Penny Illustrated Paper
< Back to collection introduction
The British Library holds the only complete run of the ‘Penny Illustrated Paper’, published between 1861 and 1913. It provides a valuable and entertaining source of detailed information on everyday life and historical events in Britain and across the Empire.
Today, we take mass-circulation newspapers, crammed with images of people and dramatic events, for granted. In the nineteenth century, illustrated newspapers were excitingly new - and, as now, influential. 'The Illustrated London News' led the way when its first weekly issue went on sale in May 1842.
At that time, the government not only taxed paper, but also levied a further duty on each newspaper sold. Both these obstacles to the growth of popular newspapers were removed with the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855 followed by the abolition of paper duty in 1861.
Daily and weekly newspapers could now be published more cheaply and reach a far wider readership. Mass appeal was economically viable. It was also respectable, as the example of the six million visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London’s Hyde Park had proved. By 1863, the circulation of 'The Illustrated London News' reached an impressive 300,000 copies a week with a cover price of six pence. Other publishers were not slow in setting out to capture their share of this expanding market.
Ebenezer Farrington published the first issue of his weekly ‘Penny Illustrated Paper’ on 12 October 1861. The title proudly proclaimed itself in capital letters and carried the motto: ‘With all the news of the week’. In early copies, the banner’s pictorial background features sailing ships in harbour, lifting cranes, and a steam engine on a railway viaduct with mountains rising in the background.
The newspaper adopted a campaigning stance, from the start: "In producing an Illustrated Paper for the million, let us plainly say, we want it to be esteemed the friend of the million," read the first editorial. Its aspiration was to use the cheap press to help solve "…the terrible amount of suffering, disorder, and vice that must be dealt with in a more vigorous fashion than hitherto…"
Contents are divided by sub-titles, printed in gothic lettering. For example, the edition for 24 January 1863 has Topics of the Week; Home News; Accidents, Inquests, etc; Guy Waterman’s Maze (fiction); Picked Up at Sea; Sporting News; Recreations; Foreign News; Law & Police; Gossip; and Advertisements.
The ‘Penny Illustrated Paper’ followed the lead of 'The Illustrated London News' in offering articles covering a wide variety of subjects and generously illustrated with woodcuts. The size and content of the illustrations varies greatly, reflecting the degree of popular interest in current events and the ‘celebrities’ of Victorian life.
From the mid-1880s, illustrations featured yet more strongly. Each issue has a whole-page cover illustration, another whole-page picture inside, and often a foldout illustration acting as a supplement to a particular issue. A column devoted solely to commentary on the illustrations began on 9 January 1886. More space was also provided for advertisements, both large and small. Nearly three pages of small advertisements were included in the same issue that saw the beginning of the ‘Our Illustrations’ column.
One of the predominant features of the ‘Penny Illustrated Paper’ was the honesty of the reporting, together with the clarity of its expression. The sometimes crude, yet vividly depicted, illustrations give an immediate impression of events occurring in that week. Looking at the results today, we cannot fail to appreciate the achievements of the editors in not only gathering wide-ranging reports each week, but also ensuring that a substantial number of woodcut engravings, and later photographs, were organised in time to go to press.
For over fifty years, every week, this work continued alongside competitors whose weekly cover price was much greater. During the closing years of the nineteenth century, the rise of mass-circulation national daily newspapers provided even more competition. In January 1908, the newspaper’s title was changed to ‘P.I.P. Penny Illustrated Paper’. Five years later, the title was lost altogether when it became absorbed into ‘London Life’.
