remains unknown – the photographers tried other poses. They asked the women to switch places (figure 1.34) and, realizing that some poses were especially hard to keep, turned Elizabeth Hall more directly to the camera, where she could lean more squarely and easily on the creel. Perhaps thinking her companion’s outstretched hand was too ambiguous a gesture, they gave her oysters to hold, as if she were about to deposit or remove them from the creel. The neck braces were still needed: we spot the tall shaft and vice grip behind the companion. Judging by the picture’s rarity, it was deemed a failure, too. Elizabeth Hall was asked to don the creel on her back. The photographers tried several pictures with this as a theme, placing the women against the brick wall and also against the adjacent limestone or concrete one (figures 1.35 and 1.36), observing how the backgrounds contributed to or took away from the figuration. They seemed to like something about the second of these two – something about its suggestion of conversation between the women or maybe the hint of a perplexed thoughtfulness caused by some remark – and they tried another, this time without the distracting presence of the creel on Hall’s back, which too frequently connoted the travel of goods to market (figure 1.37). The photographers seemed to like it well enough; they tried to erase the tripod behind Hall so as to prepare the negative for positive printing. They made a sloppy job of it. What had been a session partly devoted to the task of picturing the women’s labour had also become one about their social relationship. Two final images from the shoot (figures 1.38 and 1.39) mostly do away with the attributes of their work. Instead, one is fascinated by the play of hands and the two women’s gentle touching, the other by the bowed heads and the meaningful space between them. Especially in the second of these images, the women’s separateness is emphasized: Elizabeth Hall set against the brick, her companion against the limestone, the corner wedge between them, a shadow looming like a solid barrier. The women’s dispositions were suggestive of something, but certainly not labour. All in

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1.40 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, print by Michael and Barbara Gray from the original negative, Three Newhaven men on a boat, 1991, National Galleries of Scotland

all, the photo shoot had its share of busts but, if nothing else, was an informative exercise about what was possible onsite. In the end, as we will see, they preferred one and used it in a telling manner. The observation of the fisherfolk’s work life expanded to include various aspects beyond the arrival of the catch and the transport to market. There was the beaching of the boats and the manner in which they were arrayed in relation to the shoreline and town. There were the boats themselves, which came in a couple of different sizes (figure 1.9); indeed, the presence of the people in our example is, among other advantages, meant to provide a sense of scale. There were the long days at sea (figure 1.40), which could be concocted in the same way that the photograph of the men “sailing” had been arranged. Sara Stevenson once remarked that Hill was a man “who liked to know how things worked.”58 That sensibility was surely piqued, and it led to an even further investigation of what such a life entailed. The two photographers pushed beyond Newhaven, to next-door Leith, if only to recognize that many of the same habits

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1.41 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Newhaven (or other) fishermen, two men leaning against mooring post on quayside, boy seated at their feet, 1843–46, National Galleries of Scotland

could be found there. They went to a rival village, Prestonpans, and pictured fishermen at the quay (figure 1.41). The men were shown not doing much of anything; their mere presence as competitors was enough (in the background was Musselburgh, and then beyond, Leith and Newhaven). While in Leith, Hill and Adamson also took a picture of the newly constructed archway leading to the Victoria docks (figure 1.42). The scene was a departure from the photographers’ normal habits; although their oeuvre would eventually contain pictures of buildings and landscapes, they are few in number compared to the outpouring of portraits. One can see the appeal of the subject. In good light, the decorative details of the arch stood out. The overlap on the buildings in the distance provided an interesting contrast; the photographers were careful to line up the arch’s keystone with the column of windows behind. The tall mast of the ship to the right – maybe one of

1.42 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Leith Archway, entrance to Victoria Dock?, 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh Photographic Society, gifted 1987

those big three-masted trading schooners that regularly arrived – served as a useful repoussoir. The photograph was a departure in another way, too: the dock was in the process of being augmented to accept even bigger steamships for international trade. Together with the pictures of the Newhaveners, such a scene was an indirect acknowledgment that the fishing cultures of the Forth were part of a much larger shoreline economy. interest in the fisherfolk was the continuation of a large project, hatched in the 1820s and 1830s, to recover or, better, to construct mostly out of thin air a native culture among an urban bourgeoisie. Unlike other nativist and nationalist movements in Western Europe in the age of revolution, Scotland’s peculiar version, rather than prelude to an independence movement, accentuated nativism as part of an effort at rapprochement, its proponents wanting badly a full-scale economic and social connection with England. Called a “unionist-nationalism” by the historian Graeme Morton, the movement had many rumblings in the early nineteenth century but

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was given a rocketing boost in 1822 with the visit of George IV to Scotland, the first reigning British monarch to visit in nearly two centuries.59 Stage-managed by Walter Scott, the king’s arrival was met with a spectacle of tartan regalia and, with the king’s huge (some would say gullible) delight in the exotic costume and pageantry, suddenly raised the kilt and Highland culture to an acceptable identity. The tartan – and more generally the representations associated with outlawed societies of a rebellious Scotland in the previous century – became in vogue. The king was even convinced to don an extravagant kilt (and, famously, also pink pantaloons to cover his pale, bloated legs). Scott’s purpose was manifold, but at least one significant goal was to turn general sentiment among the disenfranchised, disillusioned, displaced, and subdued populations of Scotland away from a radical reform movement – or, worse, rebellion – and the demand for independence, showing them the benefits of union with a sympathetic monarch. It required, too, convincing George IV that he was, in fact, sympathetic and, in addition to being a Hanoverian or British king, also actually a Jacobite king, descended from not only the Stuarts but also The Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charles, the fabled revolutionary of Scottish history and lore. The preparations for the arrival revealed the enormous fiction of it all. Scott consulted stage and costume designers, drilled young men who would serve as honour guards in the nuances imagined to be typical of Celtic march and weaponry, and even mediated between Highlanders and Lowlanders who fought among themselves about the “true” interpretation of the infamous Highland Clearances. In one ludicrous event, the townspeople who attended the Grand Ball for the king (the “Highland Ball,” Scott preferred to call it) were required to wear ancient Highland costume. It sent Lowlanders scrambling to Edinburgh’s tailors and, for some, on a quest to find ancestral roots in the north, no matter how remote or dubious. The beneficiaries of all this “Scottish” choreography and its aftermath were the Lowland bourgeoisie, whose economic and social aspirations were facilitated by union. There was much to be gained by maintaining and even strengthening a close relationship with London: increased opportunities in the marketplace; freer trade; professional advancement; and among small property owners and those with some means, even the possibility of the right to vote and the ability to appoint representatives of one’s choosing – as it turned out, a right only gained ten years later. Equally, there were many cultural benefits to being aligned with the empire’s centre – expanded educational options, travel on imperial authorization, wide and deep patronage, a global reach for virtually any endeavour – not to mention psychological benefits that might be obtained. The losers were the working and subjugated classes

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1.43 George Cruikshank, Geordie and Willie “keeping it up” – Johnny Bull plays the piper!!, 1822, ©Trustees of the British Museum

and their supporters, who enjoyed none of the benefits of the vote or expanded education and whose political aspirations were jettisoned in favour of middle-class stability, comfort, and ambition. It is a familiar story. The turn to nationalism as a feature of unionism brought a literary renaissance: an even greater celebration of Scott’s novels, which among other things reached back into Scottish history for their settings and romance, and of Robert Burns’s poetry, with its dialect rhythms and vernacular subjects.60 It also had a strong visual component. There were predictable caricatures. In one of the more notable, George IV is shown wearing his kilt and enormous feather bonnet (the pink pantaloons discreetly omitted) at the Highland Ball (figure 1.43). He is accompanied by his sidekick, William Curtis. They dance riotously, they kiss the local girls, they cavort like nobody else in the crowd. They’re so uninhibited that they fart with gusto – a society lady must cover her nose at the sudden release. The whole of it is just so much flatulence, the picture seems to say. The gibe was nasty and schoolboyish, as were many that took the king’s Scottish enthusiasms with suspicion, but it had the effect of keeping “Highland” pictorial forms as a legitimate symbology in the public sphere.

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Along with the many caricatures, more high-minded painting turned increasingly to Scottish subjects. It was the great age of Scottish genre and landscape painting – the Ben and Glen school, as some have quipped – of which we can count Walter Geikie a participant. The subjects ranged widely, from pastoral scenes and gentle shepherds to Lowland peasantry and village brides to county fairs and country brawls to crofters and, of course, fishing lads, and much more. The paintings were filled with tam-o’shanters and kilts, ruddy faces and bare feet, earasaids and big brooches, pretty lassies and brawny boys. An entire iconography of daily objects and cast of literary characters became part of the nationalist lexicon. The paintings drew from novels and poems, especially the pastoral and romance; Scott and Burns became standard reading, eclipsing Shakespeare and rivalling the Bible, and provided an enormous trove of subjects. The painters structured their characters around early nineteenth-century canons

1.44 Alexander Carse, A Brawl Outside an Ale House, 1822, National Galleries of Scotland

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about morality and virtue and emergent ideas from Enlightenment anthropology and beliefs about “others.” Studiously avoided were subjects having to do with urban modernity and the crises of the working classes as a consequence of Tory-style unionism. The people were instead gentle, thrifty, shrewd, amorous to the point of lasciviousness, imperturbable, hard working, wise in a folk sort of way, and above all contented. They had their village ways about them, including coarse gestures and a taste for dram. They feasted, bickered, and brawled, and then reconciled over a good ale. Alexander Carse’s A Brawl Outside an Ale House (figure 1.44) is a fair example of the genre. In these paintings, the aspirations of the people did not extend very far and centred on the lives they could eke out in the little towns and communities in which they could be found, where they took pleasures in the small successes they could muster. They were actors on the stage of history, not its directors, still less its playwrights. If the paintings could have talked, they would have spoken in a local patois. Indeed, more than a few paintings’ titles were in dialect. It hardly needs saying that such imagery had only an approximate relationship with the actual circumstances of the Scottish folk it claimed to describe and, in some cases, especially among the most London-leaning of the painters, hardly anything to do with them at all. The paintings produced a “false pastoralism,” as Andrew Noble has bluntly called it, and became, rather than an expression of Scottish folk, a mirror of the needs, desires, and increasingly patrician values of the bourgeoisie.61 It was they who wanted a Scottish folk worthy of the name; and it was they who proffered and consumed them as patrons of the arts. The paintings were undeniably successful; while the art market in and around Edinburgh had once been underwhelming for such a capital city, in the 1830s it began to thrive and by the 1840s became well established. All this enthusiasm for genre’s Scottish subjects – this zeal for a manufactured nationalist culture – was accompanied by vigorous claims about the “authenticity” and “naturalism” of the paintings and an equally vigorous defence of “native” or “local” styles that could be explained as pure vernacular.62 The paintings and representations were without guile, so its supporters argued, but were heartfelt and honest. This is not to say that the paintings did not occasionally cause anxiety and debate; there is ample evidence to suggest they did. Genre’s key purpose was, after all, part of a larger effort to produce a normative, homogeneous, and generally passive vision of a rural society that was still subject to bouts of disturbance and radical agitation. It was sometimes hard to proclaim authenticity and honesty for them when news in the journals and gossip on the streets reported other developments in the countryside.

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Overall, however, local genre became a recognizable fashion and commodity and made up a Scottish school of painting, distinct from the preoccupations and affectations down in London, though related enough in a way that made them recognizable as belonging to the same general language. They spoke in dialect, as it were, not another language altogether. D.O. Hill certainly knew the paintings and subjects intimately. He painted sixtyone landscape scenes devoted to places in Scotland associated with Burns and published them in a collection of prints in 1840.63 He was secretary and chief negotiator for the Royal Academy when it began an aggressive campaign to bring works by David Wilkie and other Scottish genre painters to its walls. Robert Adamson knew the Scottish subjects, too. When he set up his studio on Calton Hill, among the location’s major attractions was a series of sculptures by Robert Forrest who, beginning in 1832 and running for a decade and a half, crafted and installed large works drawn from Scottish romances and pastorals, including the ever-amiable Tam o’Shanter and Souter Johnnie and the pair of Simon and Bauldy, characters from the wildly popular poem “The Gentle Shepherd.” The Scotsman reported with both enthusiasm and sometimes puzzled amusement on the crowds and commotion they were regularly causing. Their presence was surely a potential boon for a studio trying to get off the ground. (The sculptures must have been intended as compensation, too; they were placed near the Political Martyrs’ Memorial.64) A slightly earlier exhibition in New Town, of James Thom’s versions of Tam o’Shanter and Souter Johnnie, brought some 18,000 visitors who were willing to pay a shilling each to see them. In such a menagerie of subjects, it was enormously important that the folk remained absolutely recognizable as types, however clichéd and even disfigured, and held in a grip of formula and convention.65 In effect, they were frozen in time – in “time immemorial.” They were uncontaminated by the circumstances of modernity but instead exhibited the characteristics and habits of an ancient racial stock. They were insular and also insulated, raised from an early age to take the exact same places as their parents, married among themselves, and lived and died within the confines of their ancestral homes. They had names like Jenny, Maggie, and Willie and their children had names like Jenny, Maggie, and Willie. They wore the same kinds of clothes their parents did, even if the style made no earthly sense to outsiders, even if the dress made them the objects of gawking wonder or patronizing advice. “I suggested to pad for the necessary part,” Lady Eastlake once recommended to a fishwife about her mountainous and most illogical costume, “and a little less weight of material, and

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expenditure of shillings upon the rest; but Jinny had an unanswerable: ‘It was verra true – a piece upon the bock might be better, but ye ken it’s juist the fashion o’ the place.’”66 In a paradoxical way, this belief in the folk as the breathing embodiment of an ancient racial stock also helps explain the insistence that the Newhaveners were not foreigners, although they apparently had the look and ways of the Dutch or Flemish or some other immigrant import. The contorted quality of the claim was the local response to a larger conundrum: that an urban bourgeoisie was celebrating a folk culture that was not, in truth, really their own. Or to put it another way, when it came to tartans and the like, people descended from the Anglo-Saxon border were frequently embracing subject matters and stock characters loosely based on the Celtic fringe without, in fact, adequately incorporating Highlanders themselves into Lowland society or ambition. They were a separate people and society, so it was acknowledged repeatedly, and there was a fundamental tension in adopting their culture if it meant having to accommodate the people, too. This is not a perception offered from today’s perspective alone; it was then already an active subject among a notable portion of educated Lowland Scots, including those from all sides of the political spectrum. Take, for example, the following from the Fifeshire Journal, published just the other side of the Forth from Newhaven. The writer observes the presence and also the hardships attending the Highland peoples after the Clearances and famines have brought them south, and he is hardly sympathetic with them, especially those looking for work in his own county. The reason for his impatience? In contrast to “Saxon habits” (he means those of Lowlanders), “the Celtic race is an inferior one [and] attempt to disguise it as we may, there is naturally and rationally no getting rid of the great cosmical fact that it is destined to give way … before the higher capabilities of the Anglo-Saxon.”67 The paper was notoriously racist and race-baiting, but it expressed brazenly and in ethno-nationalist terms what others said more decorously. The two peoples were distinct, even incompatible in terms of living and working side-by-side, and mixing them was a blunder against nature. Or take the following by George Bell, a friend of Hill and a frequent sitter for the photographers’ camera. He was about as opposite politically and socially as one could be to the writer for the Fifeshire Journal. A physician and ardent reformer on behalf of Edinburgh’s poor, he wrote frequently and passionately about the plight of those huddled in the closes and wynds of Old Town. They were too many in such tight quarters, he wrote, too deprived of skills in a competitive job market, too shackled to dram, too easily preyed upon by pawnbrokers and spirits dealers, too accustomed to filth and hopelessness and crushing debt to help themselves. Who were they? Mostly

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Highlanders. The solution? Don’t give them money, as some advocated, because “it is universally notorious that giving money aggravates the evil.” Instead, send them back to the Highlands, where they can farm peacefully on the vast tracts of empty land, for at heart they were simple peasants, not city dwellers, and one best imagined them thriving in a pastoral abode. “The two facts – waste labour, and waste land – stand staring and wondering at each other,” he wrote of the displaced Highlanders and the cleared lands. “Waste land is the natural resort for waste labour, and the cultivation of it is the sure, and we will add, the only method by which pure consumers can be converted into producers.”68 In Edinburgh, they took without giving; back in the “natural resort” of the country, safely removed from urban vice (and safely removed from sight, one suspects), they were at home and could survive. By the time Arthur Balfour, as secretary for Scotland, was asked his opinion in a debate about the fitness of the general population for Scottish home rule, he had misgivings about there being such a thing as a “general” population and instead observed two distinct peoples in the country: “I venture to say that the Highlands of Scotland are more unlike the Lowlands of Scotland in every essential particular than the Lowlands are unlike the North of England. Linguistically, ethnologically, in the character of the people, in the social habits, in every thing of essential moment, I boldly state that the line of division is not the division between England and Scotland, but some line to be drawn far north of that.”69 It is a curious scenario, is it not? The Lowland bourgeoisie celebrated and adopted a culture that most everyone agreed was not theirs. They recognized its sources, sometimes even its make-believe in their hands, and yet went on celebrating it with verve and bigheartedness anyway. Of the circumstances of any actual folk in relation to how they were depicted in art and literature, they had little to say. That was the agitator’s rant. The strategies for how to massage such a knotty scenario among polite urbanites are also familiar: acknowledge the foreign qualities as they appear in representation, then chalk them up as quaint or picturesque touches; or express the worry that the subject matters and also the people are from elsewhere, then pooh-pooh such fears as meaningless, too trivial among sophisticated cosmopolitans with worldly views, and go on with the revelry; or stage the anxiety as a means to contain and explain it. Or better still, in the case of Newhaven, flaunt a nativism that simply does away with all the handwringing. It was this last that seems closest to our example. “The characters, habits, and personal aspects of these women, are so unlike those of the neighbouring rural population,” we can recall the 1837 report on the fishwives declaring, “that some believe them to be a peculiar race, descended from foreign settlers, whose manners

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they still retain.” But lest the fears of unseemly fascination in a non-native people run wild, the belief simply “is not so.” There is always a rational explanation. “In their case, it is obvious that the character is modified, like that of every other class, by their occupation [and] their marriages being confined chiefly within the limits of their own caste.”70 As everyone truly knows, with the exception of the unfortunates at Buckhaven, such colourful and useful folk along the Forth cannot belong to others; they are ours. it’s important in this overall context to keep from indicting the individuals who took part in the mad rush toward the artificial pastoralism of Scottish subjects or to mire them in a charge of false consciousness. For if we were to ask the most fervent supporters about their tastes for these subjects and devotion to the genre’s many maudlin virtues, most would have answered earnestly, without a trace of real irony or subterfuge. Many would have gone to their graves believing in the rightness, the patriotism, and perhaps even the religiosity of their fervour. “We all agree with your appreciation of the Wilkie,” Hill wrote to the artist David Roberts in 1846, in reference to a canvas by the great Scottish genre painter, “never surely was passion and feeling and sorrow more intensely depicted than this.”71 There is no reason to doubt his sincerity or his belief in the origins of those sentiments in the folk. The earnestness brings into sharper relief the reactions of people of goodwill when they are forced to compare the representations of Scottish subjects, on the one hand, and the people amidst concrete historical circumstances, on the other. For now, we need to re-immerse ourselves in some of those circumstances before returning to the photographs and Hill and Adamson’s challenges. beginning in 1837, economic competition, already stiff for Newhaveners, was looking as if it would get stiffer. In that year, the town of Granton, just west and within eyeshot of Newhaven, began construction of a large harbour that would rival – in fact, quickly and completely outperform – the two smaller piers at Newhaven. The harbour would extend farther into the Forth and accommodate much larger and deeper vessels, always the ambition and bane for the most aggressive villages on the coastline. In addition, it would be connected to busy Leith by a new road, the two towns together poised to monopolize steamers and shuttle traffic. By 1842, the central pier of the harbour had been built, and in fact Granton was where the young Queen Victoria arrived on her first official visit, not Leith, where George IV had arrived to the colourful tartan fanfare, nor Newhaven, which had hoped it would serve as the new royal port of

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entry. The next year, in 1843, construction began to lengthen the central pier even further, another 1,700 feet (the extension alone longer than Newhaven’s total), to so dominate the large vessel market that no other town could realistically match it. The construction lasted all that year and most of the next, the extension being opened in October 1844. In 1845, with enough berths to accommodate fleets of traffic, a new low-cost steam ferry service was introduced at Granton, and within a year it replaced all services previously in and out of Newhaven. In addition to the steamers, a rollon/roll-off railway ferry was already in the planning and initial construction stages. Within a few years, the new harbour boasted an enormous paddlewheel steamer, aptly named the Leviathan, to carry wagons, passenger cars, even locomotives, whose tracks on the south side of the Forth ended at Granton and began again on the north side at Burntisland. While passengers had previously complained about having to suffer the indignities of shuttling on yawls from the ferries to Newhaven at low tide, they could soon simply remain sleeping in their berths while the car itself was transported across the water. In addition to steamers, shuttles, and railway ferries, the fishing industry took off. Previously, Granton could not compete with its nearby rivals, but by the mid-1840s, it outdistanced them all. It was just so easy to dock a deep-hulled fifie there and sort the catch into barrels. The volume of fish was so large that a fancy ice house had to be built to store up enough ice to preserve fresh herring and oysters bound for London, the Dutch ports, and the German exchange; the merchants couldn’t count on the regular shipment of ice from Norway providing enough. A member of the Calotype Club was soon drawn to the busy port and took a picture (figure 1.45), making sure to catch at least four steamers at dock, the warehouses sprouting along the pier, the smaller ice house wedged in the middle, and a big double-masted schooner tucked between a couple of steamers and completely dwarfed by them. Merchantry was certainly looking good. Newhaven had only a poor likeness of it. Between 1837 and 1844, there was something of the slow, relentless leak of a faucet – the drip, drip, drip of a problem – for the more worried of the Newhaveners, who watched and listened to the competition grow wider and more formidable with each passing month. Certainly by 1845 and the opening of the ferry service, the drip had turned into a rush. (The agony wouldn’t end; construction would continue until the early 1860s.) It didn’t help that the Duke of Buccleuch, who was funding the entire Granton harbour project, was being difficult again with the Newhaveners and frequently refusing to renew rental contracts that would allow them to fish and dredge for oysters on his grounds. He would have preferred to rent to the Prestonpans or Fisherrow men, who brought the catch through his harbour. In fall 1843, for example,

1.45 Unknown photographer, Granton Pier, 1850, The City of Edinburgh Council

the duke’s representative sent a tersely worded letter to the fishermen telling them of the rental offer from the duke for the upcoming season; he would be charging a much higher amount than he had previously. There would be no negotiation. “If we do not hear from you in the beginning of next week acceding to these terms,” the agent wrote, “it will be necessary for us to throw the fishing open to the Prestonpans people” – a dig that was sure to hit its mark. And for good measure, he added, “or any other who may choose to offer.”72 The men initially didn’t know how to respond. The rent was steep, the profit margin looking very slim, the possibility of bargaining not even on the table. The week passed; the contract was lost, even after their lawyer had tried, against all odds, to broker another.73 It wasn’t the first time they wavered indecisively, and they should’ve learned from before. Earlier in the year when the duke’s offer had come through for the summer season, again at a much higher rate, the men had gone into a tizzy, which led to an odd paralysis. It was their livelihoods, after all. Their lawyer even had to push them to discuss the matter, asking their society’s preses to call a general meeting when its leaders couldn’t come to a reasonable plan of action (and then, in what must have seemed catty given the circumstances, the lawyer charged the society for the postage on the letter that urged them to act – the squeeze was coming from everywhere).74 Despite the duke’s rebuffs, at that date there were still other options to try to meet the families’ needs. The adjacent fishing and oyster grounds belonging to the Earl of Morton and to the Edinburgh Corporation could still be rented, though that meant

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only two-thirds of the men’s usual territory could be worked and probably also twothirds the usual catch could be expected. It didn’t help that Lord Morton was sore that the men hadn’t yet paid the rent for a previous season, a hefty £60 balance.75 They were on thin ice with the Edinburgh Corporation, too. There were still the occasional shuttles that needed help, the complaints about the men’s rudeness notwithstanding. There were the big whales and distant herring shoals to chase. There was the option of simply ignoring the duke’s contract and encroaching on the grounds set aside for the fishermen of both Prestonpans and Fisherrow; as dangerous as it sounds, this seems to have been done frequently. (The Prestonpans and Fisherrow men returned the favour when they trespassed on the grounds rented by the Newhaveners, which then led them to rent a steamship in order to encircle and beach the trespassers’ boats, capturing twenty-seven men in the process and dragging them to court. The competitiveness was turning nasty.)76 There was always the lure of the grey market and, if certain goods could be handled discreetly, the black market, too. Wives and daughters could try the net factories, the kippering yards, or the kitchens and housekeeping jobs in Trinity. That is, there were still prospects and contingency plans; the whole family would simply need to get more resourceful in the mixed-and-matched economy. Probably like many others, William Ramsay had a plan. For 1843, he chose to put almost all of his energies into the oyster season and not pay anything toward any of the other seasons. There seemed no decent profit to be made in local fishing for haddock and cod that year, and he was willing to let his boat be beached for parts of it. We have seen his successes, along with his friend Alexander Rutherford’s, sending oysters to the international market and banking on an insatiable foreign demand to bring home a decent purse. What he did in the other seasons is anyone’s guess, though travelling below the radar might have been a benefit. Whatever the jobs, he made enough to stay out of the debtor’s books, at least for a time. That certainly wasn’t the case for many others. Perhaps – though we are on speculative ground here – Ramsay’s entrepreneurial ingenuity won him favour in the eyes of his fellow fishermen. If his aim was to lay low, he couldn’t after 1844, when the men elected him preses for their society. It must have come as something of a surprise to him. In an organization that prized continuity and experienced leadership, he does not seem to have held any elected office before then. Once upon a time, being elected preses was no doubt an honour and a privilege. It came with a small salary and, although a boatload of responsibility, a fair bit of prestige in the village. By the mid-1840s, however, there is evidence to suggest that nobody – at least nobody remotely qualified – wanted the job. The men’s society – more offi-

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cially, the Society of Free Fishermen of Newhaven – was an ancient organization that the village’s fishermen had established to oversee and protect their craft. There were many such bodies along the Forth; the men in Prestonpans and Fisherrow, to name just two, had also organized themselves along the same lines. Part guild, part union, part mutual aid fraternity, its historic purpose, dating at least to the construction of the Great Michael, had been to safeguard the men’s rights as independent fishermen; navigate them through the courts; contract for rental grounds on their behalf; negotiate with merchants, creditors, and debtors; and provide sick and death benefits to the men and their wives and children. It was led by a preses (president), boxmaster (treasurer), key-keepers (who held the keys for the boxmaster’s safe), and secretary, along with a committee, usually three or four men, who had no title but carried, if nothing else, the weight of experience with Edinburgh and the neighbouring towns. All were elected and served a one-year term. In theory, any member was eligible for office; in practice, usually only boat owners gained any kind of status and influence. They simply had more invested in the business. One could be a member and still take other kinds of jobs; and as a member who paid his yearly dues, one could also decide, in any given year, to pay other dues selectively in order take advantage of certain rental contracts and be free of others, as William Ramsay did. The men were, in this sense, independent contractors who came together when it benefited them to do so but were otherwise free to choose their own livelihoods and paths. There were of course enormous social benefits to belonging, but the men chose their economic lives as each saw fit. Even though wives and daughters were integral parts of the fishing economy, the membership was limited to men. It was once theoretically open to any fishermen and oystermen in the region who worked with the villagers (even to the hated Prestonpans men), but that policy changed abruptly in the new economy of the 1840s. With Granton’s rise, the job of preses became ever more complex. The number of lawsuits facing the fishermen and, equally, the number that they themselves initiated ballooned amidst competition in the international market. Payment to lawyers was fast becoming another monthly salary in itself. (The society sometimes avoided paying for long stretches at a time; in 1849, their main lawyer – there were several – after having not been paid for months, pleaded with the men, “I am in great want of money at present and I hope you will be able to give me something.”77 To which the society seems to have remained eerily silent.) The rental contracts became harder to obtain and even harder to negotiate. And then there were the maddening problems associated with the market’s many specializations. The curers, for example, preferred to contract individual boat owners as a way to monopolize certain catches, but in so

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doing, bypassed the structure and bargaining might of the society altogether. It didn’t help that some boat owners were happy with private arrangements. The jealousies and gossip must have taken flight. The merchants wanted to pay variable prices throughout the season, matching the ups and downs of their own resale markets at the foreign ports. That meant the preses had to constantly renegotiate what initially seemed solid contracts, and so had to keep many different merchants in play and angling against each other – and avoid being angled by them. And it got worse. The membership was continually in arrears, and the debt book was filling up with months and months of obligations. Even Alexander Rutherford, who seemingly did well for himself, fell into debt every year; he would pay it off the following year, only to fall into debt again shortly after. The stiff competition was having its effects in every household and causing a constant juggling act with the wallet. The insurance companies demanded more money for their policies – with limited income, the men’s property, including houses and boats, were falling behind in basic maintenance – and the society ended up having to pay an astronomical £400 for a single policy in 1843, a lifetime of earnings for many in the village.78 How the men individually responded to the circumstances took many forms, but at least some must have been borderline criminal: encroaching where they shouldn’t, of course, but also harassing and bribing others, dredging more than was wise for the survival of the scalps, sneaking onto other beaches at off-hours and grabbing mussels for bait to sell back to the other villages, stowing an occasional box of “missing” cargo – all small acts of survival. Whatever the actions, they were found out, and the duke’s agent sent another terse letter in 1845 that must have sounded if not a death knell then something very close: “We are directed to say that the behavior of the Newhaven fishermen has been such as to deprive them of any claim of favour from His Grace, and that it will depend upon their conduct in time to come whether he will ever let the Fishery to them.”79 The duke refused to rent to them in 1845 and 1846. In fall 1847, desperate for any kind of reprieve, the men appealed to the local court to keep others from encroaching on one of their few supplies of mussels, to no avail. What is interesting about the latest court case was the reasoning the fishermen gave: it’s not that they believed they had exclusive rights to the mussels, it was that they had not been able to fish the duke’s grounds the previous two years and were hard up.80 At such a historic moment, who would want to be a preses? Many of the most qualified must have refused the job. In 1845, the society, under William Ramsay’s oneyear leadership, issued a new “Rules and Regulations” book with whole new sets of controls, something it hadn’t done in at least four generations and maybe even longer.

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Reviewing the new rules, we can readily hear what Ramsay and his officers were trying to ameliorate: If a member refuses to accept the vote to be an officer, he must pay a fine. Members must not expose the society’s affairs and, without exception, cannot grouse about other members’ benefits. Members on sick pay cannot “tipple from house to house, nor be out of his dwelling-house or lodging after ten o’clock at night.” And if we ever wondered why, in such straits, the members didn’t entertain radical agitation, consider this rule: “Neither religion nor politics shall be the subject of debate at any of the public or private meetings of the society.”81 So the men refused to help with the heavy lifting, gossiped about the society’s affairs (and, for many, probably bellyached about its ineffectiveness or just plain incompetence), complained about the favours and small extras other families got, faked being sick in order to get some precious coins and then were found out by their late-night tippling. Some were talking about politics and perhaps even political change. Whether the new rules brought order or, in a larger context, whether Ramsay could bring some modicum of economic stability to the fishermen were open questions. The shuttles and ferries had by then abandoned Newhaven, and the enormous international market, which had once brought the village to a level of modest prosperity – at least everyone had opportunities to weigh – was becoming harder to access. The men had a difficult time meeting their obligations for the rental contracts and frequently fell behind.82 Within a few years, the society’s leadership, its box growing emptier because of the inability of the fishermen to pay their dues and because of the extraordinary outlay sent to lawyers to help plead their case in the courts, sent an official missive to its members, declaring that all sick pay and death benefits were being cut in half. They had never been cut in anyone’s memory. For the first time since the steamships had arrived in Newhaven in 1812, the treasury was almost empty. There had been so many legal expenses that “it was entirely out of [our] power to continue the Weekly Allowance … The Funds were so exhausted that [it is] impossible to [help].”83 One of the society’s most sacred pledges, to care for those members who were sick or widowed, could no longer be fully carried out.84 perhaps andrew noble’s charge of false pastoralism will not seem so blunt after all. But let us put the matter this way: Globalization in Scotland in the thirty-five years between 1812 and 1847 was best characterized as it was in many parts of the evolving British empire. The coming of steamships and railroads radically transformed the nature of the market, such that international trade, previously a facet of most local economies, became the driving force. Goods, especially perishables like fish and oysters,

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could be transported to farther places more quickly. In addition to the increased trade to foreign ports, the nature of the trade had likewise changed. Where previously any trade expansion was driven by import or export demand – the case of the Great Michael, for example – the new trade was characterized by the integration of markets between trading economies. By this is meant that, among other things, the prices for goods moved proportionally across different national markets; the price for herring at the Newhaven docks was in close relation to that at the Dutch exchange, the two closely monitoring each other. No wonder the Dutch, German, and British merchants wanted variable prices from the Newhaveners throughout the season; they knew how intimately the wholesale and retail at different ports were integrated, and their profits mattered greatly by calibrating the relationship between them all. The Newhaveners’ demand for a specific rate, most often calculated by the men’s measurements of their own investments in rental contracts, net and boat maintenance, and the like, was not always practical given the calculations based on prices elsewhere. That is, the Newhaveners’ estimation of a living wage was no longer solely theirs to compute, requiring they readjust their wallets and expectations. It was not easy for many of them to do. It is a truism today, but only beginning to be so then: the world’s economies were becoming globally integrated. The forging of this integration is a peculiarly 1820s phenomenon, and its development, and also growing pains, crucial in the 1830s and 1840s.85 It’s no wonder that the Duke of Buccleuch was willing to invest gobs of money in a gargantuan harbour at Granton. With the integration of the markets, there was no turning back to the fantasy of easy give and take: my fish for your ice, my oysters for your wood – that didn’t cut the mustard anymore, even as a fantasy. What was needed was a huge supply of a desirable commodity so that its possessor could try to dictate the terms of both his market and also yours. In addition, it would be better to possess many different kinds of commodities at once, rather than be reliant on a single one, the better to enter and exit the marketplace propitiously without falling too much prey to the patterns elsewhere. The 1804 plan for a massive warehouse district between Newhaven and Leith was already one such sign in that direction; Granton’s warehouses were its fruition. It’s also no wonder that Henry Dempster kept urging the fishermen of the Forth to worry about the Dutch. It didn’t matter whether the Newhaveners would ever in their lives come across a Dutch-packed herring or taste its plumpness and freshness. The innovations and practices across the North Sea mattered hugely to local livelihood, and one had better start developing keen telescopic vision. The peculiar situation of Scotland was its marginal relationship to empire. Though Scots had participated widely in imperial ventures – the British East India Company

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was filled with them and, as a later chapter describes, the tea and opium trades in China depended on them – those were endeavours primarily pursued by individuals and the wealthy. Walter Scott and the Lowland bourgeoisie viewed union as the only viable option for the country as a whole to survive in the modern, globalized world. In addition to whatever feudal fantasies Scott harboured (and there were many), Scotland needed the market diversity and reach of London to stabilize its own economy in the face of rapid integration. There would be clear winners in union and also, as always, clear losers. Predictably, its outcasts would be heavily represented by the working and peasant classes, whose access to the international sphere was always going to be dictated by the big trade houses and whose political ambitions for freedom of determination would in no way be facilitated by union. Whatever rights and comforts they might demand, they would be regularly measured by a standard having very little to do with local custom but rather against the market logic of profit and loss. Of course, one way to peddle that trade-off, perhaps even to assuage any lingering guilt on the part of its orchestrators, would be to celebrate the outcasts’ cultures – in fact, not just celebrate but revel in them, raise them to a level of national pride. The emotional benefits were, and continued to be, enormous. Scottishness of that sort was almost fully internalized among a significant portion of society by the 1840s.86 All the better that the symbols and forms had been previously outlawed but then made triumphant; all the better that they were being rescued as if from the dustbin of history. though situated on one of the highest points in town, the studio on Calton Hill was still not bright enough for the photographers to take pictures indoors. All the camera work needed to be done outdoors on the southern face of an exterior wall. Rather than allow the exterior environment dictate the design and layout of the photographs, Hill and Adamson manipulated it, setting out writing and dining tables, chairs, rugs, a fine tapestry, a peculiar-looking swag or curtain, many different kinds of books, sculptures, urns, tablecloths, even some medieval armour, as if the exterior wall were an interior space. The fiction of domestic arrangement became one of their signature styles, and there are few portraits of the ladies and gentlemen of Edinburgh without some aspect of it. It must have been a relief but also something of a conundrum when the photographers arrived in Newhaven to find that the villagers already had some of their furniture outdoors. People in the village lived outside on their stoops, where they tended to children, mended nets and cleaned baskets, baited the mountains of hooks, washed clothes and hung them to dry, swapped news, and socialized (figure 1.46). The arrangement was not a fiction of domesticity; it was domestic

1.46 Left David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Group of Newhaven fishwives on outside stairs with basket and washing, National Galleries of Scotland 1.47 Right David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Mrs Grace Ramsay and four unknown women (Newhaven 48), National Galleries of Scotland

life. The recognition informed how the photographers set up the exterior wall on Calton Hill when the fishwives visited them for more pictures (figure 1.47). Gone are the many fancy props that appear elsewhere in the standard photographs. Instead, the women are arranged around a simple wooden bench – it was probably the closest the photographers had to a rustic seat – and a basket and creel. The women were best understood as being “outside” where they normally met, without the pretend parlour room as a device for gathering and socializing. Compare the photograph to another of the Newhaveners taken by a member of the Calotype Club (figure 1.48). In the club photo, the fishwives are certainly outside, and the women look to be the same two who appear in Hill and Adamson’s picture, seated and on the far right, though this is far from certain. The overall effect, however, could not be more different. The example of John Kay’s drawing of the oyster caller is strong in the club picture (figure 1.11), in the airless and specimen-like handling of the figures, as if the women were simply there to confirm the larger fascination in their dress and industry. The portico has no necessary function as a setting; if anything, the fluting on the columns only serves to accentuate the busy stripes on the dress. Any suggestions of personality or sociality that might be offered – and they are slight – pale in comparison to the light-and-dark maze of the costumes. It is a picture of the folk.

1.48 Unknown photographer, Newhaven Fishwives, 1850, The City of Edinburgh Council

Or compare it again to another photograph by Hill and Adamson, this time of women with the pastor of their church, the Rev. Dr James Fairbairn, and the publisher and church elder James Gall (figure 1.49). Fairbairn had been present at The Disruption and was probably slated to appear in Hill’s history painting.87 It seems his very presence along with Gall’s necessitated pulling out some of the props normally arrayed for sitters of their ilk and status. The pairing of props is odd: the rustic bench, creel, and basket on the left (the “outside”) and the books, writing table, tablecloth, and chair with an upholstered seat on the right (the “inside”). The fishwives were positioned as if they were attending a Bible lesson or some other religious instruction, though whether they did so on the “street” or in the “parlour” is another matter altogether. The differences among the three photographs are modest, easily missed, but they matter, for in the comparisons we observe a small recognition on the part of Hill and Adamson about the way a people lived in the village. The recognition was particular, discrete, and also sometimes led to awkwardness, and it could figure in a most

1.49 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Mrs Carnie Noble, unknown woman, Bessy Crombie, Mary Combe, Mrs Margaret (Dryburgh) Lyell, Rev. Dr James Fairbairn, James Gall. Called ‘The Pastor’s Visit’ (Newhaven 56), 18 July 1845, National Galleries of Scotland

unobtrusive way: in a simple bench that could pass for an outdoor seat and perhaps, too, in a dark shawl cast aside, a suggestion that the seated woman has taken off a warm piece of clothing and is resting for a spell in the glare of the hot sun. The vast majority of Hill and Adamson’s Newhaven pictures aim for other kinds of assessment: the variety and quality of labour, the anthropological-like fascination in costume and accessories, the strength and uprightness of the men and strength and comeliness of the women, and also, yes, the “Scottishness” ascribed to the folk, and more. Yet in these few isolated instances, the folk were also perceived and distinguished as belonging to an environment – of hard work and hard bargaining, surely, but also of community, social relationships, and a quality of uncontrived informality and of the settings (the stoops and sandy shoreline) in which these things took distinct shape. They were part of the revelation of picturing onsite, of having to strike up conversations, of wanting to borrow props, and of needing to gain trust. Photographing the men and women certainly had a relationship to the photographers’ usual studio habits and conventions, but there were times when such routines were put aside or, when enlisted, augmented or adjusted in an effort to account for the lay of the land.

1.50 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, James (or Sandy) Linton (Newhaven 1), National Galleries of Scotland

Take, as another example, the very choice of sitters. The fishermen who can be identified were almost invariably boat owners, not hired hands who made up the crew. It seems the photographers had learned enough about the professional life of the fishing society to understand its hierarchy and to whom they ought to propose their project, especially if they wanted boats in the scenes. A few times, the photographers identified some of the men by title, especially in the case of pilots, easily the highest-ranking members of the social structure (figure 1.22). Pilots had to be licensed and literate, and their services were sought after, their knowledge of the Forth coming in handy for foreign steamers and schooners trying to negotiate the currents and depths and also for smaller vessels venturing into the shallows upriver.88 In other pictures, the photographers made sure to note the boat owner’s status by including his prized possession, as in the case of James Linton (figure 1.50). It’s no coincidence that “Newhaven” can be made out on the prow. The yawl was surely a significant emblem of a professional identity – it required a major investment – and one of the sources of any fisherman’s prominence around the village, even of vanity and pride. These gestures of recognition must be weighed against the obvious historical circumstances. The date of Linton’s picture – one of a handful that has been dated – was June 1845. It was a low time. The drip-turning-to-rush that we earlier observed

1.51 Thomas Begbie, Newhaven Pier, 1887, The Cavaye Collection of Thomas Begbie Prints: Museums and Galleries Edinburgh

was by then a manifest reality for the Newhaveners. One might have willfully ignored the competition from Granton before; it was hard to afterwards. The visual evidence was unambiguous; the Calotype Club member’s photograph of the busy dock had gotten that right. Where once the shuttles and steamers used Newhaven, they were now docking off to the west on Granton’s newly extended central pier, the warehouses opened to greet them, all within eyeshot of the fishermen’s increasingly quieter docks. A slightly later picture by Thomas Vernon Begbie (figure 1.51), purposely mournful in all kinds of ways, visualized the matter starkly for Newhaven. In Granton, there were already rumours of a colossal paddlewheeler in the works – what turned out to be the Leviathan – reputed to be in the 400-ton range. Its size could only signal more bad

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news. That summer, too, was the first of the two consecutive summer seasons for which the Duke of Buccleuch withheld rental contracts from the Newhaveners and gave them to rivals. The men could probably see some of the awful Prestonpans yawls full of the morning’s catch arriving at Granton, too. That year, the number of fishermen in the society who opted not to pay into the other rental contracts dropped, from 256 to 149, less than 60 per cent of the total previously.89 What the other 40 per cent did we can guess. Something of these circumstances surrounded Linton’s posing for the photographers. Hill and Adamson probably paid him, the extra money no doubt welcome.90 We can imagine that the session proceeded by trial and error, as we saw previously with the dance around the neck brace with Mrs. Elizabeth Hall and her companion. And indeed, we can spy the ghost of a tripod stand behind Linton’s right foot, more expertly erased than was the case for some of Elizabeth Hall’s negatives. But let us also try to imagine the shoot in another way, with the new reality of the shoreline for all to see, and let us give some shred of agency and motivation to its sitter. For posing was a two-way street. It required give and take, suggestion and consent, request and amenability, recommendation and counter, even or especially at this early date of photography’s practice. There were no long-standing protocols on the matter when on the streets, and definitely none when on the shoreline. If you don’t like that pose, we might hear Linton telling the photographers, how about this (figure 1.52), with his legs more squarely planted and his arm tucked more securely into the boat? The attitude was somewhat easier for him to hold; the other made him totter ever so slightly. If it should please the photographers, they could enlist his sons. Though young, the boys were obedient and could sit quietly right there by his feet. Look at how they can behave (figure 1.53). Did the men notice his name on the other side of the prow? It was his boat, yes, and when he was at sea everyone recognized it. At its tip is where he normally hung the flag identifying his licence to fish the grounds. The whole of it might prove useful for their designs. For a few more coins (the fishermen must have been extraordinary hagglers, too), his boat could surely serve as a useful place for other of their operations. It was beached and he had no need for it until the next morning. There was no more to do at sea that day; the fishing grounds had shrunk. He had two friends just up the road who also had some time. Let him empty the basket – the nets needed work anyway – and bring a stool from the stoop for one of them who is getting on in years (figure 1.54). And for a few more coins, his friends might be willing to lend their sons. Let him fetch the lads while the two photographers repositioned their machine (figure 1.55).

Clockwise 1.52 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, James Linton (Newhaven 2), National Galleries of Scotland, Bequeathed by James Brownlee Hunter, 1928 1.53 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Sandy (or James) Linton, his boat and bairns (Newhaven 45), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland 1.54 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Two unidentified men and James Linton (Newhaven 33), National Galleries of Scotland, bequeathed by James Brownlee Hunter, 1928

William Ramsay, Alexander Rutherford, and John Liston were all boat owners, too (figure 1.1). We may fancy their picture was taken around the time of James Linton’s, though there is no hard evidence to support a precise date. Still, between late 1844 and much of 1845, being a preses made Ramsay a man whose opinions and consent mattered, despite whatever grumblings were going on within the society, and the photographers surely were apprised of it and would do well to approach him. It’s hard now not to look into his eyes and try to see the photographers through them: these two men, dressed in finery, come down from Calton Hill wanting likenesses of him and his friends. They seemed affable and earnest enough, and what did he care of their plans,

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1.55 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Newhaven Boys ‘Newhaven Fisher Gallants’ (Newhaven 51), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland, Elliot Collection, bequeathed 1950

which he may not have quite gotten the grasp of anyway, this “calotype.” They had shillings, and he just needed to stand by the boat for them. It was all very puzzling but easy. He ought to tell Alexander and John. He ought to tell Grace (figure 1.47). He ought to tell all the fishermen; it was his job to help them, and they sorely needed it. Whatever artistic motivations about picturing different “bodies” and “classes” Hill and Adamson might have brought to the shoreline that day, the act of paying the men, of putting coins into their hands and feeling their grasp, returned them to the world of the village’s economy. Any look around the docks and up and down the shoreline told them it was modern and complex, despite what the writers had said and whatever quaint image of the Newhaveners the people in Edinburgh had formed based on the curious fishwives they saw in New Town. Their lives were physical and sometimes a mighty struggle, the hustle and resourcefulness apparent, the competition and marketplace expansive and unforgiving. The photographers might ask the fishermen to hold some poses, and if they complied but did not quite get the attitude or bearing Hill and Adamson had in mind, or if they had stiff or even graceless carriages that

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went against studio habits, what did it matter in this case. They were not gents and ladies from New Town; they were a people whose ways and ambitions could be only partly fathomed. They were noticeably separate from the image of the “folk” that had been circulating. The picture would do well to get even a glimpse (figure 1.1). in 1845, hill and adamson began organizing their pictures into albums. Their earlier pledge to publish a book of pictures about the fishermen and also other books organized around various photographic themes was not forgotten. The time was right. They had amassed an enormous pile of negatives, eventually numbering several thousand in total and 130 or so of the fisherfolk. There were plenty to choose from. But inventory matters aside, the sad truth was that, for all of their efforts and vast social connections, they had still not made any profit. In fact, the studio was hemorrhaging money. The art historian Anne Lyden reports that the photographers sold individual prints at a shop belonging to Hill’s brother in New Town, but it must have been small beer in comparison to what they were spending.91 Where the rest of the money came from is unknown. Perhaps John Adamson in St Andrews sent some spare coins to help his younger brother. Perhaps, too, Hill drew income from his paintings and also the prints based on his paintings. Whatever the intake, it was not enough and their resources were being gorged, prompting Hill to write to a painter friend in March of that year that he “had sunk some hundreds of pounds and a huge cantle of my time in these Calotype freaks.” The frustrations were reaching a boiling point. Not only was there no money but also no acclaim among the cognoscenti and aesthetes who were his circle, and if he did not shortly succeed “in doing something by it worthy of being mentioned by Artists with honor[,] I will very likely soon have done with it.”92 The photographers sent a portfolio to the London printseller and publisher Dominic Colnaghi, who promptly tossed it under a counter. Then in the fall they decided to organize the first of several large folio-sized albums, the kind of album they had probably wished Colnaghi would sell. It would not only display their photographic prowess and artistic conceptions but also simply help them try to make ends meet. They imagined selling it for the astronomical price of £40 or £50.93 Now called the Clarkson Stanfield Album after the painter to whom it was first given – alas, not sold – the first folio album brought together a variety of Hill and Adamson’s photographs.94 But even at that early date and even, or perhaps especially, under the pressure to turn a profit and be worthy of “honor,” the album established both the key pictures of their oeuvre, at least as the photographers first saw it and as most others have subsequently agreed, and the structure and sequence in which

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the photographs would be collected and understood.95 For our purposes, where once the photographers imagined a stand-alone book devoted to the Forth’s fishing cultures, beginning in 1845 with the Stanfield Album and those following, they opted to include those photographs in another structure framed by other subjects, the ladies and gentlemen of the country especially. For all of their variations and permutations, the albums follow a pattern organized around a hierarchical social structure. They almost invariably begin with portraits of great Scottish men, followed by portraits of known Scottish women (frequently the wives and daughters of the men), followed usually by portraits of the children of these men and women, and then finally an uneven mix of landscapes, buildings and monuments, an occasional soldier or two, some tableaux, and the fisherfolk. Proportions aren’t everything, but in the case of the first folio album they are telling: thirty-eight pictures of the gents, eight of the ladies, twenty-three of various monuments, one of soldiers, and a whopping thirty-eight of fisherfolk and their environs. Though making up only a sliver of the vast inventory, pictures of the Newhaveners were, at least early on, conceived by the photographers as being equal in importance to their many portraits of The Disruption’s great men. Genre paintings had, of course, paved the way for the general fascination with folk among Hill and the artsy set, such that any oeuvre could seem barren without them. But there was more involved, something about the experience of being on the beach, confronting its inhabitants, working closely with them, at least for a time in the previous months. The selection of “fishing” pictures began not with any of the men and women but with one of the Leith docks (figure 1.56), a recognition that any assemblage of the shoreline had to acknowledge, as they well knew, its breadth, industry, heavy construction, expanding architecture, and sheer size. The young boy’s presence brought a sense of the ever-increasing scale into the watery distance and also, by the mere suggestion of restfulness and stillness off to the side, confirmed the place as something to be settled in and experienced. The photographers included not one but two pictures of James Linton and then another of the boys and boat (figures 1.52, 1.53, and 1.55), the recent involvement with the man clearly having an effect. They showed the village’s outdoor sociality (figure 1.46), its labour (figure 1.25), even its competition (figure 1.41). It would be a stretch to suggest that the proportion of fishing pictures was evidence of a democratic longing on the part of the photographers or that the fisherfolk were anything but low on the rung of an intensely classed society. Rather it was a proposition that they could be understood, or at least imagined, as integral to a cross-section of a worthy and admirable contemporary society – a modern Scottish society – along with its great men.96

1.56 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Leith Docks, ca. 1843, ©National Portrait Gallery, London

There must have been a good deal of hemming and hawing in the selection and arrangement. The photographers had originally made a title page announcing “100 Calotype Sketches,” chosen and then carefully printed, mounted, and bound one hundred pictures on heavy paper between beautifully embossed leather covers; but soon afterwards, they added more photographs, as if the initial selection and organization were not quite right, and covered over several of the originals with others mounted on separate stock and abruptly hinged over the existing pages. Important for us, the later inserts, offered as revisions, almost all involved the Newhaveners. One example will provide insight into what the additions were meant to do. In the original selection, Hill and Adamson chose a picture of Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall (figure 1.57). From a certain aesthetic standpoint, it is a lovely photograph, resounding evidence of what the combination of Hill’s painterly sense and Adamson’s technical know-how could achieve. In Adamson’s hands, the full range of the camera’s light-to-dark spectrum was on display: the high white on Elizabeth Hall’s blouse and far side of her face, bright to the point of near blow-out (but not quite, held back by just a hair); the deep darkness of the cape as it cascades and touches the ground; and

1.57 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall (Newhaven 13), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland, bequeathed by James Brownlee Hunter, 1928

1.58 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall and Unidentified Woman, n.d., University of Glasgow Library Special Collections

then the subtle easing of intensity and contrast of the stripes across the dress. There was the outright demonstration of the camera’s particular thoroughness, its ability to capture every detail no matter how intricate or finicky, as in the weft and weave of the wicker in the foreground and crinkled rock edge in the background. These were details that painters avoided; the camera, on the other hand, gobbled them up. There was the careful management of the depth of field that Adamson’s fast lens produced, the entire figure of Elizabeth Hall and her creel and basket well focused, the crinkled rock beyond just barely, and the fade-out to a pleasing bokeh that framed and hugged her. Matching Adamson was Hill’s sensitivity to the comportment of Hall, her head bowed gracefully and eyes averted, as if in thought or meditation, her fingers achingly close but not quite touching, a yawning space calling for attention. And then the upturned basket: its open mouth showed its vessel-like, womb-like shape, a traditional image of fecund femininity. If the photographers were aiming for approval and honour from “Artists,” they couldn’t have done much better than with the picture of Elizabeth Hall. There were no missteps; the photograph was tightly unified. Elizabeth Hall was a woman to be beheld. And yet, upon consideration, the two men decided it needed covering and hid it behind another, which we have already encountered (figure 1.36). From the aesthete’s view, the addition had none of the careful loveliness of the original. In terms of the camera’s technical range, it displayed hardly any of the easy and controlled transition from light to dark but was instead abrupt and syncopated and, in the case of Hall’s dress, blotchy. The exact report of the lens was put to strange use, capturing the stripes (what picture of the fishwives would be complete without them?), but also the odd

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leafless vine or weed behind and the escaping string and the string’s cast shadow below. The smooth fade-out to a pleasing bokeh was instead brusquely cut off by the back wall, and rather than hugging the figures, the background flattens them. Another print of the same photograph (figure 1.58) allows us to see more easily the mess that the original negative was and the many artifacts – those blips and spots and low-level visual noise – that had to be reckoned with. Adamson could not quiet them all. Gone, too, are the metaphors offered by the basket or the connotations of the wistful bow and yawning space. But what is lost in artistic honour is gained in the suggestions of an actual social relationship between women at work. From the original series of Hall and her companion, the photograph condenses all that the others – the ones deemed failures – were aiming for. To return again to the dance around the neck brace, the session was partly trying to solve the problem of picturing the two women at work (figures 1.33–1.39), and somewhere along the experiments, the photographers came to understand that the sheer fascination with labour, à la Geikie, was mixed with a recognition of the rapport that naturally occurred upon any kind of mingling. It was the achievement of the picture in question to condense both: work and its arrest, physicality and intimacy. There was nothing necessarily pretty or picturesque about it. Or perhaps it is better to say that in overlaying the photograph with another, Hill and Adamson provided a comparison. The added picture was hinged over the original, meaning it could be flipped up, exposing the other, and then returned into place. A viewer couldn’t see both at once, only consecutively. They were two aspects of the same woman, the object of a rustic loveliness found beneath the figure who belonged with her companion to a milieu. With the camera’s service, the fishwife could be extracted from her society and become a pretty lass. Let us put the comparison more historically. The viewer could toggle between an image that tried to recognize the folk of the modern shoreline and one that saw them through the lens of Scottishness. Or better, Scottishness had to be wrested from daily life. The distinction was neither entirely polar nor wholly complete, but it was what the camera in this early moment of practice could offer. tragically, robert adamson died in early 1848, ending the partnership’s run. Given the miserable state of finances, the studio would not have lasted much longer anyway. Neither the Stanfield Album nor any of its near-cousins brought the expected windfall. With bundles of photographs still in his possession, Hill continued to create more albums and gave them to friends and colleagues who might help him find some measure of success for them. He sent an album to the Royal Academy, but it met with

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ambivalence. The next year, in 1849, he already had to send a note of apology to a painter-friend who he had enlisted to try to help guide the album through the Academy’s doors.97 He continued to send individual prints to art competitions – he and Adamson had done so when the partnership was still active – but they met with little success. In 1852, after another failure at a juried show, he chided the judges for their refusal to award him a medal for “this preoccupance [sic] … I am still of opinion they should have done so,” he wrote the same friend, “it would have been some consolation for much time and money I gave, I hope not foolishly, in making the art respectable.”98 But by then the calotype was already being superseded by prints gotten from the new wet plate process, and within a decade the wet plate would completely overwhelm virtually all the original processes for making pictures. Its consistency, flexibility, and relative economy were beyond the reach of either the daguerreotype or the calotype. Within a few years of the end of the Hill and Adamson partnership, their kind of photography had become a thing of the past. In 1859, Hill organized what might have been his most sumptuous album, the socalled James Wilson Album, now at the British Library. It’s an extraordinary album of luxurious make, with ornate gold embossing on rich blue leather bindings, silver decorative clasps, an intricate geometric design incised on gold-leafed page ends, and even more floral and arabesque motifs incised in gold on the inside covers. The photographs are mounted on heavy, folio-sized cardstock, and the prints are among the finest of the many versions that fill other albums. The whole of it – two separate volumes – weighs a ton. Like most of the other albums, the James Wilson Album is not something to casually flip through on the lap. Even more so than the others, it is something to inspect as a work of art. After more than a decade of assembling albums, Hill knew how to put one together. Gone are the awkward additions and hinged pictures; gone, too, are the hesitations or augmentations that these edits may have at one time represented. He again prefaced the album with a title page proclaiming “One hundred calotype” prints and again exceeded that number, though intentionally so from the beginning (its table of contents page happily listed one hundred and five). But in comparison to the Stanfield Album, he significantly reduced the number of “fishing” pictures from thirty-eight to nineteen, half the original conception. There were no more Prestonpans competitors (figure 1.41), no more fishermen bringing in the catch (figure 1.25), no more Leith ports, no more pilots (figure 1.22), no men “at sea” (figure 1.24), no stock-taking of the boats (figure 1.9), no stoop scenes of casual sociality (figure 1.46). Where once William Ramsay and his friends (figure 1.1) had appeared in other, earlier albums – in 1849, for example, in

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1.59 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall (Newhaven 14), National Galleries of Scotland

the Henry Bicknell Album – they, too, were dismissed from this one. And, significantly, he got rid of the photograph of Mrs Elizabeth Hall and her companion (figure 1.36). Instead, he not only kept the lovely photograph of Elizabeth Hall but also gave it a title, calling her “A Newhaven Beauty” and explicitly confirming what the earlier comparison in the Stanfield Album had implied. In addition, he added another picture of her (figure 1.59), emphasizing her importance as a “lass” in the remaining sample of Newhaveners. But perhaps most significant of all, he added captions to nearly all of the Newhaven pictures, which he had never previously done. The captions are full of consequence because they redefined the photographs as belonging to Scottish pastoralism and the romantic sensibility. Of James Linton and his children (figure 1.53), in the Wilson Album he was now “Saunders Mucklebackit of Musselcrag,” a character from a Walter Scott novel. Of the two women laying out their fish for inspection (figure 1.28), they were, like Elizabeth Hall, now “twa bonnie

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lasses.” And of Elizabeth Hall herself, she now spoke in verse: “When Jamie, Jock and Janetty / Are up and gotten lear / They’ll help to keep the boat affloat [sic] / And lichten a’ our care.” She became the mother of children (the ever-present Jamie and Jock of Robert Burns’s poetry) who would one day grow up to keep the boat afloat – that is, succeed her in the fishing culture, just as she once took the place of her mother and thereby repeating, in a long line of such parents and children, the cycle from time immemorial. Others spoke in verse, too. Two fishwives were not merely bringing their creels from the beach (figure 1.60), they were instead longing with hope and melancholy for their men to return from sea and “hail[ed] the bark that never can return,” a passage from a poem by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell. Grace Ramsay and her friends were not merely reading in front of the Calton Hill studio (figure 1.61), they were burying themselves in a love letter from the sea, “Frae Jamie at the sea.” And the

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1.60 Opposite David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Two unknown women. ‘To hail the bark that never can return’ (Newhaven 26), National Galleries of Scotland, purchased from the estate of Sophia Finlay (Charles Finlay’s Trust), 1937 1.61 Left David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Marion Finlay, Mrs Margaret (Dryburgh) Lyall, Mrs Grace (Finlay) Ramsay. Called ‘The Letter’ (Newhaven 36), 1843–47, National Galleries of Scotland, bequeathed by James Brownlee Hunter, 1928

various fishwives now also most definitely spoke in thick dialect, as Grace Ramsay and her other companions did (figure 1.47): “What are ye for the day, monkbarns / Plenty o haddocks & whitings,–a bannock fluke and 2 cockpaidle.” Maybe in producing such a luxurious album, so evidently and self-consciously “artistic,” Hill thought it best to define the Newhaveners along the lines of the dominant mode of a cognate practice, the portrayals and sentiments of genre painting. The shorthand that had always accompanied any representation of the folk in a tartanizing era was never far from reach. As we have seen, it was a ready vocabulary, understandable, wildly popular among a patron class, tenacious in its staying power, and synonymous with nationalist feeling. Perhaps, too, Hill, for all of his efforts in trying to gain honour as a photographer, understood that the calotype would never be resurrected in the new age of the wet plate. If it was going to be consigned to the dustbin of history, he might as well embrace the past with full glory: the verses and characters

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were invariably by poets and novelists long dead. Hill himself would leave the calotype behind, dabbling in the albumen print and becoming a member of a photographic society that was heavily commercial and invested in the wet plate. But perhaps, as this chapter has been proposing from the beginning, the best antidote to the attraction of Scottish pastoralism lay in the face-to-face encounters with actual people and witnessing first-hand their lives in a modern, globalized, and pitiless economy. In 1859, alas, Hill had not been on the shoreline with a camera in over a decade. In the interim, he had immersed himself with even greater conviction in the promotion of the fine arts as a trustee for the Royal Scottish Academy. Whatever recognition he might have limned of the fisherfolk’s life was becoming a distant memory. It was just so instinctive and easy to regard the people as Scottish folk. However, for a brief time between 1843 and 1846, while photography was still in its infancy, when the protocols for taking and sitting for a picture were still in awkward formation and before a numbing orthodoxy had settled into place, one could break free from instinct and just about see the conditions of a hardscrabble life. You just needed to look carefully into William Ramsay’s eyes.

