Jeff Rosen: Julia Margaret Cameron, Prince Alamayou, and the “Secret of England’s Greatness”

In June 1868, as Great Britain was concluding its war with Abyssinia, the British army stormed the mountaintop stronghold of King Theodore, deposing the child Prince Alamayou, leaving him orphaned and alone. In July, the young boy was transported from Africa to Freshwater on the Isle of Wight in the care of a British officer. Soon thereafter, he was escorted to Julia Margaret Cameron’s studio, becoming the subject of numerous photographs that Cameron copy-righted on July 23, 27, and 29. Cameron clearly hoped to take advantage of the popular news of Britain’s military triumph as much as Queen Victoria’s expressed interest in his welfare and future upbringing. On July 15, 1868, for example, the Illustrated London News wrote the following: “Theodore’s son is at present staying in the Isle of Wight with Captain Speedy. He is to be brought up as the son of an English gentleman, with the view of his entering the Indian Civil Service.”

This presentation examines Cameron’s photographs of Prince Alamayou along two distinct axes: Britain’s so-called civilizing mission to educate and shape the world in its image defined her first approach to portraying the Abyssinian prince. As a result, she initially depicted the child as an unworldly African, providing a model for his later portrayal as an English gentleman. In the second, related axis, Cameron depicted the Prince and his attendants in allegorical compositions representing the victorious and the vanquished, subjects that acquire special meanings in the context of British
colonialism. In her photographs, Cameron portrayed the Prince as emblematic of his country’s defeat, but she also appropriated his image to embody the Victorian myth of Britain’s altruism and benevolence as a conquering power, embracing the same theme of magnanimity that is found in Thomas Barker’s contemporary print, The Secret of England’s Greatness.

Paper presented as part of the "Photography and Britishness" conference held at the Yale Center for British Art, 4–5 November 2016. This conference was co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London; and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino.