The Illustrated London News founder Herbert Ingram was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1811, and opened a printing, newsagent, and bookselling business in Nottingham around 1834 in partnership with his brother-in-law, Nathaniel Cooke.

The first issue of The Illustrated London News appeared on Saturday, 14 May 1842, timed to report on the young Queen Victoria's first masquerade ball.

[4] The 16 pages and 32 wood engravings of that first edition covered topics such as the war in Afghanistan, the Versailles rail accident, a survey of the candidates for the US presidential election, extensive crime reports, theatre and book reviews, and a list of births, marriages, and deaths.

However, Ingram was determined to make his newspaper a success, and sent every clergyman in the country a copy of the edition that contained illustrations of the installation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and by this means secured a great many new subscribers.

As reading habits and the illustrated news market changed, the ILN bought or established a number of new publications, evolving from a single newspaper to a larger-scale publishing business.

Ingram and The Illustrated London News responded by establishing a competing magazine, The Spear, which appeared two days before The Sphere on 25 January 1900.

Bruce Ingram was editor of The Illustrated London News and (from 1905) The Sketch, and ran the company for the next 63 years, presiding over some significant changes in the newspaper and the publishing business as a whole.

Photographic and printing techniques were advancing in the later years of the 19th century, and The Illustrated London News began to introduce photos and artwork into its depictions of weekly events.

Often, rough sketches of distant events with handwritten explanations were supplied by observers and then worked on by artists in London to produce polished end products for publication.

This was particularly the case where popular subjects such as colonial or foreign military campaigns did not lend themselves to clear illustration using the limited camera technology of the period.

By the 1920s and 1930s, the pictures that dominated each issue of the magazine were almost exclusively photographic,[12] although artists might still be used to illustrate in pictorial form topics such as budgetary expenditure or the layout of coal mines.

The occasion was marked in the paper with a set of specially commissioned colour photographs of the royal family, including the future Queen Elizabeth.

In the postwar period, print publications were gradually displaced from their central position in reporting news events, and circulation began to fall for all the illustrated weeklies.

With circulation figures continuing to fall, The Illustrated London News switched from weekly to monthly publication in 1971, with a new focus on in-depth reporting and selective coverage of world events.

In 1985, The Illustrated London News and the archives of the Great Eight publications were sold to Sea Containers, an international transport corporation headed by James Sherwood.

Along with the Illustrated London News Group, Sea Containers operated the Orient Express and Great North Eastern Railway, and a range of luxury hotels.

After publishing its last Christmas number in 2001, The Illustrated London News was relaunched in 2003 under the editorship of Mark Palmer, which ran for one issue before finally ceasing publication for good.

In May 2024, Illustrated London News Ltd fell into administration and has subsequently appointed Opus Restructuring Llp of 1 Radian Court, Knowlhill, Milton Keynes, MK5 8PJ to wind up the company, bringing nearly 200 years of publication to an end.

Illustrators, artists, and photographers included Edward Duncan, Bruce Bairnsfather, H. M. Bateman, Edmund Blampied, Mabel Lucie Attwell, E. H. Shepherd, Kate Greenaway, John Proctor, W. Heath Robinson and his brother Charles Robinson, Rebecca Solomon, George E. Studdy, David Wright, Melton Prior, William Simpson, Frederic Villiers, H. C. Seppings-Wright, Myles Birket Foster, Frank Reynolds, Lawson Wood, C. E. Turner, R. Caton Woodville Jr, A. Forestier, Fortunino Matania, Christina Broom, Louis Wain, J. Segrelles, and Frank Vizetelly.

Writers and journalists included Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Augustus Sala, J. M. Barrie, Wilkie Collins, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Camilla Dufour Crosland,[19] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Charles Petrie, Agatha Christie,[20][21] Arthur Bryant, and Tim Beaumont (who wrote about food).