The special correspondents’ monuments: Melton Prior, imperial memory and the Victorian press in the shadow of the South African War, 1899–1901

Abstract

This article examines Bertha Burleigh’s 1912 marble and onyx monument to the war artist Melton Prior (1845–1910) alongside a range of earlier memorials to ‘special correspondents’ in the crypt in St Paul’s Cathedral. It considers the monument in the context of significant shifts in the nature of war reportage in the early twentieth century, as new and increasingly brutal technologies and methods of war placed significant strain on romantic Victorian conceptions of conflict. Exploring the extent to which war artists such as Prior were implicated in the violence they were tasked with documenting, the article also asks how such visual reportage informed the racial politics of memory embodied in the crypt, anointing some men as imperial heroes worthy of sombre commemoration and others as ‘ungrieveable’.