2 A WILDERNESS OF ONE’S OWN

Toward the end of his life, William Notman sat down with pen and paper and began to reflect on his past. Although a familiar practice for a Victorian man of his age and achievements – to ponder the path his life had taken and leave an account of it for the future – in this case, it’s an unusual scene for us to conjure. Notman was not a contemplative man by nature, and whatever thoughts about life’s course and blessings he sometimes permitted himself were not things he had ever previously tried to deliver in longhand. Though educated and cultivating a social manner that made it easy for him to get along with others, he was neither particularly expressive nor entirely comfortable when it came to writing. More businessman than poet, when he had previously written for magazines, the papers, or his own publications, he felt most useful dispensing straightforward technical advice: for aspiring photographers, the mechanics of how to take pictures and achieve naturalistic effects, especially fake snow and ice for winter scenes, his specialty (figure 2.1); and for sitters, the best attitudes to strike and dress to wear when posing in his studio.1 There were “things you ought to know” that made for a successful portrait session, he told prospective clients in a small booklet.2 Dress in this colour and not that, he directed them (no blue, pink, or white; they muddled the grey scale). Avoid fussy patterns (dark checks and plaids are “sometimes too much”). Be prepared for the stabilizing tripod and neck brace (notice the tripod behind the man on the right in our example). Keep still and relax the muscles. Do your job as a sitter – that is, follow the photographer’s prompts – and the picture will surely come out well. And if it didn’t and the sitter looked ghastly, do not fret; he could “restore or add” to the picture with colours, tinting, and any other comely additions. Notman could be more forceful as a writer when defending how much he was charging. “The too prevalent desire for cheapness,” he once scolded the complainers, “has induced many to embrace the profession, lacking the necessary qualifications,” namely his. But whenever his writings required more – more eloquence, thoughtful insight, historical awareness, self-conscious reverie, in

2.1 William Notman, Mr Grenfell, 60th Rifles, and Mr A. Pepys, Montreal, qc, 1868, i-31231.1, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.2 Opposite William Notman and Son, Mr William Notman and sons William McFarlane, George and Charles, Montreal, 1890, ii-93256, McCord Museum, Montreal

fact more “things” his contemporaries wanted to know – he knew his limitations and almost invariably hired others to write in his place. The process of “ruminating” in pen, as he would call his small manuscript, was a difficult task.3 It required introspection and honest recall and a way of soothing the memories with words. He would prefer to photograph or, better, find a way to profit from it. Indeed, Notman did photograph himself around this time (figure 2.2) and, likewise, was angling for a way to profit from it. In the picture, we find him seated among his three sons, a proud father amidst his prized pupils. The oldest, William McFarlane, on the left, had already been named a partner in the firm and was being regularly sent to the West to get more pictures of the open land and to scout opportunities; George, in the middle, had just come back from London, where he had been the family’s representative at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, and was about to be discharged to Boston to manage the American branch of the studio; and Charles, on the right, had already spent a number of years in Boston learning the trade and been summoned home to accompany his older brother for yet another trip. Still at the studio on Bleury Street in downtown Montreal, where he had been a professional photographer for nearly forty years, old William Notman was preparing for a transfer of the business empire. There would be continuity in the Notman brand, the photograph declared,

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and that continuity was written across the picture’s surface, in the nearly identical clothes the men wear – the dapper dark lapels, shiny watch chains, striped pants, starched collars, and crisp cuffs. The Notman formula – the smooth, milky texture of dark fabric; the creamy, clear light; the lively, syncopated play of heads and hands (his sons knew the commands by heart); the tightly controlled depth of field trailing softly but quickly into a pleasing bokeh – all these would be insured in the transfer. There would always be nobility and solidness of bearing, the photograph promised, since the men knew those who came to the studio were usually looking for some admiration of themselves. Notman was always at his best when he understood the anxieties, concerns, and opportunities in the marketplace and could try to address them with his camera. The occasion that prompted Notman to sit down and write, as opposed to picture, is not entirely known, though there are slivers of evidence to suggest it may have been

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an invitation to speak to a group of youngsters at the local ymca, of which he had been a member for years, and to share with them nuggets of elderly wisdom.4 His friend, competitor, and fellow Scots-Canadian Alexander Henderson had also given a lecture there. Henderson’s lecture had gotten enough notice from members and subscribers that even the Montreal Gazette chronicled the story.5 It would have been in character that Notman could not let such attention to a rival pass or let Henderson, of all people, have the final word about a lifetime in photography. And it would have been equally in character that, had he not actually received an invitation, he would have simply, through connections and clout, invited himself. “I love to live over again and enjoy afresh the days and scenes of youth,” Notman wrote, “we recall the past and think over what in earlier days prompted our best and noblest aspirations.”6 We can just about imagine the youngsters rolling their eyes, bracing themselves for yet another old man reminiscing about his childhood and trying to spin a moral lesson from it. Perhaps the sentimentality and self-indulgence could be pardoned; Notman was relying on stock prose. What is startling about the rumination were the details he relayed. Of his youth in Scotland, I remember the delight of rising with the sun that I might accompany Archie the shepherd and his dogs on their morning inspection of the fleecy flocks scattered here and there over the mountain side and how I after wondered at the seemingly more than sagacity of the dogs as they comprehended and obeyed the Gaelic orders and the shrill whistle of their master … [Of the hilly environs I recall] being often far above the clouds[,] instead of looking up to them we looked upon them, walking through them as we descended … [Of the house and village I recall] the blue curling smoke ascending from the homestead beyond which [sat] some hundreds of feet below the loch placid and bright as a mirror with many fishing boats lining the shore, some at anchor[,] some drawn up on the beach, nets hung out to dry[,] two dozen or so of unpretending dwellings with thick stone walls[,] small doors and windows[,] thatch roofs mossy and grassy with age … the whole forming a Scotch village picturesque in the extreme … [And of the villagers] figures might be seen here and there usually in knots of two or three … the subjects of conversation [would] most probably be on farming and fishing, now and then on politics perhaps a year or two old.7

The story of Scottish pastoralism outlined in the previous chapter should make us wary of the image Notman painted, of hills floating above clouds and picturesque villages below, shepherds and “fleecy flocks,” wise dogs who understand Gaelic, and

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Highland villagers who seem to know nothing of contemporary politics and live close to the farmlands in “unpretending dwellings.” The scenes of his youth were not much more than a fantasy, especially when we know the bare facts of the matter. Notman was born and raised nowhere near the Highlands but rather in Paisley in the west central Lowlands, a growing city of 60,000 just outside of industrializing Glasgow.8 In Notman’s youth, the city was home to a busy handloom weaving industry – factories upon factories pushing to market what was then already known as the Paisley shawl (a kind of imitation cashmere) and the Paisley pattern. It also had a reputation for extreme radicalism, as its factory hands had learned to organize themselves and, during the various economic crises between 1826 and 1843, to undertake mass demonstrations, strikes, and riots, prompting British authorities to intervene and eventually pursue trials for treason.9 The violence was felt all the way in London (the Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli famously remarking later in a novel to “keep your eye on Paisley [because] there will … soon be a state of things there [that will] burst it, sir; it will burst it”).10 Notman’s family was directly affected; his father was a small factory owner and, though the records do not say explicitly, probably the target of organized radicalism. Like many ambitious families from towns surrounding the River Clyde, by 1840 the Notmans had moved to Glasgow to start anew, trying their hand at trading dry goods and wholesale cloth for the international market and also, equally motivating, escaping the violence and uncomfortable scrutiny pointed at them back home. At fourteen when the family moved, young William soon joined the family business and eventually became a lead salesman and trader, picking up extra work as a travelling salesman for a textile manufactory. Whatever concoction of stories, in his mind, would give rise to his “best and noblest aspirations,” it certainly did not include life as a salesman. As we will see, in 1856 he was charged with criminal dealings and about to be convicted for fraud. Rather than face embarrassment and, worse, sentencing and prison time, he hopped the next ship for Canada, never to return. He left his poor father to stand trial instead. And yet, an image of Scotland persisted in the mind’s eye. It’s as if a nostalgia for a homeland that, if pressed to tell the truth, Notman would have had no desire to visit, had created a substitute for the real thing. It was certainly vivid, not to say beautiful – Archie the shepherd, the blue curling smoke, the mossy roofs – but as an image, it was not much more than a happy contrivance. Like most forms of diasporic nostalgia, it had the benefit of sitting outside of historical time, in this case outside of any semblance of Scottish modernity and the Notman family’s participation in Paisley’s and

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Glasgow’s rise to industrial prominence, and so avoided the messy details of particular events. The image was like one of Notman’s dreamed-up photographs in the studio that also played with time and space and parlayed forms of desire. This chapter seeks to understand why the image of the pastoral homeland became so compelling and durable in the international sphere, and how such a thing and, especially, the principles and concessions behind it facilitated the ambitions and experiments of two photographic practices in Montreal, those of Notman and Henderson. It focuses on a brief period in the two men’s careers, between 1856, when Notman opened his first studio, and 1867, when Confederation established the union of Upper and Lower Canada with the Maritime provinces to form the Dominion of Canada.11 Two projects will prove especially important in our efforts to understand the global flows of early photography: for Notman, a group of studio pictures devoted to hunting, and for Henderson, several closely related books of outdoor views devoted to the rural environs prior to Confederation. In contrast to the discomfort and stock prose in Notman’s writing, the two projects were remarkable for their inventiveness and self-reflection. They were also among the few times the photographers permitted themselves moments to ponder their own aspirations in a new land. In the context of the main historical outline offered in the first chapter, Notman was only five years younger and Henderson ten years younger than Robert Adamson and came to professional photography roughly a decade after the Edinburgh pioneer had. They witnessed the rise and fall of the calotype and daguerreotype – the two probably toyed with both of the early processes, as well as others – and graduated to the more industrial wet plate.12 That’s to say, they were nearly contemporaneous with Hill and Adamson – Henderson’s family, in fact, knew and corresponded with Hill – but represented the next generation of photographers, whose practices were more squarely shaped by a competitive professional portrait and landscape market.13 Moreover, they took part in the expansion of Scottishness as a visual representation in the global sphere – as a globally trafficked image – that proved to have varying degrees of usefulness and compromise in the British empire. We begin with migration itself, of people, cultural forms, and ideas. Following that we survey the imagery these and other immigrants tried to establish in Montreal and how such representations addressed, with different measures of insight and success, incredibly fraught local conditions. This will lead the way to a close assessment of Notman’s and Henderson’s photographic borrowings, experiments, and achievements, and how these various activities with the camera shaped and were in turn shaped by the pressures and opportunities for Scots in their efforts to make new homes for themselves. Scottish pastoralism and its cognates, we will see, had their uses at a historical

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moment when claims for and about a new land reached a crucial turning point.14 The photographers found themselves in a place “where we were strangers,” Notman’s wife wrote to relatives back in Britain, but circumstances, including those in both Canada and Scotland, eventually transformed it into not only a “home” but also a “country” for nearly all their ambitions.15 the notmans were doing reasonably well in Glasgow after their arrival in 1840. They got out of Paisley before they had lost everything, and putting all their purses together, they made enough to move several times in the big city over the next decade, each move landing them in a better neighbourhood and nicer surrounds. It’s hard to assess whether they lived at or above their means, though the various rents were steep. Two addresses are telling: the first, on West Nile Street, an upscale three-storey rental downtown, just a block from the fashionable Buchanan Street commercial strip – still, today, one of the most expensive commercial streets in all of Britain – and the second, a farmhouse rental three miles north of town on the new railway line near Bishopbriggs, a straight commuter shot to Glasgow Cathedral. The farmhouse was just up the road from a location D.O. Hill had illustrated a decade earlier in 1831 (figure 2.3). Even then, the locale was already looking crowded and impressively industrial from Hill’s point of view, the smoke stacks dominating the landscape and dwarfing most everything else, the two churches in the background in particular. It was an image of industrial promise and new beginnings organized around the railroad. The ladies with their parasols and men with their top hats made for a fine outing. No doubt the Notmans’ choice of neighbourhoods was commensurate with the ambitions of an aspiring urban bourgeoisie. By the early 1850s, however, business had gone sour, and the family was on the brink financially. They were certainly not alone. Even in its heyday, Glasgow’s commerce was always subject to the slightest tremors in the imperial markets; its simple capital goods of iron, steel, trains, and bridges were all interconnected, geared toward fickle overseas operations, and perpetually at risk from the huge competition in heavy industry in the US and Germany. Confronting a chronic oversupply of labour and ridiculously high unemployment for such a wealthy city, Glasgow’s smaller merchants were even more susceptible to the traumatic effects of a lost bill or late payment.16 The Notmans were deeply in debt, the rentals and business costs exceeding their income by a wide margin. Young William Notman, about twenty-nine at the time, hatched a plan to alleviate the family’s burdens. The basic outline of his scheme – more accurately, a scam – is well documented.17 A travelling salesman for a textile firm based in Gloucestershire,

2.3 D.O. Hill, Opening of the Glasgow and Garnkirk Railway: View at St Rollox Looking South-East, 1831, reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland

Notman ordered extra cloth from his company with the idea of reselling it under the table to others who had no contract with the manufactory. Without warning to his employers, he suddenly doubled his orders and arranged to have the extra cloth rerouted to his own warehouse for a grey market. Notman got others (usually very small businesses with few wholesale connections) to buy the excess cloth and place orders for more, including coughing up a down payment so that he never needed to pay a pence. He would simply funnel money and cloth to and fro and take a cut without anyone being the wiser. It required sleight of hand with the account books, or better still, no account books whatsoever (there were “no Books kept at our Counting House … for such orders,” his father would later testify); young William transacted everything by whispers.18 The scam worked for a while but was eventually found out. Notman’s belief that he could continually double orders without anyone noticing was plainly naïve, and the perpetual rerouting of goods away from their usual destinations caused its own suspicious commotion. He was charged with fraud. Of the charges, what is notable today is the blunt and defamatory language – and the humiliation it brought – and the zeal of the prosecutors in widening the scope of the investigation to indict Notman’s father and two brothers, too.19 Leave it to the

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typical thoroughness of the Scottish courts in such matters: some two dozen witnesses were called to testify, and some six dozen documents presented as evidence of the family’s guilt.20 Young Notman was accused of “falsehood, fraud, and willful imposition,” the indictment screamed in capital letters.21 He knew he had no defence – he was plainly guilty – and in June 1856, while the legal proceedings got underway and the prosecution witnesses and mountain of incriminating documents started piling up, he left Glasgow for good on a ship bound for Montreal. The flight from justice only made matters worse for those who remained. The language in court became shrill, reaching a hysterical pitch when the prosecution realized a crook was escaping justice. Notman had “contrived a wicked and felonious scheme” and knowingly pursued “false and fraudulent orders” – “evil,” “wicked,” and other words redolent of sinful behaviours were a favourite in the sheriff ’s vocabulary. Notman was acting “wickedly and feloniously, falsely, fraudulently, and willfully”; he “embezzled large sums”; he had neither moral scruples nor personal integrity nor manly fibre and “did abscond and flee justice”; he was an outlaw and, in addition to the original crimes, “libeled for fugitation.”22 He was, simply put, a wanted criminal on the run, and the court had no way to recover him. In the larger scheme of things, despite the sheriff ’s horror, Notman’s scam was no grave act of lawlessness or atrocity. We saw countless small breaches of law and sundry transgressions among the Newhaven villagers in their efforts to survive. Modern capitalism’s grip on a people’s livelihood is neither wholly fair nor forgiving, and simply to exist sometimes requires pushing hard against its capricious boundaries. In the case of Notman, on the one hand, we should not underestimate the personal trauma nor dismiss the extraordinary embarrassment the experience visited upon him; they were enough to force him into a self-imposed, lifelong exile. But on the other, we should not discount the scam as a one-off, a singular mistake that he would spend a lifetime repressing or trying to atone for. He would eventually try to finagle finances and the law again and, likewise, be found out. Like many others of his ilk and disposition, he sought the nooks and crannies of an economic structure and tried to take advantage of them; and in no case would he have thought these efforts incompatible with a belief in his fundamental respectability. Or, as some later observers put it, Notman would have been perfectly happy spending his life as an anonymous merchant, “growing plump and prosperous catering to the appetites of the Victorian marketplace”; circumstances pushed him to act when that vision was slipping away.23 There were consequences, of course. In 1856, the judgment against him effectively bankrupted the family; the house, business, and nearly all the belongings were lost. No wonder later

2.4 William Notman, William Notman and family, Montreal, qc, 1859, n-1976.3.37, McCord Museum, Montreal

that year, as soon as he could afford to, he sent for his wife and daughter, a brother a year later, and two years after that, in 1859, his parents and other siblings. They had no future in Glasgow. The family had been split up in the interim, trying to fend for themselves without much in the way of prospects. Like other hard-up Glaswegians, they probably relied on the generosity of friends and extended family just to get by, and young Notman, too, must have sent remittances. The separation makes a photograph of them together again in 1859 all the more poignant; it was a reunion of sorts (figure 2.4). It has none of the Notman formula that would soon become his signature style, but no matter: the budding photographer had other things on his mind, namely recouping the family name, forging a different kind of reputation and, with his whole family beside him again, trying to leave Scotland far behind. Alexander Henderson took an entirely different route to Canada. Neither escaping the law nor forced to flee, Henderson was looking for autonomy and adventure. Unlike Notman, he came from money and pedigree and had a very healthy inheritance. Born in Press estate, a large manor southeast of Edinburgh near the border, Henderson was the son of landed gentry.24 His family had made gobs of money as seed merchants and bankers, risen to prominence in modern Edinburgh, and been

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duly awarded titles and rank. They were the kind of Lowland family – universityeducated, investment-wealthy, with London connections and a nose for business and expanded opportunities in the empire – that benefited from the rapprochement that Walter Scott had dreamed about when he nurtured George IV’s enthusiasm for tartans. The Hendersons cultivated the habits of British gentry, sending their young son to London for cultural training and uplift, on a Grand Tour of the Continent, to a boarding school in Edinburgh and another in Warwickshire, and more. When his father died in 1840, Henderson, only nine at the time, was put under the care of a guardian and, through a trustee account, inherited the family’s fortune. By then, it included the manor and surrounding farmlands of nearly 650 acres (and, somewhat comically, its own schoolhouse, teacher, and students for which he, though an adolescent, was formally responsible), stock in the Bank of Scotland, more stock in the railroads and insurance companies, real estate, and lumber.25 The income from it all could bring in as much as £1,500 annually, an astronomical amount considering that at the very same moment William Ramsay and Alexander Rutherford, the fishermen in Newhaven, were more than content with 70 shillings for a season of oyster dredging. Or, for a closer comparison, William Notman was annually earning £150 as a travelling salesman for the textile manufactory.26 The family nose for investments rubbed off on Henderson; throughout his life he would invest in various stocks – the railroads in both Scotland and Canada, real estate, more insurance and lumber companies, the new Montreal Telegraph Company, and much more. He also invested for others, including friends and family in Scotland looking to expand their interests in Canada.27 Money sometimes attracts money, and Henderson courted a woman, Agnes Robertson, who also came from wealth. Their combined inheritance would be large and complicated enough that the two families negotiated a prenuptial financial contract, even going so far as to appoint trustees to manage the estate during their lifetimes.28 To assuage any doubts his new in-laws might have that he would make a good match, Henderson promised to continue a career as an accountant to insure the couple’s financial health.29 After polite diplomacy and careful arbitration, the two married in October 1855. They could have made a home for themselves at Press Castle – indeed, anywhere in Scotland – and settled down to a life of manorial luxury. But within days of the wedding, they were sailing for Canada to begin life anew in the provinces. Henderson was all of twenty-four and, one imagines, wanting to make good on his own great expectations. From his worldview, the empire was an open field for him to explore. The trusteeship would always keep him tied to Edinburgh, and their two families extended all over the Lowlands. There was no escaping that, but there was also

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no preventing his youthful enthusiasms. In his pocket, he had letters of introduction to bank officials and accountants in Montreal, Toronto, and Kingston (it was good to cover all the bases) testifying to his “highest respectability” and great “estimable character.”30 That is, he had no job but deep pockets and an impeccable pedigree. How different Henderson’s immigration was from that of Notman, and yet he, too, wanted a family portrait not long after his arrival, visiting – of all places – Notman’s studio (figure 2.5). There he sits off to the right, a young child in his lap, Agnes facing him with their oldest, her brother behind, a loyal dog at their feet. He sits in Renaissance profile, like a prince admiring his family. Yet, for all of his pedigree, neither his nor Notman’s different trajectories would have been easily sleuthed from the rhetoric of their two family portraits, such is the camera’s capacity to level social difference and fictionalize status. Henderson even sat in front of the same painted background, the dark curtains, and patterned rug as Notman’s family had. From our point of view, whereas Notman’s family portrait marked a reunion and the hope for new beginnings, Henderson’s celebrated a different kind of moment, not about breaking completely with the past but borrowing on its privileges for the present and pushing forward from it into a future elsewhere. the examples of notman and Henderson are in keeping with much that is now known about Scottish migration to Canada. It was once fashionable to view Scots who hit the migrant trail as mostly comprised of Highlanders who were displaced from their ancestral homes by avaricious landlords and chieftains. Faced with mounting debts and attentive to the increasing demand for food in the cities, landowners conspired with chieftains to turn the Highlands into pasture for sheep and cattle, forests for deer, agricultural lands that supported intensive farming rather than merely the subsistence variety pursued by their Gaelic tenants, and wide vistas and picturesque views for tourism. To effect any economic advance, the land’s historic residents simply had to go. The infamous Clearances pushed poor Highland clans to the Lowlands but also, so the argument went, further afield, to North America and Australia. In this history, long-distance migration was another way of saying eviction and expulsion. There was nothing truly voluntary about Scots on the move to the old colonies.31 There was much to recommend this view of Scottish migration. It was hard to square a history that admitted that Scots were actually eager and deft participants in British imperial ambition when contemporary politics leaned heavily in favour of the Scottish National Party in its pursuit of Scottish independence. Far easier to recover a history that meshed with a “politics of grievance,” as the historian Tom Devine has

2.5 William Notman, Alexander Henderson and family, Montreal, qc, 1859-60, n-0000.159, McCord Museum, Montreal

said.32 For our purposes, the old attitudes seemed to confirm the most salient aspects of contemporary diasporic thinking as they related to representation. The displaced Scots had been pushed from their homeland and left to fend for themselves in regions for which they were wholly unprepared (they were farmers in open ranges, after all, not tree fellers in thick forests or fur trappers on the wintry landscape, as Canada seemed to require of them). They pined for a way to return but were forced by circumstances to remain forever removed from the land of their dreams. Struggling to survive in the twilight of the diaspora, they clung to an image of Scotland that was, so it could be imagined, authentically pastoral and folk. Through them proliferated a version of Scottishness more or less equivalent to that which we saw circulating in Chapter 1. It is certainly the case that the Highland Clearances wreaked havoc on the population and devastated whole communities and that some evicted Highlanders made their way to Canada. Parts of the Outer Hebrides likewise sent large numbers of its poor to the rural portions of Quebec, among them a group of well-studied migrants from the Isle of Lewis who resettled in the Eastern Townships near the American border.33 But it’s now abundantly clear that the vast majority of migrants who left

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Scotland were Lowlanders, including nearly the entire immigrant Scottish population in Montreal at the time of Notman’s and Henderson’s arrival.34 They left for a variety of reasons. Those from the Lowland farms chose to avoid the squeeze brought on by the industrialization of the fields, the dim prospects for non-inheriting sons, and the increasing competition for jobs from the immigrant Irish.35 Those from the cities, especially Glasgow, were confronted with the ebbs and flows of opportunities in the heavy industries. Those with intermittent incomes were tired of the city’s high rents (much higher than virtually anywhere else in Britain), of being jammed into overcrowded apartments (it was not the lack of apartments, but that too many were overpriced), and of paying a ransom for food. Those who had artisanal skills were frustrated with competing for wages with the hordes of new and unskilled immigrants, not only the many Irish but also large numbers of Italians, Jews, and Lithuanians, and, yes, displaced Highlanders and also rural Lowlanders moving for opportunity.36 They faced a too-plentiful supply of labour, which drove wages down, and preferred a chance to use their hard-won skills as an artisan class elsewhere, to be craftsmen and “more of a man,” as one wrote.37 Some tried to escape debts (or indictments). And some simply wanted to try their hand at an adventure that, though an ocean away, still relied on the comforting political, cultural, and economic framework of Victorian Britain. In very few cases did these migrants completely break from Scotland; Notman was, in this sense, somewhat exceptional. Despite the long voyage across the Atlantic, there was always a lively network of Scots coming from and going to Canada, and then coming and going again; and an advanced international postal system made keeping in touch hardly a concern.38 Rather than being promoted by Highlanders in the diaspora, the image of Scottishness being trafficked in Canada came from a variety of Lowlanders. It helped, of course, that London had taken George IV’s original enthusiasms and run with them. In 1852, Prince Albert bought Balmoral Castle in the Aberdeenshire Highlands for Queen Victoria and made British holidays and sporting trips to Scotland downright chic among the monied classes. The queen even took to wearing Paisley shawls and Paisley patterns. The upper classes fell into a tartan swoon.39 It also helped that the image of British military might in the provinces took its most recognizable form as the Highland warrior, decked in kilts and arranged in Scottish regiments (figure 2.6), spearheading expansion one day and posing the next in the photo studio as a model for manliness, heroism, and conquest. Of course, most of the Scottish recruits were drawn from the working classes of the Lowlands, and most of those stationed in Lower Canada saw no battlefront whatsoever.

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2.6 William Notman, Group of soldiers of the 78th Highlanders, Montreal, qc, 1867, i-27617, McCord Museum, Montreal

The persistence of Scottishness of this sort suggests the enormous success of the unionist-nationalism model developed in the second quarter of the century. Urban and Lowland Scots could celebrate the unique features of Scottish pastoralism and in the same breath pledge loyalty to the empire; there was a distinction but no necessary contradiction. The pastoral image served men like Notman and Henderson well and, as the example of Archie the shepherd might suggest, remained with them well into old age. But it also behooves us to think carefully about the image of a Montreal Scot that Notman would come to make part of his repertoire at the studio (figure 2.7). The sitter in this case, F.H. Baillie, was not even a Scot but, in fact, an Englishman from London who five years earlier was playing cricket for the Second Battalion of the 60th Rifles at Windsor Castle.40 Imagine this: an English cricket player, posing as a Highlander, for a fugitive on the run from Glasgow’s sheriff, in a studio in the provinces.

2.7 William Notman, F.H. Baillie, Montreal, qc, 1869, i-37007.1, McCord Museum, Montreal

montreal had always been a key location in the empire. Just downstream from the confluence of the Ottawa and St Lawrence rivers, it was the centre of trade in Canada and a link between the fur-trapping regions to the north and west and the Atlantic ports to the east. Set on an island, it jutted just enough into Lake Saint-Louis, a widening in the St Lawrence River, that boats would literally run into its shores as they descended from Upper to Lower Canada. Over time, its geographical and commercial importance made controlling it the key prize in the fight between French and British companies, especially those involved in the lucrative fur and lumber markets. Nearly all their economic ambitions in Canada began with some effort at a foothold on Montreal’s shoreline. At mid-century, its population stood at a little over 56,000, with slightly more English than French speakers, though that was rapidly changing. By comparison, Glasgow had somewhere around 250,000 and Edinburgh about 190,000.

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Montreal’s location made it a port of entry for nearly anyone wanting to push further into the interior; however, many, like Henderson, who initially came with letters of introduction for positions in Toronto and Kingston further west, decided to stay. They made for a curious hodgepodge of communities, of planned and happenstance settlers, of individuals and institutions jostling together along the banks of the river with sometimes little in common except for their efforts at establishing roots and belonging. Its air of cultural variety and difference, or maybe just “incongruity” and babble, struck a Scottish visitor in 1853: Half French and Half English – a diversity in manners and dress as well as in creeds – institutions drawn from the commune de Paris and the Parliament in Westminster – ancient feudalities and modern privileges … nunneries next door to Manchester warehouses – barristers pleading in the language of France and a custom-house decorated with the royal arms of England – priests in long black dresses, and Scotch Presbyterians – cabmen in frieze jackets fresh from Ireland, and native market carters in coloured sashes and night caps – in short, a complication of incongruities; the old and new world jumbled together, and then assorted according to some odd device in social economics. Such is Montreal.41

The visitor was William Chambers, the busy publisher from Edinburgh who had printed the volume of John Kay’s caricatures (figure 1.11). He knew a thing or two about eccentric and picturesque urban personalities. He had gotten the bizarre French and English juxtapositions right, especially the sense of feudal Catholicism butting up (somewhat helplessly, he might have said more explicitly) against secular British industries. He had also gotten the class structure about right, too, with the many Irish relegated to service jobs and Aboriginals doing hard manual labour. There’s an air of cultivated naiveté, however, in his assessment of the unfathomable “odd device in social economics” that sorted the various inhabitants. He knew full well that, by the time of his visit, nearly all the economic power was in the hands of the British, and the social order, too, was being doled out in a predictable way. No accounting of Montreal’s place in the global flows of people can ignore its history of conflict between its French-speaking and English-speaking citizens and the almost total suppression of its Aboriginal peoples. Several developments in that history are worth keeping in mind. First, the violence of 1837–38 in Lower Canada, sometimes referred to as the Patriotes Rebellions, proved to French speakers that they were officially second-class citizens. Their efforts at political reform, including merely adequate French-speaking representation in colonial affairs and an end to English-speaking

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business dominance in official provincial decision-making, led to British reprisals, including, in their most extreme form, the burning of entire French-speaking villages, public humiliation, rape, executions, and, for some, exile. In the aftermath, more moderate reformers sent by the Crown attempted to soothe political and ethnic relations and hatched a plan, the Act of Union of 1840, for the merger of Upper and Lower Canada under a more responsible central government (which, in effect, diminished even further the influence of French speakers in a much larger English-speaking geopolitical entity). Most controversially of all, they recommended a policy of full-scale assimilation of French Canadians into English language and culture. When Notman and Henderson arrived in 1855–56, such a policy had been pursued for a decade and a half with much zeal but only minimal success and a boatload of resentment. Rather than easy assimilation, the policy just as easily led to a harshly polarized cultural landscape. William Chambers had gotten that strange mixture of side-by-side existence and rigid exclusivity about right – of feudalities and modernities, of priests and Presbyterians rubbing elbows but having nothing to do with each other. Second, where Aboriginals and Europeans in the areas west of Montreal had for centuries existed together in a kind of hybrid society of mutual aid and mediation – negotiating, accommodating, and facilitating each other’s needs in an effort to secure their individual livelihoods in a “middle ground,” as the historian Richard White has called it – by the early nineteenth century, that ground had given way to almost total domination by the British.42 The middle ground had not been some idyllic paradise – there had been plenty of episodes of conflict and violence, misinterpretations and misunderstandings – but in the era before the rise of a British state in the provinces, it had been sustained by a rough balance of power between the various groups. However, with the coming of aggressive American interests, the withdrawal of the French, the transformation of the fur trade, the flowering of other kinds of industries beyond fur in which Aboriginals did not participate, the intensive cultivation of land and despoliation of game upon which local villages had previously depended, and the large and growing demographic imbalance in Upper and Lower Canada between the peoples – in all, the ramifications of global flows – Aboriginals lost whatever hold on power they once had. So, too, did they lose whatever ability they had to maintain a level of social and cultural independence from the province’s colonizers and became subject, like the French, to a policy of assimilation. The clearest evidence for it around the time of Notman’s and Henderson’s arrival was the so-called Gradual Civilization Act in 1857, in which Aboriginals were given the option of becoming British subjects if, among other “civilizing” gestures, they revoked their rights and tribal affiliations as Aboriginals;

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learned to speak, read, and write the Queen’s English; accepted the British system of property ownership; and chose a proper (English) surname. It had few takers and, as in the efforts to assimilate the French, brought a load of indignation. Third, the British who dominated the economic landscape of the city were not of English origin but almost entirely Lowland Scottish. Although making up a small fraction of the total population – by one estimate, a little over 3,000, about 4 per cent of the total, in comparison to, say, more than 14,000 Irish – they absolutely monopolized the city’s larger companies.43 There were plenty of aspiring Scottish craftsmen and small merchants and others, like Notman and Henderson, trying their hand in a new trade. But there were also a distinct few – the river barons, as they have been called them – who owned and ran the major banks, fur companies, breweries, lumber operations, shipping lines, and emerging factories along the city’s shoreline.44 (Notman would eagerly photograph nearly all of them at one time or another.) It was they who got the government to cough up money to construct the Lachine Canal in order for ships (bearing their imports and exports) to more easily navigate the rapids on the city’s southwestern edge. And it was they who had everything to gain by quelling political dissent and advocating for the merger of the two provinces and, in the 1860s, the confederation of the country. They were rarely identified as “Scots,” though everyone knew how to distinguish the various British accents, and were generally understood simply as “English speakers” among those who advocated for reform. That’s to say, in the eyes of the French Canadians and Aboriginals and even the many Irish, they had effectively become British. A photograph taken by Notman from the slopes of Mount Royal shows the city he began calling home (figure 2.8). The shoreline and the St Lawrence mark Montreal’s edge in the distance. Off to the left can be spotted the two façade towers of Notre Dame, site of the city’s original French settlement. Off to the right is the new Victoria Bridge, pride of British imperial technical know-how and symbol of a new economic reach for the city’s merchants and industrialists. And in the centre, close to the slope, a new neighbourhood of opulent houses and large grounds is taking root and already looking rather stately. It was the “Square Mile” or “Golden Square Mile,” as it would eventually be called, full of golden (gaudy) homes being built by the river barons and their ilk.45 It sat like a wedge or fulcrum in the physical makeup of Montreal, far enough away from the busy shoreline and all its mercantile and industrial commotion to conjure a sense of the pastoral, but still close enough to the French-speaking working classes filling up the Saint Jacques ward to the left and the English-speaking Sainte Anne ward to the right.46 An image of urban expansion, even a bit of boosterism

2.8 William Notman, Montreal and reservoir from Mount Royal, qc, 1865, i-16524, McCord Museum, Montreal

pride, the picture also wore the city’s ethnic history in its very composition. The tensions between its competing residents would only get more fraught. Between 1850 and 1860, the population ballooned from about 56,000 to over 90,000, an enormous growth never before seen in Canada. The new citizens came from other portions of the empire, as our photographers did, but easily the largest influx arrived from the Quebec countryside, whose French-speaking farmers were having a difficult time surviving in the aftermath of the Union and moving in huge numbers to the city in the hopes of landing any kind of job. Where once the English held a small majority, by the 1860s the proportions had dramatically reversed. Chambers’s observation of cheek-by-jowl coexistence would soon give way to a far more segregated arrangement. The new demographics also gave rise to an oddly colonial situation: a minority of English speakers who held rank and power, and a majority of non-English speakers who were officially being assimilated into a more politically and economically dominant society. However, the difference between this and other imperial situations was that the majority of the subject population were themselves mostly migrants. The growing city was a settler society – or more accurately, composed of one settler society trying to manage another, and both having had a hand in displacing Aboriginal ones.

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Fourth, the same impulse that gave rise to the grand homes in the Square Mile also brought forth a new demand for “culture,” leading to new art associations and even a few gallerists who began peddling the work of local artists.47 Like so much else in the 1850s and 1860s, the associations were highly segregated, dominated by Englishspeaking artists and patrons with virtually no French-speaking representation or contributions. Napoléon Bourassa was the single French-Canadian artist invited to become a member of the Art Association of Montreal (aam), one of the earliest and most successful of the organizations, but it’s telling that he was invited neither to show his canvases in any of its early exhibitions nor to contribute his collection of works or those of his students to any of its conversaziones. He looked upon the aam with envy because it seemed to facilitate so easily the ambitions of its Englishspeaking coterie in a way that was mostly denied to him or offered only through occasional largesse. And he also understood clearly the relationship between it and the new political reality of ethnic relations, as if an art community was no informal or organic thing but a logical, even ruthless extension of a general imperial mindset: of explore-settle-cluster-exclude-vanquish, with the clustering and excluding being what he called the “most precious piece of luggage” of the British arsenal. Rather than “culture” being a spontaneous or even charming outgrowth of political and economic dominance, it was part and parcel of the associational qualities integral to it. The “spirit of association exists at a high level in our English colleagues,” he told his French-speaking supporters. “It is a quality so deeply bred into them by their upbringing that it is today part of their character. No matter where he goes to put down roots, the Englishman takes it with him and maintains it, for there is no doubt that it his most precious piece of luggage. It is this quality that contributes most vigorously to his success, and that secures wealth and unquestioned political dominance for him.”48 Art associations, fraternal organizations, mutual aid societies, nepotism in government, immigrant networks, party loyalty, cricket clubs, banking oligarchies – it was all the same thing, from his point of view. It was hard for an individual to fend for himself in the face of such organized collectivity. soon after his arrival in Montreal, Notman took a job at Ogilvy and Lewis, a wholesaler of dry goods. The merchandise was familiar enough; he had skills selling and trading; and we may imagine he omitted any mention of his most recent escapades when he applied for the job. But quickly, by year’s end, he had hatched a plan to turn the slow winter months into a chance at another profession, trying his hand at a

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portrait photography studio. With the blessing of his bosses, who loaned him money and promised him his job back should he fail at the venture, he opened a tiny studio in a small brick house on Bleury Street, a north-south thoroughfare just outside the Square Mile. It was a good location, near a parvenu class with lots of disposable income, yet the ambition is still remarkable to ponder. Though he may have played with a camera before, Notman had no particular training as a photographer, still less as one aiming to make a living wage. The cost of setting up a studio, even a tiny one, was substantial, easily a hundred dollars for a camera and a handful of decent lenses, to say nothing of comfortable props, painted backgrounds, flattering costumes, or perishable supplies. There were already, even in 1856, competing studios dotting the cityscape, mostly congregated in Place d’Armes, the old French settlement around Notre Dame, close to the docks and the quick exchange of money. Sailors just getting paid, small merchants flush from a deal, soldiers arriving at port, traders coming down the St Lawrence – they could all be tapped. Though seasonal and in no way lucrative, there was enough patronage to go around, or so the many photographers hoped. By 1860, there were at least seventeen studios.49 In choosing to be closer to the Square Mile, Notman was banking on a different clientele, on Scots merchants and industrialists who were doing well in the province and turning to imagery as one of their expressions of having arrived. He would accept any patron, of course – a start-up portrait studio couldn’t be picky – but the golden houses and ostentatious displays inside them told of special opportunities. He was far from alone in thinking this. In 1858, if he had walked out his door and turned south, in a half-block he would have run into the studio of a photographer named George Martin. Walking another block and turning west, he would have come across that of an ambrotypist named J.M. Higgins. Turning east instead of west, he would run into two studios belonging to Arthur Tabor. Another block would bring him to the daguerreotypist Thomas Coffin Doane. Three blocks back toward his place, he would meet the daguerreotypist John Buxton, and next door G.H. Presby, and next door again, James Ross. They all knew where their bread would be buttered; a portrait by Thomas Coffin Doane from around 1855 already shows the Scottish accoutrements that were part of the wardrobe (figure 2.9). The profession was getting insanely crowded, and the number of portrait sessions required to feed so many photographers was becoming nearly unsustainable. As the rundown of names and studios suggests, the photographers were initially peddling different technologies and products – daguerreotypists next to calotypists next to ambrotypists next to tintypists. Notman was initially a calotypist and

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2.9 Thomas Coffin Doane, Redford boys in Highland costume, Montreal, qc, ca. 1855, mp-1975.67.25, McCord Museum, Montreal

ambrotypist. Despite his drive and business sense, it’s an open question whether he would have outlasted the fierce competition on the merits of his camerawork alone. Judging by the few that survive, his earliest portraits were not particularly distinguished, looking like most others from commercial studios all over the American east coast. If he had thought his swagger might help, others like Doane had a much more substantial reputation and a decade more experience as a photographer. Some big prizes for Doane at the 1855 Paris international exhibition surely did not hurt. If he had thought being an English speaker, or even a Scot with a Lowland accent, might give him advantage, so, too, were the majority of the competition. However, two developments, both in a three-year period beginning in 1858, pushed Notman over the top. The first was his very quick and early adoption of the new wet plate process. It’s unclear exactly when the process was first introduced into Lower Canada. The newspapers usually kept up with technological developments in Europe – the daguerreotype had been reported in the Quebec Gazette mere weeks after it was

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first announced in Paris, for instance, and the talbotype just a few weeks later – and enterprising importers were never far behind.50 Certainly by late 1857, the wet plate had made its way to Montreal, and Notman was among the first to embrace it enthusiastically. The advantages over rivals peddling other technologies were enormous: far easier preparation of glass plates; more consistent results, especially in middling light; more portability, even with heavy glass; and perhaps best of all, massive reproducibility. The process for taking a picture was still painfully slow by later standards, and the amount of ancillary materials that needed to be taken on the road whenever a photographer wanted pictures of the outdoors was sometimes comical and occasionally harrowing: it demanded a veritable darkroom of supplies and smelly chemicals stuffed into a portable wagon. But for a seasoned salesman with a nose for accounting (even if he sometimes eschewed books and preferred whispers), inventories, itemizing, and balancing stock and demand, the wet plate permitted a merchant’s mindset. The possibility of making many crisp pictures from the same negative simply invited a bookkeeping and managerial way of thinking – Notman’s strengths. Where previously his efforts were a one-to-one equation of labour – one session yielded one ambrotype – the wet plate facilitated a potentially endless stream of profit. Even the calotype, which in theory was a reproducible item, could not compare: the paper negative was simply too fragile for unlimited use. Notman soon developed an elaborate records system: picture books for cartes de visites; more for cabinet cards; an index book of sitter’s names; a decimal system for naming, dating, filing, and cross-referencing; and more.51 It was easy for sitters to return to his studio and save money by ordering more copies; he kept the negatives forever – the warehousing mentality followed him to Bleury Street, too. The business required clerks and assistants to help with the books, women to develop the prints and reprints, still others to help sitters into makeup and costumes, and a fine arts department for the comely hand-colouring.52 By 1864, he had thirty-five full-time employees; ten years later, fifty-five, including a half-dozen staff photographers. The studio was run more like a manufactory than an artisanal practice. He had also gotten hold of a wet plate stereoview camera, which allowed him to take pictures of the outdoors and deliver images in three dimensions – of the docks and stalls, landscapes in and around the river, new manors on the Square Mile, summer and winter scenes, ice shoves, snow melts, the annual floods by the river, tall Notre Dame, the exchange buildings, the imposing banks, Bonsecours Market, leafy Mount Royal, and on and on. With views, he could enter into an entirely different market. That market was not yet wholly codified in 1858; leave it to a diligent merchant like Notman to help shape it.

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Other photographers surely recognized the advantages and possibilities of the wet plate, but sometimes making good on the recognition is a matter of timing. Two or three months of lag, an inability to come to terms quickly with the wet plate’s opportunities and constraints, a hesitation to jettison all the older equipment and invest heavily in the new, or maybe just being overextended and having no ability to jump on a prospect – any of these could make the difference between success and failure. Whatever the many indecisions or shortcomings among the lot, we soon find the neighbourhood around Notman’s tiny studio losing its other photographers. The ambrotypist J.M. Higgins could not compete and closed in 1859; the daguerreotypist John Buxton sold out in 1860 to another willing to try (who closed up two years later); G.H. Presby closed the same year; George Martin closed his studio in 1862, as did both Arthur Tabor and James Ross; even the celebrated Thomas Doane decided he could not match up and eventually left Montreal altogether for Boston and New York. Over time, they would be replaced by others with a hankering for the profession, but by then Notman had established himself as the major studio of the city. It’s telling that when his first studio burned down in July 1858, he had enough resources to reopen just a month later.53 In 1860, just as Buxton and Presby sold out, he bought the adjoining property on Bleury Street and started expanding. The new building would eventually have a posh reception room and three posing (or “operating” or “taking”) studios with large side windows and bright skylights. A slightly later, uncropped photograph shows one of the posing studios, so-called Operating Room A (figure 2.10).54 A comparison with the family pictures taken in his old studio reveals the new advantages (figures 2.4 and 2.5). A tall, dark curtain was still being used, and the props were sometimes just as few.55 Apart from the more geometric handling of the group, most noticeable are the high ceiling and skylight, the cavernous space, and especially the bright, consistent, creamy light. From overhead and the side, the daylight picked out forms and crisply delineated details. Of course sitters still needed to remain obedient to the photographer’s commands (notice the blurred movement of the figures on the right), but despite the hiccups, the possibilities in such a studio must have seemed endless. It’s doubtful any of the other photographers in the neighbourhood could have so quickly recouped from the disaster of a fire and pursued such an ambitious expansion. In 1861, the first year in which the record books give full accounting, Notman took 3,000 portraits alone; a few years later, he was up to 5,000. No other photographer was even close. The second key development grew out of the first. With the stereoview camera in hand, Notman sought a subject that could make good on its “view” capabilities –

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images that summoned and highlighted the stereoview’s best and most enchanting illusionistic prowess. It required scenes that had a marked recession of space, objects positioned at intervals into depth, and a careful overlapping of figures and forms. It helped, of course, if the subject matter was even mildly popular, interesting, or better still, momentous. He found one in the construction of the Victoria Bridge. Designed for the railroad and the first to span the St Lawrence, the bridge was an enormous undertaking years in the planning and already under construction when Notman came on the scene. It promised to link the city to the south shore and the extensive rail lines to the coast, allowing exports to reach the ice-free port of Portland, Maine, all year long. It was a much-anticipated boon; the city’s trading economy normally went into hibernation during winter when the river froze and became impassible. In 1858, Notman got himself hired by the bridge’s chief engineer to record the final stages of creation.56 Nobody had thought to photograph it before; but then again, nobody had

2.10 William Notman, “R” Company, Rifle Brigade group, Montreal, qc, 1866, i-20428, McCord Museum, Montreal

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2.11 J.G. Parks, Victoria Bridge, Montreal, ca. 1864

a wet plate stereoview camera. With new technology in hand, Notman got the most plum job available to any photographer in the city. A bridge of that significance eventually drew almost every ambitious photographer for a chance at a money-making subject. A slightly later Montreal rival, J.G. Parks, made a stereoview that was typical of their efforts (figure 2.11). Standing on the city’s southwestern edge, he peered up at the bridge, making sure to note its weirdly boxed tracks (the engineers soon had to poke holes in it to vent all the exhaust suffocating the crews) and its abrupt way of piercing the landscape and trailing off to the distant shore. The long span certainly receded into depth, which made for a good stereoview, and the line of abutments provided the requisite punctuations or stops along the way to deliver the stereoviewer’s best effect. Parks even added the standing man to bring the punctuations up to the foreground. It was one of the many ways to get the bridge to yield its stereoscopic magic. The angle of the camera and the strategy of a foreground figure became a formula. Despite all the feverish energy to photograph the bridge, most of the photographers lacked Notman’s singular advantage, namely, official access to the construction itself.57 While the competition had to content itself with pictures from afar, Notman insisted on his intimacy with the nitty-gritty and proximity to the labourers. Many of his pictures were not great, stereographically speaking, but they showed details nobody else could get. And besides, he had the luxury of full-time right of entry and

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2.12 William Notman, Men destroying coffer dam crib, Victoria Bridge, Montreal, qc, 1859, n-000.193.96.2, McCord Museum, Montreal

2.13 William Notman, Framework of tube and staging no. 8, Victoria Bridge, Montreal, qc, 1859, n-000.193.127, McCord Museum, Montreal

could wait for a moment during construction when a view with a better effect would present itself (figure 2.12). And if not that one – if the details were not sharp enough, if the sense of recession was too compromised by the distraction of the foamy water, if the activity remained too obscure – then he could patiently wait for another (figure 2.13). It’s a good bet the photographer had his darkroom very close by – perhaps even helped into convenient place by the engineer’s men – and could reload his camera in rapid fire. On a good day with good light, he could take a dozen pictures. With so many at his disposal, his oeuvre simply squashed the competition’s, and Notman began making stereo cards by the wagonload. He had cornered a lucrative market. The Victoria Bridge photographic project secured Notman’s place in the profession and, just three years after his arrival, turned an immigrant on the run into a major player in Montreal’s new photographic culture. He had monopolized the portrait market around the Square Mile and had an enormous lead in the view market. He pressed his advantage even further. Although the bridge was completed in late 1859, it was to be christened in an official opening only in August 1860 when the queen’s

2.14 William Notman, Card, Group of stereographs from the Maple Box, Victoria Bridge, Montreal, qc, 1859-60, n-000.193.96-104, McCord Museum, Montreal

oldest son, the Prince of Wales, would travel to Montreal on an official royal visit. Notman took it upon himself to prepare an album of stereoviews for the Royal Family. Now called the “Maple Box Portfolio,” it was a sumptuous production, along the lines of Hill and Adamson’s best leather-bound presentation albums, and full of pictures of the Crown’s possessions, many of the wondrous bridge and also of the city and the environs of Upper and Lower Canada. Most striking on some of the album’s pages (figure 2.14) is not only the symmetry of layout – images of scaffoldings on lower left and right, for instance, or two pictures of the bridge pointing inward in the middle row – but also an emphasis on the decidedly stereographic nature of the vision, the new way of seeing modernity in the making. The central image showed the inside of the railway tunnel, but in the context of the album page it also resembled nothing so much as the two lenses and awaiting apertures of a stereoview camera.

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(As in the case of fraud in Glasgow, Notman’s dealings in the Maple Box Portfolio matter were less than forthright. He slipped a suggestion about a portfolio to the Commissioner of Public Works and then proceeded as if there were official approval – none was forthcoming – and a hefty contract. He promised new and original pictures – in fact, he simply recycled old ones – and then tried to charge the government a king’s ransom for the whole thing, valuing it at an absurd $2,200, about $65,000 in today’s money. The episode got him in hot water again.58 “It must be apparent that the Department cannot recognize the existence of any order,” an official for Public Works wrote to him in frustration over the photographer’s conniving, and because the pictures and album were put together “before any communication of any kind had taken place,” the “official gift” was in reality no such thing.59 Of the exorbitant price, Public Works would simply not be held hostage. It’s unclear if the portfolio ever reached Queen Victoria; there is no trace of it today in any of the royal collections, and the one surviving copy was something the photographer kept for himself and happily showcased in his studio. But that did not stop Notman from advertising himself as the “Photographer to the Queen” and plastering his manufactured acclaim all over the entrance to his studio [figure 2.15]. How that must have amused everyone in the know.) while notman’s emergence as a professional photographer was facilitated by business acumen and some questionable ethics, Henderson’s came by way of an even less familiar route for photographers at the time. Independently wealthy, promising to follow a career as an accountant for the sake of his in-laws, and by temperament less aggressive in his tactics, Henderson first took to the camera as a hobbyist around 1857, only months after Notman had opened his studio. He almost immediately found in it an amateur’s passion. He toyed with new cameras and development processes and, like a gentleman scientist, wrote about his experiments for the journals. There’s an air of disinterested inquiry in his writings, as if the purpose to relay his discoveries is not for the sake of making a name for himself – that would have been Notman’s ultimate reason – but simply to engage others who had similar leisure, resources, and enthusiasms. “Wax is one of those articles of commerce which is very generally adulterated,” he told fellow amateurs in an early article, but he showed them how he tested and used it in the darkroom anyway.60 He proposed alternative development processes, including several the journals’ editors thought misguided or dubious.61 He played with expensive papers and imported rare or obscure equipment for trial and error. He kept up with others’ investigations in England and gave them a try. The makeshift studio in his house was like a little laboratory. Turpentine wax papers and more common wax

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papers, Norris and Fothergill dry plates, collodio-albumen processes – such materials and methods had no mass production value. Wax was a bear to work with, and the early dry plates took two or three times longer to expose than wet plates – that is, four or five minutes of an open shutter, a professional portraitist’s nightmare. They were all decidedly playthings for the tinkerer. He happily reported on successes and failures, sent samples and suggestions, and also recounted many missteps and misunderstandings (“I was then a beginner,” we can recall him admitting). He especially pointed to the little contraptions he had devised that made taking pictures all the more enjoyable (“I am sure it would be a good thing for lady amateurs,” he wrote about one of his methods for dealing with messy plates).62 His wallet allowed him to buy different cameras and lenses, about which he enthusiastically reported. He took long trips to try out the new equipment outdoors, including into the thick forests upriver on the Ottawa to “some lumbering establishments”; and while Notman probably used a wagon to schlep his gear around, Henderson proclaimed to the amateurs that he put

2.15 William Notman, A.W. Ogilvie & Co.’s flour wagon at Notman’s studio, Bleury Street, Montreal, qc, 1864, i-11842.1, McCord Museum, Montreal

2.16 Above Alexander Henderson, Tanneries Village, St. Henry, near Montreal, qc, 1859, mp0000.10.95, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.17 Right William Notman, Capt. Alexander Henderson, photographer, Montreal, qc, 1862, i-4414.1, McCord Museum, Montreal

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all of his “in a fishing basket” and only did so “if I wish to walk far.”63 His was unquestionably a gracious, leisurely activity. Tellingly, while Notman preferred to contribute to the Philadelphia Photographer (he spied a professional market south of the border and eagerly wanted entry), Henderson wrote primarily for London’s Photographic News, a journal for the gentlemen back in Britain, he thought; he was its first North American member.64 What Henderson had been doing for a job in Montreal is anyone’s guess. Despite all the letters of introduction, he almost certainly did not spend any length of time as an accountant. Between 1859 and 1863, he appeared on the merchant rolls as a selfemployed “Commission Merchant,” meaning he bought and sold goods for others and took a cut for every transaction.65 But there are no records of him transacting anything, and whatever he did in the trade, if he really did anything, was in no way too onerous to keep him from going on extended photographic tours, joining the local rifles brigade (a popular amusement for the wealthy), taking holiday trips to the coast, indulging his passing interests in natural history, agriculture, and engineering by taking classes at McGill College, or simply wandering about the new city and its environs with his camera and fishing basket.66 There’s a very early photograph by him of the Saint-Henri district (figure 2.16), a densely populated French-Canadian and immigrant Irish working-class neighbourhood of tanneries. It shows the tanneries and houses side by side and, strikingly, no people anywhere to be found. They were all busy working inside; he was alone in his spare time, a flâneur on the dirt roads. Another photograph, this time of him, shows him in a fancy rifles brigade uniform taken soon after he had gotten it (figure 2.17). He looks dapper and official, the big sword, leather sash, and chin strap all impressive military touches. He must have sent a copy or two back to Scotland to impress the in-laws with his patriotism, seriousness, and training. But as our example of F.H. Baillie (figure 2.7) might suggest, the various rifles brigades seemed to spend more time playing cricket or other vigorous games than engaging in anything remotely warlike. It was only in 1866 that Henderson, on the strength of merely a third-place prize in an amateur photography competition and, as we will observe, connections with Montreal’s art associations, decided to move beyond a leisurely practice and try his hand as a professional operator, opening a commercial portrait studio on trendy Phillips Square. While Notman opened a studio in 1856 with an aggressive mindset, Henderson opened his a decade later with, one suspects, no strong sense of what it would actually demand of him. If establishing a professional portrait practice meant being amenable to all comers who wanted a sitting, he was not particularly suited to

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the task. Portraits required extraordinary patience with a variety of personalities, of which in truth Henderson had very little. He held unflattering attitudes about different classes and ethnicities that made the ennobling of every sitter, so key for Notman, an unnatural thing for him. “There is a population of seventy thousand in Montreal,” he wrote to his in-laws not long after he arrived in the city, “and more than half is Papist,” he observed in disgust. “The French Canadians are very simple-minded,” he wrote, too, but that was preferable to the Irish, who were “as bigotted [sic] and tyrannical as at home.”67 No wonder that after initially advertising himself as a portraitist and landscapist, he dropped the former service from his advertisement – there must have been too many trying sessions – and when he moved to a new studio almost exclusively focused on landscapes thereafter. Henderson’s fascination with landscape was an extension of his leisurely lifestyle since the pictures he took were always part of an excursion. Of course, more profitminded photographers included “views” in their repertoire, but the differences between their sensibilities and his are clear and often noticeable in the results. Take, for instance, two early photographs by Henderson and Notman of the same location.

