Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860 9780226276540

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Steam-Powered Knowledge

aileen fyfe

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

is lecturer in

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

modern British

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

history at the

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

University of

Printed in the United States of America

St Andrews, United

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

1 2 3 4 5

Kingdom. She is the author

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27651-9 (cloth)

of Science in

ISBN-10: 0-226-27651-1 (cloth)

Salvation and coeditor of

Library of Congress

Science in the

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marketplace, both published by the University of Chicago Press, and editor of Science for Children.

Fyfe, Aileen. Steam-powered knowledge : William Chambers and the business of publishing, 1820–1860 / Aileen Fyfe. pages; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27651-9 (cloth : alkaline paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-27651-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. William and Robert Chambers—History. 2. Chambers, William, 1800–1833. 3. Chambers, Robert, 1802–1871. 4. Publishers and publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Booksellers and bookselling—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 6. Railroads—Economic aspects. 7. George Routledge and Sons—History. I. Title. Z325.C44F94 2012 070.5094109′034—dc23 2011029615 o This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This book is for Alastair and Morag Fyfe, who have often questioned but never doubted.

Contents Acknowledgments, ix List of Abbreviations, xi A Note on Money, xiii Preface, xv

Introduction: The Flood of Cheap Print, 1 1 W. & R. Chambers and the Market for Print, 13

Part I: Organizing a Proper System of Publishing, 27 2 Industrial Book Production, 31 3 Reaching a National Market, 41 4 Production and Steam Power, 55 5 New Formats for Information, 67 6 Reaching an Overseas Market, 79 7 A Modern Printing Establishment, 89

Part II: Railways and Competition, 97 8 The Coming of the Railways, 101 9 Centralizing Business in Edinburgh, 111 10 Routledge and the New Competition, 123 11 Railway Bookstalls, 135 12 Instruction in the Railway Marketplace, 147 13 The Dignitaries of the Trade Take on Routledge, 159

Part III: Steamships and Transatlantic Business, 173 14 Transatlantic Opportunities, 177 15 Getting to Know the American Market, 187 16 The Dissemination of Cheap Instruction, 201

17 A New Spirit of Engagement, 213 18 Building Relationships with Boston and Philadelphia, 225 19 Piracy and Shipwreck!, 239 Epilogue, 253

Notes, 263 Bibliography, 293 Index, 303

Acknowledgments The research and writing of this book would have been impossible without the support of the National University of Ireland, Galway, and its staff. Writing a historical monograph is entirely contingent on having the time and money needed to visit archives and rare book collections, and, later, having time to write. These necessary conditions of historical research are coming under increasing pressure in our modern universities, so I feel extremely fortunate to have received such strong support during the progress of this book. I would like to acknowledge the National University of Ireland, Galway, for providing research funding and, most important, the freedom of a sabbatical year; the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, for the glorious luxury of another year free from teaching; and the Bibliographical Society of America, for funding my trips to Boston and New York. For hosting me during various periods of research leave, I am grateful to the following institutions and individuals: the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge (Iain Donaldson); the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge (the late Peter Lipton); Linacre College, Oxford (Paul Slack); the School of Modern History, University of Oxford (Robert Fox); the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts (Caroline Sloat and David Hall). I benefited enormously from the different intellectual contexts of these places and the stimulating conversation of their various staff, students, and visiting researchers. Over the years, I have spent many happy hours in the North Reading Room of the National Library of Scotland, delving among the somewhat dusty files and boxes of the Chambers archives, and special thanks must go to the NLS staff, who were the epitome of helpful, speedy, and knowledgeable. I would also like to acknowledge the staff of Cambridge University Library; the Bodleian Library Oxford, especially the John Johnson Collection; the British Library; the library of the American Antiquarian Society; and the New York Public Library. Parts of this book have been presented and discussed over the years at seminars and conferences of historians of science, histo[ ix

rians of technology, book historians, and literary scholars. I have benefited from many conversations with Jim Secord, Jon Topham, Bernie Lightman, Leslie Howsam, and Juliana Adelman; and I would like to thank Sondra Miley Cooney for her encouragement (and her tips for using the Chambers archive!). I would particularly like to mention the support and encouragement of my friends and colleagues who are fellow members of the British Society for the History of Science, and whose many conversations have provided a valuable blend of moral support and intellectual stimulation. For generously sharing their expertise by commenting on sections (or more!) of the typescript, I wish to acknowledge Enrico Dal Lago, Graeme Gooday, Laura Kelly, James Sumner, and the anonymous readers at the University of Chicago Press. It was the late Susan Abrams who first brought me to the University of Chicago Press; her successor Catherine Rice encouraged me in the early stages of this project; and the final stages have been under the steady hand of Karen Darling, with help, as ever, from Abby Collier, Micah Fehrenbacher, Stephanie Hlywak, and Michael Koplow. Lisa Wehrle was an efficient and sympathetic copyeditor. And finally, I could not end without mentioning my husband Paul. It is such a joy to share my life with someone who encourages my enthusiasm for my research and whose eye for narrative, style, and clarity I respect enormously.

x ] Acknowledgments

Abbreviations AAS CEJ HRAM NLS NYPL ODNB RKP RTS SBTI SDUK SPCK WRC Corr. LB LL Publ. Ledger

American Antiquarian Society Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal House of Routledge Archive on Microfilm National Library of Scotland New York Public Library Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) Routledge and Kegan Paul archive Religious Tract Society Scottish Book Trade Index Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge W. & R. Chambers Archive Correspondence Letter Book Literary Labour (includes correspondence and invoices) Publications Ledger

[ xi

A Note on Money In the nineteenth century, Britain used a predecimal monetary system with three units: pounds (£), shillings (s), and pennies (d). The United States used a decimal system of dollars ($) and cents (¢). British money: £1 = 20s. = 240d. 1s. = 12d. U.S. money: $1 = 100¢ Exchange rate (approximate): £1 = $5 4s. = $1 1s. = 25¢ 6d. = 12½¢ 1d. = 2¢

[ xiii

Preface William Chambers bought his first printing press in 1820. Aged twenty, he had recently completed an apprenticeship with an Edinburgh bookseller and was now running a tiny bookshop of his own. He slept in a room behind his shop, and frugal living had allowed him to save enough money to purchase a secondhand printing press.1 The press was small, old, and temperamental, and the types that came with it were very worn, but printing helped fill the long empty hours in the shop. In the printers’ workshops of Edinburgh, highly skilled compositors set the type and trained pressmen performed the printing, but Chambers chose to do everything himself.2 As he taught himself the skills of composition and printing, he was learning techniques that had barely changed since the time of Gutenberg or Caxton four centuries earlier. During quiet periods in the shop, Chambers would carefully select individual pieces of type to place on his composing stick and spell out (in mirror image) a line of poetry by Robert Burns. He would justify each line of type and place it into a galley until he had enough completed lines to tie them into pages. Once he had eight pages, Chambers locked them into the forme that would hold them in the bed of the press. On rainy days, when customers were rare, the self-taught printer would work the press in his back room: covering the surface of the type with just the right amount of ink, placing a sheet of paper carefully into place, pulling the lever that brought the paper and the inked surface together with a firm and even pressure, retrieving the sheet of paper and placing it to dry, and then repeating the process. After printing 750 copies, Chambers unlocked the type and returned the letters to their places in the case. Next he arranged the type for another eight pages, which he printed on the backs of the sheets. Once the ink was dry, he could fold each sheet in half once, twice, and three times. The resulting gathering would contain the first sixteen pages of the Songs of Robert Burns. It took months for Chambers to finish printing the six sheets that made up the entire book. His final step was to stitch the gatherings together and add a cover. Despite the worn type, the uneven print quality, and the primitive sewing and binding, Chambers [ xv

managed to sell the copies at a shilling each, and claimed to have cleared £9 over and above his original purchases of ink and paper. Three decades later, William Chambers crossed the Atlantic for the first time. After enjoying twelve days of elaborate meals and socializing in the first-class accommodation on the Cunard steamship America, he arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the end of September 1853.3 During his visit, he was overwhelmed by “a complimentary and undeserved address” thanking him for his role in providing cheap instructive schoolbooks to the Englishspeaking world.4 He then embarked on a two-and-a-half-month tour of the United States and Upper and Lower Canada. He took another Cunard steamer to Boston, and then traveled to Montreal by railroad and steamboat. The speed and reliability of these modern methods of transportation enabled him to cover vast distances, visiting Toronto, Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Buffalo, and New York. In Boston, he was made an honorary member of the Mercantile Library Association, while in Washington, after observing the opening of Congress, he was rather amazed—yet delighted—to be introduced to President Franklin Pierce.5 Such an extensive (and expensive) foreign tour shows how far William Chambers had come from his small and cranky press. Having founded the publishing house of W. & R. Chambers in 1832, he was now coproprietor of one of Edinburgh’s larger printing and publishing operations, employing 150 staff and the latest technical processes to bring instructive and educational cheap print to Britain and to the world. The New York Literary World declared that William and his brother Robert had “done more, perhaps, than any other two individuals of the age for the promotion of sound and useful knowledge,” and as Chambers prepared to leave New York, the Times of London was reporting that he had “amassed wealth” by “the enormous sale” of cheap publications of “lasting good.”6 By this time, Chambers had abandoned the traditional skills associated with hand printing and become an enthusiastic convert to the latest innovations in printing processes and machinery: machine-made paper that was produced in ever-larger sheets; stereotype plates that preserved the form of moveable type long after the original type was dispersed; and, especially, printing machines that could be driven by steam power. These techniques had existed in 1820, but the British book trade did not adopt them until much later. William Chambers’s firm would become one of the pioneers, transforming printing from a handcraft to a great Victorian industry and doing so, moreover, not simply in search of profit but as a means of bringing cheap instructive print and education to a universal readership.

xvi ] Preface

Introduction The Flood of Cheap Print

W

e take print so much for granted that it is perhaps difficult to remember that the widespread availability of the printed word was once a novelty. Of course, the novelty in the nineteenth century was not the mere existence of print—Gutenberg’s printing press had been around for four centuries—but rather the quantity and cheapness of printed matter. As a journalist remarked in 1855, “the quantity of printed matter that now issues from the press, and passes through the shops of booksellers to the public, is something totally unprecedented.”1 Another commentator pointed to the significance of price, noting that “the small and low-priced volume which is accessible to all” was rapidly replacing the “huge costly tomes” of former years.2 Literary reviews in the 1850s were full of articles headed “Cheap Literature,” “New and Cheap Forms of Popular Literature” and “Reading for the Million.”3 The “multiplication of cheap books” in Britain attracted envy even across the Atlantic, which was a notable feat given the American book trade’s reputation for cheapness throughout the 1830s and 1840s.4 Ever since Gutenberg’s day, most printed books had been expensive luxuries for wealthy customers, and even teachers, ministers, or lawyers would have had to think carefully before purchasing a new book. Throughout the nineteenth century, the latest works of the famous novelists and poets—the works that we now consider part of the Victorian literary canon—remained too expensive for most lower or middle-class readers. New novels were routinely issued in three volumes at a total cost of 31s. and sixpence, yet weekly wages could be just 12s. for agricultural laborers, rising to 25s. for skilled compositors in the Edinburgh print trade, yet still only 40s. for low-ranking professionals such as ministers or teachers.5 Charitable bodies had been teaching the working classes to read since the late eighteenth century, but the skill was of limited use when the only affordable forms of [1

print were secondhand books; a limited range of ballads, chapbooks, and pamphlets costing just a penny or two; and the tracts given away by religious organizations.6 However, the great literary works were far less representative of the output of the print trades of their day than we might imagine. Almanacs, spelling books, and dictionaries had long been the bread and butter of publishing, and by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, publishers were issuing enormous quantities of schoolbooks, railway timetables, cookery books, and cheap instructive texts on a wide range of topics. These sorts of books were usually available for a few shillings, making them far more accessible than the famous literary works. Of course, this flood of cheap print was not the only significant change to nineteenth-century life. Robert Chambers reminded his readers that “when I first saw and sailed on salt water, there was no such thing as steam-navigation. . . . Gaslight was then spoken of, but not effected.”7 Years later, on the half-centenary of Chambers’s Journal, William Chambers himself reflected on the changes he had seen over his lifetime: Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is the change as to facility of transit by sea and land through the agency of steam, while telegraphic communications are effected with the swiftness of lightning. Life may not be extended in point of years, but time is immensely economised.8 By the time Chambers wrote those remarks in the early 1880s, commentators had been praising the “lightning” speed of the electric telegraph for thirty years.9 Even when the British cable network was still being developed, journalists were insisting that it would alter “the very habits of social life” and improve “the social condition of all the races of mankind.”10 Such claims have frequently been mirrored by modern writers who find the origins of the modern digital information revolution in the Victorian electric telegraph.11 The electric telegraph’s ability to transmit information almost instantaneously over long distances undoubtedly made the device a modern marvel. However, the excitement about the electric telegraph should not overshadow the fact that, in the mid-nineteenth century, it had yet to establish its global reach and, crucially, played only a very limited role in the provision of knowledge and information to ordinary people. Its services came at a cost, based on length of message and distance of transmission. In the early 1850s, a twenty-word telegram from London to Edinburgh would have cost 8s.6d., whereas a penny postage stamp would have ensured that a letter, containing as many words as the writer could fit onto the page, was delivered the next day, for just a hundredth of the cost.12 Nor could the telegraph compete with the printed word in publishing, or “broadcasting,” information to large num2 ] Introduction

bers of people. Nor could it form a repository of knowledge for future generations. The telegraph’s domain was the almost-real-time communication of brief, valuable information between two (or a small number of ) affluent correspondents. Throughout the nineteenth century, therefore, the printed word continued to convey the widest variety of forms of information to the widest variety of people. In his reflective article, Robert Chambers suggested that of all the changes he had seen over his lifetime, the most striking were “the improvements in what I would call, comprehensively, access to knowledge.” Without mentioning the contribution made by the Chambers firm, he recounted the increased availability of newspapers, magazines, and cheap books, all of which had added “prodigiously to the educational means of the country.”13 The telegraph might seem the revolutionary Victorian information technology, but in terms of everyday impact, the transformation of the printed word, from rare luxury to an everyday commodity for most of the population, was far more significant. In economic terms, the printing and allied trades were a very small sector of British industry, employing less than 2 percent of the British workforce in 1851. But the key to understanding the peculiar excitement surrounding cheap print is to understand that print was not a commodity like any other.14 Walter Bagehot, editor of the Economist magazine in the 1850s, was one of those who expressed skepticism of the true value of most scientific and technological advances, noting that “we go by the train, but we are not improved at our journey’s end. We have railways, and canals, and manufactures—excellent things, no doubt, but they do not touch the soul. Somehow, they seem to make life more superficial.”15 Unlike screws, hat pins, printed muslin, or Wedgwood vases, print had the power to affect consumers’ minds and souls. The majority of nineteenth-century Britons took this power of print for granted. As staunch Christians—mostly of Protestant denominations—they believed that reading certain printed texts could save souls from eternal damnation. This was the age of the great Bible, tract, and missionary societies, which used printed matter to bring Christianity to the entire world.16 But the belief in the power of print was not limited to religion, for it was regarded as a civilizing and improving force by a wide range of commentators. In an age before television, radio, telephony, and the Internet, printed matter was the most significant medium for the transmission of information.17 And this was not only true for things like news, financial information, and theater reviews: for the vast majority of the population, any knowledge of very basic facts about the world—such as its history, geography, and natural history—was likely to come from printed matter. Print could introduce its Introduction [ 3

readers to political economy and natural science, to great literature and distant lands, and to philosophy and theology. It offered instruction to readers who wished to become educated and informed, and it could “awaken the higher powers of thought—reflection, imagination, and taste.”18 It was true that print sometimes encouraged less uplifting developments: young women might be tempted to waste their leisure hours on novel reading, while young men might discover radical politics or heterodox religion.19 But despite the ongoing fears about the bad effects of certain sorts of print, the general consensus in British society was that print was, overall, a power for good and “the mightiest agency of modern times.”20 Cheap print influenced people’s minds, not just the material conditions of their daily lives. It represented a potential force for true social improvement.

Analyzing Cheap Print The Victorians loved statistics, and contemporary descriptions often used numbers to convey awe.21 Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the mechanical computer, visited the printing office of the Times in 1832 and reported that “in one hour, 4000 sheets of paper are printed on one side; and an impression of 12,000 copies, from above 300,000 moveable pieces of metal, is produced for the public in six hours!”22 Other commentators described the enormous size of the printing machines, the number of people employed to run them, or the reams of paper they consumed, and so too, the cheap print revolution was described numerically. The publisher and educational campaigner Charles Knight sought to quantify the increase in book production by examining the numbers of books published per year. This enabled him to report that the output of the British book trade had increased from 842 titles a year in 1828 to 2,530 titles in 1853, while the number of monthly periodicals had risen from 177 to 362.23 Historians have expended considerable energy trying to improve on these estimates, and the absolute numbers are now believed to be rather higher than Knight thought.24 But he was right about the growth: recent figures suggest that the number of new titles issued per year rose from about 2,000 in 1800 to about 4,000 in 1840.25 The modern estimates also confirm contemporary impressions that the years around 1850 were particularly special. Not only was this the time of the most rapid rate of growth in the output of the book trade in the entire century (albeit short lived), but, as historian Simon Eliot has shown, it was when the price structure of the British trade changed: the time when cheap books became more common than expensive ones. Eliot has defined “cheap books” as those under 3s.6d.26 Knight, too, drew attention to the fall in prices; he claimed that the average price of a new book had fallen from 4 ] Introduction

16s. in the 1820s to 8s.4d. in the 1850s. By using average prices, Knight was barely doing justice to the flood of cheapness that his contemporaries saw around them, though he commented that “the system of cheapness in books has been carried further than I ever contemplated it could be carried.”27 With reprints widely available for five shillings, and certain novels, histories, and travel books now sold on railway station platforms for just a shilling or two, the sheer quantity of cheap books was striking. Nothing better illustrates the dramatic fall in British book prices around 1850 than the reactions of Americans. Ever since the United States gained their independence—and their freedom from British legislation and taxation—American book prices had been lower than British prices. In the 1830s and 1840s, this fact was often used as ammunition by British campaigners. In 1834, for instance, Knight reported that Harper & Brothers in New York was planning to sell Maria Edgeworth’s novel Helen: A Tale (London, 1834) for just 75 cents, equivalent to 3s. and thus a tenth of the price of the London edition.28 When American prices dropped dramatically during the depression of the early 1840s, the contrast became even more striking.29 The latest London novels and the first volumes of Thomas Macaulay’s History of England (London, 1848) were selling in New York for 25¢, and the most celebrated were even issued in 12½¢ editions.30 But by 1853, the Boston Transcript was reporting that “the English press has entirely distanced our own in the honor of issuing substantial literature at a low cost.”31 And by the 1860s, the respected New York publisher George Putnam had to admit that “our boasted cheapness in book-making has been actually eclipsed,” and many “popular and useful books” were “actually sold cheaper in England” than their equivalents in the United States.32 British print had become so cheap that it was cheaper even than American print. For the Victorians, the most striking symbol of the new world of abundant, cheap print was the steam-powered printing machine. It was said to have “caused a great revolution” in printing and to have finally realized the “full capability” of printing by moveable types.33 Knight chose the title The Printing Machine for his new magazine “for the many,” and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal assured its readers that its cover price could be so cheap only because it was steam-printed.34 But by highlighting the role of the steam-printing machine in the flood of cheap print, the Victorians placed too much emphasis on a machine. The printing machine may have been the most dramatic of the technical changes in the printing trade, but it was accompanied by the arrival of machine-made paper, stereotype plates and edition bindings, and several new techniques for reproducing illustrations.35 The more extended of the contemporary accounts of the progress of printing, such as those published in Knight’s Penny Introduction [ 5

Magazine and Chambers’s Journal, did give detailed descriptions of all these techniques and their relations to one another.36 But even so, in their emphasis on technology, they largely ignored the social, political, and commercial factors in which the new processes operated. The exception was their recognition of increased literacy rates, since this underpinned the conviction that a new mass market existed for print. Recent scholarship has retained the assumption that the most important factors in the expansion of the nineteenth-century marketplace for print were the arrival of new print processes and the improvements in literacy. However, it is striking that we have a far more sophisticated understanding of the latter than the former, thanks to several generations of scholars who have situated literacy and education in the social, political, and religious context of nineteenth-century Britain.37 Research on the social, economic, and cultural contexts of print has built on this work, investigating the ways in which authors and their publishers responded to the challenges and opportunities of the expanding audience for print. These studies rarely pay more than lip service to the new technologies.38 Technology does take a more prominent role in the scholarly efforts to quantify the economic changes taking place in the book trade, in terms of output, prices, and print runs, but it is usually held up as the explanation, without itself being interrogated or explained.39 In contrast to our histories of literacy and education, our histories of the new print processes still tend toward the descriptive. Bibliographers and historians of printing have provided us with explanations of each of the new processes, descriptions and illustrations of the printed product that resulted, instructions on how to identify surviving specimens, and descriptions of the various types of machinery that made it all possible.40 But we know surprisingly little about how such technologies were used in practice or how their use fitted into wider commercial or social objectives. Despite the fact that strong technological determinism is out of fashion, there remains a widespread assumption in the history of publishing that it is sufficient to remark that the arrival of new technologies and methods of production were hugely significant, without asking why, or how, or to whom, or where.41 Meanwhile, historians of technology have demonstrated that technology rarely, if ever, has the straightforward, world-changing effect that the Victorians took for granted. We know that new technologies, even if technically more advanced, rarely gain immediate or automatic acceptance. They have to compete in a marketplace with existing technologies and emerging rivals.42 Commercial decisions about marketing strategy, pricing policy, and associated equipment or applications can be far more significant in determining the rate of uptake and success of a new technology than anything in6 ] Introduction

trinsic to that technology. Most recently, a new emphasis on users has shown that technologies can end up being used in quite different ways and contexts from those intended by their inventors and designers, and that even nonusers influence the development and marketing of technology.43 Most of these studies of technologies in social context have focused on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and despite a clear interest in information and communication technologies, we do not yet have any nuanced account of the way that the new print technologies of early Victorian Britain were integrated into existing business systems to enable them to reach new audiences for print.44 We know when and by whom steam-printing machines, stereotyping, and machine-made paper were invented, but we do not yet know how and why certain printers and publishers started using them while others did not. The existing studies of later periods would lead us to expect to see the new technologies used in a variety of ways, for different purposes, at different times, and in different contexts, and particularly so in the early years of those technologies, when their uses and meanings had not yet stabilized.45 In the case of print technologies, this suggests a focus on the period from the 1820s to the 1850s. It is already well known that the first commercial steam-printing machine was commissioned by the proprietor of the Times newspaper and brought into use in 1814. The earliest users of the machines were also proprietors of newspapers or high-circulation weekly magazines, who welcomed steam printing for its ability to extend circulations while keeping deadlines tight.46 The later a newspaper could go to press, the more up to date its news could be, but the fewer copies could be printed. It was possible to increase output by running multiple hand presses simultaneously, but steam-printing machines were the only way of substantially increasing circulations. In contrast, most literary book publishers saw no need to abandon a system that was working well. They prided themselves on selling books of high production quality to a relatively small but affluent audience.47 Such a business model did not require rapid or mass production, but it did require print quality that was believed to be possible only with hand presses. Stereotyping follows a similar story. The real question, then, concerns what was going on in the period between the newspapers’ adoption of the new technologies, around 1820, and their eventual percolation through most of the British book trade, sometime after 1850.48 Studies of particular publishing houses give some hints. Historians of the great nineteenth-century Bible and tract societies have noted that those organizations were using both steam printing and stereotyping earlier than might have been expected.49 So too was the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), most notably with its Penny Magazine, Introduction [ 7

first published in 1832.50 Despite their disagreement over the inclusion of religious sentiments, these organizations shared a commitment to the cause of popular education and a relative lack of interest in profit. They found the steam-powered printing machine attractive—for not only was the machine fast, but, once set up, it required less labor to run. Over long print runs, therefore, the machine was cheaper than hand printing. Charitable societies were confident that such large numbers of copies would sell, and, unlike most traditional publishers, they were willing and able to take the risk. As philanthropic charities, these publishing societies were somewhat apart from the regular commercial trade and usually have been marginalized in the histories of nineteenth-century publishing.51 But there were other, commercial publishers in the 1830s who shared both their ambitions for popular education and cheap print, and their early use of technologies. One of the best known is Charles Knight of London, who worked closely with the SDUK but also published on his own account.52 Another is the firm of W. & R. Chambers of Edinburgh.53 Knight and Chambers were pioneering in their use of new processes to produce general knowledge works in a range of new formats, at a time when they were otherwise restricted to the big London newspapers, the most successful of the weekly magazines, and the charitable publishing societies. Both were convinced that knowledge ought to be widely available, and that, in the absence of a proper educational system for all classes, cheap instructive publishing was the most effective way of achieving this aim. William and Robert Chambers were more actively involved with the new processes than Knight, for they quickly became printers as well as publishers and by 1850 owned one of Edinburgh’s most advanced printing houses.54 They are also notable for running their firm entirely as a commercial undertaking, whereas Knight’s finances were tightly interwoven with those of the SDUK during the years of its existence.55 And, whereas several close flirtations with bankruptcy drove Knight into semiretirement in the early 1850s, W. & R. Chambers was a commercial success and maintained their high reputation for sound instructive and educational publications into the twentieth century.

