1865: Cartes de visite, the Lincoln conspiracy, and the evolution of transnational imagination

Description

On 1st May 1865, Joseph Tussaud of the famous London waxwork museum, in the company of Southwell Brothers, together copyrighted two cartes de visite at Stationer’s Hall of American actor John Wilkes Booth. Booth had been killed three days earlier in a barn in Virginia, on the run after assassinating United States President Abraham Lincoln. Just over two weeks later, on 17th May, across the Atlantic in Washington D.C., photographer Alexander Gardner copyrighted his own cartes de visite of the Lewis Powell (alias Lewis Payne), who after Booth’s death had become the star of the trial of the remaining captured conspirators.
Gardner’s photographs of the Lincoln conspirators have generally been understood by modern scholars and in popular retellings of the conspiracy as a rogues’ gallery, produced as prototype mugshots in a quasi-judicial process of criminal documentation. Their use and exploitation as commodities, especially of Payne as an overnight sensation during the trial, also point toward the kind of celebrity culture with which we would be familiar. Nevertheless, both such readings oversimplify the complex new transatlantic culture of notability centred around crime as a driver of specular curiosity – cartes would be traded across Booth’s killer Boston Corbett, and later the Glasgow murderer E. W. Pritchard, for example. This paper focuses on cartes of the relatively unknown Lewis Payne: how they came to feature in carte albums in the United States, North and South, and how this compares with the obvious celebrity of the international actor Booth. Cartes de visite of notables could be purchased locally and inserted into an album alongside a family’s own. Using archival resources from London to Charleston, SC., this paper frames this imaginative process as one that could be at once social, notable, and martial, depending on the local and national context.

Period	4 May 2024
Event title	Event 2024 - Flightless Conference British Association for Victorian Studies / North American Association for Victorian Studies Hubs in USA, UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, South Korea
Event type	Conference
Location	Stirling, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International