Resource Shelf reports:
A unique visual archive of 19th century Victorian Britain, including illustrations and photographs of events ranging from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the Boer war, will be available online for the first time from today. The Illustrated London News archive [from Gale Cengage] holds 250,000 pages and as many as three-quarters of a million illustrations, from as far back as 1842.
Highlights from the 160-year archive include reports by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins and Agatha Chrstie, as well as artwork by William Heath Robinson, Louis Wain and Mabel Lucie Atwell. ILN covered world events, such as the Boer war, and domestic celebrations including the Great Exhibition of 1851, publishing the plans for the Crystal Palace event before even Prince Albert had seen them. The online archive, which goes up to 2003, will initially be available only to libraries and educational institutions.
The graphics in the ILN are marvelous, but don’t forget to check out Chesterton’s articles
From 1905 to 1936, G. K. Chesterton wrote an opinion column for the ILN. In it, he was one of the first, if not the first, to warn that Nazism and Hitler meant another European war, one even more horrible than the Great War. In a 1932 column, he even predicted that it would break out–as it did–over a border dispute between Germany and Poland.