In 1842, Herbert Ingram, a young printer
and newsagent from Nottingham, arrived
in London. As a newsagent he noticed that
when on the rare occasions that newspapers included woodcuts, their
sales increased. He therefore came to the conclusion that it would
be possible to make a good profit from a magazine that included a
large number of illustrations.
Herbert Ingram discussed the proposal with
his friend, Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch
magazine. With Lemon as his chief adviser, the first edition of the
Illustrated London News appeared on 14th May 1842. Costing
sixpence, the magazine had sixteen pages and thirty-two woodcuts.
The first edition included pictures of the war in Afghanistan, a train
crash in France, a steam-boat explosion in Canada and a fancy dress
ball at Buckingham Palace.
Ingram was a staunch Liberal who favoured
social reform. He announced in the London Illustrated News
that the concern of the magazine would be "with the English poor"
and the "three essential elements of discussion with us will
be the poor laws, the factory laws, and the working of the mining
system". Later Herbert Ingram was
to become MP for Boston and until his death in 1860 continued his
campaign for social reform in the House of
Commons.
The London Illustrated News was an immediate success and the
first edition sold 26,000 copies. Within a few months it was selling
over 65,000 copies a week. Encouraged by the success of the Illustrated
London News, Ingram decided in 1848 to start a daily newspaper,
the London Telegraph.
High prices were charged for advertisements and Herbert
Ingram was soon making £12,000 a year from his publishing
venture. When Andrew Spottiswoode started a rival paper, the Pictorial
Times, Ingram purchased it and merged it with the Illustrated
London News. In 1855 Ingram took over another rival, the Illustrated
Times.
Special events were important to the success of the London Illustrated
News. The magazine did very well during the Great
Exhibitionof 1851 and over 150,000 copies were sold of the edition
that reported the funeral of the Duke of
Wellington. The Crimean War caused
a further boast to sales and by 1863 it was selling over 300,000 copies
a week. This was far higher than other journals. For example, newspapers
such as the Daily News only sold 6,000
copies at this time, and even the largest selling newspaper, The
Times only sold 70,000 copies.
In the
20th century the London Illustrated News employed Britain's
top artists including Frank
Reynolds,
Henry M. Brock,
Fortunino Matania, H.
M. Bateman and Lewis
Baumer.
Picture used
by Herbert Ingram as part of his campaign
in the
Illustrated London News to bring an end child labour in the
mines.
(1)
Review of Work by Ford Madox Brown
in the The Illustrated London News
(1865)
Bravo! Mr. Brown, we would at once exclaim for the boldness of representing
as your principal hero that potent agent in the work of British civilization,
the excavator or navvy. We applaud, also, the variously suggestive,
and by no means squeamish, way in which the theme Work is illustrated,
positively and negatively. We applaud, we repeat, the honest effort
to represent the actualities of workaday life.
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