The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News was an English

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 weekly magazine

Magazine

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

 founded in 1874 and published in London. In 1945 it changed its name to the Sport and Country, and in 1957 to the Farm and Country, before closing in 1970.

History

The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News was founded in 1874. The paper covered, as its title indicates, both sporting and theatrical events, including news and criticism. It also contained original pieces of fiction in serials and a story or two in each issue. There were numerous similar publications in Britain at the time, including The Illustrated London News, which shared its address and some illustrators with the magazine.

In 1883, the paper published a cartoon showing Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 in convict dress, which was considered at the time to be a very serious slur. Twelve years later, Wilde was convicted of "gross indecency

Sodomy law

A sodomy law is a law that defines certain sexual acts as crimes. The precise sexual acts meant by the term sodomy are rarely spelled out in the law, but are typically understood by courts to include any sexual act deemed unnatural. It also has a range of similar euphemisms...

" and sentenced to two years penal labour

Penal labour

Penal labour is a form of unfree labour in which prisoners perform work, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence which involve penal labour include penal servitude and imprisonment with hard labour...

.

The paper is a good source of illustrations from sporting and theatre events, such as images of horse racing

Horse racing

Horse racing is an equestrian sport that has a long history. Archaeological records indicate that horse racing occurred in ancient Babylon, Syria, and Egypt. Both chariot and mounted horse racing were events in the ancient Greek Olympics by 648 BC...

. Notable illustrators included Louis Wain

Louis Wain

Louis Wain was an English artist best known for his drawings, which consistently featured anthropomorphised large-eyed cats and kittens. In his later years he suffered from schizophrenia, which, according to some psychologists, can be seen in his works.- Life and work :Louis William Wain was...

, Frank R. Grey

Frank R. Grey

Frank R. Grey was an English illustrator, best remembered for his illustration of Jane Turpin stories by Evadne Price. He was with the publishing house of Robert Hale, Ltd. and illustrated all ten collections of Jane stories published by Robert Hale. The 1985 collection of Jane stories - Jane and...

, D. H. Friston and Alfred Bryan

Alfred Bryan (Illustrator)

Alfred Bryan was a popular English illustrator, best-known for his many contributions to the London-based weekly theatrical review Entr'acte....

. In 1920, its address was 172, Strand

Strand, London

Strand is a street in the City of Westminster, London, England. The street is just over three-quarters of a mile long. It currently starts at Trafalgar Square and runs east to join Fleet Street at Temple Bar, which marks the boundary of the City of London at this point, though its historical length...

, London WC 2

London postal district

The London postal district is the area in England, currently of , to which mail addressed to the LONDON post town is delivered. The area was initially devised in 1856 and throughout its history has been subject to periodic reorganisation, contraction and division into increasingly smaller postal...

.

Notable editors included James Wentworth Day

James Wentworth Day

James Wentworth Day was a British writer and occasional broadcaster, firmly of the Agrarian Right school and essentially a High Tory. He lived for most of his life in East Anglia, an area which would always be his first love; he had a particular interest in wildfowling, and at one stage owned...

, who served in the post between 1935 and 1937.

The magazine's published fiction included W. S. Gilbert

W. S. Gilbert

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of which the most famous include H.M.S...

's short piece, Actors, Authors and Audiences in 1880's Holly Leaves, its annual Christmas

Christmas

Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...

 special, Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker

Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula...

's The Squaw (1893) and Crooken Sands (1894), Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...

's story The Unbreakable Alibi in Holly Leaves of 1928, and her Sing a Song of Sixpence in the following year's Holly Leaves. The Irish chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

 grand master George Alcock MacDonnell

George Alcock MacDonnell

George Alcock MacDonnell was an Irish chess master.He tied for 3rd-4th at London 1862 ,...

 wrote a regular chess column under the name of Mars.

According to a Catalogue of Printed Books in the Library of the British Museum, the British Library

British Library

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...

 holds copies of the paper from 28 February 1874. The University of Wisconsin–Madison

University of Wisconsin–Madison

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...

 has all but three of the first twenty-five volumes in its English and Irish Periodicals collection.

Titles and issues

• Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News: 28 February 1874 to 22 January 1943, Nos. 1 to 3576
• Sport and Country: 5 February 1943 to 16 October 1957, Nos. 3577 to 3958
• Farm and Country: 30 October 1957 to December 1970, Nos. 3959 to 4200
• Holly Leaves: the Christmas edition of the titles, issued 1880 to 1969

External links

• http://www.xix-e.pierre-marteau.com/ed/colonel/setting.htmlIllustration of a scene from The Colonel
  The Colonel
  The Colonel can refer to:*Colonel Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken *Colonel Tom Parker, the manager for Elvis Presley*The Colonel , an 1881 play by F. C. Burnand...
  
  ]
• Links to several illustrations from the magazine