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2.18 Opposite Alexander Henderson, Niagara Falls, ny-on, ca. 1860, mp-0000.1452.180, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.19 Left William Notman, Niagara Falls, Niagara, on, 1860, n-0000.193.239.2, McCord Museum, Montreal

In 1860 – it must have been before the Prince of Wales visited to christen the Victoria Bridge – the two men went together on a photographic expedition to Niagara Falls and took a number of related pictures (figures 2.18 and 2.19). We can just about imagine them together: Notman, by then already a professional photographer who was plotting to become “Photographer to the Queen,” carrying the large stereoview camera he had used for the bridge project and also carting the crazy tangle of wet plate equipment in his portable darkroom; and Henderson, an avid amateur with a love of new gadgets, with a single-plate camera and also, proudly, only a small basket stuffed with everything he needed.68 The two must have been side by side on occasion, trading pointers, offering opinions, but as the pictures tell us, they also set out on their own, each hunting for a spot that seemed to offer a better vantage for their purposes. The differences are telling. While Notman’s photograph certainly captured the Falls – it is there somewhere in the middle ground – Henderson’s also captured the moody clouds above, the spray off to the right, the thick stream of water rushing to the precipice, and more. The picture is an effort to register all that struck his senses – of sight, yes, but also of the thunderous sound, the spray on his skin, the deep awareness

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of the sublimity of the place – which is nowhere evident in Notman’s. It was best to get closer to the Falls, Henderson understood, to get the feel of it. In contrast, it was fine for Notman to remain at a distance, the better to witness others onsite and document the Falls’ fame as a destination. There was even a makeshift viewing shelter on the near bank. Its presence was not, as some might have casually expected, primarily for visitors to get relief from the bright sun or watery spray. As its awning declared in bold, it was the ideal place for them to make “photographic and stereographic views,” the empty chair underneath pointing to the exact spot for the cameraman’s bliss. Notman captured others more or less obedient to the suggestion. In fact, they were his focus, and he metered the light and measured his aperture’s opening to get them clearest. In the process, he left the Falls unfocused and mostly overexposed. No matter. The tourists’ presence was as important as the Falls because they evidenced the sheer popularity of the place and urged others to follow suit. For Henderson, such people were interlopers and were one more layer between him and the scene beyond. He waited for them to leave (or to wander off to the side; notice the man at lower right) and tried for something less touristic and more immediate. although existing on opposite sides of the spectrum of photographic practice, Notman and Henderson both made good on the opportunities given to them by the particular character of British imperialism at mid-century. If, generally speaking, the empire can be explained in broad economic and political terms, then several are of relevance for the matter at hand: the rapid and almost incessant revolution in technology; the escalation of concentrated capital and financial resources; the greater rationalization of production methods; the role of mass production in fueling a consumer economy and also being fueled by it; the extraordinary variety and ever greater quantities of goods; the steady rise of office and service jobs; and perhaps most importantly, the convergence of economic and political endeavours between industry and government as they related to territorial expansion.69 For what else drove Notman’s initial success if not his understanding and embrace of these main traits of a modern empire’s munificence? He took to new technology like none of the competitors in the neighbourhood could; he introduced a rationalized method for making and selling pictures into what had previously been, in the hands of its earliest practitioners, an artisanal devotion; he both fanned the flames of consumer desire and was the beneficiary of ceaseless consumer fantasies; and he created office and service jobs at the expanded studio in place of what had normally been a mostly solitary enterprise for the cameraman, thereby bringing the “art” of photography, so crucial to

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D.O. Hill and others of his generation, more squarely into the domain of a service industry. Furthermore, his choice of location put him in the centre of concentrated capital, whose possessors had gotten to their positions by linking economic and political ventures in Lower Canada and sealing their efforts in the Act of Union. Notman would eventually make every effort to become one of them. While Notman had to work hard to amass resources, Henderson came by his as the gift of birth. He balked at the consumer fantasies that Notman catered to, quickly giving up portraiture for a less direct contact with the variety of social appearances and desires; and yet he, too, used nearly the same circumstances presented by empire to follow his curiosities. The fascination with gadgetry and invention, the ready availability of technology for overseas markets, the print outlets to connect with others across the globe, the quick communication and correspondence across the Atlantic – all these, were they not, both the cause and effect of economic expansion? Indeed they were driven by a moment when the character of British capitalism became truly global – that is, by the meeting of modern economic and geographical expansion in the provinces. All of this advantage suggests that among newly immigrated Scots the benefits of becoming British imperials were offered daily. It took ambition and wherewithal to exploit the offer, of course, and sometimes luck and cunning; but there was nothing about being Scottish, so disadvantageous in other places and times, that held them back. In fact, given the pattern of Montreal settlement and the tartan swoon coming out of London, one could almost say it was a small bonus. It is tempting, therefore, to imagine that in the diaspora, amid a range of English-speaking others who were from different parts of the empire and who likewise jostled for advancement, the Scots learned how to become British in a way that was less easily reckoned back in the Lowlands.70 The immigrants were willing to trade much that had previously characterized their attachments to home for the chance at comforts in the provinces. And besides, the symbolic quality of those attachments, quite apart from any economic ties, were prefabricated in almost every way as Lowland enthusiasms for “Scottishness.” Saying this does not mean the immigrants gave up their connections to the homeland or discarded their most cherished memories of it – one might even say, their nationalist memories of it. But it did require that they come face to face with the long-term implications of the unionist-nationalism model facilitated by Walter Scott and his generation: of allowing the empire to grab hold of the terms of Scottish nationalism and, just as importantly for our purposes, to use the imagery associated with it for the service of imperial ambitions. One could get a glimmer of the British

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use of Scottishness back in the Lowlands, but it was in the international sphere – of kilted brigades and tartanized fashions and over-the-top Highland games, among other flamboyant demonstrations – where the spectacle was most keenly ritualized and its imperial utility most evident. William Notman seems to have had no misgivings, at least not publicly, toward those whose patronage he needed. When he published his first book of portraits, he devoted it almost entirely to the British cause. He called it Portraits of British Americans and offered fawning accounts of all those Canadian contemporaries, his monied sitters, who would speak in the name of a British-style administration of the provinces. First published in 1865, just as the provinces were debating a merger of the various regions into a formal Confederation under the Crown, the book stated its support plainly. Notman hired a deputy clerk of Quebec’s legislative council to pen the introduction and also the biographical entries that accompanied his portraits. The entries were long, often story-like, and sometimes numbing to read, but their tone was unambiguous. Of the prime minister of New Brunswick, for instance, he was one of those wise men whose most fervent wish was for “the Political Union [to] be brought about,” and if it should come to pass, all the better for the empire at large, for “the wisdom of the Empire has approved what the sagacity of the Provinces projected.”71 Of the governor general of the Province of Canada, Viscount Monck, with foresight and tact he was able to “blend the prejudices of the Province to the policy of the Empire.”72 Of all those Scots who had resettled in Montreal and done well, like the Reverend Alexander Mathieson, he served his “king and country with honor” as a young man and, strengthened by his experiences in the provinces, grew ever more “loyalist by instinct, and a royalist by conviction.”73 And of Highlanders, like John Sandfield Macdonald, the controversial premier of the Province of Canada, “three generations of descent, and a century of absence, have not sufficed to exorcise the spirit of the Highlander”; but lest there be some worry that some recalcitrant Highland prejudices lay dormant in his soul, he was a true patriot to the Crown and “gave no opposition to the principle of Confederation.”74 The book contained no women – it was a manly world in the empire, Notman believed – and only a handful of French Canadians. If there were any thoughts that his inclusion of them might suggest hesitation about Confederation, the introduction put the matter to rest: “Statesmen of different parties,” it declared, “appreciating the requirements of the hour, forgetting alike the rivalries and jealousies of the past, are agreed in declaring that the time is come when the power of these separated Provinces should be consolidated.” And so as not to confuse the call for union with some American-style declaration of independence, such a

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unification would be “one great monarchial confederacy,” it blared.75 Whether French Canadians would have thought that the brutal suppression of the Patriotes Rebellions and the call for full-scale assimilation in its aftermath were mere “rivalries and jealousies of the past” is another matter altogether. Becoming British did not, of course, mean jettisoning the distinctions between the various English speakers. After all, the immigrants certainly knew the differences among them – Henderson’s ungenerous description of the Irish a harsh example – and each decided to go their own way when it came to organizing ethnic associations and helping other immigrants from the homeland who were in need. The conspicuously Scottish St Andrew’s Society of Montreal, for instance, was poles apart from the exclusively English St George’s Society; and both had nothing but scorn for the various St Patrick’s societies and Catholic parishes of the Irish.76 But one could also be amenable to change. Although he praised Church of Scotland immigrants like Mathieson, Notman held no unshakable affinity for the institution to which they belonged. He even left a Presbyterian church in 1868 to join a more properly British Anglican one, eventually becoming one of its stalwart patrons.77 Whatever spiritual motivations lay behind the switch, there were clearly economic, social, and political benefits to embracing a more firmly English affiliation. Such were the opportunities in the provinces. and yet – here is the rub – becoming British was no overnight process. In 1865, when Notman published Portraits of British Americans and Henderson was on the verge of opening his own professional studio, the two men had been in Montreal for only a decade (and for Henderson, even less, since he travelled back to Edinburgh for a time). The process of becoming “British” – or better still, of squaring a lifetime of being “Scottish” with the nuances, values, and trade-offs of an identity presented by the empire – was an ongoing project full of peculiar accommodations and conflicts and, in the end, incomplete. It was a lived phenomenon, of course, and if either Notman or Henderson were pressed on the matter, they would have had no precise or succinct way to describe the transformation we are tracing. They would have tried to compare and contrast the aspects of daily life that were familiar with those that were new, as all immigrants do. They would have measured opportunity by its risks and rewards, and told of their decision-making in mostly matter-of-fact ways without wondering whether their choices had loftier ethnic impact. They planned for the future but lived in the moment. Or, since the two men most frequently expressed themselves with the camera, their photographs might have best told the story. Indeed, several

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photographic projects testify to the searching, experimental, and often uneven and hesitant nature of the adaptation. Before getting there, however, we need to turn our attention to one more aspect of the two men’s settling down as photographers, namely their enthusiastic participation in the new art associations. Notman and Henderson became members of the Art Association of Montreal, in fact, among its leading figures. Notman arranged for his photography studio to be the location of aam’s founding meeting in 1860, and Henderson was its first chairman. the aam was the second effort on the part of Montreal’s artistically minded to organize themselves into an official body with the purpose of promoting the visual arts in the city. The first, undertaken more than a decade earlier, had very little life, managing to put together all of one exhibition before quietly disappearing.78 When Notman and Henderson first arrived, Montreal can be fairly characterized as undergoing a fallow period in the matter of an artistic scene – few galleries and auctioneers, few exhibitions, no truly activist painters, and no professional sculptors at all – the fissures between English and French speakers preventing any kind of widespread linkage among artists and patrons who might, in fact, have helped each other promote a culture worthy of the name.79 In 1859, however, there were renewed efforts on the part of those in and around the Square Mile to push forward with a new society. The locale of the energy was telling. Whereas the first organization had been initiated by painters, the new aam was comprised almost entirely of art collectors. Something of their ambitions and also their parvenu sensibilities can be discerned in the founding resolutions and the initial operation. They declared that they wanted, first, an annual exhibition of works; second, the “promotion of sound judgement in Art, by means of lectures [and] conversazioni”; third, a library and reading rooms; fourth, a gallery of sculpture, “including casts”; fifth, a permanent gallery of paintings; and finally, the founding of a school for art and design.80 From afar, the resolutions certainly seemed reasonable enough – the Art-Journal in London called them evidence of a “high state of civilization” in the colonies – but on the ground, they had a more provincial purpose. By “annual exhibitions” and a gallery for painting and sculpture, the founders meant venues to showcase their own collections, which included not only cheaper plaster casts but also occasional second-rate Old Master works. If they harboured secret anxieties that their tastes were not up to par, they would rectify that by calling for lectures to help them develop “sound judgement.” The bases for the conversazioni would be works from their own walls; they wanted confirmation that their purchases had been worthwhile. The call

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for an art school – it would never come to be – was like a throwaway; nobody put any funds toward it. We need only try to imagine an organization founded instead by painters to understand the overall priorities. In reality, it was made up of members of the rifles brigades, merchants, the bishop of the Anglican church who was also the aam’s president (we now know one of Notman’s motivations for switching churches), and more. Its first conversazione was a “soiree,” the Gazette reported, and had more “sweet music” than much in the way of developing aesthetic judgment of the paintings.81 No wonder Napoléon Bourassa thought the aam was full of British organizational sensibility. Its meetings were mostly social get-togethers for the city’s economic and political leadership. They had no earthly idea what an actual conversazione was, he thought; they even pronounced it in the most preposterous way.82 Nonetheless, Notman’s and Henderson’s participation in the aam gave them access to works of art, if not artists, and through those, a visual imagery associated with the province. The paintings ranged across a variety of landscapes and genre scenes and, especially for our needs, an important hybrid of the two, of small activities taking place against the vistas of Lower Canadian scenery. For convenience, we can call them “hybrid landscapes,” knowing full well that no such salon category existed but that, to any contemporary, was quickly recognized. Other art markets had versions of them – Paris and London had plenty – but they were a special favourite among Montrealers for the simple fact that they pictured the human occupation of a frontier territory. The underlying source of their enthusiasm is not hard to fathom: the hybrid landscape gave form to certain anxieties, desires, enthusiasms, and fantasies of its patrons as they settled into their place in the social order of a new land. Or, to put it another way, there was a relationship between this “official” art of Montreal and the fraught social relationships among the city’s ever-diverging population. Take, for instance, the work of one of their favourites, Cornelius Krieghoff, easily the best-known painter in Montreal at mid-century. Born in Amsterdam and raised mostly in Bavaria, Krieghoff had begun painting in Quebec almost immediately upon his arrival in the province in the 1840s.83 He was self-taught, initially painting on the side as a portraitist, but by mid-decade when he settled for a time in Montreal, he had developed a repertoire of this hybrid landscape that brought him enough attention that he could try his hand at a full-time career as a painter. It helped that the city had very few professional artists. The art historian Dennis Reid counts two in 1846; that grew to a mere seventeen by the end of the decade.84 Numbers aside, Krieghoff ’s popularity was won by the kind of subjects he had developed that piqued English-speaking interest: pictures of rural folk amidst either fall or winter scenery.

2.20 Cornelius Krieghoff, Winter in Laval Mountains Near Quebec (The Crack in the Ice), 1862, The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario

By “rural,” Krieghoff almost always meant French habitants and Aboriginals, rarely any other. The poor Scots from the Isle of Lewis who settled in the Eastern Townships, for instance, did not qualify as sufficiently native, folk, or picturesque, and one could forget about American stragglers across the border. Two paintings can serve as representative examples. Winter in Laval Mountains Near Quebec (The Crack in the Ice) (figure 2.20) typifies much of what made Krieghoff ’s reputation. A French trapper has returned from an outing with his dog and trusted rifle. The day has been successful: two rabbits hang from the gun. The meat will serve as food and the pelts as income. We know he is a habitant: the bulky blanket coat (the Canadian version of the French capote), the colourful ceinture-fléchée around his waist, and the brimless toque on his head give the game away. He meets another habitant who cannot farm during the winter but has found another purpose for his cow: hauling chopped wood to bring to market. The load is so heavy that the ice begins to crack beneath them, apparently to nobody’s notice. Even the children seem unaware or unconcerned by it and have left their toboggan and ventured onto the ice. Another habitant chops more wood in the background (there was never

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enough in the cold winters, and there was, seemingly, an endless supply – notice the stumps on the hillside); a bemused wife or daughter spies the encounter on the ice from a distance. The Laval Mountains were already well settled by mid-century, and there are everywhere touches of the human mark on the landscape: the stockade, the house and barn off to the side, the upturned canoe, the overturned sled, even the barren tree rendered lifeless by all the aggressive pruning and chopping. Off in the distance is a hint of more chimney smoke. The small homestead is looking a little ragged – the winter has been hard – but its inhabitants push forward in their daily efforts to survive. Of course, nowhere evident is any sign of modernity as those in Montreal knew it. Nor is there any sense of ethnic mixture or mingling; the habitants seem exclusive unto themselves. The market is a long way off, and besides, the logs were merely being sold off to those citified folk, and the cow and its owner would return to the peace and quiet of home. From Krieghoff ’s point of view, there was much to recommend such a subject. Winter scenes posed a challenge: how to make an interesting canvas based on variations of “white.” It’s evident he took care and probably great painterly pleasure in the countless small flecks of paint required for the snow-covered pines or the extraordinary reflections he could tease out of the ice and the degrees of opacity and translucence he could place on its surface. The challenges of such a scene offered an assortment of solutions, as another, closely related painting suggests (figure 2.21). The cow with the loaded cart has been replaced by a dog and a smaller cart (an odd substitution, though the dog seems eager for the task); the barn and house have switched places; the trapper has switched hands; and the habitant’s pointing gesture is aimed less firmly down the icy river but rather at the snowy path, causing our attention to move in a different pattern as we unfurl the narrative. Or take another (figure 2.22), in which the habitant gestures toward his house – a fine specimen of rural homesteading, he seems to suggest; and the road pushing off into the distance is now lined with an orderly fence, making the trip to market even easier to follow. These narrative dramas and formal solutions caught the eye of Montreal’s patrons (it certainly did Notman’s). But equally, it was the overall image of rural survival, offered in a most picturesque manner, that drew them. The habitants struggled in the hard winter, true, but they would endure by their wits and know-how until spring and the new farming season; and in the meantime, they and their rural environs were all so amenable to picture-making. The difficult economy, which was driving tens of thousands from the Quebec countryside to the cities and swelling all the working-class wards, had no place here.

2.21 Top Cornelius Krieghoff, Winter Landscape Laval, 1862, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 2.22 Bottom Cornelius Krieghoff, Winter Scene in the Laurentians – The Laval River, 1867, The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario

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One is tempted to call such scenes “Canadian pastoralism,” after the Scottish version observed in the previous chapter. It, too, offered a compensatory image of the countryside in the face of rapid demographic and social change. Instead of kilts and earasaids, there were blanket coats and toques. Instead of brawny Highlanders and bonnie lasses, there were habitants and Aboriginals. The historical differences, however, were significant and are worth noting. While picturesque Scottishness was being upheld as a unionist good, French-Canadian and Aboriginal societies and cultures were supposedly being eradicated in favour of an official policy of assimilation. While Scottish pastoralism proposed a living embodiment of a historical identity, Canadian pastoralism pictured ones that were being actively consigned to the past. Furthermore, while the Scottish countryside was being transformed into agribusiness, deer forests, and tourist sites, large chunks of its population still, at the height of genre painting’s popularity, held out hope for political reform; genre painting imagined a quiescent, contented folk in the face of a working class that was not. In contrast, the habitants and Aboriginals of Lower Canada were mostly politically impotent in the aftermath of the Rebellion and the Act of Union and in the push toward Confederation; they were flocking to the cities by the wagonload. In response, some French-Canadian activists called for farmers to resist the lure of the cities in the belief that squatting in the rural environs would somehow ensure the survival of an authentic separatist identity. They concocted representations like those in the romans de la terre (“novels of the soil”), hugely popular among a French-Canadian readership, which fancied habitants, nearly as picturesque as Highlanders, clinging heroically to the farmlands and wilderness in the face of urban British capitalism. None other than Napoléon Bourassa published one as a serial in 1864 and the following year republished it as a novel.85 But all of these were romantic fantasies in the face of economic and demographic realities, and even Bourassa published his romans from the comforts of his home in Montreal. There were pockets of political energy, of course: the rise of the Parti rouge, the radical heir to the rebellious parties of the 1830s, among the most notable. But these efforts were mostly stillborn and others that had a small life came to naught; and the British knew it. Although the French-speaking citizens held vastly superior numbers in Lower Canada, they could not organize themselves effectively. The Catholic Church was a huge obstacle with its staunch ultramontane political stance, and the seigneurial system that had previously organized French-Canadian land distribution, abolished only in 1854, had driven a feudal-like identity deeply into the people. It did not help that Louis-Joseph Papineau, one of the original rebels of 1837–38, was himself a seigneur and kept professing allegiance to it, even after his return from exile. The

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splits among those who wanted to be most active were simply debilitating. Or, as Bourassa put it in his inimitable way as he was opining about “the spirit of association” among the British, the French spent too much time arguing uselessly among themselves over petty grievances to pursue any real coordinated action. In contrast to the British, “we, whose origins are French, spend a long time arguing at the beginning of any new venture. We spend more time arguing in the middle and we almost always argue at the end. How many fine ideas, how many patriotic plots have we not smothered in the cradle by arguing like children!”86 The second painting, Death of the Moose at Sunset, Lake Famine South of Quebec (figure 2.23), is notable for its Turner-like colouristic effects, the brilliant orange-red background providing an unusual variation for Krieghoff ’s normal winter sky. But equally notable are the characters. At the centre stands Krieghoff himself, in a blue coat with large sketchbook in hand. He faces his friend and dealer, John Budden, an auctioneer, fast-talking entrepreneur, and general “Quebec bon vivant,” as the art historian John Russell Harper once called him.87 To the right is the wealthy ScotCanadian merchant and industrialist James Gibb, an admirer and frequent patron of the painter.88 Led by two Aboriginal guides, they are out on a hunting expedition and have landed a moose. Compared to the series of paintings organized around the habitant’s homestead and the “crack in the ice,” Death of the Moose understands the rural environs as a hinterland suited for sport. Traces of settlement are nowhere evident. The trees are blasted and toppled over, not because they have been subject to the habitant’s axe but because they are simply the detritus of a natural environment. While the rabbits provide meat and income in one series, the moose provides instead a hunter’s trophy in this painting. Dressed for the sporting occasion – the men even wear the blanket coat and ceinture-fléchée associated with French trappers (though they were only weekend hunters, there was no reason they could not look the part) – they have rehearsed the most colonial and exportable of Victorian manly activities, the chase for big game.89 A dog yaps happily in the background; the guides tend to the grisly work of dispatching the moose and securing its parts; even the sunset obliges, showing us that “death” – the extinguishing of the last light – can be a majestic thing after such a chase. The fantasy of habitant and Aboriginal survival, which to many seemed dubious at best, or equally the fantasy of the imperial conquest of nature, the hybrid landscapes associated with the province proposed their own kind of wager about life in rural Canada. English-speaking patrons loved the imagery and bought the paintings almost as soon as Krieghoff could finish them. He found a healthy clientele among

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the founders of the aam, men like Gibb, and through connections offered by the bon vivant Budden, but he also seems to have done well with British soldiers stationed at the garrisons.90 One can only imagine a kilted officer buying a picture of a Canadian habitant. Regarding others with a hankering for art, an observer put the matter bluntly: the “French-speaking bourgeoisie ... did not buy his [Krieghoff ’s] pictures.”91 Despite their kinship to the reveries of the romans de la terre, the paintings generally told of someone else’s delusions. these paintings had a marked effect on Notman’s and Henderson’s sensibilities. When he organized a book of pictures called Photographic Selections in 1865, comprised of photographs of works of art as well as samples of his own key pictures, Notman made sure to include several of Krieghoff ’s canvases, among them both Winter in Laval Mountains (figure 2.20) and Death of the Moose (figure 2.23). He also included his panorama of the emerging Montreal metropolis (figure 2.8).92 He did the same the following year in yet another publication, adding Krieghoff ’s paintings and his photographs as carefully chosen inserts.93 For the casual observer, the combination of pictures had no necessary relationship. They were attached pages apart from each

2.23 Cornelius Krieghoff, Death of the Moose at Sunset, Lake Famine South of Quebec, 1859, oil on canvas, Collection of Glenbow, Calgary, Canada, 81.7.1

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other and tucked between many other kinds of pictures: in Photographic Selections, a photograph of a genre painting by David Wilkie, for instance, another of a religious painting by Raphael, and especially a number of Canadian landscape paintings by artists patronized by the aam. But neither were they discordant or disjunctive; at least its buyers would not have thought so as they flipped through its pages from the comfort of the parlour. They told of a distinctly imperial form of progress in which the relationships between urban and rural societies were free of difficulty or struggle. When one penetrated the other, as in the case of Krieghoff and his patrons venturing into the Lower Canadian wilderness for sport, there was no disruption or conflict. As in the book of pictures, the societies sat side by side in harmony. The relationship between painting and photography as complements to imagining the province helps to explain the very direct borrowing that sometimes took place between the two. Sometimes the borrowings are understood as merely formal, but the ideological undertones are not hard to spot. Dennis Reid has pointed out the near transcription of, for example, the German immigrant painter Otto Jacobi’s

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2.24 Opposite Otto Jacobi, The Rapids, Montmorency River, 1860, Musée national des beauxarts du Québec 2.25 Left William Notman, Natural Steps, Montmorency Falls, near Quebec City, qc, ca. 1860, n-0000.193.110.1, McCord Museum, Montreal

The Rapids, Montmorency River (figure 2.24) based on Notman’s Natural Steps, Montmorency Falls (figure 2.25).94 The painter caught just enough of the jagged rock face so apparent in Notman’s photograph to suggest something of the ruggedness of the place, but not too much to overwhelm the canvas with its crenulations of light and shadow. He gave the sky a more brooding tone and the outcropping on the lower left a more prominent place, the better to balance the scene from side to side and top to bottom. He preferred the water to be smoother, more like a gentle tide than a rushing torrent, the better to effect a fluid transition into perspective. And he omitted the small figures on the far ledge, a feature, we have seen, often preferred by Notman to emphasize the touristic value of the site. Jacobi’s work was a landscape painting, after all, and had to obey some of the genre’s rules. But by and large, the painting is a happy copy, and the painter felt no anxiety about that. Of course Notman’s picture made it easier for Jacobi to compose without ever having to set foot anywhere near the rapids. That was part of the appeal. The photograph already did the work of anodyne conceptualization of the environs. The borrowings could continue in the other direction. When an anonymous photographer went to the same location on the Montmorency a few years later, she positioned herself close to where Notman had (figure 2.26). It must have been appealing

2.26 Top Anonymous Photographer, Natural steps, Montmorency, qc, ca. 1870, mp-0000.25.781, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.27 Middle William Notman, Natural Steps on the Montmorency near Quebec, before 1865 2.28 Bottom Alexander Henderson, Regulating dam, Blanche River near Derry, qc-on, ca. 1866, mp-0000.267.1, McCord Museum, Montreal

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to situate the camera and tripod in such a way that the image in the ground glass would follow that of the famous photograph and work the play of light and shadow as Notman had. Rather than assent entirely to Notman’s example, however, the picture borrows bits and pieces from Jacobi’s. The choices are small but definite: the foreground outcropping is more prominent; the background treeline provides a distinct screen and a greater balance between the uprightness of trees and the striations of rock face; the glass-like water offers a smooth transition into the distance, like a carpet or undulating runner over the steps. Although the location was heavily visited, the photographer waited for a moment when all the tourists had disappeared, preferring the untrammelled rather than the touristic vision of the place. Or take yet another picture by Notman (figure 2.27). The photographer returned a few years later – tellingly, around the time Jacobi exhibited his canvases to acclaim at a large show in London. He, too, learned lessons from the painterly adaptation of his original, especially in the stronger sense of compositional balance and, most striking of all, the white carpet of water that cuts the scene in two. Or take, finally, a photograph by Henderson (figure 2.28). Its subject is of an entirely different location, on the Blanche River, a tributary of Lake Timiskaming in Upper Canada. The site presented a different range of challenges than those posed by the rapids and steps on the Montmorency, and unlike Notman, who preferred a higher vantage, Henderson’s solution was to wade into the water with his fishing basket, the better to capture more directly the onrush that he experienced. Yet, what is striking above all is the glossy, reflective quality of the water below and the dark clouds and opaque sky above, the two echoing each other as weighty, materialist things. They looked like the kind of substance found in painted landscapes. Henderson had learned to slow his shutter and meter for the mid-tones in order to get the same painterly effect in the photograph. All of this adaptation and adjustment suggests a community of painters and photographers enormously sensitive to the pictorial solutions offered by each medium, most obviously in the choice of subject matter but also in the subtleties of form. In less than twenty years, the technology of photography had advanced enough to permit a far wider range of effects than anything Hill and Adamson could have imagined with their calotypes, enough that photographers could take aesthetic cues from paintings and find a way to achieve them with the wet plate, and to turn the language of colour into that of the grey-scale. Henderson was particularly adept: all that experimentation in the house laboratory had given him an easy facility with the equipment. When he could not achieve the right appearance with the photographic arsenal at hand, he was not above drawing on the negative in the manner of a draftsman, once

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declaring to a colleague that a whole batch of negatives was not up to par and required “twice the usual time and work, as they had to be carefully intensified and pencilled [sic] in most cases.”95 Photographs certainly captured scenes instantaneously and frankly but – here is the point – they had to be carefully fine-tuned to work properly as intelligible views. in early 1866, Notman began a series of projects devoted to hunting. Krieghoff ’s Death of the Moose, published a year earlier in Photographic Selections, was much on his mind. Something about the way the painting captured the various aspects of a hunt remained vivid: the Aboriginal guides leading the hunters on a chase, the convergence of adventurers in the snowy wilderness, the excitement of the kill (recall the yapping dog), the trophy of the moose, the preparation for transporting the rewards, the calm afterwards – all of it taking place before an atmospheric sunset. Translating such a subject into photography would be tricky – the mechanics of the wet plate were still too involved to permit the picturing of many activities at once, and trying to concoct an actual hunting scene outdoors brought its own dilemmas – but there could be particular rewards, for instance enabling a more distinct narrative handling of the event in separate pictures. Krieghoff had already shown in his obsessive return to the same subject matter that paintings could explore variations on a theme; by their serial nature, photographs were even more suited to the task of chronicling and could expound on the plot of a subject. Notman had already met the perfect actor in the drama he was imagining: Colonel William Rhodes, an authentic Englishman from the upper classes who had immigrated to Canada and set himself up on a large estate south of Quebec City.96 Krieghoff, it seems, had introduced them.97 Notman had taken pictures of Rhodes for Portraits of British Americans. What is striking about the portrait, in contrast to virtually all the others in the book, is its exaggerated depiction of the man: not a wise politician or energetic representative of officialdom hankering after Confederation (whose portrayals certainly had their share of hyperbole) but a sportsman in the wilderness. Rhodes was cut from the same cloth as many of the others. A member of the House of Assembly, a founding director of the Grand Trunk Railway, president of both the Quebec and Richmond Railroad and the Quebec and Trois Pistoles Railway, and chairman of the Quebec Warehousing Company, Rhodes had done extraordinarily well in the provinces through political connections and economic manoeuvring – perhaps even better in Quebec than he would have back in West Yorkshire as the non-inheriting son of minor gentry. But the portrait and the accompanying biographical sketch work hard to downplay, even

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disavow, any of that. “Though Colonel Rhodes has sat in Parliament,” Fennings Taylor wrote, “we are not aware that he has the misfortune to be moved by any special political aspirations.”98 Of his participation in the grand industrial and governmental aspirations among British Canadians, “political science, railway economy, or comparative currencies, have not with him, we incline to think, been matters of severe study.” Instead, he was simply chosen by others for the jobs in parliament and the railways, for quite apart from anything Rhodes claimed or desired, his “friends and neighbors … have thought it fit in some way to associate him with such subjects.” Being a gentleman who does not wish to disappoint, he simply gave of his time and energy willingly, with no objectives in mind. The country needed selfless men like him; indeed, he intrinsically “belong[ed] to the country and its progress.” If he had not given his time for Queen and country, what would he have preferred to be doing? Hunting, of course: the “taste for the chase inherited and acquired in the old country, knew, as we conjecture, little abatement when Colonel Rhodes left England.” Rather than deprive him of his manly pursuits, the wintry conditions of Canada in fact facilitate them. In the most severe winter, “you must look for him among the wild hunters of the frozen north,” and there, among “icy halls of cold sublimity” and “the everlasting verdure of eternal pines,” Rhodes was most at home. His specialty was hunting caribou: the elusive, mythical creature “is to our Canadian hunters what the red deer is to the Highlander.” In a book that was never short on embellishment, the biographical sketch of Rhodes was, we might say without exaggeration, over the top. The photograph, even more so (figure 2.29). Dressed in the blanket coat of a habitant hunter, Rhodes has already bagged two caribou (he has “few superiors” on the hunt, an authentic “Nimrod of the North,” Taylor added). He has efficiently dismembered the beasts – no blood splatters or signs of the carcasses – and saved only the most desirable parts, the heads with their antlers, to mount in his den. Though dressed as one, he was no habitant hunter scrambling to feed his family; he was instead, like Krieghoff ’s patrons, a gentleman after trophies and sport. His rifle has been sheathed; the chase is over and the return to camp imminent. In all the exertion, his shoelaces have come undone, and a companion – his guide – bends over to re-knot them. Most extraordinary of all, Rhodes touches his companion’s back in a gesture of – what shall we call it? approval? blessing? comfort? paternal affection? boastfulness? Was he in a state of mesmerized grace? Or was he merely steadying himself? The skyward look to the heavens made it – this light touch on the back – seem so much weightier. It was the key sign of interaction between the two figures and also, in the matter of Rhodes’s biography, of the characterization of an immigrant who had made good in the

2.29 William Notman, Colonel William Rhodes and Octave the guide, Montreal, qc, 1866, i-19310.1, McCord Museum, Montreal

provinces. And Notman took pains to picture it just right. He tried different orientations for the two men and their actions. One picture (figure 2.30) may have made the act of tying the shoelaces more obscure and the hand on the back too outstretched and deliberate; Rhodes’s hand seemed overly a gesture of benediction. Another (figure 2.31) made the companion seem more like a monk than a guide; the result was a scene too removed from the events of the hunt and its aftermath. And yet another (figure 2.32), which did away with the central touching altogether, had not enough intimate interaction between the men and no sufficiently metaphorical or thematic overtones. The gesture needed meaning without portentousness; it required connotation that grew out of a simple action; it showed character in a common deliberation. Most of all, it could not be pinned down to one interpretation or another – not an unqualified indication of blessing, for example – but oscillated between a number of possibilities, some mundane, others more symbolic. Suffice to say that in Rhodes, Notman found a fantasy figure who allowed him to explore a variety of dispositions and identities in the Canadian wilderness.99

2.30 Above William Notman, Colonel William Rhodes and Octave the guide, Montreal, qc, 1866, i-19312.1, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.31 Top right William Notman, Colonel William Rhodes and Octave the guide, Montreal, qc, 1866, i-19314.1, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.32 Bottom right William Notman, Colonel William Rhodes and Octave the guide, Montreal, qc, 1866, i-19315.1, McCord Museum, Montreal

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Notman brought Rhodes and others to the studio for a series of concocted scenes.100 They included a studio assistant named Octave Dandurand, the companion in Rhodes’s portraits, and three members of a Huron family, all named François GrosLouis – a grandfather, father, and son – who were Aboriginal guides and who had also posed as models for Krieghoff.101 Together they made for a mixture of Lower Canadian types: the British settler, the French-Canadian youth, the Aboriginal family. In addition, Notman brought scads of stuff that could turn the Operating Room into an elaborate wintry scene: fox and lamb skins, coarse salt to depict “snow,” a magnesium flash to produce a “campfire,” saplings and branches to indicate the “wilds,” a painted backdrop to suggest the terrain of the “high mountains” where the game lived, snow shoes, a tent, pine needles, rocks, sleds, pots and pans, stuffed animals, tethering ropes, dried fish, firewood, and more. Called Caribou Hunting in Canada, the eleven scenes elaborated on Krieghoff ’s Death of the Moose by picturing in more extended, narrative form the many aspects of the hunt. Taking its cues directly from Notman, the Philadelphia Photographer, when it covered the pictures later that year, gave the scenes long captions; they are worth transcribing in detail.102 Of the first (figure 2.33), the main actor in the drama is “‘The Hunter.’ Clad in his fur-lined clothing, armed with his snow-shoes and rifle, he stands knee-deep in snow [sic], eager for the chase, as soon as the artist should release him. The hills in the distance will soon be covered by his tracks, now only known to the wild cariboo and its young.” Of the second (figure 2.34), “‘The Guide’ comes next, with smiling face, and with his sledge close by, laden with snowshoes and other paraphernalia, and ready to lead the hunter through the pathways of yonder woods, and over those snow-clad hills.” Among the key features of the captions are, first, their fictionalization of Rhodes and Dandurand, who are never named as anything but their roles in the story; it was clear that Notman wanted to prevent the pictures being misconstrued as portraits, since he had already made a name among Montrealers who wanted pictures of themselves pretending to play in the winter. Second, the captions contained occasional discrepancies from the pictures now at hand, suggesting Notman tried other, now-lost versions of the scenes. And third, they were candid in acknowledging the fabrication of the photographs. Rhodes’s hunt can only begin when “the artist should release him” from the studio; both the hunter and the guide are ready to penetrate “yonder woods” and the “snow-clad hills,” that is, into the painted background anyone could plainly see. These were procedures in the Operating Room, the photographer reminded everyone. Or to put it another way, though never once appearing, Notman was as much a part of the story as Krieghoff was in Death of the Moose, and he used the captions in the journals to insist on it.

2.33 William Notman, Caribou Hunting: The Hunter, Montreal, qc, 1866, n-0000.57.1, McCord Museum, Montreal

2.34 William Notman, Caribou Hunting: The Guide, Montreal, qc, 1866, n-0000.57.3, McCord Museum, Montreal

After being introduced to the main characters, in the next picture (figure 2.35) “we find them ‘Going Out.’ They begin to look more like work, and are tugging up hill with snow-shoes on. The guide is behind the other [sic], and finds his strong form none too strong to pull the laden sledge up through the deep snow. With bodies bent forward, and feet sunken out of sight, they seem to be toiling hard for their pleasure.” They penetrate the wilderness, the guide in this version doing the heavy work of carting supplies, the hunter free from such burdens and on the lookout for game. Their feet are “sunken” but the snow is not yet so deep and the weather not so inhospitable as to make the journey overly arduous; still, they are “toiling hard.” That would change; every drama needs hardship for its protagonist, no? “Yes!” the story agrees (figure 2.36), “in the next we find one poor fellow who, more eager than the rest, had gone on before, and lying down is entirely ‘Exhausted.’ The snow is falling down in great heavy flakes, and he is almost covered with it when his companions over-take him. The storm and wind were too much for him, and there he lies, while his companion is trying to cheer and revive him.” The scene was nearly a whiteout. Notman had produced the effect by passing the negative through a cloud of Chinese lacquer.

2.35 William Notman, Caribou Hunting: Going out, Montreal, qc, 1866, n-0000.57.2, McCord Museum, Montreal

2.36 William Notman, Exhausted, Caribou hunting series, Montreal, qc, 1866, view-602.1, McCord Museum, Montreal

(“Put it in a small vial,” Notman told his readers about the lacquer, “introduce into it one of those ingenious contrivances for blowing perfume [and] blow a shower of the liquid Chinese white into the air, and while it falls catch as much of it as desirable on the varnished side of the plate, and by judiciously holding the negative, you can so direct it as to give the effect of a slant to the falling snow.”103 There was no trickery, he explained, only a photographer’s ingenuity.) Recovered from the blizzard, hunter and guide finally reach camp and meet their Huron companions (figure 2.37). Neither rest nor conviviality await them, however, for “here is a busy scene, and everything to do. Each man is a committee in himself to hunt firewood, build the fire, prepare the feast, or pitch the tent. All are busy and in a hurry to get through.” Dandurand and the sled have somehow disappeared, replaced by a bearded man loaded down by a backpack. No matter: he was another “companion” in the story – another interchangeable actor – since what mattered was less his individual identity than his function as helpmate for the hunter. While the others are

2.37 William Notman, Caribou Hunting: Arrival at camp, Montreal, qc, 1866, n-0000.57.4, McCord Museum, Montreal

“busy” tending chores, the hunter in this version of the scene is at rest with his spyglass in hand, ready to scout the environs for game. The story drives toward its central conflict. While the others hunker down for a good rest, the hunter is already on the prowl (figure 2.38). “Here an anxious group, their old leader with field-glass in hand, are looking far off into the distance (which is admirably effected by the arrangement of the background – a most capital one for the purpose), as there is ‘game in sight.’ Some have hastened at the signal to the door of the tent, and with their heads peering out, make a most interested and naturally arranged group.” Notman made sure to draw readers’ attentions to the “naturally arranged group” – his choreography, of course – and especially the most capital background. Of all the scenes, the painted backdrop in Game in Sight was the most laboured, the clouds drawn with strong, heavy-handed contours, as prominently outlined as the tethering rope or the upright tree posts. Hardly bland, the background was an insistent presence. (What was that white mass extending below the tip of the field glass? a mountain peak or more

2.38 William Notman, Game in Sight, Caribou hunting series, Montreal, qc, 1866, view-600, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.39 Opposite William Notman, Caribou Hunting: The Chance shot, Montreal, qc, 1866, n-0000.57.6, McCord Museum, Montreal

dazzling atmosphere?) The scenery was the closest Notman could get to the stunning background in Krieghoff ’s Death of the Moose. One imagines the sky must have been orange-red. The historian Gillian Poulter describes the kind of hunt proposed by the series as “still-hunting,” meaning the careful stalking of prey rather than the wild chase with dogs and horses of the British hunt, in which the poor fox or deer is hounded into exhaustion.104 It was instead an exercise in quiet discipline. “In some instances the caribou have to be approached by crawling on the ground,” Rhodes recalled of a hunt.105 With enough patience, the quarry will always be found. “Off with the cover of the rifle,” he recounted of the moment of truth, “a glance at the caps, shuffle out

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of the snow shoes, and the deer is counted as my own.”106 According to Notman, however, it was less a singular enterprise than a collaboration – Dandurand has reappeared – and less a measured target than a “chance shot” (figure 2.39). In the exhilaration of the moment, the heart quickens, time compresses, the trigger is pulled, the bullet hits its mark, the caribou falls, the event passes all too quickly. Indeed, the scene collapses at least two moments into one, the initial raising of the rifle and the ultimate seizing of the caribou; the prized head already looks to have been removed – a third moment. The chase is a success and yet is suddenly over. One suspects Notman did not bother telling the editor of the Philadelphia Photographer what the long caption should be; it was, apparently, self-evident and the scene needed no explanation. The editor took the bait, noting that the picture “will speak for itself.” With the climax of the chase complete, it was left for the hunter and his companions to come to terms with the whole episode with a good pipe in hand (figure 2.40), “probably telling stories of former adventures.” They return to camp where the others,

2.40 Top William Notman, Caribou Hunting: The Hunters Resting, 1866, courtesy of Toronto Public Library 2.41 Bottom William Notman, Around the Camp Fire, Caribou hunting series, Montreal, qc, 1866, view-596.A, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.42 Opposite William Notman, Caribou Hunting: Sunday in the bush, Montreal, qc, 1866, n-0000.57.9, McCord Museum, Montreal

now gathered around a campfire, share in the journey (figure 2.41). (It was a magnesium burst that simulated the fire, Notman explained, “a picture which could not have been made a year or two ago,” the caption added.) “After an exciting day, our heroes have seated themselves upon the ground to tell the adventures of the day’s chase,” the Philadelphia Photographer reported. “The pipe is in nearly every mouth and a happy, contented-looking group are they,” though in our version we cannot tell if the hunter, too, partakes; his back is to us. The scene around the campfire is cast in a glowing light, all the debris on the snow carefully picked out by the camera. (Do not fret about the studio floor, Notman told photographers, it can be “covered with some such stuff as Kamptulicon [a material made of cork and rubber], which looks so brown and shabby to begin with, that you never fear spoiling it, but as the occasion requires, with perfect freedom, pile cordwood on it, build cottages, form sandy beaches with boats drawn up, erect tents, plant trees, crowd solid blocks of ice, form snow-wreathed plains,” or as the case may be, even set fire to it.)107 The men extend their hunting trip into Sunday – they are weekend hunters, after all, and want to make full use of the time away – and they also take the Sabbath seriously (figure 2.42), using the day to tidy both the camp and themselves. “There seems to be a general cleanup going on,” the Philadelphia Photographer observed, “one burly hunter

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sits stripped naked to the waist, washing himself, apparently indifferent to the cold wind playing around him.” The stripped man was an important component for Notman, as variants of the scene suggest. He represented not only the cleaning of site and self so characteristic of the day but also the adaptation to outdoor living among the rugged. By washing in the snow, Rhodes explained, “an amount of comfort and cleanliness can be obtained … The snow also makes the skin cold-proof.”108 “All seem to be glad enough of a ‘day of rest,’” the Philadelphia Photographer agreed with the picture’s tone, “and glad enough to keep it sacred, so far as abandoning the chase pro tempore goes,” though, curiously, hunter and guide are nowhere to be found. One presumes they are still stalking, for there would be two trophies in the end. They are replaced by another, the seated man with moustache at the tent’s opening. Finally, the hunt and weekend concluded, the hunter and guide set off for home with the spoils on their backs (figure 2.43). They were “homeward bound, well pleased, no doubt, with their adventures and their success.” The men are situated in nearly the exact setting as surrounded them in Caribou Hunting: Going out (figure 2.35), though the props look a little more ragged for the wear and the fox and lamb furs cannot quite become “snow” anymore after all the tramping back and forth. A more narratively based expansion of Krieghoff ’s hybrid landscape, Caribou Hunting gave Notman an opportunity to experiment in the studio and find a photographic way to mix genre and landscape and, characteristically, to strut his ingenuity in pulling it off. There were other touchstones besides Death of the Moose, from the theatre, the popular dioramas, and the travelling raree show, to other photographic experiments that took costume drama as their subject, pictures by Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Rejlander back in Britain or, closer to home, those being reproduced in the Philadelphia Photographer by the German team of Loescher and Petsch. In fact, the team’s famous costume scene The Gleaners appeared in the very same issue that covered Notman’s series. Still, whatever the many cognate works, Krieghoff ’s example was key because, unlike all those others, it broached the complicated subject of human occupation in a specifically Lower Canadian setting. What was an idealized version of rural life at this time, 1866, on the eve of Confederation, and this place, a predominantly French-Canadian and Aboriginal wilderness being penetrated and governed by the British? Or to put it in terms more particular to Notman, what was his status, as an immigrant from Scotland trying to make good in the province, in organizing all of this? Notman does not seem to have had a simple answer to those questions, and Caribou Hunting was a means of trying on different responses for size. Take, for example,

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the variants of several of the scenes and how they proffer different attitudes about the central plot. It is a pity that one of the variants of Going out (figure 2.35), referenced in the Philadelphia Photographer’s caption, no longer exists, but we can just about imagine a striking contrast between a scene in which the guide leads through the heavy snow and another in which the hunter does, or one in which the guide struggles with the load as opposed to another in which it is the hunter’s turn – “his strong form none too strong,” we might recall as a possibility. Or take two versions of Hunters resting. In one (figure 2.44), while the guide looks on, the hunter holds the knife and is about to do, or has just finished, the gory work of beheading the caribou; it is a scene of stoic manliness. In another (figure 2.40), the hunter sits more idly in meditation, and the young guide is shown more devoted to his pipe. The beheading no longer central – it seems a picture more firmly about “resting” – the distinct differences in status between the two figures is pronounced, though in a reversal of expectation, it is the handsome guide, perched higher, enjoying his pipe, relishing the prize, who comes off as superior. Rather than manly, the hunter in the comparison becomes disconcertingly passive (recall his singular energy when all of his companions preferred to rest in Game in Sight), his soft hands not quite limp but oddly, gently clasped. Or take the scenes that undercut the hunter’s prowess. We find him overcome by the elements in Exhausted (figure 2.36) and requiring the help of his companion, the French-Canadian assistant, just to survive. He had impatiently, stupidly, pushed ahead of the group – “more eager than the rest,” the Philadelphia Photographer put it generously – and had to be saved by those who understood the local terrain and quirky elements better. The hunter is nearly buried alive but for the efforts of another. Or take again the climax scene of the kill (figure 2.39). It was the photograph that the Philadelphia Photographer proclaimed needed no explanation, but in truth its meanings were hardly unequivocal. In contrast to Rhodes’s own self-image as the practiced and solitary stalker, the scene is one in which the hunter must be helped along. Gillian Poulter calls the guide a “muse,” and she is surely right.109 He whispers the location of the prey; he sights the line of the hunter’s eyes; the hunter has yet to aim his rifle properly, but the guide, tensed and crouched and focused on the target, already knows the events ahead. The caribou lies before them, evidence of his foresight. A small shift of the body here, a switch of gestures and orientations there, a substitution of one figure for another, a whisper, a gentle clasp, a trifling deed – they were tiny changes but resulted in enormous differences in their implications, both particular to the logic of the series and also writ large in their address to history. After all, what was hunting but a metaphor for the colonial control and ferocious use of the

2.43 William Notman, Carrying Heads, Caribou hunting series, Montreal, qc, 1866, i-19359, McCord Museum, Montreal

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2.44 William Notman, Caribou Hunting: Hunters resting, Montreal, qc, 1866, n-0000.57.7, McCord Museum, Montreal

province’s unique and precious natural resources? (“We might be inclined to fancy that the Colonel will never rest until he has bagged the last moose, the last caribou in the country,” a contemporary wrote admiringly, but also alarmingly, of Rhodes.)110 In the variants for Caribou Hunting, the photographer proposed a variety of understandings of the hunter in the wilderness: as hero, conqueror, zealot, victim, casualty, bold in the face of opportunity, helpless in a foreign environment, eager and stupid, valiant and needy, full of bravado and pointlessly reckless, stoic and resigned, Godfearing and indifferent, aided by interchangeable companions but dependent on them all, present at key moments but unaccountably absent at others – in all, an assortment of possible characterizations. It was not that Notman ever settled on any one of them. When he advertised the series, he gave buyers options about which photographs they could purchase. One could buy a set without Exhausted, for example, and avoid the

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hunter’s vulnerability and folly, replacing it with Arrival at Camp and Returning; or one could buy a single scene or any number of combinations.111 It was a shrewd business move, of course, and Notman always had his sights on appeasing his patrons and making a profit. But choosing one scene or variant over another could change the arc of the story dramatically. The hunter always got his trophies, but how and at what cost were open questions. in 1865, henderson began collecting his photographs in small, handmade, selfpublished books. What prompted him to start making the books remains unknown. He had previously shown individual prints to admiring patrons at the aam exhibitions – a good sign that the books would be well received – and one suspects the success of Notman’s photobooks was likewise an important spur. By then he had amassed a large number of pictures, some seven or eight years’ worth, and culled a very select few for inclusion. The exact number varied from book to book – as few as ten, as many as forty, and most with twenty – Henderson seemed continually to experiment with their choice and sequence.112 Sometimes called Canadian Views and Studies, Photographed from Nature and at other times Photographic Views and Studies of Canadian Scenery, the books were markedly different from Notman’s. Comprised entirely of outdoor views, they eschewed both the grand portraiture that drove Portraits of British Americans and the studio allegories of conquest and possession that would underwrite the Caribou Hunting series. And yet, they are no less informed by the events leading to Confederation and try to address those developments through a different vocabulary, of “scenery” as opposed to “biography” and “genre.” Moreover, for all of their variety and testing, the books were driven by a notion about how the land ought to be grasped and also, equally important, by an uneasy sense that such a notion ran in the face of its actual use. In trying to interpret these books, it’s helpful for us to recall the “seismic” as a handy way to think about the indirect forces rumbling beneath the historical ground. Unlike Hill and Adamson, whose direct dealings with the Newhaven fishermen and fishwives put pressure on their practice, or Notman, whose sense of social relations among the conflicting populations could be abstracted into allegories, with models like the French-Canadian Dandurand and the Huron GrosLouis family standing in for whole cross-sections of people, Henderson mostly kept figures out of his scenes and generally avoided picturing them amidst the concrete historical conditions of empire. There were notable exceptions, as we will see. Yet we are able to feel their presence in his way of confronting the scenery before him.

