Charles J. Dunphie of Commons. Charles Dunphie was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Coming to London, he studied medicine at King's College Hospital, where he was a favourite pupil of Sir William Fergusson, but soon took to literature and journalism. For some years he was on "The Times" staff, and when the Crimean War broke out in 1853 he was offered the post of its special correspondent. But having lately married, he persuaded his colleague and countryman, William Howard Russell, to go in his stead. During the war, he was one of the founders of the "Patriotic Fund Journal" (1854-55), a weekly miscellany
Roger Fenton that in autumn 1854, as the Crimean War grabbed the attention of the British public, that some powerful friends and patrons – among them Prince Albert and Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for War – urged Fenton to go to the Crimea to record the happenings. The London print publisher Thomas Agnew & Sons became his commercial sponsor. The resulting photographs may have been intended to offset the general unpopularity of the war among the British people, and to counteract the occasionally critical reporting of correspondent William Howard Russell of "The Times"; the photographs were to be converted into