Organization of This Book Previous histories of the new print technologies have tended to focus on invention and to assume that an obvious improvement must have had an immediate impact. What has yet to be described are the complex ways in which individuals decided whether to acquire the new machinery or techniques, when to do so, and what to use them for. The real interest lies in the ways the 8 ] Introduction

new technologies were used, often in combination with older methods and sometimes for purposes that the inventors had not imagined. It is these issues, dependent on human agency and linked to specific times, places, and contexts, that this book will address. I have sought to investigate these issues through an examination of the activities of W. & R. Chambers in the early days of their history, roughly from the 1830s to the 1850s. The Chambers brothers are a revealing example because they were part of what we might call the second wave of adopters. Chambers came to steam printing and stereotyping some fifteen or twenty years after they had been invented, when they were relatively well developed but had yet to come into widespread use. Being ahead of the crowd meant that Chambers were choosing to use new processes at a time when their uses and roles in the publishing business were still fluid and open to negotiation. Chambers needed to—and yet also had the freedom to—configure the techniques in the best way for their particular philanthropic ambitions and commercial needs. Other companies were publishing cheap print before the 1830s, but it was William Chambers’s careful integration of those technologies into a well-run business system, where they had to be adapted to commercial, legal, and literary realities, that enabled his firm to make a commercial success from cheap print. The W. & R. Chambers archive, deposited in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, provides a marvelous resource for anyone who wishes to investigate the business of publishing in these early years of the new print technologies.56 The archive contains account books, author correspondence, and receipts for everything from new machinery to musicians for the company’s annual soirées. It is through those archives and the published record that I can tell the story of why and how W. & R. Chambers adopted and used stereotyping and steam printing in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. These new printing processes did not operate in a vacuum but were part of an increasingly large business operation, and had to be fitted around existing editorial, commercial, and technical practices. Moreover, the operation of those various internal business practices was constantly affected by things over which the Chambers brothers had little control, from tax regimes through transport networks to literacy rates. Changes in the wider world, and elsewhere within the business, could have knock-on effects on how particular techniques were used, and it is clear that the ways in which Chambers used both stereotyping and steam printing changed over time in response to changes in the company’s business model and in the wider commercial context. Part 1 examines the early decades of W. & R. Chambers, during which they made the transition from hand-press techniques to stereotyping and Introduction [ 9

steam printing and experimented with alternative ways of using those processes. By the 1840s and 1850s, Chambers were well known as publishers of books and instructive tracts, but the company had started by publishing a weekly magazine. It was the pressure of producing sufficient copies of this magazine, combined with an intense desire to increase its circulation, that originally led the firm to both steam printing and stereotyping. This in itself was not particularly unusual, but what was striking was their subsequent decision—having purchased a printing machine of their own—to experiment in printing different types of work by steam. They were among the first in Britain to print books by steam power. They also used stereotype plates to coordinate the activities of two geographically distant printing centers, thus overcoming the difficulties of distribution in the pre-railway era, one of several problems that were arguably exacerbated by their location in Edinburgh rather than London. Their success with this unusual system inspired them to expand it across the Atlantic, though with rather less success. What the chapters in part 1 reveal is a publishing firm that was experimenting with various ways of using new technologies, at first to meet the needs of their magazine, but later to expand their activities in new ways, in terms of both genre and geography. By the late 1840s, the Chambers establishment had settled into its mature form. Parts 2 and 3 examine the way in which their business and technological practices responded to two significant changes in commercial context, both instigated by emerging steam-powered transport technologies. Part 2 considers the impact of the railways, which connected Edinburgh to London in 1850. We might expect that the most obvious effect of the railways would be their impact on doing business, by speeding up communication and distribution.57 The railways certainly did assist in making business correspondence faster and more reliable; but in terms of freight, W. & R. Chambers initially used the railways as a backup to the coastal steamships they were already using, rather than a replacement for them. In fact, the most substantial effect of the railways on the Chambers’s business was in neither of these areas. The emergence of bookstalls selling cheap books on railway platforms meant vastly increased competition in the niche in which Chambers had established themselves. Other publishing firms began to use the production processes and marketing techniques that Chambers and Knight had pioneered, and, by turning them to entertainment rather than education, demonstrated their full potential. Faced by the new competition, Chambers struggled to survive. That they did succeed in surviving—though they barely succeeded in competing—was due largely to their robust and wellestablished business and technological systems. The new competition in the market for cheap print in Britain encouraged 10 ] Introduction

W. & R. Chambers to look for other ways to expand their readership. The firm had long harbored ambitions to reach across the Atlantic and throughout the British dominions, but the establishment of regular transatlantic steamship services in the 1840s made doing business with the United States seem far more viable. As things transpired, W. & R. Chambers were more successful in the American marketplace than many of their British rivals— thanks to their commitment to education, low prices, and the new print technologies—but the steamships were rather less helpful than might have been anticipated. The firm’s experiences clearly demonstrate that the possibilities offered by new technologies were not necessarily sufficient to overcome the challenges of different legislative and commercial contexts. This book focuses on W. & R. Chambers and, in particular, on William Chambers, the elder brother and business mind behind the firm. Contemporaries often associated the firm with Robert Chambers, who was the more literary talented and sociable brother.58 But Robert freely admitted that he had “hardly anything to do with business,” whereas William was described as “a man of business first, a man of letters afterwards.”59 It was William who devoted his “industry, frugality, prudence, and foresight” to the “commercial administration of the business” and thus built it into one of the great Victorian publishing firms.60 By launching Chambers’s Journal in 1832, converting to stereotyping and steam printing a year later, and then transferring those techniques to instructive tracts and cheap books, William Chambers was intimately involved in the issues that are at the core of this book. He himself firmly believed that the new print processes would revolutionize the provision of cheap instruction and thus contribute to the improvement of all classes of society. My mission in this book is to investigate how he tried to make that dream come true.

Introduction [ 11

Figure 1. Front cover of the first issue of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, February 4, 1832. Bodleian Library, shelfmark Per.2705.b.3. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

1

W. & R. Chambers and the Market for Print

William Chambers and his younger brother Robert grew up in the historic town of Peebles, about twenty-five miles south of Edinburgh. Robert later described his hometown as “neat and agreeable” but with a “decidedly dull aspect.”1 Their father, James, had been a handloom weaver, but never settled successfully to another occupation after the arrival of powered looms. William left home at the age of fourteen to begin an apprenticeship with an Edinburgh bookseller. Soon afterward, the whole family moved to Edinburgh, where Robert continued his schooling. James Chambers subsequently moved his family again, but after he lost another job, Robert’s education had to stop, and the family gave up their hopes that he might go to the university and train for a profession. The well-being of the younger children now depended on their thrifty mother, but William and Robert were old enough to fend for themselves. William was coming toward the end of his apprenticeship, but sixteen-year-old Robert was left in an awkward position: too old to begin an apprenticeship, but untrained for a profession. After Robert spent unsatisfactory spells as a teacher and a clerk, William suggested that he might be able to do something modest in bookselling. Robert rented tiny premises on Leith Walk, the main road from Edinburgh to the port of Leith. Lacking the capital to stock a shop, he acquired all of the family’s books (except the seventeenth-century Bible), and displayed them on a stall outside. Leith Walk was where William himself chose to set up shop when he finished his apprenticeship the next year, though he could afford slightly better premises and had good connec[ 13

tions in the book trade. By 1820, both brothers were booksellers, just a few hundred yards apart.2 The brothers used the dead time in their shops to pursue other interests; William bought and began to use his press, and Robert began to write about the history of Edinburgh. In October 1821, the brothers embarked on an ambitious joint project: a sixteen-page periodical miscellany called the Kaleidoscope: or Edinburgh Literary Amusement, which they planned to issue every fortnight and to sell for 3d. Robert wrote the content, while William worked long into the night doing the printing, folding, and stitching. Their younger brother James was brought in to help with the printing, but it was a Herculean task. According to William, the Kaleidoscope sold well enough to cover its expenses, but—as with his Songs of Robert Burns—there was no remuneration for the substantial labor involved. After seven issues, the brothers admitted defeat, and the last Kaleidoscope appeared on January 12, 1822. Yet, it was not a total waste of time. As William later said, it was “a trial of one’s wings,” which would encourage them “to higher flights in more favourable times and circumstances.”3 William and Robert Chambers were always very conscious of having made their own way in the world. They would become major players in the Edinburgh book trade and substantial employers in their own right, but both brothers—and especially William—saw themselves as self-made men, and this motivated a deep commitment to education, instruction, and selfimprovement.4 All of the publications of W. & R. Chambers—from the Chambers’s Journal on which the firm was founded, to the instructive pamphlets, textbooks, and standard reference works that followed—were dedicated to the cause of helping other people make the transition from daily struggle to adequacy, as they themselves had done. During the first half of the nineteenth century, literacy skills were extending to shop boys, tailors, carpenters, and even factory workers, but most books and magazines were far too expensive for such people—or even clerks and schoolteachers—to purchase. The Chambers brothers were among the small number of younger publishers who focused on the needs of readers with only a basic education and very limited spare cash.

War and Taxation The British political situation had created a rather difficult atmosphere for those interested in education and information in the early nineteenth century. Britain had been at war with France until 1815, with her armies campaigning abroad and civilians at home kept alert by fears of invasion. Re14 ] Chapter One

strictions on the circulation of treasonable, seditious, or militarily sensitive information are not unexpected during wartime, but after the war, the restrictions actually increased. Napoleon’s armies were no longer a threat, but the British ruling classes saw danger in the possible influence of French political ideas on radicals, demagogues, and the uneducated masses. Nobody could forget that the fragile constitutional monarchy produced by the French Revolution had fallen apart in months of terrible bloodshed in 1793–94. Although blame could certainly be placed on the absolutist, allegedly corrupt, and certainly bankrupt reign of Louis XVI—and here the British congratulated themselves that their monarch was constrained by parliament—the Revolution and its aftermath were widely seen as a failed attempt to put philosophical ideas about government, representation, and religion into action. Successive British governments were determined to restrict such radical political ideas from circulating orally or in print. Thomas Paine was found guilty of seditious libel, and the second part of his Rights of Man (1792) was suppressed. Paine escaped to France, but in 1793, a young Glasgow lawyer, Thomas Muir, was sentenced to fourteen years transportation to Australia for making speeches and circulating seditious publications, including the Rights of Man. Paine and Muir had both called for a reform of the political system, and despite being temporarily quieted by wartime repression, demands for wider political representation did not go away. In a system in which the only voters were those males who owned substantial property and were members of the established church—which was barely 2 percent of the population—an extension to the franchise would benefit large numbers of middle-class and professional men. Conservative fears arose from the possibility that the working classes too might seek political power, and the events in France seemed conclusive demonstration of what a disaster that would be. The extent of the continuing political tensions in Britain became apparent in August 1819, four years after Waterloo. A crowd of sixty thousand had gathered for a political rally on St. Peter’s Fields, in Manchester, and the local authorities overreacted. They sent in armed, mounted troops, and around five hundred people were injured and at least eleven were killed. Less fatally, existing laws against treason, sedition, and blasphemy allowed action against anyone who made speeches or wrote pamphlets (or printed or distributed them) that promoted, or even hinted at, political or religious reforms. The use of these laws affected ideas of all varieties, not just the overtly political: surgeon William Lawrence’s Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (1819) was condemned as blasphemous.5 The most significant restriction on the circulation of knowledge was a W. & R. Chambers and the Market for Print [ 15

group of taxes on printed matter. These “taxes on knowledge” were routinely blamed for the paucity of cheap print in Britain and were continually attacked by liberal reformers from the 1830s onward. They had the effect of restricting all forms of printed knowledge—from philosophy to botany, from the newest novel to the latest news—to that small circle of affluent readers for whom an additional penny or two made little difference.6 These taxes posed a real challenge to William Chambers’s ambitions to provide cheap educational publications. The most pervasive of the taxes was on paper, where 3d. was added to the cost of every pound (weight) of paper, whether for printing, covering, or wrapping. The tax weighed particularly heavily on cheap publications, where the profit margins were so slight that they could be eroded by even a fraction of a penny in tax, and their publishers argued that abolishing the paper tax could mean the difference between life and death for their lowpriced publications. In 1832, Chambers’s Journal informed its readers that a tenth of its cover price was tax, and the following year, it announced that its readers were generating £1,600 a year for the Treasury.7 Years later, Chambers would complain that one of the company’s best-selling works (it had sold over 80,000 copies) had to be abandoned because the £6,220 of tax swallowed the profits. London publisher Charles Knight had the same problem.8 But the paper tax would be the last of the taxes on knowledge to fall: it was halved in 1836, but not finally repealed until 1861. The other taxes on knowledge were more limited in their application. The tax on newspaper and periodical advertisements added a massive 3s.6d. to their actual cost. This placed advertising beyond the reach of most small businesses and individuals, and limited the revenue available to newspaper and periodical publishers. This advertisement tax was reduced to 1s.6d. in 1833 and repealed in 1853. A further tax was levied on the very act of conveying news. This had the intriguing effect of making a legal distinction between general knowledge and current affairs, with the latter being taxed in an attempt to limit the spread of political information. All newspapers had to pay this “stamp duty,” which increased the price of each copy by 4d. (1d. from 1836; repealed in 1855). It was thus impossible to sell a newspaper for less than 5d. for most of the first half of the nineteenth century, and at this price, circulations were low. The shilling Literary Gazette sold about 4,000 copies weekly, while in 1830, the Times (then a biweekly) reached only 11,000.9 When William Cobbett launched a pamphlet version of his Political Register in 1816, selling it at 2d. rather than the 6d. price of the regular stamped edition, he found 50,000 readers—but the Register was swiftly closed down by a government that feared that the masses might imitate the revolutionary and regicidal French if they were encouraged to become politically aware.10 16 ] Chapter One

Editors of illegal newspapers, who printed on unstamped paper and sold at a penny or two, were being prosecuted and gaoled right into the 1840s.11 In this context, starting a cheap periodical could be seen as a radical political statement. Those who experimented with cheap instructive magazines in the 1820s and 1830s were careful to avoid political or controversial content. They did not want to go to gaol, but they also needed a legitimate means of avoiding the newspaper stamp, which would have forced their prices up. Chambers’s Kaleidoscope was one of many new (and equally short-lived) periodicals that sprang up across Britain in the early 1820s in response to the expanded market for print created by the evangelical education charities. The Kaleidoscope was a miscellany of poetry, sketches of authors, historical tales, and musing or satirical essays. Similarly, Charles Knight’s first attempt at a cheap instructive magazine, the Plain Englishman—which ran monthly from 1820–22—offered “intellectual food of the best quality” but avoided news.12 One of the most successful of the early cheap magazines was the weekly Mirror of Literature, launched in London by John Limbird in 1822 and sold at 2d. In contrast to Chambers’s Kaleidoscope, the Mirror’s backers had more experience and resources. The Mirror relied heavily on reprinting excerpts from the more expensive periodicals—an easy and cheap way to generate copy—and was put together by a full-time editor. It was printed by a regular print shop and drew on the skills of artists and wood engravers for its innovative incorporation of illustrations into a cheap periodical.13 Unlike its contemporaries, the Mirror was still running fifteen years later. In summer 1851, Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune who was visiting Britain for the Great Exhibition, delighted repeal campaigners by giving evidence about American newspaper circulations and readerships to the Parliamentary Select Committee on the newspaper stamp. The highest-selling newspaper in Britain at the time was the Times, now a daily costing 4d. with a circulation of 38,000. Although selling eight times as many as its nearest rival, the Morning Advertiser, this was nothing to boast about compared with Greeley’s Tribune, whose weekly edition routinely sold over 50,000 copies.14 New York, with a population barely a fifth that of London, nevertheless consumed more than twice as many newspapers every day.15 In such figures, British campaigners saw the benefits of no stamp duty, no paper duty, and no advertisement tax.16 The subsequent repeal of the newspaper stamp in 1855 was a victory for the increasingly vocal and active group of campaigners, publishers (including Robert and William Chambers and Charles Knight), and authors who had formed themselves into an Association for Promoting the Repeal of All the Taxes on Knowledge.17 By 1861, the last of the taxes was repealed; and it was the removal of the paper tax, perhaps more than that of the stamp duty, that ushered in W. & R. Chambers and the Market for Print [ 17

the immense growth in numbers of newspapers and their circulations that Greeley had predicted.

Trade Practice and Philanthropic Duty The taxes on knowledge were undoubtedly part of the reason for the paucity of extremely cheap print in Britain, but they were less important in restricting access to information than the repeal campaigners implied. Until around 1850, the taxes simply reinforced the predominant tendency in the British publishing trade to concentrate on selling expensive books to a limited number of wealthy readers. The repeal of the taxes would have had relatively little effect on the price of print if most publishers had continued to focus on their traditional markets. For campaigning purposes, however, taxation provided a discrete target, with a defined solution and an established method of action. Building on the successes of the antislavery and anti–Corn Law campaigns, political lobbying had become a standard process for those hoping to influence legislation. Focusing on taxation also had the advantage of creating a platform on which all members of the book trade could unite. Even those publishers of expensive literary books who were not particularly bothered about the taxes would sign a petition for an issue affecting the entire trade. It would have been a completely different matter for educational reformers, liberal politicians, and a small number of young publishers to try to change the ingrained practices of the senior members of the book trade. Fortunately, by the time the tax repeals finally occurred, attitudes toward the education of the working classes and the desirability of cheap print had changed. Seen from a modern perspective, the focus of the major British publishing houses on expensive books and small audiences in the first half of the nineteenth century seems blinkered, but it made sound commercial sense. The audience for books was always limited to people who were both literate and sufficiently affluent. For three centuries after the invention of printing, literacy had essentially been limited to the social and learned elites, so ability to pay and ability to read usually went hand in hand. When money was no object, printed books could be attractive and desirable, beautifully printed on fine white paper. Even as the book-buying classes expanded during the eighteenth century to include the gentry and the successful professional and merchant classes, the tradition of quality production and high prices continued to dominate the London book trade. It was where profits were easiest to make. There were publishers who specialized in different sorts of works: chil18 ] Chapter One

dren’s books, almanacs, and ballads were far less elegant and sold at much cheaper prices. Some publishers created successful businesses from the highvolume sales of such cheap works, but they were on the fringes of the book trade and their activities often went unremarked by observers who focused on the eminent publishing houses in the streets around St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.18 At the end of the eighteenth century, as publishing was emerging as a separate trade from printing and bookselling, changes in copyright law resulted in a bifurcation within the publishing trade. A 1774 House of Lords judgment made it clear that copyrights could not be owned in perpetuity as had previously been argued. Publishers after 1774 typically chose to specialize either in producing new copyright works or in reprinting public domain works. Only houses with substantial capital could take the first route, and they became the pillars of the nineteenth-century trade. Houses that sought new copyrights (Longman, Rivington, Murray) had to price their books high enough to cover the author’s fee, but as long as they continued to focus on the traditional upper- and upper-middle-class markets this was no problem. Those publishers who took the other route—reprinting out-of-copyright works—were generally smaller concerns and included many provincial publishers. With no need to pay authors, and in an effort to be successful in their limited local markets, they offered their wares at substantially lower prices. In the early 1820s, you would have paid 31s.6d. for Walter Scott’s latest novel, Kenilworth (1821), published in three volumes by Constable in Edinburgh and Longman in London. Alternatively, you could have paid around 6s. for a copy of one of the older classics, perhaps Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) or Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766), from your local bookseller-publisher in York, Bristol, or Norwich.19 At the time, most publishers—and, probably, most readers—thought that 6s. was an impressively low price for an entire novel, play, or treatise, and they took it for granted that new works would carry a substantial premium. But those who had some knowledge of the lives of the lower ranks of society realized that 6s. was far from cheap for the majority of the population. A laborer had no hope of purchasing such a book, and even skilled artisans found it difficult to buy more than one or two books a year. Books had been out of the reach of laborers and artisans for centuries, but in the early nineteenth century, educational reformers and Christian missionaries began to argue that literacy and knowledge ought to be available to everyone. The evangelical revival drove the foundation of a plethora of philanthropic societies during the two decades on either side of 1800.20 Sunday schools began to appear in the 1780s, and their efforts to teach basic literacy W. & R. Chambers and the Market for Print [ 19

skills to the children of the poor were extended in the 1810s by charitable societies that ran day schools. Overseas missionary societies were founded with enthusiasm in the 1790s, followed by domestic missionary societies—particularly in the big industrial cities—in the 1830s. The aim of all these societies was to spread Christianity and save souls, but their mode of action was predominantly educational. Schools provided the literacy that was essential to reading the Bible, but readers could not be expected to restrict themselves to the Bible, especially when they were just learning to read. There was an urgent need for more cheap print, particularly with a sound moral and Christian tone. The Religious Tract Society (1799) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804) were among the societies founded with the aim of providing this sort of cheap print to the “thousands who would have remained grossly illiterate.”21 Their publications were intended to ensure that literacy remained a route to salvation rather than to unbelief or radical politics. While the activities of many other organizations were restricted by the government’s fear of political agitation, the religious societies flourished. By the 1820s, the evangelicals proudly reported that literacy rates were rising and a new readership was emerging.22 A number of other groups shared the desire to improve the education of the poor. Radical political thinkers, inspired by the American and French Revolutions, had been arguing since the 1790s that workers ought to be enabled to participate in a democratic process and therefore should be informed about political matters. Such views were a minority in Britain, and their repression was one of the key aims of the taxes on knowledge.23 However, a more moderate view was becoming increasingly accepted among liberal thinkers by the 1820s: that even within the existing political system, education would enable the working classes to act in an informed and rational manner. The idea of keeping the lower classes in willful ignorance no longer seemed desirable, either politically or morally, and the fact that many liberals were influenced by the evangelical revival helped to enhance this feeling.24 The liberal interest in extending educational opportunity manifested itself in a variety of initiatives of the late 1820s, from the proliferation of adult education Mechanics’ Institutes and the formation of the SDUK, to the foundation of the University of London in 1829, which, unlike Oxford and Cambridge, would award degrees to students of any religious background. Religious charities and political liberals transformed the enterprise of providing printed matter for the working classes from a potentially seditious act into a philanthropic duty. During the 1820s and 1830s, charitable publishing societies were among the most important sources of cheap print. A hundred religious tracts could be bought for just a shilling and then given away to in20 ] Chapter One

dividual readers for free, while the secular SDUK produced a series of instructive pamphlets that sold at just 6d. A renewed tide of cheap miscellanies sprang into existence during the political agitation leading up to the 1832 Reform Act, and once the act was passed (increasing the electorate to 3.4 percent of the population), political tensions briefly relaxed and the charitable publishers felt able to launch magazines for the working classes without facing criticism for encouraging the masses to aim above their stations. The Penny Magazine (SDUK/Knight, 1832), Saturday Magazine (SPCK, 1832), and Weekly Visitor (RTS, 1833) carefully steered clear of potentially controversial subject matter and were backed by organizations with impeccable social credentials. The Penny Magazine, thanks to its powerful patrons, was the most talked about of these new magazines, and it was soon claiming amazing sales of 200,000 copies a week.25 The charities’ activities attracted attention from commercial publishing houses, particularly those whose owners had philanthropic inclinations. If the societies were correct, and the reading public was now far larger than most publishers had assumed, then there ought to be an opportunity to sell far more books and magazines. Prices might have to be lower, but higher sales should keep profits secure. In fact, six weeks before the Penny Magazine was launched, and four hundred miles further north, William Chambers had already begun his second attempt at a cheap magazine.

Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal By the early 1830s, both William and Robert Chambers had moved out of their small shops on Leith Walk to better premises in Edinburgh itself. Robert’s writings had brought him an increasing circle of connections in the Edinburgh literary world, and he was sufficiently well established to marry in late 1829; William married four years later.26 In his role as bookseller, William had watched the progress of the magazines being launched in both London and Edinburgh at a penny or a penny and a half weekly. But William was highly critical of these publications. Not only did they frequently appear late—creating problems when he could not supply customers who expected their magazine regularly every Saturday—but their contents were sloppy compilations of extracts and clippings, with no overall plan. William believed that the press had a real power to improve its readers, and he believed that he could do much better.27 The first number of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal—later called just Chambers’s Journal—appeared on Saturday, February 4, 1832 (see fig. 1). For one and a half pennies each week, readers received a four-page magazine with four columns of text per page.28 That first issue made no secret of WilW. & R. Chambers and the Market for Print [ 21

liam’s ambitions. The front page announced his conviction that “a universal appetite for instruction” now existed, and further, that his new magazine would supply “a meal of healthful, useful, and agreeable mental instruction” in a format and at a price to suit “the convenience of every man in the British dominions.” As well as presenting the Journal as a medium for diffusing knowledge and ambitiously outlining its audience, William criticized the work of those charitable organizations that also claimed to diffuse knowledge. He mentioned no names, but he must have had the SDUK and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in his sights. According to him, they had failed in their mission, partly because of their structural inflexibility but especially because of the constraints that their political or religious affiliations placed on them.29 Throughout its long life, Chambers’s Journal would eschew party politics and religious sectarianism in its efforts to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Robert Chambers helped write some of the articles for the early issues of Chambers’s Journal, but he was initially skeptical that the new magazine would be any more successful than the Kaleidoscope. However, as the Journal ’s success became clear, he joined William as a coproprietor; his name appeared on the masthead for the first time on September 1, 1832. Their brother James, then in a bookselling partnership with Robert, was also involved until his premature death in 1833. Another brother, David, would become involved later. The first issues of Chambers’s Journal sold around 30,000 copies, and a few months later, after the establishment of a separate edition printed in London, the total circulation rose to about 50,000 copies a week.30 This success, coupled with the astounding figures achieved by the Penny Magazine, inspired numerous imitators. In Edinburgh, for instance, there were the Universal Magazine: A Weekly Repository of Amusement and Instruction and the Schoolmaster and Edinburgh Weekly Magazine, better known under its later title of Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine. These magazines shared the instructive and entertaining agenda, but few were as successful as Chambers’s Journal and the Penny Magazine. The Universal Magazine lasted just two months, while Johnstone’s was quickly transformed into a higher-priced monthly magazine. William Chambers and Charles Knight were proud that their periodicals survived when so many others failed, and both were convinced that the reason lay in the quality of their publications’ contents. Knight claimed that one of the Penny Magazine’s great achievements was precisely its contribution to improving the quality of cheap literature, by “superseding a large amount of weekly trash, and destroying, for ever, the astrological and indecent almanacs.” By providing better-quality reading material at low prices, Knight 22 ] Chapter One

believed that Chambers’s Journal and the Penny Magazine had created new readers and had encouraged more people than ever before to become the purchasers of books, thus “planting the commerce of books upon broader foundations than those upon which it had been previously built.”31 Both magazines contained a miscellany of articles on history, natural history, industry, travels, and anecdotes about British or foreign social habits. In its first year, for instance, Chambers’s Journal carried articles on heat and light, monkeys and birds, railways and printing, and the distribution of disease and the literary history of the Bible; it also ran a series of biographical sketches that included Richard Arkwright, James Watt, and Isaac Newton. In contrast to the Penny Magazine, Chambers’s Journal also included stories (or “tales”) and poems alongside its instructive articles. One of the key differences between both these new magazines and their predecessors was the high proportion of articles that were specially written rather than extracted from other publications. Chambers’s Journal did fill the spare inches at the foots of columns with miscellaneous excerpts (on the peculiarities of authors, the sagacity of an elephant, and the progress of British commerce, for instance), but the rest of the content was original. This commitment to new writing reflected a commitment to instruction, which required organized knowledge, presented in a suitable style. In their ambition to provide cheap print to educate and inform the working classes, the young firms of W. & R. Chambers and Charles Knight had far more in common with the charitable publishing societies than with the rest of the British book trade in the 1830s.32 Some of the established firms, including John Murray and Longman, launched series of cheaper books in those years around 1830, but although these are usually presented as part of the nascent movement for increasing the diffusion of knowledge, the decision to issue original works at 5s. or 6s. a volume indicates a different strategy. The economy was depressed in the years immediately after 1829, and these series may be better seen as reactions to decreased consumer spending, with publishers presenting the price cuts as disinterested philanthropy rather than economic necessity.33 None of these midpriced series was a great success: Murray remaindered the volumes of his Family Library, while Longman was still selling off volumes of the Cabinet Library at reduced price in the 1840s.34 The most successful of these midpriced book series was Colburn & Bentley’s Standard Novels (1831–55), some of whose 6s. volumes sold 6,000 copies.35 Contrasting that with the circulations of the penny magazines is a sharp reminder of how increasing price decreases the potential market. Colburn & Bentley managed to make a profit on this level of sales by relying on the economics of reprint publishing: their titles were from the firm’s backW. & R. Chambers and the Market for Print [ 23

list, whereas Murray had paid substantial sums for new authorship.36 By the 1840s, the strategy of issuing a midpriced reprint a few years after the first (expensive) edition had become a fairly routine practice for the big publishing houses, in much the same way as publishers now issue works in paperback a year or so after the hardback edition. But these five- and six-shilling works—while certainly a boon to the middle classes—did little to help the working-class readers about whom evangelicals and liberal reformers were so concerned. It was the activities of Chambers, Knight, and the charitable societies that eventually made it clear to all observers—including the rest of the book trade—that penny magazines could sell in hitherto unimagined numbers, and that books would do likewise if priced at a shilling or a shilling and sixpence. To readers, the most obvious distinction between Chambers’s Journal and the Penny Magazine would have been their visual appearance. Knight was a committed proponent of the value of illustrations in instructive works, and the Penny Magazine had a large wood engraving on every title page and numerous smaller images inside.37 Chambers’s Journal was resolutely unillustrated. Yet the most significant distinction was really—as William Chambers remarked on the fiftieth anniversary of his own Journal—that the Penny Magazine, for all its patronage and early promise, “broke down and perished in fifteen years.”38 Chambers found two explanations for this. The first was the more attractive material in his own magazine: he suggested that the SDUK were too focused on instruction and that “they made no provision for the culture of the imaginative faculties.” Their treatises “were . . . too technical and abstruse for the mass of operatives.” With an eye on the market, Chambers’s Journal carried short stories, poetry, and, ultimately, serial fiction as well as its many instructive articles. Second, Chambers argued that his firm’s success lay in its commercial organization, for “a society cannot, as a rule, compete with private enterprise.” Whereas the SDUK was run by a committee, William and Robert Chambers had direct control and entire responsibility for the writing, editing, printing, publishing, and distribution of their publications.39 The circulation of Chambers’s Journal grew through the 1830s and early 1840s, peaking in 1844 at 90,000 copies.40 In contrast, the Penny Magazine’s sales declined from the oft-quoted 200,000 copies to around 25,000, and it closed in 1846.41 Chambers’s Journal survived the difficult 1840s and kept a circulation of around 50,000 copies through the 1850s. It had readers not just in Scotland, but throughout England and Wales; it also claimed readers, to a more limited extent, in Ireland, the colonies, and the United 24 ] Chapter One

States. The success of the Journal enabled W. & R. Chambers to expand their operations, and by the 1850s, they were issuing a well-respected series of textbooks, several series of instructive tracts, and cheap reprints of classic works. They had a large staff and extensive premises for printing and editorial work. The firm was valued at over £50,000 in the late 1850s, and for the last decade, the brothers had each been able to draw highly respectable annual incomes of at least £1,000.42 Despite the competition from new titles in the later nineteenth century, Chambers’s Journal successfully defended its niche in the magazine market into the twentieth century (when it finally closed in 1956).

W. & R. Chambers and the Market for Print [ 25

I

Organizing a Proper System of Publishing

By mid-1832, it was clear that Chambers’s Journal was a significant success. Where many of its early imitators and competitors had already folded, the Journal’s circulation was rising. In later years, it was sometimes claimed that this “unprecedented” success carried William Chambers “off his feet.” In fact, as a contemporary in the Edinburgh book trade remarked, this was highly unlikely, as he was “far too ‘firm-set’ a man for anything of the kind.”1 And Chambers could not afford to be carried away because those rising circulation figures were actually as much a cause for concern as celebration. While William and Robert Chambers might dream of an ever-bigger audience, they were operating before the creation of a swift, integrated national market in Britain: there were no railways for rapid distribution networks, nor was there a national banking system or credit network, nor a penny postal service for corresponding with agents, suppliers, or authors. The international market that they hoped for, in the British colonies and the United States, was even more difficult to reach. The Journal ’s original success was based on the existing, traditional systems of print manufacture, but the growth of its circulation would strain those systems. As the brothers wrote in the Journal in 1834, one of the main problems they faced was that “all the old modes of procedure” had broken down under the success of the Journal, and they had had to “organise a proper system of printing and publishing.”2 In creating this “proper system,” William and Robert Chambers showed how far they had come from their early efforts with the Kaleidoscope, as they became converts to the very newest printing techniques. [ 27

Part 2 investigates why W. & R. Chambers adopted stereotyping and steam printing in the early 1830s, at a time when these techniques were still rare outside the newspaper industry (and especially so outside London). It then follows the changing ways in which the Chambers brothers put those techniques to use, as they became more familiar with the possibilities and as their firm’s needs changed. W. & R. Chambers were unusual in the publishing world for developing in-house capabilities in both processes, which enabled the firm to exercise direct control over their use. This decision meant that Chambers had a strong motivation to get a good return on their investment, and also gave them greater opportunities to experiment. During the 1830s, Chambers developed novel applications of the new processes of steam printing and stereotyping to further their goal of spreading cheap, popular instruction to readers throughout Britain.

28 ] Part I

Figure 2. The print workshops of the 1850s were enormous enterprises, full of machinery. This crosssection shows the interior of Harper & Brothers’s new building in New York, built after a fire destroyed the previous premises in December 1853. The steam engine is visible in the bottom left, printing machines on the floor above, and the compositors’ gallery on the top floor. Detail from Jacob Abbott, The Harper Establishment (1854). Reproduced by permission of the American Antiquarian Society.

2

Industrial Book Production

Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal described the changes in the book trade in the first half of the nineteenth century as a “great revolution in the business of the printer.” Its own proprietors’ early experiences with hand printing were represented as a period of continuous trial and vexation, ended only by the arrival of the steam-printing machine. It wholeheartedly celebrated the “stupendous spectacle of moral power” that was revealed in the application of the “inert mechanism” of the steam-printing machine to “knowledge and human improvement.”1 The Journal’s editors were so excited that they devoted a long article in 1835 to describing the publication’s own production processes, from papermaking and typesetting through stereotyping to machine printing. Its competitor, the Penny Magazine produced by Charles Knight and the SDUK, had done the same thing in 1833.2 Machinery was a key feature of these descriptions, and stereotyping was routinely included as one of the recent technical advances, despite not actually involving a machine. Despite the flood of innovations in the early nineteenth century, certain aspects of the print production process remained resolutely unmechanized and unmodernized. The monotype and linotype machines, which were the eventual solution to mechanizing the composition process in the 1890s, would fundamentally reconceive the task by combining it with typecasting. Until then, compositors retained their position as well-paid, highly skilled craftsmen.3 Similarly, many of the decorative parts of the binding and illustration processes remained in the hands of skilled craftsmen throughout the century. Folding the printed sheets of paper into pamphlets and sewing them together into [ 31

book blocks was also difficult to mechanize, but publishers felt less pressure to do so since these tasks were usually carried out by unskilled female workers for low wages. Even before the industrialization of printing, the few publishers and charities who specialized in cheap print had developed a variety of tricks and techniques for reducing the costs of as many aspects of production as possible. For instance, they often reprinted public domain works as cheap sources of texts. They did not pay high fees to authors of new works. Illustrations were kept simple and few. Bindings were plain. Paper was the most significant component of physical book production costs in Britain between 1836 and 1856, accounting for 40 to 45 percent of the total cost. To save on paper, the smallest typefaces possible were used, and page margins were reduced. The other major costs were the highly skilled task of composition, which accounted for 30 to 35 percent, and the press work or machining that comprised the remaining 20 to 30 percent.4 Machine printing and stereotyping helped to save the labor costs of press work and composition, which is why they were adopted so quickly by those involved in the cause of cheap print and popular education.

Paper In Britain, the cost of paper was artificially raised by government taxation (see chapter 1). But even without taxation, paper was an expensive commodity. For most of the nineteenth century, paper was made from pulped linen or cotton rags. Once the rags had been soaked and macerated to a suitable consistency, a wooden frame criss-crossed with wires was lowered into it, to catch a thin layer of pulp. The paper maker transferred this carefully to a sheet of felt, squeezed the water out, and then hung it up to dry for a month or so. In earlier times, the scarcity of rags had been a problem, but the industrialization of cotton manufacturing encouraged people to buy new clothes rather than mending old ones, and it also generated cotton waste that could be used to supplement the rags. By the 1830s, supply was no longer such a problem. Machine production helped reduce prices, but it was only in the last two decades of the century that prices fell dramatically, after the introduction of esparto grass and wood pulp as alternative raw materials and the development of next-generation machinery.5 The first commercially successful papermaking machine was built near London in 1803 by Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier. The brothers were not terribly effective at defending their patent and subsequently went bankrupt, but machines based on their designs became very successful. By 1830, twothirds of the paper produced in Britain was machine-made.6 Printers often 32 ] Chapter Two

formed long-term relationships with particular paper merchants, preferring certain manufacturers for covers and endpapers, and others for book paper. Papermaking factories were usually located outside the cities, near sources of plentiful clean water, and the arrival of the railways made it easier both for paper makers to dispatch their wares to the city and for printers to seek tenders more widely than before. With paper forming such a high fraction of the physical production costs of a printed item, finding the best price was essential for producing cheap books and magazines. In the 1850s, W. & R. Chambers bought paper for their Edinburgh print works from mills in nearby Colinton and Penicuik, but also from Airdrie (near Glasgow) and as far away as Aberdeen.7 Samples and prices were generally sought by post, but in 1854, David Chambers made plans to visit the paper mills of Buckinghamshire personally, in the hope of negotiating better prices.8 Because the Fourdrinier machine dripped paper pulp onto a continuous moving web of wires, it could make very large sheets of paper (or even continuous rolls). Although a handmade sheet of paper is limited to the size of frame that a man can hold in his outstretched arms, machine-made paper by the 1830s could be twice that big, and by the end of the century, it would be four times that size. Being able to make more paper on each cycle of the manufacturing process helped reduce costs in itself. The size of the platen in a hand press limited the size of paper it could print, so hand-press printers who bought machine-made paper would have had the sheets cut down to one of the traditional sizes, such as post, crown, or demy. Printing machines could apply pressure across a larger area, which meant they could take larger sheets of paper. This did not have to mean larger book pages; rather, it meant more pages printed per cycle. In 1820, William Chambers had hand-printed eight pages on each side of a sheet for his Songs of Robert Burns, a common layout known as octavo. (Four pages per side would be quarto; twelve pages per side, duodecimo.) With a sheet of paper twice as large, and a machine capable of printing it, he could have printed two octavo sets of pages on one sheet. For William Clowes & Sons, one of the big steam-printing establishments in London from the 1830s and the printers of the Penny Magazine, this technique “effected a complete revolution in our business” because it was now possible to print a book “in half the time we used to do.”9

Composition and Stereotyping Early nineteenth-century attempts to mechanize composition typically involved mechanical arms to pick out the letters of type, controlled by some form of keyboard, usually resembling a piano; the typewriter was not yet invented. None was satisfactory, and the major development in this area still Industrial Book Production [ 33

relied on the compositor’s skilled work as a starting point. The stereotyping process involved using a mold to cast an exact replica of the surface of the block of composed type. The resulting stereotype plate (or plates, since a separate plate was usually cast for each page on the sheet) could be placed in the bed of a printing press or machine. The idea of stereotyping had been around since the late eighteenth century, but it was first made practicable in the 1810s. The process did not become commonplace in Britain until the 1850s, even though American printers were using it from the 1820s.10 The great advantage was that these stereotype plates could be stored and reused almost indefinitely (until they wore out), long after the original type had been dispersed. Thus, Chambers’s Journal defined stereotyping as a “means of keeping up fictitious types to answer future demands, at an expense infinitely inferior to that of keeping the actual pages standing.”11 For most printers, type was far too valuable an asset to be locked up doing nothing, so it was usually dispersed after the initial print run. Supplying back issues or printing subsequent editions thus required the type to be reset, which is why there are often textual variants between first and later editions of texts prior to the mid-nineteenth century. A publisher therefore had to balance the cost of keeping type locked up, or the cost of storing a long print run that might not sell, against the cost of resetting the type. Chambers’s Journal calculated that £100 of type were locked up in each of its issues, whereas the cost of making a set of plates was only 45s.12 The ability to reprint at no additional expense was extremely useful to publishers issuing steady-selling books, such as Bibles, tracts, and schoolbooks. The British and Foreign Bible Society and the American Bible Society were early adopters, using stereotyping from the 1810s.13 Subsequent users found other ways of using plates. Some publishers made multiple sets and ran several presses simultaneously, as William Clowes did with the Penny Magazine in London in the 1830s.14 Plates could also allow periodical publishers to respond to an unexpected demand for back issues, or additional sets of plates could be sent to an agent in another city to print a local edition. Plates even became property that could be sold across the Atlantic in the absence of copyright. Plates were most useful for texts that did not need to be revised, but revisions could be made by cutting out a piece and soldering in a replacement, so plates did not “freeze” a text forever. Stereotyping in the first half of the nineteenth century was difficult to do well, and most publishers believed the effort was worthwhile only for frequently reprinted publications such as Bibles. Making a stereotype plate involved covering the block of composed type with a thin layer of grease and then with a half-inch layer of plaster of Paris. The plaster had to be removed 34 ] Chapter Two

without breaking and baked until completely dry. It was then placed in a perforated iron box, which was lowered into a vat of molten lead alloy. If all went well, on opening the box the foundryman would find a plate about a sixth of an inch thick, “exhibiting the perfect appearance of the faces of the types on which the stucco was plastered.”15 However, the high temperature of the molten metal often shattered the mold, and achieving the required thin and uniform layer of lead alloy was tricky. Even after three years of regular weekly practice, the man who stereotyped Chambers’s Journal sometimes took six attempts to produce a usable plate.16 The wider adoption of stereotyping in Britain in the late 1840s was partly due to an increasing awareness of its usefulness, but also to the development of a different way of making the mold, using flexible papier-mâché. This was easier to make and, unlike the plaster mold, could be reused. In the United States at the same time, publishers were starting to turn to electrotyping, where electricity was used to deposit a fine layer of copper on a wax mold. Wax was easier to use than plaster, and the copper surface (which was backed with type metal once it was removed from the wax) retained finer details. These new processes made plates easier to produce, while larger print runs and multiple editions for the mass market made them worth having.