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2.45 Alexander Henderson, St Anne de Bellevue, near Montreal, ca. 1865, mp-0000.1828.69, McCord Museum, Montreal

Just as the example of Krieghoff was vital to Notman, so, too, was it for Henderson. But while Notman took Death of the Moose and its corollaries as a basis for his own experiments, Henderson gravitated toward those exemplified by Winter in Laval Mountains (figure 2.20) and its kin, of the countryside and the representations of the human mark on it. It was not that the books avoided the cityscape or hints of an interaction between urban and rural. There are pictures in every surviving version that explore it, but the interaction is always unequal and a prelude to an escape. Take, for example, St Anne de Bellevue (figure 2.45), a district on the western tip of the city and one of the oldest parts of the settlement. These were intermediate areas where modern sprawl had not yet totally arrived – though signs of it were beginning to appear, mostly with welcome but occasionally alarm – and where the rural was receding rapidly in the face of all those steam-powered boats coming into view. The outskirts of the city are off in the distance – a church spire can be spotted, the houses sprout cheerfully on the riverbanks – but most of the sprawl disappears beyond the large tree at right, a lurking presence that nevertheless frames the entire view. A quick turn of

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the camera to the right, for instance, would have brought it all into sight. Easily the clearest sign of urban development was the boxy, stepped railway bridge that connected St Anne to the neighbouring island. Its presence was hard to ignore – it was what brought most Montrealers to the area as they passed through – though Henderson tries hard to qualify it, likening its long span to a background horizon line. More worth picturing, from his point of view, is the canoer, who works the current and guides his small craft to the near shore. He serves as contrast to the other forms of modern transportation on the far side, leaving them behind as he undertakes his own excursion across the river. In the copy of Canadian Views now held at the University of Toronto, St Anne de Bellevue is immediately followed by a related picture, Above Railway Bridge (figure 2.46), which pushes us even further from the city; and in the sequence of the two photographs, we find ourselves stepping back and turning left, as it were, leaving the cityscape behind, the railway bridge growing fainter, the rugged landscape becoming more pronounced. We venture onto the unsettled land where Henderson is already standing, on the “opposite” bank, so to speak, and plant ourselves with him more firmly in its rocky environs. Or perhaps more accurately, we follow the path that the photographer encourages us to take with him. The books register not our movement but his, as he guides us to the places he thought were the opposite of those from which he and his patrons came. Not quite narrative, the books are a compilation of forays outward. Or, to put it differently, the sequence takes the traditional format of the book as narrative and transforms it into a photographic way of movement. Henderson’s particular preference was for landscape – we have noted his distaste for portraiture and its social requirements and his harsh view of others – and it could be easily said that venturing into the rural zones of the province provided a refuge from the often tense street and ethnic relations that were increasingly characterizing urban living. He was frequently drawn to the regions immediately surrounding the city, not exactly rural but convenient enough, like the small island off St Anne; or Nun’s Island off the southern edge of the city, just upstream from the Victoria Bridge; or across the bridge to Saint-Lambert; or sometimes even a long walk eastward to the very edges of the city’s sprawl. They were easy to get to – Henderson could take his camera out on a day trip – and did not require that he leave his young family for any great length of time, so the fantasy of escape could be had without actually escaping very far or for very long. Many of these areas were already settled but being opened up to more aggressive development with the coming of the bridges and railways, though as in the case of St Anne de Bellevue, Henderson worked hard to temper their appear-

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2.46 Alexander Henderson, Above Railway Bridge, St Anne’s, before July 1884, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

ance. Sometimes the lands could be imagined to be desolate, or mostly so, as on Nun’s Island (figure 2.47), the snow seemingly unmarked by all the snowshoers or tobogganers who were daily roaming about. Sometimes the sprawl could be reduced to a few houses seemingly set off by themselves, as if they were isolated pockets of homesteading, as in the case of a small Dutch-style house and sled at Hochelaga, on the eastern edge of the city (figure 2.48). If we did not look too hard, we might not notice all those other houses in the distance, their silhouettes pretending to fade into the horizon; nor might we notice the guardrail of the road leading us quickly to them. Instead, we might fixate on the leafless tree – that was Henderson’s keenest interest in the photograph – and liken its crooked branches to the fingers of an outstretched hand, reaching over and grasping the rest of the small habitat. Of course Henderson knew these places were in no way unconnected to the city; all the painters and photographers in Montreal were busy meandering the same environs to get pictures, too, and happily noted all the bustle taking place to feed the city’s needs (figure 2.49). Such expanses were evidence that all the investment in the Victoria Bridge was having its intended effect, as the city and its economy reached out beyond the island to touch

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and remake the neighbouring territories and provide a pathway to other markets. Henderson, too, noted the activity – it was hard to avoid completely – though he preferred the solitary few workers quietly plying their trade on the frozen river as opposed to the small factories and processing plants already cropping up all over the landscape (figure 2.50). One could almost forget in his photograph that drawing ice had become a lucrative business and big companies were already squeezing out the habitants who cut ice and firewood for the city’s markets to survive the long winters before they could return to the fields in spring. For Henderson, the day trips were succor – the obverse of city life – and had to be pictured as such, until he could flee for more extended excursions. The push into the wilderness was not without its encounters, however, for as every explorer knew, the regions up and down the St Lawrence were still filled with small settlements and homesteads. So much of the land was being carved up, cleared, and frequently transformed into farmland, and the very idea of “wilderness” was losing whatever virginal associations visitors might once have been able to foist on it. The homesteads had an unmistakable ethnic component, of course, usually being the preserve of those French Canadians who clung tenaciously to the rural environs as a means of maintaining a separatist identity in the face of urban British domination – recall the romans de la terre, for example. Krieghoff pictured them as mostly selfcontained pastorals – those hybrid scenes. Henderson did not exactly avoid them but preferred the barest evidence of them. North of the Ottawa River, for instance, he came across a freshly furrowed road between tall oaks (figure 2.51) and took notice of it with his camera but did not let his readers continue down its path. On a trip to the Eastern Townships, he found a log fence of the kind that had also piqued Krieghoff ’s interest, and he duly registered it but, again, did not follow it to its source, preferring

2.47 Top Alexander Henderson, Winter Scenery on Nun’s Island, ca. 1865, Library and Archives Canada, accession number pa-135022 2.48 Middle left Alexander Henderson, Winter Scene at Hochelaga, 1860–65, Library and Archives Canada, accession number pa-126623 2.49 Middle right James Duncan, The Icehouse, Nun’s Island, Montreal, 1859, m967.138.23b, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.50 Bottom Alexander Henderson, Drawing ice, qc, ca. 1865, mp-0000.308.7, McCord Museum, Montreal

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to let it sit as a picturesque element for his interest in the nearby rapids. His patrons might have already suspected where the fence led. The Eastern Townships especially were dotted with new settlements and causing much commotion among the Scots in Montreal. In this case, the ethnic conflicts were front and centre. New immigrants from the Isle of Lewis were squatting all over Winslow Township and causing a ruckus with older French-Canadian habitants. They were overrunning lands, their neighbours complained, which had been carefully parcelled by the authorities to try to keep the peace. They were hungry, the squatters replied, and the farming lands set aside for them were, in their judgment, hardly sufficient to feed them or, to the horror of the habitants, sustain even more Scottish relatives following them across the Atlantic.113 Montreal’s St Andrew’s Society sent money in an effort to relieve the poverty and soothe the conflicts; it was a stopgap measure and did not work. Henderson knew the villagers were there; he even found some (figure 2.52) but did not want any pictures of them included in the books. Instead, the books are mostly comprised of pictures from all around the heavily wooded environs of Lower Canada and occasionally those of Upper Canada and the ambiguous regions between them. They try to fulfill the promise offered in St Anne de Bellevue, taking the reader to the places across the bridge, as it were, and looking for Montreal’s opposite. They record Henderson’s restless wandering as he tried pushing deeper into the forests. By this time, Notman could make any such trips with one of his many assistants and darkroom buggy in tow, or simply appoint one of them to venture out for him. Henderson went alone with only his fishing bag. He proudly called himself an amateur – the titles on some of the books exclaim it – and in the context of the project he might equally have called himself an adventurer. Yet, what is most remarkable about the photographs he chose were their small, insistent, hard-torepress reminders of the human mark in nearly every place he went. It was shamefully easy to orient his camera in such a way to capture a pristine wilderness – that was the city’s ideal opposite – and certainly there are photographs that follow that prescription. But the books contain ample evidence of land use and human activity of all sorts – in fact they outnumber all the others – of loggers, hunters, canoers, trappers, squatters, homesteaders, habitants, and more. When Henderson trekked up the Ottawa and came across a lumberer’s camp, he did not shy away from it (figure 2.53). When he turned north into the densely forested region around the Rivière Rouge, he found evidence of the loggers’ handiwork all over the river (figure 2.54) and noted that, too. He went west to the region around Grenville, an area dotted with tiny lakes and remote patches of land where one might hope to disappear without notice, and he stumbled

2.51 Top Alexander Henderson, Oak Wood, North of Ottawa River, ca. 1865, Library and Archives Canada, accession number pa-028610 2.52 Bottom Alexander Henderson, Sugaring off party, eating “La Tire,” Eastern Townships, qc, ca. 1870, mp-0000.1452.171, McCord Museum, Montreal

2.53 Opposite top Alexander Henderson, Lumberer’s camp while on the drive, Ottawa River, qc-on, ca. 1865, mp-0000.268.9, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.54 Opposite bottom Alexander Henderson, Timber jam, Rivière Rouge, qc, 1863, mp-0000.1468.37, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.55 Above Alexander Henderson, Lake Commendeau, Grenville, qc, ca. 1870, mp-0000.1468.26, McCord Museum, Montreal

upon boaters out for a row (figure 2.55). The pictures suggest he occasionally announced himself to the people he found, but for the most part he was content to picture them at a distance or capture merely the signs of their presence. Of the many kinds of people he found, boaters and canoers especially caught his eye and appear frequently – disproportionately – in the books. They appear in smooth water and rough; they are near and far (figure 2.56); they are central to the scenery and small specks within it (figure 2.57); they gave a sense of scale and, likewise, were given scale by the surrounds. Their importance was partly occasioned by the places Henderson went and his own means of travel along the rivers to get there. Partly, they hearkened back to the promise in St Anne de Bellevue, in which a canoer announces

2.56 Top Alexander Henderson, Inlet to Lake Inchbrakie, Wentworth, qc, ca. 1869, mp-0000.139.22, McCord Museum, Montreal 2.57 Bottom Alexander Henderson, Lake, canoe, and islands, Laurentians, qc, ca. 1870, mp-0000.1452.150, McCord Museum, Montreal

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the travel outward as the central trope of the books. Partly, the boat was for most people the principle form of travel off the Island of Montreal, except during winter, and so conditioned a population attentive to all manner of river craft. But partly – importantly – the canoers most resembled Henderson’s own ambiguous presence. Did they belong to the place or were they just passing through? Were they habitants heading home, immigrants acclimating themselves, or Montrealers out for an amble? Did they travel by boat for work or pleasure? Did the land belong to them? What kind of “possession” did their presence suggest? For instance, was the land for them a refuge? a dwelling? a seasonal diversion? a place to escape from, as so many long-time dwellers were doing in the years leading to Confederation? Did they view the rivers and forests as a private experience, as Henderson did, or did they regard them as a means of livelihood, as the industrial loggers and fishermen did, dependent on manipulating the resources and transforming their look? Did they identify with the wilderness and all that Henderson understood or wanted it to be, or were they profoundly estranged from it? There were no clear answers to any of these questions, of course, and that uncertainty made the boaters and canoers that much more central as figures. Henderson’s books plunge us into the rural regions of the provinces as a form of refuge and show instead an adventurer coming upon a variety of other meanings ascribed to the places he found, some fathomable to him but most not. Rather than jettison them in favour of his own needs and desires – a careful culling of his vast collection of pictures would have made that a snap – he chose to acknowledge them. The land could not simply be made over into a blank slate, ready to fulfill his demands on it. Like Notman’s handling of the hunter in Caribou Hunting, Henderson’s inclusion of other alternatives was a moment of pause. In the headlong rush to gain custody of an entire country – that was one implication of the debates in 1865 and 1866 – he stood back in an effort to take stock of the repercussions ahead and his place within them. Understanding this helps us understand the formal strategies of the photographs. Take Inlet to Lake Inchbrakie (figure 2.56) as exemplary of the most sophisticated among them. The photograph calls upon an old-fashioned perspective to organize its key elements. A figure stands in the distance – a canoer and his craft, naturally – at nearly the vanishing point. The outer trees form a pleasing repoussoir. The inner trees angle inward like orthogonal lines; one on the left seems especially eager for the job. The water’s bright central reflection, like a stream of light, urges us onward. The distant mountain and its reflection in the water form a billow around the figure and likewise urge us toward him. He stands at an inlet, after all, a narrowing point

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that promises an expanse beyond. Perspective in landscape painting and photography is the design equivalent of control, in that it masters and organizes all that comes within its domain before an all-seeing, all-powerful eye. And yet, although borrowing from its overall structure, Inlet to Lake Inchbrakie includes strategies that thwart it. We confront a screen of trees that delay our movement backwards. We observe a density of detail in the buildup of the branches that keep us attentive to variegated textures. We are fixated on the local dapplings of light and dark that are contrary to the smooth, even, cast light of a central source. We linger over the enclosed incidences in the play of highlight and shadow – an odd patch of darkness here, a web of brightness there. All these strategies take advantage of the camera’s capacity to gulp detail and meter for different ranges of brightness, and the result is a scene that proposes the plunge into perspective depth but continually delays, thwarts, and even discourages that journey. In all these choices, we ought to remark on the astonishing expressive quality Henderson had hit upon with his small device, this photographic way of suggesting the “pause.” Perhaps, now, my earlier claim about how some of photography’s earliest practitioners found in their machine a means of expression will make a little more sense. In just twenty years since Hill and Adamson first took up the camera, Henderson had learned how to bend its mechanical features for decidedly thematic purposes, full of an awareness that formal manoeuvres achievable by the lens and shutter potentially had creative, even metaphorical meanings. Rather than an uncomplicated prospect, the camera in Inlet to Lake Inchbrakie confronts us with a piecemeal perception; rather than an expanse of space, it provides a collection of things. The things are lush, most certainly, and also, as the lens was good at securing, obdurate, disparate, and fascinating in their own right. Where Notman sought creamy textures and the unifying quality of limpid light – recall the formula of his portraits (figure 2.2) – Henderson found a virtue in the variability and mixture of surfaces that the camera could provide. Such manipulation of foreground surfaces keeps us locked in the place of our viewing; or more accurately, it kept the photographer aware of his location in the scene before him, a knowing, insistent present-ness before attempting to garner the world beyond. Henderson turned to the strategy repeatedly. When he offered landscapes without traces of the human mark, as in Winter Scene Taken While Snowing (figure 2.58), the bricolage of foreground elements is again foremost. The deep slope of the valley in the distance and the temptation to push back into its cradle are, for the most part, undercut by all the textures immediately before us – of the buildup of ice and

2.58 Alexander Henderson, Winter Scene Taken While Snowing, ca. 1865, Library and Archives Canada, accession number pa-028615

snow and the this-way-and-that of the thick stems. Or take, finally, The Trout Brook (figure 2.59), an unusual photograph insofar as it is oriented vertically as opposed to the photographer’s normal (and more comfortable) horizontal handling of his instrument. The format allowed him to emphasize the height of the trees in relation to the fallen logs in the brook; it emphasized a contrast between top-to-bottom and side-toside features and between prickly edges and a glassy surface. The photographer could remain suspended in that space immediately before him; all else faded quickly into a spectral light. In the copy of Photographic Views and Studies now held at the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Montréal, The Trout Brook is followed immediately by Timber jam (figure 2.54). They are of different locales, and the camera in each is handled entirely differently. And yet, in the context of the book, they are likened to each other formally and thematically – fallen logs and glassy water, and the accumulation of debris on the edges. But here was the point: however much Henderson wanted The Trout Brook to represent his way of being in the forest, a spectre, whose arrangement had come about by another’s intervention, was never far away.

2.59 Alexander Henderson, The Trout Brook, ca. 1865, Library and Archives Canada, accession number pa-028608

we have several times mentioned the drive to Confederation, and perhaps one way to bring this chapter to a close is to flesh out that development, if only slightly, to provide a more vivid picture of the issues surrounding Caribou Hunting and Canadian Views. In October 1864, delegates from Upper and Lower Canada, Newfoundland, and the Maritime provinces – New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island – met in Quebec for what turned out to be the second and perhaps most meaningful conference to discuss a proposal for the union of all the provinces. They hammered out a proposal, the now-famous Quebec or Seventy-Two Resolutions, which included among other things a framing of the governance of such a union: the development of a legislature of various compositions, an outline for the responsibilities and powers of a strong, central administration, and so on. It covered taxes, banking, the dispersal of assets, the assumption of debts, the creation of rules and of bodies

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to enforce laws, the subsidy and control of a militia, the division of legal rights and responsibilities between local and federal legislatures, and more, and seemed the closest to a working platform from which such a proposition for Confederation could be brought to London for the queen’s approval. Of course it had both supporters and detractors, and by the conference’s conclusion, everyone knew the proposal required vetting and a boatload of convincing among the constituencies within the provinces. For its supporters, the rewards were clear: a national economy that facilitated easier trade and a broader economic development across the union, and an infrastructure – of trains, especially, but of other inter-colony projects – that fostered migration to alleviate the problems of a swelling population, physical expansion to the west and its extraordinary resources, and military protection. The latter was much on their minds. The American Civil War had turned many away from the thought of republicanism and worried others that the violence would spread north. The incursions seemed real: the Fenian raids, Irish Republicans based in the US who crossed the border and raided British forts, would plague the border regions over the next several years. It also did not help that the US, in retaliation over British behaviour during the war and Canadian support of the Confederate South, simply cancelled a decade-old treaty that had allowed trade across the US-provincial borders without taxes or tariffs. The prospects of a shackled economy, increasingly beholden to unpredictable developments beyond the border, made the call for unification even more urgent. All these aspects of the drive toward Confederation are well known today, and they were likewise on everyone’s thoughts throughout 1865 and 1866. The arguments raged in the press, on street corners, in the cafes, at the various ethnic societies, and, we can add, in the photo studio and darkroom. The general atmosphere of partisan debate helps to explain even more vividly Notman’s 1865 publication of Portraits of British Americans. In many ways, it mouthed the arguments offered by proponents of Confederation, though couched in the language of biography and portraiture. And it allows us to marvel at the achievements in Caribou Hunting and Canadian Views in the effort, maybe even the courage, to pause. The headlong push among merchants and industrialists toward Confederation was not without its vocal detractors. (Joseph Howe, Nova Scotia’s premier, likened joining his province with Canada to Scotland absurdly joining Poland or Hungary, an analogy that was sure to pique Notman’s and Henderson’s interests.) Nor was it without its ambivalences or feelings of contradiction even among its supporters. It was becoming increasingly clear, for example, that London had very little interest in footing the enormous bill to maintain the colonies; the push toward Confederation was in some

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senses a response to Britain’s increasing reluctance. “We deceive ourselves in supposing that we have any value in the eyes of Great Britain,” a politician opined in 1865. “England has no need of us.”114 The claim was from a Newfoundlander, whose colony had its own ambitions in relation to Confederation quite distinct from those Scots Montrealers in Lower Canada; but the sentiment, and the anxiety behind it, was not uncommon. In such a context – of nationalist sentiment within the framework of empire, of the push for opportunity and a form of self-governance, even individual rights and an underlying ideology of liberalism, against the reality that many who demanded such things were in fact recent immigrants who overwrote the claims of others – what did it mean to be a “British American,” as Notman called his book? Furthermore, what did it mean to claim ownership and responsibility for the entire land, including those backwater environs, and responsibility for its many disenfranchised people? What were a Scottish migrant’s claims, rights, and responsibilities within such a society? later in 1866, Notman organized the studio for two more hunting series, Moose hunting and Trapping, ten different scenes in all. With the exception of a single picture for the Trapping series, he did not enlist Rhodes again and instead preferred the GrosLouis family and other men who played the part of trappers. From the point of view of execution, the photographs are accomplished, an advance on those of the Caribou Hunting series produced only a few months earlier. He had learned from the experience, doing away with the empty spaces that characterized some of the Caribou Hunting pictures in favour of a density and profusion of props. In Moose hunting: early morn, the alarm (figure 2.60), for instance, the Operating Room has been filled with stray materials – pine needles here, twigs and broken branches there, an axe or two wedged into a log, uneven puffs of snow, the makeshift lean-to of the forest tent – that give it more casually, more vividly, the look of the “natural.” Scenes like it were more strutting on Notman’s part, further evidence of his resourcefulness, creativity, and attention to detail. He had also learned to compose in a more focused fashion. All of the picture’s particulars are in the service of the story. A bear has wandered into camp, and the men, awakened by the intrusion (notice that some are still sleeping), must suddenly confront it. A hunter points his rifle, and the shot is about to be taken. The rifle barrel sits nearly in the centre of the photograph and is set off by a darkness around it. All the attention is pointed at the target; even the fallen logs, the wedged axes, and the makeshift tent seem to direct us to the left. The background painting no longer calls for attention and instead becomes a suggestive but indistinct sky against

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2.60 William Notman, Moose hunting: early morn, the alarm, Montreal, qc, 1866, i-20499.0, McCord Museum, Montreal

which all the action takes place. Notman understood he could not compete with Krieghoff ’s spectacular sunset. The camera’s great power lay not in its ability to simulate colour but instead to inhale foreground surfaces and control our attention by a suggestive handling of the spectrum of grey. Compared to The Chance shot (figure 2.39), the hunter in Early morn, the alarm is in firm control. His guide crouches behind him, but the implication of the muse-like relationship is gone. The scene does not collapse several moments into one, as the earlier picture had done, but holds us in the moment of truth. There is no ambiguity in the action and no questioning of the hunter’s prowess. When Notman brought Rhodes into the studio for one last picture (figure 2.61), the result was more like Early morn, the alarm than The Chance shot. This time, the hunter’s determined aim is central, and he anchors the entire scene. Even the tree and old guide seem to rise up from behind him, a confirmation of his pivotal role as the protagonist. In these later series, any offer of alternative interpretations of the hunter’s place in the wilderness is simply not explored. The pictures rush

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2.61 William Notman, Trapping the carcajou, Montreal, qc, 1866, i-21953, McCord Museum, Montreal

to their climax, and the trophies of the hunt will be secured without falter. The narratives are about as tight as the scenery is seamless. After 1866, Notman would never try another series like those of the hunting and trapping projects that had so preoccupied him that year. He would go on to other experiments like the zany composite of the skating rink and, with most of them, enjoy enormous success. He would expand the studio and set up other locations across the newly confederated country, reaching out to Ottawa and then further west to Toronto and as far east as Halifax. The new taxes and tariffs imposed by the US would not deter him from pushing south of the border, and in addition to opening a studio in Boston, he would get himself installed as an official photographer for the 1876 centen-

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nial held in Philadelphia (all the currying of favour with the Philadelphia Photographer would pay off; when the centennial was over, he would not contribute to the journal again – the early connections had done their job). He would make strategic forays into American colleges and universities, where he spied a potential market for portraits of students and faculty, eventually getting himself a lucrative niche at places like Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Princeton, Smith, Vassar, and Yale.115 (Typically, he would try to find a way around the tariffs, sending negatives and prints back and forth between home base and the satellites and then distributing his pictures to American patrons, all without paying customs duties. He was eventually found out – not before making a small fortune, of course – and forced to abandon the subterfuge. No matter; he was by then a very rich man and could afford the fines and duties or, as he preferred, simply build a plant on trendy Boylston Street in downtown Boston.) Henderson, too, would go on to a level of comfortable success. He would become the lead photographer for the Canadian Pacific Railway and criss-cross the country taking pictures of all the land into which the trains were pushing. Only bits and pieces of his signature style in Canadian Views would go on to become the house style of the railroad companies, where he happily offered an image of the seemingly untouched country about to be bulldozed and heavily settled. The great irony of his earlier work is that its underlying logic of the individual experience of the land was transformed into a “feeling” and “sentiment” for it and that such a private, emotional response to landscape in the end paved the way for its full-scale possession; it naturalized ownership. He eventually saw no contradiction between his photographic efforts and his patrons’ industrial ambitions, and as his family had done back in Scotland, he soon invested heavily in the big lumber companies, land corporations, and railways cropping up all over the new country. He was so eager to invest that he even broke one of the provisions set by the trustee account his family had set up when he was first married, putting funds toward risky ventures that the trustees balked at, and then even suing them – his own trustees – when he could not invest all that he had wanted to and thus fell short of his great expectations; he was that desirous to lay claim to the prospects offered in the rich land.116 Late in life, he would write to his daughter that he wanted to make one last trip west to see the far reaches of the country again. He did not expect to see the rich forests and open land anymore and knew he would find instead “villages turned to cities[,] stations to villages.” But that was nothing to lament; far from it. “It is a wonderful country,” he told her.117 That’s to say, the two immigrant Scots would go on to become among Canada’s leading photographers and Montreal’s most well-placed citizens. The opportunities

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to become “British” – or better, after Confederation, “Canadians” – had turned out well. However, for a brief moment in the mid-1860s, on the eve of wholesale change to the country, when the future was in no way clear and the past not so distant, when their status as Scots in the empire was giving way to something else – an identity they could not, at that point, confidently name – the two men paused and regarded their place in the situation. The question of their belonging was before them. In a moment of reflection before the tumbling rush, they asked a photographic version of what all immigrants end up asking anxiously at some point: whose land am I in, and how do I belong in it?

3 UPRIVER AND DOWN

It was autumn 1872, a few months after John Thomson had returned to Britain after another prolonged stay in East Asia. Reunited with his wife and young children, including an infant son he had only recently held for the first time, Thomson was at something of a threshold. A whirlwind past, of trekking thousands of miles in a remote land, lay behind him. The chance for a comfortable and more settled future at home lay ahead. He was thirty-five years old and as a globe-trotting photographer had under his belt what for many would have been a lifetime of adventure. In his possession were more than 600 precious glass plate negatives he had made during his travels in China. They included views up and down the coast, from Macao, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou in the south, to Xiamen and Fuzhou further north, and further north still to the regions in and around Shanghai, Nanjing, and Beijing. Included, too, were views pushing inland along the great rivers: the North River that fed the Pearl River delta, the Min that ran past Fuzhou, and the Yangtze that emptied at Shanghai. They were his choice work and on them he banked his prospects. The remainder of his negatives – they must have numbered in the thousands, given that over the course of nearly a decade his various studios had been geared toward a busy portrait industry – he simply left behind to settle debts and get some needed cash. Although a native of Edinburgh, he had chosen to settle in London where he could be closer to the learned societies, tap and monitor the British mania for both travel literature and pictures from the far reaches of the empire, and parlay into a career as an “expert” his firsthand experiences in – and of course his photographs of – the Far East. His wife, who had been with him for a time in Hong Kong, had returned to Britain two years earlier in the belief that without her, Thomson could be freer to travel and find his “expectations,” “accomplish what you could scarcely have done had we remained with you,” she had written to him while they were apart, and stockpile enough raw materials to insure him “profitable and congenial work at home.”1 The family plan for him was similar to that of many other Scots who went to China at mid-century: to make

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money and return with a full wallet. There were adventures to be had and curiosities to be followed, of course, as well as scenery to startle the eye, ways of living to stretch the mind, ancient monuments to gawk at, and stories to savour and retell over a “comfortable fireside,” he promised his wife.2 But with a young family at hand, Thomson’s motivation in China was also to corner a market in pictures so as to barter them for the kind of comfort and status he would not have been able to provide had he remained in Edinburgh. Unlike other Scots, who did indeed return home with a full wallet, Thomson brought only the potential for gain. In London he had neither a job nor much in the way of savings. He had, however, his glass plates, some ideas about how they could become more widely recognized as a source of knowledge, and a plan to publish them. It was in these first months back in Britain that Thomson penned one of his most remarkable and revealing essays: remarkable, in that it described the presence of Chinese competitors in photography when few “experts” in London were willing to acknowledge anything of the sort, and revealing, in that it betrayed some of Thomson’s quandary and anxiety in trying to distinguish his work from theirs. Titled “Hong-kong Photographers” and appearing across two issues of the British Journal of Photography, it tried to explain something of the Chinese adaptation to the camera.3 Contrary to popular belief, he told his readers, the Chinese “have ‘taken kindly’ to photography.” There were a slew of Chinese-operated photo studios in Hong Kong, he explained, catering to an equally enthusiastic clientele; and they were not just peddling trash. “In Queen’s Road,” he wrote, “a score of Chinese photographers … do better work than is produced by the herd of obscure dabblers who cast discredit on the art in this country.” One especially, Lai Afong, had exceedingly “exquisite taste” and made pictures that would enable him to make a living “even in London.” Fresh from a heady trip abroad, Thomson seemed to offer high praise for his Chinese contemporaries and buck the trend of the usual stingy appraisal in the British press of anything having to do with the Chinese handling of modern things. He understood that a western technology was being taken up enthusiastically by foreign hands, whose skills could not simply be dismissed. In their own way, the Chinese were becoming participants and competitors in an increasingly global marketplace of images. Certainly they outdid the hacks in London, but did the Chinese make work that could rival his? Perhaps a closer look by a discerning eye (his) might also reveal a notable naiveté with the camera, as if, like other instruments of modernity, it eluded their full grasp. When it came to the most essential ingredient in photographic portraiture – its promise of likeness – they seemed insensate to the camera’s most

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compelling feature: the effortless and convincing naturalism it provided, of shadow and shade, a gentle chiaroscuro, and all the variable effects of light in a picture that were the devil for painters to achieve but, in a skilled photographer’s hands, were a snap. As all true portraitists knew, the careful handling of light was necessary to provide a plausible account of a person’s substance and presence.4 “You foreigners … always wish to be taken off straight or perpendicular,” Thomson says a Chinese operator scolded him in a now-famous passage: “It is not so with our men of taste; they must look straight at the camera so as to show their friends at a distance that they have two eyes and two ears. They won’t have shadows about their faces, because, you see, shadows form no part of the face. It isn’t one’s nose, or any other feature; therefore it should not be there. The camera, you see, is defective. It won’t work up to that point; it won’t recognise our laws of art.” As if to press the point of Chinese innocence in the face of the camera’s capacities, Thomson describes a tit-for-tat conversation with “A-hung” about the importance of shadow to perception: “But then, I say to A-hung – ‘if you had no shadow the face would be a blank.’ ‘Oh no, our artists know better, for they give you features complete, without the shadows.’ ‘No! Look at these card pictures of yours; they are not complete, so far as the figure is concerned. Why not photograph the back and tail and stick it onto the back of the card, so that your customers might leave no doubt in the minds of their friends as to their having a back and tail.’ ‘Very good suggestion,’ says A-hung, ‘I will propose it.’” So the Chinese took up the camera but fit it into a practice and worldview that confounded its full potential. Moreover, its operators seemed wholly unaware of the simple-mindedness of their beliefs, clinging, as they did, to a received wisdom about representation that was out of step in a world remade by the lens. In the matter of photographic realism, they remained primitives, and even – there is a hint of this – superstitious. In such a view of the competition, what, then, did Chinese skill and “exquisite taste” consist of? How was it possible that the photographers’ naiveté with the camera could still end up producing better work than that of the flunkies in Britain? Partly, Thomson thought, it was a peculiar relationship between photography and painting, for as he well knew, the majority of Hong Kong studios had a painting division and Chinese photographers frequently began their careers as painters in the treaty ports. Certainly there was something about the complicated chemistry and “nicety of manipulation” in the darkroom that “suits the Chinese mind,” he observed. But there was also something about the camera’s rapport with the brush that gave it, in Chinese

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hands, a special look, a cultivated taste, an aspect of picturing that he could not name with any exactness but could still “recognise as art.”5 No one could fail to notice the close proximity of the easel to the tripod in a typical Hong Kong photographic establishment; there was value in such togetherness, though what it facilitated was harder to say: There are four or five artists at work in the light part of the room and verandah, copying photographs, on a large scale, in oil. How very lightly these limners are dressed! – only a pair of silk trousers and a pipe each. And how they smoke and chat, and seem to enjoy themselves … [One is] a man who looks twenty years older than he ought – he of sallow, deep-lined visage in the corner. He is a miniature painter on ivory, whose work is held in high estimation for its delicacy, careful drawing, and beauty of colouring. This individual is never able to work more than from two to three hours a day, the rest of his time being occupied with the opium pipe and siestas. Opium has been the curse of his life. As his occupation is a profitable one in his skillful hands, he can always command time and money for the excessive indulgence of the vice. There is a degree of refinement and beauty about his miniatures which is rare and surprising when one considers his most inartistic surroundings. His work is done chiefly from photographs. If the subject has to be enlarged he places over the photograph a piece of glass marked with small squares. Corresponding squares of larger size are then pencilled on the ivory and filled in from the photograph … A master hand paints in the head, an inferior the hands, and an apprentice the costume and jewellery, the latter being generally profuse, as it costs nothing … The cost of a painting measuring about eighteen inches by one foot is about thirty shillings. They are the delight of the foreign sailors frequenting the harbour, who invest their savings in these mementos of dear or dead friends. There is the traveller now going off on his morning rounds to visit the ships in the harbour, with his portable collection of samples … A-hung is busy with new customers, who are engrossing his attention. Mark the polite parting salutation of this photographer of the Flowery Land as we bid him adieu.

It was a curious description, this view of A-hung’s studio, full of starts and stops and odd asides. Among the many details, several stand out. First, although A-hung could advertise himself as a photographer, he seemed in fact more like a manager, tending to visitors, passing courtesies, and supervising a small, image-producing manufactory that encompassed several different media at once. There were cartes de visite, the stockin-trade of a portrait business, but also miniature ivories and oil paintings and, though

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never named in Thomson’s essay but evident elsewhere, paintings for lockets, brooches, porcelain, lacquer, fans, chests, and much more.6 The more a studio could do, the better chance it could weather economic storms. The exchange between different media was sometimes extraordinarily fluid; in some cases, it had reached a point of casual efficiency, each picture submitted to an assembly-line-like procedure, in which images were transferred back and forth by a glass template, and masters, “inferiors,” and apprentices took their places in front of the easel by turns. Painting was aided by photography, it is clear, though the reverse, photography being cross-pollinated by painting and other media, remained evident but, at least for the journal’s readers and to Thomson himself, unfathomed. In addition, the Chinese business was profitable and had no shortage of customers for its work. A single portrait cost 30 shillings, no small outlay. Recall that William Ramsay and Alexander Rutherford of Newhaven were happy with 70 shillings for an entire oyster season. No wonder the foreign sailors had to invest their savings to get a picture. Despite the expense, their wallets could be pried open by all those hawkers who made the daily rounds on the docks with samples in hand. The pictures were no doubt refined, but mostly, it seems, the sailors wanted mementos of not only dear but also dead friends, presumably those who died in Hong Kong or some other place far from home. Perhaps especially in a foreign port, where enough British died that the cemetery laid out for them only fifteen years earlier was already filling up, the camera’s Barthes-like relationship with memory and death was particularly acute and helped drive an industry.7 Finally, despite his manifest interest in the studio’s workings, Thomson could not keep from inserting observations about other, more social aspects, including the affable sociability of the place. The Chinese clearly enjoyed each other’s company, and the warm temperatures created an atmosphere bordering on indolence, causing the men to dress casually and take regular afternoon naps. Especially worth noting was the prevalence of opium. Even there, in a place devoted to photography and its cognates, one could not escape the presence of the drug. Making pictures sometimes seemed a virtue to feed a vice. Three years earlier, in 1869 while still at his Hong Kong studio, Thomson arranged a stereoview photograph that tried to recreate aspects of scenes that could be found at places like A-hung’s, though with significant alterations (figure 3.1). In his mind, the proper studio was best devoid of conviviality and more tightly concentrated on the work on the canvas. The single painter attends to a small painting; a makeshift easel sits on top of a well-used desk; a thin brush and maulstick are in hand; and small dabs

3.1 John Thomson, Hong Kong: Chinese Portrait Artist, 1869, Wellcome Library, 19840i

of oil are spread out on a simple palette before him. He is putting the finishing touches on a street or genre scene. Coupled with the portraits and seascape tacked to the wall, the street scene was one of a number of different subjects that could be ordered. There were even tantalizing and mysterious canvases – the picture at bottom left turned carefully away, for example – so as to spark further interest and cultivate more possibilities. Some portraits are larger than the standard eighteen inches by one foot in A-hung’s studio, but all have the look of having been taken from a photograph. The large one on the easel that is mostly obscured by the street scene seems as though it is based on a “dear”: a wife, sister, mother, or maybe just an object of desire, who needed remembering. Unlike A-hung’s studio, which had a most inartistic surrounding, the one recreated by Thomson was clean and luxurious: a fancy curtain off to the side, an ornate sideboard to the right, a small table with inlay nestled in the back, a sumptuous cloisonné vase or urn reflecting a bright glow. And, of course, there was the opium pipe – a high-class brass version, by the looks of it – sitting on the small table, ready for use. Contrary to the remarks about proper Chinese conventions, this painter seems to have no difficulty with portraits “off straight.” The sitters are posed looking to the right or left, and subtle shadows creep across jowls and fall deeply in eyes. He seems to have made sure to get all the nuances of light and shade just right.

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Among its many purposes, the combination of essay and stereograph was Thomson’s way of raising Chinese photographic practices for inspection to acknowledge them but also to distance himself from them. He recognized that there were other photographers peddling pictures like his – in fact too many of them. As he knew, Chinese-made albums were already circulating widely among a certain class of British patrons; there was no denying their popularity. He had vague ideas about their shortcomings, which he happily lampooned, but he also admitted their appeal, which he was more hard pressed to name. How should he position his pictures in relation to theirs? What measure of value should he adopt? What capacity in the camera seemed most relevant? What insight into modern China could he offer that others, with photographs aplenty, could not? What about this sense that the laws of art were somehow involved and brought meaningful distinctions? And, finally, what should one make of the insistent social life that kept intruding on the photographic scene and that, as his own picture of a studio proposed, should be kept out? These are among the questions this chapter pursues. It is concerned with a Scottish photographer travelling to the far reaches of the empire for adventure and opportunity and finding a population that answered back with their own kinds of pictures and practices. It takes seriously the subjects raised by Thomson’s essay, of professional and social relations in a treaty port, of photography’s linkage with other aspects of a trade-driven visual culture, and of the barely suppressed connection with a communal life organized around, among other things, an addictive drug. It does not leave the previous discussions about Scottishness and its benefits behind but places them within a more expanded imperial context and, with the photographer’s return to Britain, follows the arc of their travels. Finally, it addresses Thomson’s two early photobooks, Views on the North River, published while he was in Hong Kong, and Foochow and the River Min, published shortly after his settling in London. They represent something of a before-and-after comparison, bracketing the return to Britain and the early efforts to carve a new life. We begin by following Thomson to China, establishing the world he found in Hong Kong, and branching out, just as he did, to regions further inland along the rivers. More than in the previous chapters, I will spend considerable time pushing us further into the contexts involved in the encounters before getting to the central works themselves, asking for patience from the reader and risking a level of whiplash as we travel back and forth through a number of related subjects. All this in the hopes that the “seismic” – the effort to know the historical ground in order to feel its effects – will prove salutary in understanding the photographs. I will try to keep

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Thomson and his pictures in sight as we cover this ground. Though not the direct setting for either photobook, Hong Kong will loom large; it was Thomson’s home in China and, as his essay made clear, the central marketplace in ideas, competitive practices, and so much else for a migrant photographer. As we will come to see, the two kinds of unknowing in the photographer’s account of his Hong Kong rivals – of an artistic practice he could not clearly name and of a social life he could not readily accept – were related. The nagging wish not to see the agency and the desires of the Chinese would have a profound effect on Thomson’s books. the trip from edinburgh to East Asia was long, at least six weeks. Before the opening of the Panama Canal, the usual journey was a combination of rail and steamship legs past Spain, through North Africa, and around South Asia: first to Southampton, then by sea to Alexandria by way of Gibraltar, overland to Suez, down the Red Sea, hugging the coastline to India, port calls at Mumbai on the Indian west coast and Chennai on the east, down to the Straits of Malacca, more port calls at Penang and Singapore, and finally up the Chinese coastline to Hong Kong and Shanghai. The route was well travelled and, accounting for the usual delays brought on by fickle weather and tides, somewhat predictable. The P&O, or Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (Thomson’s choice), Jardine Skinner, and for the final legs the Apcar Line – the steamships had offered intermittent service since at least the mid-1830s and regular service by 1842. They were part of the same onslaught of steamship travel in world trade with which the fishermen of Newhaven had grappled. It’s fanciful to imagine Thomson leaving for Southampton by way of Leith or, better still, Granton or Newhaven. More likely, he took a train from Waverley Station in Edinburgh. The rail service was by then well oiled. He made the journey twice, first in 1862 to settle for a time in Singapore and then, after a return trip to Edinburgh in 1866, for a second time in 1867 to establish a base in Hong Kong. While it’s possible to chart Thomson’s travels by way of an increasingly established network of transportation available to ordinary Scots, there were extraordinary differences between those taken by, say, Notman and Henderson and those by Thomson. First of all, we should not underestimate the enormous distance to the Chinese ports and the effects it had on a traveller’s sense of isolation from family. Though the trip from Scotland to Canada was no short hop – in 1862, a steamship from Glasgow to Quebec still took eighteen days – the sheer length of the voyage to Asia meant that the frequent coming and going of Scots that characterized Canadian migration had no Chinese equivalent. With monsoons and typhoons bracketing seasonal travel, the trip

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was at least a year’s commitment abroad and usually more. Women did not routinely go; children hardly ever. Recall that Henderson arrived in Canada with a new bride, and Notman fully intended to bring his family to Montreal as soon as he could establish himself. In contrast, Thomson left Edinburgh expecting a prolonged stay away from most of his family and, except for bad health that caused him to return in middecade, probably imagined his initial trip keeping him in Asia for ten years or more.8 He had a troublesome and alcoholic older brother in Singapore, whom he joined on his first voyage, and eventually a younger brother joined them both. In addition, he called for his soon-to-be-wife to come to Hong Kong, where she stayed between 1868 and 1870, giving him the momentary semblance of family life. But these were exceptions to the usual rule of single Scots in the treaty ports; and it took considerable effort on Thomson’s part to create the kind of domesticity that could simply be taken for granted in Montreal. (He felt the sting of his wife’s absence, writing to her frequently and confessing doubt and anxiety without her.)9 He was otherwise surrounded by men in search of fortune and, like him, with an ambition to return home. A photograph by Lai Afong of the Scots in Fuzhou was typical of the composition in the treaty ports (figure 3.2). The picture’s lineup of five women among the thirtythree men (and one Chinese) was, in fact, an overrepresentation of the ratio of women in Fuzhou in 1870, around when the photograph was taken (to say nothing of the massive underrepresentation of the Chinese). If the distance was greater than that to Lower Canada and brought its share of peculiar isolation, the long trip to Asia was itself of a particular sort. Unlike those headed to Montreal, the steamship companies offering service to the Far East were in the unvarnished business of colony making. In their case, it was not a colony in the sense of resettling people, though there were elements of that; rather, it was primarily devoted to resettling an international business of drug trafficking. There was a reason P&O, Jardine, and Apcar dominated the intercontinental route. During the 1840s, they were the three companies most successful in smuggling opium and, after the treaties of Nanjing and Tianjin, in transforming Hong Kong into a commercial beachhead for the big British opium conglomerates. As much as the ports of call – Mumbai, Singapore, and others – were chosen to punctuate the long trip, provide a bit of temporary land for weary sea legs, and get needed supplies onboard, they were also important nodes along the opium trail. At Mumbai, passengers piled onto the decks above, opium chests were loaded into the holds below; at Hong Kong, the flow reversed. Although by the 1860s, the Chinese domestic industry of growing opium had expanded immensely and, in some provinces, easily fed the population on its own, Bengal and

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3.2 Lai Afong, Our new Club House just opened, January 1870, National Galleries of Scotland, gift of Mrs Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell 1990

Malwa imports were still numbering in the thousands of chests each year. P&O’s imports alone totalled nearly 700,000 chests since Hong Kong’s opening. Jardine was importing even more, making a boatload of money for its Scottish founders and their heirs – two Edinburgh men and their sons, as Thomson surely knew.10 No wonder the photographer was sensitive to the presence of the drug. His travel on the steamships bound for China put him in contact with it almost immediately. If he cared to venture below deck, he could have smelled the distinct flowery scent coming from the holds. Thomson does not seem to have made any pictures during any of his long trips while on board; it would have been difficult even if he had all of his equipment with him. But he made sure to get pictures of the steamships at Hong Kong (figure 3.3). He did not need to wait for an opportune day when one propitiously arrived and dropped anchor; they were seemingly always there, all the companies competing fiercely with each other for a berth and transforming the waterway into a perpetual traffic jam of tall masts. He made sure to get the full height of the steamship in the left

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foreground, showing its twin masts and twin smokestacks, the small boats cluttering its top deck, and its enormous hold below. By the looks of the hull sitting high in the water, the ship was already emptied of its cargo. Where did all the opium chests go? Thomson pictured that, too (figure 3.4). A large percentage was handled by Jardine, pictured at far right, whose grand, three-storey, colonnaded headquarters was the first British landmark when the city of Victoria started taking shape, or by Dent and Company, immediately next door, whose building was equally ornate and imposing. The photographer recognized other interests on the docks – the crowded Praya, the hoists uniformly spaced and ready for use, the grand façades of British businesses circling around the bend, the tiny boats all jostling for space in the water below, even the long slope up to Victoria Peak above, a dreamy backdrop to the distinct civilization beginning to emerge. But none of these other developments or fascinations would have been possible, the picture seems to say, without the anchoring presence of the shipping companies on the right. At any rate, the point of view seemed the most obvious one – this entrance from the sea onto the Praya – to make a picture of the arrival of modern British trade. thomson’s choice to establish a base in Hong Kong, as opposed to any of the other treaty ports, took advantage of several developments particular to it. For one, the foreign population rose more explosively there than in any of the other towns to which the British had access, a boon to any photographer needing patrons. When the British took possession of the island in the early 1840s, there were perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 locals scattered across the shoreline and hills. When Thomson arrived twentyfive years later, the population had ballooned to 125,000 settlers, both foreign and Chinese, including a spillover onto Kowloon across the bay.11 Other treaty ports had larger populations: at the same time, Fuzhou was said to have more than a half million Chinese, Guangzhou even more.12 But none could boast such an extreme change or a demographic with so much cash. Of the settlers on Hong Kong, only 2,000 or so were Europeans, but all were migrants, of one sort or another, whose distance from family and friends at home made them susceptible to the photographer’s services. Moreover, the port, along with Shanghai, was the primary hub for ships on the international route. It brought countless sailors who, as A-hung knew, were waiting for boats to pull anchor to head to other Asian ports or make the long voyage home and, in the meantime, could be enticed by the travelling salesman. Along with the population change came a dramatic physical change, which gave photographers no shortage of subjects for their cameras. Once a quiet island with

3.3 Top John Thomson, Hong Kong from Kellet’s Island, 1868–71, Wellcome Library, 18660i 3.4 Bottom John Thomson, The Bund, Hong Kong, 1868–71, Wellcome Library, 18692i

3.5 John Thomson, Harbor, Hong Kong, Near the Bund, 1868–71, Wellcome Library, 18718i

hardly a structure in sight – a small fishing village once sat where Victoria soon sprouted, and the dirt path to the peak was a mere “rugged slope of rock,” as some early observers noted – the coming of Jardine and others brought an avalanche of construction.13 In 1845, just three years after Jardine first settled, a visitor already noted thirty “European houses,” by which he meant the warehouses or godowns and their related headquarters, and a Chinese village of forty or fifty houses alongside – an “embryo city,” he called it.14 Year by year it grew rapidly, not incrementally. Within a decade, the entire shoreline had changed, creating a modern cityscape worthy of the name; and the number of promising vistas to capture it had likewise grown. Each passing year brought more pictures monitoring every new building or shift in the physical landscape: a new church for the Protestants, a tall clock tower to ring out the shipping schedule, a grand cricket ground for the young Brits, an ornate Chinese theatre to entertain them, a joss house at East Point, the zany Douglas Castle on the peak, the new reservoir at Pokfulam, a change to the façade of Augustine Heard & Co. (there were already remodelling projects), another new business near Lyndhurst Terrace, even a ceremonial arch at Pedder’s Wharf. Photographers were always on the spot; nearly every one of them traded on a stock of local views. Thomson, too, quickly built up a supply: countless views of the ever-expanding harbour, from both near and far, as single prints and in stereoview (figure 3.5), and just as many of the new roads being laid out for more development (figure 3.6). The seasonal botanical gardens, the

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3.6 John Thomson, Harbor, Hong Kong, 1868, Wellcome Library, 18680i

popular race course, the east end of Queen’s Road (figure 3.7) and the west end, too – all these could be revisited again and again for all the changes that continually happened. And always, there was the rapid expansion up Victoria Peak as merchants who became wealthy tried to outdo each other by building their mansions ever bigger and ever higher toward the summit. The slopes were the Hong Kong equivalent of Montreal’s Golden Square Mile, though courting even more ostentation because of the many clear sightlines from the town below. The visual dramas encouraged photographers to try to encompass several developments at once. In his Pedder St (figure 3.8), Thomson made sure to capture the new clock tower rising up and the three-storey businesses standing at attention on either side. The boulevard was certainly grand and, without taxing the imagination, could seem at home next to the Capucines in Paris or Princes Street in Edinburgh. It was complete with young trees

3.7 John Thomson, East End, Queen’s Road, Hong Kong, 1868, Wellcome Library, 18736i

uniformly lining the sidewalks and already casting a bit of shade for promenaders. Thomson angled the camera so that the top of the clock tower stretched but did not quite reach the outline of Victoria Peak, a photographic suggestion that there was more space to grow. The mansions are beginning to make their way up the mountain; one seems to float among the clouds. With so many photographers scrambling for views, there could be a numbing sameness to their pictures, and today it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the view of one from that of another or the view of one year from that of the next. But that was part of the point: only an enthusiast could so quickly admire

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3.8 John Thomson, Pedder St, Hong Kong, 1868, Wellcome Library, 18700i

the revisions in the cityscape and, for some, probably mark the month and year when such changes took place. He was willing to pay for a picture that registered them – this street-level process of colonialization – or so the photographers hoped. Other treaty ports were not devoid of such interests – photographers descended on most of them, too – but Hong Kong’s quality as a boomtown was unique. “Boomtown” – it’s an apt description, though sometimes not used enough. For what else was the island but an overnight phenomenon that was almost completely begun from scratch? It was distinguished from other boomtowns in the British mind – from Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, even Glasgow, which had older histories of settlement and whose rapid expansion could be traced to the rise of heavy industry and the interconnectedness of factories and markets by rail. There seemed no such histories or indus-

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tries in Hong Kong, at least to the British. Neither was it like other boomtowns in the British Caribbean, whose pleasing weather or fertile soil drew investors. Instead, Hong Kong was hot and muggy – “one can scarcely breathe,” an early Scottish visitor complained – and the summers almost unbearable.15 The soil in the lowlands was hardly better than the slope of rock once thought to characterize the scrawny dirt path that led to the peak. “No one can approve of the selection of Hong-kong as a British settlement,” that same Scottish visitor scoffed. Who would want to live on such an inhospitable piece of granite? Only those attached to the opium houses, he thought. Other businesses would go elsewhere. “Viewed as a place of trade,” he portended, “I fear Hong-kong will be a failure.”16 But that aspect of Hong Kong – its sole purpose as a place of freewheeling speculation and aggressive trade – gave it a rags-to-riches aura. Its character was completely in keeping with unregulated, entrepreneurial, colonial capitalism. The photographers knew as much. In some instances, Hong Kong’s emergence was at other ports’ expense. Certainly that was the case for Guangzhou, the earliest and previously the most important of the treaty ports, whose origins as a European outpost spanned several hundred years by then. Guangzhou had given rise to the Canton system, the structure that had governed trade between Europeans and Chinese.17 There were many rules and protocols that characterized it, most of them an effort by the Qing court to control foreign access to the mainland and the markets. For our purposes the system also gave rise to a particular visual imagery. Because European ships were required to anchor at nearby Huangpu and then have the precious goods shuttled on sampans and smaller chop boats, and because the foreigners themselves were restricted to a carefully cordoned off district in Guangzhou, with neither the right nor the invitation to explore further, the imagery associated with settlement frequently had a quality of containedness. Simply put, the traders had only the long waterway leading from the coastline to Huangpu and Guangzhou and the “factories” or hongs where they temporarily lived as the two most significant landmarks of their Chinese experience. The rest of the enormous region remained a terra incognita. A painting by an unknown Chinese artist of the American Garden in Guangzhou immediately after the First Opium War continues to show the restriction and boundary of the foreigners’ experience (figure 3.9). The new garden had a cultivated English look to it, and strollers seem happy to take their airs along its wide paths.18 But equally noteworthy are the tall fences that marked the limits of their outings. Old China Street outside the fence on the far left and Hog Lane on the far right seem to have a good Chinese pedestrian traffic, but where the tiny figures are headed is anyone’s guess. By then, the traders actually

3.9 Chinese Artist, View of the American Garden at Canton, 1844–45, Peabody Essex Museum, museum purchase, 1961, e82881, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma 3.10 Dutton and Michaels, Panorama of Guangzhou, three-part photograph, ca. 1863, image courtesy of The Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles

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wanted the fences because Chinese anger at the results of the war brought a level of discomfort, even violence, to daily relations.19 The Chinese artists who provided souvenir paintings to the merchants and traders did little in their pictures to imagine a different topography. Not so in Hong Kong. The negotiations during and at the conclusion of the Second Opium War firmly established the British right to move beyond the carefully monitored boundaries of the treaty ports. From the traders’ point of view, Hong Kong was symbolic of the new ethos, blessedly free of walls and all the restrictions that had been placed on movement and open trade everywhere else. The suspicion of surveillance was gone. So, too, were the pesky guards who kept them quarantined, the countless minor officials who had to be addressed, the rigid procedures for shuttling goods and loading ships, the bribes and kickbacks that had to be paid, the strange courtesies that had to be endured – at least they hoped they were rid of them.20 The merchants trusted they were at liberty to expand their reach and do business unfettered, and something of that freedom and expectation underwrote much of the imagery. Compare two nearly contemporaneous panoramas of the two treaty ports, old and new, one of Guangzhou by the photography team of Dutton and Michaels and the other of Hong Kong by Thomson (figures 3.10 and 3.11). Both are concerned with encompassing the vast sprawl that only a multi-part panorama could approximate; and both are fascinated by the jigsaw-puzzle-like accretion of buildings on the banks

3.11 John Thomson, Hong Kong Harbor, Taken from Above the City, ca. 1868

of a waterway, something that all the treaty ports shared. But that is where the similarities mostly end. The bird’s-eye view of Hong Kong more easily likened it to the spectacle offered in the grand maps of both European and American traditions, by which the visual consumption of the place was given a lofty weightlessness. One could behold the city from afar and observe its sprawl from Olympian distance, the preferred visual strategy for boosterism and expansionism.21 Certainly Thomson took advantage of Victoria Peak’s height, against which the landscape surrounding Guangzhou offered no similar opportunity for Dutton and Michaels. They did the best they could, climbing the tallest building across the river in hopes of getting a decent prospect. Still, they could not clear the rooftops entirely and caught the tiled roofs of the span of buildings before them. A Chinese man does some patching on one, while the photographers turned their camera outward. The near and far are drawn together; the rhetoric of expansiveness – if, indeed, that is what Dutton and Michaels sought – is continually framed by the immediacy of setting. Moreover, the fact of Chinese labour, on which the port survived, remained visible. A few surviving representations of Guangzhou tried giving it a lofty vantage. They were necessarily imaginary scenes, as in a painting made just two years before Thomson arrived back in China (figure 3.12). By then, the original factory grounds had burned down, and the entire foreign contingent of godowns and residences had

3.12 Yee Cheong, View of Canton with Shamien Island, 1865, ca. 1880, Peabody Essex Museum, museum purchase with funds from Museum Friends and Fellows, 1961, m10867, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

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been moved to Shamian Island, the oval land mass on the far left of the painting, marked by bigger, more distinct houses and darker trees and shrubbery. The rest of Guangzhou fades into relative homogeneity. The painter imagined rings of walls snaking from the coast to the distant background, like a buffer or shield protecting an inner sanctum, and the land itself totally covered by ant-like buildings and an occasional tall structure (his rendering of the “pawn shops,” where money was kept). Off in the corner, the foreign concession sits like an oasis amidst an indecipherable sprawl and, much like the pictures that were previously made of Guangzhou before the opium wars, seemingly cut off from the teeming Chinese world around it. Thomson, too, went to Guangzhou and took pictures of the old factory site (figure 3.13). Much had changed politically since Guangzhou’s heyday, and theoretically the British could venture outward into the mainland; but at least as the photograph would have it, the European grounds were still separated from the straggle that seemed to characterize the rest of the metropolis, what Thomson called the “miserable makeshift huts of the poorest class.”22 Inside the fence were a tidy lawn and boxed shrubbery;

3.13 John Thomson, The Old Factory Site, Canton, ca. 1868

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outside, dirt and thatch. There was not so much easy contact between the populations as a marked coexistence, the picture seems to say. Photographs like these of the treaty ports were not without their purposes, as we shall see, but they bore a different charge than the broadening that attended those of Hong Kong. in keeping with its character as a boomtown, the population of Hong Kong was unlike any other in China. Of the migrants from Britain, the most well-documented were its merchants, traders, and business and insurance agents – a male workforce that was attached to the large trade houses in one way or another. They came mostly from middle-class and, a greater number, lower-middle-class families in Britain, as Thomson did, and spent their days behind desks and their evenings trying their best to socialize among the professionals, managers, and other functionaries like them. They had a taste for ostentation, something Thomson noted with amusement and also a hint of disdain. The company men “live in a very expensive style,” he observed, “much more expensively, one would think, than they need to.”23 He calculated their yearly costs: money spent on a “house-boy” and a “house-coolie” (having two was apparently “indispensable”), more for “chair-coolies” (the young men had to ride around town in style), a nice sum for laundry for all the clothes they were having made, another sum for rent in a nice apartment, even more for entertainment (quantities of beer and wine that brought a “startling monthly bill”), and an astronomical amount for health care, including a suspicious outlay for an “enormous quantity of drugs.”24 The lifestyle was far more lavish than anything they would have tried in London, he said. It all seemed so profligate. Yet, he did not object too strenuously to their high living; after all, they were the class of men on which his portrait and view business heavily depended. He was even amenable to bringing the “chair-coolies” into the studio in order to recreate the kinds of luxurious habits the men cultivated (figure 3.14). While the company men made up the bulk of the British population, there was also a smaller but no less important segment of working-class migrants, almost a third of the total, also male, and heavily involved in the military and police, employed as mechanics, or picking up jobs as seamen.25 If they had remained in Britain, they would have been solidly working class but could also have aspired to the lower-middle classes without too many contemporaries batting an eye. However, in the shrivelling of social classes in Hong Kong, their status was far more determined and their aspirations more bounded. True, they were white and spoke the Queen’s English, and thus obtained a station that put them above the much larger Chinese population and were happy to lord it over them. But they were hardly admitted into the membership of the cricket

3.14 John Thomson, As We Went About Hong Kong, ca. 1868–69

or jockey clubs or other gentlemanly societies reserved for the company men. They made far less money than their fellow migrants and took up residence in humbler rooms, often having to share them. Some were forced to live among the Chinese in the overcrowded western portions of Victoria, others were banished across the bay to Kowloon. In that instance, they lived far enough away from the swank residences on the peak that any hope for getting ahead must have seemed about as remote as the mansions appeared from across the water. Depending on their status within the migrant community, a viewer of a photograph like Thomson’s outlook onto Hong Kong from the Kowloon side could mean wildly different things (figure 3.15). Kowloon, to some in the colony, was as Brixton was to Belgravia.26 Especially among those who took jobs as policemen, the pay was atrocious, “very far below what the humblest in the Colony required,” an early observer noted.27 The constables and their underlings compensated by shaking down brothel owners and tavern keepers, and crafting a culture of small bribes, graft, and smuggling, which so many of the company officials had hoped they had left behind in the Canton system. Although they were charged with policing the subculture of crime, the constables frequently existed completely within it and succumbed to its attractions, receiving its many special “emoluments” – the same observer tried to put the matter delicately – or partaking of the “ardent spirits” that served as inducements; they all too frequently “yielded to the temptation offered by the many public houses about.”28 The system of bribery and graft had gotten so prevalent that

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3.15 John Thomson, Kowloon, Kwangtung Province, 1870, Wellcome Library, 18888i

in 1869, while Thomson was busy establishing his studio and making views of the environs, the governor of Hong Kong wanted the entire contingent of constables fired and a new crop of migrants brought from Edinburgh to replace them. He imported forty-five Scotsmen, only to learn that they quickly fell victim to the same corruption; he soon dismissed them, too.29 They were prime candidates to become indigents or beachcombers and add to the number of unemployed or disaffected. Thomson was aware of the subculture’s presence, mostly tried to ignore it, but like others, knew more details than he would have cared to tell his wife. Of the west end of Queen’s Road in a neighbourhood he identified as “Tai-Ping-Shan,” or the hill of great peace, the district might have had a poetic name, he declared, “but a fine name will not hide the sins of the place.”30 The quarter had “strange hotels,” by which he meant not only brothels but also the flophouses and boarding rooms of the itinerant

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3.16 John Thomson, Hong Kong, 1869, Wellcome Library, 19986i 3.17 Opposite William Pryor Floyd, Tai Ping Shan, Hong Kong – Chinese Quarter, ca. 1868

working classes, “the haunts of vagabonds.” Alcohol flowed freely (“spirits are sold in nearly every second shop”), and opium was even more liberally dispensed. Prostitution was rampant and enormously profitable; in 1867, the colonial government instituted a Contagious Diseases Ordinance, with compulsory health inspections of the sex workers in an effort to protect the health of British servicemen who kept the brothels in business. The painted women were gaudy beyond all bounds of taste, Thomson observed, “their faces are enamelled” and their hairdos naughtily suggestive of a “bird with spread wings.” Accommodating a regular cross-section of coolies and sailors, the streets of Taiping Shan were also filled with pimps and brutes, both foreign and Chinese (easily recognized, according to Thomson, with “bull-dog, battered, and damaged” faces). In addition to their regular business, the music halls, gambling houses, opium dens, and brothels also sheltered an illicit trade carried on by smugglers and bandits who dealt in all kinds of sordid materials and preyed upon the lonely white migrants flush with a little cash. “I should not like to describe everything I saw there,” he said. If his surviving negatives are any indication, the photographer seems to have turned his camera on Taiping Shan only once or twice, as if not wanting to give it more light of day than was decorous. He made a few pictures that contained indirect references, as in a photograph of hms Princess Charlotte at anchor in the bay (figure 3.16). Its significance is that the old vessel was a “receiving ship,” meaning that it was an old boat, afloat but no longer seaworthy, and used to hold impressed sailors who

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could not easily get to shore without being noticed. The usual idea for maintaining such a heap was to keep the sailors sequestered and prevent them from deserting; but also, in the case of the treaty port, it had the added benefit of blocking them from falling victim to the city’s underbelly. The men could not be easily dissuaded (how they got off the Princess Charlotte is another matter; most impressed men could not swim); the sailors were constantly ending up in jail for one reason or another. The boat became a local joke, a kind of overgrown nursery: the men in charge of overseeing it could not wait to land another assignment.31 Thomson gave it a central presence in the photograph, as if a focus on it needed no further explanation; its measured distance from the docks told enough of the story. Other photographers were only a smidgen less discreet. William Pryor Floyd, Thomson’s major British competitor among the cameramen, went directly to Taiping Shan with his camera and pictured its environs (figure 3.17). Less a region of darkness, the neighbourhood for Floyd was best characterized by its pileup of buildings and empty sedan chairs. No need to say anything more about why they were empty; his Hong Kong patrons knew exactly where their users had gone. With such a mixture of the British migrant classes in Hong Kong, the commonplace perception of a foreign land being a place that could amalgamate them is far from correct. Rather than making the migrants develop a sense of themselves as one –

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they were, after all, a very tiny minority of whites in a sea of Chinese – the segmentation and strong class differences imagined by the men as the natural structure of society in Britain carried over even more vehemently to the island. Read this account by a British court clerk named Alfred Weatherhead who lived in Hong Kong for three years, made his money, and left the island for London just a few years before Thomson arrived: The exclusiveness, jealousy and pride of “caste” that have been so long and so justly attributed to our English brethren and sisters in our Indian possessions attain more luxuriant growth in China. The little community, far from being a band of brothers, is split up into numerous petty cliques or sets, the members of which never think of associating with those out of their immediate circle … Even here (in England) one sees a somewhat similar state of society in many of our small country towns, where every one knows every body, and the minutest details of your neighbours’ daily lives, manners and conversations, are noted with watchful assiduity. Anyone who has had the happiness to spend some time in one of these rural paradises can form a pretty good notion of the state of matters in an English colony, only that things are much worse.32

The insufferable snobbery, the petty grievances, the obsession with breeding and good manners, the constant social surveillance and comparison, the eccentric and often unfathomable airs of the British beau monde, the fake bon tons that were tried on for size – all these were alive and well; and everyone, especially those like Weatherhead jockeying for social mobility, were keenly aware of them. Far from binding the men, the varied senses of exclusiveness and special standing also kept them apart. The library and reading rooms, supposedly open to all migrants, “would involve people of different circles meeting each other, which would be highly improper and objectionable,” Weatherhead smirked, and so were rarely used by anyone. He made enough money, about £300 a year, to put him on the edge of a comfortable life (Notman, recall, made £150 annually as a travelling salesman).33 But it was not quite comfortable enough (Weatherhead’s boss, the colony’s chief justice, made £3,000). After all the costs associated with keeping up appearances and indulging in a bachelor’s life, including the servants, chair-coolies, laundry services, clothes, rent, alcohol, and drugs, he had to watch his coins if he had any hope of bringing some money home. these divisions among the small British migrant community in Hong Kong allow us to reintroduce a theme established in the previous chapters, namely the sense of Scottishness that had evolved within the ambit of imperial nationalism. It’s clear

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Thomson brought some of the cultural distinction among Scots that had been nurtured by the unionist-nationalism model and likewise took advantage of the paths other migrant Scots had been able to pave in the empire. His accounts are littered with recognitions of Scots abroad, the pleasures he took in their company and the bonds they shared about “home.” He met a Scot in Penang, he said, who hosted an evening ball for him, and more in Province Wellesley, “big brawny men from the lowlands,” who showed him the kind of warm hospitality “for which my countrymen have always been famed.”34 In the Malaysian countryside, he ran into yet another, and they spent a long evening trading stories about “the old country.”35 When not meeting Scots on the road, he found ways to liken some of the sites and experiences to those he “remembered” from Scotland. They were tinged with a romantic pastoralism that had by then become standard fare. Along the north branch of the Pearl River, inland from Guangzhou, he found a beautiful countryside that reminded him of the Scottish Lowlands “covered with ripening fields of barley.”36 In Formosa, he trekked into the hills to meet the indigenous peoples of the island and found them an admirable people, far more worthy of praise than the Hakka living near the shoreline. Why? They had an intoxicating wildness that matched, even surpassed, the “animal spirits” of Scottish Highlanders – the highest praise he could muster.37 When he got to Mengzixia (figure 3.18), he found “a Highland loch in miniature.”38 When he reached Baoluokeng, the feeling of romantic poetry overtook him, and he started poeticizing about crags, knolls, and mountains, and the poignant ruins of Scotland.39 Up the Min River from Fuzhou, he came across a landscape that startled him; except for an old pagoda, he could imagine himself “transported suddenly to a scene on the river Clyde.”40 Some sheltering rocks up the Yangtze reminded him of cave dwellings at Wemyss Bay in the west central Lowlands, “which sheltered our forefathers.”41 And in a most revealing encounter, when he met the King of Siam, Thomson found his Lowland accent a benefit: “He enquired my nationality. I told him I was born in Edinburgh, ‘Ah! you are Scotchman, and speak English I can understand[;] there are Englishmen here who have not understanding of their own language when I speak.’”42 In a reversal of the usual complaint, his dialect was even more properly commonplace among those whose contact with travellers had been first facilitated by Scots on the road. In all these instances, the reminders of Scotland were, in Thomson’s mind, unclouded by artifice. Never mind that he had been born and raised in a lower-middleclass tenement in Edinburgh, and his family, as far as can be discerned, had no connection with spirited Highlanders or the early settlers of Wemyss Bay.43 (Never mind that the “history” of Wemyss itself was mostly a nineteenth-century fabrication concocted by the descendants of Highlander clans who could reach the village by a

3.18 John Thomson, Kwangtung Province, China (also called The Mang-Tsz Pass), 1870, Wellcome Library, 18890i

new rail line in 1865 and wanted to claim some precious pieces of land being turned over to development.)44 Never mind that the barley fields in the Scottish borderlands had long passed out of the hands of picturesque cotters and crofters and become increasingly the domain of British agribusiness. The connections to Scots and the images and values of Scottish pastoralism appeared like comforting anchors in the continuous and sometimes disorienting flow of travel. Of course these hooks and anchors were familiar strategies among most travel writers; they gave readers points of reference and the comfort that the imperial near and far were not always so divorced. But we are also in a position to say more about their utility in China and, equally, their difference from, say, the situation in Lower Canada. For as we will observe, representations of “Scottishness” in China had less the quality of a diasporic imagination, less a fantasy of a scattering from a mythic home, than one of a fashioning of identities across contingent boundaries.

