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 elaborate for a journal of to-day, and in 1820 it gave its readers “A Faithful Reproduction of the Interior of the House of Lords as prepared for the Trial of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Caroline.” In 1821 it published an interior of the House of Commons with the members in their places. The Observer of 22nd July 1821—the Coronation number—contained four engravings. Of the George IV. Coronation number Mr Clement sold 60,000 copies, but even that was nothing to the popularity that this journal secured by its illustrations of the once famous murder of Mr Weare and the trial of the murderer Thurtell. The Observer in 1838 gave a picture of the Coronation of Queen Victoria. In 1841 there was a fire at the Tower of London, when the armoury was destroyed. The Observer published three illustrations of the fire; it further published an emblematic engraving on the birth of the prince of Wales, and issued a large page engraving of the christening ceremony in the following January. Thus it had in it all the elements of pictorial journalism as we know it to-day.

The weekly Illustrated London News was, however, the first illustrated newspaper by virtue of its regularity. It was the first illustrated paper, because all the illustrations to which we have referred as appearing in the Observer and other publications were irregular. They came at intervals; they were quite subordinate to the letterpress of the paper; they were given only occasionally in times of excitement, with a view to promoting some little extra sale. That they did not really achieve the result hoped for to any great extent may be gauged by the fact that from 1842 to 1847 the Observer published scarcely any illustrations at all, and in the meantime the Illustrated London News had taken an assured place as a journal devoted mainly to the illustration of news week by week. That is why its first publication marked an epoch in journalism. The casual illustration of other journals still went on: the Weekly Chronicle, for example, still published a number of pictures; the Sunday Times, also a very old paper, illustrated in these early days many topical subjects. In 1834, indeed, it pictured the ruins of the House of Commons, when that building was burned down. A paper started in 1837 called the Magnet gave illustrations, one of them of the removal from St Helena and delivery of the remains of the emperor Napoleon to the prince de Joinville in 1840.

The first number of the Illustrated London News appeared on 14th May 1842. Its founder was Herbert Ingram (1811–1860), who was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, and started life amid the most humble surroundings, what education he ever received having been secured at the free school of his native town. Apprenticed at fourteen to a printer in Hull, he later settled in Nottingham as a printer and newsagent in a small way. It was during his career as a newsvendor at Nottingham that he was seized with the belief that it was possible to produce a paper entirely devoted to illustration of news. In the first number of the Illustrated London News, however, there was not a single picture that was drawn from actual sight, the factor which is the most essential element of the illustrated journalism of to-day. Sir John Gilbert (1817–1897), the artist, has stated that not one of the events depicted by him—a state ball at which the queen and the prince consort appeared, the queen with the young prince of Wales in her arms, and other incidental illustrations—was taken from life.

The Illustrated London News had not been long in existence before there were many imitators, in America Harper’s Weekly, in France L’Illustration and in Germany Über Land und Meer, and from that day there has been constant development, the Illustrated Zeitung of Leipzig being perhaps the most striking. In America the use of illustrations in the daily papers has become a regular feature, culminating in the bulky Sunday editions of the principal journals; and the practice of presenting the news in pictorial form has increased continuously even in England. In 1910 three London daily newspapers were principally devoted to illustration—the Daily Graphic, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch, while most of the penny and halfpenny journals included some form of pictorial matter. This change was due,

to the ever-increasing cheapening and ever-growing celerity of manufacture of what are known as half-tone blocks. It was in 1890 that the application of photography to illustrated journalism began in England, and by 1910 it had grown to enormous dimensions, but the first newspaper photographs (mainly portraits) had to be engraved on wood, although the use of halftone came in well-nigh simultaneously. Up to 1890 illustrated journalism was in the hands of the artists, and the artists were in the hands of the wood engravers, who reproduced their work sometimes effectively—often inefficiently. But in the course of twenty years the wood engraver had been utterly superseded so far as illustrated journalism was concerned. The further developments of journalism seemed likely to be entirely in the direction of coloured reproductions, block-making and machinery for facilitating their production having made particularly rapid strides.