CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL:
“LITERATURE FOR THE PEOPLE.”
We have already seen, in our short sketches of the Bells, the Cookes, the Donaldsons, and the Constables, some endeavour—neither faint nor altogether unsuccessful, yet not more than a trial venture, for education was still a monopoly of rank and riches—to render books the property and the birthright of the people. In our present chapter, however, we come to a new phase in the history of bookselling. The schoolmaster, as Brougham said, was abroad; the repressive taxes on knowledge either were, or were about to be, removed; learning, or a smattering of learning, was within the reach of most. The battle of future progress was to be fought out with the pen, just as the triumphs of early civilization had been achieved with the lance and with the sword. The public writer henceforth was to occupy the preacher’s pulpit, and his congregation, far above the limits of any St. Peter’s or St. Paul’s, was to be told only by millions. Books were to be no longer the curious luxuries of the rich man’s library, or the hoarded and hardly-earned treasures of the student’s closet, but were to be fairly placed at the disposal of the many.
Talent certainly, if not genius, is only the product of the requirements of the time and place; and as soon, therefore, as cheap books were in real request, men thoroughly competent and thoroughly earnest came forward to supply the want—fighting bravely, with all the strong energy of their wills, to do the work that each had chosen, and yet each as certainly acted upon invisibly, insensibly, and inevitably, by the true, if word-worn, laws of supply and demand.
The means by which this end was to be attained were many, and the labourers in the new fields of cheap literature numerous; but in our present chapter, as elsewhere, we have selected the representative men and the typical means. The names of Chambers, Knight, and Cassell (the latter certainly in a less degree) are inextricably woven into the movement, of which at present we have only seen the commencement; and the plan by which the most expensive treasures of literature, the choicest garnerings of our knowledge, were placed at the disposal of the meagrest purse, was almost universally that of distribution into small weekly or monthly parts, at an infinitesimal cost—a method that may with justice be styled the people’s intellectual savings bank; and it is to the early history of the people’s intellectual savings bank that we now address ourselves.[18]
Robert Chambers was born at Peebles, on the banks of the Tweed, on 10th July, 1802, two years later than his brother William, with whom his whole career is intimately connected. They were the sons of James Chambers, at one time a prosperous muslin weaver, employing some hundred looms. Their father is described as “a lover of books, a keen politician, and an open-hearted friend;” but having already been generous beyond his means to the poor French prisoners in Scotland, he was completely ruined by the introduction of machine-weaving looms, and was compelled to sell his modest patrimony, and remove with his family to Edinburgh, with only a few shillings in his pocket on which to start life afresh. But before this the young lads’ education had commenced. At Peebles there were certainly no newspapers; but their old nurse sung ballads and told them legendary stories of the former exploits of the warriors of the country side; and then there was old Tam Fleck, a host in himself, who had struck out a wandering profession of his own, a “flichty chield,” who went about with a translation of Josephus (Lestrange, 1720) from house to house. “Weel, Tam, what’s the news the nicht?” would one of the neighbours say, as Tam entered with the ponderous volume under his arm. “Bad news, bad news,” replied Tam. “Titus has begun to besiege Jerusalem—it’s gaun to be a terrible business.” At the little village school, too, William was introduced to Latin for the fee of five shillings a quarter, and Robert was well grounded by Mr. Gray in English for two shillings and twopence. Robert was a quiet, self-contained boy, unable from a painful weakness in his feet to join heartily in the usual games of his schoolfellows. “Books,” he writes in the preface to his collected works, “not playthings, filled my hands in childhood. At twelve I was deep, not only in poetry and fiction, but in encyclopædias.” Receiving his first education at the Burgh Grammar School, he acquired afterwards, at the Edinburgh High School, under the tuition of Mr. Benjamin Mackay, the usual elements of a classical education, embracing, indeed, as much Latin as enabled him in after-life to read Horace with ease and pleasure.
