A History of Booksellers, the Old and the New

by Henry Curwen

Mr. William Chambers, who undertook from the first the largest share in the mercantile concerns of the firm, has still found time to accomplish a large amount of literary work. In addition to the book previously mentioned, he has published, among others, “Travels in Italy,” and a “History of Peebleshire,” and the “Memoir of Robert Chambers,” besides contributing freely to the Journal, and other of their serial publications.

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Charles Knight was born at Windsor in the year 1791, and was the only child of his father, a bookseller and printer of some importance in that town, who, by his connection with the Microcosm, a paper conducted by Canning, and written by Hookham Frere, “Bobus” Smith, and other Etonians, had made many influential friends. The last number of this schoolboy journal appeared, however, four years before the birth of his son.

Charles was educated at the school of a Dr. Nicholas at Ealing, and his early avidity for reading had, he himself thinks, much to do with rendering his constitution weak and feeble. At the age of fourteen he signed indentures of apprenticeship to his father, and in 1812, when he attained his majority, he was sent up for a few weeks to London to undergo a short term of training in the office of the Globe newspaper, so as to give him practical experience in reporting and other journalistic work; for from early boyhood he had determined to possess a paper of his own. On Aug. 1st of the same year his desire was realized, and, in conjunction with his father, he started the Windsor and Eton Express, the editorship of which he continued up to the year 1827, finding time, however, in the midst of his busy life, to devote to the cultivation of more general literature. In 1813 appeared the first original work from his pen, “Arminius,” a tragedy—which had been offered to the manager of Drury Lane Theatre, and had of course been rejected, but very courteously. During his residence at Windsor he was co-editor, with H. E. Locker, of the Plain Englishman, a miscellaneous journal, which only lasted from 1820 to 1822.

His first venture into the dimly descried regions of popular literature appeared, he says, in the Windsor Express for Dec. 11, 1819, in a paper called “Cheap Publications,” and was followed by others, till, in one of the last numbers of the Plain Englishman, we come across an article entitled “Diffusion of Useful Knowledge”—a straw which shows which way his mind was turning.

Charles Knight.

1791–1873.

Among Mr. Knight’s other literary labours at this time, in 1820, he undertook the editorship of the Guardian, again in partnership with a colleague; and his life, divided between Windsor and London, became one of very pleasurable excitement. His connection, too, with a literary journal, served to render him familiar with the aspects of the publishing trade in London, and at the end of 1822 he sold his share of the Guardian, and took up his position in Pall Mall East, and started as a publisher.

One day, shortly after this, coming back jaded and weary from his London office he found two Eton lads—W. M. Praed and Walter Blunt—waiting at his cottage with an eager proposal that he should publish an Eton miscellany. Generously and sympathetically did Mr. Knight enter into the schemes of the schoolboys; and the plan of the Etonian was forthwith drawn up. Knight found much pleasure in watching and assisting the young periodical, which was a kind of pleasant nursery ground for the growth and display of the youthful talent of which Eton then proudly and unwontedly boasted. “It was refreshing,” he writes, “after the dry labours of his day in town, to watch the bright, earnest, happy face of Mr. Blunt, who took a manifest delight in doing the editorial drudgery; the worst proofs (for in the haste unavoidable in periodical literature he would sometimes catch hold of a proof unread) never disturbed the serenity of his temper. To him it seemed a real happiness to stand at a desk in the composing-room.” But Praed it was, with his sparkling wit, his elegant aptness of expression, and his boyish gallantry that yet smacked of the wise experience of age, who was the life and soul of the project, and his contributions eventually occupied fully one-fourth of the whole miscellany, and when he went to Cambridge it was thought advisable, perhaps found necessary, to terminate the Etonian altogether. Still Mr. Knight’s chief hopes as a publisher were centred in the promise of his young Eton friends, and during a week passed with them at Cambridge the general plan of Knight’s Quarterly Magazine was settled, and he was introduced to Derwent, Coleridge, Malden, and Macaulay, afterwards his chief contributors.