A couple of months have gone by since my visit to Canterbury Cathedral, during which I’ve been completely absorbed by two of the research projects that form part of the coursework for my Masters in History. One revealed corruption in psychiatric care in nineteenth-century colonial India, while the other looked at the vogue for exchanging and collecting a style of photographic portrait called the carte de visite. That reminded me of an image of Lieutenant Charles Carrington ‘Carrin’ Churchward that I found some years ago during my research for Avarice of Empire.
A carte de visite was a 57mm x 90mm photograph mounted on stiff card measuring 63mm x 102mm (larger than a modern business card, but smaller than a postcard) that could be mounted in an album or enclosed within a letter. The name and popularity of the format originated in Paris, where the carte de visite was patented by entrepreneurial photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in November 1854. It became the Victorian era’s curated, self-performative equivalent of Instagram. Celebrity cartes de visite were sold in their many millions worldwide throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the fashion for them peaking in the early 1860s and continuing to flourish during the 1870s. In Britain alone, carte de visite photography was (in today’s money) a multi-billion-pound industry.
The carte de visite of Carrin Churchward, one of the officers of the 16th Lancers who features in Avarice of Empire, was produced at the Waterloo Crescent studio of J. Weston & Son in Dover — likely in July or early August 1865 just before Churchward left England for India. The portrait shows him in his full-dress uniform, including the Prussian-style czapka helmet with its horsehair plume, scarlet tunic with gold braiding, dark blue trousers (with a yellow stripe down the side), and holding his 1853-pattern cavalry sabre. His thick moustache and bushy burnside whiskers were all the rage. Churchward may well have had the carte taken so that he could give family and friends a keepsake during the leaving party arranged by his father at Kearnsey Abbey in Kent on 16th August 1865.