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While Scottishness in Lower Canada frequently maintained the hyperbolic representations of tartanism as one of the symbolic means of imperial allegiance – Notman’s pictures of “Highland” cricket players, say, or the kilted soldiers in the Montreal garrisons – there was no equivalent in China. Some observers reported on an annual St Andrew’s Day Ball in Hong Kong, but it was the only event of its kind and, less a tribal spectacle, nearly everyone was invited, including Portuguese, Eurasians, and even some Chinese.45 (The invitations were cast so broadly, another early observer opined, because there were so few women to dance with. “Here it is men and not women who are wall-flowers,” he thought, and any woman, even a Portuguese lady who had been deserted on the island by an ex-lover, was better than nobody. Even then, the ball did not prevent the class antagonisms from surfacing. The constables and sailors called the company men “dollar-snatchers” and they, in turn, were called “dollar-lackers,” turning the whole event into what must have been an unintentional but annual comedy.)46 The connections among Scots in coastal China were of a far less demonstrative sort and centred, instead, on the submersion of social and cultural bonds into the etiquette, structure, and social relations of the British trade houses. It’s no surprise why this was the case. Nearly all the men, at least those involved with the companies, understood that their ability to move from place to place and, ultimately, their efforts to return home loaded down with money was almost entirely dependent on their loyalty to British employers. Like all treaty ports, Hong Kong in the 1860s offered little in the way of other opportunities made possible by any other kind of business beyond trade. At least for Europeans, it had none of the density of start-ups that a place like Montreal could accommodate, and so had no outlets to which migrants, who might have been disaffected or disillusioned with their lot as company men, could turn. The complex rituals that were part of the recruitment and training, the very public discourse about English comportment that came from ownership and top management, and, at least for those original Guangzhou companies that had relocated to Hong Kong in the aftermath of the opium wars, the ideal of a “covenant” or “indenture” between the corporations and its employees – all of these made for a structure of assimilation.47 In such a scenario, the world of English civility was entirely acceptable to many of the aspiring Scots.48 They knew there was no other realistic option in the colony. It required enormous capital to begin a business in Hong Kong, and only those major multinational conglomerates, with fingers in shipping, finance, and politics, had any chance. Above all, business required the backing of a colonial administration and the wherewithal to be politically and economically transnational. Indeed, the photographers’ many pictures

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of the harbour, in addition to monitoring physical change on the landscape, condensed the energy of British global capital as a cityscape. The companies that could amass anything like that depth of resources and connections were essentially English in both formal and socio-cultural terms, even those owned and operated by Scots. For them, being British came in handy when business required the queen’s war vessels or London’s diplomats to push through trade policies, of course; but becoming British extended beyond mere economic or survival strategy and, for many, reached a curious degree of internalization. It is telling that the obsession with breeding and good manners in Hong Kong came not from well-heeled English but mostly from hard-nosed Scots who came from respectable but needy lower-middle-class Lowland families. They had modest educations, learned their craft by way of a connection or two, left Scotland to find opportunity, made their money in the treaty ports, and along the way acquired the tastes and habits of an English class far removed from the circles of their own families. They spent freely, partly because life in a treaty port, though filled with new experiences, could also be full of boredom, especially in the off-season when the weather and tides kept sea traffic lower than usual. Partly it was the alienating experience of being isolated by language from most of the population – the pidgin Chinese-English only went so far – and having fine clothes, opulent meals, sumptuous quarters, and casual sex were the closest things to a shared lifestyle. But partly it was the age-old effort to demonstrate having done well by emulating the habits and wearing the markers of distinction. “Nothing surprised me more,” Thomson observed of the parvenu, “than [how] the unfledged youth, coming out from the simplicity of some rural home, was apt to develop into a man of epicurean tastes [and] a connoisseur of fine wines.”49 Their new-found status also helps to explain their extraordinary disdain for those less successful or fortunate. They tended to stereotype those white, migrant working classes in an even more caricatured form of brutishness – “bull-dog,” “battered,” and “damaged” – than they delivered to them back in Britain. That is, they confirmed what the historian David Roediger once described as the formation of a class identity based on marking and diminishing those even lower on the wage scale.50 There was another kind of wage beyond pay, and it consisted of both racial and class distinction. Class uplift required both racial debasement – the Chinese were always an easy target – and also disparagement of others of their own ilk. Policing the boundaries between the young men and other white migrants who, in truth, were not always that different in origin, was an ongoing project. It required vigilance at social events, a heavy dose of parody and satire or, equally,

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patronizing and snobbery in daily relations, and a conspicuous expenditure of the funds that the young men might, in hindsight, have preferred to save for home. A photograph by Lai Afong of Scots on an outing (figure 3.19) is a group portrait of such company men. Like many made at the time, the picture proposes an image of white collectivity in a foreign land. The men pile on the grass and those on the ground, at least, lounge with an ease that suggests their comfort with each other and their surrounds. Most have doffed their hats; a few enjoy a good cigar. One on the far right breaks into a warm smile; others try for a more dignified stoicism. They are nearly identically dressed, the fashion of young professionals. No doubt the fancy striped pants worn by the man leaning against the tree were custom made by a local tailor. Called A study of Scotch Life and Scotchmen, it hardly seems “Scottish” in any of the usual senses proposed in the empire and seems, instead, utterly conventional. For the men, what was “Scotch life” in Hong Kong if not the embrace of a measured civility?

3.19 Lai Afong, New Year’s Group, 1870, A study of Scotch Life and Scotchmen, National Galleries of Scotland, gift of Mrs Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell 1987

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certainly migration to Hong Kong was not purely a European phenomenon. The Chinese came from all around the coast and the inland, but primarily from the Guangdong regions in and around the Pearl River delta and also Fujian province just north. A diverse demographic with distinct ethnic backgrounds, equally distinct dialects, and occasionally a history of tensions and violence between and among them, they included the Hakka, Hokkien, Punti, and Tanka peoples and a smattering of others from Guangxi and even as far north as Suzhou. Given the island’s nearness to Guangdong and the large numbers of migrants from that province, the aggregate of migrants mostly spoke some form of Cantonese and established it as the language of the port, though their distinct pronunciations easily gave their backgrounds away to any native speaker. The Hokkien from Fujian, in particular, spoke a southern Min language that, although something like a lingua franca in Southeast Asia where Thomson had lived during his first trip abroad, in Hong Kong could be readily marked and mocked. Back in Fujian, it had so many variations in the small villages and towns that even among its speakers there was a level of unintelligibility. The diversity was perpetually maddening to the province’s officials trying to administer their territory; a trip over a mountain to a different village frequently brought an occasion for miscommunication (though it certainly aided the villagers in their attempts to evade officialdom). It was not always any better on the island. Trying to get Hokkien villagers with discrete dialects to converse, let alone agree on anything, was sometimes a nightmare. The view of the Hakka was not much better. They were like the Irish, “who are the Hak-kas [sic] of Liverpool and New York, of Melbourne and Montreal,” Thomson said of them, among the least flattering comparisons he could come up with. They were “strangers” with funny speech who “plod on” in life like unthinking mules.51 Communication was not always any smoother among the migrants from nearby Guangdong. There were hundreds of small villages stuffed into the nine counties of the delta and seemingly even more variations of speech. In Zhongshan, the area adjacent to Macao and along the waterway that British traders took to reach Guangzhou, there were three nearly unintelligible dialects that even the county’s own officials had a hard time deciphering. Just as we should be wary of giving too much credence to a common belief that a foreign land might facilitate an amalgamation among British migrants, so, too, should we be wary of ascribing the same understanding among the Chinese. Together in Hong Kong, the Chinese migrants were and continued to be different. Like the British migrants, the Chinese who arrived in Hong Kong tended mostly to be young men, charged by their parents to make some money and send funds

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home to maintain the family purse; but their male migrant societies were hardly like those of the British. Sometimes migration among Chinese men to other parts of the globe in the mid-nineteenth century was characterized as creating a series of “bachelor societies” – in Chinatowns like that, famously, in San Francisco but also those in smaller factory towns and mining villages with less densely packed enclaves.52 Among anti-immigration activists, the name carried with it an invidious set of connotations: of tightly packed quarters where working men lived cheek by jowl, spent their leisure hours gambling and smoking, and entertained themselves with a range of illegalities tinged with sexual promiscuity and danger. But that description would more properly characterize the British rather than the Chinese situation in Hong Kong. While travel to Hong Kong for the British immersed them in an intensely male world, with rarely the ability or desire among the men to make it anything else, migration for the Chinese never put them far from home. There was frequently a fluid movement back and forth to their villages of origin, especially during festivals and the new year. Often, Hong Kong was merely one stop along an expansive migrant trail.53 Of course there were women and children, and they, too, constituted the constant flows of peoples. Particularly among the Tankas, who traditionally lived on boats with their whole families, Hong Kong’s docks were one of a number of locations they frequented, mixing in work they could find on the island with the fishing that had traditionally served them. The other Chinese migrants on Hong Kong frequently dismissed them as mere gypsies, boat people whose wanderings along the rivers and coastline forever unmoored them from Han Chinese society. They were poor (though that was a widespread condition for most migrant groups) and bore the reputation of raising daughters who would grow up to become easy women, about the nastiest slur their competitors could level. Thomson, too, recognized the Tankas as distinct, though he never identified them by name. “There are, in Hong Kong alone, more than 30,000 such people as these,” he observed, “who make their homes in their boats, and earn their subsistence by fishing or attending upon the ships in harbour.”54 Whereas other Chinese scorned them, Thomson had kinder things to say, impressed by their ability to read the sea and tides and their “great shrewdness [calculating] the near approach of a storm.” No doubt he was sensitive to sea travel and rough waves after having spent months on the water. In addition, he brought a number of the women into his studio (figure 3.20) and, in contrast to the sordid repute sent their way, tried to picture them so as to suggest they were parts of extended families, including aunties, children, and grandparents. He was equally taken by the women’s beauty. They were “pretty,

3.20 John Thomson, Canton Boat Girls, 1868–72, Wellcome Library, 19610i

and attractive-looking [with] large lustrous eyes,” he wrote. He thought they were prettier than the other women from Guangdong, perhaps the reason they were so singled out for abuse; they could “not [be] of purely Chinese blood,” he guessed. The opportunities that drew migrants from Guangdong and Fujian varied considerably and must have seemed like a smorgasbord of offerings, from the hard manual labour of a port town – the towing and shuttling the Tankas accomplished with their boats, the constant scrubbing down of the hoists and docks, the running of the sedan chairs for the luxury-minded company men, the loading and unloading of the steamships, the mountains of laundry that needed cleaning and delivering, the

3.21 John Thomson, Hong Kong Flower Boy, 1868–72, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of George J. Harrington Jr, 1993, ph27.31, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

coal and charcoal that needed hauling – to the many artisanal jobs upon which an urban society depended – bakers, barbers, cooks, knife grinders, shoemakers, tailors, weavers, and much more. In this sense, too, Chinese migration differed dramatically from its Scottish counterpart. Some craftsmen had small stores, but a good many simply plied their trade in the streets. They comprised enough of a workforce that competition between them could be fierce. In addition to whatever skills they possessed, their sheer numbers made it difficult for white working-class migrants to break into any of the trades; and besides, the foreigners had little to offer that the Chinese wanted or could not fashion for themselves. Many aimed their services at the company men, but just as many, including merchants and other shopkeepers, aimed at the tens of thousands of Chinese who filled the neighbourhoods. The entire eastern end of Queen’s Road had developed around them, as Thomson was keen to show (figure 3.7). And no doubt Taiping Shan had its own special offerings. The photographer brought street people into the studio to picture them with their tools or with the goods they were peddling (figure 3.21). During his travels, he sometimes

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followed up on the fascination with the working life on the streets, taking opportunities to picture the various forms of labour whenever he could cajole a worker or even a patron to pose. Thomson was not alone in finding these workers photogenic, nor was Hong Kong the only place where that fascination could be fed. The British photographer William Saunders, based in Shanghai, brought the Chinese into the studio and, like Thomson, pictured them with the trappings of the streets and the workshops.55 Whether the sitters had any actual relationship to the props they held is unknown. Although he occasionally took his camera outside – he made his reputation photographing the capture of Suzhou in 1863 – the studio was frequently Saunders’s preferred location. The light was easier to control; the camera gave more predictable results; and most importantly, against the spare backgrounds, the subject matter could be isolated in a way that allowed the normally congested life of the streets to be parsed and observed. In one notable case, he brought an enormous loom inside to choreograph a picture of a weaver (figure 3.22). In the seclusion of the studio, he was able to convey something of the crazy tangle of parts that made up the loom’s construction. In addition to whatever picturesque or ethnological fascination they held, these pictures tried to offer snippets about the glut of working-class life in a way that could be digested. For those whose memories stretched back far enough, this density of street life was the most remarkable aspect of the new treaty ports. Previously, the encounters between foreign traders and the Chinese had been rigidly policed. The Canton system had designated a single Chinese man, a comprador, one assigned to each factory, to organize the supply of goods and services to the foreigners in the companies. Because the traders were limited in their movements, only those Chinese who were licensed by the comprador normally had any contact with them.56 The suppliers often lived in sampans or on houseboats anchored on the shoreline next to the factories and offered a variety of necessities, including the enormous quantities of mutton and dairy that had no place in the Guangdong diet but that the crew of a British ship could consume by the boatload. They cut hair, they sold eggs, they probably smuggled a trinket or two. But for the most part, the moments of contact were brief, contained, and scripted; and they occurred between representatives on either side of the transactions. The rich variety of street life remained below the threshold of knowledge, let alone being at all visible to most of the foreigners. Occasionally Chinese officials staged demonstrations – public punishments and the like – in places like Respondentia Walk in Guangzhou (roughly, the area pictured in View of the American Garden at Canton [figure 3.9]), but these could hardly be called “street life,” in the daily sense.

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3.22 William Thomas Saunders, Print, photographic, 1882, Peabody Essex Museum, museum purchase, 1997, ph23.71, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

Sometimes there were open-air markets, increasing in frequency on the eve of the First Opium War; they gave the various inhabitants of the factories more opportunities for mingling with commoners. A Chinese painter tried to show what one looked like in Guangzhou (figure 3.23), though such a market was equally contained, the fence around the square duly noted, the Chinese allowed in at specific times to hawk their wares. The treaty ports and especially Hong Kong after the Second Opium War facilitated an entirely different kind of contact. Men came and went freely; the meeting between populations was frequent, casual, and individual; haggling and wrangling were daily exercises; and conversations, such as could be carried on, extended beyond the subject of commerce. While Cantonese was the “official” language among the Chinese, a pidgin Chinese-English was the lingua franca of the streets. Even Thomson learned it and was happy to flaunt his knowledge of it: “Tsing! Tsing! too muchee long tim my

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3.23 Attributed to Lam Qua, 1801–1860, China, View of Hongs at Canton, 1825–35, Peabody Essex Museum, museum purchase, Augustine Heard Collection, 1931, m3793, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

no hab see you!” he relays. “This is the pidjin English for ‘I greet you! it is a long time since I have seen you!,” he interprets.57 At least to people like Thomson, the vernacular was a clear sign of access to the people and their day-to-day life. Foreigners had ample opportunity to see how the Chinese dealt not only with them but also with each other. The courtesies and rivalries, the formalities and bad manners, and the tribalism and ethnic divisions – all were on ample display. Men like Thomson began to develop a sense of the complex multiculturalism of the place, or so they believed. They also understood that such a thing was being hatched because of British control of the island; it was a colony, after all, created within the previous twenty years – a magnet for all those migrants wanting opportunity, a laboratory of a western civilization on an eastern coastline – and bore only an approximation of a native life that might exist deeper in the mainland. The photographer frequently made a distinction between the people and sights in Hong Kong and those from “cities purely Chinese,” he called them.58 What made for a “purely” Chinese city he could not initially say, but it must offer something different.

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take two scenes of Hong Kong’s busy thoroughfares by Lai Afong, one of the Praya (figure 3.24) and another of Queen’s Road (figure 3.25). They each show the tall buildings that characterized the accretion along the docks and the nearby streets that had come to signal British expansionism: the three-storey structures and, on the ground floor, the arcades that held street-level shops and warehouses. On Queen’s Road, the photographer made sure to capture enough of the English-language signs so that aspects of the street’s commercial variety could be read by a foreigner: a dealer in silks, several tailors, others who boasted they had goods “of all kinds.” For those who could read them, the advertisements in Chinese proclaimed a different kind of

3.24 Top Lai Afong, Praya, Hong Kong, ca. 1874, Peabody Essex Museum, ph32.18, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma 3.25 Bottom Lai Afong, Queen’s Road, Hong Kong, ca. 1874, Peabody Essex Museum, ph32.19, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

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merchandise. The small signs on either side of the road, identical with black letters on white background (“gongyan,” meaning “official smoke”), told them that opium was being sold legally. Remodelling on the busy road was already taking place: the scaffolds to the right marked a facelift, the crane-like arm further down told of a modification to an upper floor. The same image of eventful commerce could be said of the Praya. On the waterfront, the hoists are all filled with boats, their jobs done for the day; on the opposite side, the rickshaws are lined up waiting for business. Along with the buildings, they revealed a mercantile bustle that brought life to the island. But most noticeable of all in Lai Afong’s two pictures – what separates his work from Thomson’s of the same time – are the crowds on the streets: though moving too fast for the lens, their ghostly presence provides a sense of the streets being inundated by anonymous Chinese and of the shops and sidewalk stalls being used continuously by them. Who else wanted the official smoke? No wonder some photographers preferred to extract individuals from among the crowds to the studio to make better sense of who they were and what they were doing. They were countless – sometimes too elusive, it seemed, and doing too many things – and flowed fluidly in and out of the new thoroughfare as if it were theirs. while the presence of so many Chinese gave photographers ample opportunities to delight in Hong Kong’s street life, the direct contact with foreigners likewise gave the Chinese new possibilities to fashion a different world for themselves. Several points about this development are worth keeping in mind. First, the Chinese migrants who came to Hong Kong were frequently escaping the regions they originally called home; there was as much a push as a pull factor in their decisions. Partly, the push came as a result of the horrid economies in some places. Portions of Guangdong were desperately poor, and families had for generations sent their sons on the migrant trail in hopes of bringing home some much-needed income. The farmlands could not yield enough, often not more than subsistence, especially after local officials took their cut and the Qing court its tributes; and yet families did not want to abandon them entirely. They were the sites of ancestor worship and, in a culture still steeped in Confucian thought, the centre that gave meaning to filial piety. But events immediately prior to Thomson’s arrival delivered a different quality to the push and caused some families to rethink their commitments and others to uproot entirely. The Taiping Rebellion, beginning in 1850 and lasting until 1864, had laid waste to huge swaths of Guangxi, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang, the areas immediately bordering Guangdong and Fujian. Sporadic fighting was still taking place in the Fujian

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outskirts when Thomson first set up his studio. Millions died in the war (by some estimates, as many as 20 million), and millions more were uprooted. The warring parties razed whole villages and decimated farmlands. The displaced peasants pressed into surrounding provinces, which in turn stressed an already thin bank of resources in the regions that received them. The jealousies and bad manners that the British witnessed in Hong Kong were the local manifestation of tensions back in the provinces, where populations met, rice and other crops got stretched to a breaking point, and the survivors struggled to find some kind of accommodation with each other in the aftermath of the rebellions. The Qing and their provincial officials were no help; the villagers were left to struggle along among themselves. Thomson was enormously sensitive to the ruins brought about by the Taiping Rebellion and the efforts to rebuild, frequently referring to them in his writings, though he did not at all understand the depth or complexity of the grievances among the Taipings or the fallout of the rebellion on the south; and in all cases he sympathized with the Qing. During a trip north, he imagined the enormous carnage at Nanjing, the site of the climactic battle, calling it a “cold-blooded massacre as inhuman as any that have stained the annals of the Taiping revolt.”59 He found an old pagoda at Wuhan that had been damaged during the fighting and was glad that it had been rebuilt, its “peculiar design” restored to its original magnificence.60 He wanted to meet one of the heroes who put down the rebellion, only to find that the general had died shortly beforehand, a “great disappointment to me,” he wrote.61 But while pagodas could be rebuilt and generals given eulogies fit for heroes, the consequences for a war-torn people, which brought about mass migrations and a domino effect of displacement, continued to spill onto the coastline. Second, the attitudes that gave shape to the Taiping Rebellion were more widespread than Thomson or most of the company men in Hong Kong truly understood. It was not that the migrants in the southern provinces all agreed with the Taipings’ ideology, a strange mix of Christianity, Confucianism, and millenarianism; rather, the rebellion was symptomatic of a more pervasive dissatisfaction with the despised Qing. Rents and taxation imposed by the court’s officials had gotten completely out of hand. The trade imbalance brought about by the import of opium emptied coffers, leaving virtually no surplus to fall back on and draining the country of all its exportable goods in an effort to feed a national habit. The rise of bandits – often poor Chinese turning to smuggling and stealing to try to survive – also gave rise to secret societies and self-defence organizations to fight back. The countryside was filled with small scuffles between the two, producing a vigilante culture that the peasants could not

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really stop from infiltrating their villages.62 The Qing were in no position to arbitrate; they were busy trying to fend off open rebellion from more organized collectives from within. In addition to the more well-known Taiping rebels, dissenters sprouted in Hunan and Jiangsu in the central coastal regions, mostly poor peasants who had gotten hold of modern weapons and, at one point, even succeeded in cutting off the Qing army from Beijing (their sweeping motto, “kill the rich,” could not have made anyone in the imperial city feel safe). There were more dissenters in southwestern Yunnan province among the Muslim Hui people, and yet more again in the northwestern Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia provinces, also among the Hui. The conflicts were not small affairs, either. The fighting in Jiangsu simply devastated what had been a fertile crescent of farmlands and, combined with unusual floods along the Yangtze, transformed the province into a wasteland. Those in the western territories resulted in the loss of nearly 20 million by death or displacement. Even when the fighting ended, the simmering of class antagonism and ethnic discontent that had given impetus to the rebellions in the first place did not subside; the Qing did not help matters afterwards by imposing even harsher discriminations against the Muslims. When Thomson arrived in Hong Kong, the Qing army was fighting over an enormous territory, thousands of miles in both northwestern and southwestern territories and in nearly every region on the coast between Jiangsu and Guangxi – this, after having been completely humiliated by the British during the Second Opium War. Its commanders had few resources and frequently resorted to a scorched-earth policy during warfare and to mass executions and castrations after. These were the easiest way to fight a war and try to rid the court of its enemies, but they did not win any loyalties from the farmers and peasants whose crops were being reduced to ash and whose communities were being summarily annihilated.63 Within this climate of violence, nervous anxiety, and near-total disgust with the Qing, millions of peasants did the unthinkable and left their ancestral villages. The significance of the decision to uproot ought not to be underestimated. Above all, uprooting signalled a reinterpretation of the Confucian system of filial piety upon which an entire empire rested. Worship of, and sacrifice for, parents and ancestors continued – such a system of virtue and respect was deeply rooted – but the necessary corollary, worship and respect for the state, came apart at the seams. The tributes and obedience the Qing continued to demand were increasingly interpreted as the desperate efforts of an imperial court trying to stabilize its wobbly hold on power and as the surest signs of failure in the face of the military and economic incursions from foreigners. Why pay high rents and taxes when the court was so manifestly incompetent? Why

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toil on the land when it was the locale for death and destruction? Why sacrifice for such a pitiless regime?64 The lure of a different way of living – of surviving in the twilight of an empire – appeared possible with the coming of the new treaty ports and the opportunities and travel that global capitalism seemed to offer. Or, to put it another way, the infiltration of European colonialism combined with the failure of the Qing to address adequately a people’s needs broke apart the traditional bonds between Chinese ethnic groups and the Chinese state. The period between and immediately after the opium wars began an unprecedented reorientation of Confucian loyalty away from Beijing toward what we may tentatively call a more transnational sense of commitments. The anthropologist Aihwa Ong once called that new sensibility an “Overseas Chinese modernity,” meaning the sense of self built around practical, everyday behaviours that tried to broker the opportunities offered by colonial rule, western modernity, and global capitalism.65 That identity would more properly characterize the new Chinese in the next century, but its seeds were planted when individuals took a chance on places like Hong Kong. When the Scottish visitor thought he spied an “embryo city” just outside the European houses, he could not have realized that he was naming a phenomenon that would have long-standing consequences. Third, although the prospects for Chinese migrants in the treaty ports were many and varied, the working relationship between the old comprador class in Guangzhou and European traders provided a recipe for success. Although few in number, the compradors and their families had learned how to accommodate the demands of the Qing court – keep the foreigners under control and extract from trade as much silver as possible – with the demands of the foreigners. After all, they took care of all the factories’ needs, even living inside them when the traders left during the hot seasons and providing every resource and comfort to keep them coming back. They turned a blind eye when they saw the enormous amounts of opium being smuggled by Jardine past the port’s guards, and after opium became legalized, they took a cut of the profits and happily brokered the countless fees and bribes that were needed to push the drug into the countryside. They developed regional networks of their own, which included artisans; pilots; suppliers of the weird foods, goods, and raw materials; smugglers; and well-placed insiders among the pawn shops, who could provide whatever they needed to keep trade and the economy going. In all the transactions, they stored up enough profit and made enough connections that, once the Canton system broke down, they could try to become global capitalists themselves. In many ways, they showed by their daily wits how a level of comfort, social

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advancement, and opportunities for their children could be gotten by matching the foreigners’ needs with local resources and finessing the realities of parochial politics. From afar, the imperial court still demanded their loyalty, but in local matters, they knew how their bread was buttered. If the British left, much of their hard-won comfort and status was in jeopardy. During the Second Opium War, their defence of Hong Kong against the Qing spoke volumes about their attitudes. Of course they did not suddenly become colonial subjects in substance. Although some developed friendships with the British and others found something like an affection for them, they held no great loyalty to them and, in the main, would have been just as happy to work with the Americans, Dutch, Spanish, or Portuguese or, indeed, no foreigner at all, as long as whoever was in charge kept order and facilitated a profitable international trade. Would it be too much of a stretch to say that a “comprador sensibility,” or some such thing, began to characterize a range of visual objects that were peddled to the foreigners? Take, for example, a fan now held at the Peabody Essex Museum and made some time between 1855 and 1865 (figure 3.26). The making and sale of fans for the foreign trade had long preceded the Peabody version, though several of its details were

3.26 Chinese Artist, Fan, 1845–65, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of Helene D. Stoneman in memory of Vernon C. Stoneman, 1981, e81311, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

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of the moment. Painted on its pleats were three city views: at left Hong Kong, Macao in the centre, and Guangzhou to the right. Opening the fan along its segmented folds, one came upon the cities piece by piece and quickly recognized them by their distinct urban topographies: for Hong Kong, the mansions that climbed the slopes to Victoria Peak; for Macao, the circling scoop of the shoreline that made up the Praya Grande and the forts that were built on the flat hill tops; and for Guangzhou, the thirteen factories that had once comprised the original foreign settlement. The views told of a trip from the coastline to the interior along the Pearl River delta and also told its corollary, of the growing foreign presence and control in southern China: first the Portuguese in Macao, then those multinationals of the factories upriver in Guangzhou, and finally back downriver to the British in Hong Kong. The waterways are filled with ships, including the steamships and big schooners that merchants operated to bring opium to the country and extract the tea and porcelain that had become so precious. The sampans and chop boats that had once shuttled the goods in the old Canton system are mostly pushed off to the margins; their days were past. Though made by Chinese artisans out of local materials, such a fan had little use or interest among the Chinese, and certainly no Qing official in Beijing or the provinces wanted a reminder of the history that the views conveyed. A bit like mutton or dairy, the fan was procured almost exclusively for the foreigners. Its point of view on the three settlements was even concocted from that of a trader looking out from a ship. Usually identified as a “luxury item” made for merchants and company men, this kind of object, to repeat, might be better understood by way of the comprador sensibility. The words conjure more accurately the logic behind the fan’s peculiar representations and also, importantly, its origins in a historical period when events in the interior – of violence, disenchantment, and both forced and voluntary migration – pushed ethnic Chinese to the coastline and when some of the migrants, including photographers, adopted a more open, practical, and conciliatory attitude toward the colonial presence. on the face of things, Thomson’s background was not unlike those of other aspiring Lowland Scots. The son of a tobacco spinner and tobacconist, Thomson was slated for a life similar to that of his artisanal and shopkeeping family. When he was about thirteen, the family apprenticed him to an optician and scientific instrument maker. It was a decent trade for a clever boy and one that gave him a set of skills that could travel well, the sort of flexible career in the crafts that many of his class aimed for. Richard Ovenden speculates that Thomson’s master was James Bryson, a leading figure in the trade and also, propitiously, well connected to the gentlemen

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scientists who made up the heady world of Edinburgh’s photography community, including the Brewster group that once included the likes of Hill and Adamson.66 It must have been in that general milieu of glass and instrument makers where Thomson learned the rudiments of the camera. Whether he knew Hill personally is hard to say; they ran in entirely different social circles. If they had met, the young apprentice would have represented the new generation of wet plate practitioners that Hill, still brandishing his calotypes, was struggling to reconcile with. Recall that in 1859 he was organizing the sumptuous album given to James Wilson. The Wilson Album represented the “art” of photography, at least as Hill could imagine resurrecting the calotype for such a thing; Thomson was more firmly planted in the scientific end of the profession. That same year he was experimenting in microphotography.67 He knew how to sketch; he could repair watches; he understood some chemistry; he could grind glass and augment lenses; he probably knew a thing or two about fixing compasses, barometers, and wind gauges; he had a knack for tinkering. He was “very young and inexperienced at the time,” he wrote of his skills with focusing lenses and wet collodion; but by 1862, on leaving for Singapore, he had developed enough confidence with the camera and darkroom that he could anticipate joining his brother in a photography studio as soon as he arrived.68 How different the photography scene was in Singapore than in Edinburgh. While Edinburgh had at least a dozen professional photographers, including probably nine or ten on Princes Street alone where Thomson first trained (to say nothing of the many amateurs prowling about the city or of what was going on in the Rock House on Calton Hill), Singapore had three. Although it had a large population – some 80,000 when Thomson settled in – the city could not support rival photo studios. Two were gone within a year of Thomson’s arrival, and only the third, his brother’s, remained.69 Even then, the photo business must not have been lucrative enough to stand on its own; the brothers advertised taking pictures but also repairing watches, clocks, nautical instruments, and, one suspects, whatever small things needed mechanical mending. While Edinburgh had a scientific community attuned to developments in photography, its members writing papers on the subjects of optics, darkroom chemicals, and the like, or journals from London that could be subscribed to that gave ample advice, Singapore had nothing similar. Whether Thomson developed his skills quickly or simply pumped out passable portraiture as he learned his craft is hard to say; very little remains of his early studio work. No matter: there was not much in the way of competition to keep him on his toes. He soon moved up the coast to Penang and Province Wellesley, claiming in retrospect that business was better – “congenial, profitable, and instructive,” he

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put it.70 But there is a sense that even in Penang the business had its ebbs and flows. The level of production was not so demanding that he could not “gratify [a] taste for travel,” he also wrote. To judge by the work that survives from his journeys in Thailand and Cambodia, he had reached a level of competence, though the explanation of his time in Penang being “instructive” for his photography also had a variety of connotations. The environment was challenging for the wet plate camera and darkroom. He learned first-hand that a sturdy camera made of completely dried wood and hefty, tight bellows was invaluable. The humidity and swamps warped bad wood, and insects – white ants and moths, which he came to know well – wreaked havoc on the bellows.71 Good glass plates were hard to come by (“a fertile source of annoyance,” he complained).72 The collodion frequently misbehaved; the nitrate bath sometimes needed babying (“I treated it as one would an invalid … giving it a period of bright sunshine and pure air, which cured it”).73 And then there was the portable darkroom tent, where most of the preparation and development of the glass plates had to take place. The fumes and heat made working inside it nearly unbearable (“the most unhealthy part of the photographer’s operations”).74 He found ways around the many challenges, though the learning curve and the process of trial and error yielded some simply bad pictures. Frustrations must have been aplenty but, then again, he could proceed at his own pace. There was still very little in the way of competition in Southeast Asia. How different again the photography scene was in Hong Kong than in Singapore or Penang. When Thomson arrived, the colony had already had nearly twenty foreign photographers take pictures of the city and its environs. If he had thought that he could continue as the first photographer to set eyes on places as he did in Southeast Asia, he learned quickly that virtually everything in Hong Kong and its environs had long been scrutinized. Several long-time practitioners, including William Pryor Floyd, had set up permanent studios; others used Hong Kong as a base for travels or as a place to sell their work and pick up supplies as they roamed along the coast. In addition, there were twenty or more Chinese photographers, including Lai Afong, and several partnerships and collectives working under a single name, as in the case of three photographers who organized a studio called “Pun Lun” and another three who arranged “Ye Chung.”75 Pun Lun and Ye Chung lasted throughout the entirety of Thomson’s stay and well beyond. Thirty years later, Pun Lun was still plying its trade, as a stereoview by the American photographer James Ricalton reveals (figure 3.27).76 The studio held an impossibly long tenure in a profession normally ruled by high turnover, and showed resourcefulness, a willingness to ride out hard times, and no doubt an adoption of something of the comprador sensibility and transnational

3.27 Above American Stereoscopic Company (James Ricalton), A Street in Hong Kong, China, 1901, Library of Congress 3.28 Left Attributed to William Pryor Floyd, Victoria Photographic Gallery, ca. 1867, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of Mrs W.F. Spinney, 1923, ph17.72, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

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commitments that Hong Kong required. The numbers of studios would only rise, several new ones starting up before Thomson left. If he could have gotten by with less than stellar work in Singapore, there was no getting around the stiff competition and higher standards in Hong Kong. The Chinese photographers did better work than the dabblers back in Britain, we know. All the photographers monitored each other’s presence; their pictures were careful to show where some kept shop, including a few that must have seemed too close for comfort (figure 3.28). Surviving in such a climate took a measure of grit and a willingness to grapple. Displaying more pugnaciousness than he ever needed to before, Thomson almost immediately got into a price war with Floyd.77 As Floyd’s storefront scene suggests, Chinese photographers happily advertised the fact that they were painters, too; Thomson’s portrayal of A-hung’s studio could have been given equally to those of Nan Ting, Ye Chung, Hing Cheong, and a good many others. They specialized in “ship” and “portrait” paintings, their advertisements proclaimed; Thomson’s stereoview of a studio was right on that score (figure 3.1). Perhaps those Chinese painters who took up the camera were doing poorly in the painting business and found a cognate practice that ended up being more lucrative.78 But perhaps, too, the opposite was true: some began as photographers and hired miniaturists and painters in order to expand their businesses to compete with others. In that scenario, since they themselves were not painters, the photographers became managers of image manufactories, not unlike A-hung, who hired a small army of assistants. Whatever the paths they took to reach the photography-painting practice, the studios were juxtaposing different media and producing works with enough merit to get patrons. In such a climate, a photographer like Thomson, with neither connections among the local painters nor the ability or taste to create the atmosphere of high production and studio companionship, was at a marked disadvantage. Thomson’s singular advantage was his ability to tap the British publications to which the Chinese had no access. In this sense, too, the photography scene in Hong Kong proved enormously different from that in Singapore. China Magazine, which published its first issue the same month Thomson announced his new studio on Queen’s Road, became an early outlet for his pictures and experiments with the pen. Proclaiming its job was to provide the real story on life for Europeans in Hong Kong, instead of the half-truths, fabrications, and sheer “nonsense” being peddled back in London – so claimed its editor – the magazine was a good forum for aspirants like Thomson.79 It did not have the caché of a science journal or one connected to the

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learned societies, but its readers and writers were of a similar cast, at least they fancied themselves so in the colony. But there was already a sense that Thomson was not exactly cut from the same cloth. Back in Edinburgh during his hiatus in 1866–67, he had used his pictures of Thailand and especially Angkor Wat in Cambodia to get himself noticed among anthropologists, ethnologists, and geographers. He gave presentations using his photographs and also published a collection of them as The Antiquities of Cambodia.80 Although he had no formal training in any kind of social science and a limited grasp of the fields, the pictures and publication got him a much-coveted invitation to become a fellow at the Royal Geographical Society and the Ethnological Society of London.81 For a boy from the Edinburgh tenements, he had gained limited access to a different status, and it was heady stuff. He proudly attached the monikers of the societies to his name, thereafter calling himself “John Thomson, F.R.G.S. and F.E.S.L.” But upon seeing his official title in China Magazine, the local China Punch could not help but take a few jabs:82 “No. 4 of the china magazine – The Conductor begs to inform subscribers that Mr J. Thomson A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I.J. and sometime W. and Y. has undertaken the photographs published in number 1, 2, & 3., and they will be sent to the undertakers as soon as possible. The Conductor has now much pleasure in stating that every thing is in train, and feels convinced that the China Magazine will take a prominent status in a payingline. Photographs of scenes in Hong Kong, the Swiss Cantons, Cochin-China Fowls, the Siamese Twins, Malacca Canes and Penang Lawyers, chiefly from negatives by Mr Thomson, will appear during the present quarter.”83 China Magazine boasted of its tipped-in photographs, which the satirist duly noted, and promised a range of subjects that verified colonial experience and spectacle. It would never actually publish pictures of Siamese twins or Vietnamese chickens, though that did not stop its critics from hyperbole. But most notable was the savage reference to Thomson and his self-proclaimed associations with the learned societies. There was something pretentious about all those alphabetical appendages, Punch seemed to suggest, more like the blaring of a social climber and not befitting a man of true breeding.84 we are finally returning to the difficulties posed by Chinese competition in the photographic marketplace with which this chapter began. Although today less familiar, Thomson’s contributions to China Magazine can be understood as of a piece with his more famous essay on A-hung and represented his earliest efforts at distinguishing himself from the intense competition. It was a single essay on the visual

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sophistication of his pictures that merits special attention. Called “Three Pictures in Wong-nei-chung,” the essay was the first and only extended statement of aesthetic intent that Thomson would ever make.85 For our purposes, it summoned, perhaps almost too predictably, elements of the Scottish pastoral to make the case. Casting himself as a visitor to Hong Kong, he imagined buying a photographic souvenir from one of the local Chinese studios of a place called Wong-nei-chung, better known to the island’s residents as Happy Valley. Wong-nei-chung contained a small village, a cemetery, and, notably, a racecourse, the sort of green playground where the colonialists gathered when they wanted a reprieve from the Praya’s bustle – a “happy” locale. Hong Kong’s photographers had made it one of their specialties. But something about its promise for escape also gave it, for Thomson, a marked visual and emotional quality akin to the stock images of the pastoral, of “shady woodland, pleasant meadow, lofty hill-land, brooks, streams and waterfalls.” Thinking about it even got him musing on Tennyson’s poetry. He knew any picture of Wong-nei-chung could only be an approximation of all that the place had to offer – “all its beauties would require at least a hundred plates” – but even then, he was not prepared for the disappointment upon seeing the Chinese examples. The studio’s photograph certainly captured the many elements on the landscape but almost indiscriminately, with no conjuring of the pastoral’s usual allure. “There was a ghastly distinctness about it all,” he complained, “the hills that I knew to be in the distance were as clear as those close at hand.” Instead of the stuff of poetry, the hills looked as they “would appear through a telescope, not soothed into that wondrous gentleness of colour and delicate detail which is the sweetest charm.” Just as bad, the foreground intruded on the scene and relentlessly itemized every detail, from the treetops that poked in from the margins to the man-made barriers separating the racecourse from the surroundings. “All my admiration, all my enthusiasm, all my appreciation had never aroused me to such a sublime pitch of ecstasy as would have caused me to count the posts in the Race Course railing!” he quipped. In the photograph, what he found was not a landscape but “an exact chart.” What he wanted was less science and more art. In contrast to the dreary empiricism of the local photographer’s picture, Thomson suggested an alternative, namely his (figure 3.29). Borrowing some aesthetic ideas from Ruskin, he claimed to have organized a picture that overcame the camera’s undiscerning and microscopic pragmatism and instead offered something of the grandeur that Wong-nei-chung represented.86 The scene needed coherence, not itemization, in which all its component parts were subordinate to a controlling idea. The passage is worth quoting whole:

3.29 John Thomson, Wong-nei-chung Village, 1868, China Magazine, vol. 2, no. 14 (August 1868), frontispiece, Cornell Library Rare Books and Manuscripts

There is the picture. I call it “Wong-nei-chung Village.” See if you can discover its principal subject! Is it the village? Examine it and see if everything else is subordinate to the village. Scarcely so, I think; the trees on the right hand of the foreground contrast richly in their depth of colour and distinctness with the softer outlines of the distant houses, and help you to see how far they are from where you stand, but the remainder of the foreground bears little or no relation to them. The village then is subordinate to something else. Is that something else the hill in the back ground [sic]? Look carefully, again and again, and by degrees you will come to see that everything in the picture, from first to last, unites to convey to you an idea of the grandeur and grace of that great hill. Its outline is echoed in that of the trees in the right foreground. There is the same sudden rise at the summit, and the same slope below, which, in the trees, breaks off soon and droops to the earth, while in the hill it flows grandly away into the far distance. These trees are themselves echoed by the bush on the other side, the outline of the main portion of which, begins a graceful curve which is continued by the hedge on the opposite side of the road, and over the nearer pines, and goes out of the picture in the patch of grass by the roadside. Then there is the village; look how it nestles! The trees in front hold themselves just high enough to let you peep at it but no more, and you see it surrounded by clouds of other trees that clothe the hill. Do you note how all this gives to the hill the air of a protector? and see how nobly it bears its character! Rising above all, nobler than all, greater than all, calmer than all, it looks royally down upon

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the landscape of which it is the King, and in token of its kingship wears a crown of golden light upon its forehead, placed there by the morning sun.

So the hill, rather than mere background, was the picture’s controlling idea, and its “kingship” required that all other elements become subservient to it. Whether the photograph could actually sustain the claims made for it is a matter of debate. After all, one could just as easily point to the sedan chair and its accompanying figures as the objects that continually beckon attention; or one could view the extraordinary shifts in scale between small figures and tall trees as the picture’s most interesting tension, and regard the mountain as a mostly nondescript fade-out to the scene before it. And of the village, for which Thomson named the picture, it’s mostly an excuse for other pictorial concerns and, except for his raising it for our inspection, would carry no primary interest whatsoever. But these are matters of interpretation, and the proper question is not whether Thomson was right or wrong in his assessment of both his and the other photograph’s feats but why he felt it necessary to make it in the first place. When the photographer sought to stake a claim in a competitive marketplace, he did so by invoking an artistic sensibility with which he was, until then and also afterwards, never associated. The hyper-scrupulous microphotography that he had once practised was precisely the kind of camerawork the essay vilified. The “bad” photograph against which Thomson crafted his own grand view was never identified or reproduced in the magazine. For good reason: it could easily have been any number of his own pictures. Indeed, there had never been “another” photographer who made the picture – it was all rhetorical strategy – and he knew intimately the kinds of prints that he judged inadequate. He went several times to Wong-neichung and brought back a passel of views, some “good” but others full of the countless rail posts on the racecourse about which he complained (figure 3.30) or the silly treetops and long branches that kept intruding from the margins (figure 3.31). In a few, he fixated so intently on a foreground itemization that the racecourse and the village, the two central features for most foreigners’ happy excursions, mostly disappeared (figure 3.32). He knew he had to try for better. Something of the hybrid painting-photography production in the Chinese studios was energizing their pictures. At least he could try to claim something equally painterly, something recognizably pastoral, maybe even approaching poetry. Though singular, “Three Pictures in Wong-nei-chung” was not a one-off, and for a time the ideas in it became a litmus test for how Thomson measured his pictures. The style of writing was not, in truth, a mode with which he was most comfortable.

