THE morning of the 3rd May 1884 was one of those dreary, bitterly cold days when everything seemed black, grey and miserable. Dense smoke spiralled skywards, floating from a sea of chimney stacks, reaching up like hundreds of blackened fingers trying to poke the foggy sky. London was the most important city in the world and the most polluted. The air was clammywet with a drizzling cocktail of rain mingled with smoke and soot. This noxious mixture endowed a patina of wet, sticky, black dirt onto everything – trees, flowers, and even the matted hair and ragged clothes of the news vendor standing on the corner of Aldersgate Street and Little Britain. The vendor was plying his trade selling the London Illustrated News. His cries of “Gordon besieged in Khartoum!” echoed through that cold, foggy air as he proffered the sixpenny weekly to passers-by.
AG’s day of birth
However patriotic Shirley Hibberd was, the fate of General Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon was probably not at the forefront of his thoughts. For the first edition of his latest venture, a new weekly magazine titled , was making its debut that very day. Hibberd left the Aldersgate offices of his publisher W.H. and L. Collingridge, and strode across the busy street to see if his new creation was on display at the newsstand. And there it was, patiently sitting among its, , (which Hibberd had edited from 1857-1873),
