Bell's Life in London

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Bell's Life in London, and Sporting Chronicle was a British weekly sporting paper published as a pink broadsheet between 1822 and 1886.

Bell's Life was founded by Robert Bell, a London printer-publisher. Bell sold to William Innell Clement, owner of the Observer, in 1824 or 1825, and the paper swallowed up a competitor, Pierce Egan's Life in London and Sporting Guide. From 1824 to 1852 it was edited by Vincent George Dowling, "during which time Bell's Life became Britain's leading sporting newspaper, without which no gentleman's Sunday was quite complete."^[1] Dowling's son, Frank Lewis Dowling, effectively edited the paper during the last year of his father's life, and succeeded him as editor from 1852 to 1867. By the 1860s Bell's Life was facing competition from The Field, The Sportsman, the Sporting Life, and the Sporting Times. In 1885 Edward Hulton bought Bell's Life and made it a daily, but in 1886 it was absorbed by Sporting Life.^[2]

Contributors included Francis Frederick Brandt, the agricultural writer Henry Corbet (1820-78), Charles Dickens, Henry Hall Dixon, the writer on angling Edward Fitzgibbon (1803-57), the cricket writer Frederick Gale (1823-1904), the writer on card games Henry Jones (1831-1899), William Russell Macdonald (1787-1854), Rev. Charles Henry Newmarch (1824-1903), the sports writer William Ruff (1801-56), Robert Smith Surtees, the chess writer George Walker (1803-79) and John Henry Walsh.^[3]

[edit] References

1. ^ Tony Mason, ‘Dowling, Vincent George (1785–1852)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 29 Dec 2007
2. ^ Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals
3. ^ ODNB