ABSTRACT
Comprehension of such a subtext infers what experimental science would call a ‘constant’ underlying the Illustrated London News (ILN) evolution; preceding readings have assumed that mundane economic preoccupations inform most examples of image-text collaboration. Focusing on the beginnings of the ILN , the Introduction queried the newspaper’s self-proclaimed status as a family-oriented, comprehensive purveyor of the ‘news’. Moreover, the examples chosen for closer scrutiny in the introductory section demonstrated that the genre of the advertisement shares structural and ideological similarities with news coverage. The announcement proudly recalling the remarkable ‘public patronage awarded to’ the ILN is an express proclamation of the newspaper’s success with the ‘respectable families of England’. William Chatto’s ‘History and Practice’ of wood engraving and the ‘colosseum print’ offered gratis to purchasers of the first volume – both arguably function as extensions of this advertisement at a point early on in the ILN’s development.
