Henry Vizetelly (1820 - 1894)

Henry Richard Vizetelly (30 July 1820 – 1 January 1894) was a British publisher and writer. He started the publications Pictorial Times and Illustrated Times, wrote several books while working in Paris and Berlin as correspondent for the Illustrated London News, and between 1880 and 1890, ran a publishing house in London, Vizetelly & Company. He was in San Francisco, California, when gold was discovered in 1849. His book California (written under the pseudonym "J. Tyrwhitt Brooks") recounts his adventures for four months in the gold fields. In his 1893 autobiography, Glances Back Through Seventy Years, he admits it was an elaborate hoax, having never left London and wrote the book in just a few short weeks.