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He had always preferred writing about more scientific and practical aspects of photography – uncooperative nitrate baths, finicky collodion, pesky bugs. They had much more relevance and probably seemed more adequately manly for a new fellow of the geographical and ethnological societies. But at least in Hong Kong, a nationalist aesthetic had become a necessary component. the treaty of tianjin at the conclusion of the Second Opium War gave the British many of its objectives in going to war in the first place. Among them, foreigners gained the right to open even more ports for trade, establish legations near the previously off-limits Forbidden City, travel without escort within the mainland, and steer its vessels unfettered up the Yangtze. The treaty pried China open. Thomson would soon take advantage of nearly all of the concessions, travelling to the new

3.30 John Thomson, Race Course, Hong Kong, 1868–72, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of George J. Harrington Jr, 1993, ph27.8, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma 3.31 Opposite top John Thomson, English Cemetery, Hong Kong, 1868–72, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of George J. Harrington Jr, 1993, ph27.9, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma 3.32 Opposite bottom John Thomson, Race Course, Happy Valley, Hong Kong, ca. 1868, Wellcome Library, 18672i

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ports of Nanjing and Hankou, spending weeks in Beijing, going up the Yangtze, and more. But from the point of view of trade houses, by far the most desired outcome legislated by the treaty was the legalization of opium. The agreement enabled British merchants and free traders to foist the drug onto China without even the veneer of prohibition and all its entangled laws. Recall Lai Afong’s picture of Queen’s Road with a couple of shops proudly announcing official smoke. With Qing imperial consent, the legalization of opium insured the enormous flow of silver, porcelain, silk, and tea outwards without restraint. By then, however, there was really no need for opium to become official for the trade to continue. A huge proportion of Chinese commerce was already completely dependent on the drug’s availability. Opium constituted an economy unto itself. Not only was it the chief commodity that lay at the heart of an international exchange but also, as in any flourishing economy, it generated an extensive and deeply entrenched network of Chinese at home who transported, prepared, and circulated it, and at street level blended, hawked, and protected it. Opium needing cutting and balling; entrepreneurs appeared for that. Opium could be mixed with ash and sold cheaply to the poor; small dealers stepped up for that job, too.87 And for the wealthy, there were countless brothels, tea houses, and even the notorious flower boats – an aquatic brothel and opium den in one, or “floating music-saloons,” as Thomson called them – which photographers were always on the lookout for (figure 3.33).88 Foreign merchants brought the drug to the treaty ports, but from there, its diffusion into the countryside required Chinese brokerage houses, loan sharks, pilots, and oarsmen, and all the many hands that made up the industry of large dealers and small retailers. There was a mountain of soft money, too: bribes to government officials, kickbacks to local functionaries, “fees” to gatekeepers and sentries. Over time, soft money went from being an unexpected windfall to a normal part of the monthly income. Opium fed nearly everyone. Even the Qing, who had officially declared the drug illegal, derived an enormous income from the lijin, or duties imposed on its travel to the interior. They gladly closed a blind eye to the drug’s transport when much of their ability to wage wars against the many rebels was facilitated by the taxes derived from it. By then, too, the drug was no longer only an import. Huge swathes of farmland inside China, especially in Sichuan and Yunnan, had been transformed in poppygrowing fields, and the Chinese themselves were becoming homegrown profiteers of the drug’s expansive use. Some Qing officials even encouraged domestic production; it was better to keep silver within China, they reasoned, circulating continuously in the mainland, than send it to Britain from where it would never return.89 The Chinese

3.33 Unknown photographer, Canton. Pleasure Boat, 1880–90, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

in Fujian, the locale for one of Thomson’s great books of pictures, were especially avid advocates of opium’s cultivation and use. The province’s farmers had turned the arable coastline into poppy fields and made a cheaper grade of opium than that being brought from India; they found a large local market.90 The historian Jonathan Spence estimates that in the late 1860s and early 1870s cheap domestic opium compounded on top of the imported varieties finally brought smoking among the peasantry to a massive scale.91 Local markets had grown most among those who had previously been least able to afford it. The profits on low-grade opium for farmers, while not large, helped to insulate them from the ebbs and flows of a souring general economy. They were willing to resort to violence to defend their fields against any attempts to burn them. When dealers in and around Guangzhou faced sporadic crackdowns, Fujian’s locals were only too content to invite them north to continue business. By the eve of the Second Opium War, some clans in the province’s Pujian county were working directly with the British – no middlemen or laundering required anymore – to push the drug further inland to Ningbo, Shanghai, and even as far away as Shandong province. In 1857, the efforts by the clans had become so frankly brazen in their dealings that the American consul in Fujian wondered where all the official prohibitions had gone.92

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Perhaps, others reasoned, the law’s enforcers were themselves long-time smokers who felt no great urgency to police the drug. No doubt opium could exact a horrifying toll on the user’s body, and reports by the various crusaders, including British missionaries, were accurate in their graphic accounts of an addict’s wasting away. It was already abundantly clear that there would be no easy way to wean the country of its dependence. Ridding it of the drug would end up being more than a half-century project, the lifetimes of most Chinese. But it should also be noted that opium had so thoroughly permeated Chinese society, throughout all subgroups, that extreme drug abuse was only one of the many outcomes of smoking. There were, after all, more than 400 million Chinese in 1860, the majority of them smokers of one kind or another. They used the drug as a medicine; a treatment for dysentery; a general pain reliever for fever, diarrhea, and vomiting; a comfort for cholera, malaria, even childbirth. In Guangdong, it was mixed with caterpillar fungus and ginseng to strengthen the lungs and kidneys and, for some, to act as an aphrodisiac.93 In Beijing, young students used it on the evenings before their imperial exams to help their acuity. Its spread was worldwide by then. Back in Britain, countless country pharmacies, fair booths, and street peddlers sold it as an elixir or a restorative; the prevalent, British-style one-inch-long bar could be recognized almost instantaneously by those looking for it.94 In the United States, the drug was diluted as powder in alcohol, producing the compound known as laudanum, and purchased over the counter as an analgesic and cough suppressant.95 In contrast to the general claim that smoking brought about a debilitating lethargy, Chinese labourers frequently used it to replenish their energy so as to continue their back-breaking work. “I made a journey of 35 miles one day,” a Methodist missionary wrote, “borne in a sedan chair by three strong Chinamen who took nothing but opium till they got to their journey’s end. They would carry me at a rapid pace for three hours till they came to a town, then dump me down in the crowded market place and deaf to all remonstrance, rush off to an adjoining opium house, have a quarter of an hour’s smoke, and start again with lightness and elasticity in their tread.”96 Thomson, too, spied the lightness and elasticity in the oarsmen he hired to row him upriver. Their ability to heave the boats up fast-moving rapids, “straining to their utmost” against an impossible rush of water, made a marked impression on him. He never recognized (or chose to ignore) the correlation between the men’s herculean efforts and the regular smoking they were doing in their downtimes.97 Needless to say, the variety of opium use did not absolve the foreigners from having foisted the drug onto the Chinese in the first place. Neither did it excuse them for

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using it as a pretext for war or as a means to extract extraordinarily unequal treaties from the Qing, to so dominate the country as to render it easy pickings for colonial expectations. Nor, finally, did it obfuscate the undeniable fact that, at the dawn of British-style global capitalism, a drugged nation was a prostrate one. But on the ground, the Chinese use of opium had an array of social and cultural, not to mention economic, investments. Pleasure was no doubt one, comfort another, conviviality yet another, even social climbing. Thomson proscribed the Chinese use of opium, choosing to see in it only its debilitating effects on the people he met. In this he was very much part of a contemporaneous movement among British missionaries who began to denounce what was happening in China.98 (It helped, too, that British anxiety over opium as a poison was equally the result of the drug reaching epidemic proportions back home, prompting a law against it in 1868.) But there are moments in his travelogue when Thomson spied its more myriad meanings – “they seem to enjoy themselves,” we will recall him saying of the opium-smoking painters at A-hung’s studio – and, characteristically, tried to deflect, parody, or moralize about the scenes he found. The general reaction suggests that opium, for Thomson, was a source of anxiety, and it needed managing by constant disparagement and execration. The problem was not simply the drug itself but what it represented. Among many things, it signalled – and here was the important point – the activity, aspirations, and inward co-operation of the Chinese themselves. We would do well to recognize that a global community of smokers had a complex relationship with the drug.99 Certainly, opium was casually everywhere. before following thomson upriver, there is one more matter to address – briefly now, and pursued in more detail further on – and that is the camerawork in the inland territories immediately prior to his going and how it might be related to the issues raised in the previous pages. For there was camerawork, and it came about in relatively predictable fashion. While foreigners could not easily travel inland, coastal Chinese certainly could, and it was none other than Lai Afong who in the 1860s had already gone westward along the tributaries of the Pearl River and photographed sites that no foreigner with a camera had yet seen. Take, for example, his panorama of Wuzhou, a city on the banks of the West River (Xiajiang), on the edge of Guangdong in neighbouring Guangxi (figure 3.34). On the face of things, the panorama has the look of those taken of the treaty ports – Dutton and Michael’s of Guangzhou comes to mind – evidencing a general style of “cityscape” already becoming de rigueur among photographers. In an accompanying caption, Lai Afong made

3.34 Lai Afong, Panorama of General View Woo-Chow City, 1860s, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2003.r.22)

sure to note the special sites of interest for an English-speaking audience: a Chinese theatre being built off to the left (it is the half-finished structure with a steep-pitched roof, seeming to float on a forest of bamboo poles); the many Chinese hongs lining the small rise in the middle distance; the Wuzhou hills beyond; and below, along the riverbanks, the gridlock of sampans, “the only place of abode of many Chinese and their families,” it explains.100 The panorama tells of an extraordinary hive of activity. Some of the boats were still moving downstream, and construction seems not limited to just the new temple. The countless sampans revealed a horde of poorer Chinese trying to finagle a living amidst the city’s commerce. Moreover, none of the activity had anything to do with foreign intervention, at least not directly. As everyone knew, Wuzhou was a major hub along the waterway, connecting the western portions of the country to the treaty ports along the coast, and served as a combination weigh station, finance centre, and distribution point. And everyone also understood that among its major commodities – indeed its most lucrative – was domestic opium.101 It came by the boatload from Yunnan and the regions southwest. The Wuzhou clans financed a chunk of the trade and expanded an old city by building godowns and even an auspicious temple to bless it. Some of the opium headed further eastward to Guangzhou to complement or be mixed with the imported varieties, but most of it went elsewhere. If an opium economy in the interior was a matter of Chinese ingenuity, then a place like Wuzhou was its ultimate expression. No doubt Lai Afong went to Wuzhou for some of the same reasons Thomson would soon travel along the North River: to provide views of a specific land in

3.35 Chinese Artist, Hong bowl, 1785–94, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of William A. Coolidge, 1986, e75076, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

southern China that had always lain just outside European grasp. The large region to the west of the old city had always been the most tantalizing and forbidden terrain vague for generations of factory inhabitants. It was the nebulous region around the bend, so to speak, in figure 3.12. Equally, it offered a site to relish for those British in Hong Kong already champing at the bit to increase their reach.102 “Who would not want a piece of the action here?” the panorama seems to ask. Look at how the river bends and flows outward to the coast! Look at the places for berths! Look at all the labour waiting for work! Look at how the hongs have already facilitated an economy! Yet, most notable, above all, were the pictorial means by which such an enticement was being offered. For if we earlier noted how Lai Afong’s panorama conformed to the general look of the treaty port cityscape, then we ought also note that the conventional image of the treaty port was here being mapped onto a port that, until then, had no foreign presence about it. There was no “treaty” aspect at all. Yet it was easy to imagine what Wuzhou could become; it already seemed to lend itself, at least photographically, to the familiar shape of coastal trade. This borrowing of the visual language associated with treaty ports puts us very close to the exchange between media that Thomson understood to be part of the Chinese studios. The image of the treaty port was not, after all, a photographic invention. It had long preceded the appearance of the camera and appeared in a variety of other media, as in the example of the folding fan (figure 3.26) from the late 1850s, but also, even earlier, in paintings made by Chinese artists, on bowls by Chinese potters (figure 3.35), ivory dioramas made by Chinese artisans, teacups, lacquer trays, folding screens,

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vases, table tops, desks, lanterns, and much more. An entire culture industry devoted itself to reproducing the imagery in as many objects as could be consumed. Representations like these had no source in Chinese iconography. They were made expressly for foreigners, applied to Chinese materials to provide the look and feel of the indigenous, and catered to an imagination about western ambition in China. Or to put it another way, photography’s cross-pollination by other media was less a matter of simple copying – that was Thomson’s mistake when he described the goings-on in A-hung’s studio – than of borrowing both the iconography and, less easily articulated for its observers, something of the iconology of the objects that Chinese artists and artisans had made for foreign buyers. They had found subject matters and points of view that represented, more than anything else, a yearning for China. For what else was a picture like that of Wuzhou if not at base another stirring of colonial interest for the English speakers? All the photographers – both Chinese and foreigners – had learned the subject matters and conventions by heart and pumped pictures out by the dozens. In doing so, they were endlessly reproducing a treaty port photographic culture that their contemporaries came to regard as alternately a documentary or a memento but, in fact, grew out of the comprador’s sensibility about how to keep the foreigners returning. Or to put it most succinctly, the early photographic cultures that developed during the moments of encounter were neither strictly western nor eastern but some shifting hybrid form in the space between the two. They were based on the imagination and condition of otherness – of both British and Chinese cameramen imagining the differences and desires of the others and trading their imaginations back and forth in an endless circuit, as if they were exchanging something that had the whiff of the truly indigenous about it. the trip up the north river (Beijiang) was the first of Thomson’s river expeditions. The path led from Guangzhou northwest along one of the three tributaries that fed the Pearl River. He almost certainly began the trip in mid-1870, as soon as his wife had left Hong Kong for Britain and given him the command to find his expectations.103 Heading out of Guangzhou, Thomson snuck past a cutlery factory where he could not help but remark that it made knives and scissors vastly inferior to those being fashioned in Birmingham or Sheffield. “I have no doubt it would be well worth the while of an English manufacturer to visit,” he observed, “so that afterwards he might imitate and export them himself.”104 But just as we might prepare for a journey that would deliver the same kind of imagery and enticement as Lai Afong’s panorama of

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Wuzhou, the photographer shifted his attention entirely, as if places like the opium port and knife factory were antithetical to the inland. He simply avoided picturing any of the riverboat towns along the North that were remotely like them. He had no pretensions, he wrote, “beyond conveying an idea of the natural beauty of the scenery, its vast plains and broken mountain ranges, and more especially, the beautiful bends and windings of some two hundred miles.”105 How willful of an ambition! Along the same two hundred miles, British manufacturers sent a geological team in 1865 to hunt not for beautiful bends and windings but for coal. They found the same scenery not so lovely at all. Coal was everywhere, their report noted enthusiastically, and the river valley was filled with Chinese miners excavating like madmen, turning the landscape into a vast, blackened field.106 The bends and windings of the river were full of sampans loaded down with nuggets and ash heaps headed to market, clogging the narrows, spilling their contents overboard, and causing a snarl-up of commotion. Extracting not just coal but also limestone and a special rock called Ying stone in and around the city of Yingde was a small industry of its own, and foreigners wanted in. Poachers went after panther and mink furs. Tea merchants harvested and processed six types of leaves, which the British wanted for themselves. The mountainous region around Qingyuan had lumber for the picking and a port to handle it. A farmer near Sanshui thought he found a vein for iron and started digging fanatically (in 1867, 7,000 tons of iron were being imported to China by British merchants; they wanted no part of any local find and actively suppressed it). In addition to all these more or less above-board practices, pirates had taken to lying in wait in some of the more remote corners of the river, trying to grab some coins from those sampans coming back from their coal and ash sales. Local officials were doing their best to manage and also take a cut from the various trades. The whole region was not unlike our image of Fujian and its poppy fields, with peasants trying their best to extract the land’s resources to good advantage, others angling and haggling for a slice of the pie, bandits trawling for easy prey, and officials trying desperately to keep the peace and at the same time enrich themselves. All of this was the reality of a region opened up by the treaty, the fallout of the Second Opium War, and a new kind of covetousness sweeping the countryside. But remarkably, for Thomson, he sought natives not in any way involved in modern commerce or industry, and certainly none connected to piracy, thuggery, or graft. He wanted instead a rural folk who had “reached the highest degree of civilisation where city life is unknown,” he wrote.107 How could such folk be recognized, and what constituted the highest degree of their civilization? Of course they must have

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a “farm house and well stocked yard, [a] robust farmer, his cheerful wife and group of healthy children,” he explained; and of the tokens of their civilization, they needed “the ripe wheat field, and the busy reapers surrounded by the varied beauty of the cultivated landscape” – all the things that made the river valley amenable to a particular kind of Scottish sensibility. Our discussion in the previous chapters has tuned us to the pastoral’s usefulness and resilience in massaging imperial ambitions, and the hinterlands of Guangdong were not immune. But let us put the matter in context: the pastoral was especially appropriate for a land undergoing a transformation in the aftermath of war and rebellion and under the throes of colonial greed. Scarred, battered, the object of mining and manipulation, the site of manufacture and make-do, teeming with people trying to survive in a modified political and economic environment, the river valley needed aestheticizing – a project for photography much on Thomson’s mind anyway. It was as if the photographer and the North were right for each other: a photographer wanting desperately to distinguish himself from his competitors by laying claim to the beautiful, and a river valley needing rounding up to make it amenable to the foreigners’ gaze. The pastoral was familiar to them; it was the household language of Lowland Scots in the empire, full of nationalist overtones and the comforting nostalgia of cultural possession. This is not just a perception offered retrospectively. Thomson was frank about it, explaining that he wanted “a picture which reminds one of similar scenes at home.”108 Or, better, he wanted not the Scottish pastoral unblemished but one mapped onto southern China. The photographer would later admit that the river was not always so peaceful (“thousands of junks and boats,” he would describe, “where endless discord reigns).109 However, the book of pictures he assembled based on his journey was nothing if not an effort – a complicated one, it turned out – to make good on the fancy. In late 1870, soon after his return from the trip, Thomson approached the same Hong Kong publisher that produced China Magazine to bring out a volume of his pictures. Called Views on the North River, it is today a very rare work. No more than a handful of copies exist; only a small batch was likely made.110 It consists of a brief introduction, a mere fourteen tipped-in albumen photographs, and letterpress for each image. The book has the feel of an experiment, as though the photographer were testing what a photobook of inland China might look like, how it could be organized, and what it should do. If it was Thomson’s desire to provide a pastoral of the North River, the book’s central tension came down to a familiar one for photographers: how to import the structure of a “book” made up not only of words but also pictures, and how to

3.36 John Thomson, Pearl River, Kwangtung Province (also known as View from the Kwan Yin Cave), 1870, Wellcome Library, 18874i

make word and image collaborate and, as it were, speak in the same voice. Cohesion was important, since the effort to represent a “purely Chinese” inland in the face of competing realities could so easily reveal its biases and inconsistencies.111 For the construction of a photobook, even a short one, was not without the pitfalls of contradiction, the relationship between word and image a particularly sensitive breaking-point. From our point of view, the inconsistencies between them had a large significance, for they were inseparable from the many struggles to lay claim to the land. Organization was mostly a simple matter, and it was here, in the matter of structure, where the narrative quality of the traditional book was enlisted. In contrast to, say, Alexander Henderson’s sequencing of scenes in his Canadian Views, in which a bricolage of outings ruled the day, Thomson viewed his book as a single journey upriver, from the coast to the deep inland, from front cover to back, reaching a climax with no return. The journey itself – the constant push upriver, the continuousness of the river’s edge, the views that could be spied from the banks – became the principle motif. The North’s waters appeared in ten of the photographs, and the accumulation of pictures implied that Thomson never strayed far from it. A picture like View from

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the Kwan Yin Cave (Guanyinyan) (figure 3.36) is a fair example of the bunch. He liked to capture his boat, the better to evoke the quality of a voyage; and the landscape around the river flowed always outward and upward, with little indication of settlement. If in his essay on Wong-nei-chung he called for the background mountain to serve as the “king” upon which all of the remaining elements should be subservient, in Views on the North River it was the water – or better still, the connection or fluctuating interface between land and river – that provided the compositional logic. Any understanding of the countryside sprang from it. The journey was occasionally dramatic, but in those instances the excitements were related to the demands of travel itself: the thrill of pushing a boat up a fast-flowing current or the fright of wading too deep into marshy wetlands. Of a scene at the north end of Mang Tsai Pass (Mengzixia) (figure 3.37), we learn that on the placid water the boat’s trackers in fact made headway only “with the greatest difficulty” against the force of the wind and the current.112 In such a place, “a sudden gust of wind might have hurled them into the water, leaving the boat to drift and be dashed to pieces against the rocks.” At another stop, the photographer sunk into a deep bog that threatened to pull him under like quicksand, and he had to make a “narrow escape” or be lost.113 And at yet another, the boat ran aground, sending one of the oarsmen overboard into the fast current and requiring that he be rescued and dosed in brandy to cajole him onward.114 What would a journey be without a few hazards and a display of moxie? But the larger point is that while the sequence of pictures was construed like the easy flow of passing scenes and, much like the unfolding of pleats in a fan or the turning of pages in a book, stretched open piece by piece, page by page to reveal a scenery on the river’s edge, the letterpress worked hard to augment. They frequently filled in events or details that remain wholly invisible in the pictures. Despite the occasional quagmire and surge of water, Thomson determined to make the photographs nothing if not idyllic, full of simple people and simple pleasures, and presented as the opposite of Hong Kong’s glut and modernity. Of the book’s first picture, for instance (figure 3.38), Thomson had this to say: “This illustration may be 3.37 Opposite top John Thomson, Pearl River, Kwangtung Province (also known as Rapids), 1870, Wellcome Library 18824i 3.38 Opposite bottom John Thomson, Kwangtung Province (also known as Road to the Village of Wong Tong), 1870, Wellcome Library, 18850i

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taken as a type of the approach to the majority of farm villages that are scattered along both banks of the river, where they are found nestling in the most beautiful and secluded spots, beneath venerable trees, and encompassed by hedgerows, whose blossoms fill the air with a delicious perfume.”115 If the people of Hong Kong had taken aggressively to photography, the unworldly villagers of Wong Tong (Huangtong) were terrified by it. “On seeing the Camera pointed at their village,” he explained, the old women “fled, and the only man present, a vender of sugar cane, left his bundle against the tree and retreated to the village to spred [sic] the alarm that the ‘Fan-qui’ were about to assault the place.” If the ethnic peoples flocking to the treaty ports were full of distrust and polemic and flung bad manners at each other, the “head man of the village … approached with calm dignity and a white beard flowing like a flag of truce [and] gave us a hearty welcome to his house.” The photograph could offer none of that drama but provided a visual corollary: the road inward to Wong Tong was like an invitation. Gone are the frightened women; gone, too, are bundles of sugar cane tossed aside in haste and the old man with his white beard of truce. In their place are a young child, halfway down the road, meeting our gaze and, further on, a group of villagers awaiting our arrival at the gate beyond. The warm solicitation and good manners were typical of the countryside, he thought. “This was one of those many instances of a simple genuine hospitality which I experienced all over the land,” he would later note, “and I feel assured that any foreigner knowing enough of the language to make his immediate wants understood … would encounter little opposition.”116 The hybrid modernity that characterized the North lay just outside the pictures’ edges. Qingyuan was a river hub as busy as Wuzhou, less an opium centre than one devoted to coal and porcelain clay, and for that reason even more crowded with sooty boats dropping debris everywhere. Thomson tried to avoid it, preferring instead a scene of a pagoda three miles upstream (figure 3.39) and a pass further beyond. He knew Qingyuan existed; the lanterns were easy to spot from the pagoda, and the crew had to get supplies and settle down for a night there. To him, it was smelly, noisy, and overcrowded; too full of restless workers staying up at all hours trying to subsist; too maddening with firecrackers, drunkenness, and opium stupor; and far too crammed with hagglers on sampans angling for work – hardly typical of the region, he thought. The Tankas were fine for Hong Kong, but boat people in the interior were apparently unsightly, untrustworthy, and unworthy of the camera. The choice of photograph from among the assortment was also key. Some were obvious candidates for the discard bin. Along the east bank about sixty-five miles

3.39 John Thomson, Pearl River, Kwangtung Province (also known as The T’sing Yune Pagoda), 1870, Wellcome Library, 18860i

from where the North fed into the Pearl, Thomson tried to picture a small fishing village he had come across (figure 3.40), but the scene contained too many distractions: the piles of wood being collected as fuel for smelting, the pole stands set up for the industrial-sized fishing nets, and most disturbing of all, the faint outline of Qingyuan on the horizon, with its many hongs and even more sampans scrambling for space on the shoreline. There was nothing rustic about it. Other pictures showed differences in the degree of picturesqueness. Compare figure 3.39, which found its way into the volume, with figure 3.41, which did not. They both positioned a figure on the riverbank as a kind of repoussoir, and both explored the join of water and land that became the leitmotif of the album. The latter contained far more of the soft outlines and graceful curves Thomson had recommended in his essay on Wong-nei-chung; and its handling of the background mountain range, the tinted sky, and the deep water is by comparison far more robust. Indeed, the same details in figure 3.39 are overexposed,

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the sky and river reduced to flat panels of silver. But the chosen photograph had the marvelous ancient pagoda and, in contrast, none of the messy settlement of hardscrabble farmers or, worse, the long conveyer belt of wood on the opposite shore that told of logging and the cut trees being pitched into the river for transport. The nature of the inland as the polar opposite of Hong Kong and as the receptacle for the pastoral was as determined as it was straightforward, and Thomson tried advancing it, despite his awareness of greater complexity. It was not that other truths were entirely suppressed in the book, but they were relegated to the accompanying letterpress and were acknowledged as exceptions or, from our point of view, concessions to a desire to see otherwise. The region had been the site of recent fighting between the Qing and Taipings – a pity, he noted, because so many of the picturesque and photographable bridges had been destroyed by rebels. The survivors of a battle in a place he called Lien Chow Kwong village (Lianzhoujiang) were in bad shape; their homes had been destroyed and they were a “miserable” and “unwashed” lot, reduced to begging and so weak that they had to lean against the battered walls just “to have a steady look at us.”117 They made for unsightly pictures, and as he explained, by “turning my back on the village” he was able to get a worthier scene of sampans huddled on the banks. The economy for many of the ethnic Chinese he met was hard up, and pirates were everywhere trying to take the little that they had. He found boaters on the river who moored together in the evenings “for better security against the surprise attack of the pirates who infest the neighborhood.” But all these truths were offered like a low drone in the face of the photographs’ determination. Less descriptions, the words were additions, full of complementary but also contradictory particulars that raised the photographs’ status for inspection. Two final pictures can represent the extraordinary vigour that went into trying to transform the inland into a more familiar scene from home and also the strain in the effort. Looking North from the Pau-Lo-Hang Temple (Baoluokeng) (figure 3.42) was a scene more than a hundred miles upriver in a small village now known as Hongmiaojiao, near Yingde and its limestone quarries. While the Chinese were mining like fanatics in the distant mountains and the temple itself was a ruin “at the hands of the rebels,” the photograph instead “is intended to give some idea of the grandeur of the inland … [of] graceful bamboo or the luxuriant green of the paddy fields, and studded with picturesque villages.”118 The place got Thomson thinking about Walter Scott – it’s still astonishing to ponder the twists and turns of his associations – and he mused on Loch Katrine, even reciting some lines from “The Lady of the Lake” as if in a reverie. It put him in mind of the craggy knolls and grassy lands back home, and

3.40 Top John Thomson, Pearl River, Kwangtung Province, 1870, Wellcome Library, 18864i 3.41 Bottom John Thomson, Pearl River, Kwangtung Province, 1870, Wellcome Library, 18866i

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3.42 John Thomson, Looking North from the Pau-Lo-Hang Temple, Kwangtung, ca. 1870, Wellcome Library, 18878i

he thought wistfully of sportsmen out for a day to hunt pheasants. In truth, it was less the place that caused him to wax eloquently about Scott – the temple was a battlefield of ruin – and more the effort it took to transmute it. Or take, finally, the last photograph of the volume (figure 3.43). Thomson claimed to have travelled two hundred miles upriver and named each place along the way so that even today we can follow his footsteps – except for the last.119 It was presumably furthest upriver at the geographical and cultural opposite of the coast – the endpoint of both the journey and the book – and it was there that he could meet the ideal citizens of the pastoral: the robust farmer, his healthy wife, and the flock of children standing beside the ripe

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3.43 John Thomson, An Up-Country Farm, 1870

wheat field. There was no agribusiness in a place like that and certainly no poppy fields or mining sites, only the know-how and hard work of an ancient folk tending their crops and a wisdom passed down from the ages. “If the farmer were asked his reason why he conducted his operations after fixed rules,” Thomson thought, “he would say that it is good because his father had taught him.”120 This was not a uniquely Chinese trait, we know; “ye ken it’s juist the fashion o’ the place,” the Newhaven fisherwoman had once told Lady Eastlake about why she wore her most illogical costume.121 The skills needed to keep the fields bountiful and luxuriant were not limited to the Chinese, either: the people succeed “as well as our farmers did at home a century ago.”122 There were probably many good reasons why Thomson omitted the location of the last photograph. Perhaps he had simply forgotten where it was. Perhaps the place was really somewhere in the middle of the journey rather than at the end, and instead of compromising the structure and climax of the book, he preferred to omit annoying

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details. And perhaps, too, reveries like those about Walter Scott and Loch Katrine simply overwhelmed any memory of some scene’s whereabouts. But whatever the reason, it seems an apt omission, for the culmination of the inland journey was never about an actual place but rather a desire for it. back in london, Thomson got down to putting together another book about a river journey. Called Foochow and the River Min, it was to be a sumptuous album, making good on the call for an aesthetic photography that would finally distinguish him from the horde of competitors. It was also the beneficiary of what he had learned in putting together Views on the North River. At a casual glance, the new album could be distinguished from its predecessor by several important changes. First, although it contained an introduction, there would be no letterpresses to accompany the photographs – no drone of noise to contradict or confuse the imagery. It was foremost a book of pictures, and whatever history and society characterized the region had to be gleaned from images. Knowledge would be intensely visual. Second, it contained many more pictures, eighty compared to the fourteen of the earlier volume, by far the most Thomson would organize into a single publication until then. It was a chance to make pictures the motor of exploration and experience, and of narrative. He had the pictures printed with the latest carbon process, the most luxurious he could have chosen. A simple comparison between a carbon print and the original glass plate negative from which it is taken suggests the enormous benefits (figures 3.44 and 3.45). With carbon, highlights and shadows could get articulated with a subtlety and suppleness extraordinarily hard to get with other processes. One could fill in, painting in the sky, for instance, or outlining more carefully the double silhouette of trees off to the left. With the stunning reflection in the water, the full range of the camera’s grey-scale could find its way into print. The tipped-in albumen pictures being peddled by others looked wan by comparison. From the outset, the album was to be as plush as, say, Hill’s most extravagant productions, and just as exclusive. No more than forty-six copies were made, and only a handful now exist. Third, the album focused on an entirely different river valley, a region more than five hundred miles north of Guangzhou, in and around the treaty port of Fuzhou in Fujian province. While Guangzhou had a rich opium economy, Fuzhou and its environs had an equally rich tea economy. Tea leaves brought down along the Min (Minjiang) from the Wuyi region had always been the calling card for foreigners. They became a favourite of British taste buds: Bohea, Congou, Souchong, and especially Pekoe.123 Of course the province was not immune from opium; as frequently as tea went downstream to Fuzhou, opium was

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3.44 Top John Thomson, The Island Pagoda, 1873, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.19, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma 3.45 Bottom John Thomson, Jinshan Temple, River Min, Fukien Province, 1870–71, Wellcome Library, 18760i

making its way upstream as trade bait. Recall, too, how the poppy fields on the arable coastal regions were beginning to take over part of the economy by transforming the low-end market for the drug.124 In addition, there was a new Chinese arsenal that changed the tenor of the port and its business. These would largely obscure opium as the face of the province, or at least the album could propose that. In choosing Fuzhou, Thomson also confronted something he had avoided on the North: the city and its outskirts had already been covered by a host of photographers, including none other than Lai Afong and also Tung Hing, a photography collective

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based in Fuzhou itself.125 They had already established lists of stock views, and their albums were being swept up by Fuzhou’s small foreign community. If Hong Kong had made Thomson aware that his pictures belonged to a larger marketplace of similar work, Fuzhou confirmed that pushing inland did not free him of that arena; if anything, as a stranger to the place, he relied even more on the standard imagery and tourist sites. He conscientiously followed the Chinese photographers’ course, going to many of the same places they had already been to. Often, he positioned his camera not far from where they had placed theirs, climbing the same hills, looking for the same vistas, measuring in his mind’s eye some of the scenes in their albums with what he could see on his camera’s ground glass. Take, for example, his prospect of a place called the Bankers’ Glen in the hills outside Fuzhou, and compare it with one made by Lai Afong (figures 3.46 and 3.47). He moved slightly right of where Lai Afong once stood and used a shorter lens, but the picture took its cues from the same fascination with the farmlands nestled between the mountains and the long ribbon of water in the distance. No doubt following the Chinese had a practical component: Lai Afong had covered the area around the Bankers’ Glen more thoroughly and provided clues to where a photographer could set up his portable darkroom (figure 3.48). Notice the small black tent in the middle foreground, carefully propped against the tall brush. The field in front of the glen had flatland to keep the trays from spilling the nitrate bath and a small creek and an irrigation ditch close by to wash the plates – notice, again, the ribbon in the foreground corner where water ran. These sorts of detail were easily missed by others, but photographers paid careful attention to them: they were the lifeblood of camerawork in the field. Thomson scaled the mountain off to the right and took a picture that he ended up not including – we spy the same rock face from a different angle (figure 3.49). He almost certainly set up his darkroom nearby, taking his cue from Lai Afong. The water was clean and clear; the glass plates from the shoot show little impact from sediment – always good news after all the effort. The Bankers’ Glen took its name from Fuzhou’s foreign financiers who liked to visit the spot for a respite

3.46 Opposite top John Thomson, The Banker’s Glen, 1870–71, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.30, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma 3.47 Opposite bottom Lai Afong, Yuen-foo River, View from the Hill, ca. 1869, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Gilman Collection, purchase, Robert Rosenkranz gift, 2005

3.48 Lai Afong, Entrance to the Bankers’ Glen, view to the right looking up Yuen-foo Monastery, National Galleries of Scotland, gift of Mrs Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell 1988 3.49 Opposite John Thomson, River Min, Glen, 1870–71, Wellcome Library, 18774i

from the crowded city. Lai Afong had made sure to take a picture of just such an outing (figure 3.50), somehow getting the British consul, his wife, and their friends to pose. Thomson did not have the benefit of their company, but that did not stop him from going down into the narrow passage and getting a photograph of a nice resting spot, too (figure 3.51). Or take Thomson’s picture of the island pagoda (figure 3.44), and compare it with two versions made by Tung Hing (figures 3.52 and 3.53). Once known as Lo-sing (Jinshan), the temple was a fixture in the river just west of the city. A bridge once connected it to the shoreline, but that was long gone by the time of the photographers’ visits. One had to approach it from the proper angle, going out into the river rather than picturing it from the riverbank – actually close by, as one of Tung Hing’s images

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shows. The advance from the river side gave a better measure of the banyan tree growing oddly from the temple’s foundation and of the overall floating quality of the structure. Thomson dutifully took his prompts from others. Getting to the proper location required a flat-bottomed boat and an oarsman or two. There was already a small industry among the Chinese who rented their sampans and no doubt knew exactly where on the water to bring the visitors for the best vantage. Sometimes Thomson went to well-known sites and reproduced with his camera nearly the same view as others had gotten (figures 3.54 and 3.55), angling his lens this way and that to get the scoop of the treeline to balance with the arc of the grave. Recall at Wong-nei-chung, the “trees are themselves echoed [and] the outline of the main portion … begins a graceful curve.” At other times, he went to closely related sites but took an eccentric view. In the case of the triumphal arches that dotted the landscape (figure 3.56), he tried to hide the fact that the monuments were usually part of a much more crowded environment and instead, according to his views, could be likened to the mountainous landscape, the arch’s triple head outlined against the three hills. (“Look carefully … and by degrees you will come to see that everything in the picture, from first to last, unites to convey to you an idea of the grandeur and grace.”) And at other times still, he went to famous locations but, in contrast to the pictures of others, subtly positioned his camera so as to obscure or downplay unexplained or simply ugly details. At the Yuenfu monastery (Fangguanyan), Thomson caught more of the building jutting out from its cave setting than did Lai Afong (figures 3.57 and 3.58). He wanted more of the sky and background mountain and found in the carbon process a means of elaborating them more finely. One benefit to all of the manipulation at the monastery is that he drew attention away from the random rope that hung down from the mountaintop off to the right. But while he wanted to tone down its curious presence, Lai Afong wanted to emphasize it; and in case viewers somehow missed it in his picture, he added for good measure: “For this is a Gambler’s rope down which travelers create [sic] to supply the two old priests.”126 That trivial detail was among the picture’s chief interest for him; Thomson bristled at its cheesiness.

3.50 Opposite top Lai Afong, The Bankers’ Glen, Yuen-foo River, ca. 1869, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Gilman Collection, purchase, Robert Rosenkranz gift, 2005 3.51 Opposite bottom John Thomson, The Banker’s Glen, 1870–71, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.31, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

3.52 Right Tung Hing, Hung ‘tang-chin-shan-shih, Monastery, 1862–70, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2003.r.22) 3.53 Below Probably by Tung Hing, Temple Dedicated to the Queen of Heaven; Foochow Views, 1870, Peabody Essex Museum, ph13.6, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

These many pictures of Fuzhou and the regions around the Min were variations on a theme and, like those many photographers in Hong Kong, Thomson, Lai Afong, and Tung Hing trafficked in an imagery already becoming standard fare. If they were all to return, say, ten years later, they would find another generation of photographers following the script.127 Of course Thomson played his hand by emphasizing the aesthetic features he began to outline in Hong Kong, but in this he remained within the ambit of the familiar. The real differences between his album and those already published by others came down to, first, the delicate handling of the book’s structure and, second, its awkward inclusion of the region’s inhabitants.

3.54 Left John Thomson, The Mandarin’s Grave, 1870–71, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.38, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma 3.55 Below Probably by Tung Hing, Grave of “Ting Young Ling”; Foochow Views, 1870, Peabody Essex Museum, ph13.7, Courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

3.56 John Thomson, Widow’s Arch, 1870–71, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.16, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

3.57 Top John Thomson, Left Shoulder of Cave, 1870–71, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.36, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma 3.58 Bottom Lai Afong, Left shoulder of the cave in which is situated Yuen-foo Monastery, National Galleries of Scotland, gift of Mrs Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell 1989

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If organization was book-like and straightforward in Views on the North River, the same cannot be said for Foochow and the River Min. The book certainly began in Fuzhou near the coast and ended at the farthest point in Thomson’s travels, a place upriver he identified as Yenping City (Nanping). In between, however, the photographs track back and forth, darting between Fuzhou and the regions west, venturing northward on a separate course, out west again to the Min’s rich farmlands, back downstream to the city, wandering along Fuzhou’s streets and poorer neighbourhoods, following boats both up and down the rapids, and finally pushing upstream to Nanping, the next important trading post on the river. Across its pages, the book charts a shifting set of attentions, frequently returning to places already introduced, concentrating momentarily on this monastery or that, comparing one region to another, fleeing to the city’s foreign settlement, going north-west-east seemingly all at once. In part, the zigzagging quality had to do with the assemblage of scenes that Thomson made over the course of several trips. While he proposed one long journey along the North, the pictures of Fujian province were the result of at least three separate trips. The schizophrenic quality of the book’s sequence gives a flavour of the difficultly in containing vastly different places and excursions. But organization also told another story, of priorities and points of view, of foray and return, assertion and restraint, the breakdown of the authority of narrative, and most especially an awareness of precedence. Contrast that structure to Lai Afong’s and Tung Hing’s albums. In Lai Afong’s Foochow, now held at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the journey begins in Fuzhou at the so-called Fives Court (one of the recreation spaces carved out by the foreigners) and another view, number two in the volume, of the foreign settlement from across the river (figure 3.59). In Fuzhou, the foreigners were physically separated from the Chinese, more like the arrangement in old Guangzhou than anything in Hong Kong, and were far fewer in number, only a few hundred amidst the vast majority of Fujianese and others from within the province and along the coast. There was fluidity across a bridge that linked the two populations – the Chinese and foreigners coming and going alike – but also a marked distinction that had a visual and architectural corollary and a reminder of the social relations of days past. Lai Afong tried to capture something of that in his view of the British hongs. The businesses sat majestically overlooking the Min and all the trade that flowed past it. By contrast, in the third image in the volume, of the Chinese settlement (figure 3.60), the buildings are piled on top of each other, the white (Bai Ta) and black (Wu Ta) pagodas punctuating a jigsaw puzzle of rooftops. One side of the bridge was stately, the other

3.59 Top Lai Afong, Foochow, Foreign Settlement, South Side of the River, 1869, National Galleries of Scotland, gift of Mrs Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell 1985 3.60 Bottom Lai Afong, City of Foochow-foo, National Galleries of Scotland, gift of Mrs Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell 1986

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3.61 Lai Afong, Duck Market at Sing Chang, ca. 1869, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Gilman Collection, purchase, Robert Rosenkranz gift, 2005 3.62 Opposite Tung Hing, Hsing-‘tsun-chieh, 1862–70, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2003.r.22)

an undifferentiated mass; one nestled on a low rise and was bordered by greenery, the other overwhelmed them; one tended toward the panoramic, the other toward claustrophobic. The combination of pictures introduced the album as an updated version of the old treaty port experience, of foreign encampment within a teeming Chinese container. Even the British hongs are reminiscent of the godowns elsewhere. The difference is that Lai Afong’s album offered a journey beyond the bend for its foreign patrons and, furthermore, posited an ideal viewer: a foreigner come to Fuzhou to take advantage of the treaty port’s opportunities. As it unfolds, it imagines the sequence of experiences such a foreigner might have: first, his settlement and the amenities like the upscale handball courts he shared with others of his ilk; then an image of the Chinese settlement across the bridge where all his trading partners and labourers lay; then to the city wall and its old moats; followed by a trip outward to the suburbs where silk-

worms were nurtured and small factories made shirts for him; to the picturesque island pagoda just west and the Bankers’ Glen where he took his weekend air (figure 3.50); to the Fangguanyan monastery where he was treated to a story about gamblers’ ropes and harrowing feats on the mountainside (figure 3.58); and always further and further westward on an imaginary excursion. Along the way he experienced the river’s rapids, came across spectacular rock formations, flowed past Nanping, went to cities much further inland to Wuyishan than Thomson would go, and finally, fifty-one photographs later, ended up at the region around the Xingcun market, where his afternoon Pekoe tea originated and where the object of all of his hectic trading activity could be found. He rarely met any Chinese during his journey, and when he saw them, they were simply a mass of people on the riverbanks (figure 3.61), the upland equivalent of the mass of Chinese he had left behind in Fuzhou. If he chose, he could have inserted portraits of himself or his friends anywhere in the journey, reminders of the companionship and pleasures that attended his time in Fuzhou (figures 3.2 and 3.19). Lai Afong knew his clients well. In contrast, Tung Hing’s Foochow, now held at the Getty Research Institute, begins deep inland and flows downstream. How different its first image is from Lai Afong’s

3.63 Tung Hing, Chêng-kao-yen, 1862–70, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2003.r.22)

(figure 3.62)! While Lai Afong introduces the foreigners’ settlement, Tung Hing offers the villagers’, and while Lai Afong posits the Xingcun tea fields and markets as the endpoint of the journey, Tung Hing proposes them as the beginning. The differences are not just matters of location; or perhaps it is better to say, the flow of the imagery mattered tremendously. If Lai Afong imagined that the unfolding of his album was best suited for a foreigner leaving the comfort of Fuzhou’s hongs for an adventure upriver, Tung Hing put forward the possibility that the same journey, leaving the farmlands and heading toward the treaty port, was an experience familiar not to foreigners but rather rural Fujianese. The ideal viewer was not necessarily foreign; indeed, in contrast to Lai Afong who captioned all of his work in English, Tung Hing captioned all of its in Chinese. Nearly all the English accompaniment was merely the makeshift phonetic approximation of Chinese characters (figure 3.63). It came second, as if an aid to a more originary Chinese way of knowing the places on the route. Tung Hing spends far more time upriver – nearly two-thirds of the album – among the mountains, valleys, and villages in Wuyishan, at the many obscure places from which

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the peasants who became labourers in Fuzhou had originally come. The journey ends not at the foreign or even the Chinese settlement but rather at the Fuzhou arsenal, a factory built by the Chinese, full of Fujianese labourers manufacturing modern weaponry. Along the way, it avoids places like the Bankers’ Glen in favour of pictures of more modest houses and towns on the Min. A mountain village like Chenggaoyan (figure 3.63) had no economic allure for foreigners in the manner that Wuzhou or even Nanping had; it was best understood as a place of local familiarity. Jeffrey Cody and Frances Terpak suggest that pictures like these borrowed heavily from literati painting.128 Enormous rock formations evoked the scenery in ink paintings. Weird crags and cliff faces, jutting forms and protruding ledges, the strange shapes of a mountainside, the equally bizarre outgrowth on a ridge – all these had long-standing presence in the Taoist imagination and represented a centuries-long fascination with natural stone. The ideal literati lived a quiet life in the mountainous regions, responding sensitively to the quirky world that the Earth bestowed and making ink paintings that gave form to both the land and his reactions to it. Of course, Tung Hing did not expect literati painters to suddenly become the major patrons for its work; nor did the studio think it could survive on peasants who might have recognized the farmlands and villages in the photographs and wanted copies. The albums were aimed at the very same foreigners who patronized Lai Afong. An album by Tung Hing now held at the Peabody Essex Museum, for instance, includes a simple handwritten caption by its foreign buyer telling where in a photograph of Fuzhou he once lived.129 That kind of individual response was no doubt common (“I was there!”), and eagerly courted. Yet it seemed as if another imagination was at work in an album like Tung Hing’s, another sensibility being activated and, equally, the suggestion that the paradigmatic viewer was not securely British. Going upstream envisioned the journey of a foreigner into uncharted terrain; going downstream from the Wuyishan villages reckoned something else. Doubtlessly beautiful, the pictures grew out of Thomson’s inkling of an experience, but one he could not quite name. He had suspicions the Chinese fascination with rocks and the peculiar orientation along the river had something to do with their adherence to feng shui, for which he would eventually have nothing but spleen. The Chinese attention to geological irregularities, their penchant for turning the shapes of rocks into silhouettes for fantastical creatures, and their obsessions with the balance and alignment of landscape elements were superstitious gobbledygook, he would later think. Outside Fangguanyan monastery (figure 3.57), he looked at the mountains, thought of their beauty, also thought about how the Chinese might

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look upon them, and would later scoff at the differences: “Those crags [are supposed] to exert an evil influence on the city which lies directly North of them,” he would say. “I believe geomancy has degenerated into a system of imposture among the modern Chinese, as the geomancers of the present day are a level of quacks.”130 Down at Fuzhou, he observed the new construction and would laugh approvingly at how it broke all the rules of feng shui. “Feng-shui, indeed, had to yield to the stern necessity of the times,” he would proclaim, and “the outraged terrestial [sic] dragon, and the no longer venerated tiger, may weep sympathetically over the evidences of a degenerate age.”131 Watching Chinese labourers learn new skills at the Fuzhou arsenal, he would commend their industry, explaining that the young men had ascertained for themselves that “science is the true Feng-shui of foreign progress.”132 Elsewhere in Fujian he looked upon the relation of the streets to the surrounding landscape and would joke that the locals probably thought the organization was “intimately connected with Feng-shui, or good luck of the port. But in such a place as this it is but seldom that good luck waits upon the lower and most superstitious classes.”133 Thomson would eventually let no chance pass when he could pour polemic on the ancient philosophical system of harmony. The dogged criticism suggests that the whole subject, rather than being easily dismissed, continued to be a source of anxiety. He did not fully understand the Chinese points of view, though he could see their effects in the pictures; and they were undeniably astonishing and evidence of better picturing than the hacks back in Britain could do. For a time, before invective set in, he remained a guarded admirer. Consider two photographs from the Chinese albums of Lai Afong and Tung Hing, a view of an odd rock formation (Matouyan) in Wuyishan that many locals saw as having the shape of a horse’s head and named it as such (figures 3.64 and 3.65). The photographers had approached the mountain from the same angle, pointing west, and made sure to get its long hump of a back and upright neck and head. They both found the dark ledge around the head that made the uppermost part of the rock look like a horse’s mane, and they captured something of the way the horse’s body seemed to grow out of the lowlands around it, like it was standing on thick stumps of legs.

3.64 Opposite top Lai Afong, Stone Horse-head with Tea-fields near Sing Chang, National Galleries of Scotland, gift of Mrs Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell 1991 3.65 Opposite bottom Tung Hing, Ma-‘tou-yen, 1862–70, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2003.r.22)

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Lai Afong got closer to focus on the terraces that enterprising villagers had carved, turning the mountainside into tea fields; Tung Hing pulled back to capture more of the hut and drying laundry, evidence of where the villagers lived. (Characteristically, Lai Afong also included a small nod to where he had set up his darkroom: in the small shack at the lower right, he scratched his name into the dark overhang of the roof, a witty way to locate where he had been. It was “dark” for me in there, he seemed to say.) It would be easy to make much of the differences between the two photographs and interpret the focus on the terraced fields versus that on the drying laundry as evidence of distinct outlooks, of the search for industry versus habitation, say. Or we could try to decide how the competing interests in shack and hut signalled unlike values. But whatever the interpretations, the larger point is that any imputing grew out of an awareness that one was a view coming upriver, while the other was one going down. The two converged but the attitudes upon reaching that place could be construed as dissimilar. In Foochow and the River Min, Thomson responded by going upstream and downstream all at once, north-south-east-west in fragmented sequence, and his book of pictures posited no single experience or point of view. The foreigners’ experience would have been preferred by the most hardened of the Fuzhou Scots, of course, and it was the easier one to concoct coming from the coast; but at any given location along the river, as Thomson knew from others’ pictures, that experience kept running into another’s. He chose to scramble his photographs. It would be the only time in all of his oeuvre that he would do anything like that, of acknowledging competing points of view by foisting his own in an illogical pattern. This is partly what is meant by that phrase “awareness of precedence.” The Chinese albums came before Thomson’s and not only gave him a framework for constituting his work but, by the very acts of going before, also had built within them perspectives that were not necessarily commensurate with his own. In the competing albums, the photographer always had the sense that the course of those journeys not only preceded his own but also had a level of priority over his and spoke of another’s possession. After all, what was a name like the horse’s head if not the product of someone else’s imagination? No surprise that Foochow and the River Min did not propose a journey in the traditional sense because there was no destination or culmination that seemed as self-evidently or unproblematically pastoral. Or to put it differently, the destinations upriver were too many, too conflicting, and too varied in meaning; and wherever he might end up, no matter how bucolic it might seem, the place was likely to have already been subject to the construal of others.

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Perhaps this awareness helps explain the second great difference in Thomson’s album, namely the inclusion of Fujian’s people. While Views on the North River mostly omitted the Chinese, nearly half the pictures in Foochow and the River Min included them. In some pictures, the Chinese were part of an overall river valley view (figure 3.66), which they complemented. Here indeed was the pastoral in Fujian. But in others, especially those taken in and around Fuzhou, they were the

3.66 John Thomson, Road to the Plantation, 1870–71, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.23, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

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primary focus of the camera (figure 3.67). There was the pastoral’s opposite. How one squared the two was never easily explained. True, the people could be “types,” or cross-sections of the poor, held up as ethnological specimens or representatives of the rural/urban contrast, as would eventually come to be the case for the learned societies. But on the ground, they were equally ingredients in an overall stock-taking of the region. The one always had the echo of the other, one could not be asserted without the other – and so suggested a complex social world inhabiting the region that could not be fully explained by way of contemporary theory but merely glimpsed through the services of the camera. The people were obstinately there. I take three photographs to be emblematic of the new and singular attitude in the album. The first, of the bridge connecting the two settlements in Fuzhou (figure 3.68),

3.67 John Thomson, Beggars, 1870–71, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.42, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

3.68 John Thomson, Part of Lower Bridge, 1870–71, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.15, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

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is something we can hardly imagine Thomson including in Views on the North River, or indeed on any of his lists of views for sale. It is scarcely a view in any of the customary senses. Certainly some of the foreign hongs lay in the distant shoreline, and the sampans and the single-masted sloops are lined up ready to transport goods and people and continue the business of treaty port trade. But they are all framed by the bridge and the Chinese on it, and any view of the hongs, the photograph proposes, is equally a view of its support. The Chinese themselves are not clearly identified but remain a ghostly presence, evanescent but never absent, insinuating themselves into the scene at its edges but announced only in passing. They were interference and yet not easily dismissed. Or take another picture from further upriver (figure 3.69) and contrast it with the closest cognate in Views on the North River, the scene of Wong Tong and its related story of the elder with the white beard of truce (figure 3.38). In both cases, the photographer had arrived at a modest village. In the earlier picture, he relayed how the villagers were frightened by the camera, and it was only the warmth of the elder that broke down the divide and brokered a warm invitation. In the later, the photographer had arrived only to find that the villagers, hardly frightened by the camera, are already taking stock of him. Rather than unfettered observation of the Chinese, the picture stages a continual exchange of gazes, of the photographer looking at them looking at him. There is no accompanying letterpress to break the relay and explain that some kindly, countryside invitation was in the offing; and we are left in the picture with an unresolved exchange without end. The upcountry bridge was doubtlessly picturesque, the building equally photographable, its tangle of bamboo and struts pleasingly rustic. But none of that got around the simple fact that the inhabitants of the place continued to look back. We could stare intently at the building, hoping to extract sylvan charm, only to find that even there, within the forest of architectural bamboo, other men, hidden at first, returned our gaze. Or take finally a photograph Thomson made at nearly the furthest extent of his trip westward on the Min (figure 3.70). By the standards outlined in his essay of Wong-nei-chung, the photograph is an extraordinary work: the graceful harmony and balance and slow rhythmic bending and blending of the landscape’s ingredients, and the unity of an idea that dovetailed parts to whole. These were not the features of feng shui or literati painting, he might have wanted to say, but of a western sensibility attuned to a Ruskin-derived idea of the beautiful and majestic. Your harmony to my harmony, he might have added; your balance to mine; your horses and dragons to my kings and queens. (“Do you note how all this gives to the hill the air of a

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3.69 John Thomson, A Rustic Bridge, 1870–71, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.75, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

protector? and see how nobly it bears its character! Rising above all, nobler than all, greater than all, calmer than all, it looks royally down upon the landscape of which it is the King, and in token of its kingship wears a crown of golden light upon its forehead.”) The carbon process allowed Thomson to augment the print to emphasize even more the golden ribbon of light peering over the clouds and the outline of the hills beyond. The prickly dappling light on the leaves on the left matched well with the smooth, clean surface of the river. The atmosphere trailed off, the distance grew quietly faint. It must have been tempting to construe A Reach of the Min just as he

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3.70 John Thomson, A Reach of the Min, 1870–71, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the estate of Mrs Anthony Rives, 1973, ph26.68, courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, ma

had similar scenes before, that the place was like a Scottish loch and the waters reminded him of home. He could have begun reciting verse from Walter Scott or been swept off in reveries of “The Lady of the Lake” and Loch Katrine. But he did not. At the culmination of Views on the North River, he proposed the ideal citizen of the pastoral, but in Foochow and the River Min he offered instead another Chinese man who, like him, was gazing upon the same scene. Hands clasped on his knees, knees tucked up, a head turned outward, fully contained within himself, the man was an image of thoughtful repose. As tempting as it might have been to wax eloquently about home, the context within which the image was brought forth in Foochow and the River Min

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kept Thomson from it. He might have seen and longed for one thing, but there was no guarantee that the Chinese man saw it the same way. mere months after publishing Foochow and the River Min, Thomson put together the book for which he is best known, the monumental Illustrations of China and Its People. Published in four volumes, stuffed with 200 photographs, filled with long text, including a nearly ten-page narrative of a trip up the Yangtze, Illustrations of China is the exact opposite of the short, experimental Views on the North River and the almost exclusively photographic Foochow and the River Min. While the two earlier books had taken the trips up individual rivers as their leitmotifs, Illustrations of China proposed an exhaustive compendium of all of Thomson’s travels in the country, in and around Hong Kong, Macao, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, all the way to Beijing and the regions around the Great Wall. The territory covered by the book was enormous, more than four thousand miles by his estimate, and promised an encyclopedic account of China in words and images that was until then unprecedented in British publications. The letterpresses explained in sweeping detail how one should regard each picture and, by extension, how one should regard Qing China. Only a handful of photographs that had appeared in Foochow was used again in Illustrations of China, and absolutely none from Views. Gone, too, was the finicky attention to aesthetic value, and rather than print with carbon, Thomson turned to the collotype.134 The collotype had certain advantages. It was cheaper to make, had a tough surface, and could be reproduced in large numbers without too much difference between copies, and in that sense a photo-mechanical method more like an engraving or block print. But there were trade-offs. The images were far softer than carbons or albumens and lacked the kind of painterly quality that Thomson had teased in Foochow. The subtleties in the shadows faded away; so, too, did the careful transitions along the greyscale that had once facilitated the ambition to create unity in the landscape views. None of the photographs that I have singled out as especially emblematic in Foochow reappeared in Illustrations of China. Instead, Thomson chose pictures of the Fujianese. But how differently they appeared! Of the men in figure 3.67, he had much new to say: The worst class of beggars are the outlaws, who recognize no chief, and who live in holes and hovels about the burial grounds. I made the acquaintance of some of this class [and] found them dwelling, with many others, in a Chinese city of the dead, where the coffins containing bodies are deposited temporarily in mortuary houses or tombs til the geomanas

284 has been paid to find a suitable place of internment. Many of these coffins are, however, never moved again, and then they rot in their places where they were stowed. In the first of these charnel-houses which I came to, I fell in with a living tenant, an old man so worn and ghastly that I fancied he had forced himself free from the mouldy, dank coffin that lay in the darkest corner of the sepulchre. He was seated at the doorway moaning, and striving to fan into flame some withered branches which he had gathered to make a fire. Further on I found the subjects presented in my photograph. These occupied another tomb, and had established a begging firm under the control of a lusty chief, who had just concluded a hearty meal, and who is seen standing in front of the entrance enjoying a pipe. His ragged partners were each discussing a reeking mixture of broken scraps which they had collected during the day. They had now laid aside their daily counterfeits of disease and deformity, and were laughing merrily, forgetful of the cares and coffins surrounding them. The jester of the party was a man who made a good thing of it by acting the religious devotee, performing penance by driving an axe into his head; and when I saw this imposter he was seated astride the highest coffin, cracking jokes over the skull of its occupant.135

A mix of amateur anthropology and ethnology, a dose of gothic ghoulishness, suffused with prurient fantasy, loaded with Victorian moxie, and stuffed, too, with no small helping of gibberish, the description was in keeping with many others in the book. It pronounced about the Chinese urban working classes as a backwards and mostly bedraggled people, hardly the moderns that he knew actually made up the treaty ports, and certainly nothing like the rustic farmer he once imagined living up the North or the Chinese man gazing into the Min. But in truth, such a description should not be too surprising. Thomson quickly learned that his photographs operated best when they fit the needs of an empire bent on dominating China; and he also understood that his pictures had a much better chance of becoming a source of expertise if he lay aside all the concern with aesthetic invention and turned instead to pseudoethnological illustration. That’s to say, in London, on the threshold of his future, Thomson had quickly found his footing, learned how to distinguish his work from others, and understood how to turn his treasury of photographs to profit. The experience of coming face to face with ordinary ethnic Chinese and understanding their own aspirations during a complex moment of encounter was not something easily reckoned; but for a time, as this chapter has been arguing, they could not be simply dismissed. What was, after all, the lesson from Hong Kong and upriver? The Chinese were not passive victims or idle witnesses to Western ambition but profoundly active participants in it. Hong Kong’s emergence as a boomtown was both

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the cause and effect of a widespread migration among not only foreigners but also Chinese willing to take a chance. The kinds of migrants who appeared could never be homogenized, continually kept insisting on their differences from each other, and tried to use those differences to their gain. The photographers produced a marketplace full of ingenuity and cross-pollination between visual cultures. If Westerners thought they had transplanted a pictorial tradition to which the Chinese assimilated or, as Thomson told in his jibes at A-hung, adapted incompletely and in cockeyed fashion, they were trying to downplay the obvious; the Chinese were not mere copyists. Thomson’s resorting to the Scottish pastoral and its aesthetic requirements came about partly in response to the suspicion that the Chinese were doing something inventive with their pictures. Even opium, which represented to missionaries a guilty episode in British imperialism, also represented the adeptness and adaptations of the Chinese. It was no longer the illicit drug that snuck under the radar of polite conversation, hidden away in private dens, or cast off on flower boats. With the peasantry taking to it in huge numbers, it was a full participant in the economic, social, and cultural functioning of a country. Thomson wanted always to anathematize it, but even he recognized that there was more to it than met the moralist’s eye. While Views on the North River tried to put aside the Chinese view of things in favour of a stock attitude that the pastoral facilitated, Foochow and the River Min in its own peculiar, indirect, and photographic way registered it. But as Thomson found purchase as an imperial expert on the Chinese, pictures like Part of Lower Bridge and A Reach of the Min (figures 3.68 and 3.70) had absolutely no value to him. They were far too ambiguous and too aware of the photographer’s limitations in fathoming the Chinese outlook. Both Thomson and his audience needed more conviction in their assessment of the British presence in China. Given how Thomson would eventually fashion his future, the view offered in Foochow and the River Min remains all the more astonishing, if short-lived. The pictures told of a passing moment after the photographer’s return from China and before his full immersion in London, when he was still digesting the experience of living amidst others in a foreign land and before the conventional wisdom offered by the learned societies had taken firm hold. In that in-between time, photographs had the capacity to say something far more equivocal.