Printing In a hand press, sheets of paper were laid on top of a flat printing surface, and pressure was exerted from above by a screw or lever pressing down on a flat surface called a platen. Hand printing was a stop-and-start process, as the type had to be inked and a new sheet of paper inserted before each pull of the lever. Two experienced men might manage to print 250 single-sided sheets in an hour’s work, but rates were often slower. The challenge for anyone trying to invent a printing machine was how the continuous power provided by a water wheel or steam engine could be applied to this discontinuous process. In the early 1810s, a Prussian inventor called Friedrich König came to London, where he hoped to find supportive investors for his proposed powered printing machines. Among his designs was one that was completely different from the hand press: it involved a cylindrical platen that rolled the paper over the flat printing surface. His sponsors introduced him to John Walters, the owner of the Times. Walters commissioned two of König’s machines, and the Times was first printed by steam on November 28, 1814 (which conveniently helped Walters break a strike by his pressmen).17 The newspaper industry was at the forefront of developments in printing Industrial Book Production [ 35

machinery, simply because other printers found the hand press quite adequate. Most books were printed in runs of no more than 1,000 copies, and if they happened to be a day or two late in the shops, it did not really matter. The exception to this rule was, of course, the daily or thrice-weekly newspapers, where timing was critical and the circulation was often up against the maximum possible by hand printing. Some of the most successful British weekly papers and magazines did begin to use steam in the 1820s, and so did a very few book printers, including the Edinburgh firm of Ballantyne, which was struggling to meet the apparently endless demand for Scott’s latest novels. But with high installation costs, very few printers could justify investing in steam printing, and there were still only six printing machines in London in 1820 (in addition to the pair at the Times).18 Even among newspapers, only a few really needed the power. The Times was the best-selling newspaper of the early nineteenth century, with a circulation of 11,000 copies in 1830. Its nearest competitor was the Morning Chronicle, with about 6,200 copies.19 König’s first machine produced around a thousand single-sided sheets per hour, but by the late 1810s he and his successors Augustus Applegath and Edward Cowper had produced a “perfecting” machine that could print the same number of double-sided sheets. Later designs introduced more cylinders to feed paper more quickly, and mounted the type on a revolving drum (curved stereotype plates, which could be mounted on a true cylinder, were not developed until the 1860s). In 1851, the Times was being printed on an eight-feeder cylinder perfector, designed by Applegath, which produced 10,000 sheets per hour. Applegath’s machines mounted the revolving type on a vertical drum, but Robert Hoe of New York produced a competing design with a horizontal drum: his ten-feeder machines could print about 20,000 sheets an hour. Hoe would later develop web-fed rotary machines (in which the curved printing surface prints onto a continuous web of machine-made paper), and by the 1870s, his machines would dominate the newspaper trade on both sides of the Atlantic.20 The newspaper printing machines were highly specialized monsters that provided striking statistics for all those who wished to appreciate the great achievements that had been made in the provision of cheap literature, but if they had been the only option, powered printing might well have remained of limited relevance to the rest of the book trade. Those machines were too big and too expensive for most book publishers. In the United States, machine printing was made more accessible by the 1821 invention of a flat platen printing machine by Daniel Treadwell in Boston. Treadwell’s machine was smaller and cheaper than the König-based cylinder machines, yet at 36 ] Chapter Two

500 sheets an hour, its output was still a significant improvement over hand printing. It was thus potentially useful to printers who worked with substantial print runs but did not face the tight time constraints of newspapers. The availability of these platen machines (and those developed by Bostonian Isaac Adams in the 1830s) enabled a variety of American printers to adopt machine printing in the 1820s and 1830s. In Britain, however, Treadwell and Adams machines were not generally available until the later 1840s. Thus, any British printers considering machine printing in the 1820s had to look at a variant of the newspaper machines. One of the biggest printing establishments in London was that owned by William Clowes, who had bought Applegath’s printing workshop in 1826: by 1843, he owned twenty-four perfector machines as well as twenty-four hand presses, and could produce 1,500 printed reams per week.21 When Applegath & Cowper’s patent expired in the early 1830s, generic versions of their machine became available at cheaper prices and could be more widely used.22 Among the producers of these generic machines was Thomas Middleton, who had worked with Applegath & Cowper and would supply W. & R. Chambers with machines in the late 1830s and 1840s (see chapter 7). The Applegath & Cowper cylinder machines (and generic imitations) were faster and more expensive than Treadwell platen machines. Thus, the main reason for acquiring such a machine remained the printing of a successful newspaper or weekly periodical. However, machine printing was also attractive to philanthropically motivated publishers, most of whom subcontracted their printing and thus were more concerned by running costs than purchase price. Machines could finish a run more quickly, so that fewer hours of labor had to be paid for. They could also be operated by less skilled, cheaper labor (two boys to feed in the paper, and a man to oversee several machines).23 These lower labor costs meant that, per unit printed, machine printing was cheaper than hand printing. However, since the preparation of the machine was more complicated (and thus expensive), printers needed to be planning long runs to benefit from lower unit costs. For the Religious Tract Society, which produced tracts in runs of five or ten thousand, or for penny magazine publishers with circulations of twenty or thirty thousand, this was not a problem. Charles Knight estimated that the Penny Magazine’s costs would have increased by 40 percent if it had been hand-printed.24 The widespread perception was, however, that the quality of print produced by machines was not as good as that done by hand. It was difficult to get both sides of a page lined up properly on the early machines, though “perfecting” machines solved that particular problem. William Savage, auIndustrial Book Production [ 37

thor of a Dictionary of Printing who had followed the fortunes of printing machines since the early test runs at the Times, was convinced that machines were incapable of “producing the finest work, and printing the finest impressions from highly finished engravings on wood.” The finest workmanship, he wrote, required the best ink, evenly spread and firmly pressed into the paper. The machines required a weaker, thinner ink, and their speed meant that the inking was “done in an imperfect manner with an inferior ink.” Printing a page incorporating images and text resulted in “crude” and “muddy” images, as the machines had trouble applying equal pressure to the engraved wooden blocks surrounded by metal type. Nonetheless, Savage did not deny that their ability to print faster and on larger sheets of paper gave the machines great merit in terms of speed, which was essential to newspapers and certain periodicals.25 Publishers’ decisions to use machine-made paper, stereotyping, and machine printing changed the structure and organization of the book trade. As in other industries, skilled craftsmen were replaced with semiskilled machine attendants, though compositors retained their position, and stereotyping added a new craft process to the trade. For the consumer, the result was greater choice and increased availability of cheap books and magazines. It is all too easy to assume that cheap prices were the inevitable consequence of great inventions, so it is worth remembering that the prices of reprinted out-of-copyright books had been falling since the late eighteenth century;26 and that religious charities and political radicals had been producing cheap print (legally and illegally) since the 1810s. Cheap print did not require steam printing or stereotyping—but those new techniques made things much easier for publishers of cheap print. Still, it is significant that, in Britain, such publishers were in a minority in the 1830s and 1840s. Papermaking machines spread quickly, but printing machines were a more complicated story. Publishers had to be able to afford them, but they also had to need them. This is why the different ways that British and American publishers perceived their audiences in the 1830s had such an impact on the uptake of machine printing. American publishers, almost all of whom aimed for a cheap product for a wide audience, could see a clear use for printing machines, and the availability of the cheaper Treadwell machine made it an easier decision. In Britain, the only option was an expensive cylinder machine, and since most publishers targeted a limited circle of affluent customers, the decision against was equally straightforward. In the 1830s, only a few British publishers used steam printing and stereotyping. The tract and Bible societies, Charles Knight, and W. & R. Cham38 ] Chapter Two

bers were among the small number outside the newspaper industry using printing machines. And Chambers stood out from their peers for two reasons: rather than contract out their printing like most publishers of the era, they decided to do their own, thus becoming intimately involved with the machinery. Second, they decided to use their new machinery for more than just periodicals.

Industrial Book Production [ 39

Figure 3. Waterloo Place, Edinburgh, in 1837. As well as being the point of departure for the mail coaches, this street housed the offices of the General Steam Navigation Company and of W. & R. Chambers. Detail from lithograph by Samuel Dunkinfield Swarbreck. Reproduced by permission of Capital Collections, Edinburgh.

3

Reaching a National Market

After London, Edinburgh was the second center of the British book trade, and launching Chambers’s Journal there brought both advantages and disadvantages. Edinburgh had a long history of printing, and although it was no longer a seat of government, it continued to be the heart of the Scottish legal system and the home of an eminent university. In the 1830s, it dominated the Scottish publishing trade, producing more than 70 percent of all Scottish publications.1 Nevertheless, the Edinburgh publishing trade was small in comparison with that of London, whose publishers issued over 35,000 titles in the 1830s, compared to Edinburgh’s 4,600.2 Being so far from the London trade would occasionally create problems for W. & R. Chambers, when supplies or machinery or expertise seemed only to be available in London. As William Chambers later remarked, “no mechanical difficulty would have been experienced” if the Journal had been launched in London, but “the case was very different in Edinburgh.”3 On the other hand, distance from London gave the new Journal a clearer field in which to seek its market, rather than having to compete directly with the myriad of new publications that seemed to spring up daily in the capital. Britain in the 1830s was not yet an integrated national market, and in lowland Scotland, Edinburgh publications had the clear advantage of being available more quickly and with lower transport costs than did London publications; the reverse, of course, was true in southern England. From the very beginning, William Chambers had ambitions for his Journal to be read throughout Britain, and beyond. He therefore had to overcome some serious challenges to distribute his publication, and retain control over it, in areas far [ 41

beyond the Scottish lowlands. An innovative use of stereotype plates would provide the solution.

The Market of Lowland Scotland The natural market for Chambers’s Journal was the lowlands and south of Scotland, which contained the country’s two main cities and the majority of its 2.4 million inhabitants. This area was characterized by relatively high literacy rates and a thirst for knowledge and self-improvement, and Edinburgh publishers had easy geographical access to it. Edinburgh, the capital, had a population of 219,000 in 1831 and was dominated by landowners and legal practitioners. It was already dwarfed by Glasgow, forty-five miles to the west, whose strong engineering and manufacturing sectors supported a thriving economy and a population of 316,000.4 Both cities had extensive trading connections: Edinburgh with the Baltic, Glasgow with North America and the West Indies. But beyond the central belt—the neck of low-lying land, rich in iron and coal, between Glasgow and Edinburgh—Scotland remained a largely rural country. Both William and Robert Chambers were convinced that Scotland was distinctively different from England. As William expressed it, the institutions and character of Scotland “differ as much from those of the sister country, as the mountainous and romantic regions of the north differ from the broad luxuriant meadows of the south.”5 Between them, the brothers had recently written three descriptive works on Scotland, all of which stressed this distinctiveness: Robert’s Picture of Scotland (1827), William’s Book of Scotland (1830), and their coauthored Gazetteer of Scotland (1832). William’s subsequent interest in governmental, legal, educational, and charitable systems was already apparent in the way he discussed his homeland in the Book of Scotland, which went into detail about the intricacies of the Scottish legal system, from marriage and entails, to crime, punishment, and religion. Scots were particularly proud that they had better access to education than their English neighbors, as demonstrated both by the higher literacy rates of the entire population and the higher percentage of the population receiving formal education, up to and including university courses. These things were routinely ascribed to the Reformation ideal of every person being able to read the Bible for themselves, which the Presbyterian Scots had taken more to heart than their southern neighbors. In post-Reformation Calvinistic Scotland, the aim was to have a minister and a schoolmaster in every parish. In reality, as William Chambers knew, the system did not match this ideal. The parish and grammar schools were generally good, but provision 42 ] Chapter Three

was scanty both in the highlands and islands and in the growing cities. In addition, reforms were needed in the higher education offered by the university colleges. The range of educational works that W. & R. Chambers produced after the success of their Journal—from the instructive tracts aimed at autodidacts to the textbooks for use in the classroom—can all be seen as helping to improve the education of the people. The Scottish education system might not have been perfect, but it was good enough for William Chambers to expect a ready market for his Journal in Scotland, and particularly in the lowlands. He wrote in 1830 that to those who are not intimate with the character of the Scottish people in their own country, it would be difficult to convey an adequate idea of that burning desire which almost every parent has, to see his children educated. . . . It is not confined to persons in easy circumstances; it descends to the meanest of the peasantry, and will be found mingling with the every-day feelings of the poorest family in the land.6 Such a respect for education and thirst for learning generated a market for the improving and instructional journal Chambers wished to produce. Equally, literacy rates were higher than elsewhere in Europe, particularly than in England. By the mid-nineteenth century, almost 90 percent of Scottish men and 75 percent of Scottish women were literate; in England, on the other hand, only around 70 percent of men and 60 percent of women were so.7 These cultural conditions meant that at its launch, Chambers could expect his Journal to have relatively easy geographical access to an appreciative potential audience. The early issues show how Chambers, consciously or not, tailored his Journal to his expected audience: the journal’s articles discussed historic places and famous men of Scotland (but only a few from elsewhere), some of the vocabulary was distinctly Scottish, and the editorial voice generally assumed a readership familiar with Scottish culture and society. In February 1834, Chambers’s Journal reprinted figures from Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine showing the sales of various periodicals in “a certain unnamed country town in Scotland.” This “unnamed country town” had 200 readers of Johnstone’s Magazine, 260 of the Penny Magazine, and 700 of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. These three titles had all been launched as cheap instructive weekly magazines; Johnstone’s had retreated to a monthly format, but at 8d., it remained far cheaper than most monthlies. The figures show a clear preference for the Edinburgh Journal, despite its extra ha’penny in price compared to the Penny Magazine. The same bias can be seen in the monthly magazines, where the Edinburgh-based Blackwood’s and Tait’s were more in demand than London-based titles such as the MetReaching a National Market [ 43

ropolitan Magazine or the Monthly Magazine. The figures also clearly demonstrated the structure of the reading audience. Compared to the hundreds of readers for the cheap weeklies, the country town had 14 readers of Blackwood’s Magazine and another 6 of Tait’s Magazine (both monthlies, costing 2s.6d.), and only 6 readers for the Quarterly Review and 8 for the Edinburgh Review. All of these magazines were produced for the professional and upper middle classes, who had the money and education to appreciate the literary and critical contributions but who constituted only a small proportion of the total population. The early market for Chambers’s Journal was firmly based in central and lowland Scotland. It is striking that William Chambers’s first batch of publicity posters for the Journal was distributed entirely in Scotland, and apart from Inverness, Elgin, and Aberdeen, the posters all went to towns in central or southern Scotland. It was not until March 1832 that Chambers sent posters to Newcastle and London (and to Wick, Thurso, and Kirkwall in the far north).8 Two years later, the Journal was selling as many copies in England as Scotland, but its core readership was still Scottish. In February 1834, W. & R. Chambers tried to compile a geographical breakdown of the sales of Chambers’s Journal throughout Britain. The resulting figures showed that the Journal was being distributed to all corners of Scotland, from the large numbers sold in Edinburgh and Glasgow, to the few dozen sold on the Isle of Skye, or in the Orkneys. The figures also showed a keen demand for print in the major industrial cities of northern England, with large numbers going to Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle every week. Yet older English towns such as York and Bristol took no more copies than did Shetland, supporting Scottish prejudices about the lack of enthusiasm for cheap print and self-improvement in most of the English towns. The marked desire for cheap print in the English industrial cities—but not elsewhere—had also been noted by evangelical missionary organizations, which feared that readers were being led astray by the availability of so much non-Christian reading material. Chambers’s Journal claimed that its distribution figures could be read as an index to “the degrees of intelligence and appetite for reading which prevail in different parts of the empire,” yet they also demonstrated the Journal’s success in reaching throughout Scotland, England, and Ireland. The Journal encouraged its readers to think of themselves as part of a national reading audience.9 At the launch of Chambers’s Journal, William Chambers had the advantage of a literate local market with an interest in instruction. But as the weeks went by, his desire to reach further afield came up against geographical constraints. How could a young bookseller-turned-editor and publisher tell readers and booksellers across the nation about his Journal? And how 44 ] Chapter Three

could he get packages of the Journal to every corner of the British Isles for a simultaneous Saturday publication day?

Reaching beyond Edinburgh The first of William Chambers’s problems concerned advertising and marketing his Journal. This was particularly important because, in the midnineteenth century, the British book trade rarely used “sale or return.” Booksellers purchased all the stock in displayed in their shops, at the discounted price traditionally offered to members of the trade. Works that did not sell became the booksellers’ loss, not the publishers’. Unsurprisingly, booksellers tended to limit their risk by holding a small amount of stock and instead ordering publications requested by customers. This meant that Chambers needed to advertise his Journal so that readers would ask their booksellers to order it, and that he also had to persuade as many booksellers as possible to take the risk of stocking the Journal so that readers might see and handle it for themselves and be tempted to buy. In 1837, a specialist advertising journal—the Publishers’ Circular—was founded as a means for publishers, wholesalers, booksellers, and library proprietors to learn what had been recently published, by whom, and at what price. It rapidly became the semi-official organ of the London book trade. But the Edinburgh trade had no similar publication, particularly not in 1832. The main option, therefore, was the newspapers. Despite the hefty advertisement tax (see chapter 1), Chambers advertised in a range of lowland Scottish papers, from the seven-penny, twice-weekly Scotsman, with its 2,000 subscribers, to smaller local newspapers, such as the Dumfries and Galloway Courier, the Kelso Chronicle, and the Fife Herald. He also used a relatively unusual publication, the Edinburgh, Leith, Glasgow and North British Advertiser, a sheet that was paid for entirely from advertising income and was issued free every Saturday to around 7,000 people, principally in the cities. By 1833, the new firm of W. & R. Chambers began to engage an advertising agency to place announcements in multiple newspapers in the northeast of Scotland.10 Establishing good relations with retail booksellers in as many towns as possible was a key ingredient for publishing success, and William Chambers supplemented the public advertisements with a more targeted approach. Thanks to his existing trade connections as a bookseller, Chambers’s publicity posters were personalized for local stockists in twenty-eight Scottish towns.11 As W. & R. Chambers grew, they continued to expand what they termed “their connection” with other publishers and booksellers. In Scotland or in the north of England, this was relatively straightforward since Reaching a National Market [ 45

other Edinburgh book publishers and newspaper printers had already established distribution systems, and there was therefore a large body of locally available knowledge about the names of reliable booksellers in towns all over north Britain. Establishing connections at a greater distance was more complicated since it was more difficult to discover which towns had the prospect of a substantial readership, who the booksellers were in those towns, let alone (the critical question!) which particular bookseller was trustworthy, hardworking, and reliable. Publishers therefore tended to rely on their brethren in other cities to act as their agents. The agent would use his own networks of booksellers to sell the other publisher’s works alongside his own. For this service he would receive a discount on the works he personally ordered, or improved terms of credit, or permission to hold stock on “sale or return,” or reciprocal agency services from the other publisher. There was a long-established tradition of publishers in Edinburgh and London acting on one another’s behalf, but Edinburgh publishers also regularly used agents in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Belfast, and Dublin, as well as sometimes in English towns.12 In 1832, Chambers had five agents in Glasgow, who supplied not only the many Glasgow retail booksellers, but also those in the surrounding areas and along the west coast.13 The firm’s agent for northern Scotland was the Aberdeen bookseller Lewis Smith, while William Curry Jr. acted for the firm in Dublin, as did William Somerville Orr in London. All of these men were already well known as agents and acted for several other publishers. Curry, for instance, was Dublin agent for both Oliver & Boyd and Oliphant of Edinburgh, as well as London publishers Longman & Co. and the Religious Tract Society.14 By the 1840s, Chambers also had arrangements with George Philip in Liverpool and R. McComb in Belfast. One of the side effects of the agency system was that Chambers could not form an accurate picture of their distribution outside Scotland. They knew exactly how many copies they sent from Edinburgh to various other Scottish towns, but they knew much less about where Orr or Curry sent the thousands of copies they received. Thus, the firm’s 1834 distribution figures almost certainly painted a blacker picture of the English circulation than they should have. Some agents—and George Philip in Liverpool was particularly guilty of this (see chapter 9)—supplied the Journal to booksellers who lived far beyond their nominal area. Furthermore, Chambers believed that about half of the 14,000 copies of the Journal that were delivered by Orr to London booksellers were subsequently forwarded by those booksellers to their country connections. Newspapers and private letters could travel the country through the Royal Mail, whose system of fast mail coaches was the rapid communication 46 ] Chapter Three

system of pre-railway Britain. In the 1830s, Edinburgh had direct daily mail coach connections to London, Carlisle, and Aberdeen, and a twice-daily service to Glasgow. The journey to London took just under two days.15 Newspapers, having paid the stamp duty, traveled for free, whereas the recipients of letters had to pay a charge determined by the weight and the distance. The mail coaches made it possible, therefore, to distribute news of a forthcoming publication all over Britain relatively quickly. But the bigger problem was transporting the copies of the publication. The Royal Mail did not carry parcels, and the regular passenger stagecoach services did not have space for cargo, so bulky packages had to use other services. Heavily laden wagons could not achieve the speeds of the mail coaches, even on the post roads, and when serving remoter areas, where roads were still unpaved, muddy and rutted, they might only do three or four miles an hour and were constantly at risk of overturning or breaking an axle. Thus, if it was possible, water transport was generally preferable since boats could carry more goods and (usually) more smoothly. The industrial areas of Britain had an extensive canal network, developed in the late eighteenth century (Edinburgh and Glasgow had been linked in 1790), and coastal shipping was enormously important. The port of Leith (outside Edinburgh) had connections by sailing smack to ports up and down the east coast, and from the 1820s, Leith and London were connected by the new steamboats.16 Both sailing ships and steamboats were affected by weather conditions in the turbulent coastal waters, but, if the steamboats were able to run, they usually made the journey in around three days, whereas the sailing boats might take up to three weeks.17 In contrast to the mail coaches, the delivery of freight in Britain was slow and unpredictable, and this posed significant problems for Chambers’s efforts to achieve regular and uniform distribution for a dated, weekly publication. William Chambers had decided that Chambers’s Journal would not be a newspaper. This was a simple economic decision: the privilege of carrying news and traveling through the mails required the payment of 4d. in stamp duty, which would have more than trebled the price of the journal and put it far beyond the reach of his intended readers. A further advantage of avoiding current events was that the Journal could be printed three or four weeks in advance of its specified publication date.18 This gave sufficient time for packages of the journal to travel to London, Dublin, Shetland, or Cornwall and be released to the public on the same day throughout the entire kingdom. Thus, national distribution was theoretically possible, but there were still problems. One of these was the self-discipline required from the individual booksellers, who were supposed to keep their packages of the Journal closed until the official publication date. In reality, most packages of the Journal Reaching a National Market [ 47

did not leave Edinburgh until a few days before publication since booksellers were too strongly tempted to steal a march on their competitors by putting it on sale as soon as it arrived. In November 1832, Chambers insisted that all their Glasgow agents sign a formal memorandum promising not to put the Journal on sale—or to allow any of the booksellers they supplied to put it on sale—before 3 p.m. each Friday. They would, however, continue to receive their packages from Edinburgh on Thursday, to allow time for orders to be forwarded to more distant booksellers.19 The intended result was that by the end of each Friday—and certainly by Saturday—stocks of the Journal would be available all over the west of Scotland.

An Innovative Solution for England The big problem for distribution was London, the largest city in the kingdom, the center of the publishing trade, and hence the center of distribution networks for most of England. For Chambers to reach a national market, large numbers of the Journal would have to go to or through London. For the very first few issues, in February 1832, copies of the Journal traveled by road from Edinburgh to London, but the problems soon became obvious. It was one thing to send a few copies of a magazine by stagecoach, but quite another to face the problem of transporting several thousand copies. A thousand copies weighed about 44 pounds (20 kilograms) and occupied just under a cubic foot. By March 1832, it was already apparent that perhaps 10,000 or 20,000 copies would be needed in London each week. Transporting this sort of bulk required the services of the coastal shipping between the port of Leith and London docks. This was what most Edinburgh periodicals did. Charles Knight recorded that, in late September 1821, he was reading the latest issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, even though the London periodicals had not yet been distributed. He wrote that the “northern” magazines were already “quietly reposing, in well arranged heaps, in our southern warehouses, perfectly sleek and dry, after a happy voyage of sixty hours” from Leith. Knight recounted the episode to demonstrate that the coastal steamers were already “breaking down the difference between Paternoster Row [London] and Princes Street [Edinburgh],” but it also reminds us that Edinburgh publishers had to be far more organized, and go to press rather earlier, than their London counterparts.20 At the end of April 1832, just two months after launching the Journal, Chambers made a radical decision: it would henceforth be printed in two locations, in Edinburgh and in London. Having a second printing center 48 ] Chapter Three

would slash the transportation costs, simplify the distribution of the English copies, and take some of the strain off the Edinburgh printers. It may seem an obvious solution, but it was actually very unusual in the book trade of the 1830s, largely because few periodicals faced the same scale of problems. The proprietors of quarterly journals had to worry about the distribution costs of only four issues a year, and even monthly magazines like Blackwood’s had only twelve issues. Chambers’s Journal had fifty-two issues to distribute and a much higher circulation. Only the few national newspapers faced anything like the same problems of high-frequency issues and sizeable circulations, compounded by the tight time constraints of newsworthiness. Newspaper proprietors had typically turned to specialist distribution companies, such as W. H. Smith, to solve their problems. Chambers, on the other hand, came up with their own solution: a London edition. In its initial incarnation, Chambers’s plan involved dispatching a single printed copy of the Journal by mail coach to London. On its arrival, it was handed to the compositors, who set up the types from which identical copies could be printed. The English market could thus be supplied without waiting for the coastal steamer and without the “considerable expense” of transporting “a whole wain-load of paper.”21 Even after paying the London compositors, the Chambers firm saved a significant amount. For this scheme to work efficiently, it was critical that Chambers should have a trustworthy agent in London to oversee the printing. William Somerville Orr was the man they chose. An expatriate Scot, he had a shop on Amen Corner, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, and held a number of other agencies, as well as publishing on his own behalf. Orr’s role as manager of the London edition meant that he became a different sort of agent from those in Aberdeen or Dublin. His shop would eventually hold over a thousand pounds of Chambers’s stock, so that London retailers and wholesalers could fill their orders—not just of the Journal, but of all Chambers’s publications—without having to deal with the Edinburgh head office.22 Chambers agreed to license Orr to print the Journal in return for a set fee per 1,000 copies printed. This meant that Orr had to pay all the production costs of the London edition, but he could take all the profit beyond the licensing fee. This arrangement, although less profitable for Chambers than one in which the firm took the profits, placed the burden of financial risk on Orr and recognized that Orr, with his London location and connections, was in a better position to make decisions about the size of the print run than Chambers in Edinburgh. It also gave Orr a strong incentive to improve the circulation of the Journal in England, which, at this stage, appears to have been more important to Chambers than absolute profit. In spring 1832, Orr Reaching a National Market [ 49

