CHAMBERS, EPHRAIM (d. 1740), English encyclopaedist, was born at Kendal, Westmorland, in the latter part of the 17th century. He was apprenticed to a globe-maker in London, but having conceived the plan of his Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, he devoted himself entirely to it. The first edition appeared by subscription in 1728, in two vols. fol., and dedicated to the king (see [Encyclopaedia]). The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert owed its inception to a French translation of Chambers’s work. In addition to the Cyclopaedia, Chambers wrote for the Literary Magazine (1735-1736), and translated the History and Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris (1742), and the Practice of Perspective from the French of Jean Dubreuil. He died on the 15th of May 1740.
CHAMBERS, GEORGE (1803-1840), English marine painter, born at Whitby, Yorkshire, was the son of a seaman, and for several years he pursued his father’s calling. While at sea he was in the habit of sketching the different classes of vessels. His master, observing this, gratified him by cancelling his indentures, and thus set him free to follow his natural bent. Chambers then apprenticed himself to an old woman who kept a painter’s shop in Whitby, and began by house-painting. He also took lessons of a drawing-master, and found a ready sale for small and cheap pictures of shipping. Coming afterwards to London, he was employed by Thomas Horner to assist in painting the great panorama of London for the Colosseum (the exhibition building in Regent’s Park, demolished towards 1860), and he next became scene-painter at the Pavilion theatre. In 1834 he was elected an associate, and in 1836 a full member, of the Water-colour Society. His best works represent naval battles. Two of these—the “Bombardment of Algiers in 1816,” and the “Capture of Porto Bello”—are in Greenwich hospital. Not long before his death he was introduced to William IV., and his professional prospects brightened; but his constitution, always frail, gave way, and he died on the 28th of October 1840.
A Life, by John Watkins, was published in 1841.
CHAMBERS, ROBERT (1802-1871), Scottish author and publisher, was born at Peebles on the 10th of July 1802. He was sent to the local schools, and gave evidence of unusual literary taste and ability. A small circulating library in the town, and a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which his father had purchased, furnished him with stores of reading of which he eagerly availed himself. Long afterwards he wrote of his early years—“Books, not playthings, filled my hands in childhood. At twelve I was deep, not only in poetry and fiction, but in encyclopaedias.” Robert had been destined for the church, but this design had to be abandoned for lack of means. The family removed to Edinburgh in 1813, and in 1818 Robert began business as a bookstall-keeper in Leith Walk. He was then only sixteen, and his whole stock consisted of a few old books belonging to his father. In 1819 his elder brother William had begun a similar business, and the two eventually united as partners in the publishing firm of W. & R. Chambers. Robert Chambers showed an enthusiastic interest in the history and antiquities of Edinburgh, and found a most congenial task in his Traditions of Edinburgh (2 vols., 1824), which secured for him the approval and the personal friendship of Sir Walter Scott. A History of the Rebellions in Scotland from 1638 to 1745 (5 vols., 1828) and numerous other works followed.
In the beginning of 1832 William Chambers started a weekly publication under the title of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (known since 1854 as Chambers’s Journal of Literature, Science and Arts), which speedily attained a large circulation. Robert was at first only a contributor. After fourteen numbers had appeared, however, he was associated with his brother as joint-editor, and his collaboration contributed more perhaps than anything else to the success of the Journal.
Among the other numerous works of which Robert was in whole or in part the author, the Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen (4 vols., Glasgow, 1832-1835), the Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1844), the Life and Works of Robert Burns (4 vols., 1851), Ancient Sea Margins (1848), the Domestic Annals of Scotland (3 vols., 1859-1861) and the Book of Days (2 vols., 1862-1864) were the most important. Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (1859-1868), with Dr Andrew Findlater as editor, was carried out under the superintendence of the brothers (see [Encyclopaedia]). The Cyclopaedia of English Literature[1] contains a series of admirably selected extracts from the best authors of every period, “set in a biographical and critical history of the literature itself.” For the Life of Burns he made diligent and laborious original investigations, gathering many hitherto unrecorded facts from the poet’s sister, Mrs Begg, to whose benefit the whole profits of the work were generously devoted. Robert Chambers was a scientific geologist, and availed himself of tours in Scandinavia and Canada for the purpose of geological exploration. The results of his travels were embodied in Tracings of the North of Europe (1851) and Tracings in Iceland and the Faroe Islands (1856). His knowledge of geology was one of the principal grounds on which the authorship of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (2 vols., 1843-1846) was eventually assigned to him. The book was published anonymously. Robert Chambers was aware of the storm that would probably be raised at the time by a rational treatment of the subject, and did not wish to involve his firm in the discredit that a charge of heterodoxy would bring with it. The arrangements for publication were made through Alexander Ireland of Manchester, and the secret was so well kept that such different names as those of Prince Albert and Sir Charles Lyell were coupled with the book. Ireland in 1884 issued a 12th edition, with a preface giving an account of its authorship, which there was no longer any reason for concealing. The Book of Days was Chambers’s last publication, and perhaps his most elaborate. It was a miscellany of popular antiquities in connexion with the calendar, and it is supposed that his excessive labour in connexion with this book hastened his death, which took place at St Andrews on the 17th of March 1871. Two years before, the university of St Andrews had conferred upon him the degree of doctor of laws, and he was elected a member of the Athenaeum club in London. It is his highest claim to distinction that he did so much to give a healthy tone to the cheap popular literature which has become so important a factor in modern civilization.
His brother, William Chambers (1800-1883) was born at Peebles, on the 16th of April 1800. He was the financial genius of the publishing firm. He laid the city of Edinburgh under the greatest obligations by his public spirit and munificence. As lord provost he procured the passing in 1867 of the Improvement Act, which led to the reconstruction of a great part of the Old Town, and at a later date he proposed and carried out, largely at his own expense, the restoration of the noble and then neglected church of St Giles, making it in a sense “the Westminster Abbey of Scotland.” This service was fitly acknowledged by the offer of a baronetcy, which he did not live to receive, dying on the 20th of May 1883, three days before the reopening of the church. He was the author of a history of St Giles’s, of a memoir of himself and his brother (1872), and of many other useful publications. On his death in 1883 Robert Chambers (1832-1888), son of Robert Chambers, succeeded as head of the firm, and edited the Journal until his death. His eldest son, Charles Edward Stuart Chambers (b. 1859), became editor of the Journal and chairman of W. & R. Chambers, Limited.