Hello, My name is Sarah Castagnetti and I’m a visual collection specialist at the National Archives. Today, we’re going to look at some copies of a newspaper called the Illustrated London News.
These newspapers used to be in the library of a government department called the British Transport Historical Records Office, and they cover the years from 1842 to 1965.
It was published once a week, and its unique selling point was that it had a lot of illustrations which were used to depict current events
in a way that hadn’t been done before. When it was launched in 1842, photography was still quite new, and it wasn’t possible
to print photographs in newspapers. Instead, artists would create images known as engravings, which could be printed more easily but this was expensive and took a lot of time.
So most daily newspapers only had occasional illustrations. Even though it was called the Illustrated London News, it actually featured stories from across the UK and important events around the world. Before we look at our first example from this collection, notice that our document has a unique reference, so we can use our catalogue to find it.
This one is ZPER34/12.
Now let’s take a close look at our document and work out what it’s about. What type of document is it? This is an example of what we call a bound volume, where a number of items are joined together inside a protective cover.
Remember I mentioned that the Illustrated London News was published once a week, and volumes like this contain copies from January to June or July to December for individual years. It was common for newspapers to be bound into volumes for people to use in libraries and so on, because it protected them from damage. What about the appearance of the document? It’s quite big and heavy. The Illustrated London News was printed in what’s called a broadsheet format, and the pages are about 40cm high and 28cm wide.
When you get 26 copies bound together inside a strong cover like this, it makes it quite awkward to handle, but it does a good job
of protecting the papers inside. You can see on the outside that it shows the dates the volume covers, and this volume covers the dates January to June 1848.
And if we look inside, we can see how news stories were presented. Let’s look at the edition published on Saturday, the 15th of April, 1848. Here, on the front page, you can see an article titled The Chartist Demonstration, which relates to events that took place
earlier that week on Monday, the 10th of April, 1848. Chartism was a working class movement that started in 1836 and was still active at the time of this demonstration in 1848. But after this it began to decline.
At that time, only men that owned property could vote, and the Chartists wanted to extend voting rights to all men over 21 and to promote other reforms to the electoral system. The reports in this edition of the London Illustrated News cover the Chartists meeting on Kennington Common in London and their procession to Parliament to hand in a petition. The reports generally portray the events of the 10th of April as a failure. For example, they claim that there were not as many people present as the Chartist leaders had said
there would be here on the first page. The article says 300,000 Chartists summoned to Kennington Common have dwindled down to 15,000.
The reporting also emphasizes how well-prepared the government was, with prominent building secured and extra law enforcement officers recruited. Again on the first page, The article says 150,000 special constables watchful for the preservation of order,
have grasped their useless truncheons and have paraded the streets without meeting a foe.
The illustration here has the caption the Bank of England in a state of Defence, and the report on the next page describes how defensive structures were built with loopholes sufficiently large for the mouth of a cannon and apertures between them for placing muskets. If we turn a few pages, we can see two large illustrations of the meeting on Kennington Common and the procession at Blackfriars Bridge.
The top illustration says it is from a Daguerreotype, which was an early kind of photograph. The artist would have created their engraving by copying the photograph. Here, you can see the original photograph taken by a photographer called William Edward Kilburn.
Let’s look at another bound volume of the Illustrated London News now. This one has the reference ZPER34/18 and it covers the dates January to July 1851. If we look at the edition published on the 19th of April, 1851, we can see an article titled fugitives from slavery. Remarkable return in the census. On this page, there’s an illustration of Ellen Craft, who is described as a fugitive slave and is described in the accompanying article as nearly white and is depicted wearing a top hat and glasses.
Ellen and her husband William, have been born to enslaved mothers in Georgia in the United States of America. In 1848, they managed to escape north to Boston, where they were able to live as free citizens and where they became well-known abolitionist speakers. However, the 1850 fugitive slave act meant that they could be re-enslaved if they were tracked down, so they fled to the UK.
The article explains that Ellen and William had been visiting Mr. Wilson Armistead in Leeds in March, on the night of the 1851 census, and that it was requisite that their names and places of nativity, as well as their rank and profession, should be inserted by him in the government’s census paper to be filled up and returned on the 31st. The article reports that Ellen and William’s names were entered on the census, along with the description fugitives from slavery in America, the land of their Nativity. It describes them as very interesting
and intelligent persons. Ellen is 24 years of age and as fair as most of her British sisters. William is very dark, but of a reflective, intelligent countenance. Although the tone of the article is respectful, there are elements of the description of Ellen and William that we might question today.
We have looked at two articles from different editions of the London Illustrated News. Each one gives the perspective of the person that wrote them, and reflects something of the views and attitudes of the time. These are considerations that we must bear in mind when we’re trying to evaluate their significance. These are just two examples of articles in one particular newspaper that can be used to find out about people and events in history.