made arrangements with the printing firm of William Clowes, one of the biggest and most advanced printing houses in London, and Clowes printed 10,000 copies of issue 13 of Chambers’s Journal (April 28, 1832).23 Yet Orr did not make a permanent arrangement with Clowes, and, for the next few months, he moved the Journal’s printing back and forth between Clowes, Whiting, and Bradbury & Evans. By the end of July 1832, the London print run had risen to 20,000, and Orr had just about settled with Bradbury & Evans.24 Bradbury & Evans was a young firm of printers who would become famous as Charles Dickens’s printers after Pickwick Papers (1837). With the London edition of Chambers’s Journal looking like a great success, Orr entered into a partnership with Bradbury & Evans, which would guarantee the printers regular work and a share in the profits, and would ensure Orr got the best price for the printing. The introduction of additional partners into the London Journal printing rather undermined Chambers’s desire for a single trustworthy agent in the capital. Moreover, as William Chambers later put it, “Mr Orr’s connexion with B. and E. took place without our concurrence, and was in reality an improper step; it was tolerated by us but never sanctioned.” This “improper” connection continued until 1846, by which time it had caused both Chambers and Orr substantial heartache and financial loss.25 In 1832, however, the problems that would arise from Orr’s lack of financial acumen, his potentially imprudent partnership with the printing firm, and the inequities of the financial arrangements for the London and Edinburgh editions were all in the future. Chambers’s more pressing problem continued to be one of meeting demand. The problem was not just about geography but about time. In these early months, Chambers and Orr were under pressure to provide back numbers, for those readers who had missed the first issues and wanted to catch up. In both Edinburgh and London, the printers were having to reprint the early issues. At the end of May 1832, Bradbury & Evans were printing fifth editions of the February issues, while in late July, they were printing third editions of the April issues.26 Reprinting an issue usually involved resetting the type, which was one of the most expensive parts of the print production process. It was to avoid these costs that Chambers began to use stereotyping, and the first issue to be stereotyped was that of July 28, 1832. At that time in Edinburgh, only two or three specialist stereotyping firms existed—the process appears to have been introduced at the University Printers in 1825—and Chambers’s work was initially done by Thomas Allan, the son of the printer-proprietor of the Caledonian Mercury.27 Soon, however, Chambers would employ their own stereotyper. Having stereotype plates made reprinting much easier: the plates merely 50 ] Chapter Three

had to be brought out of storage and put to work in a press or machine, saving both time and money. Thus, for instance, the first Edinburgh printing of issue 39 (October 26, 1832) had been 22,250 copies, but an extra 500 were needed almost immediately, and a further 1,000 in December. These copies were all printed by the large firm of Ballantyne, but a year later, an additional 1,000 copies were printed from the same plates by one of the city’s smaller printers, Mrs. M. Aitken.28 William Chambers also quickly realized that stereotype plates could streamline the system of two-center printing. During April and May 1832, the entire content of the Journal was being set up in type twice, once in Edinburgh from manuscript and again in London from the Edinburgh-printed copy. Clearly, this took time and money, and even with skilled compositors, it was possible that errors would be introduced, which might (or might not) be caught if a proof was pulled before the print run was started. William Chambers seems to have been particularly concerned for the reputation of the journal that bore his name, and worried that the edition circulating from London had more errors and looked badly edited, in comparison with the edition he controlled directly. With stereotype plates, however, the editors gained “the advantage of supervising both editions.”29 A set of stereotype plates could be sent to London “in a small box, about the size of a quarto volume” (though considerably heavier).30 It was almost as convenient as sending a single copy of the Journal, but removed the need to recompose the text in London. The two editions would be identical, and time and money would be saved on the London edition (though it was Orr who would benefit financially, not Chambers). By September, Chambers’s Journal was referring to stereotyping as “a wonderful process,” which had enabled the just-established firm of W. & R. Chambers to “extend the circulation of the work on the most liberal principles, and in a very quick manner, all over the country.”31 Both Chambers’s Journal and the Penny Magazine used multiple sets of stereotyping as a way of speeding up production, enabling two (or more, for the Penny Magazine) presses or machines to work simultaneously. What was distinctive about Chambers’s situation was the fact that the printing was happening in two widely separated locations. For Chambers, plates did not simply increase the number of copies that could be printed in a given time, but also saved time and money compared with shipping printed copies, and offered the reassurance of identical editions. These benefits would have been of less concern to a London-based publisher, working at the center of Britain’s publishing and book distribution network. There is, for instance, no record of Charles Knight being particularly worried about the time or cost of Reaching a National Market [ 51

getting the Penny Magazine to its Scottish readers. But Edinburgh publishers could not afford to be so sanguine if they wanted to compete in the English marketplace. When William Chambers launched Chambers’s Journal, he barely understood the practical implications of his ambition to provide cheap instructive print to readers throughout Britain on a weekly basis. His bookselling experience was certainly useful, but his connections were largely restricted to Scotland and not quite adequate for the week-on-week problems of distant markets. Moving so quickly to two-center printing was a brave and confident move, placing great trust not merely in William Orr’s capabilities but in the future success of the Journal itself. The first two months demonstrated that a London edition could be managed using existing technologies, but the innovative use of stereotyping promised savings of time and money (for Orr) and total editorial control and a wider circulation (for Chambers). Stereotyping, in fact, was (by two weeks!) the first of Chambers’s ventures into the new techniques of industrial publishing, and it was with reference to stereotyping, used to coordinate multicenter printing, that Chambers’s Journal first used the term system, in February 1833.32 The success of that system for London would hold out the promise of extending it to reach an even larger geographical area (see chapter 6). By autumn 1832, as the Journal reached its fortieth issue, the typical weekly pattern was to print an Edinburgh edition of 22,250 or sometimes 24,000 copies, while Bradbury & Evans printed 20,000 copies for Orr in London. Both printers used stereotype plates made in Edinburgh and could use their stereotype plates to reprint back numbers if needed.33 However, given the increasing demand for the Journal, steam printing would soon be as essential as two-center printing. It would enable Chambers not only to meet the demand for 50,000 copies during 1832 and 1833, but also to cater for the subsequent rises to 60,000 and then 80,000 copies in the 1840s. Bradbury & Evans were already steam-printing the Journal in 1832, but the more fascinating story concerns the Edinburgh edition, and why W. & R. Chambers did not simply contract their work to steam printers, but became steam printers themselves.

52 ] Chapter Three

Figure 4. W. & R. Chambers’s steam-powered cylinder printing machine, as illustrated in their instructive serial Information for the People (rev. ed. 1842).

4

Production and Steam Power

The Potential of Steam William Chambers’s ambitious dream for his Journal was threatened not only by the logistics of distribution, but also by the basic question of just how many copies could be produced each week on a hand press. It was a terrible thought that one could potentially create a magazine filled with fascinating material that readers wanted to read, and yet be unable to produce enough copies to satisfy the demand. Yet this was the problem that William and Robert Chambers found themselves facing by the middle of 1832. Printing Chambers’s Journal in advance helped to solve the distribution problem, but it did nothing to change the fact that a week’s worth of copies needed to be produced in no more than a week. So the problem was: how many copies could be produced per week? The printing for the first issues was done in Edinburgh by John Johnstone, “a genial old man” of a printer whose workshop was at the top of High Street.1 William Chambers’s optimistic order for the first two issues was 30,500, which he assumed would cover an immediate demand of perhaps 25,000, with the remainder being stored against a future demand for back issues as the Journal became better known.2 Johnstone’s men operated hand presses, and they found it extremely difficult to print 30,000 copies each and every week. The delays frequently destroyed Chambers’s careful arrangements for distribution. The only good news was that the decision to print a separate London edition meant that the success of the Journal did not put even more strain on Johnstone. A brief look at the mechanics of printing demonstrates why [ 55

Johnstone had so much trouble. Chambers’s Journal—at this very early stage of its career—was a folio publication, comprising just four pages with four columns of text. This meant that its pages were printed on a single large sheet of paper, which was then folded once. (By autumn 1832, it had become a smaller quarto publication, with eight pages of three-columned text, whose sheets had to be folded twice and cut along the edges.3) This simple format meant that no stitching or binding was necessary, but even a single sheet of paper had a front side and a back, and would have had to go through a press twice. Johnstone ran two presses simultaneously, one for each side of the sheet. In contrast to William Chambers’s early efforts with his own small cranky press, Johnstone’s men were skilled pressmen. But even if they kept up the notional rate of 250 sheets an hour for a full ten-and-a-half-hour day, their weekly output would be only 15,750 copies.4 For most magazines, this would be perfectly adequate for their circulations—but it was far less than William Chambers hoped for, and far less than the actual demand. Chambers persuaded Johnstone to work his presses through the night, with a second shift of four pressmen relieving the day shift. A doubling of the theoretical output would never be realistically possible, with rest breaks and accidental delays—but something approaching 30,000 copies might perhaps be hoped for. Yet night work brought all sorts of extra problems with it. A few years later, Chambers would claim that the workmen could not be persuaded to remain sober throughout the night. It seemed that “the greater the urgency for the work, and the higher the price paid for its execution, the more extensive were the saturnalia that prevailed.” Despite the best efforts of Johnstone and his overseers, paper was wasted, stereotype plates were damaged, and too few copies were printed. Time after time, the parcels destined for country booksellers could not be dispatched early enough to ensure their arrival by the Saturday of publication.5 All these problems meant that Chambers sometimes had to transfer a part of the work to other printers to get it done in time. On one occasion, to the brothers’ distress, the firm found that none of the Edinburgh printers could take on their job, at any price. They had to send the work to Glasgow, forty-five miles away, to get it done in time. They later claimed that “the dreadful harassment of mind which ensued” in those spring months of 1832 “led us to think of removing the whole of our printing business to London.”6 Their London agent, William Orr, seemed to be having no trouble getting the London edition printed at reasonable prices and within the time needed. Since Orr was working with William Clowes and Bradbury & Evans, the London edition of the Journal was almost certainly being printed by steam while Chambers were still struggling with the limitations of hand presses 56 ] Chapter Four

in Edinburgh. Instead of moving to London, however, Chambers turned to steam printing in Edinburgh. On paper, the decision to use steam power might seem straightforward: the firm wanted to increase output more than hand presses could easily achieve, and steam would have seemed like an ideal choice. But Edinburgh was not London. Steam printing had only recently arrived in the northern capital, and only a handful of establishments used the new machines in 1832. Either Neill & Co. or Ballantyne is usually presumed to have been the first, around 1830, though Applegath & Cowper are known to have made a machine for the North British Advertiser in 1829, and the Scotsman certainly had one by 1831.7 Regardless, it is clear that Chambers would not have had many options for contracting the Journal to a local steam printer. The house of Ballantyne had been founded by James Ballantyne, a school friend of Walter Scott, and became one of the largest and most advanced printing houses in Edinburgh through its exclusive contract to print Scott’s works.8 Scott was a secret partner in the business, and the complicated interconnections of their affairs meant that when, in 1826, the crisis in the book trade brought down Scott’s publisher, Archibald Constable, both Scott and Ballantyne were also declared bankrupt. (In 1832, W. & R. Chambers’s first office was in the premises recently vacated by Constable’s successors, on Waterloo Place; see fig. 3.9) Both Chambers brothers had been in the trade at the time of this “crash,” and it convinced them that their firm should not accept credit nor pay by bills, but would always make “ready-money payments.” Otherwise, as William wrote, transactions would “subside into a system of bills—bills to wholesale stationers, bills to printers, bills to artists, bills to writers, bills to everybody. . . . There is great seeming prosperity, but so is there too frequently a great bill-book—dismal record of difficulties and heart-aches.”10 Despite the disaster, James Ballantyne and his son John managed to recover their business, for they still had a good name in the trade and one of the best-equipped printing houses in Edinburgh. In mid-1832, the Ballantynes would presumably have been very interested in the prospect of regular, large-scale work, such as the weekly run of Chambers’s Journal. Ballantynes began to print the Journal on their steam-powered machines in mid-July 1832, shortly after Chambers decided to use stereotyping (see chapter 3). Ballantynes presumably had standard cylinder perfector machines, running at about 800 to 1,000 completed sheets an hour. That rate would have enabled them to print the 30,000 copies that had defeated Johnstone in just two and a half working days, leaving plenty of spare time for delays and accidents. Production and Steam Power [ 57

Becoming Steam Printers By the end of 1832, W. & R. Chambers were the proprietors of a highly successful weekly magazine and had overcome their early problems by adopting steam-printing and stereotyping technologies. But they were still not satisfied with their system of production. They seem to have wanted to have as much as possible under their own direct control. In 1833, they took the dramatic step of expanding their young firm so that they could do their own composition, stereotyping, and printing, rather than relying on the contracted services of Johnstone or Ballantyne. This was not a return to the days of the Kaleidoscope, when William had printed what Robert wrote. Rather, this involved setting up a substantial establishment, buying equipment, and hiring workers. As well as being writers and editors, they would now have to become managers and employers. These ambitions would have been far beyond the means of two small booksellers on Leith Walk, but the Journal provided a stream of ready cash that the brothers invested back into the business. Chambers’s decision to become printers as well as publishers reflects both their Edinburgh setting and their origins as magazine publishers. The longestablished London publishing houses, such as Longman and Rivington, had given up their printing businesses to specialize in publishing, but several of the younger publishing houses in Edinburgh clearly saw advantages to controlling their own printing.11 Although Blackwood’s historian notes that that firm was “unusual in owning both the editorial and the printing sites,” so too did Oliver & Boyd and Thomas Nelson, as well as W. & R. Chambers.12 Moreover, it was still common practice for newspapers and other periodicals to be edited, printed, and published by their proprietors. Set in this context, Chambers’s decision to become printers is not unsurprising, but the decision to become steam printers at such an early stage in the spread of the technology was still a brave one. Chambers’s first purchase of equipment was the acquisition of compositors’ tools in November 1832. Further purchases followed gradually over the next year as funds became available. For the compositors’ gallery, they needed not only a font of type, but wooden frames and cases to hold the loose type; composing sticks; and a selection of rules and spacing pieces, to justify the letters as they were brought together. Much of this equipment came from an Edinburgh firm of printers’ joiners, Alexander Donaldson & Sons.13 Type could also be purchased locally: Chambers’s first purchase was a selection of pica, brevier, and nonpareil types (some of the most common sizes) from William Miller & Co., the Royal Letter-Founders for Scotland. They paid £30 for these fourteen pounds of tiny letters cast from lead, and they subsequently bought another £43 of type from a smaller Edinburgh firm, Wilson & Sin58 ] Chapter Four

clair.14 The equipment for a stereotype foundry was slightly more difficult to find. They were able to buy twenty-six iron blocks for mounting the plates from John Ruthven, a local printing press manufacturer, but their stereotype lathe was purchased secondhand in London.15 By the end of 1833, they had all the equipment needed to carry out their own composition and stereotyping. They must also have been recruiting artisans, though no personnel records survive from the period. The most audacious part of the new plan was the decision to become not merely printers but steam printers. In 1832, Edinburgh had no established printing-machine makers.16 Purchasing a machine would have involved shipping it from London or Manchester at significant expense, followed by the difficulty of finding local expertise to get the machine working and to maintain it. Rather than do this, Chambers decided to commission a young inexperienced local engineer. Robert Gunn had been associated with the North British Advertiser newspaper office, where he would have seen Applegath & Cowper’s machine in action. By February 1833, Chambers had installed Gunn in a former blacksmith’s shop on Rose Lane, at the eastern end of Rose Street, not far from the Chambers office in Waterloo Place. His task was to design a printing machine, which would be built at the Glasgow foundry of Claud Girdwood and be powered by an engine supplied by Samuel & Hugh Norton of Leith. It was once he had secured this commission that Gunn announced himself, apparently for the first time, as a “printing machine maker” in the Edinburgh city directory of spring 1833. (Gunn also made a machine for a Dublin printer that same year and may have moved to Dublin.17) The machine Gunn designed for Chambers was a two-cylinder perfector printing machine (see fig. 4), very similar to the Applegath & Cowper machines, which were now out of patent protection. It was to run at 750 double-sided sheets an hour, six times as fast as a single hand-operated press. Chambers’s excitement at the prospect of their new printing machine was not shared by their neighbors. As word spread that the Chambers brothers were going to install a steam engine, some of the other residents of the Waterloo Place/Rose Street area were sufficiently dismayed that, in mid-February, they made a formal complaint and threatened to seek an injunction from the city council. On their lawyer’s advice, Chambers tried to assuage the fears by downplaying the risk. In a memorandum, William Chambers explained that the firm was installing only a very small steam engine, just two horsepower, which they expected to run at only half-power. He claimed that it would “not require more than an ordinary kitchen fire to keep it in action” and would be far less dangerous than the blacksmith’s forge that had previously been in the premises. Indeed, he went on, the steam engine would be “hardly in any respect different from the trifling engines employed by grocers to grind their Production and Steam Power [ 59

coffee”! Chambers also went on the offensive, suggesting that the residents’ property was too far away to be perceptibly affected, and pointing out that owners of more valuable property had not complained about larger steam engines erected near them.18 The residents were not satisfied with these protestations. They were probably not very impressed with Chambers’s veiled threat that his firm would be able to win any court case nor with his self-assurance that they were being “utterly ridiculous” to expect his firm to abandon its plans at this stage. Three days later, therefore, W. & R. Chambers instructed their lawyer to present a petition, via the Sheriff Court solicitor, for formal permission to erect the steam engine, despite the complaints. This went to the Dean of Guild, a member of the city council whose duties included ensuring that new buildings conformed to the law. On March 1, the Dean and other council members visited the Rose Lane premises. A settlement was reached, which involved Chambers paying the opposition’s legal fees of £2.10s., but being allowed to continue the work in Rose Lane.19 It may have helped—or this may have been a condition of the permission to proceed—that Rose Lane was only the test site. Chambers had acquired new premises in Roxburgh Close, just off High Street in the heart of the Old Town, and craftsmen worked throughout the autumn making the new workshop ready for the installation of the printing machine and its steam engine in December.20 Meanwhile, Gunn’s printing machine was under construction. In September, plumbers and masons installed the boiler, water pipes, steam pipes, and furnace of the steam engine at the Rose Lane site, and the printing machine was connected and tested. The printing machine had cost £300, and Chambers spent a further £200 on the steam engine and other accessories.21 In early December, the entire setup was moved to Roxburgh Close, and Chambers began at last to print part of the Journal run themselves. The first few months were a teething time, and they still relied on Ballantynes to do part of the run—and, on two occasions, the entire run. The new machine was worked in gradually, and Chambers relied heavily on the assistance of the Leith engine makers, Samuel & Hugh Norton, to solve problems with both engine and machine. On February 1, Norton’s men had to work through the night to get the repairs done in time to allow printing to go ahead for that week, but by the end of February, things had settled down.22 Plenty of minor accidents still occurred, but these were the broken cranks, bent levers, missing wheels, and cracked plates that happened in any mechanical workshop, and could be fixed by a blacksmith. Chambers’s printing office would become a source of regular work for Daniel Robb, the blacksmith on Warriston’s Close, just below Roxburgh Close. Throughout the late 1830s and 1840s, Robb was in and out of Chambers’s workshop several times a week, 60 ] Chapter Four

and he issued quarterly invoices running to three or four pages of itemized detail, such as “altering a stay for steam pipe,” “altering a working rod,” and “repairing a frame of machine,” not to mention all the new keys, nuts, chisels, pins, hinges, and levers he supplied.23 The Chambers brothers were delighted with their new situation as printing-publishers. As they wrote in the Journal the following year, only those “who have experienced the same species of vexation” with hand printing could truly appreciate “the feeling of delight which animated us on first seeing this machine regularly at work.” The fact that their printing machine performed even better than expected—producing 900 sheets an hour instead of the specified 750—just added to their pleasure. Gone were the days of stress and uncertainty, struggling to get sufficient copies of the Journal ready for publication day. Unlike the residents of Rose Street, who had feared the disruption of a steam engine, William and Robert Chambers saw in it “a joyful prospect of future tranquillity.”24

Making Use of the Machine William and Robert Chambers had become steam printers because of the demands placed on them by the success of Chambers’s Journal, but with the new machine working at 900 sheets an hour, the Edinburgh run of the Journal took just over half of the working week. In order for Chambers to maximize the return on their investment in premises and equipment, they needed to find ways to keep the machine running for more of the week. Back numbers of the Journal were not enough, for they were printed irregularly in relatively small numbers and were rarely urgent. They might fill up odd gaps in the machine’s schedule, but they were just as likely to be contracted out to hand printers if there was something more important for the machine to do. In fact, by the time the machine had been built, installed, and tested, Chambers had already begun to issue two new serial publications. These helped to occupy the machine as well as to overcome the prejudice that machines were useful only for periodicals (where print quality did not matter too much). The new Chambers’s publications of early 1833 were relatively similar to the Journal in terms of production format and quality—another periodical, and serially issued instructive tracts—and thus not too great a stretch of the existing uses of printing machines. In terms of content, however, the two new serials differed significantly from each other and from the Journal. Chambers’s Historical Newspaper was issued as a monthly supplement to the Journal. Since the Journal did not pay stamp duty, it could not carry news, and the Historical Newspaper was an attempt to discuss recent events and issues while remaining outside the scope of stamp duty. Stamp duty apProduction and Steam Power [ 61

plied only to periodicals appearing more frequently than every twenty-eight days. The assumption was that information at some point loses its currency: it ceases to be news and becomes general knowledge, or even history. Any monthly periodical, even if it discussed current affairs, was technically outside the remit of stamp duty and could be sold cheaply. Both Chambers and Charles Knight tried to take advantage of this in 1833, but it remained a controversial format. As late as 1850, Charles Dickens’s attempt to issue a Household Narrative of Current Events as a monthly supplement to Household Words caused the Court of the Exchequer to engage in prolonged discussion of the distinction between news and history during Easter and summer 1851.25 Dickens’s high-profile case added fuel to the gathering force of efforts to repeal the taxes on knowledge in the 1850s; but in the 1830s, carrying news in an unstamped magazine was still highly controversial. Knight’s Companion to the Newspaper lasted until 1836 (by increasing its price from 2d. to 6d.), but Chambers’s Historical Newspaper was discontinued within a year.26 The other new Chambers’s project of 1833 was the Information for the People, and this serial did make a long-term impact. It came out fortnightly and, rather than being a periodical of unlimited term, was a series of fifty parts. Each part looked like a number of the Journal (which now had sixteen pages and a triple-columned layout), and the price was the same. The Information carried diagrams and maps, unlike the Journal. The key difference, however, was that the Information devoted its entire issue to a single topic, such as “Astronomy,” “Emigration to Canada,” “Moral Philosophy,” or “The American War of Independence.” By collecting all fifty parts, readers would accumulate a basic encyclopaedia of articles on history, geography, and the sciences. The aim of the Information for the People was broadly similar to that of the SDUK’s Library of Useful Knowledge, which had been appearing from 1828. In fact, Chambers proudly advertised that each issue of the Information contained as much text as the treatises of the Library but cost only three half-pennies, a quarter of the SDUK’s price.27 By early 1834, Chambers reported that the Information was regularly selling at least 16,000 copies per issue and sometimes twice that. A very few issues had already sold 47,000 copies. Meanwhile, the circulation of the Journal remained around 50,000 a week and did not seem to be affected by the success of the Information.28 Significantly, Chambers had persuaded a substantial number of people to purchase a new piece of reading material without compromising their existing reading habits. The brothers were delighted at this proof that their readers really did seek knowledge and instruction, and not merely entertainment. They had feared that, without the stories, 62 ] Chapter Four

poems, and lighter matter that was incorporated into the Journal, the Information would not sell. Similar fears about the Library of Useful Knowledge had led Charles Knight to launch a Library of Entertaining Knowledge— but since it appeared in 4s.6d. volumes, its sales figures could not hope to compare with those of the Information.29 The Information for the People had in fact been devised and launched before Chambers’s steam-printing machine was quite ready. With its fortnightly gap between issues and (initially) a smaller print run, the Information did not need steam printing as urgently as the Journal did. But Chambers were in the position of possessing a steam-printing machine that would otherwise stand still for a couple of days a week; and the brothers must surely have been realizing that, with long runs, steam printing worked out more cheaply per unit than hand printing. In 1832, John Johnstone was charging Chambers 24s. per 1,000 copies to print the Journal.30 By 1844, when Chambers’s own printing department was well established, the firm’s ledgers gave a cost of 14s.9d. per 1,000 for composition, paper, and printing.31 Steam printing made cheap instruction more profitable, as well as making it possible for Chambers to meet high demand. The ultimate success of the Information also depended on stereotyping, which enabled the demand for back numbers to be met long after the serial issue of parts had ceased. On the first of February 1834, Chambers’s Journal carried an editorial reviewing its progress and geographical success. A footnote explained the significance of the recent transformation of W. & R. Chambers: Among the labours connected with our business, not the least has been the labour of organising a proper system of printing and publishing. The nature of our publications was, in every respect, so extraordinary, that all the old modes of procedure may be described as having fairly broken down under it. The business of composing the types and of printing the sheets (the latter process being accomplished by steam-power) is now under our own superintendence; by which the anxiety and difficulty inseparable from so vast and complicated a business are considerably lessened.32 Chambers did not make their own paper, ink, or type, but they did virtually all the literary and editorial work themselves in their Waterloo Place offices, and their employees set up the type, made the stereotype plates, printed the sheets, and folded them in the Roxburgh Close workshop. The quotation makes clear that Chambers were already thinking in terms of a “proper system of printing and publishing.” Like other advocates of mechanization, who Production and Steam Power [ 63

saw technology as a way to rationalize the workplace and to raise efficiency, Chambers embraced new technologies as a means of organizing and systematizing their business. It was the success of the weekly Chambers’s Journal that encouraged W. & R. Chambers to use steam printing, although it was their desire for control that led them to purchase their own machine. Their decision to stereotype the Journal had already brought them greater control over the London edition. But the decision to purchase a printing machine meant that maximizing the use of the machine now became a concern. If they had continued contracting out their printing (as occurred with the London edition), they could have remained unperturbed about whether Ballantynes had sufficient work to keep their machines and staff busy. But having invested £500 in their new equipment, Chambers needed to get a good return on their investment; there was no point in the machine standing idle. Thus, they experimented with using the machine for different genres of publication. In later years, Chambers regularly issued more individual book titles, but they would never again launch so many new types of publication in so short a time as they did in the mid-1830s. Most printing machines in Britain in the 1830s were used for newspapers or periodicals, but Chambers realized that assumptions about high-quality press work were irrelevant to the market they were trying to reach. For selfimproving autodidacts among the working and lower middle classes, cheapness was the key requirement. And so, Chambers began to use their machine to print instructive tracts and, as we will see, full-length books. These books were not objects of great art or beauty, but their sales soon demonstrated that a strong demand existed. Chambers thus transformed the sorts of knowledge available to readers with only a few pennies to spare.

