Mr. Knight was his own editor, and with the assistance of such writers, his periodical could not fail to be a success. Even Christopher North, in Edinburgh, was moved to write of them as a hopeful class of “young scholars,” and Knight retorted to this stale accusation of youth by declaring that he had read and rejected seventy-eight prose articles, and one hundred and twenty copies of occasional verses, “all the property of the old periodical press,” while Praed wrote saucily enough, that “Christopher North is a barn from his wig to his slippers.”
After the first two numbers, Macaulay felt constrained to retire, as his father objected to the political opinions of the magazine, but he was luckily induced to alter his mind, and to the future numbers he contributed the best of his early poems—notably, “Moncontoria” and “Ivry” and the “Songs of the Civil Wars.” Here, too, were printed Praed’s most charming jeux d’esprits, so called, though depth of feeling and nobleness of sentiment often lay beneath their airy bantering tone. De Quincey, then almost starving in the streets of London, was made lovingly free of its pages, and the Quarterly Magazine attained a great celebrity as the most classical, and yet the lightest, gayest, and most pleasing periodical of the day.
Unfortunately a division occurred among the contributors themselves—their opinions, and the opinions they expressed, were as widely divergent as the four winds of heaven—their supply of matter was quite irregular, varying with the individual amusements of the hour—reaching, Knight tells us, to “wanton neglect;” and after many dissensions, the publisher felt “that he had to choose between surrendering the responsibility which his duties to society had compelled him to retain, or to lose much of the assistance which had given to the Quarterly Magazine its peculiar character.” He could not hesitate in his choice, and with the sixth number the work ceased, being, however, continued under the editorship of Malden, and in the hands of another publisher for a quarter longer, but the panic that ruined Scott and Constable, and shook so many publishing houses, made small work of the transplanted Quarterly.
This period of Knight’s life may be regarded as the time when he sowed his publishing wild oats; henceforth sterner work awaited him. Among, however, the earliest of his distinct publications may be mentioned Milton’s “Treatises on Christian Doctrine,” then first discovered among the documents at the State Paper Office.
Knight had fortunately no bills afloat at the time of the panic which, in connection with his endeavour to assist the Windsor bank, he so graphically describes—“In the Albany we found the partners of one firm deliberating by candle light—a few words showed how unavailing was the hope of help from them: ‘We shall ourselves stop at nine o’clock.’ The dark December morning gradually grew lighter; the gas lamps died out; but long before it was perfect day we found Lombard Street blocked up by eager crowds, each man struggling to be foremost at the bank where he kept his accounts, if its doors should be opened.” Still, Mr. Knight, though not directly involved, found, like many other publishers, that the schemes of 1825 would not sell in 1826, and that the booksellers must, spite of themselves, “hold on” as best they could. Colburn, indeed, was the only one who still continued his ventures, and from the light and soothing nature of his publications, chiefly fictions calculated to allay the torture of reality, he was able to reap a reward for his temerity.
Every day found Mr. Knight more sick of his prospects than the last. The Brazen Head, a weekly satirical and humorous journal of his just started, lightened though it was by the rippling wit of Praed, fell upon the public like a leaden lump.
Mr. Knight’s brain had long been filled with a scheme of popular and cheap literature, and he now made up his mind to start afresh—to tempt the world and bless it with a real “National Library,” so good that all should desire, so cheap that all would buy. Lord Brougham, who was at that moment organizing the “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” heard of this plan and obtained an introduction to the schemer. The idea of the National Library was at first taken up by the Society, but was finally adopted by John Murray. Differences of opinion as to the editorial responsibilities, and the arrangements as to the transfer of his stock to Albemarle Street, presented new difficulties, and thoroughly sick of the whole matter, Mr. Knight suddenly abandoned it. The germ of his idea, however, bore fruit in the “Treatises” published by the Society in March, and in the “Cabinet Encyclopædia,” issued a few years afterwards by Longman. “My boat,” writes Mr. Knight, “was stranded. Happily for me there were no wreckers at hand ready for the plunder of my damaged cargo.” Anyhow, for the time being, publishing was over. To a man of indomitable pluck, and blessed with the pen of a ready writer, journalism presents a tolerably open field, and to newspaper work Mr. Knight again addressed himself; but in a few weeks a document, which Mr. Knight values, he says, as a soldier values his first commission, reached him containing an offer of the superintendence of the Society’s publications, an offer that was forthwith accepted. As a first step, the “Library of Entertaining Knowledge” was commenced, and, in 1828, he started the British Almanac, and the Companion to the Almanac—a wonderful change for the better after the “Poor Robins” and “Old Moores” of the past.
In 1832, Mr. Knight was offered an official position at the Board of Trade, but fortunately for the education and interests of the people he had the courage to refuse it, having the pleasure, however, of being asked to recommend some one else to the post. In the March of this year appeared the first number of the Penny Magazine, subsequent by only a very few weeks to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.
The new periodical had been suggested by Mr. Hill in a conversation about the wretched character of the cheap prints of the period. “Let us,” he exclaimed, “see what something cheap and good can accomplish! Let us have a penny magazine!” “And what shall be the title?” asked Knight. “The Penny Magazine.” At once they went to the Lord Chancellor, who entered cordially into the project, and though a few old Whig gentlemen on the committee urged that the proposed price was below the dignity of the Society, and muttered, “It is very awkward, very awkward,” Mr. Knight undertook the risk, and was immediately appointed editor.
The success of the magazine was amazing even to the sanguine editor; at the close of 1832 it reached a sale of 200,000 in weekly and monthly parts—representing probably a million readers, and Burke had only forty years previous estimated the number of readers in this country at 80,000! Among the contributors it will be sufficient to mention Long, De Morgan, Creswick, Allan Cunningham, and Thomas Pringle, whilom editor of the Whiggish Blackwood. One writer, however, stands out from the rest, both by his misfortunes and his attainments—coming not only under the “curse of poverty’s unconquerable ban,” but being completely deaf and almost dumb. Recommended to Mr. Knight as an extraordinary, though unknown genius, who had been brought up in a charity school, stricken with a sudden and melancholy affliction, who had worked his way to St. Petersburg, and thence through Russia to Moscow, and on to Persia and the Desert; who knew French and Italian perfectly; the kind-hearted publisher, from the very first, took a liking to Kitto—soon to be known as an eminent traveller, Orientalist, and Biblical commentator. After the first trial article of “The Deaf Traveller,” Kitto was regularly engaged to assist Mr. Knight personally in his own room; and here in his spare time he managed to acquire German.