Victorian Studies

The Crimean War produced the first generally acknowledged war correspondent: The Times's William Howard Russell. But perhaps more importantly, the war also changed the way journalism itself functioned during wartime and the way readers participated in its reportage. Newspapers like The Times provided a public forum for the expression of private experiences of the war—a forum in which public and private voices mixed, as official "despatches" were printed alongside personal letters from soldiers at the front. In addition, institutionally backed editorials and articles from the papers' "Own Correspondents" surrounded an unprecedented barrage of letters to the editor from civilians weighing in on the Crimean campaign. These unofficial contributions suggest that the world fashioned by the mass media during what was dubbed "the people's war" functioned as a genuine public sphere.