A History of Booksellers, the Old and the New

by Henry Curwen

In our own times, Manchester bookselling has been principally represented by the brothers Abel and John Heywood—a name almost as widely known as that of any London firm. The brothers were born at Prestwich, of very humble parentage; their father, indeed, is said at one time to have been in receipt of parish relief. Abel began life as a warehouse boy, on the scanty pittance of eighteenpence a week; but at the age of twenty he was summarily dismissed by his master in a fit of passion. He now obtained the wholesale agency for the Poor Man’s Guardian, and was very shortly afterwards fined £54 for selling it without a stamp. He could not pay the fine, and was sent to prison for four months; but his family managed the shop during his incarceration, still selling the Guardian as before, but in a quieter manner. In 1834 and in 1836 he was again fined, but now he could afford to pay. The Government next tried to seize the papers while in the hands of the carriers, and they were obliged consequently to be sent through the country carefully concealed—embedded in a chest of tea or a hamper of shoes. As soon, however, as the duty was reduced from fourpence to a penny, the poorer classes were able to pay for stamped papers. Abel Heywood was, nevertheless, again the subject of a legal prosecution for the publication of a penny pamphlet by Haslam. Acting with vigorous promptness, he caused three or four copies of Shelley’s works to be purchased from the chief Manchester booksellers, and then contended that the poems were more blasphemous than his pamphlet. The Government did not care to excite the ill-feelings of the reading public by sending booksellers of position to prison, and as the cases were precisely similar, they relinquished the prosecution. Probably this decisive conduct suggested the same course to Hetherington, who was afterwards the cause of that famous trial, the Queen v. Moxon.

In 1838, Fergus O’Connor started the Northern Star, and for four years its prosperity at the time was unexampled. Heywood sold 18,000 copies weekly. By degrees his periodical trade increased enormously. In 1847 he joined some paper-stainers, and the firm soon became one of the largest in the world. In the year 1860 the paper duty paid by them amounted to more than £20,000. Among the most successful of his recent publications have been “Abel Heywood’s Penny Guide Books.” The series now embraces upwards of seventy-five numbers, referring to every place of importance or interest in the kingdom. He has also issued the whole of the popular tale, “The Gates Ajar,” for the same price—one penny—giving in a pamphlet form what usually occupies a goodly volume.

Abel Heywood, however, was as well known as a distinguished public man as a successful bookseller. In 1835 he was appointed a Commissioner of Police, and during the Manchester riots in 1842 and 1849 he took a conspicuous part in quelling the disturbances. Elected to the corporation, he became an alderman in 1853, and in 1859 he was third in the list of candidates at the general Parliamentary elections. In 1862 he was elected Mayor of Manchester; in 1864 he took his son, Abel, into partnership.

John Heywood commenced life in the same lowly circumstances as his brother, and at the age of fourteen found employment as a handloom weaver. Within ten years his wages rose from half-a-crown to thirty shillings a week; and when in receipt of this latter sum he regularly allowed his mother a pound a week. At the age of four-and-twenty he married, and to improve his worldly position, accepted the management of a small factory at Altrincham, in Cheshire; but as the speculation proved a failure, he returned to his former occupation of “dressing” for power-loom weavers, at which he remained until his thirty-fifth year. Desirous of rendering even his spare time profitable, he had bought a paper-ruling machine, upon which he worked in the evenings; and Abel, who was now a successful bookseller in Oldham Street, offered him a situation in his establishment as paper-ruler, with a salary of two pounds a week: and in his brother’s employ he remained for seven years. In 1842, however, determined to make a start for himself, he took a little shop in Deansgate, and, assisted by his son John, a lad of thirteen, the business, originally infinitesimal, increased rapidly and vastly. At first they confined their efforts almost entirely to the sale of weekly or Sunday papers, and they were able to carry abroad conveniently under their arms all the newspapers they could dispose of. In a few months, however, the aid of a wheelbarrow was required, and this, in turn, was discarded for a pony and trap. After adding every possible enlargement to the old premises, they were obliged in 1859 to take a shop on the opposite side of the street; and year after year, as the business expanded, addition after addition was made to the premises, until three buildings were rolled into one, and at the end of another seven years a huge six-storey manufactory was built in the rear of the triangular shop. The increase of the working staff kept pace with the growth of the establishment, and now, instead of the armful or the barrow-load, a special railway truck, with a freightage of about two tons, comes down from London five times a week; some hundred and fifty assistants supply the place of the lad of thirteen, and nine spring-carts have been introduced in lieu of the little pony trap. A thousand parcels are made up each day, and between three and four hundred orders are received by every morning’s post; for, besides being the largest newsvendors and booksellers out of London, the firm are the largest copybook makers in the kingdom. Fifteen hundred gross of copybooks are despatched from the warehouses every month; and it is stated that the weekly issue of newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals amounts to the almost incredible number of a quarter of a million.

