Students on the V&A / RCA History of Design Postgraduate Programme spend the autumn term researching an object in the museum’s collection. In this series, we share some of their exciting discoveries.
In December 2023, a volcano erupted at the Sundhnúksgígar crater in Iceland. My news apps were immediately flooded with images of flames and lava for days on end. Tourists in the area were advised to ‘think four times’ before trying to get close, so eager were people to catch a glimpse or get a picture for themselves. Images, particularly shocking or sensational images, are now central to the way we consume the news. In this context, fire makes a particularly good news story. It’s exciting visually, dangerous and can engage an audience (or a group of tourists) instantly.
And yet, images have not always been such a prominent feature in how we consume the news. In fact, historically, most newspapers contained no images at all or only included visual representations in very rare instances. My research into a woodblock for printing, now in the V&A’s collection, revealed just how important fire, as a subject and visual spectacle, was to the reimagining and redesign of the mid-nineteenth-century newspaper.
On Saturday 14 May 1842, readers were able buy the first issue of the Illustrated London News (ILN), the very first illustrated newspaper. The woodblock for the cover image depicted a fire that broke out in Hamburg on the morning of 8 May. Before the ILN, newspapers looked very different. Three separate taxes, Advertisement Duty, Stamp Duty and Paper Duty, meant publishers made strenuous efforts to limit the amount of paper they used. Newspapers maximised content and minimised white space with layouts that were dominated by dense blocks of text.
The ILN emerged through a collaboration between two men, Herbert Ingram (a newsvendor and printer) and Henry Vizetelly (an engraver). Ingram’s experience as a newsvendor provided the impetus for the creation of the paper. He knew what sold and what people wanted. As an engraver Vizetelly was in communication with newspaper editors so he also knew which events they’d want illustrated. The pair came together when Ingram concocted the idea for a cure-all-wellness pill, Parr’s Life Pill. He hired Vizetelly to illustrate the fictitious Old Parr, a man reputed to have lived to the age of 152. According to Ingram’s canny sales pitch, so could the consumer. The pills were a commercial success, and the profits were then used to finance the creation of the ILN.
Woodcuts, such as those that appeared in the ILN, were cheap compared with other printing techniques. They were also associated with working-class readers. However, in the period before the publication of the ILN, Thomas Bewick, an engraver with a natural affinity for woodcut, revived the technique and brought it to a middle-class audience. Previously, the majority of woodcuts had relied on harsh, black, cartoon-style outlines. But Bewick developed a style that made creative use of negative space and finer lines to build an image. By the time Ingram and Vizetelly were marketing the ILN to middle-class consumers, their target demographic had already come around to this new woodcut style employed by Bewick and his apprentices.
By 1842, and the advent of the ILN, woodcut prints that could be produced cheaply were also desirable. But what to depict? What sorts of images would appeal to Victorian news junkies?
Another fire begins to answer these questions. On 16 October 1834, the Houses of Parliament were engulfed in flames. According to a report in the Times, thousands gathered on the streets to watch the building burn, with yet more people watching from nearby windows and boats on the river. The Mirror even offered back copies of its fire coverage. Additional visual illustrations of the same episode were available at both ends of the print market: James Catnach produced a cheap broadside illustration using woodcut and William Heath a more expensive coloured lithograph. JMW Turner painted the event twice and the Adelphi Theatre, less than a month after the fire, began to advertise a Pictorial View, taken from Lambeth Palace, of the conflagration of the Houses of Parliament. While it’s not clear exactly what form this took, it may have been a large-scale visual recreation. In combination, these examples all evidence the public desire for media that recreated a spectacular fire.
By the time of yet another fire – this time at the Tower of London in 1841 – the city’s authorities had learned from the mistakes of the past and wanted to avoid the disruption of seven years earlier. On this occasion, the area around the Tower was cordoned off immediately. But as in Iceland in 2023, sightseers were not to be deterred – their interest led the Ordnance Department to charge admission, six pence per visitor, to view the still-smouldering Tower. The Observer went on to print three illustrations of the fire.
Little over a year later, in May 1842, Ingram and Vizetelly caught wind that a fire had started in Hamburg. They would have been only too aware of these earlier conflagrations and their mass commercial appeal to early Victorian audiences. In the hope of capitalising on recent events in Hamburg, Vizetelly’s assistant was sent to the British Museum to find a print of the city and sketch it, before adding flames, smoke and onlookers, all from his own imagination.
Other stories could have made the front page of this new illustrated paper. However, Ingram and Vizetelly knew the financial success and proven appeal of fire as a visual spectacle. It made good business sense to make fire in Hamburg front-page news. Much like the tourists in Iceland, the Victorian public had shown its eagerness to be close to the action or, at the very least, own an image of an exciting event.
To see what else V&A/RCA History of Design students have been up to, read our other blog posts or check our pages on the RCA website. You can even find out how to apply for 2025/2026 admission to MA V&A/RCA History of Design here.
