Since he was a child, Henry Carter wanted to be an artist. Born March 29, 1821, the son of a glove manufacturer in Ipswich, Suffolk, England, Carter loved drawing and wood carving, but his father called him impractical and insisted that he assume a leadership position in the family's business. While working at his father's manufactory, Carter became fascinated with silversmiths in the factory, noting their tools and how they were used. Eventually, he collected enough engraver's tools to teach himself engraving and to begin working at it.
Unwittingly, his family cooperated by sending the young man to London for more business experience. But London afforded young Henry Carter opportunities to study both the theory and the practice of the trade he loved. Combining his business acumen with his art, Carter submitted sketches to London magazines. Fearing discovery by his father, he created a professional name: Frank Leslie.
When young Carter saw the pioneer pictorial weekly Illustrated London News founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842, he knew what he wanted to do. He deserted the family business and worked his way up to superintendent of the new magazine's engraving department. Along the way, he learned every aspect of the trade, including the system of controlling light-and-shade on wood engravings for printing -- a process he would later introduce to the United States. With his background and a new name, Henry Carter would start the first successful American news picture magazine, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, and create the role of pictures in the news.
The Illustrated Newspaper was so expensive to produce that the publication often teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. A large, expensive staff turned out timely stories and illustrations, but pressures for such news didn't occur every week.
Leslie could not afford to run his illustrated newspaper at a loss; he had invested heavily in news. Leslie soon found another means for ensuring his weekly's success: sensationalism.
Frank Leslie helped create the myth of the virtuous individualist at the head of a large media conglomerate. In 1905 artist Joseph Becker, who had run the publication's art department for half of its 50 years, recalled that Frank Leslie's motto was "Never shoot over the heads of the people." As a result, journalism historian Frank Luther Mott writes, his weekly newspaper "was never profound and seldom very stimulating; but it was nearly always passably amusing, and in its earlier years especially it presented a vivid and lively picture of the American scene."
Leslie took hundreds of thousands of Americans to places they had never
seen before. The technology for reproducing photographs in magazines and
newspapers wasn't invented until Leslie's death. During his lifetime, Leslie
provided the most earthy realism -- sometimes more imagined than real --
available in his day.
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Last updated: March 9, 1998.
Comments to: Communication Department