In 1864, John Heywood, senior, died, and the business devolved upon his son, who had inherited all his father’s energy and industry. In 1867 he introduced a platten printing machine, adapted to take impressions from the stereo-plates of his school-books—known as “John Heywood’s Code,” “John Heywood’s Manchester Reader,” &c.—and before long he resolved to become a regular printer as well as a publisher, and the “Excelsior Printing Works” were erected about a mile from Deansgate, where 355 people are constantly employed in the manufacture of books, in a manner very similar to that previously described in our accounts of the Messrs. Nelson and Collins, of Scotland. Among the books published by Mr. John Heywood are dialectic works, many of which are regarded, justly, as Lancashire classics. One of his latest triumphs has been the issue of the “Science Lectures for the People,” delivered at the Hulme Town Hall, and sold separately at a penny each—a fact that says something as to the good taste of the factory lads. Four monthly and three weekly periodicals are published by Mr. John Heywood. Of the former the Railway Guide is the most widely circulated, while the Lithographer is indispensable to the many decorative artists of the neighbourhood; and Ben Brierley’s Journal, with its vernacular contributions, finds its way to every Lancashire fireside. Of the latter, the Sphinx, a satirical journal, is the most popular.

The career of the two Heywoods is a striking example of the labour, energy, and success which Lancashire folk are apt to think the true attributes of the typical “Manchester man;” and if they have not been instrumental in adding much to the higher literature of the world, their publications have very widely extended the taste for knowledge among the lower orders in the north of England.

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Even in Birmingham the trade of bookselling was introduced at a comparatively recent date. Dr. Johnson tells us that his father used to open a bookstall here on market days; and Boswell adds, in a note, that there was not then a single regular bookshop in the whole town. Elsewhere he tells us that “Mr Warren was the first established bookseller in Birmingham, and was very attentive to Johnson, who he soon found could be of much service to him in his trade by his knowledge of literature; and he even obtained the assistance of his pen in furnishing some numbers of a periodical essay, printed in the newspaper of which Warren was proprietor.” Mr Warren, however, though Johnson’s first encourager, has long since been forgotten, and Birmingham bookselling is now universally identified with the name of William Hutton; and from his autobiography, published in 1816—perhaps the most interesting record of a self-made life that has ever been personally indited—we give a short sketch of his career.

William Hutton was born at Derby, in 1723. His father, a drunken wool-comber, scarcely brought home wherewithal to keep the wretched family from starvation, and “consultations were held (when the child was six years old) about fixing me in some employment for the benefit of the family. Winding quills for the weaver was mentioned, but died away. Stripping tobacco for the grocer, by which I was to earn fourpence a week, was proposed, but it was at last concluded that I was too young for any employment.” Next year, however, the result of the consultation was otherwise, and he was placed in a silk-mill; the youngest, and by far the smallest, of the 300 persons employed, a lofty pair of pattens were tied on to his feet so that he might be able to reach the engine; and he continues:—“I had now to rise at five every morning, summer and winter, for seven years; to submit to the cane whenever convenient to the master; to be the constant companion of the most rude and vulgar of the human race; never taught by nature, nor ever wishing to be taught.” Brutally treated, so that the scars of his chastisements remained on his body through life, he left the mill as soon as ever his apprenticeship expired; “a place,” he says, “most curious and pleasing to the eye,” but which had given him a seven years’ heart-ache. He was now bound for another term to an uncle—a stocking-maker at Nottingham. “My task was to earn for my uncle 5s. 10d. a week. The first week I could reach this sum I was to be gratified with sixpence, but ever after, should I fall short or go beyond it, the loss or profit was to be my own.” In this situation, he was not only thrashed by his master, but starved by his aunt; and, goaded by the taunts of the neighbours, he fled away, but was reluctantly compelled to return. In 1744 his apprenticeship expired, and for two years longer he remained as a journeyman in the same employment, but he now made the melancholy discovery—for all trade was in a very wretched condition at the time—that he had served two separate terms of seven years, to two separate trades, and yet could subsist upon neither.

A gradually acquired taste for reading led him to purchase a few books, and their tattered condition prompted him to try his hand at binding; and, as he could get no employment in his own avocations, he determined to start afresh as a bookbinder. His friends sneered at his ambitious hopes, but his sister supported him firmly. There were no binding tools to be purchased then in the country, so his sister “raised three guineas, sewed them in my shirt-collar, for there was no doubt but I should be robbed,” and put eleven shillings in his pocket as a sop to the expected highwayman, and off he started for London, walking fifty-one miles the first day and reaching it on the third. Here he invested his three guineas in tools, and stayed three days, seeing all that could be seen for nothing, his only paid entertainment being a visit to Bedlam, which cost a penny. Three days more, and he was back at Nottingham, terribly worn-out and footsore, but with fourpence still remaining out of his little travelling fund.