SHADBOLT, Sydney H.

The Afghan campaigns of 1878–1880, compiled from official and private sources . . . Dedicated, by permission, to Lieut.-General Sir F. S. Roberts, Bart., G.C.B., C.I.E., V.C., R.A., Commander-in-Chief of the Madras Army. Comprising historical and biographical divisions, and containing a rapid sketch of the war, maps illustrating the operations and the movements of the forces, one hundred and forty permanent photographs of officers who lost their lives in the campaigns and of recipients of the Victoria Cross, with memoirs prepared from materials of the movements in the field of the various...

London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1882. 2 vols, folio (305 x 245 mm), pp. [vi], 274, with 20 plates, each with seven woodburytype portraits of officers who lost their lives in the campaign and of recipients of the Victoria Cross; [vi], 352, with a mounted woodburytype frontispiece, and six maps (one folding); original green cloth, gilt; extremities a little rubbed; gilt edges. First edition of this account of the Second Afghan War. One volume comprises biographical entries, the other a detailed analysis of the campaign compiled from official accounts, maps and data. Shadbolt was a barrister of the Inner Temple as well as a talented writer (he had earlier co-authored The South African Campaign of 1879 with J. P. Mackinnon). When the Afghan amir invited a Russian diplomatic mission to Kabul but refused to welcome one also from British India in 1878, a British invasion of that country was organised. It was divided in three columns: the first, commanded by Donald Stewart, was to occupy Kandahar; the second, under Sir Sam Browne, was to threaten Kabul from the Khyber Pass; and the third, led by Sir Frederick Sleigh Roberts (to whom Shadbolt dedicated this work), was to occupy Kurram Valley. The conflict continued until the British victory at the battle of Kandahar in 1880. After this Abdur Rahman (the British choice) was confirmed as amir and he accepted the treaty of Gandamak, which put Britain in charge of Afghanistan’s foreign policy.Woodburytype flourished from about 1870 to 1900, at its peak in the 1870s and 1880s it was extensively used to photographically illustrate books and journals. ‘Despite its delicacy and beauty, woodburytype remained a transitional technology for publishing photographs, a labour-intensive means of mass-producing reproductions of carbon prints that partially replaced the pasted-in albumen silver photograph, but was itself replaced by faster, cheaper, type-compatible processes like the half-tone’ (Hannavy, ed., Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century photography p.1512).

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