A collection of early nineteenth-century illustrated satirical periodicals, including the Glasgow Looking Glass (later the Northern Looking Glass) and the London Looking Glass. It satirised contemporary society and underwent several formats and technical changes before ceasing publication after seventeen issues.

Explore articles and interpretation about the Glasgow Looking Glass

The World's First Comic and Its New Digital Format

Laurence Grove, University of Glasgow/San Diego State University

The Glasgow Looking Glass, which in its initial run lasted for 17 issues from June 1825 until April 1826, has now, but only recently, been accepted as the world’s first modern comic. What was this satirically brilliant, thoroughly modern, publication that seems largely to have gone unnoticed?

Glasgow Looking Glass in Context: Visual Satire and Early Illustrated Print

Robert Maclean, Assistant Librarian, University of Glasgow

The Glasgow Looking Glass was a short-lived satirical periodical published in the city during the 1820s. It is remarkable for its extensive and characterful illustrations, capitalising on the then-new technology of lithographic printing to seamlessly integrate text and image...
 
The digitisation of the first volume was completed in 2013 by the University of Glasgow Library's Photographic Unit, with additional digitisation work undertaken subsequently to support access to further volumes. As part of preparation for the Digital Research Collections platform, metadata was reviewed and enhanced to improve discovery and navigation. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was applied to the digitised images to support full-text searching. As with all OCR-generated text, search results may contain errors or omissions, particularly where page layout, typography, print quality, or document condition affects the accuracy of text recognition.