64 ] Chapter Four

Figure 5. This 1854 advertisement reveals the range of publications W. & R. Chambers would go on to produce, including instructive tracts and books as well as their Journal. From W. Chambers, Things as They Are in America (1854).

5

New Formats for Information

Instructive Tracts The title of W. & R. Chambers’s first instructive serial—the Information for the People—tells us much about their sense of audience and mission. In 1834, the brothers acknowledged that many of the copies of their Journal were actually bought by those “in the middle and upper ranks,” but by implication, they were most pleased that it was also “diffused through the very humblest departments of society.”1 Although “the people” could mean the entire population, it more usually referred to the lower ranks of society—in particular, by the mid-nineteenth century, the working classes. However, as Chambers recognized, the group of people who did not have access to expensive schooling or publications was not limited to the artisans and industrious laborers that the SDUK focused on, but included significant numbers of “the middling sorts.” Robert Chambers would later call himself an “essayist of the middle classes,” and claimed to write for people like himself—for sons of weavers, for young booksellers and apprentices, and for clerks and teachers.2 By using the word “information,” Chambers also—and, I believe, deliberately—set themselves apart from the SDUK. Where the SDUK promoted knowledge, Chambers offered information. The first volume of Chambers’s Journal had a regular column headed “Popular information on science,” and one of the categories in its index was “Articles of information.” It seems highly probable that this preference for “information” over “knowledge” was a careful strategy to distinguish Chambers publications from those of their main competitors, Knight and the SDUK. The SDUK had been founded six years before the launch [ 67

of Chambers’s Journal and had been issuing the treatises of its Library of Useful Knowledge since 1828. Knowledge carried more overtones than information, partly because it tends to convey a sense of value, worth, and wisdom—in contrast with unprocessed, unbiased information—but also because, by the 1830s, it was already inextricably identified in the public mind with the “useful” knowledge offered by the SDUK—and perhaps also with the “Christian” knowledge promoted for over a century by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The word knowledge was firmly associated with charities whose moral mission was to improve the humbler classes. By opting for information, Chambers may have hoped to distance themselves from these organizations and present their publications as being both by and for the people. One of the reasons for the early success of the Information for the People, as with the other Chambers publications, must be the almost-unique selling point of costing just 1½d. Few sorts of respectable print could be purchased so cheaply, with out-of-copyright reprinted books starting around 5s., newspapers costing at least 5d., and even the SDUK’s Library of Useful Knowledge treatises costing 6d. Apart from the religious tracts given away by committed evangelicals, the cheapest forms of print were those sold by street vendors and itinerant hawkers: chapbooks with their traditional tales of “Jack the Giant Killer” and “Valentine and Orson,” sheets of songs and ballads, broadsides with lurid confessions of modern murderers, and pamphlets and newspapers purveying radical political agendas. This sort of literature could be bought for no more than a penny, and more usually just half a penny, but much of it was exactly the sort of misguided, sensational, and potentially corrupting reading material that educational philanthropists were trying to supersede.3 The “Prefatory Information” for the Information for the People was very short, but it made absolutely clear that the significant thing about the project was its inclusion of “human knowledge” at “a price beyond example moderate”—in other words, cheap instruction.4 When the Information was revised and reissued in 1842, a new preface made the point at greater length. The work would address the needs of the “large portion of the middle and the whole of the working classes,” who could not afford scholarly compendia such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Issuing knowledge in the form of “detached sheets,” without the usual features that constitute “dignity in the externals of books,” might not look good to some commentators, but the strategy was essential to convey knowledge “into regions where such knowledge would have never, but for this or similar undertakings, found its way.” The preface continued with a thundering critique of the British education system. The Information could, at best, reach only those who could read, and it 68 ] Chapter Five

was “the great disgrace of our age” that “there are great multitudes who do not possess this accomplishment, and for whom, of course, popular encyclopaedias exist as much in vain as light does for the blind.”5 Only the SDUK’s new project, the Penny Cyclopaedia, came close to competing with the Information for the People in market and price. The contrast between the two projects is highly revealing. Chambers announced that the Information would be a fifty-part work, issued fortnightly at 1½d., and completed in two years. Knight and the SDUK announced that the weekly parts of their Penny Cyclopaedia would eventually form an eight-volume alphabetical encyclopaedia. Early sales of the Penny Cyclopaedia were an impressive 55,000, whereas the Information could claim only 18,000 on average. But the big difference was that Chambers completed the Information on time, while the Penny Cyclopaedia project kept expanding despite declining sales. By the end of the 1830s, the Cyclopaedia was issuing four parts a week, in a desperate bid to reach the end of the alphabet. Subscribers were losing patience, and many could not afford 4d. a week. Sales were down to less than 20,000 a week when the Penny Cyclopaedia was finally completed in 1843. A contemporary noted that if the Penny Cyclopaedia had continued with its plan of weekly issues, it would have taken thirty-seven years to complete!6 The individual parts of the Penny Cyclopaedia were indeed slightly cheaper, but the Information for the People was completed in a reasonable timeframe, for a total cost to the reader of just over 6s., rather than almost £8! While the Penny Cyclopaedia struggled toward completion in the late 1830s, the Information for the People was extending its initial modest success. No figures survive for the costs or profit of the original edition of the Information, but a comment in Chambers’s Journal in 1845 implies that its cumulative sales may have reached around 45,000.7 Knight estimated that the Penny Cyclopaedia would have needed regular sales of 36,000 to break even.8 The Information surely broke even; and its ongoing sales inspired W. & R. Chambers to issue a second edition in 1842. Some articles needed updating, such as that on emigration to Canada and all those dealing with industry and machinery. They also decided to expand the series to cover a hundred topics. All told, Chambers spent just £362 on the extra literary and editorial labor (whereas Knight is believed to have spent around £40,000 on literary labor for the Penny Cyclopaedia project9). Between 1842 and 1845, Chambers printed 84,420 sets of the new edition, at a cost of £20,900 (of which an incredible £15,000 was for the paper). Advertising cost £323, but by 1845 they had managed to sell 81,500 sets. Their profit on this edition was already £9,415, which, over the three years, matches the Journal’s profits of about £3,000 a year.10 In contrast, most of Chambers’s individual book titles made profits of just a few tens of pounds. The Information continued to be New Formats for Information [ 69

printed—with further revisions in 1848 and 1856—until it was superseded by Chambers’s Encyclopaedia.11 The first edition had promised simply to cover “those branches of human knowledge in which the greater part of the community are most interested,” but by the second edition, readers’ presumed interests had been replaced with the concept of universal significance: the contents included everything necessary to make “an individual of those classes a well-informed man.”12 Subjects were now included because they were “important” rather than interesting. The original Information for the People had a clear focus on informing readers about the rest of the world. The very first treatise was an “account of the earth, physical and political.” Five treatises discussed emigration (to the various Canadian colonies, the United States, New South Wales, and Van Dieman’s Land). Others described Britain, the British Empire, the United States, the East and West Indies, and China, covering each region’s geography, politics, history, industry/agriculture, and society. The obsession with assisting emigration was reflected in the Journal, whose very first issue had included extracts from a traveler’s account of Canada and the United States, with the comment that information on emigration was typically provided at too high a price for those who needed it most.13 In addition to descriptive geography, the Information also dealt with natural sciences (the horse, astronomy, chemistry) and industry (printing, the steam engine). The only biography was of Benjamin Franklin, the American printer, inventor, and statesman. The new edition of the Information was an opportunity for Chambers to rethink what sort of knowledge was required and how to arrange it. Where the original Information had resembled a miscellaneous magazine, with its constantly changing subject matter, the revised Information was organized like an encyclopaedia, with a classification of knowledge. The articles of descriptive geography were grouped together; so too were the articles on emigration, on natural history, on natural philosophy, on agriculture and country life. The new articles filled in some of the gaps in the historical and geographical treatment, but they also introduced a variety of new topics that might be deemed essential for the well-informed Briton: education, the banking system, the legal system, political economy, and civil government. For a little light relief, there were articles on singing, gymnastics, and such “in-door amusements” as chess and draughts. The success of the Information compared with the Penny Cyclopaedia is another illustration of Chambers’s ability to manage a project more effectively than Charles Knight, working with the SDUK and its contractors, was able to do. But the serial’s success in general terms demonstrated that it had 70 ] Chapter Five

found a gap in the market: that there was a large readership for cheap publications offering solid instruction, not simply fantastical tales. The only other significant users of the pamphlet format were disputants in religious and political controversies, who wrote pamphlets where later generations would write to the newspapers; and evangelical societies, which issued their message of salvation in religious tracts. During the 1840s, Chambers used the format of series of instructive tracts for several new projects, including the Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1844) (see chapter 6) and the Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts (1844–47). They had such confidence in the market for such works that they planned the Miscellany with the incredible breakeven point of 52,000 copies.14

Steam-Printed Books The success of the Information for the People and Chambers’s Journal gave W. & R. Chambers confidence in their ability to make a commercial system of supplying desirable instructive reading material at affordable prices to sufficiently large numbers of readers. It also gave the firm money to invest in future projects, and they would soon become pioneers of yet another format for cheap information: the steam-printed books of the Educational Course and the People’s Editions. One of the great advantages of the tract as a publishing format had been that it was so very short: it used a small amount of (expensive) paper, and its author could not expect a substantial payment for so little work. It thus avoided the problems that had beset earlier attempts to offer full-length books by eminent authors at just 5s. a volume. By the late 1830s, Chambers would demonstrate that it was possible to sell entire books for under 2s. Three reasons explain why they succeeded where others had failed. First, they accepted that it was not possible to pay substantial sums of money to secure the copyright of a new and original work. Instead, they either commissioned short, new works from little-known authors or they selected works that were out of copyright and therefore could be reprinted for free. The period of copyright protection at this time was a maximum of twenty-eight years, so unprotected works were not necessarily ancient and could easily be packaged as “classics,” while foreign works were also unprotected by British copyright. Second, Chambers resolved to keep paper use to an absolute minimum by using a small typeface, closely printed lines, and double columns. They also used an inexpensive binding format. Yet these techniques were hardly unique to Chambers: provincial publisher-printers had been demonstrating for decades that closely printed editions of noncopyright works could turn a profit with a 5s. price tag. Chambers’s originality lay in their third cost-cutting technique: the decision to New Formats for Information [ 71

use their steam-printing machine. Although many believed that machines could not produce sufficiently good quality print for book work, anyone who was prepared to ignore elite expectations about what books ought to look like and to privilege cheapness over elegance would find no real reason why books could not be printed by steam.15 Chambers’s first steam-printed book appears to have been their edition of the celebrated phrenologist George Combe’s Constitution of Man (1828), which they printed in October 1835. The first three editions of Combe’s work had been copublished by the Edinburgh firm of John Anderson and the London firm of Longman and sold at 6s., but when a charitable trust subsidized the price of the remaining copies, the boom in sales hinted at a much larger potential audience.16 Combe was a close friend of Robert Chambers, and this is presumably why W. & R. Chambers, who usually printed only their own publications, agreed to steam-print the fourth edition of Constitution on behalf of Anderson, Longman, and several other publishers.17 Although the third edition had already been stereotyped, Chambers had to make new plates for the new page format. Where the third edition had been 382 duodecimo pages, Chambers’s compositors managed to fit the text into just 110 (slightly larger, octavo) pages. The steam-printed fourth edition of Constitution of Man was known as the “People’s Edition,” and it sold for just 1s.6d. (even less than the subsidized copies). The first 2,000 copies were said to have sold out within ten days, and the stereotype plates were immediately put back into the machine to print another 5,000 copies, which also sold out quickly. Despite the cramped format, the response was incredible. Chambers printed five more impressions of 5,000 copies in the first half of 1836, and another 10,000 in November. The earlier editions of the book had sold just over 10,000 copies in seven years, whereas Chambers’s edition had sold 42,000 copies in only two years.18 It was a wonderful proof both that books could be printed by steam and that large number of readers would enthusiastically welcome such books. In November 1835, a month after printing the Constitution of Man, Chambers announced their Educational Course, a series of readers, textbooks, and teachers’ manuals that they advertised as embodying the “most advanced views of Education, both as a Science and an Art” and supplying “a complete Elementary Education, Physical, Moral, and Intellectual.” The series was unusual for the range of disciplines it covered, including, at the more advanced levels, the natural sciences and modern languages. It was also unusual for being so affordable: its rudimentary volumes cost 6d. or 10d., while the most expensive volumes were only 4s. In their advertising, Chambers drew attention to the “considerable advantages” their firm possessed for producing a series of this sort, citing both their established repu72 ] Chapter Five

tation as morally sound but apolitical purveyors of cheap information and “the means they command for the preparation and diffusion of Popular Literature.”19 This last was surely a reference to the firm’s ability to use steam printing and stereotyping, as much as to their editorial experience in this market niche. One of the most successful of the early volumes of the series was the Introduction to the Sciences (1836), which had sold 12,000 copies by 1837 and 71,000 copies by 1843, all for a mere 9d. a copy.20 Like the Information for the People, the volumes of the Educational Course were newly written for the series, but costs for literary labor were kept low by using little-known authors (such as schoolteachers or the Chambers brothers themselves), reusing material from the Information, and keeping the works short. The very cheapest volumes were less than a hundred pages long, which also meant less expense on paper. The volumes appear to have been steam-printed and stereotyped from the start. In 1837, Chambers extended their range of steam-printed books by launching a series of People’s Editions of noncopyright nonfiction at prices between 1s.6d. and 2s.6d., depending on length. In theory, these volumes should have been more profitable since they involved lower costs for literary labor, but in the long run, the Educational Course found a more secure and steady market in the schoolbook sector. The People’s Editions mixed classics with modern foreign works. Works by long-dead philosophers and theologians, such as John Locke and Francis Bacon, appeared alongside those by the more recently deceased William Paley. Modern works included François Guizot’s History of Civilisation in Europe and Adolphe Quételet’s Treatise on Man. Locke, Bacon, and Paley were all common targets for reprinting, but including modern foreign works, which required translation, was more unusual. Several of these appeared in the series because William Chambers visited the Netherlands and Belgium in 1838 (his first foreign visit), drawn there by his curiosity about the education and social systems. In Brussels, he bought a copy of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Travels in the East, which was translated and issued as a People’s Edition in 1839.21 He also met George Combe’s brother Andrew, who was physician to the King of the Belgians and who introduced him to Quételet. Quételet’s Sur l’homme had been published in 1835, offering a statistical analysis of social and human phenomena. Chambers was sufficiently intrigued to have the work translated, and it appeared in the series in 1842.22 The economics of these steam-printed books are nicely illustrated by one of the early volumes, Paley’s Natural Theology. Its early editions had appeared in the standard octavo format, with 548 pages of text in a relatively large typeface with plenty of white space on the page; its cost was 10s.6d. New Formats for Information [ 73

When it came out of copyright in 1816, it was immediately issued by reprint publishers, who used smaller pages and smaller typefaces to reduce its price to between 5s. and 8s. In 1837, the Chambers’s People’s Edition took these techniques further and combined them with steam printing to produce a 100-page, double-columned edition selling at 1s.6d.23 The Chambers edition was stereotyped, so although the first print run was 3,164 copies, it was easy to print more. By the end of 1842, Chambers had sold 14,500 copies and made a profit of £268, equivalent to just over £53 a year. Once the early copies had paid off the costs of composition and stereotype plates for the project, the later copies needed only to cover the printing and paper costs, but since they were sold at the same price, all these extra sales generated proportionately more profit. Thus, in 1837–38, the Chambers firm was making £12.9s.9d. profit per 1,000 copies sold, but between 1842–47, that rose to £22.12s. per 1,000.24 Such figures demonstrate why it was not merely useful but profitable to have stereotype plates for fulfilling later demand. By the late 1840s, a new confidence in the size of the market enabled competitors such as George Routledge (see chapter 10) to stretch their fixed costs over larger print runs, and thus to sell novels at a shilling without needing to economize so strictly on paper and typeface. These new volumes did not use double columns and were physically more attractive than the People’s Editions; unsurprisingly, they damaged the series’ sales. Nevertheless, from the late 1830s to the late 1840s, the Chambers People’s Editions were, like the Information for the People, almost alone in occupying a market niche for very cheap nonfiction. That novelty made them very successful (and profitable for Chambers).

Morals and Instruction In their emphasis on really cheap publications providing useful knowledge to a readership hitherto ignored by mainstream publishers, W. & R. Chambers had a lot in common with religious publishing societies such as the Religious Tract Society. Although the brothers were certainly seeking personal profit rather than funds with which to spread the gospel, their choice of publishing specialism was driven by an idealistic desire to help people. The similarities are particularly apparent in the format of Chambers’s instructive serials, such as the Information for the People. In publishing terms, the Information was an unusual sort of product, neither book nor magazine. Its closest cousin was probably the religious tract, hundreds of thousands of which were being distributed by city missionaries and scripture readers in Britain’s industrial cities every year. The successors to the Information for the People admitted the similarity by using the term tract: the Miscellany of 74 ] Chapter Five

Useful and Entertaining Tracts was launched in 1844 and the Repository of Instructive and Amusing Tracts in 1853. Like the religious tract, each number was a short pamphlet on a single topic, written in clear and simple language, perhaps adorned with a striking illustration. Both sorts of tracts were produced in large numbers at low cost. The religious tracts were usually bought in bulk by philanthropic bodies and given to their ultimate readers for free, while Chambers’s tracts were intended to be bought directly by their readers.25 Chambers and the tract publishing societies shared the desire to help people improve themselves and believed that printed matter had the power to do this. The key difference was how they defined improvement. For the Religious Tract Society, improvement was predicated on having a spiritual awakening and accepting Christ and his message of salvation. The Chambers firm was more concerned with helping readers get on in this life by expanding their general knowledge. Like those of Charles Knight and the SDUK, Chambers’s publications avoided controversial religion and politics, leaving evangelical Christian commentators in the difficult position of admiring their cheapness, solid worth, and reliable instruction, while regretting their lack of engagement with salvation. By the mid-1840s, the success of Chambers and the SDUK certainly seems to have inspired religious societies, notably the Religious Tract Society, to bring a Christian tone to cheap instructive literature by publishing on a wider range of topics than they had hitherto done.26 Yet although the evangelicals regularly labeled Chambers and the SDUK as “secular” publishers, Chambers were not totally averse to the inclusion of broad nondoctrinal Christianity. As we have seen, they issued Paley’s Natural Theology as one of their first People’s Editions, presumably assuming that its demonstration of the existence of God through an examination of the natural world would appeal across sectarian divides. This very book had divided the SDUK, when the society’s founder, Henry Brougham, edited a new edition and the society declined to publish it to avoid contravening its ban on religion and politics.27 With no ties to a charitable society likely to take a conservative interpretation of its remit, William and Robert Chambers were free to make their own decisions on what to include in their publications. Little is known about the brothers’ personal faith, but both were churchgoers, and William was reputed to be something of a stickler for morality (as some of the authors of the Journal’s fiction discovered).28 They appear to have been happy to include nondoctrinal Christianity in their publications and to discuss religious topics, such as the history of the Bible or pagan beliefs. This was utterly insufficient to satisfy the evangelicals, who believed that a Christian tone ought to suffuse knowledge of every sort, but it meant that Chambers’ publications New Formats for Information [ 75

were not so lacking in religious tone as is sometimes supposed. For instance, the first edition of the Information for the People included articles on natural theology, moral philosophy, and the “duties of life” (which discussed relationships within the family and between neighbors, raising many moral issues). The second edition added a history of Christianity and the Bible, and an essay on “Mohammedan and pagan religions” (the latter term encompassed Hinduism and Buddhism, which were presented as mythological religions, in contrast to monotheistic Islam). As well as dealing, occasionally, with explicitly religious topics, Chambers’s publications took care to maintain a high moral tone.29 This was particularly apparent in the fiction and historical narratives carried in the Journal and in the later series of instructive tracts. The new generation of penny magazines of the 1840s would often be accused of glamorizing crime and vice in the cause of greater drama. The Chambers publications, however, were careful to report history accurately and unsensationally, and to ensure that fictional villains suffered appropriately. The brothers and their editorial assistants were not averse to editing their contributors’ texts to suit their needs. In 1835, an editorial in the Journal noted that even contributions from “the most practised writers” regularly required “purification before we deem it fit for insertion.” Purification did not simply refer to “moral decency” but to a determination to exclude any references to “superstitions, savagery, and darker vices of the past.”30 Charles Knight shared this desire to replace superstition with modern rationality and wrote of the SDUK’s success in sending “light into the strongholds of ignorance and superstition.”31 Regular contributors to the Journal quickly became familiar with Chambers’s stance, and the novelist Catherine Crowe wrote in 1841 that “you may rely on it I shall never interfere with any alterations you have thought proper to make whether I approve of them or not.” She took the very practical view that “in writing for you . . . one works for money, & not for fame; & if you purchase my wares, I think you have a right to do what you please with them.”32 It seems unlikely that all contributors were so “amiable,” and by the early 1850s, even Crowe was chafing at “these new regulations” when Leitch Ritchie, the Journal editor, sent back one of her stories. Crowe nearly rebelled but eventually agreed to alter “whatever was likely to offend.”33 Chambers’s advertisements clearly show the strong editorial line on good taste and impeccable morals. The Miscellany of Tracts was to go beyond being useful and instructive by bearing “on the cultivation of the feelings and understanding.” It was explicitly trying to engage with “important moral and social questions.”34 The Repository of Tracts was advertised as combining its “correct information and sound instruction” with “innocent entertainment.” Its contents would be “under the control of good taste, and free—as 76 ] Chapter Five

far as possible—of controversial matter.”35 By making these explicit statements, Chambers tried to define their publications as “a higher kind of Literature” than that which could be “obtained through the cheap periodicals hitherto established.”36 And they were judged to have lived up to their claims. In 1847, for instance, poet Coventry Patmore reviewed a selection of cheap literature in the North British Review. He wished that the “moral tone” of all light fiction could be raised “up to the present mark of Chambers,” and commended the firm’s histories for their high standard “of taste, and tone, and feeling.” Noting the high sales of Chambers’s Miscellany, Patmore congratulated the firm on achieving that success “fairly” and “by merit.” In contrast to unnamed others, Chambers’s contributors did not stoop “to humour the weaknesses of their readers, or pamper any unhealthy appetite.”37 By the late 1840s, W. & R. Chambers were well established as publishers of respectable, instructive cheap print. Their commercial success was a result of William Chambers’s insistence on “systematic, almost mechanical precision” in the running of the firm, combined with the willingness to use the new processes of steam printing and stereotyping.38 The reduced unit costs that those processes offered—to publishers producing for the emerging mass market—made cheap print more profitable; but Chambers’s innovation was to apply the new processes to genres increasingly far removed from the newspaper and magazine industry. The instructive tracts and People’s Editions of the 1830s and early 1840s were incredibly remunerative for Chambers. The publishers of chapbooks and ballads also made money from cheap print in this period, but the striking thing about Chambers is the combination of new technologies with a commitment to instruction and high moral standards that brought them respect from the rest of the literary and book trade community. For Chambers and Knight, and like-minded commentators, the success of these instructive works seemed to demonstrate a hitherto unfulfilled demand for respectable, instructive cheap print, and justified a great optimism about the prospects for popular education. The events of the later 1840s would disillusion them (see part 2), but until then, Chambers seemed able to make a success from whatever new form of instructive print they could dream up. Nevertheless, they faced several continuing challenges: getting their printed works to their prospective readers, not just in Britain but in the English-speaking world overseas; and, more generally, asserting as much control over all aspects of their business as possible.

