Jerrold, Blanchard, 1826-1884

English journalist and author.

British journalist and playwright.

Blanchard Jerrold, British journalist, editor and playwright. Adolphe Smith (1846-1925), British journalist and socialist; Alice Smith, his wife, British literary critic.

William Blanchard Jerrold (1826-1884) was the son of British playwright, journalist and political satirist Douglas William Jerrold (1803-1857). The elder Jerrold was editor of a number of publications including the Daily News, Jerrold's Shilling Magazine, and Lloyd's Weekly, as well as a regular contributor to Punch . Blanchard Jerrold also wrote frequently for these papers, and at his father's death he took over the editorship of Lloyd's . He was a prolific writer, a novelist and playwright as well as a journalist, and he shared his father's interest in social reform and the labor movement. His 1872 collaboration with the illustrator Gustave Doré, London: a Pilgrimage, contrasts the lives of London's rich and poor. Among his many other works are biographies of Doré, George Cruikshank, and Napoleon III, and a series of writings on food entitled "Knife and Fork." (More detailed biographies of both Douglas and Blanchard Jerrold may be found in the Dictionary of National Biography .)

Adolphe Smith (1846-1925) was a British journalist and socialist. He was born at Headingley, Yorkshire, but at least one of his parents was French; he seems to have lived in France for part of his life, and fought in the Paris Commune uprising of 1870-71. He wrote frequently on contemporary public health issues, such as the cholera epidemics in France in the 1880s and the spread of smallpox in London. He served as an interpreter at conferences of the International Association of Medical Press, and was the official Anglo-French Interpreter at Congresses of the [Socialist] International between 1882-1910. Smith is best known today for the text accompanying John Thomson's photographs in Street Life in London, published serially in 1877-78, which documents the life of London's poor; other full-length books include The Biography of Charles Bradlaugh and Monaco and Monte Carlo .

Alice Jerrold Smith (1848-1882), Blanchard Jerrold's daughter, married Adolphe Smith in 1872. She wrote A Cruise on the Acorn, a children's book published in 1875 by Marcus Ward & Co., as well as literary criticism for the Liverpool Courier .