Frank and Frank

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

First published in 1855, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (later Leslie's Weekly) ended its run in 1922. As its title suggests, the periodical provided engravings and Daguerreotypes (and, later, photographs) as illustrations of the news of the day.

According to Joshua Brown, author of The Great Uprising and Pictorial Order in Gilded Age America, the newspaper's illustrated articles concerning the American Civil War, which were often shocking and sensational, catapulted the publication to success (20).

Frank Leslie

In producing the 16-page newspaper, a laborious sort of assembly-line approach was taken to produce each illustration. It took artists and engravers eight hours to produce one completed illustration—and this period of time represented an increase in speed; before the assembly-line process was introduced, producing a single finished illustration took as long as an entire week (Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America 33).

However, a “beeswax mold” then had to be the finished picture then had to be made of the page bearing the illustration, after which this mold was immersed “in an electrocharged bath containing copper particles” so that it could be copperplated—a process which took “between thirty and forty-eight hours” (Beyond the Lines 33).

Over time, this process was expedited so that “by the 1880s three sets of Frank Leslie's, comprising forty-eight pages, were being electroplated in three hours” (Beyond the Lines 39).

Critics pointed out that the newspaper's claim that the resulting pictures provided “'eye-witness' recordings of events” was far from the truth, as they tended to be based more on the artists' imagination than on a “direct observation” of the events they supposedly depicted (Beyond the Lines 33).

The printing of the newspaper itself was also a time-consuming enterprise, but, like the production of its illustration, the time required for the printing of the publication also decreased thanks to technological developments and other innovations. For example, the newspaper's purchase of a Taylor Perfecting Press in 1858 allowed 1,200 copies per hour of the newspaper to be printed (Beyond the Lines 40). As a result, Frank Leslie's could report on the current events of the day while they were still current.

To appeal to the public, the newspaper routinely printed lurid stories; as Brown points out, such fare included engravings of details of “notorious crimes, . . . sexually charged cheap amusements and “violent” rough sports” (Beyond the Lines 41).

Indeed, the covers of the newspaper indicate the lurid nature of the publication's contents.

After almost 80 years, Frank Leslie's periodical ceased publication. Leslie died in 1880. As the result of an expensive train trip that he'd taken with his second wife, Miriam, and a bevy of their friends in 1887, which Miriam describes in her book From Gotham to the Golden Gate, an an economic recession, the publication was in poor financial shape (Woman of the Century 459).

Frank Leslie

Upon her husband's death, Miriam changed her name to his (Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 11, 186), and, as Frank Leslie, ran the business until 1992, when, tiring of the task, she sold the publication “and its German edition for between $300,000 and $4000,000” (Woman of the Century 459).

William ("Willie") Charles Kingsbury Wilde

As a result, “in her early fifties,” she was “extremely rich” (Beyond the Lines 233). She married yet again, to her fourth husband, Oscar Wilde's younger brother William (“Willie”) Charles Kingsbury Wilde, who was seventeen years younger than she (Beyond the Lines 233).