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Harper's Weekly Main Screen, Demo CD
| Jackson was to be employed by Major Pangborn and the World Transportation Commission. Just before they were about to start on their world tour, he found out that no funds were available for his salary. Desperate, he turned to a friend at Harper's Weekly, America's leading illustrated journal. He was able to work out a deal with them to supply photographs and text from his travels at one hundred dollars per page. Forty Jackson articles were published in Harper's during 1895 and 1896, over half of them about India. |
| Jackson's photographs accompanying each article were among the very first halftones ever to appear in Harper's or any American popular periodical. Technical developments made printing photographs as halftones on plain paper possible around 1895. Jackson's name was prominently displayed at the bottom of full-page photographic spreads. His photographs and words provided a new window on the world and India for tens of thousands of Americans. |
| The pictures and text below are excerpted from the August 17, 1895 issue of Harper's Weekly, from an article on the Great Indian Penninsular Railway from Madras to Bombay. |
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"The island of Bombay itself has an area of twenty-two square miles, and upon it the greater part of the city stands, but it has also, since the islands that link it to the mainland were finally joined by the railway and other bridges, spread out until it embraces several of these within its suburbs. The great docks which lie along the inner side of Bombay Island posess all the facilities of the finest harbors of England or America, and the vast ranges of warehouses are uniformly built of stone in a style which, like all the modern buildings of any pretensions to a public character, give the impression of being intended to signify the permanence of the occupancy of the country by its present masters. "The city itself, through which one can most conveniently find his way by hiring a hansom-cab, or, if he prefers it, a native jut-cart with its characteristic pair of small zebus, has all the characteristics of a great Eastern city in an extraordinary degree. Bombay is, indeed, the gathering-place of many nations, especially, of course, those of the East, and its great wharves, heaped with goods, crowded with men, and blocked with vehicles, are not more interesting and attractive than are its wide markets and bustling streets, where twenty nationalities jostle against one another, and more than as many languages and dialects reach the bewildered ears of the stranger." |
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"Bombay is an exceptionally beautiful and well-built city. The architecture of its principal streets and buildings is rather profuse in ornament, indeed, but even this, which at first strikes the eye as rather overdone, assumes, after a short time, an air of suitability to the magnificent boulevards planted with noble trees, of which all the newer part of the city mainly consists. In the older parts of the city, indeed, there are to be found a narrower class of streets, like that of which we supply an illustration, but even in these the shops and architecture are of substantial and often even splendid architecture. "It is, however, the long lines of palacelike villas that crown the higher ground, with their sparkling white walls gleaming through the shade of the gorgeous tropical vegetation that surrounds them, that lends the special charm to every general view of the city, and leave the impresssion firmly fixed in the mind of every visitor that Bombay is well entitled to the name of the Queen City of modern India." |
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