Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/454

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earlier date, when less rigorous standards were accepted than

have since prevailed and when the methods of mechanical reproduction were cruder and slower, many illustrations were drawn in this spirit.47 The illustration like the text often suffers from the necessity

of having to anticipate conditions and events that may belie anticipations. In 1892, B . Gillam drew for Judge a cartoon to be used in anticipation of the expected victory of Harrison over Cleveland. It was a double page cartoon representing the elephant riding over Cleveland . At the last moment, it was

evident that Harrison had been defeated and the cartoon was changed by retouching the face of Cleveland and giving him a

Harrison beard , putting a patch over the eye of the Republican

elephant, and changing legends.48 Punch, in anticipation of the success of the expedition sent out to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum , published a cartoon

" sent by cable” and printed the morning after the event. - Tribune, June 30 , 1875 . “ Thus The Times and all other papers were distanced by the Tribune." -

H . Blackburn , “ The Illustration of Books and Newspapers,” Nineteenth Century, February, 1890 , 27 : 213 -224.

47 “ In the first number of the Illustrated London News, 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 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.” — C . K . Shorter, “ Newspapers,” Encyclopaedia Britannica , XIX , 550 551.

H . Vizetelly says that the only authorities the artist had to guide him were scanty scraps of information concerning the guests and the costumes as they appeared from time to time in the Morning Post and The Times, and that in general “ the system pursued (in the Illustrated London News) with regard to the majority of engravings of current events — foreign , provincial, and

even metropolitan when these transpired unexpectedly — was to scan the morning papers carefully , cut out such paragraphs as furnished good sub

jects for illustration , and send them with the necessary boxwood blocks to the draughtsmen employed .” — Glances Back Through Seventy Years, I, 232.

The opening address of the first editor, F . W . N . Bayley, " was little else than an amplification of the prospectus, couched in the writer's customary high flown style, only he sought to hoodwink the public by saying that, ' should the pen ever be led into fallacious argument the pencil must at least

be oracular with the spirit of truth'. And this, too, with not even a single engraving in the opening number derived from an authentic source ! ” —

Ib ., I, 237.

48 The cartoon is reproduced in Maurice and Cooper , History of the Nine teenth Century in Caricature , pp . 310 -