CONCLUSION

In 1866, a Scottish migrant who had been living in Canada for nearly thirty years returned to Newhaven for a visit. He travelled in the reverse direction of the path taken by Alexander Henderson some ten years earlier, first making his way to Montreal, then catching a small commuter to Quebec City, hopping a large steamer across the Atlantic to Glasgow, then the railroad to Waverley Station in Edinburgh, and finally a small coach for the quick ride downhill from New Town to Newhaven. I like to imagine that when he arrived after the long trip he stopped at a local tavern, perhaps the old Peacock Inn where D.O. Hill had once painted. He wanted to wet his whistle with a good Scottish ale – the Canadian versions still couldn’t match – and, as luck would have it, found William Ramsay nursing a drink. Though getting on in years, Ramsay might still have been out on the Forth during the designated seasons but in downtimes liked to rest his bones in the company of a tall pint. Feeling that the end for him was near, Ramsay had a load of stories to tell and a visitor eager to hear them.1 I fancy the two men around a table talking over the developments on the shoreline that the migrant had missed while he was away. Some landmarks remained, of course, and the skinny houses and tall outdoor stairways looked mostly the same, but the feel of the place was different, that much the migrant knew. What had happened? Ramsay would tell him of the challenges to the oyster industry, the spectacular rise of Granton and the agonizingly slow and painful descent of Newhaven, the international competition and global demand for herring and the pressures these things brought to the fisherfolk’s lifestyle, the many struggles the Society confronted in its efforts to accommodate the fiscal and legal realities of the modern marketplace, and the strenuous efforts by all the preses to keep the membership intact and its needs addressed. Perhaps he would explain that young men were leaving the village by the droves; there was no secure future for them working the shoals and beds. Some were taking to the factories in the north of England or heading west to Glasgow and the shipyards. Those who stayed were just getting by, eking out a living by mixing and matching a number of

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seasonal jobs along the shoreline and uphill in New Town. They always seemed to have their sights elsewhere, though. Who could blame them? Still others took the plunge and hopped steamers bound for Canada or, for the most adventurous, China. If the migrant had stayed in touch with his family during his time abroad, he might have gleaned something of these many developments from letters and maybe even a clipping or two, though listening to the fisherman recount them, he would have also understood that reading about them and living through them were entirely different things. He could see the effects on the village, where at the centre of town, a block from the shoreline, the old fish market still stood but was becoming increasingly haggard. The vats once used to boil whale blubber were mostly unused, and while the villagers were happy to be rid of the awful stench, they sorely missed the shillings that the boiling season brought. Stepping outside the Inn, he could see the Leith docks off to the east with its busy berths and Granton off to the west with its long pier and warehouses, and he might have wondered how Newhaven was fitting in. Like a prodigal son, the migrant called himself a son of a fisherman coming home to see “dear Old Scotland.”2 The people of Newhaven were his kin. In that sense, the homecoming would be a chance to reconnect with the village and people he’d left behind long before, when he ventured across the ocean to find his own fortune, and to discover how, half a lifetime later, they had fared. Maybe, too, after a number of pints, the migrant would have learned of the two Edinburgh photographers who had come down from Calton Hill to take pictures of some of the village’s inhabitants, and how William Ramsay, Alexander Rutherford, John Liston, and others stood before the odd box-like contraption – uncomfortably at attention for what still, twenty years later, seemed like hours. They had braces wrapped around their necks to keep them frozen and other strange prosthetics to wear. They had to take this pose and that, the women had to hold this basket and that creel, hold them again in another way, and then another. Not much of it made sense to any of the sitters, but the Edinburgh men had been well dressed and friendly and they had paid well. The younger and quieter of the two had never returned, and the fishermen never found out what became of their efforts, this calotype thing. Someone said they had heard of pictures in a large book, but none of the villagers knew anything directly about that. Besides, the likenesses had little to do with their lives. They were for someone else. Alas, we know virtually nothing of the circumstances surrounding the migrant’s visit home, and the idea of his meeting Ramsay and hearing the fisherman’s stories is a reverie. We do know, however, that another image of Newhaven stuck in his mind’s

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eye, and the visit home was a chance not to discover recent history but re-establish another one. He wrote about what he saw. All of it will sound familiar: “In dress, in language, and in physical development the men and women of Newhaven appear as a distinct race from the rest of Scotchmen; and although they are in daily communication with the Capital, distant only about three miles, yet the constantly varying of Fashions in dress or manners of the Edinburgh ladies makes no difference whatever with the women of Newhaven; there they are, dressed just as were their great, great, great grand-mothers, one hundred and fifty years since.”3 He wrote about the men’s long boots and canvas trousers, the women’s piles of petticoats and aprons, the men’s industriousness and skill at sea, the women’s regular trips to the Edinburgh markets where they made a picturesque scene, the men’s prodigious drinking during their tavern times, the women’s energetic street call for oysters and haddock, and of course their peculiar accents, relentless haggling, and rough speech. They “abused each other,” was how he described their interactions in the village, “until I thought they had exhausted the whole vocabulary of Billingsgate.”4 They were, after all, an authentic rural folk surviving in all their unchanged and unvarnished rustic charm in a modern world. In such an account, it’s sometimes hard to fathom fact from fiction and observation from wish fulfillment, though given the history we have traced in this book, we might be inclined toward seeing the imaginary end of things. I have tried to show the extraordinary durability and utility of the features associated with a certain kind of Scottishness – pastoral, folk, and resolutely pre-modern – and how these kept cropping up among Lowland Scots as they tried to find their places within the scope of British imperialism. The prodigal son, who never identified himself, was writing not for the fisherfolk or even those fashionable ladies in Edinburgh but rather for people like him, Scottish immigrants in Canada. The following year, after returning to Upper Canada, he published a small pamphlet recounting his visit home. The pamphlet was published in Woodstock, a growing town in Ontario, full of immigrants from Scotland and England and loyalist to the core. The Scots who had settled there relished images of home, he knew, and he most certainly understood what his friends and fellow migrants required. In Canada, there was room for advancement for immigrants, he wrote, and the opportunities to start fresh were “doing so much for the moral and intellectual improvement of our countrymen.”5 The empire gave them a second chance. What they needed from his pamphlet was some anchor to a familiar past, the better to “remember” their roots and also measure just how far they had come.

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Conclusion

Nearly all the photographers in this book had at one time or another invoked aspects of the Scottish pastoral and tried them on for size in their camerawork. As a conceptual framework and an emblem of nationalism, this sort of Scottishness came in handy and had its social and political uses, that much is clear. Among other things, it helped grease global flows. We might now also be in a position to say that it facilitated an ideal photographic identity – white and male, though of course never admitted as such – whose many privileges were put to the test at almost every turn. By mid-century, in the decades after Lowland Scots had effected a new rapport with England, it was also partly internalized and instinctive, no matter how artificial, manufactured, and eye-winking it had first been. In spite of everything, even contorted ideologies want to naturalize the representations related to them, to make them seem like they are hardly contested or disputable but simply reflect the way things are or ought to be in the world “out there.” For many, the camera was the instrument par excellence for the task; its status as a maker of documents gave its users and viewers all kinds of confidence in concocting the real. Of course representations like these are never fully comprehensive, and they must work hard at cancelling or suppressing alternatives. The workings of ideology are never complete but a continual process, and the internalization of its basic forms is piecemeal and imperfect. They function best – most invisibly – in a docile or passive setting, which it hardly needs saying parts of the empire were most certainly not. They therefore ran aground when the sheer force of the encounters between different peoples made the framework, no matter how familiar and usable, seem ill fitting and inadequate. Perhaps, now, that earlier phrase about the photographers’ strategies being laid “a little more threadbare” will make more vivid sense. The remarkable aspect of the photographers’ response was not to be paralyzed by the loss of a reassuring set of habits but, during moments of unsettledness, to face difference and uncertainty a little more squarely than was customary. The people and places on the other side of the lens were insistent in their uniqueness and struggle – that much was amply clear to anyone with a beating heart. They had an obdurate reality that did not conform to the fancies imposed on them. The photographers answered in various ways: building pause, awkwardness, separateness, or questioning into their projects, or by allowing indecision and open-endedness rule the day. These kinds of answers took mettle, some honesty, a comfort with irresolution, and acts of imagination with a machine that was still something of a laboratory unto itself. Early photography was, it turns out, grandly experimental in all kinds of ways. However,

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the achievements were fleeting and, given the circumstances within which they arose, very hard to sustain. Uncertainty and imperialism rarely go hand in hand for very long. The flickering quickly passed. Unionism beckoned, Confederation promised a new beginning, the learned societies offered distinction. The needs and views of others would be pushed aside in favour of opportunity. The photographers made their choices – in the end, it’s hard to rebuke them – and followed suit. But there were moments – this book has tried to identify them – when the face-to-face meetings on the migrant trail put familiarity and pattern in a limbo full of unease. The encounters between different peoples held up the images of a homespun nationalism for inspection and turned them into mirages. It was only then that another kind of dreaming might have begun. We are still waiting for its arrival.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The seeds for this book came from a number of different places, but one still stands out to me. I was in the Scottish borderlands trying to photograph the grand ruins at Jedburgh Abbey and doing a pretty awful job of it. At one point I found myself thinking about the pictures that Fox Talbot had made of nearby Melrose Abbey during his famous trip to Scotland in 1844. Would it be helpful to apply some of his strategies at Melrose to Jedburgh, I wondered? To what end? What was Fox Talbot, a visitor like me, looking for – about modern Scotland, or Walter Scott, or the remains of a Scottish past – that encouraged him to handle his little machine in the way that he did? What began as a vague set of questions in the borderland dovetailed over the years with others, concerning migrations, the global origins of photography, the impact of nationalisms and empires on the sensibilities of travellers (including me), the simple challenges of picturing people and places whose differences can seem stark, and more. At times, it seemed like a boiling stew of interests that took on a blended flavour only in the occasional tasting. Trying to think through their blending and trying also to think about them in an art historical way has taken me to places far and wide. Those adventures always brought treasures, not to mention how their distances from home made me appreciate even more the enormous journeys undertaken by some of the individuals studied in this book. Along the way, I have been helped by many good people. They shared their wisdom, showed me their pictures and archives, swapped opinions, answered all sorts of obscure questions, pointed me to other people whose expertise I learned from, sent me eye-popping images and yet more archival nuggets, cheerfully gave advice, and so much more. I especially want to thank Briony Carlin at the Victoria and Albert Museum; Roy Flukinger at the Ransom Center of the University of Texas; Graham Hogg at the Scottish National Library; Sarah Kennel at the Peabody Essex Museum; Annie Lyden at the Scottish National Galleries; Heather McNabb and Hélène Samson at the McCord Museum; and Jim Mizerski in Phnom Penh. For their help with the reproductions of the paintings and photographs, I want

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to thank Emily Antler, Anne-Frédérique Beaulieu, Terry Bennett, Jeff Cody, Marcus De Chevrieux, Lia De Ray, Lina Doyon, Peter Findlay, James Gehrt, Laura Lloberas, Heather McNabb, Karen O’Brien, Emily Park, Gillian Poulter, Nicola Russell, Agata Rutkowska, Tracey Schuster, Craig Statham, Nicolas Tyack, Alan Walker, Gordon Wilkins, and Hilary Wong. Luke Gartlan gave me really good suggestions about some of the secondary literature related to Chinese photography, from which I learned a lot. Gordon Wilkins, then at the Peabody Essex, remarked in passing to me about an aspect of Thomson’s Foochow album that proved crucial to my thinking about it, and I’m really grateful to him for it. Sandra Matthews asked me some years back to edit an issue of Trans Asia Photography Review devoted to “photography and diaspora,” and the experience of doing it, along with Sandra’s boundless enthusiasm and support, have been important spurs to keep mining the vein. At one of those surprising turning points in the research, Tanya Sheehan invited me to give a keynote lecture at a conference on “photography and migration,” for which I am thankful. I learned much from the many discussions at that conference at a pivotal moment in the book’s genesis. I was lucky enough to be a senior scholar at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny when many of the original ideas for this book began to gel. I want to thank John Davis for inviting me, and Jennifer Donnelly, Lucy Pike, and Veerle Thielemans, among many others, for being such gracious hosts. I happened to be there when the vote on Brexit took place, and no doubt something of the debates and reactions among the Giverny participants and the Vernon locals have had their effects on these pages. In particular, several long conversations with Huma Mulji about migration and security in Britain have stayed with me, including one during a rainy drive to Chartres in which getting lost actually triggered an odd insight into the condition of placelessness. Mount Holyoke College, where I have now taught for more than twenty years, has always been a very fine home to do art history, with smart colleagues, a collegial atmosphere, a supportive administration, a library staff that can excavate pretty much anything, and generous sabbatical and travel funds. The dean of faculty, Jon Western, has been a long-time friend and supporter, and in the case of this book, I’m especially grateful for the very considerate subvention he put toward it. Chris Pyle talked me through the varieties of sloops and yawls and kept me untangled from all their dizzying knots. Calvin Chen helped me track down Thomson’s whereabouts along the rivers (no mean feat), helped with the translation of some now-forgotten place names, and talked with me often about the varieties of Chinese migration. On our regular

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Acknowledgments

jogs and in between all of our gasping for air, Ken Tucker swapped ideas about globalization, nationalism, populism, and empire that have really sharpened my thinking. Kevin McCaffrey’s daily dose of absurdist humour about the present state of affairs has been more grounding for me than he may realize and more sustenance for one of the underlying convictions of this book. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, Jonathan Crago has been an enthusiastic supporter of the book from the moment he first read it as a manuscript; he and Kathleen Fraser have been expert shepherds of its progress. Eleanor Gasparik’s copy editing has been extraordinarily thoughtful. I also want to thank the three anonymous readers for the Press, who offered smart suggestions for nailing the argument.

NOTES

abbreviations for archival sources McCord McCord Museum, Montreal nls National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh nrs National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh introduction 1 The ad originally appeared in the Gazette on 25 February 1870 and is transcribed fully in Stanley G. Triggs, The Composite Photographs of William Notman (Montreal: McCord Museum, 1994), 11. Capitalization is in the original. 2 One of the McGill-Queen’s University Press readers for the manuscript was keen on the term “global flows,” seeing it as borrowing from Arjun Appadurai’s work on globalization, and asked me to say a few more words about how the overall project relates to his ideas. I must confess to not having his work directly in mind when I hatched the title. Indeed, Appadurai’s early essay and book from which “global flows” arose are now some thirty years old, and since then the term has entered into our daily speech in more varied ways.

Nonetheless, I understand the interest and can point to a number of overlapping concerns as a way to cue the reader to the book’s scope and matters. Among the more general overlaps, Appadurai’s wish to break down the old centre-periphery model of global relations is resurrected here; so, too, are his efforts to counter cultural homogenization (Americanization and its cognates, for example) with the dynamics and uneven play of local absorptions; and so, finally, is his interest in establishing the possibility of “imagined worlds” as an updated (global) version of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities.” Furthermore, although Appadurai’s proposals were formed out of the experience of late modernity and their translation into a much earlier moment of empire comes with hazards, one can still try on some of their more provocative views concerning the nation-state as it relates to globalization. First, Appadurai famously downplays the role of the state in the forces and drives of globalization, pointing instead to the complex relationships between and among five others aspects of global flows, his so-called “scapes” (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes,

296 financescapes, and ideoscapes). As many others have noted, downplaying the state can be taken only so far – just ask anyone at a border detention centre. But if for a moment we accept it as characterizing aspects of late modernity, the current project, concerned with photographic practices during the Victorian era, might be said to be an important historical juncture when Appadurai’s state only just began to lose its central authority – ironically, at the height of Britain’s power and reach – and other ephemeral dynamics and the disjunctures between and among them began to exert a structuring influence that would eventually govern global movements and even help topple an empire. Second, Appadurai’s model is heavily dependent on the sheer speed of exchange (of information, images, ideas, technologies, peoples) that is characteristic of the contemporary world. Only in such a fluid, high-speed ecosystem, its critics point out, can the boundaries between nation-states be seen to break down under the pressure of other globalizing forces. It hardly needs saying that the mid-nineteenth century had a much different rate and quality of exchange in all these areas. But one does not need to jettison the general claim to see its utility. As one example, the Victorians’ sense of global modernity included the perception that the workings of the world were speeding up, technologies were transforming the fabric of daily relations, and the far corners of the globe did not seem so far away as they had previously seemed; and individuals, including photographers, began to explore the possibilities implicit in those perceptions to fashion another sense of themselves in relation to “imag-

Notes to page 6 ined worlds.” Indeed, my sense of “Scottishness,” in all its weird articulations, depends on this. For Appadurai’s early ideas, see his “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 7 (1990), 295–310; and his Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), esp. 27–85. For a helpful critique of Appadurai’s formulations regarding the nation-state, see, among many others, Josiah Heyman and Howard Campbell, “The Anthropology of Global Flows: A Critical Reading of Appadurai’s ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,’” Anthropological Theory, vol. 9, no. 2 (2009), 131–48. 3 Deciphering how individuals and communities “answered back” has generated much good scholarly work and produced a variety of interpretive attitudes, to which this project tries to contribute. A helpful sampling might include Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (eds.), Photography’s Other Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2012); and Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). In the matter of “answering back” in East Asian photography, the general subject of my chapter 3, see the introduction in Luke Gartlan and Roberta Wue (eds.), Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan (London: Rout-

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4

5

6

7

ledge, 2017), 1–13. For “answering back” between and among communities, see Anthony W. Lee, A Shoemaker’s Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a NineteenthCentury Factory Town (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). In the field of British imperial photography, some of the recent work has been an effort to rethink earlier scholarship that had discounted the energy on the other side of the lens, so to speak. Yet it must be said that this earlier work was foundational and brought an enormous sophistication to what had been a simplistic view of travelling photographic practices. See especially James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and Visualisation of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). Graeme Morton, Unionist-Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland 1830–1860 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999). The study of the first three decades of Scottish photography is undergoing something of a renaissance. See especially Sara Stevenson and A.D. Morrison-Low, Scottish Photography: The First Thirty Years (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2015). John Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China, or, Ten Years’ Travel, Adventures, and Residence Abroad (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1875), 475. Alexander Henderson, “Notes on Dry Processes – New Action of Light – Handle for Glass Plates,” Photographic News, vol. 3, no. 59 (21 October 1859), 82–3.

Notes to pages 7–14 chapter one 1 Sara Stevenson, The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 136. Stevenson also cautions that the translation of the tableau’s experience into the photographic session must still have caused a strain for many; as David Wilkie, the Scottish painter whom Hill greatly admired and who himself was an admirer of the tableau, remarked, the performances were enchanting but also too “evanescent … the curtain drops in twenty seconds, the people being unable to remain for any longer period in one precise position.” As quoted in Allan Cunningham, Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1833), 216. 2 Alison D. Morrison-Low, “Sir David Brewster and Photography,” Review of Scottish Culture, vol. 4 (1988), 68. 3 There is debate about the founding date of the club. Roddy Simpson suggests 1843; see his The Photography of Victorian Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 48. The National Library of Scotland, which owns one of the two surviving club albums, offers the possibility of 1842 in its on-site pamphlet, “The Edinburgh Calotype Club.” 4 “A Reminiscence of the Calotype Club,” British Journal of Photography, vol. 21 (1874), 385. 5 To modern readers, a yawl might conjure a different kind of boat than those pictured in Hill and Adamson photographs, usually larger and longer, with two masts, the second much shorter than the first and mounted aft of the rudderpost. In today’s normal description, the Newhaven boats

298 would be instead one-masted sloops with unstayed masts and lugsails or dipping lugsails. The archives and literature refer to the small boats by a number of names, especially “yawl” and “cobble” (Robert Louis Stevenson’s preferred name) and occasionally “yoal” or “yole” (though these denote more properly the kind of fishing boat in Shetland). The larger boats are usually called “fifies” or sometimes “open fifies.” I follow these conventions. 6 Graham Smith points also to the genre painting origins of this photograph’s bonhomie. See his “Edinburgh Ale by David Hill and Robert Adamson,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, vol. 2, no. 3 (1983), 14–16. 7 For example, the photograph appears as plate 49 in one of the albums (unnamed) held by the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh; as plate 77 in the album presented by Theodore Martin now held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in which it is referred to as “Fishermen Ashore”; as plate 79 in the privately held Bicknell Album; and as plate 215, once again called “Fishermen Ashore,” in the three-volume album held by the National Portrait Gallery in London. There are many loose original prints in various collections. I have not encountered an album in which figure 1.3 appears. 8 The discussion of Newhaven’s varied economy is pieced together from a variety of sources, some more reliable than others: Mrs G. Cupples (Ann Jane Dunn Douglas Cupples), Newhaven, Its Origins and History (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1888); John Russell, The Story of Leith (London and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson,

Notes to pages 15–26

9

10

11 12

13 14

1922); Guy Christie, Harbours of the Forth (London: Christopher Johnson, 1955); James Scott Marshall, The Life and Times of Leith (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986); and the unfootnoted but generally excellent Tom McGowran, Newhaven-on-Forth, Port of Grace (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985). Other sources for the Forth’s fishing, rail, and other industries follow in the notes. On the ferries, see McGowran, Newhaven-on-Forth, 116; and also Ian Brodie, Steamers of the Forth, vol. 1 (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1976). James Walker, Port of Edinburgh, Report on its Improvement, Addressed to Messrs. Gibson and Home, Agents to His Grace the Duke of Buccleuch (London: Iobtson and Palmer, 1835), 8. Report by the Sub-Committee Appointed by the General Meeting of the Several Committees of the Counties of Scotland Chiefly Interested in Furthering the Improvement of the Communication Across the Frith [sic] of Forth (Edinburgh: Balfour, 1827), 10. Concerning the title of the report, I alert the reader to the odd spelling of the “firth” as “frith,” an Old English word meaning “peace,” “security,” or “sanctuary.” It was a common alternate spelling before 1850. I do not signal it in any further references. McGowran, Newhaven-on-Forth, 169. Robin M. Black (ed.), Society of Free Fishermen of Newhaven: A Short History Compiled from Records Made by James Wilson (Edinburgh: Society of Free Fishermen, 1951), 52. McGowran, Newhaven-on-Forth, 41. On the developments in the modern fishing industry, see Malcolm Gray, The Fishing Industries of Scotland, 1790–1914

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15

16

17 18 19

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). On the demand for herring and the Continental markets, see especially 58–79; and also Gray, “Organisation and Growth in the East Coast Herring Fishing,” in Peter L. Payne (ed.), Studies in Scottish Business History (Oxford: Routledge, 2006, orig. 1967), 187–216. George Bell, Blackfriars’ Wynd Analyzed (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1850), 8. While the German and Continental demands were new, the trade to the West Indies preceded the steamers by about a generation. See Gray, The Fishing Industries of Scotland, 50, and also the original investigation, Report from the Committee on the Herring Fisheries (1798), nrs, gd9. Gray, The Fishing Industries of Scotland, 45–6. Charles Reade, Christie Johnstone (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), 173. There seemed no standard amount for the prepay, and I have found no particular contracts or correspondence concerning herring between curers and the Newhaven fishermen in the years surrounding Hill and Adamson’s photographic work. However, a related document, concerning oysters, may give some indication: “the price per barrel is to be with one shilling as earnest money each boat and one shilling as working the boat for each boat cargo and also payment is to be made twice weekly say Wednesday and Saturday and from the time of commencement until the month of May shall be the fishing season and that you shall find youself to take there [sic] oysters throughout the season at the most convenient place for the fisher-

Notes to pages 26–9 men.” See Society of Fishermen, letter to Mr Wilson, 20 February 1841, nrs, gd265/1/3. Ironically, what seemed like a favourable agreement to the fishermen, namely the twice-a-week guarantee of pay, ended up being a nuisance. One soon lamented that it was “impossible for me to be on the shore in time to make out the amount of pay.” See William Wilson, letter to unnamed, 5 March 1841, nrs, gd265/1/3. 20 David Bremer, The Industries of Scotland, Their Rise, Progress and Present Condition (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1869), 312–20. 21 McGowran, Newhaven-on-Forth, 27. 22 These statistics are found in “Oyster Ground Rent Receipt Book 1842–43,” nrs, gd265/12/3, no pagination but organized by month and year. I should note that the names of the many Newhaveners who appear in the archives are very similar, the result of intermarriages that were common in the village. As McGowran noted only half-humorously, “of a dozen fishermen standing on a street corner the probability was that half of them were John Carnies and the other half William Fluckers.” See his Newhaven-on-Forth, 67. In official records, the men (rarely are women mentioned) distinguished themselves by adding in parentheses the maiden names of their wives, for example Alexander Noble (Carnie) or Alexander (Carnie) Noble. This is often the way in which the fisherwives are identified in Hill and Adamson’s photographs. If the men were not married, they are referred to in the documents as “Alexander Rutherford, son of Adam Rutherford.” Or if their

300 fathers were dead, they are identified as “George Flucker, son of Esther,” one of the very few ways in which Newhaven women appear in the records. In our case, we are lucky in that there was only one William Ramsay and one Alexander Rutherford during the years of Hill and Adamson’s work. There had been another, much older Alexander Rutherford, but he died some time in the late 1830s; there had also been a William Liston Ramsey (not Ramsay), but he died in either 1839 or 1840. Of special interest apropos our discussion, “John Liston” is the only fisherman who also lists his wife, “Mary Thomson,” officially in any recorded entry. The best archival sources for the names and financial dealings of the fishermen are their society’s papers held at nrs, but see especially the “Oyster Ground Rent Receipt Book” listed above, and also “Debt Book Society of Free Fishermen,” nrs, gd265/10/5 and “New Ground Rent Book 1835–49,” nrs, gd265/12/2. I will have occasion to discuss other aspects of the fishermen’s economic lives and professional identities and ambitions in later portions of the chapter, distinguishing between boat owners and hired hands, for example, estimating profits and losses, counting members and tabulating their choices. I will try to refrain from overly footnoting, with the understanding that the conclusions are based on the materials in these various and many receipt, debt, and rent books. 23 Unknown writer, letter to Thomas Wilson, 2 March 1844, nrs, gd265/1/3. 24 John Anderson, letter to the Society of Free Fishermen, 21 June 1844, nrs, gd265/1/3.

Notes to pages 29–32 25 Henry Dempster, Address to the Fishermen of Leith, Newhaven, Musselburgh, Fisherrow, Cockenzie, and Prestonpans, Showing the Effects Railway Traffic in Fish from the Eastward Will Have on these Ports, to which are Prefixed Communications and Reasonings on the Subject of Deep-Sea Fishing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Printing Company, 1846), 4. 26 Dempster, Address to the Fishermen, 3. 27 The Dutch and Flemish name for a herring boat was a “buss” and did not necessarily denote size (though they were frequently very large). The first busses were probably built in the fifteenth century and, ironically, at the time of Dempster’s warnings were beginning to be phased out, the last Dutch one apparently built in Vlaardingen in southern Holland in 1841. For a general discussion of the busses and also the organization of aggressive Dutch fishing, see Richard W. Unger, Dutch Shipbuilding Before 1800: Ships and Guilds (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1978). 28 Henry Dempster, The Decked-Welled Fishing Boat and Fisheries and Fish Market Reform: Being Dialogues on these Important Subjects with Full Information on the Oyster Question (Glasgow: Aird and Coghill, 1868), 123. 29 The Society secretary between 1833 and 1848 was Durham Liston. He seems to have led a triple-life as fisherman, grocer, and booze dealer, quite naturally, we might imagine, often freely taking advantage of the contacts offered by one or the others as they aided him. See, for example, Daniel Fisher, letter to Durham Liston, 30 October 1840, where he is called a “grocer”;

301

30 31

32

33

34 35

36

37

D.T. Allsten, letter to Durham Liston, 26 October 1841, where he is called a “spirit dealer”; and Robert Waddle, letter to Durham Liston, 20 May 1841, where he is called on to represent the fishermen, all nrs, gd265/1/3. McGowran, Newhaven-on-Forth, 219. Malcolm Gray, “Scottish Emigration: The Social Impact of Agrarian Change in the Rural Lowlands, 1775–1875,” in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (eds.), Perspectives in American History, vol. 7 (1973), 95–174. For wider discussions on changes for labour within the agricultural lowlands, a large and growing topic, see also T.M. Devine (ed.), Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1770–1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1984). John Sinclair, The Statistical Account of Scotland, Drawn up from the Communications of the Different Parishes, vol. 16 (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1795), 17–20. Robert and William Chambers, The Gazetteer of Scotland, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Thomas Ireland, Junior, 1832), 812–13. “The Edinburgh Fishwomen,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, vols. 5–6 (1837), 258. John Kay and Hugh Paton, A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings by the Late John Kay, with Biographical Sketches and Illustrative Anecdotes, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Hugh Paton, 1837–38), 338–40. Elizabeth Rigby (Lady Eastlake), “August 12,” Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, with Facsimiles of her Drawings and a Portrait, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1895), 92. Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom, Journal, 3 September 1842, Royal Archives, Windsor.

Notes to pages 32–44 38 On Kay, see Sheila Szatkowski, Capital Caricatures: A Selection of Etchings by John Kay (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2007). 39 On Geikie, see Elizabeth Bredberg, “Walter Geikie: The Life, Schooling, and Work of a Deaf Artist at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” Disability and Society, vol. 10 (1995), 21–38, and Duncan MacMillan, Walter Geikie (1795–1837): Scottish Life and Character (Edinburgh: Talbot Rice Center, 1984). 40 Duncan Forbes, “‘Dodging and Watching the Natural Incidents of Peasantry’: Genre Painting in Scotland 1780–1830,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 23 (2000), 89. See also Helen Scott, “Walter Geikie (1795–1837): An Artist of Character,” Newsletter of the Scottish Society for Art History, no. 44 (2013–14), 12–13. 41 See Julia Lloyd Williams, et al., Dutch Art and Scotland: A Reflection of Taste (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1992); and Harry T. Mount, “The Reception of Dutch Genre Painting in England, 1695–1829,” PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 1991. 42 Walter Geikie, Etchings, Illustrative of Scottish Character and Scenery, Executed after His Own Designs, edited and with biographical introduction by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, and Company, 1841). 43 Paton, A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings by the Late John Kay, 340. 44 Dick Lauder, “The Fish Are Dear Eneugh for Us the Day,” in Geikie, Etchings, Illustrative of Scottish Character and Scenery, no pagination. I take this passage from the 1885 edition, published in Edinburgh by

302 William Paterson, which includes additional plates and letterpress. 45 Dick Lauder, “Fishwife Smoking,” in Geikie, Etchings, Illustrative of Scottish Character and Scenery (1885 edition), no pagination. 46 Thanks to the appearance of the penny post, the ability to correspond so frequently has been named as one of the key aspects of St Andrew’s first flowering of photography. The town was otherwise outside the mainstream of Scottish cultural life. See Alison D. Morrison-Low, “Brewster, Talbot and the Adamsons: The Arrival of Photography in St Andrews,” History of Photography, vol. 25, no. 2 (2001), 132. 47 Alison D. Morrison-Low, “Dr. John and Robert Adamson: An Early Partnership in Scottish Photography,” The Photographic Collector, vol. 2, no. 2 (1983), 201. This reference also for the transcription of the obituarist’s quote. See also other important essays by Morrison-Low for a vivid picture of the early reception and experiments with the calotype among the Brewster circle in St Andrews: “Sir David Brewster and Photography,” cited above; “Dr John Adamson and Thomas Rodger: Amateur and Professional Photography in Nineteenth-Century St Andrews,” in Julie Lawson, Ray McKenzie, and A.D. Morrison-Low (eds.), Photography 1900: The Edinburgh Symposium, Proceedings of the Conference of the European Society for the History of Photography (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 1994), 18–37; and “Brewster, Talbot and the Adamsons,” 130–41. See also Graham Smith, Disciples of Light: Photographs in the Brewster Album

Notes to pages 44–6

48

49

50

51 52

(Malibu: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1990), 27–48. David Brewster, letter to William Henry Fox Talbot, 22 October 1842, National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, 1937–4912, document 4628. On Adamson surpassing Talbot (a matter of aesthetic judgment), see comments by Weston Naef in the roundtable discussion in Anne M. Lyden, In Focus: Hill and Adamson (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), esp. 113–14. On Hill’s early life and career, see Stevenson, The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill, 5–10; and David Bruce, Sun Pictures: The Hill-Adamson Calotypes (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 19–20. Little is known of Adamson’s early life. What sketchy details are known are mostly glossed from a much later report, many years after his death, by a friend of a friend of Hill’s: John M. Gray, “Robert Adamson,” Calotypes by D.O. Hill and R. Adamson Illustrating an Early Stage in the Development of Photography Selected from His Collection by Andrew Elliot (Edinburgh, 1928), 11. See also Stevenson, The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill, 10–13. On the daguerreotype’s presence in Edinburgh, see also Alison D. Morrison-Low, “Photography in Edinburgh in 1839: The Royal Scottish Society of Arts, Andrew Fyfe and Mungo Ponton,” Scottish Photography Bulletin, no. 2 (1990), 26–35. Stevenson, The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill, 22. See also Ralph L. Harley Jr, “The Partnership Motive of D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson,” History of Photography, vol. 10, no. 4 (1986), 303–12.

303 53 David Brewster, letter to William Henry Fox Talbot, 3 July 1843, National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, 1937–4926, document 4839. 54 On the chronology, see Sara Stevenson, Hill and Adamson’s Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1991), 12. The book was advertised as part of a plan to publish six related books, whose other titles are: Highland Character and Costume, The Architectural Structures of Edinburgh, The Architectural Structures of Glasgow, Old Castles and Abbeys in Scotland, and Portraits of Distinguished Scotchmen. They were to be sold for 5 guineas each, equivalent to about £200 today. 55 See Graham Smith, “John Adamson, Sanitary Reform and the St Andrews Fishing Community,” History of Photography, vol. 25, no. 2 (2001), 180–9; and Smith, Disciples of Light, esp. 53–4. 56 With few exceptions, Hill and Adamson’s photographs of the fisherfolk are undated, and setting them in chronological order is mostly a matter of educated guesswork. Of the photograph of the pilot, see Sara Stevenson, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson: Catalogue of Their Calotypes Taken between 1843 and 1847 in the Collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1981), 13. Stevenson also reports in The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill (p. 24) that Fox Talbot had seen an early picture of a “Pilots family” in 1843–44, and I suspect that photograph is Newhaven 53, Newhaven 54, or Newhaven 55, as they are identified in the catalogue. 57 The suggestion of “motion” has led some

Notes to pages 46–61

58

59

60

61

to view the photograph and a companion work from the same series as pre-filmic. See Ralph L. Harley Jr, “An Early Picture Narrative by D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson,” in Kathleen Collins (ed.), Shadow and Substance: Essays on the History of Photography (Troy: The Amorphouse Institute, 1990), 23–7. Stevenson, The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth, 24. The phrase actually appeared twice. See also Sara Stevenson, “The Scottishness of Scottish Photography: Discoveries and Exploration,” in Calum Colvin, et al., Revisions: Zeitgenössische Fotografie aus Schottland (Munich: Nazraeli Press, 1996), 88. Graeme Morton, Unionist-Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland 1830–1860 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999). On George IV’s visit, see John Prebble, The King’s Jaunt: George IV in Scotland, August 1822, “One and Twenty Daft Days” (London: Collins, 1988). Of many studies concerned with Scott and others as nation-forming authorities and also their enormous literary prominence, see Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Andrew Noble, “James Boswell: Scotland’s Prodigal Son,” in T.M. Devine (ed.), Improvement and Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1989), 28–9. So much of contemporary scholarship’s to-ing and fro-ing about these Scottish subjects’ relationship to actual politics can be traced back to the key work, Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (eds.), The

304 Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 15–42. 62 On these claims and defences, see especially Forbes, “‘Dodging and Watching the Natural Incidents of Peasantry,’” 81–94. There are many studies devoted to the construction of a contorted bourgeois expression through landscape and genre paintings in Britain. I return frequently to John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1740–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 63 D.O. Hill, The Land of Burns: A Series of Landscapes and Portraits, Illustrative of the Life and Writings of the Scottish Poet (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1840). I do not raise landscape paintings’ relationship to genre painting here, but it is a subject equally important for the establishment of the new pastoralism in Scotland. For a general discussion of the attitude, see Andrew Blaikie, The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 136–72. For photography only slightly later than Hill and Adamson, see C. Withers, “Picturing Highland Landscapes: George Washington Wilson and the Photography of the Scottish Highlands,” Landscape Research, vol. 19, no. 2 (1994), 68–79. 64 On the fraught symbols on Calton Hill, see Robert Crawford, On Glasgow and

Notes to pages 61–7

65

66

67 68

69

70 71

72 73

74

Edinburgh (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 133–8. Some readers will hear Frantz Fanon’s famous phrase in my description: “Colonisation is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.” See his important essay “On National Culture,” The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004, orig. 1963), 145–80. Elizabeth Rigby (Lady Eastlake), “August 12,” Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, 92. Fifeshire Journal, 11 September 1851. George Bell, Day and Night in the Wynds of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1849), 12, 15–16. Emphasis in original. As quoted in Colin Kidd, “Race, Empire, and the Limits of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Nationhood,” The Historical Journal, vol. 46, no. 4 (2003), 875. “The Edinburgh Fishwomen,” 258. D.O. Hill, letter to David Roberts, 7 February 1846, nls, Acc.7723. The painting in question is Wilkie’s Distraining for Rent (1815), exhibited in Edinburgh in 1846. Gibson Morris, letter to Durham Liston, 16 September 1843, nrs, gd265/1/3. William Lorimer, Account Book, Entry for 20 September 1843, nrs, gd265/5/1. The new offer was for fifty licences (meaning fifty different boats) for £150. For comparison, the men had paid £90 for the same season in 1838. William Lorimer, Account Book, Entry for 17 July 1843, nrs, gd265/5/1.

305 75 Mingpenny Dalglish, letter to Society of Fishermen, 13 October 1841, nrs, gd265/1/3. 76 Entry for 25 March 1843, “Oyster Ground Rent Receipt Book 1842–43,” nrs, gd265/12/3. 77 William Lorimer, letter to the preses and boxmaster, 12 May 1849, nrs, gd265/1/3. 78 National Fire Insurance Company, policy to John Johnstone as preses of the Society of Free Fishermen of Newhaven, 1843, nrs, gd265/5/1. 79 Gibson Morris, letter to Durham Liston, 5 March 1845, nrs, gd265/1/3. 80 Memorial for the Fishermen of Newhaven, 6 September 1847, nrs, gd265/3/1. 81 Rules and Regulations of the Society of Free Fishermen of Newhaven (Leith: John Hyne, 1845), 5, 7, nrs, fs1/17/171. 82 For example, City Chamberlain’s Office, Edinburgh, letter to treasurer of Free Fishermen, 2 October 1849, nrs, gd265/1/3. 83 Income and Expenditure of The Newhaven Free Fishermen’s Society, 1853, nrs, gd265/6/1. 84 The letters from widows were already pouring in. The society was also unable to pay for funerals, as previously had been its policy. See James Fyffe, letter to Thomas Wilson, 24 April 1849, nrs, gd265/1/3. 85 See Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “When Did Globalisation Begin?” European Review of Economic History, vol. 6, no. 1 (2002), 23–50. 86 The subject of “Scottish” absorption is widely and hotly debated. Hugh TrevorRoper’s view (n61) has been influential, but see also Murray Pittock, “Plaiding the Invention of Scotland,” in Ian Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture,

Notes to pages 68–83

87

88

89 90

91

92 93

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History and Myth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 32–47. Fairbairn never seems to have made it into the final painting, or at least Hill never acknowledged him as one of the more than four hundred portraits that appear in it. There are several candidates for him in the painting, though none securely identified. See D.O. Hill, The Disruption of the Church of Scotland: An Historical Picture Containing Four Hundred and Fifty Portraits Representing the Signing of the Deed of Demission by the Ministers of the First General Assembly of the Free Church (Edinburgh: Schenck and McFarlane, 1866). The number of illiterate men applying for licences sometimes became an issue. See John Shin, letter to Society, 2 March 1848, nrs, gd265/1/3. “New Ground Rent Book 1835–49,” nrs, gd265/12/2. On paying the fishermen, see the suggestion by Stevenson in Lyden, In Focus: Hill and Adamson, 132. Anne M. Lyden, A Perfect Chemistry: Photographs by Hill and Adamson (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2017), 84. D.O. Hill, letter to David Roberts, 14 March 1845, nls, Acc.7723. The price named in David Brewster, “Photography,” North British Review, vol. 14 (1847), 479. There is no evidence that the photographers sold either this or any other album they put together. See also Stevenson’s judgment in Lyden, In Focus: Hill and Adamson, 118. The albums themselves have been much less frequently the objects of intensive study, but see Colin Ford, An Early

306 Victorian Album: The Photographic Masterpieces (1843–1847) of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), and Larry J. Schaaf, The Bicknell Album: A Series of Calotypes by D.O. Hill, R.S.A. and Robert Adamson (New York: Hans P. Kraus Jr, 2008). 96 Sara Stevenson, “Drawing the Crowd: An Approach to Democracy in the Calotypes of D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson,” Scotlands, vol. 3, no. 2 (1996), 73–85. 97 D.O. Hill, letter to David Roberts, 2 January 1849, nls, Acc.7723/6. 98 D.O. Hill, letter to David Roberts, 14 July 1852, nls, Acc.7723/9. chapter two 1 For examples of Notman’s technical advice, see for directions on lighting, “Further Remarks on Light and Lighting,” The Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 3, no. 32 (August 1866), 229; for chemicals, “Editor’s Table,” The Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 3, no. 33 (September 1866), 288; and for fake snow and ice, “Our Picture,” The Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 4, no. 48 (December 1867), 398–9. 2 William Notman, Photography, Things You Ought to Know (Montreal: Notman, ca. 1867), unpaginated, McCord. This reference for the following quotes as well. 3 William Notman, “Ruminating,” ca. 1890, unpublished manuscript, McCord. 4 On the suggestion that Notman prepared the manuscript as a lecture for a “youth group,” see Stanley Triggs, William Notman: The Stamp of a Studio (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1985), 167n18. Triggs dates the lecture to around 1880; I suspect a later date.

Notes to pages 83–98 5 Montreal Gazette, 10 April 1889, 3. 6 Notman, “Ruminating,” unpaginated, but p. 3 by my count. 7 Ibid., 4–6. 8 On Notman’s early life, see Triggs, William Notman: The Stamp of a Studio, 15–21. 9 On the Paisley strikes and violence and British repression, see Tony Dickson and Tony Clarke, “Social Concern and Social Control in Nineteenth Century Scotland: Paisley 1841–1843,” Scottish Historical Review, vol. 65, no. 179 (April 1986), 48–60. 10 Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1880), 67. 11 A word about names: the designations Upper and Lower Canada refer to the regions roughly equivalent to present-day Ontario and Quebec. They were so named because the rivers ran from west to east, from the higher or upper regions to the lower. The names of the regions officially changed to Canada West and Canada East (and both fell under the official “Province of Canada”) upon the joining of the two in the Act of Union in 1840, changed back to Upper and Lower in 1849, and then changed again in the Confederation of 1867 to the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. I use the names interchangeably with the understanding that some officially did not exist at certain historical moments. 12 Notman’s and Henderson’s use of the calotype is known but their dabbling in the daguerreotype is more conjecture; there are no surviving works. However, there are references in the early literature that mention it, at least in the case of Notman. See Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin, vol. 12 (1881), 254. For Notman’s early adoption of the calotype, see Alice Notman, letter to her mother, 19 April 1857,

307 McCord. Henderson’s earliest print dates to 1858 and his earliest negative with a firm date is a whole plate from 1859. He toyed with dry plates, paper negatives, and stereographs around this time. On his dryplates and paper negatives, see Louise Guay, “Alexander Henderson, Photographer,” History of Photography, vol. 13, no. 1 (1989), 79–81. On the stereoviews, see “The Stereographic Exchange Club,” Photographic News, vol. 3, no. 53 (September 9, 1859), 12. 13 On the correspondence between Hill and Henderson’s family, see, for example, D.O. Hill, letter to John Elder, 23 July 1869, McCord. The Elders were Henderson’s in-laws and were involved with the Royal Scottish Academy when Hill was its secretary, the occasion for this and other letters. There is no direct evidence that Hill and Henderson had ever met, though there is much circumstantial evidence. On the Henderson-Elder family’s negotiations with Hill, see Harvey Elder, letter to John Elder, 12 November 1868; and Harvey Elder, letter to John Elder, 23 November 1868, McCord. Both letters reference “what has secretly taken place between Mr D.O. Hill and myself,” though the actual subject of the secret remains unknown. 14 The relationship between an aesthetic imagery, the Canadian frontier, and forms of possession has been the subject of much scholarly energy. For a helpful overview of some of the issues (though concerned primarily with the twentieth century), see the essays collected in John O’Brian and Peter White (eds.), Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2007). See also

Notes to pages 98–100

15 16

17

18

19

the efforts at a taxonomy of the imagery in Marylin J. McKay, Picturing the Land: Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500–1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). The use of the camera in the construction of Canadian identities has produced a variety of interpretations. See those collected in Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard (eds.), The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). Alice Notman, “Early Days in Canada,” unpublished manuscript, 1878, McCord. On the relationship between a heavily modernizing and industrializing economy and a generally high standard of living in Glasgow, on the one hand, and the extraordinarily high rates of poverty, fragility of livelihood, and emigration, on the other, see T.M. Devine, “The Paradox of Scottish Emigration,” in Devine (ed.), Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992), 1–15. The most detailed document is the original indictment: D. Mackenzie, “Indictment of William Notman Jr,” n.d., but probably September 1857, McCord. The most succinct description of the entire affair in the secondary literature is Gordon Dodds, Roger Hall, and Stanley Triggs, The World of William Notman (Boston: David Godine, 1993), 4. William Notman Senior, “Declaration to Archibald Smith, Advocate Sheriff, Substitute of Lanarkshire,” 24 June 1856, McCord. William Notman Senior, “Declaration to Archibald Smith,” 24 June 1856. The principals were Notman, his father, also named William, and the brothers, John and

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23 24

25

Robert. All four were agents of the manufactory. William Notman Senior, “Declaration to Archibald Smith, Advocate Sheriff Substitute of Lanarkshire,” 18 January 1857, McCord. Mackenzie, “Indictment of William Notman Jr.” On these charges, see Mackenzie, “Indictment of William Notman Jr,” and also a letter by an unknown author, simply signed “G.G.” and dated “July 22, 1857,” in which William Sr is also indicted, McCord. Dodds, Hall, and Triggs, The World of William Notman, 4. On Henderson’s early life, see Stanley Triggs, “Alexander Henderson: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photographer,” Archivaria, no. 5 (1977–78), 45–7. On the various holdings and value, see the documents contained in “Annual Income Statements, Estate of the late Thomas Henderson to His Children, 1852–1862.” On the schoolhouse, teacher’s salary, and other manorial responsibilities, see “Note of the Rental of Press and Annual Deductions Therefrom, 1855.” Henderson and the trustees occasionally sold the family’s shares in the Bank of Scotland, and from these transactions an approximate value can be established. For an example of these, see John Robertson, letter to Alexander Henderson, 11 July 1855. Correspondence and official declarations from the Inland Revenue Office provide a vivid picture of the value of investments. For an example, see “Inland Revenue Office, Edinburgh, Legal Duty on Residues of Personal Estates, March 7, 1862.” See also “Indenture Agreement Between Alexander

Notes to pages 101–4

26

27

28

29 30

Henderson and John Maitland and William Wood, Accountants (Edinburgh), January 20, 1855.” All these documents are held at McCord. “Letter of Agreement between Wm Notman Jr and Marling, Strachan, and Co., October 26, 1853,” McCord. See, for example, Polly Scott, letter to Alexander Henderson, 19 December 1894; G.W. Simpson, letter to Alexander Henderson, 5 February 1895; Elizabeth Menzies, letter to Alexander Henderson, 25 June 1897; and Elizabeth Menzies, letter to Alexander Henderson, 7 July 1897; all held at McCord. “Account for Preparing Marriage Contract, Alexander Henderson and Agnes Robertson, September 27, 1855,” McCord. The contract was revisited and augmented several times over the years as Henderson’s investments changed and matured. See, for example, John Robertson, AngloAmerican Land Mortgage and Agency Company (Edinburgh), letter to Alexander Henderson, 29 January 1895, McCord. Alexander Henderson, letter to John Elder, 11 January 1853, McCord. See, for example, Thomas Anderson (National Bank of Scotland), letter to Manager, British Bank of North America (Montreal), 17 October 1855; A. Mackenzie, Commercial Bank of Scotland (Edinburgh), letter to Charles Ross, Commercial Bank (Kingston), n.d. but probably 17 October 1855; Kenneth Mackenzie (Edinburgh), letter to John Hamilton (Toronto), 17 October 1855; and D. Grahame (Craig House, Edinburgh), letter to William Grahame (Toronto), 8 October 1855; all held at McCord.

309 31 The attitude was especially apparent in popular histories put forward by the journalist John Prebble, including his oftreprinted The Highland Clearances (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). See also the frequently reprinted James Hunter, The Making of the Crofting Community (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1976). For a good outline of the scholarly controversy, historical attitudes, and original documents associated with the Clearances, see Eric Richards, Debating the Highland Clearances (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 32 T.M. Devine, “Imperial Scotland,” in Devine (ed.), Scotland and the Union, 1707–2007 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 113. 33 John I. Little, Crofters and Habitants: Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township, 1848–1881 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). 34 Heather McNabb, “Butcher, Baker, Cabinetmaker? A View of Montreal’s Scottish Immigrant Community from 1835 to 1865,” in McNabb and Peter E. Rider (eds.), A Kingdom of the Mind: How the Scots Helped Make Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 242–59; and McNabb, “Montreal’s Scottish Community, 1835–65: A Preliminary Study,” MA thesis, Concordia University, 1999. For details of the ports of origin of Scots who immigrated to Lower Canada, see the appendices in Lucille H. Campey, Les Écossais: The Pioneer Scots of Lower Canada, 1763–1855 (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2006). 35 Malcolm Gray, “Scottish Emigration: The Social Impact of Agrarian Change in the

Notes to pages 104–11

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40

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42

43

Rural Lowlands, 1775–1875,” in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (eds.), Perspectives in American History, vol. 7 (1973), 95–174; and the essays collected in T.M. Devine (ed.), Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1770–1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1984). On immigrant Italians, Jews, and Lithuanians, see Devine, “Imperial Scotland,” 116. Andrew McIlwraith, in Andrew C. Holman and Robert B. Kristofferson (eds.), More of a Man: Diaries of a Scottish Craftsman in Mid-Nineteenth-Century North America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). Sarah Katherine Gibson, “‘In Quist of a Better Hame’: A Transatlantic Lowland Scottish Network in Lower Canada, 1800– 1850,” in Angela McCarthy (ed.), A Global Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities since the Eighteenth Century (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), 127–49. Cathy Newman, “Whose Moors Are They?” National Geographic, vol. 231, no. 5 (May 2017): 102. I.E.A. Dolby (ed.), The Journal of the Household Brigade for the Year 1864 (London: Clowes and Sons, 1864), 178. William Chambers, Things as They Are in America (London and Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1854), 63–4. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empire, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). McNabb, “Butcher, Baker, Cabinetmaker?” 243. The totals are offered from the 1861 census, the earliest such census that allows for finer distinctions.

310 44 Gerald J.J. Tulchinsky, The River Barons: Montreal Businessmen and the Growth of Industry and Transportation, 1837–53 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 45 On the neighbourhood, its residents, and its dream houses, see Donald McKay, The Square Mile: Merchant Princes of Montreal (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1987). 46 On the wards and their working-class character, see Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993). 47 Dennis Reid, Our Own Country Canada: Being an Account of the National Aspirations of the Principal Landscape Artists in Montreal and Toronto, 1860–1890 (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1979). 48 Napoléon Bourassa, “Quelques réflexions critiques à propos de l’Art Association de Montréal,” La Revue canadienne (1 March 1864), 171. 49 Hélène Samson, “Notman: A Visionary Photographer,” in Samson and Suzanne Sauvage (eds.), Notman: A Visionary Photographer (Montreal: McCord Museum 2016), 25. 50 “The New Art of Sun Painting,” Quebec Gazette, 15 April 1839, n.p.; and “Photogenic Drawing,” Colonial Pearl, 7 June 1839, 182. The earliest notice of Daguerre’s invention appeared in March in a Kingston paper. On this and also the early energy to develop camerawork among Scots in Canada, see Joan M. Schwartz, “Scottish Photography: A Canadian Perspective,” The PhotoHistorian, no. 178 (Spring 2017), 36–42. 51 A boon to any student of Notman’s works.

Notes to pages 111–22

52

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For a useful summary, see Nora Hague, “Notman’s Numbers,” in Samson and Sauvage (eds.), Notman: A Visionary Photographer, 224–9. On Notman’s various staff, see Triggs, The Stamp of a Studio; and Colleen Skidmore, “Women Workers in Notman’s Studio: ‘Young Ladies of the Printing Room,’” History of Photography, vol. 20, no. 2 (1996), 122–8. On the details of the fire, see William Notman, letter to Richard Woodwark, 15 August 1858, McCord. The operating rooms were first identified in Stanley Triggs, William Notman’s Studio: The Canadian Picture (Montreal: McCord Museum, 1992), 53–8. On the accumulation of props in his new studio, see Jana Bara, “Through the Frosty Lens: William Notman and His Studio Props, 1861–1876,” History of Photography, vol. 12, no. 1 (1988), 23–30. The details of the commission are not known. Robert G. Wilson speculates (rightly, I think) that Notman sought the job. See his “William Notman’s Stereo Perspective: The Victoria Bridge,” History of Photography, vol. 20, no. 2 (1996), 109. The chief engineer, James Hodges, does not mention photographs in his book devoted to the bridge’s construction but includes many in its pages. See his Construction of the Great Victoria Bridge in Canada (London: John Weale, 1860). A notable exception was William England of the London Stereoscopic Company who visited in 1859. On the photographer in North America, see Ian Jeffrey, An American Journey: The Photography of William England (Munich: Prestel, 1999). On the details of the incident, see Colleen

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Skidmore, “‘All That Is Interesting in the Canadas’: William Notman’s Maple Box Portfolio of Stereographic Views, 1860,” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 32, no. 4 (1998), 69–90. George Tudor Pemberton, letter to William Notman, 10 September 1860, National Archives of Canada. Alexander Henderson, “Testing the Purity of Wax,” Photographic News, vol. 2, no. 29 (25 March 1859), 35–6. “To Correspondents,” Photographic News, vol. 2, no. 28 (18 March 1859), 24. Alexander Henderson, “Notes on Dry Processes – New Action of Light – Handle for Glass Plates,” Photographic News, vol. 3, no. 59 (21 October 1859), 82–3. Ibid., 83. He might have thought the journals were for gentlemen amateurs, but by the 1860s there was a hodgepodge of sensibilities contributing to them, including those with industrial and entrepreneurial outlooks. See Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). Certainly Edwards’s general claim that a petite-bourgeois worldview began to organize the journals would most characterize contributions like those by Notman, not Henderson. For the qualities continuing to be ascribed to the amateurs, see Grace Seiberling, Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Triggs, “Alexander Henderson,” 47. Of his photographic tours, see “To Correspondents,” Photographic News, vol. 3, no. 57 (7 October 1859), 60. On the classes at McGill, see “McGill Class Ticket 1856–57,” McCord.

Notes to pages 122–30 67 Alexander Henderson, letter to John Elder, 6 June 1856, McCord. 68 The specific camera is unknown, but about this time Henderson mentions a “portable camera” with “six cells” that he pronounces “a very good one.” There are a number of candidates that would match the brief description, including (my guess) several made by George Hare, a manufacturer in London. See Henderson, “Notes on Dry Processes,” 82. 69 The key features of the British empire identified by Eric Hobsbawm in his The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 70 A not uncommon proposal. See, for example, Keith Robbins, Great Britain: Identity, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness since 1500 (London: Longman’s, 1998), esp. 213– 14. For a comparative North American colonial context, see Neil Davidson, The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 112–27. The most wideranging statement is Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). There are important qualifications, to which my discussion is indebted, in particular those offered by John M. Mackenzie. See especially his “Essay and Reflection: On Scotland and the Empire,” The International History Review, vol. 15, no. 4 (1993), 714–39; and his “Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 8 (1998), 215–31. 71 William Notman and Fennings Taylor, Portraits of British Americans, vol. 1 (Montreal: William Notman, 1865), 40. 72 Ibid., 4. 73 Ibid., 83, 88.

312 74 Ibid., 93, 108. 75 Ibid., i–ii. 76 On the St Andrew’s Society, see McNabb, “Montreal’s Scottish Community,” 68–89; and Catherine Bourbeau, “The St Andrew’s Society of Montreal: Philanthropy and Power,” in Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Hinson, and Graeme Morton (eds.), Ties of Bluid, Kin, and Countrie: Scottish Associational Culture in the Diaspora (Markham: Stewart Publishing, in association with the University of Guelph, 2009), 69–82. On the St George’s Society, see Gillian I. Leitch, “The Importance of Being English: English Ethnic Culture in Montreal, c. 1800–1864,” in Tanja Bueltmann, David T. Gleeson, and Donald M. MacRaild (eds.), Locating the English Diaspora, 1500–2010 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 100–17. For a more general discussion of Scottish associationalism, see Tanja Bueltmann, Clubbing Together: Ethnicity, Civility and Formal Sociability in the Scottish Diaspora to 1930 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). 77 On Notman’s conversion and other choices, see Lilly Koltun, “Not the World of William Notman,” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (1995), 125–33. 78 So named the Montreal Society of Artists. See Jean Trudel, “The Montreal Society of Artists, une galerie d’art contemporain à Montreal en 1847,” Journal of Canadian Art History, vol. 13, no. 1 (1990), 61–87. 79 The meager and stilted options were not unique to Montreal. See John R. Porter, “The Market for Paintings: Basic Needs versus Artistic Taste,” in Mario Béland (ed.), Painting in Quebec, 1820–1850 (Quebec: Musée du Quebec, 1992), 11–35.

Notes to pages 131–9 80 “The Fine Arts in Canada,” The ArtJournal (London), vol. 6 (1860), 208. This reference for the following quote as well. 81 Montreal Gazette, 12 May 1860, 3. 82 Bourassa, “Quelques réflexions critiques à propos de l’Art Association de Montréal,” 171. 83 On Krieghoff, see J. Russell Harper, Krieghoff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); and Dennis Reid, Krieghoff: Images of Canada (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1999); 84 Reid, Krieghoff, 51. 85 On Bourassa’s romans, see Andrea Cabajsky, “Historiographical Revision and Colonial Agency: Napoléon Bourassa’s Jacques et Marie,” in Jennifer Blair, et al. (eds.), Recalling Early Canada: Reading the Political in LIterary and Cultural Production (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005), 73–90. 86 Bourassa, “Quelques réflexions critiques à propos de l’Art Association de Montréal,” 171. 87 J. Russell Harper, Painting in Canada: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977, 2nd edition), 101. 88 There has been some debate about the location of the hunt and the identities of the men. See Reid, Krieghoff, 273n126. See also Reid’s discussion (pp. 77–8) where he names the men. 89 John M. MacKenzie, “The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine Stereotype in Late Victorian and Edwardian Times,” in J.A. Mangan and James Walvin (eds.), In Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987), 176–98; and

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MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Krieghoff ’s military patrons were recognized early on. See George Moore Fairchild, Gleanings from Quebec (Quebec: Frank Carrel, 1908), 70. Dennis Reid, “Cornelius Krieghoff: 1845– 1865,” in Elspeth Cameron (ed.), Canadian Culture: An Introductory Reader (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1997), 35. William Notman, Photographic Selections, vol. 2 (Montreal: William Notman, 1865). Winter in Laval Mountains is plate 45, Death of the Moose is plate 31, and Montreal and Reservoir from Mount Royal (he calls it Montreal with Victoria Bridge in the volume) is plate 17. In addition, he included Krieghoff ’s Tracking the Moose (plate 30). Henry Beaumont Small and John Taylor (eds.), Canadian Handbook and Tourist’s Guide (Montreal: M. Longmoore and Co., 1866). Krieghoff ’s paintings are Habitant – Berry Gatherer and The Squaw – Basket Maker. Notman’s include an alternate of his Natural Steps, Montmorency to the version I discuss (he spells it “Montmorenci” in the publication). The handbook went through several editions with variations of Notman’s photographs and reproductions of paintings. Reid, Our Own Country Canada, 68–72. Alexander Henderson, letter to Robert Bell, 6 November 1884, McCord. The estate was called Benmore and frequently came in for nearly equal gawking as given to the Colonel: complete with a “spacious piazza,” “pointers and setters”

Notes to pages 139–46 romping the environs, a real “English country gentleman’s homestead.” See Jules M. Livernois, Maples Leaves: Canadian History and Quebec Scenery, Third Series (Quebec: Hunter, Rose, and Co., 1865), 85–6. 97 So implies Joan M. Schwartz, “William Notman’s Hunting Photographs, 1866,” Archivist, no. 117 (1998), 26. 98 William Notman and Fennings Taylor, Portraits of British Americans, vol. 2 (Montreal: William Notman, 1867), 45. The entire entry on Rhodes spans pp. 39–50, from which the following quotes come. 99 What Rhodes thought of all this is another matter, though the few archival scraps connected to him would seem to suggest his own self-image was not too far removed from Notman’s portrayal of him as the mighty hunter. An article from the Quebec Daily Mercury of January 1864 includes a description of caribou hunting and is most likely a transcription of Rhodes’s own thoughts about the experience of being a hunter. It is worth quoting at length: “I followed an ‘old track,’ thinking it would lead me somewhere, probably where other reindeer might be, and after I had crossed one mountain and ascended another, I suddenly came upon other tracks which showed me I was in the vicinity of some females with very young ones. After getting safely to the leeward of the tracks I found the game very much at my mercy, as I had only to proceed cautiously and keep my eyes very actively employed. After advancing some distance I saw a deer lying down. Off with the cover of the rifle, a glance at the caps, shuffle out of the snow shoes, and the deer is counted

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as my own, as I had not been seen. On examining the ground again, I saw another deer alongside the former one, and, at a short distance, the head of a third. I consequently made arrangements to fire [and] shoot one [on] the ground, shoot another as it jumps up, shoot a third as it advances to its wounded comrades, then kill a fourth and a fifth as they, in their confusion, rush up to the dying deer. After reloading, I found four deer dead and one wounded. The dead deer were immediately beheaded, their bellies opened and the wounded deer followed. Two more shots soon brought him down. The next day I spent (having brought one of my men with me) in skinning and transporting the meat, which weighed about 700 lbs., to a neighboring lake, whence it could more conveniently be carried to Quebec.” Notman and Taylor transcribed portions of the Daily Mercury article in Portraits of British Americans. The most serious treatments of the series are by Schwartz, “William Notman’s Hunting Photographs,” 20–9, and Gillian Poulter, Becoming Native in a Foreign Land: Sport, Visual Culture and Identity in Montreal, 1840–85 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 65–115. Reid, Krieghoff, 94. Rhodes also posed for Krieghoff. Edward Wilson, The Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 3, no. 29 (May 1866), 129–30. This reference for all the extended captions of the series. “Our Picture” (see n1), 399. Poulter, Becoming Native in a Foreign Land, 104. Quebec Daily Mercury, 10 January 1866, 6.