New Formats for Information [ 77

Figure 6. The port of Leith, in 1829, showing old and new forms of shipping. Detail from engraving by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd. Reproduced by permission of Capital Collections, Edinburgh.

6

Reaching an Overseas Market

Overseas Connections As W. & R. Chambers expanded into the British market in the 1830s, they also began to develop their “connection” overseas. For instance, in March 1837, the Monarch sailed from Glasgow carrying two boxes of publications for Edward Leslie & Sons, Toronto, and Messrs. McPherson & Co, Montreal, while the Jean Hastie sailed from Greenock with four boxes for A. & W. McKinlay, Halifax.1 Chambers established a long-term relationship with McKinlay, and also with Gilchrist & Alexander in Sydney, and A. Crombie in Hobart.2 The colonial booksellers typically received a box or two of books per year, usually shipped from Greenock or Liverpool (for the Canadas) and Leith (for Australia). Unlike agents in London or Dublin, they were not permitted to hold stock on sale or return with a quarterly settlement of accounts. Transit times were too long and ships too infrequent to permit credit arrangements to be extended overseas, so the colonial booksellers had to place orders for specific books and send payment with their orders. Despite these constraints, colonial booksellers were regular customers, and as the years went by, the Chambers correspondence book acquired orders from India and the West Indies as well as Australia and Canada. As early as 1833, Chambers had received queries from colonial booksellers hoping to become agents for Chambers’s Journal. That year, they began sending stereotype plates to Dublin, extending their two-center system to three centers. For a local edition to make a profit at the same low price as the British edition, there needed to be a local readership of some 10,000 or [ 79

20,000 people. Chambers hoped that Ireland could supply such a market (although within a year, they had realized it could not), but they were dubious about the chances for a Canadian or West Indian edition. The Journal proudly reported in 1833 that “innumerable copies” were reaching “almost all” the colonies, even including “the remote fur settlements of North America,” and in 1835 it reported that 200,000 numbers had been sent to the colonies.3 Yet 200,000 numbers over the entire year—and especially when this included orders for the back run—hardly amounted to evidence of a substantial week-on-week demand. Colonial booksellers might have argued that being able to issue the Journal week by week, even if it were months behind the original date of publication, would generate a larger audience than the irregular arrival of entire annual volumes could do. But the fact was that Chambers had relatively little to gain from licensing stereotype plates for the colonies as long as it was possible to ship copies from Edinburgh. There was more profit for Chambers in each Edinburgh-printed copy sold than in the license fee they would receive for each locally printed copy sold. They were already starting to realize that their agreement with William Orr in London had its drawbacks. But despite failing to become the basis of an imperial system for printing and distributing Chambers’s Journal, stereotype plates would dominate Chambers’s early efforts to do business with the United States. Unlike the various British possessions, the United States were quite literally another country. The United States levied import taxes on British goods and provided no legal protection for British copyrights. On the other hand, the extensive reading audience in the United States ought to provide a fertile ground for British publications. Indeed, it was well recognized that British books did already circulate widely in the States, through reprinting. As part 3 will discuss, the challenge for British publishers was to find a way of making money from their American readers.4 The lack of copyright recognition made it impossible for British publishers to extend the arrangements that were successful within Britain and the colonies. Orr had to pay a license fee for permission to print the London edition of Chambers’s Journal, but an American publisher could acquire a single imported copy of the Journal, reprint it, and sell as many copies as he liked; he had no legal obligation to pay anything to Chambers. Although British publishers and authors protested that they had a moral right to compensation, they could offer no obvious product for which the Americans might be persuaded to pay. If an American publisher did express willingness to make a payment, it was most likely to be in return for advance proofs, enabling him to be first into the American market. Deals might also be struck 80 ] Chapter Six

for a new set of author’s revisions, which again offered an advantage in a competitive market. Stereotype plates came to play an important role in these transatlantic negotiations because they were a form of physical property that could be bought and sold across the Atlantic. Such a sale did not include copyright and had no legal power to prevent another publisher from reprinting the same work, but possession of the plates could give the purchaser a competitive advantage: he was saved the expense of composing the work from scratch (which was particularly important if illustrations were involved); and, if the arrangements were concluded in advance, the plates would arrive early enough to give the purchaser priority in the American marketplace. Given their early commitment to stereotyping, it is hardly surprising that W. & R. Chambers hoped to use it to enhance their international distribution. They hoped that plates would be a way of persuading American printers to work with them, instead of reprinting works without permission or payment. As we will see, their international dream would prove difficult to realize.

Crossing the Atlantic When William and Robert Chambers first began to consider the possibilities of overseas business, the Journal was top of their agenda. William’s highflown rhetoric in the first issue, about the Journal reaching “every man in the British dominions,” was, however, more an expression of optimism than a planned strategy. The first copies of the Journal to cross the Atlantic probably did so through friends and relations, or through American agents in London. By the end of April 1832, the Journal was able to announce that its existence had been noted in New York, where a publisher was already planning to reprint its key articles.5 Eleven weeks for news to cross the Atlantic and back again was fairly typical for the pre-steamship period. That rumored reprint came to nothing, but there were soon two other New York printers interested in reprinting the Journal in its entirety.6 One of them, a Mr. Hobart, entered into correspondence with W. & R. Chambers to secure a set of stereotype plates. This was in early summer 1833, when the Journal was already being printed from plates in Edinburgh, London. and Dublin, and the Chambers firm was still considering the colonial expressions of interest. With New York printers, however, Chambers had very little bargaining power: as they acknowledged to Hobart, “If you can put up the type and manufacture plates for less in New York, of course we cannot oppose your choosing to do so.” This may explain why they were quick Reaching an Overseas Market [ 81

to make an offer of weekly sets of plates, to be collected in Liverpool, for £5 a set. Chambers estimated that each set cost them £2.2s. to manufacture and another 7s. to ship to Liverpool, so they were hoping to make a profit of £2.11s. per issue, or £127.10s. a year. Unfortunately, Hobart was not sufficiently tempted by the price and he gave up his plan to reprint the Journal. A New York edition did finally appear in 1834, reprinted without permission by R. J. Richards. Chambers noted the existence of this edition in January 1835, remarking that “this forms a branch of circulation over which we of course can exercise no control.”7 The Penny Magazine was more successful in entering the American market. By 1834, there were no fewer than three local editions of the Penny Magazine competing for American readers, and two of them were the result of an agreement with the SDUK. William Jackson of New York was appointed agent for the Penny Magazine in May 1833 and for all SDUK publications the following month. As well as selling a pristine set of plates to Jackson, the SDUK managed to find a buyer for one of its sets of used plates, which were bought by J. S. Redfield, also of New York. The third American edition was printed by B. F. & J. J. Greenough in Boston, who boasted that their edition was reset with newly commissioned illustrations. Greenough’s advertisement made several references to the Redfield edition and was scathing about the poor print quality resulting from plates “nearly worn out in London.”8 Rather than receiving their British instructive magazines week by week, on the date stamped on the cover, American readers would most likely receive them six months or a year after the original issue, in units of some other size. When resetting the text of the Penny Magazine, Greenough took the opportunity to remove the original dates of publication to disguise the time delay, as did Richards with his edition of Chambers’s Journal. Richards altered the Journal’s banner to read “Published Every Saturday” in place of the original dates, thus obscuring the fact that his edition was running eighteen months to two years behind the British edition. In Britain, Chambers’s Journal was slightly more expensive than the Penny Magazine, but in the United States, both sold at $1.50 a year, equivalent to 6s. or just under 1½d. per issue. They were also both widely advertised as available in monthly parts at 12½¢. The emphasis on monthly parts and annual subscriptions suggests that American readers would have had a different experience of these magazines. American reprints tended to be short lived, as the publisher’s initial enthusiasm was only rarely matched by the substantial sales needed to make a profit on such low-priced works. Richards gave up Chambers’s Journal after two volumes, and Greenough did the same with the Penny Magazine. The 82 ] Chapter Six

fact that Jackson’s and Redfield’s editions of the Penny Magazine lasted longer indicates the advantage of acquiring plates. And when W. & R. Chambers renewed their attempts to find an American publisher for their Journal, Jackson was the obvious candidate. By 1838, Jackson had established himself as the semi-official American source of cheap British books and magazines of the instructive and amusing variety, dealing in both reprints and imports (see also chapter 16). He shared the risk of printing and distributing the Penny Magazine with publishers in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, and had arrangements with thirty-eight other named stockists, from Massachusetts to Virginia and South Carolina, and westward to Ohio.9 He also operated his own Belleville Power Press to reprint the Penny Magazine.10 His expertise, contacts, and technical capability made him a good choice for Chambers’s Journal, and when Chambers offered Jackson a set of stereotype plates (delivered to London or Liverpool) for £4.10s. a week in summer 1838, he accepted. The price was less than that offered to Hobart five years earlier, but still enough to give Chambers an income of just over £100 a year from the United States.11 The timing, unfortunately, was poor, as the United States were just entering a prolonged period of economic depression, and the American edition of Chambers’s Journal ceased in 1840. In December 1846, Chambers were informed by a Boston publisher that “we have not seen your ‘Journal’ for some years & cannot find one here now.”12

Stereotype Plates between Edinburgh and Boston It was not until the mid-1840s that W. & R. Chambers finally managed to find a more satisfactory American business partner, in the Boston firm of Gould, Kendall & Lincoln. Part 3 discusses the establishment of Chambers’s transatlantic business relationships in more detail, but the initial arrangement made between Chambers and Gould, in 1845–46, demonstrates the difficulties Chambers encountered when trying to extend their hitherto successful use of stereotype plates for managing long-distance distribution. Gould, Kendall & Lincoln had been in business since the mid-1830s and were considered the second most important publishing house in Boston, after Little, Brown & Co.13 In October 1845, they introduced themselves to Chambers and enclosed a copy of their catalog. This revealed them to be a firm focused on theological (especially Baptist) and scientific works, including reprint editions of Paley’s Natural Theology, the Bridgewater Treatises, and the works of Hugh Miller.14 Despite the apparent dissimilarities between the two firms, this contact resulted in Chambers’s first long-standing relationship with an American publisher. Over the years, Gould bought plates Reaching an Overseas Market [ 83

of a small number of Chambers’s works and imported many more works in bulk at a discount rate. Gould initially approached Chambers to inquire about purchasing a set of stereotype plates of the firm’s recently completed Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1844), edited by Robert Chambers. The Cyclopaedia had begun life as yet another of the Chambers’ instructive part-works, using the same format as the Information for the People (100 parts, 1½d. each) but focusing entirely on English literature. Chambers claimed that much of the existing literature “for the People”—including their own very successful publications—focused so much on instruction that they failed “to awaken the higher powers of thought.” The Cyclopaedia aimed to inculcate “reflection, imagination, and taste” and “the finer of the moral feelings.” 15 By 1845, the serial was complete. Gould had seen an imported copy in Boston and were interested in reprinting it. They inquired if they could purchase the original plates or have a duplicate set made, or, at the very least, purchase casts of the wood engravings to incorporate with text set in Boston. (This last reminds us that although text could be easily and cheaply reset on the other side of the Atlantic, reproducing illustrations was rather more expensive. Stereotype plates for illustrated works were more valuable than those of text-only works.) Gould tempered their obvious enthusiasm with a warning to Chambers that only a very low price would suit, for the American market was interested exclusively in “cheap publications,” and that the plates would incur a 25 percent import tax.16 Gould rejected Chambers’s first offer, of £400 for a set of plates, on the grounds that such a high price would prevent their edition undercutting the imported edition. They proposed £300, and this figure became the basis for negotiations over whether the plates should be delivered to Chambers’s agent in Liverpool or to Gould’s agent in Liverpool, and who should pay for the packing materials and shipping to Liverpool. Chambers agreed to send separate invoices, one for the £300 and one for the benefit of the U.S. customs officials, stating the basic production cost of the plates excluding the “premium” for the privilege of using them—so that Gould could legitimately pay less import tax. Meanwhile, Gould promised that the boxes containing the plates would not be opened before they left Britain; and Chambers promised that they would not sell another set of the plates to any other publisher in the United States.17 Further issues arose regarding the timescale for dispatch: Gould hoped to issue the Cyclopaedia as complete volumes as soon as possible, but the Chambers firm was having to make the new set of plates from scratch (more expensive than doing it at the same time as the original plates) and could only offer regular shipments over the next fifteen months. Gould regret84 ] Chapter Six

fully accepted that they would have to issue in parts, which they began to do in December 1846.18 The fact that this was over a year since their first inquiry brings home the slowness with which transatlantic business could take place. Chambers were already somewhat annoyed by Gould’s desire to have the plates more quickly than Chambers could make them—and embarrassed that Gould had already sent a £100 down payment, thus obliging Chambers to attend to their business. But Gould further tested Chambers’s goodwill by requesting additional services. Having been forced to issue the work in parts, Gould now wanted plates for the part covers with illustrations of the principal authors, which, they added pleasantly, “can be easily managed by your Stereotyper & with little trouble.” They also requested duplicates of the “list of illustrations” for use in advertisements and a collection of favorable press cuttings for marketing purposes.19 Selling stereotype plates, it would seem, could entail not just the packing and shipping of those plates, but supplying a range of services to assist the marketing of the American reprint, even though Chambers themselves had no financial interest in the success of that edition. Once the boxes of plates had finally begun to cross the Atlantic, from May 1846 onward, a new set of problems arose relating to different printing practices on opposite sides of the Atlantic.20 American publishers were aware that British stereotype plates tended to be made slightly differently from American ones, and that this could cause problems in using the plates in American printing machines. As a result, it was common for American publishers to stipulate how plates for export should be finished. Gould did so for the Cyclopaedia plates, as did Philadelphia publishers Lea & Blanchard when purchasing the plates for Chambers’s Latin-English dictionary in 1850.21 But despite this precaution, Gould discovered a whole range of unexpected difficulties in working with the Edinburgh stereotype plates. From the beginning, Gould had drawn Chambers’s attention to the fact that the British plates they had previously imported had been “turned on the back & not shaved as we have them.” Since the finishing of the back of the plates affected the way they sat into the bed of the printing machine, Gould was keen that the Cyclopaedia plates should come prepared for American machines, “if you have the machinery to do it.”22 By the end of May 1846, Gould had received the first two boxes of plates and discovered a new problem. The printed pages of the Cyclopaedia were to have a thin rule around the edges, creating a border to the text. Gould had assumed that this feature would be part of the stereotype plates, but in Edinburgh, it was achieved by fixing brass rules around the plates. Gould explained that in Boston, such practices “are unknown,” and although “we have consulted our best printReaching an Overseas Market [ 85

ers . . . they are ignorant of any process by which it can be accomplished.” Gould had to ask Chambers “to furnish us with a set of rules & blocks” and “directions for their use, if they should need any explanation.”23 Even as late as December, Gould were still complaining that they found “many of your plates quite difficult to work”; among other things, “all the plates were too large & we have been obliged to take them to the Foundry & have them trim’d.”24 All of these problems could be fixed, with time, effort, and inclination, but the problems illustrate vividly that Chambers and Gould were operating in distinct technical communities, and remind us of all the “extras” that were included in the sale of plates. The Cyclopaedia of English Literature proved a very successful enterprise for Gould. They offered it in sixteen 25¢ numbers (the Edinburgh edition had been a hundred slimmer numbers at 1½d. each), or as two complete volumes for $4. Gould’s edition was thus $1.50 cheaper than the imported Edinburgh edition and an equivalent price to the edition sold in Edinburgh. Gould advertised the work heavily in the American literary press in spring 1847 and received favorable reviews, which praised both the usefulness of the volume “for the great mass of readers” and the neatness of its typography. The Literary World’s reviewer even commended the engravings for being “almost equal to those in the original edition,” oblivious to the fact that the engravings were in fact exactly the same as the ones in the original!25 The Cyclopaedia proved so successful that Gould reprinted it in 1849 and again at almost annual intervals through the 1850s: by 1859, the Boston edition claimed to be in its nineteenth thousand.26 This success, however, demonstrates the problems of such deals for Chambers. After the payment for £300 (only half of which, perhaps, was profit), Chambers never received another penny from Gould for the Cyclopaedia, despite the impressive American sales. And, of course, imports of the Edinburgh edition dried up as soon as the cheaper American edition was available, thus depriving Chambers of any direct sales. In the future, Chambers were careful about the deals they agreed for stereotype plates. For a start, they tried to arrange any such deals ahead of time, so that the extra plates could be made alongside the original plates, rather than recreated afterward at extra expense, as had been done for the Cyclopaedia. Most crucially, they agreed to sell plates only for their book publications, not for the Journal or other part-work serials. When Gould inquired about plates for the Journal, in autumn 1847, Chambers instead offered a discount on imported copies as long as at least 5,000 copies were taken.27 For Chambers, a substantial discount on bulk imports became preferable to selling plates because it would give them an income proportional to the number of sales (see chapter 16). In particular, it would give them an income from any sales in the Canadian col86 ] Chapter Six

onies. The fear that Canadian booksellers would order from Boston rather than Edinburgh was a powerful argument against selling plates for the highcirculation serials. The arrangement with Gould, Kendall & Lincoln for the Cyclopaedia of English Literature taught W. & R. Chambers a number of useful lessons, at a time when they were becoming more aware of the possibilities of an American readership. It demonstrated the limitations of the system of stereotyping, about which they had been so enthusiastic in the mid-1830s. Techniques that were transferable between Edinburgh and London proved to be less so between Edinburgh and Boston. Both sides had to make accommodation for the other, and Chambers certainly found themselves having to supply far more services—covers for the parts, press releases, instructions on using brass rules with plates—than they had envisaged when they agreed a price for the set of plates. The arrangement also brought home to Chambers the unfairness of a system that made it impossible for British publishers either to charge high prices for stereotype plates (since American publishers could always threaten to reprint from scratch) or to claim a royalty on actual sales (since American publishers did not recognize British copyrights). The only way Chambers could be sure of benefiting from American sales would be to persuade American booksellers and publishers to acquire their supplies from Edinburgh, as they started to do in the late 1840s (see chapter 16). Yet making Edinburgh responsible for producing copies of all the Chambers publications for audiences far beyond Scotland would require a more extensive, modern printing establishment.

Reaching an Overseas Market [ 87

Figure 7. This early photograph of Edinburgh’s old town, with St. Giles Cathedral visible on the skyline, was taken in 1854 or 1855 by Thomas Vernon Begbie. The premises of W. & R. Chambers, at 339 High Street, were directly opposite St. Giles: the tall, smoking chimney just below and left of the cathedral is that of Chambers’s steam engine, while the buildings above and below it are their editorial offices and production workshops. Courtesy of the Cavaye Collection of Thomas Begbie Prints, City of Edinburgh Museums and Galleries.

7

A Modern Printing Establishment

Although W. & R. Chambers were proud of their “proper system of publishing” in the 1830s, by the late 1840s they would reorganize it into its mature form. The ongoing success of Chambers’s Journal and the series of instructive tracts enabled William and Robert to invest substantial sums in the business, and by 1846 they would be the owners of one of the largest and most technologically advanced printing works in Edinburgh. In that year, they were able to print the entire run of the Journal in Edinburgh, and the London edition was discontinued. This centralization depended as much on the improved facilities for communication and the transport of freight that the railways were now providing (see chapter 8), as on the number of printing machines in Edinburgh. In the early 1850s, Chambers noted that it was now possible for them to “send much more of our wares from the Edinburgh centre into England than formerly.”1 A second consequence of their increased production capacity—and their confidence in its cost-effectiveness—was that they would be able to print bulk quantities for export to the highly competitive market of the United States (see chapter 16).

