The Illustrated London News

First page of the first edition

The Illustrated London News was a magazine founded by Herbert Ingram and his friend Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch. With Lemon as chief adviser, the first edition of the Illustrated London News appeared on 14 May 1842. Costing sixpence, the magazine had sixteen pages and thirty-two wood engravings. It included pictures of the war in Afghanistan, a train crash in France, a steamboat explosion in Canada and a fancy dress ball at Buckingham Palace.

Although 26,000 copies were disposed of, there was a falling off in the second and subsequent numbers. Herbert Ingram, however, was determined to make his property a success. He sent every clergyman in the country a copy of the number containing illustrations of the installation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and by this means secured many new subscribers. The publication was later a source of early informal artistic education for the post-impressionist Vincent van Gogh.

The magazine was published weekly until 1971, when it became a monthly. From 1989, it was bi-monthly, then quarterly. The magazine is no longer published, but the Illustrated London News Group still exists. It produces in-house magazines, websites and consultancy. It also controls the archive of the Illustrated London News.

Collaborators

Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar in on front page of Illustrated London News on his last visit to Britain

The first generation of draughtsmen and engravers included Sir John Gilbert, Birket Foster, and George Cruikshank among the former, and W. J. Linton, Ebenezer Landells and George Thomas among the latter. Regular literary contributors included Douglas Jerrold, Richard Garnett and Shirley Brooks.

Illustrators and artists included Mabel Lucie Attwell, E. H. Shepherd, Kate Greenaway, W. Heath Robinson and his brother Charles Robinson, George E. Studdy, David Wright, Melton Prior, Frederic Villiers, Edmund Blampied, Frank Reynolds, Lawson Wood, H. M. Bateman, Bruce Bairnsfather, C. E. Turner, R. Caton Woodville, A. Forestier, Fortunino Matania and Louis Wain.

Writers and journalists included Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Augustus Sala, J. M. Barrie, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie^[1], Arthur Bryant and Tim Beaumont (who wrote on food).^[2]

Editors

1842: Frederick William Naylor Bayley

1848: John Timbs

1852: Charles Mackay

1859: John Lash

1891: Clement Shorter

1900: Bruce Ingram

1963: Hugh Ingram

1965: Timothy Green

1966: John Kisch

1970: James Bishop

1995: Mark Palmer

Sources: Peter Biddlecombe, "As much of life that the world can show", Illustrated London News, 13 May 1967; [1]

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Illustrated London News

• The Illustrated London News Group
• My Illustrated London News
• Japan and the Illustrated London News - lecture to the Japan Society by Terry Bennett in 2003

Further reading

• Law, Graham. Indexes to Fiction in the Illustrated London News (1842-1901) and the Graphic, (1869-1901). Victorian Fiction Research Guides 29, Victorian Fiction Research Unit, Department of English, University of Queensland, 2001.
• Sinnema, Peter. Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News. Aldershot: Ashgate. 1998.