Notes to pages 148–79 106 Notman and Taylor, Portraits of British Americans, vol. 2, 49. See also n98. 107 “Our Picture,” 399. 108 Quebec Daily Mercury, 10 January 1866, 6–7. 109 Poulter, Becoming Native in a Foreign Land, 103. 110 Livernois, Maples Leaves, 86. 111 The substitution was among the major differences between his so-called “Large Set” and “Small Set.” See the advertisement in Notman and Fennings, Portraits of British Americans, vol. 2, end matter. 112 There are at least fifteen surviving copies. The McCord Museum contains a copy with ten photographs, and the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa holds one with forty. They are the outliers to the other surviving books. I have found no two copies with the exact same choice and sequence of pictures. 113 Little, Crofters and Habitants, 45–73. 114 Ambrose Shea, address to House of Assembly, transcribed in The Newfoundlander, 2 March 1865. 115 On Notman’s various Canadian branches and his work at the centennial and the colleges, see Dodds, Hall, and Triggs, The World of William Notman, 23–33 and 39–47. 116 See the details outlined in a legal document called Precognition of Witnesses for Pursuers, Alexander Henderson and Others Against Henderson’s Marriage Contract Trustees (n.d., but probably 1898). The trustees shot back and called Henderson’s ambitions reckless and “hazardous.” See Appendix for Reclaimers, To Reclaiming Note for Alexander Henderson and Others Against Lord Pearson’s Interlocutor, 4 Janu-

315 ary 1900. Henderson continued to have many lucrative investments in Scotland, from which he drew handsome dividends. See, for example, A.W. Macpherson (of Edinburgh), telegram to Alexander Henderson, 19 May 1905, which describes his investments and quarterly dividends in both the Caledonian Railway and the Edinburgh Life Assurance Company. All documents held at McCord. 117 Alexander Henderson, letter to Polly Scott, 9 July 1910, McCord.

Notes to pages 179–90

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chapter three 1 On Thomson’s “expectations,” see Isobel Thomson, letter to John Thomson, 16 October 1871; on his efforts to “accomplish what you scarcely could have done,” see Isobel Thomson, letter to John Thomson, 12 November 1871; and on the “profitable and congenial work,” see Isobel Thomson, letter to John Thomson, 4 February 1872, private collection. 2 Isobel Thomson, letter to John Thomson, 9 July 1871, private collection. 3 “Hong-kong Photographers,” British Journal of Photography, vol. 20, no. 656 (November 1872), 569; and no. 658 (December 1872), 591. This reference for the following passages. 4 But see Wu Hung’s account about how the opposition between a Western and Chinese portrait practice was largely a constructed difference, in “Inventing a ‘Chinese’ Portrait Style in Early Photography: The Case of Milton Miller,” in Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak, (eds.), Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Insti-

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tute, 2011), 69–89. See also Roberta Wue’s account about the differing aims of Chinese portraitists, in “Essentially Chinese: The Chinese Portrait Subject in Nineteenth-Century Photography,” in Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang (eds.), Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 257–80. Deciphering the relationship between photography and painting in the Chinese studio has generated a variety of attitudes. See, for example, Claire Roberts, “Chinese Ideas of Likeness: Photography, Painting, and Intermediality,” in Luke Gartlan and Roberta Wue (eds.), Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan (London: Routledge, 2017), 97–116. Thomson tried his hand at a few of the innovations. On his claims to have applied photographs to ivory, for example, see his advertisement in the China Magazine Advertiser, 1 November 1868, no pagination. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). On his poor health and intention to keep exploring, see John Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China, or, Ten Years’ Travel, Adventures, and Residence Abroad (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1875), 1. Thomson’s letters to his wife between 1870 and 1872 do not seem to have survived, but their contents can be discerned from her return letters to him. On his doubt and anxiety, see, for example, Isobel Thomson, letter to John Thomson, 17 April 1871, private collection. There are many works devoted to the

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opium trade among British companies, but for P&O, see Freda Harcourt and Sarah Palmer, Flagships of Imperialism: The P&O Company and the Politics of Empire from Its Origins to 1867 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); and for Jardine and its several offshoots, see Richard Grace, Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). By the time of Thomson’s arrival in Hong Kong, William Jardine, the company’s founder, was already dead (his nephews took over) and Matheson, still reeling in profits from the Chinese company, had left China and returned to Britain, eventually buying the entire Isle of Lewis to build a castle. The company would go through many permutations, name changes, and ownership groups and still survives today with a number of holdings under different names. In my discussions about Jardine and Matheson’s company and its spin-offs, I will refer to them simply as “Jardine.” The numbers vary depending on the source. I take my cues from William Frederick Mayers, Nicholas Belfield Dennys, and Charles King, The Treaty Ports of China and Japan: A Complete Guide to the Open Ports of those Countries, Together with Peking, Yedo, Hongkong, and Macao. Forming a Guide Book and Vade Mecum for Travellers, Merchants, and Residents in General (London: Trübner and Co., 1867), vi. Ibid., 279. Ibid., 2. The visitor is identified as “Mr Fortune,” presumably Robert Fortune, the Scottish

Notes to pages 191–200

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16 17

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botanist who was in southern China in the mid-1840s. As quoted in Mayers, et al., The Treaty Ports, 7–8. Robert Fortune, Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China, including a Visit to the Tea, Silk, and Cotton Countries (London: John Murray, 1847), 8. Ibid., 16 and 18. There are many studies devoted to the subject. I have found works by Paul Van Dyke to be especially useful. See his “The Structure of the Canton Trade,” in Cai Hongsheng and Leonard Blussé (eds.), Sailing to the Pearl River (Guangzhou: Guangzhou Chubanshe, 2004), 45–54; and The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005). The English look was planned. See William R. Sargent, et al., Views of the Pearl River Delta: Macau, Canton and Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Urban Council of Hong Kong, in association with the Peabody Essex Museum, 1996), 190. Johnathan A. Farris, “Thirteen Factories of Canton: An Architecture of Sino-Western Collaboration and Confrontation,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architectural Forum, vol. 14 (2007), 78–9. Of course they were not. To take one example, the intensely ritualistic manners required of social relations with Chinese officials continued, much to British amusement and scorn. See, for example, W. Gilbert Walshe, Ways That Are Dark: Some Chapters on Chinese Etiquette and Social Procedure (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1890). See the suggestion by Jeffrey W. Cody and

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Frances Terpak, “Through a Foreign Glass: The Art and Science of Photography in Late Qing China,” in Cody and Terpak (eds.), Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China, 57. John Thomson, Illustrations of China and Its People, vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, Marsten, Low, and Searle, 1873–74), unpaginated (letterpress for plate 16). Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 203. Ibid., 203–4. On the working-class migrants, see H.J. Lethbridge, “Condition of the European Working Class in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 15 (1975), 88–112; and Chan Wei Kwan, The Making of Hong Kong Society: Three Studies of Class Formation in Hong Kong (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Gordon Casserly, The Land of Boxers, or China under the Allies (London: Longman, Greens, and Co., 1903), 193. James William Norton-Kyshe, History of the Laws and Courts of Hongkong, vol. 1 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), 279. Norton-Kyshe refers to a salary in 1850–51; the wages did not seem to rise much in the next two decades. Ibid., 277–9. Lethbridge, “Condition of the European Working Class,” 92. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 192–4, for this and the following quotes. For examples of the sailors getting into trouble, see Norton-Kyshe, History of the Laws and Courts of Hong Kong, 323–4; and for the hms Princess Charlotte’s commanders landing other jobs, 646. Alfred Weatherhead, “Life in Hong Kong,

Notes to pages 202–11

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34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

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45 46

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1856–1859,” transcript of a lecture given in London, Public Records Office, Hong Kong, hmms 143/1/2. This reference for the following quote as well. On Weatherhead’s salary and those of his colleagues in court, see “Return of the Judicial and Other Offices Connected with Hong Kong,” Accounts and Papers: Cost of Colonies (Session 3 February to 19 April 1859), 58, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 21 and 28. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 331. John Thomson, Views on the North River (Hong Kong: Noronha and Sons, 1870), no pagination (letterpress for plate 8). Ibid., letterpress for plate 10. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 348. Ibid., 447. Ibid., 94–5. Of Thomson’s early life, see Richard Ovenden, John Thomson (1837–1921), Photographer (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1997), 1–5. The site had become the location for an annual outing for clans trying to organize themselves into cultural and historical associations. See, for example, the notice in The Celtic Monthly: A Magazine for Highlanders, vol. 2, no. 10 (1894), 191. Lethbridge, “Condition of the European Working Class,” 107. Edward John Hardy, John Chinaman at Home: Sketches of Men, Manners and Things in China (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), 30. On the “covenant” and “indenture” between employers and employees, see

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51 52

Andrew Mackillop, “Europeans, Britons, and Scots: Scottish Sojourning Networks and Identities in Asia, c. 1700–1815,” in Angela McCarthy (ed.), A Global Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities since the Eighteenth Century (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), 19–47, and esp. 30. On “assimilation,” one is tempted instead to say “interpellation,” as proposed by Louis Althusser. Depending on one’s point of view, the trade houses could be construed as either an ideological or repressive state apparatus, though as will be clear from the chapter’s argument, that sense of thoroughgoing constitution needs vetting on a case-by-case basis. See Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86. I nearly quote verbatim the judgment of the acquiescence of Scots in the South Asian context. See P.J. Marshall, “British Society in India under the East India Company,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 31, no. 1 (1997), 101. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 208. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991). John Thomson, “Hak-kas,” China Magazine, vol. 2, no. 15 (September 1868), 134. On the bachelor societies (and their eventual transformation) in San Francisco, see Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973). On the men’s communities in factory towns, see Anthony W.

Notes to pages 211–18

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Lee, A Shoemaker’s Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For the societies’ early relation to photography, see Anthony W. Lee, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). My sense of the Chinese migrant societies out of Guangdong has been sharpened by Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For related discussions about Chinese ethnicities, dialect, and migrancy, see Sow-Theng Low, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin and Their Neighbors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Myron Cohen, “The Hakkas or ‘Guest People’: Dialect as Sociocultural Variable in Southeast China,” in Nicole Constable (ed.), Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 36–79. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 183. This reference for the following quote as well. On Saunders, see Terry Bennett, History of Photography in China: Western Photographers, 1861–1879 (London: Quaritch, 2010), 83–106. I don’t want to overstate the case. There were enough unsanctioned forms of contact, from the illegal trade that took place along the coastline to the dealings that were handled by whispers in the ports, to cause local officials and even the Beijing court to remain ever vigilant about the

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various encounters. See the many examples in Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018). Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 182. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 291. Ibid., 430. Ibid., 462. These are only a few of the many forces that gave rise to the rebellion and pushed its course. See Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2012). The rebellions, their motives, the Qing response, and the aftermaths are complex. Those in Hunan and Jiangsu are usually called the Nian or Nien rebellion and those in the western territories the Panthay and Dungan rebellions. For a general introduction to them, especially of the Muslim revolts, see Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Smith, “The Military Challenge: The North-west and the Coast,” in John K. Fairbank and Kwang-Ching Liu (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, Volume II: Lat Ch’ing, 1800–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 206–71. See also David G. Atill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856–1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Of the relations between the Qing and the Hui, see Jonathan Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). For those rebellions in the northcentral coastal regions, see Elizabeth J.

Notes to pages 220–9

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70 71

72

Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), esp. 96–151; and also Perry, Chinese Perspectives on the Nien Rebellion (New York: Sharpe, 1981). There were a host of other reasons, all of them bad for the Qing. For example, ethnic Chinese were escaping Qing laws, avoiding prosecution, and seeking the shelter of British authorities. For those unruly migrants from Guangdong, see Christopher Munn, Anglo-China: Chinese Peoples and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1880 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 70–1. Aihwa Ong, “On the Edge of Empires: Flexible Citizenship among Chinese in Diaspora,” positions, vol. 1, no. 3 (1993), 753. See also her larger study, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). On Thomson’s early training, see Ovenden, John Thomson, 1–5. So he explained in a long footnote in his translation of Gaston Tissandier, A History and Handbook of Photography (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1876), 240–2. Ibid., 240. Joel Montague and Jim Mizerski, John Thomson: The Early Years – In Search of the Orient (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2014), 6. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 8. This reference for the following quote as well. John Thomson, “Practical Photography in Tropical Regions,” British Journal of Photography, vol. 13, no. 327 (1866), 380. John Thomson, “Practical Photography in Tropical Regions [second article],” British

320

73

74

75

76

77

Journal of Photography, vol. 13, no. 328 (1866), 393. John Thomson, “Practical Photography in Tropical Regions [fourth article],” British Journal of Photography, vol. 13, no. 330 (1866), 436. John Thomson, Practical Photography in Tropical Regions [third article],” British Journal of Photography, vol. 13, no. 329 (1866), 404. The exact number of photographers in Hong Kong is unknown, though a good approximation can be gleaned by adding the many studios, both Chinese and foreign, in Edwin Lai, “The Beginnings of Hong Kong Photography,” in Lai, et al., Picturing Hong Kong: Photography 1855– 1910 (New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1997), 49–57; Roberta Wue, “Picturing Hong Kong: Photography through Practice and Function,” also in Lai, et al., Picturing Hong Kong, 27–47; Bennett, History of Photography in China: Western Photographers, 1–30; and Bennett, History of Photography in China: Chinese Photographers, 1844–1879 (London: Quaritch, 2013), 65–110. On there being around twenty photographers, see Cody and Terpak, “Through a Foreign Glass,” 37. Although the stereoview has been firmly identified as being published by the American Stereoscopic Company, the identity of the photographer has been a matter of debate. Terry Bennett suggests Henry Strohmeyer; the Library of Congress names Ricalton. See Bennett, History of Photography in China: Chinese Photographers, 34. On the price war, which seems to have taken place throughout the late summer

Notes to pages 229–32

78 79

80

81

and early fall of 1868, see Ovenden, John Thomson, 15. See also Lai, “The Beginnings of Hong Kong Photography,” 52. So suggests Lai, “The Beginnings of Hong Kong Photography,” 55. Anon., “European Life in Hongkong,” China Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 1868), 1. John Thomson, The Antiquities of Cambodia: A Series of Photographs Taken on the Spot with Letterpress Description (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1867). Some readers may be surprised by the assertion that Thomson had only a limited grasp of contemporaneous anthropology and ethnology, though even a casual reading of his writings will reveal that he frequently confused the differences between the two and just as frequently mixed and matched observations that no scientist of either persuasion would have wanted mistaken. On the distinctions between them, see Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the “Native” and the Making of European Identities (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 38–42. See also her discussion of some of Thomson’s photographs, 59–66. Though proudly remaining a fellow of various societies for much of his professional life in London, teaching photography to other members, and using the associations to burnish his reputation, Thomson did not seem to develop any greater refinement of their ideas. He mostly balked when given a chance to expound, preferring to limit his expertise to working the camera. For example, there is an extraordinary moment at an 1894 conference among scientists and travellers,

321 including Thomson, during a discussion about the natural habitat of Singapore and the Malay Peninsula and the prospects of opening the area to trade. The conversation flowed back and forth, with sharp observations, strong assertions, and polite disputes, when finally all the members turned to Thomson for some assessment, adjudication, and summary. He politely thanked the members for their papers and commentary, waxed nostalgically about when he took photographs of the region three decades before, and concluded that the whole topic was worth “fuller investigation.” See Dato Abdul Rahman, et al., “Johore: Discussion,” The Geographical Journal, vol. 3, no. 4 (1894), 301. 82 On the China Punch, see Christopher G. Rea, “‘He’ll Roast All Subjects that May Need the Roasting’: Puck and Mr Punch in Nineteenth-Century China,” in Hans Harder and Barbara Mitter (eds.), Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013), 389–422. 83 “Ready in Three Weeks,” China Punch (3 April 1868), 162–3. 84 Thomson’s work for the China Magazine was short-lived. There is disagreement about why he left. Stephen White suggests that Thomson did not approve of the magazine’s manipulations of his pictures. See his John Thomson: A Window to the Orient (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), 18. Ovenden suggests that the expense of tipping-in proved onerous. See his John Thomson, 15. Despite the caricature of Thomson, all indications point to his success in getting attention from the colonialists. See, for example, the China Mail’s judgment of

Notes to pages 232–9

85

86

87

88 89

90

Thomson’s portfolio of Hong Kong scenes. The review was published 12 September 1868 and is transcribed fully in Bennett, History of Photography in China: Western Photographers, 355–6. John Thomson (though unsigned), “Three Pictures in Wong-nei-chung,” China Magazine, vol. 2, no. 14 (August 1868), 52–6. This reference for the quotes in the following paragraphs. Thomson never named where in Ruskin’s work the ideas could be found, but it is clear that he had read the famous letter on composition. See John Ruskin, “Letter III: On Colour and Composition,” in The Elements of Drawing (New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1858, orig. 1857), esp. 168–72. On the various methods of preparing opium for different audiences, see Anthony W. Lee, “Photography and Opium in a Nineteenth-Century Port City,” in John Davis, et al. (eds.), A Companion to American Art (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 592–3. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 268. One of the central arguments of ManHoung Lin, “Late Qing Perceptions of Native Opium,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 64, no. 1 (2004), 117–44. See especially his contrarian discussion of Lin Zexu, the provincial official more famously connected to the anti-opium movement, 117–18. On opium in Fujian, see Joyce Madancy, “Unearthing Popular Attitudes toward the Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Late Qing and Early Republican Fujian,” Modern China, vol. 27, no. 4 (2001), 436– 83. See also her larger study, The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The

322

91

92 93

94

95

96

97 98 99

100

Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s (Harvard: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2004). Jonathan Spence, Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History and Culture (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 237. So reports Madancy, “Unearthing Popular Attitudes,” 463. Zheng Yangwen, The Social Life of Opium in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 49. Howard Wayne Morgan, Yesterday’s Addicts, American Society and Drug Abuse, 1865–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 37, 180. Lee, “Photography and Opium,” 586. See also J.C. Gunn, Gunn’s New Domestic Physician, or Home Book of Health (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys, 1861), 338. For an early and more general account of opium’s various uses in both the US and China, see H.H. Kane, Opium-Smoking in America and China (New York: G.P. Putnam’s and Sons, 1882). Frederick J. Masters, “Opium and Its Votaries,” Californian Illustrated Magazine, vol. 1 (1892), 631–45. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 450. Lin, “Late Qing Perceptions of Native Opium,” 135–7. Some readers will hear in the phrase “global community of smokers” the ideas of Timothy Brook, who argued something similar for the smoking of tobacco in China and western Europe in the seventeenth century. See his Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 117–51. On the caption and also on the identifica-

Notes to pages 239–48

101

102 103

104 105

106

107

108 109 110

111

112

tion of the architecture, see Cody and Terpak, “Through a Foreign Glass,” 58. The trade continued well into the twentieth century. See Alan Baumier, Chinese and Opium under the Republic: Worse than Floods and Wild Beasts (Albany: suny Press, 2008), 93. The argument of Cody and Terpak, “Through a Foreign Glass,” 58. The exact dates and chronology of his river travels are unclear; Thomson was himself an unreliable chronicler of the sequence in his publications. The date for the North River trip given by Montague and Mizerski is reasonable. See their John Thomson: The Early Years, 185. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 216. Thomson, “Introduction,” Views on the North River, unpaginated (but 1, by my count). Thomas W. Kingsmill, “A Sketch of the Geology of a Portion of Quang-tung Province (article II),” Journal of the NorthChina Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, no. 2 (1865), 11. Thomson, “Introduction,” Views on the North River, 2. This reference for the following quote as well. Ibid. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 217. So is the judgment of Montague and Mizerski, John Thomson: The Early Years, 185, and Ovenden, John Thomson, 16. Thomson does not seem to have publicized the volume in any of his advertisements. Readers may well hear the ideas found in W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Thomson, Views on the North River, letter-

323

113 114 115

116 117

118 119

press for plate 9. This reference for the following quote as well. Ibid., letterpress for plate 2. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 222. Thomson, Views on the North River, letterpress for plate 1. This reference for the following quotes as well. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 219. Thomson, Views on the North River, letterpress for plate 6. This reference for the following quotes as well. Ibid., letterpress for plate 10. Although Thomson claimed to have travelled two hundred miles up the North, the photographs focus on only a few places, which he named: the village of “Wong Tong” (Huangtong), the region around the city of “Ts’ing Yune” (Qingyuan), the “Fi-lai-sz Monastery” (Feilai Si), the village of “Lien Chow Kwong” (Lianzhoujiang), the “Mang-Tsz Pass” (Mengzixia), the “Pau-Lo-Hang Temple” (Baoluokeng), and several scenes of the area around “Kwan Yin Cave” (Guanyin). He also included in the volume Chinese characters along with the English spellings of the place names, though in several cases the characters do not accurately match the names. The errors may suggest that Thomson approached someone in Hong Kong to provide him the characters, but in the process he mispronounced the places or was misunderstood by the scribe. Many of the locales still exist. Some buildings, like Feilai Si, have been rebuilt. Others are long gone, falling to time, destroyed by floods, inundated by the Baishiyao dam and Feilaixia reservoir, and other changes in the landscape. Some village names given by Thomson are most likely approx-

Notes to pages 248–58

120 121

122 123

124

125

imate. In the case of “Wong Tong,” for example, the small settlement was probably never more than a house or two, if that, and even “village” seems too grand a description; perhaps it was merely a gathering spot for a local market that had gotten a name. The location appears to be present-day Huangtong market, Lushan Town, Foshan City. Thomson, Views on the North River, letterpress for plate 14. Elizabeth Rigby (Lady Eastlake), “August 12,” Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, 92. Thomson, Views on the North River, letterpress for plate 14. On the British impact on the Fujianese tea trade, see Zhuang Guotu, “The Impact of the International Tea Trade on the Social Economy of Northwest Fujian in the Eighteenth Century,” in Leonard Blussé and Femme S. Gaastra (eds.), On the Eighteenth Century as a Category of Asian History (New York: Routledge, 2016, orig. 1998), 193–216. See also Robert Gardella, Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Tea Trade, 1757–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Gardella reports that Malwa opium was the preferred bait upriver, which suggests that upcountry traders were operating in a lucrative drug market and leaving the dregs for the coast. See his Harvesting Mountains, 56. Very little is known about Tung Hing. The Chinese characters associated with the studio’s stamp suggest that the name refers to a business, not a person. Bennett thinks that the studio began in Hong Kong and then moved to Fuzhou, a not unreason-

324 able hypothesis, though he also thinks that the name refers to an individual (see his History of Photography in China: Chinese Photographers, 157). Cody and Terpak regard it as a business (see their “Through a Foreign Glass,” 56). My guess is that Tung Hing was a collective name in the same vein as the Hong Kong studios of Pun Lun and Ye Chung. Dating Lai Afong’s and Tung Hing’s Fuzhou pictures has been a matter of some debate. Bennett thinks that Tung Hing did not begin operation in Fuzhou until the mid-1870s, while Cody and Terpak propose a decade earlier. I agree with the latter. The internal evidence, including a dated caption in an album now held by the Getty Research Institute, suggests the studio was established by 1862–63 at the latest. An album of Lai Afong’s Fuzhou pictures now held by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh suggests that the bulk of his photographs, including several with dated captions and others commemorating the opening of known structures, can be pinpointed to the late 1860s. In either case, both Chinese studios preceded Thomson’s visit to the area. 126 So explains the caption in the version of the album held at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The photograph is number 117 of Lai Afong’s Fuzhou views. 127 There are many examples. See the pictures of Fuzhou collected by David Marr Hendersen, a British engineer based in China between the 1870s and 1890s, or those collected by John Charles Oswald, a British tea trader and racehorse owner based in Fuzhou in the 1880s and 1890s. Both col-

Notes to pages 263–84

128 129

130

131 132 133 134

135

lections are now held at the University of Bristol. Cody and Terpak, “Through a Foreign Glass,” 56–7. The buyer was Theodore F. Jones, an American trader who made his fortune in Fuzhou. The album, called Foochow Views, is composed of two volumes with a total of forty-four views, not including two loose-leaf pictures that may have been part of the original. It concentrates more heavily on Fuzhou itself than the more extensive version held by the Getty Research Institute, with four or five of a tea plantation north of the city, and the obligatory monastery, island pagoda, pagoda anchorage, and views of the foreign settlement. Like most studios, Tung Hing mixed and matched photographs to meet the requests of individual patrons. The Peabody Essex Museum’s version is an especially idiosyncratic one, meant, according to its inscription, for “Uncle Marshall and Aunt Susan from their affectionate nephew.” John Thomson, “A Visit to Yuan-Foo Monastery,” The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal (March 1871), 297. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 349. Ibid., 352. Ibid., 288. On Thomson’s printing choices, see Michael Gray and Richard Ovenden, “John Thomson and Photography,” in Ovenden, John Thomson, 167–84, esp. 180 for Illustrations of China and Its People. Thomson, “Beggars,” Illustrations of China and Its People, vol. 2, letterpress for plate 21.

325 conclusion 1 Ramsay would die a year later. See “Income and Expenditure of The Newhaven Free Fishermen’s Society, 1867,” nrs, gd265/6/1. 2 Anon., Reminiscences of New-Haven and Its Inhabitants by a Son of “Auld Reekie” (Woodstock: William Warwick, 1867), 23. 3 Ibid., 3. 4 Ibid., 14. 5 Ibid., 23.

Notes to pages 286–8

INDEX

Aberdeenshire Highlands, 106 Aboriginals, 111, 148, 156; relations with settlers, 109–10, 112, 137; as subject matter, 4, 7, 134, 137, 138, 144 Act of Union (1840), 110, 129, 137 Adamson, John, 44, 46, 82 Adamson, Robert, 5–6, 8–10, 16– 17, 22, 23, 26, 28, 98, 228; albums, 82–4, 121; background, 44–6; in comparison, 143, 160, 172; death, 87; exhibition of work, 88; paying sitters, 79, 81–2; pictorial decisions, 40, 51, 54–5, 73–7, 84, 86–7; and Scottishness, 62; at shoreline, 11–12, 31, 32, 33, 42, 46–7, 55–7. Works: see Hill and Adamson Ainslie, John, 20. Works: Old and New Town of Edinburgh and Leith, 20–2, 21 fig. 1.6 ambrotype photography, 114–16, 117 American Civil War, 175 Angkor Wat, 232 Apcar Line, 188–9 Appadurai, Arjun, 295n2 Art Association of Montreal (aam), 113, 132–3, 139, 140, 160 Augustine Heard & Co., 193 Balfour, Arthur, 64 Balmoral Castle, 106 Bank of Scotland, 103 Baoluokeng, 209, 252 Bartlett, William Henry, 40, 42–3. Works: Newhaven Pier (Frith of Forth), 42, 42 fig. 1.19

Begbie, Thomas Vernon, 78. Works: Newhaven Pier, 78, 78 fig. 1.51 Beijiang (North River), 181, 209, 244–6, 250 Beijing, 181, 224, 225, 227, 238, 240, 283 Bishopbriggs, 99 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 9 Bleury Street (Montreal), 94, 114, 116, 117, 126 Bourassa, Napoléon, 113, 133, 137–8 Brewster, David, 44–6, 228 Bryson, James, 227 Buckhaven, 27, 35, 36, 65 Budden, John, 138–9 Burns, Robert, 9, 10, 59, 60, 62, 90 Burntisland, 22, 27, 66 Buxton, John, 114, 117 calotype photography, 8, 12, 17, 81, 82, 287; characteristics of, 46; in comparison, 88, 91–2, 98, 116, 143, 228; process of, 44; as profession, 45 Calton Hill (Edinburgh), 17, 45, 62, 80, 90, 228, 287; as setting, 73–4 Cambodia, 229, 232 Campbell, Thomas, 90 Canadian Views and Studies (Henderson), 160–73, 174, 175, 179, 247 Canton system, 197, 204, 218, 225, 227. See also comprador Caribou Hunting in Canada (Notman), 148–60, 171, 174, 175, 176

Carse, Alexander, 61. Works: A Brawl Outside an Ale House, 60 fig. 1.44, 61 Cellardyke, 27 Chenggaoyan, 272–3 Church of Scotland, 45, 131 Clarkson Stanfield Album (Hill and Adamson), 82–7 Cody, Jeffrey, 273 Colnaghi, Dominic, 82 comprador, 218, 225; sensibility of, 226–7, 229, 244 Cruikshank, George. Works: Geordie and Willie “keeping it up” – Johnny Bull plays the piper!!, 59, 59 fig. 1.43 Curtis, William, 59 daguerreotype photography, 12, 45–6, 88, 98, 115 Dandurand, Octave, 148–50, 153, 160 Dent and Company, 191 Devine, T.M., 104 Disraeli, Benjamin, 97 Disruption, The, 45, 47, 75, 83 Doane, Thomas Coffin, 114–15, 117. Works: Redford boys in Highland costume, Montreal, qc, 114, 115 fig. 2.9 Duke of Buccleuch, 28–9, 66–8, 70, 72, 79 Duncan, James, 163. Works: The Icehouse, Nun’s Island, Montreal, 115 fig. 2.49, 163 Dutton and Michaels, 199–200, 241. Works: Panorama of Guangzhou, 198 fig. 3.10, 199–200, 241

328 Dysart, 22, 27 Earl of Morton, 67–8 Eastern Townships, 105, 134, 164, 166 Edinburgh, 18; and art, 61; in comparison, 108, 194, 228; journeys to and from, 22, 23, 26, 188, 286; populations in, 37–8, 63–4; and professional photography, 8, 12, 44–5, 228; and trade, 20, 29 Edinburgh Calotype Club, 12, 14, 43, 66, 74, 78. Works: Chain Pier, Newhaven, 43, 43 fig. 1.20; Granton Pier, 66, 67 fig. 1.45; Newhaven Fishwives, 74, 75 fig. 1.48 Edinburgh Corporation, 29, 67–8 Ethnological Society of London, 232 Fairbairn, James, 75 Fangguanyan, 263, 271, 273 feng shui, 273–4, 280 Fenian raids, 175 Fife, 27, 28, 35 Fifeshire Journal, 63 Firth of Forth, 22, 48, 63, 69, 72, 77, 286; fishing cultures of, 17, 26–7, 30, 37–8, 57, 65, 69, 83; as fishing grounds, 14, 18; transportation across, 20, 22, 23, 25, 42, 65–6 Fisherrow, 27, 33; fishermen of, 66, 68, 69 Floyd, William Pryor, 207, 229, 231. Works: Tai Ping Shan, Hong Kong – Chinese Quarter, 207, 207 fig. 3.17; Victoria Photographic Gallery, 230 fig. 3.28, 231 Foochow (Lai Afong), 268–72, 274–6 Foochow (Tung Hing), 271–6 Foochow and the River Min (Thomson), 8, 10, 187, 256–83; in comparison, 283, 285 Formosa, 209 Forrest, Robert, 62 Fox Talbot, William Henry. See Talbot, William Henry Fox Free Church of Scotland, 45

French Canadians, 109, 112, 130, 131, 137, 148, 157, 160; in artistic circles, 113, 132, 139; assimilation of, 110–11; character of, 126, 138; companies of, 108; in conflicts, 109–10, 166; politics of, 137; populations of, 108; settlements of, 111, 114, 125, 156, 164. See also habitants Fujian, 214, 222, 239, 245, 256; populations of, 214, 216, 268, 272–3, 277, 283; as setting, 268, 274 Fuzhou, 181, 256, 274, 283; journeys in, 209, 268–73; populations of 189, 191, 257–8; as setting 258, 264, 268, 277–80 Gall, James, 75 Geikie, Walter, 38–40, 44, 48, 60, 87. Works: Bargaining for Fish, 40, 41 fig. 1.15; Fishermen on the Shore, One Looking through a Telescope, 40, 40 fig. 1.14, 48; Fishermen Returning, Newhaven, 38, 40 fig. 1.13; A Group of Fisherfolk and Fishwives, 40, 41 fig. 1.17; Newhaven Fisher Families Outside their Cottages – A Good Joke, 38, 39 fig. 1.12; Three fishwives, 48, 52 fig. 1.31; Women Selling Fish by Candlelight, 40, 41 fig. 1.16 George IV, King of the United Kingdom, 58–9, 65, 103, 106 Gibb, James, 138–9 godown (factory), 193, 200, 242, 270. See also hongs Golden Square Mile (Montreal), 111, 113, 114, 116, 120, 132, 194 Gradual Civilization Act (1857), 110 Granton, 28, 65–6, 69, 72, 78–9, 188, 286, 287 Gray, Malcolm, 32 Great Michael, 20, 27, 69, 72 Grenville, 166 Guangdong, 218, 222, 246; journeys in, 241; populations of, 214, 216, 240 Guangxi, 214, 222, 224, 241

Guangzhou, 181, 191, 209, 211, 214, 225, 239, 242, 244, 256, 268, 283; in comparison, 197–202; as subject matter, 197–202, 218–19, 227, 241 habitants, 164, 166, 171; as subject matter, 4, 7, 134–9, 145 Hals, Frans, 4 Hakka, 209, 214 Harper, John Russell, 138 Henderson, Alexander, 5, 6, 8, 9, 96, 98, 175, 179, 286; albums, 160–73; in artistic circles, 132–3; background, 102–4; in comparison, 139, 143–4, 188–9, 247; in context of Montreal, 106, 109– 11; learning photography, 123–5; pictorial decisions, 126–8, 160– 73; and Scottishness, 107, 128–31. Works: Above Railway Bridge, St Anne’s, 162, 163 fig. 2.46; Drawing ice, qc, 164, 165 fig. 2.50; Inlet to Lake Inchbrakie, Wentworth, qc, 169, 170 fig. 2.56, 171–2; Lake, canoe, and islands, Laurentians, qc, 169, 170 fig. 2.57; Lake Commendeau, Grenville, qc, 169, 169 fig. 2.55; Lumberer’s camp while on the drive, Ottawa River, qc-on, 166, 170 fig. 2.53; Niagara Falls, nyon, 126 fig. 2.18, 127–8; Oak Wood, North of Ottawa River, 164, 167 fig. 2.51; Regulating dam, Blanche River near Derry, qc-on, 141 fig. 2.28, 143; St Anne de Bellevue, near Montreal, 161–2, 161 fig. 2.45; Sugaring off party, eating “La Tire,” Eastern Townships, qc, 166, 167 fig. 2.52; Tanneries Village, St. Henry, near Montreal, qc, 124 fig. 2.16, 125; Timber jam, Rivière Rouge, qc, 166, 170 fig. 2.54; The Trout Brook, 173, 174 fig. 2.59; Winter Scene at Hochelaga, 163, 165 fig. 2.48; Winter Scene Taken While Snowing, 172–3, 173 fig. 2.58; Winter Scenery on Nun’s Island, 163, 165 fig. 2.47

329 Henry Bicknell Album (Hill and Adamson), 89 Herring Fisheries Board, 44 Higgins, J.M., 114, 117 Highland Clearances, 58, 63, 104–5 Highlanders, 63–4, 97, 104–6, 130, 145; in comparison, 137, 209, 211; and Scottishness, 5, 7, 58–9, 106– 7; as subject matter, 42 Hill and Adamson, Works: Alexander Rutherford, William Ramsay, and John Liston, 13 fig. 1.1, 14–17, 88; Group of Newhaven Fishermen, possibly William Ramsay, Alexander Rutherford and a boy, 16 fig. 1.3, 16–17; Group of Newhaven fishwives on outside stairs with basket and washing, 73–4, 74 fig. 1.46, 83, 88; James Ballantine, Dr George Bell and David Octavius Hill. Known as Edinburgh Ale, 15, 15 fig. 1.2; James Linton, 79, 80 fig. 1.52; James (or Sandy) Linton, 77, 77 fig. 1.50; Jeanie Wilson and Annie Linton, 48, 50 fig. 1.28, 89; ‘Just Landed.’ Two Newhaven fishermen and two boys grouped around the prow of a boat, 48, 49 fig. 1.25, 83, 88; Leith Archway, entrance to Victoria Dock?, 56–7, 57 fig. 1.42; Leith Docks, 83, 84 fig. 1.56; Marion Finlay, Mrs Margaret (Dryburgh) Lyall, Mrs Grace (Finlay) Ramsay. Called ‘The Letter’, 90, 91 fig. 1.61; Mrs Barbara (Johnstone) Flucker, 48, 49 fig. 1.27; Mrs Carnie Noble, unknown woman, Bessy Crombie, Mary Combe, Mrs Margaret (Dryburgh) Lyell, Rev. Dr James Fairbairn, James Gall. Called ‘The Pastor’s Visit’, 75, 76 fig. 1.49; Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall, 84–7, 85 fig. 1.57; Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall, 89, 89 fig. 1.59; Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall and Unidentified Woman, 86 fig. 1.58, 87; Mrs Grace Ramsay and four unknown women, 74, 74 fig.

Index

1.47, 81, 91; Newhaven Beach, 31, 32 fig. 1.9, 55, 88; Newhaven Boys ‘Newhaven Fisher Gallants’, 79, 81 fig. 1.55; Newhaven – bringing in the catch, 48, 49 fig. 1.26; Newhaven (or other) fishermen, two men leaning against mooring post on quayside, boy seated at their feet, 56, 56 fig. 1.41, 83, 88; ‘A Newhaven Pilot’, 47–8, 47 fig. 1.22; Oyster dredging boat sailing, 48, 49 fig. 1.24, 88; Rev. Andrew Gray, 1805–1861. Of the West Church, Perth, Free Church minister, 47 fig. 1.23, 48; Sandy (or James) Linton, his boat and bairns, 79, 80 fig. 1.53; Three Newhaven men on a boat, 55, 55 fig. 1.40; Two Newhaven Fishwives, perhaps Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall on the right, 53 fig. 1.36, 54, 86–7, 89; Two unidentified men and James Linton, 79, 80 fig. 1.54; Two Unidentified Women, 51–5, 52 figs. 1.33–1.35, 53 figs. 1.37–1.39, 87; Two unknown women, 48, 50 fig. 1.30; Two unknown women, 51, 50 fig. 1.32; Two unknown women and Mrs Barbara (Johnstone) Flucker, 48, 50 fig. 1.29; Two unknown women. ‘To hail the bark that never can return’, 90, 90 fig. 1.60; Unknown woman, 40, 41 fig. 1.18, 48; Willie Liston ‘Redding the Line’, 23, 24 fig. 1.8 Hill, David Octavius, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 17, 22, 23, 26, 28, 98, 99, 129, 228; albums, 16, 82–4, 88–92, 121; in artistic circles, 87–8; background, 44–6; in comparison, 143, 160, 172, 256; correspondence, 65, 88; exhibition of work, 88; paying sitters, 79, 81– 2; pictorial decisions, 15, 40, 51, 54–5, 73–7, 84, 86–7; and Scottishness, 62–3, 65; at shoreline, 11–12, 31, 32, 33, 42, 46–7, 55–7, 286. Works: A Fishing Village, 46 fig. 1.21, 47; Opening of the Glas-

gow and Garnkirk Railway: View at St Rollox Looking South-East, 99, 100 fig. 2.3. See also Hill and Adamson Hing Cheong, 231 Hochelaga (Montreal), 163 Hog Lane (Guangzhou), 197 Hokkien, 214 Hong Kong, 5, 181, 187–8, 243, 283; character of, 189–203, 284–5; in comparison, 194, 196–203, 248– 52, 258, 268; journeys to and from, 188–9, 244; populations in, 191, 203–20, 222–7; and professional photography, 182–6, 229–32, 246, 264; as setting, 193– 6, 199–200, 221–2, 233–6 hongs, 197, 242, 243, 251, 268, 270, 272, 280. See also godown Howie, James, 12, 45 Huangtong, 250, 323n119 Illustrations of China and Its People (Thomson), 283–4 Isle of Lewis, 105, 134, 166 Jacobi, Otto, 140–3. Works: The Rapids, Montmorency River, 140–3, 140 fig. 2.24 James IV, King of Scotland, 18, 20 James Wilson Album (Hill and Adamson), 88–92, 228 Jardine (Jardine Matheson and Jardine Skinner), 188–91, 193, 225 Kay, John, 37–8, 40, 74, 109. Works: Wha’l o’ Caller Oysters, 38, 39 fig. 1.11, 74, 109 Kirkcaldy, 22, 27 Krieghoff, Cornelius, 133–5, 138–9, 164; background, 133; influence on photographers, 139–40, 144– 5, 148, 152, 156, 161, 177. Works: Death of the Moose at Sunset, Lake Famine South of Quebec, 138, 139, 139 fig. 2.23, 144, 148, 152, 156; Winter Landscape Laval, 135, 136 fig. 2.21; Winter in Laval Mountains Near Quebec (The Crack in the Ice), 134–5, 134 fig. 2.20, 139, 161; Winter Scene

330 in the Laurentians – The Laval River, 135, 136 fig. 2.22 Lai Afong, 182, 213, 238; in Fuzhou, 189, 257–76; in Hong Kong, 182, 221–2, 229; in Wuzhou, 241–3. Works: The Banker’s Glen, 260, 262 fig. 3.51; The Bankers’ Glen, Yuen-foo River, 260, 262 fig. 3.50, 271; City of Foochow-foo, 268–70, 269 fig. 3.60; Duck Market at Sing Chang, 270 fig. 3.61, 271; Entrance to the Bankers’ Glen, view to the right looking up Yuen-foo Monastery, 258, 260 fig. 3.48; Foochow, Foreign Settlement, South Side of the River, 268–70, 269 fig. 3.59; Left shoulder of the cave in which is situated Yuenfoo Monastery, 263, 267 fig. 3.58, 271; New Year’s Group, 1870, Stone Horse-head with Tea-fields near Sing Chang, 274–6, 275 fig. 3.64; Our new Club House just opened, 189, 190 fig. 3.2, 271; Panorama of General View WooChow City, 241–3, 242 fig. 3.34; Praya, Hong Kong, 221–2, 221 fig. 3.24; Queen’s Road, Hong Kong, 221–2, 221 fig. 3.25; A study of Scotch Life and Scotchmen, 213, 213 fig. 3.19, 271; Yuen-foo River, View from the Hill, 258, 259 fig. 3.47 Lake Timiskaming, 143 Lam Qua, 219. Works (attributed): View of Hongs at Canton, 219, 220 fig. 3.23 Lauder, Thomas Dick, 44 Leith, 17, 34, 55–7, 65, 72, 83, 88, 188, 287; and Newhaven, 18–22 Lianzhoujiang, 252 Liston, John, 14–17, 28–30, 80, 287 Loescher and Petsch, 156 Lowlanders, 5, 7, 9, 73, 103, 209, 227; in comparison, 63–4; in Hong Kong, 212; in Montreal, 106, 111, 129–30; and Scottishness, 58–60, 64–5, 106–7, 246, 288–9 Lyden, Anne, 82

Macao, 181, 214, 227, 283 Macdonald, John Sandfield, 130 Maple Box Portfolio (Notman), 121–2 Martin, George, 114, 117 Matouyan, 274–6 Mengzixia, 209, 248 Minjiang (Min River), 181, 209, 256–7, 268 Montreal, 108–13; character of, 108–9; in comparison, 135, 166, 189, 194, 211; journeys to and from, 101, 161–2, 286; populations in, 10, 106, 109–13, 126, 131; and professional photography, 3–5, 94, 98, 113–17, 120; as setting, 111 Moose hunting (Notman), 176–8 Morrison-Low, Alison, 44 Mumbai, 188–9 Nanjing, 181, 223, 238, 283 Nan Ting, 231 Newhaven, 286–7; character of, 17, 18–23; populations in, 33–43; as setting, 12, 47, 73–4; and trade, 20–8, 31–2, 65–6, 71–2 Noble, Andrew, 61, 71 Notman, Charles, 94–5 Notman, George, 94–5 Notman, William, 3–5, 6, 8, 10, 104, 111, 175, 211; albums, 131–2, 144– 60, 176–8; in artistic circles, 132– 3; background, 99–102; in comparison, 122–8, 139–43, 160, 171–2, 188–9, 208; and professional photography, 113–22; and Scottishness, 96–8, 107, 128–32; writings, 93–8. Works: A.W. Ogilvie & Co.’s flour wagon at Notman’s studio, Bleury Street, Montreal, qc, 122, 123 fig. 2.15; Alexander Henderson and family, Montreal, qc, 104, 105 fig. 2.5, 117; Around the Camp Fire, Caribou hunting series, Montreal, qc, 154 fig. 2.41, 155; Capt. Alexander Henderson, photographer, Montreal, qc, 124 fig. 2.17, 125; Card, Group of stereographs from the Maple Box, Victoria Bridge, Montreal, qc, 121, 121 fig. 2.14;

Caribou Hunting: Arrival at camp, Montreal, qc, 150–1, 151 fig. 2.37; Caribou Hunting: The Chance shot, Montreal, qc, 153, 153 fig. 2.39, 157, 177; Caribou Hunting: Going out, Montreal, qc, 149, 150 fig. 2.35, 156–7; Caribou Hunting: The Guide, Montreal, qc, 148, 149 fig. 2.34; Caribou Hunting: The Hunter, Montreal, qc, 148, 149 fig. 2.33; Caribou Hunting: The Hunters Resting, 153, 154 fig. 2.40, 157; Caribou Hunting: Hunters resting, Montreal, qc, 157, 159 fig. 2.44; Caribou Hunting: Sunday in the bush, Montreal, qc, 155–6, 155 fig. 2.42; Carrying Heads, Caribou hunting series, Montreal, qc, 156, 158 fig. 2.43; Colonel William Rhodes and Octave the guide, Montreal, qc, 145–6, 146–7 figs. 2.29–2.32; Exhausted, Caribou hunting series, Montreal, qc, 149, 150 fig. 2.36, 157; F.H. Baillie, Montreal, qc, 107, 108 fig. 2.7, 125; Framework of tube and staging no. 8, Victoria Bridge, Montreal, qc, 120, 120 fig. 2.13; Game in Sight, Caribou hunting series, Montreal, qc, 151– 2, 152 fig. 2.38; Group of soldiers of the 78th Highlanders, Montreal, qc, 106, 107 fig. 2.6; Men destroying coffer dam crib, Victoria Bridge, Montreal, qc, 120, 120 fig. 2.12; Montreal and reservoir from Mount Royal, qc, 111–12, 112 fig. 2.8, 139; Moose hunting: early morn, the alarm, Montreal, qc, 176–7, 177 fig. 2.60; Mr Grenfell, 60th Rifles, and Mr A. Pepys, Montreal, qc, 93, 94 fig. 2.1; Mr William Notman and sons William McFarlane, George and Charles, Montreal, 94–5, 95 fig. 2.2; Natural Steps, Montmorency Falls, near Quebec City, qc, 141–3, 141 fig. 2.25; Natural Steps on the Montmorency near Quebec, 142 fig. 2.27, 143; Niagara Falls, Niagara, on, 127–8, 127

331 fig. 2.19; “R” Company, Rifle Brigade group, Montreal, qc, 117, 118 fig. 2.10; Skating Carnival, Victoria Rink, Montreal, qc, 2 fig. I.1, 3–4; Trapping the carcajou, Montreal, qc, 177–8, 178 fig. 2.61; William Notman and family, Montreal, qc, 102, 102 fig. 2.4, 117 Notman, William, Sr, 100 Notman, William McFarlane, 94–5 Notre Dame (Montreal), 111, 114, 116 Nun’s Island, 162–3 Ogilvy and Lewis, 113–14 Old China Street (Guangzhou), 197 Opium Wars (First and Second), 197–9, 219, 224–6, 239, 245 Ottawa River, 108, 123, 164, 166 Paisley, 97 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 137 Parks, J.G., 119. Works: Victoria Bridge, Montreal, 119, 119 fig. 2.11 Parti rouge, 137 Patriotes rebellions, 109, 131 Pearl River, 181, 209, 214, 227, 241, 244, 251 Pedder’s Wharf (Hong Kong), 193–4 Penang, 188, 209, 228–9 Peninsular and Oriental Steam and Navigation Company (P&O), 188–90 Photographic Views and Studies of Canadian Scenery (Henderson). See Canadian Views and Studies Place d’Armes (Montreal), 114 Political Martyrs’ Memorial (Edinburgh), 62 Poulter, Gillian, 152, 157 Praya (Hong Kong), 191, 221–2, 233 Praya Grande (Macao), 227 Presby, G.H., 114, 117 Prestonpans, 17, 27; fishermen of, 56, 66–8, 69, 79, 88 Princes Street (Edinburgh), 194, 228

Index

Province Wellesley, 209, 228 Punti, 214 Qingyuan, 245, 250–1 Quebec Warehousing Company, 144 Queen’s Road (Hong Kong), 182, 194, 205, 217, 221, 231, 238 Ramsay, Grace, 90–1 Ramsay, William, 11–17, 28–31, 68– 71, 80, 88, 92, 286–7; in comparison, 103, 185 Reade, Charles, 27 Reid, Dennis, 133, 140 Rejlander, Oscar, 156 Respondentia Walk (Guangzhou), 218 Rhodes, William, 144–60, 176–8, 313n99 Ricalton, James, 229. Works: 229, 230 fig. 3.27 Rigby, Elizabeth (Lady Eastlake), 36–7 Robinson, Henry Peach, 156 Roediger, David, 212 Ross, James, 114, 117 Royal Geographical Society, 232 Royal Scottish Academy, 45, 92, 307n13 Rutherford, Alexander, 14–17, 28– 31, 68, 70, 80, 287; in comparison, 103, 185 Sainte-Anne ward (Montreal), 162 Saint-Henri district (Montreal), 125 Saint Jacques ward (Montreal), 111 Saint-Lambert, 162 Saint Lawrence River, 108, 111, 114, 118, 164 Sanshui, 245 Saunders, William, 218. Works: Print, photographic, 218, 219 fig. 3.22 Scott, Walter, 9, 73, 103, 129; as reference, 89, 252, 256, 282; and Scottishness, 58–60 Scottish National Party, 104 Shamian Island, 202 Shanghai, 181, 188, 191, 218, 239, 283

Singapore, 188–9; and professional photography, 228–31 Smeall, William, 18. Works: Boats on Sand, 18, 19 fig. 1.5; Harbour Scene, 18, 19 fig. 1.4 Society of Free Fishermen of Newhaven, 32, 67, 68–71, 79–80 St Andrews, 17, 22, 27, 44, 46 St Andrew’s Church (Edinburgh), 45 St Andrew’s Society of Montreal, 131, 166 St Anne de Bellevue, 161–2 Stevenson, Sara, 11, 55 St George’s Society of Montreal, 131 Suzhou, 214, 218 Tabor, Arthur, 114, 117 Taiping Rebellion, 222–4, 252 Taiping Shan (Hong Kong), 205– 7, 217 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 12, 44, 46 talbotype. See calotype photography Tanfield Hall (Edinburgh), 45, 48 Tanka, 214–16, 250 Terpak, Frances, 273 Thailand, 229, 232 Thom, James, 62 Thomson, John, 5, 6, 8, 10, 320n81; albums, 244–56, 256–83, 283–5; assessing Chinese competition, 181–8; background, 227–9; in comparison, 199–203, 218, 242– 4, 268–76; and feng shui, 273–4; and Hong Kong society, 203–8, 212, 214–16, 219–20; journey to Asia, 188–91; and opium, 238– 41; and professional photography, 191–7, 229–32; and Scottishness, 208–10, 245–6, 252–4, 256; and Taiping Rebellion, 223; writings, 182–5, 232–6. Works: As We Went About Hong Kong, 203, 204 fig. 3.14; The Banker’s Glen, 258, 259 fig. 3.46; Beggars, 277–8, 278 fig. 3.67, 283–4; The Bund, Hong Kong, 191, 192 fig. 3.4; Canton Boat Girls, 215–16, 216 fig. 3.20; East

332 End, Queen’s Road, Hong Kong, 194, 195 fig. 3.7, 217; English Cemetery, Hong Kong, 235, 237 fig. 3.31; Harbor, Hong Kong, 193, 247 fig. 3.6; Harbor, Hong Kong, Near the Bund, 193, 193 fig. 3.5; Hong Kong, 206–7, 206 fig. 3.16; Hong Kong: Chinese Portrait Artist, 185–6, 186 fig. 3.1, 231; Hong Kong Flower Boy, 217, 217 fig. 3.21; Hong Kong from Kellet’s Island, 190–1, 192 fig. 3.3; Hong Kong Harbor, Taken from Above the City, 199–200, 200 fig. 3.11; The Island Pagoda, 256, 257 fig. 3.44, 260–3; Jinshan Temple, River Min, Fukien Province, 256, 257 fig. 3.45; Kowloon, Kwangtung Province, 204, 205 fig. 3.15; Kwangtung Province, 248–50, 249 fig. 3.38, 280, Kwangtung Province, China, 209, 210 fig. 3.18; Left Shoulder of Cave, 263, 266 fig. 3.57, 273; Looking North from the Pau-Lo-Hang Temple, Kwangtung, 252–4, 254 fig. 3.42; The Mandarin’s Grave, 263, 265 fig. 3.54; The Old Factory Site, Canton, 202–3, 202 fig. 3.13; Part of Lower Bridge, 278–9, 279 fig. 3.68, 285; Pearl River, Kwangtung Province, 247–8, 247 fig. 3.36; Pearl River, Kwangtung Province, 248, 249 fig. 3.37; Pearl River, Kwangtung Province, 250–2, 251 fig. 3.39; Pearl River, Kwangtung Province, 251–2, 253 fig. 3.40; Pearl River, Kwangtung Province, 251–2, 253 fig. 3.41; Pedder St, Hong Kong, 194–5, 196 fig. 3.8;

Race Course, Happy Valley, Hong Kong, 235, 237 fig. 3.32; Race Course, Hong Kong, 235, 236 fig. 3.30; River Min, Glen, 258, 261 fig. 3.49; A Reach of the Min, 280–3, 282 fig. 3.70, 285; Road to the Plantation, 277, 277 fig. 3.66; A Rustic Bridge, 280, 281 fig. 3.69; An Up-Country Farm, 254–5, 255 fig. 3.43; Widow’s Arch, 263, 266 fig. 3.56; Wongnei-chung Village, 233–5, 234 fig. 3.29 Trapping (Notman), 176–8 Trinity, 32, 68, 80 Tung Hing, 257, 264, 323n125; in comparison, 260, 268, 271–6. Works: Chêng-kao-yen, 272–3, 272 fig. 3.63; Grave of “Ting Young Ling”; Foochow Views, 263, 265 fig. 3.55; Hsing-‘tsunchieh, 271–2, 271 fig. 3.62; Hung ‘tang-chin-shan-shih, Monastery, 260–3, 264 fig. 3.52; Ma-‘tou-yen, 274–6, 275 fig. 3.65; Temple Dedicated to the Queen of Heaven; Foochow Views, 260– 3, 264 fig. 3.53 UK Steamship Company, 23 Unknown artists. Works: Canton. Pleasure Boat, 238, 239 fig. 3.33; Fan, 226–7, 226 fig. 3.26, 243; Hong bowl, 43, 243 fig. 3.35; Leith, 22–3, 22 fig. 1.7; Natural steps, Montmorency, qc, 141–3, 142 fig. 2.26; View of the American Garden at Canton, 197, 198 fig. 3.9

Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom, 3, 37, 65, 94, 106, 122. Works: Sketch of a Newhaven fishwife illustrating her journal entry for Saturday, 3 September 1842, 37, 37 fig. 1.10 Victoria Bridge (Montreal), 111, 118–22, 127, 162–3 Victoria dock (Leith), 56–7 Victoria Peak (Hong Kong), 191, 194–5, 200, 227 Views on the North River (Thomson), 187, 246–56; in comparison, 268, 277, 280, 282, 283, 285 Waverley Station (Edinburgh), 188, 286 Wemyss Bay, 209–10 Winslow Township, 166 Wong-nei-chung (Hong Kong), 233–5, 248, 251, 263, 280 Wuyishan (and region), 256, 271–4 Xiamen, 181, 283 Xingcun market, 271–2 Yangtze River, 181, 209, 224, 236–8, 283 Ye Chung, 229–31 Yee Cheong, 200–2. Works: View of Canton with Shamien Island, 1865, 200–2, 201 fig. 3.12 Yenping City (Nanping), 268, 272–3 Yingde, 245, 252 Yunnan, 224, 238, 242