Expanding the Printing Establishment In the mid-1830s, Chambers had launched so many new projects—the Information for the People, the People’s Editions, and the Educational Course—that they were able to describe their printing machine as “never tiring in its arduous labours, and never stopping unless during the night and on Sundays, or when it happens to outstrip the compositors and stereotyper.”2 But [ 89

the unimaginable success of these projects, combined with the continuing slow growth of the Journal’s circulation, meant that the machine was in fact struggling to keep up with the demands placed on it. Chambers’s second printing machine was installed in early 1837, followed by another in February 1839 and yet another in August 1841. (They apparently acquired two more machines in the early 1840s, but no records survive of their purchase.) These new machines were two-cylinder perfectors, similar both to the Applegath & Cowper design and to the machine designed by Gunn back in 1833. Gunn’s machine was advertised “for sale” in June 1839, but appears to have ended up being refitted and retained by Chambers.3 In contrast to their earlier employment of Robert Gunn, Chambers bought their later machines from experienced engineers. One came from a London machine maker, Thomas Middleton, who had worked with Applegath.4 Another came from the Leith firm of Samuel & Hugh Norton, who had provided the steam engine that powered all these machines and who were routinely called in to install and repair the machines as well as the engine. The new machines were a major capital investment for Chambers— Middleton charged £400 for a machine, and Norton £300—and it is a clear sign of the success of the business that these improvements could be funded from ready money.5 Chambers had barely acquired their third printing machine in 1839 when they embarked on another purchasing campaign to acquire all the necessary equipment for a bindery. The early publications—the Journal and the Information for the People—had been printed as single sheets, folded, with a stitch through the spine, but the books of the Educational Course and the People’s Editions required more postproduction finishing. Multiple sheets had to be folded, collated, stacked, stitched together, pressed into a block, trimmed at the edges, and finally encased in a binding. These were all processes that Chambers hoped to bring under their own control. A hydraulic press, for compressing the blocks of pages before binding, came from Glasgow by canal and cost £135. A board-cutting machine and an arming press (for embossing patterns onto case bindings) cost a further £61 from a London machine maker, and Middleton was able to supply a secondhand screw press for £30.6 Thus, by 1840, the Chambers establishment included workshops for the composition of type, the casting of stereotype plates, steam-powered printing, and a bindery. The only major work that was still contracted out was the illustrations, both wood engraving and lithography; this remained the case even though the newer educational and instructive works made extensive use of diagrams, maps, and images. As the manufacturing side of the business expanded, so did the editorial department. In the beginning, William and Robert had written almost 90 ] Chapter Seven

all the contents of the Journal themselves. But as they—and especially William—became more occupied with the business, and as they added more and more new publications to their list, the brothers had to seek external contributors and authors. By 1840, they finally admitted that they could not handle all the editorial work themselves and hired their first “literary assistant.” Like William and Robert, Thomas Smibert came from the town of Peebles, and William described him as an “excellent young man” of “refined taste and correct habits.” He started on a salary of £180 a year and spent two years with Chambers before moving to the Scotsman newspaper. The fact that his successor was tempted from London with a starting salary of £300 suggests that the Chambers brothers were coming to appreciate the importance of good editorial assistance. That successor was William H. Wills, who later married William and Robert’s sister Janet and went on to work with Charles Dickens on Household Words.7 He, in turn, was replaced by the novelist Leitch Ritchie. In 1840, Chambers moved their editorial and business offices from Waterloo Place to 339 High Street, adjacent to the Roxburgh Close printing house and directly opposite St. Giles’s Cathedral (see fig. 7). Now that all their departments were on a single site, it became obvious how disorganized and poorly laid out that site was. High Street is a part of the “Royal Mile” that runs from Edinburgh Castle down the slope of the old volcanic plug toward the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The land drops away sharply on either side of High Street, and Roxburgh Close is one of many narrow alleys that provide a very steep shortcut to the lower ground level. (In the mid-nineteenth century, this lower level was being transformed into the Princes Street Gardens and the Waverley railway station.) The new Chambers editorial offices were up on High Street, while the various workshops were crammed in behind, with entrances on several levels down Roxburgh Close. The steepness of the ground and the existence of closely packed surrounding buildings would offer a challenge to any builder. In 1845, William and Robert Chambers pumped nearly the entire £10,000 profit of that year into their business, drawing barely £460 for their personal use.8 Between November 1844 and July 1845, masons remodeled the premises. The main aim of these extensive works was the creation of a new machine room, but it involved alterations to the foundry and the old machine room, and the demolition of at least one other building. Alterations were also made to the compositors’ gallery and the drying room. Chambers paid over £500 for the physical alterations to the buildings, a substantial amount that yet pales into insignificance against the costs of the machinery that was installed in the new building.9 The centerpiece of the new plant was a high-pressure beam engine built A Modern Printing Establishment [ 91

by Nortons for £210, including boiler and furnace.10 This new steam engine was rated at ten horsepower, five times more than the original engine. It was going to be used to power not only the existing six printing machines, but also four new cylinder perfecting machines from Middleton. The invoice for these machines, plus their accessories, plus the expense of shipping them from London, came to an enormous £1,585.11 The engine was bought in December 1844, and much of the masons’ work for January to April involved building it into the new premises. Middleton’s engineers came to Edinburgh to give a thorough overhaul to the old printing machines, and another of his men spent eight days at the end of May installing and testing the new machines.12 In mid-June, engineers from the Glasgow firm of Alexander More were on-site for two and a half days, constructing and testing a pair of new hydraulic presses for the bindery.13 The local blacksmith Daniel Robb was frequently called in to provide nuts, bolts, levers, and screws. He made new components for the presses being installed by “the Glasgow men,” and in May, he was paid to hand his entire workshop over to Norton’s men while they installed the new machines.14 Quite how Chambers’s Journal and the other publications continued to be printed during these six months of highly disruptive work is not at all clear from the surviving documents. It is possible that Chambers had to contract it out to other printers in Edinburgh. But once the work was done, Chambers were the proud owners of a most impressive printing plant. They wrote in January 1845 that we write at present in a huge building of four stories, flanked by a powerful steam-engine, and with the noise of ten printing machines continually sounding in our ears. . . . A hundred and twenty persons are required for all the duties which proceed in this large structure, though these have exclusively a regard to works edited by ourselves. Upwards of a quarter of a million of printed sheets leave the house each week.15 This is the building that appears in the photograph taken by Thomas Begbie (see fig. 7). Chambers owned all the property from the engine house uphill to High Street and engaged in concerned correspondence with the railway company about their creation of a new access route to Waverley Station down the side of Chambers’s property.16 Those construction works can be clearly seen in Begbie’s photograph, to the left of Chambers’s site.

Paternalistic Employers The building works doubled the size of the Chambers premises and also led them to take on more employees. By late 1845, their staff of compositors, 92 ] Chapter Seven

foundrymen, boys to tend the machines, overseers, women to fold the sheets, binders, warehousemen, clerks, and accountants had grown to around 150 people, and W. & R. Chambers had clearly become substantial employers.17 Although neither brother appears to have been a particularly active Christian, they were well aware that their role carried substantial moral responsibilities.18 William Chambers had always been interested in visiting factories, as well as schools and prisons, to inspect their regulation, and over the years, Chambers’s Journal had carried numerous articles urging improved conditions in factories, paternalistic attitudes from employers, and self-improvement in the workers. Cynics might argue that the firm was contributing to the general trend of deskilling the workforce since its extensive use of machines replaced skilled pressmen with boys to feed the paper and an overseer. And it is true that had Chambers used hand presses instead of printing machines, they would have needed far more men. But they had never run a hand-press establishment and believed that the needs of their Journal made it impossible that they should do so. From their point of view, rather than taking employment from skilled men, they were providing a considerable amount of additional employment, albeit employment that required different skills. William Chambers was actively involved in various schemes to promote the education and improvement of the working classes, both in Edinburgh and in his hometown of Peebles. In 1844, he subscribed to the Edinburgh Public Baths, later becoming one of its managers when he helped pay off its debts.19 He made generous donations of books to the literary institution in Peebles and, in 1859, paid for the construction of a public library, museum, and lecture hall in the town.20 Unsurprisingly, then, William extended his interests in factory reform and paternalism to his employees. W. & R. Chambers ran a lending library for its workers; a teacher was hired to give lessons to the boys in their employ; and the firm supported the efforts of two of its staff who offered religious instruction to the younger members of the firm on Sunday evenings. By 1845, all employees were getting Saturday afternoons off, which they regarded as “a great privilege.”21 The most prominent and public illustration of their paternalism was the annual soirée for their workers and families, which the firm started to run in summer 1838. These events were intended to unite “employers and employed in a friendly social meeting, with a view to the cultivation of a good spirit between the parties.” The workmen brought their wives and families, as did the Chambers brothers themselves. The presence of family members helped to ensure that the events did not become riotous, as other public soirées in Edinburgh had apparently become. Only light refreshments were provided, and no intoxicating liquor.22 The 1840 soirée, on July 6, involved 180 guests, A Modern Printing Establishment [ 93

who were provided with twelve gallons of lemonade, as well as tea and coffee, eight dozen oranges, and strawberries and cream. There was music from a six-piece band, and worthy speeches from employers, employees, and invited guests.23 The early soirées had been held in the Chambers premises, but by 1845, they had become such large events—there were 300 guests in 1845—that they had to move to a public room in Edinburgh. In 1847, an American journalist provided a rare outsider’s description of the Chambers establishment. The writer and his wife spent a fortnight in Scotland and the north of England, and their experiences were reported in the New York–based magazine the Literary World. Despite a late arrival in Edinburgh, the American tourists set out with enthusiasm to do the sights, starting with St. Giles’s cathedral, the palace of Holyroodhouse, and the Castle. The typical tourist route would have continued with the parliament house, the law courts, or the advocates’ library, but these literary travelers paid their next visit to “Chambers’s printing and binding establishment.” As well as reporting on the sheer quantity of printed paper being produced every week, the Americans commended the establishment for being “admirably systematized and kept clean and well ventilated to a degree worthy of imitation.”24 William Chambers must have been pleased with this appreciation of his efforts. By 1850, the Chambers establishment had acquired a widespread reputation for its size, its high level of mechanization, and its organization. In that year, the Literary World carried an article comparing the current state of the publishing trade in Britain, Europe, and America. The author was Frederick Saunders, a son of the London firm Saunders & Otley who had been living and working in New York since 1836. From his vantage point at a distance, Saunders counted only five British firms worth mentioning in his global survey. The first four were in London: Longman & Co., described as the largest publishers in the world (in terms of capital invested); and John Murray, Richard Bentley, and Henry Colburn, the “aristocratic” literary publishers. The fifth was none other than W. & R. Chambers, on whom Saunders lavished exaggerated praise, describing an establishment “eleven stories high,” where “some five hundred persons” were “employed in its several departments of type-setting, stereotyping, printing, and binding,” and where the presses “throw off 150,000 whole sheets a day.” Despite the inaccuracies and exaggeration, American readers would have been left with a striking impression of the size and modernity of the new Chambers’s establishment, which was “considered unrivalled” for its “extent and completeness.”25 It was this extensive, complete, and modern establishment that enabled Chambers to survive the increased competition in the field of cheap litera94 ] Chapter Seven

ture (see chapter 10) and to centralize their British operations in Edinburgh. From 1846, the London edition of the Journal was discontinued, indicating not just Chambers’s increased production capacity but also the emergence of the railways as a new option for freight distribution (see chapter 8). And, as new opportunities for transatlantic business emerged, Chambers’s modern establishment would prove itself to be competitive with the best of its American rivals (see part 3).

Coda to Part I So far, we have examined why and how W. & R. Chambers adopted the new processes of stereotyping and steam printing, at a time and in a place where those techniques were rare. As we have seen, and as often happens in the history of technology, Chambers adopted the processes for one purpose and then experimented with applying them to other purposes: stereotyping helped with the production of back numbers, but it also speeded up production and simplified the problems of national distribution; steam printing was originally intended for the high-circulation, high-frequency Journal, but was later applied to instructive tracts and entire books. At least some of these innovative uses sprang from the fact that Chambers so quickly took over the production of their works. Rather than subcontracting their printing, they invested substantial amounts of capital into their own print works, and this gave them a sharp interest in making best use of their equipment and skilled staff. Instead of remaining under separate control, the new technical processes became part of Chambers’ business system, to be integrated and adapted to work smoothly alongside the editorial, philanthropic, and commercial elements of that system. This is not to say that only those publishers who undertook their own printing could make a commercial success of cheap print: some publishers certainly developed close working relationships with their printers. For instance, Charles Knight worked closely with William Clowes on the SDUK publications. Yet even though Knight was very interested in the new processes Clowes was using and often visited the workshop to see them in action, Clowes was running a large enterprise with many other customers to satisfy. He was never going to organize his workshop solely around the needs of one particular customer, in the way that the Chambers print shop could be organized for maximum efficiency around its one customer. Two themes have run through this part, which highlight the distinctiveness of Chambers’s use of the new processes: geography and philanthropy. Studies of the British book trade often focus on London, but Edinburgh before the railways was far away from both the equipment and expertise of A Modern Printing Establishment [ 95

London, and the access to the substantial English reading audience that was provided by London wholesalers and distributors. This geographical distance meant that Chambers’s decision to convert to the new processes was more difficult and more daring; but, in turn, the problems of reaching readers across the nation inspired them to use stereotyping in a new way. Philanthropy is the other key theme, because it was Chambers’s sense of (secular) mission—their commitment to popular education—that drove their determination to produce print cheaply and to produce print that was instructive and improving. Publishers aiming at a more affluent sector of the market could in theory have used the new processes to reduce their production costs without changing the high prices of their books, but there was the question of scale. Steam printing, for instance, was cheaper than hand printing only on longer runs—but were there sufficient additional customers willing to pay the high prices? Most of the traditional literary publishers took a conservative approach to this problem in the 1830s and opted to stick with their tried-and-tested strategy of modest print runs resulting in high prices intended for a known market. But Chambers, Knight, the SDUK, and the religious tract and Bible societies had a commitment to reaching far wider audiences, and they knew that lower prices were essential to make print accessible. The new technical processes were ideal for the mass market: they enabled cheaper production costs, as long as print runs were high. The mission for popular education gave all these publishers a reason to be early adopters of the new processes. Among them, Chambers stands out for taking the techniques in-house and then making innovative use of them. Of course, neither Chambers nor their rivals in the market for instructive and improving literature invented cheap print. The publishers of ballads and chapbooks had done that long before, without the help of steam printing or stereotyping. What the new processes allowed Chambers to do was to make respectable, improving, instructive print (with its higher literary and editorial costs) available as cheaply as the older forms of popular literature. Knight and the SDUK shared the same aims, but it was the Chambers firm that was able to demonstrate that it was not merely possible but possible to do with profit—and that, I believe, has much to do with the Scottish firm’s tight integration of the production processes into its business system and with William Chambers’s personal business acumen. By demonstrating that there was a substantial market for respectable cheap print, and that that market could be supplied on profitable commercial terms, Chambers were instrumental in paving the way for the wider variety and greater quantity of cheap print that emerged in Britain in the late 1840s and 1850s.

96 ] Chapter Seven

II

Railways and Competition

By 1850, as steam-powered printing machines and their associated techniques were becoming more widespread in the British book trade, W. & R. Chambers were already highly experienced in their use. As we have seen, the ways in which Chambers used those techniques changed over time, as their business faced new opportunities and challenges. We might expect that the expansion of railway networks and steamship services in the 1840s would offer particularly substantial opportunities for improving communications and overcoming some of the geographical constraints that Chambers had originally faced. Certainly, the railways made communication far easier and ultimately enabled Chambers to break off their longstanding arrangement with William Orr, their London agent. The possibilities for distribution of publications also changed substantially, though railway speed did come at a price. Unlike Chambers’s print workshops, railways were under the control of companies with no particular interest in or commitment to the book trade. Chambers had no unique access to or control over the railway network, and had to fit their operations as best they could around the services offered by the companies. The rise of passenger transport also created new facilities for marketing cheap print to travelers through the railway station bookstall. Industrial printing technologies made it possible to produce respectable cheap print on a large scale, but the challenge had always been finding sufficient purchasers. For Chambers, that challenge was partly geographical, but it was also socioeconomic, as they sought to target people who were not habitual book purchasers. In many ways, the railway [ 97

bookstall should have been the distribution opportunity that Chambers had long wished for, a means of marketing cheap print to an audience that remained beyond the reach of traditional bookshops. But the railway bookstalls threw up new challenges for Chambers and all the early pioneers of instructive and improving cheap print, principally in the form of new competition. This part investigates how W. & R. Chambers negotiated the opportunities and challenges of the railways, and how the stimulus of railways encouraged other publishers to adopt the mass-market strategies that Chambers had developed.

98 ] Part II

Figure 8. A train from Glasgow arrives in Edinburgh, under the shadow of the Castle. Detail from a lithograph by C. J. Greenwood, 1851. Reproduced by permission of Capital Collections, Edinburgh.

8

The Coming of the Railways

Contemporary commentators took it for granted that transportation was essential to “social advancement” and that the railway had resulted in more progress in “facilitating and expediting intercommunication” than had occurred “from the creation of the world to the middle of the last century.”1 In 1859, Robert Chambers drew attention to some of these improvements in “travelling and communicating intelligence.” In his youth, he recalled, “For travelling between London and Edinburgh there was a daily mail-coach, carrying four persons inside, and taking three days on the journey. . . . You had the alternative of a Leith smack, which might not arrive in the Thames for three weeks.” By 1832, the mail coaches were making the journey in forty-three and a half hours, but in 1859, Robert could write that the railway now performed the journey “with unfailing certainty, in ten and a half hours; and . . . a letter written in London at dinner-time, is in Edinburgh next day at breakfast-time.”2 The American publisher George Putnam experienced the old mode of travel when he arrived in Edinburgh by stagecoach in early summer 1836. He had plenty of time to admire the view. Twelve miles outside town, he first saw “the dim outline of Arthur’s Seat.” A short while later, as his coach turned a corner, “the city suddenly comes in View, and a splendid view it is. On the right, the Frith [sic] of Forth, studded with sails and steamboats; Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags flank the city on the north-east, and its strong hold, the castle, on the opposite side. . . . Nothing can be more imposing than the approach to Edinburgh.”3 He was let down “before the granite buildings of Waterloo-Place,” not far from W. & R. Chambers’s office. Had Putnam been visiting [ 101

twenty years later, the North British Railway would have rushed him past the distant view, before forcing him underground for the final approach to North Bridge Station. The first public steam-operated railway in Britain was the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened in 1830. London was joined to the English network, via a line to Birmingham, in 1837. Edinburgh and Glasgow were connected to each other (but not to the English lines) in 1842. The Liverpool & Manchester’s directors had originally specified that the locomotive that worked their line should be able to travel at 10 mph.4 Robert Stephenson was confident that his Rocket could go twice as fast, but the directors feared that high speeds might alarm the public and specified a speed similar to that of a modern stagecoach on good roads. Despite these early worries, mechanical engineers were soon priding themselves on designing bigger, faster, more powerful and more efficient locomotives. By the 1850s, British trains traveled at average speeds (including stops) of around 25 mph, with top speeds of around 40 mph on standard gauge tracks and almost 60 mph on the broad-gauge Great Western Railway. The midcentury experience of the speed of railway travel is well illustrated by Charles Dickens’s trip from London to Paris in August 1851. He traveled with the South Eastern Railway, in conjunction with a steam packet company in Folkestone and the Compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord. Dickens’s account of the journey juxtaposed the speed and noise of the train (“Whirr! . . . Whizz! . . . Rattle! . . . Shock! . . . Bur-r-r!”) with the ease enjoyed by the passengers, who had “but to sit here thinking as idly as I please, and be whisked away.” In contrast to Putnam, Dickens barely saw the views that passed rapidly by his window, recording instead a succession of objects: “Now a wood, now a bridge, now a landscape, now a cutting.” When he arrived, just eleven hours after leaving London, he felt “dazed by my flight” and incredulous that he could be walking the Rue de Rivoli when he had been at London Bridge station that very morning.5

Railway Cargo Although passenger transport had the higher profile and generated, until the early 1850s, more income, most early railways had been built with the expectation of carrying freight.6 The earliest railways were built in and near collieries where—even when horse powered—they proved their worth in moving heavy goods from the mine to a river, canal, or seaport. The early public railway tracks were laid in areas where there was capital, industry, existing expertise and experience, and a clear expectation of commercial benefit. Thus, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway linked a major textile manufacturing 102 ] Chapter Eight

town with its nearest deep-sea port, and George Putnam recorded seeing trains loaded with cotton and coal while traveling to Manchester in 1836.7 Railways were being built in a highly competitive transport context, and their promoters had to overcome opposition from entrenched interests. In Lancashire, for instance, many local investors had shares in the Liverpool & Manchester canal and feared for their dividends if a railway began to compete for heavy goods traffic. Elsewhere, the major coaching firms already offered fast daily services for mails and passengers and did not welcome the prospect of an even faster competitor. And even if the railway promoters could overcome such protests, they still had to convince local landowners to part with their land, which was not just a matter of agreeing to a price but also of choosing a route that would make the proposed incursion as unobtrusive as possible. Nevertheless, the railways spread, and by 1850, Britain had 5,000 miles of track in operation, and another 4,500 approved for construction.8 But although passengers would quickly adopt railway travel for its speed and convenience, business users concerned by cost kept a close eye on the alternatives. Speed was clearly the railways’ main selling point. As Robert Chambers’s reminiscences made clear, a three-day journey from Edinburgh to London had become ten hours, and for certain types of cargo, that speed was valuable. The Post Office began using the railway when the Liverpool & Manchester opened, and mail trains usually replaced mail coaches as soon as new lines opened up.9 By 1840, mail from London was reaching Preston (then the furthest north point on the London & North Western Railway) in 10 hours 46 minutes, where it had previously taken a day by mail coach.10 Railway companies ran mail trains overnight to enable next-day delivery between major post towns, and this speed, combined with the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840, transformed Britain’s postal service. With the Penny Post, letter writers paid the postage in advance, and the flat-rate charge for any destination in Britain made payment simple. In 1839, 82 million items were carried by the Royal Mail; by 1844, that figure had risen to 243 million; and by 1849, it had become 338 million.11 Letter writing became a normal and usual aspect of daily life for most of the population; even poorer families could hope for letters from relatives away in the big city. The Royal Mail services carried only letters and stamped periodicals, so other business users needing rapid freight transport had to deal directly with the railway companies. Time-critical daily and weekly magazines and papers were one of the most obvious cargoes that would benefit from railway speed, but although the stamp duty allowed these periodicals to travel on the Royal Mail services with no further payment, newspaper distributors often chose to pay for their own rail services. Newspaper publishers had been using disThe Coming of the Railways [ 103

tribution agents since the start of the century, and these agents competed with each other to secure the contracts of the major newspapers. One of the biggest firms was that of William Henry Smith, which would later become synonymous with railway bookstalls (see chapter 11). Smith’s reputation was built on speed and a determination to be “first with the news,” which made the firm an early user of the railways. The mail coaches and, later, the mail trains usually left London in the evening and traveled overnight, meaning that they left long before the earliest editions of the morning papers were available. Country subscribers either ordered the London evening papers or accepted that their morning paper would be a day late. From the 1820s, Smith had begun to send consignments on the early morning stagecoach services run by private firms to get newspapers into the country ahead of the Royal Mail. By 1838, Smith was arranging with the railway companies for special newspaper trains to leave early in the morning. Using these coaches and trains instead of the Royal Mail increased the cost but meant that readers in northern England could get the Times on the day of publication.12 Smith’s son, William Henry II, became his firm’s main contact with the railway companies from the 1840s onward. In particular, he worked closely with the London & North Western Railway, becoming personal friends with its manager, Mark Huish. Together the two men created publicity stunts that benefited both companies. In 1847, for instance, Smith hired a special train to carry the result of a parliamentary debate to Glasgow. It left Euston at 5:30 a.m. and reached the end of the west coast railway line at Beattock (in the Scottish borders) at 2:05 p.m. The newspapers traveled the last 60 miles by horse power and reached Glasgow at 8 p.m., just fourteen and a half hours after leaving London. The following year, Smith and the London & North Western Railway used the east coast route (which was closer to completion) to deliver the newspapers to Glasgow in 10 hours 22 minutes, at an average speed of 49 mph.13 This was about a quarter of the time taken by the mail coach. The express services of W. H. Smith and his competitors were intended for publishers of newspapers, not books. In 1848, the Post Office introduced a “book post” service in which parcels were charged 6d. per pound weight, but had to be left unsealed so that officials could check that they did indeed contain books.14 The service enabled individual purchasers to order books from publishers, but it was not designed for publishers’ large-scale distribution needs. Publishers continued to make alternative arrangements, which usually meant negotiating with the railway or steamship companies. Until the 1880s, the book post was the only significant exception to regulations that limited the Post Office to carrying letters and stamped periodicals.15 Thus, publishers were not alone in having bulky cargo that needed al104 ] Chapter Eight

ternative transport arrangements. Railway charters required operators to act as “common carriers,” transporting any and all types of freight (though each company could set its own scheme of charges). Businesses that needed bulky cargos transported over inland routes were unsurprisingly quick to use the services of the railway companies. Although the major post roads had good surfaces, common roads were often poorly maintained and might have ruts “four feet deep, and floating with mud.”16 In 1850, well-known science writer and lecturer Dionysius Lardner reported that railway companies charged from 3d. to 4d. per ton per mile for regular freight. He contrasted this with wagon haulage in the 1760s, which had cost 14d. to 15d. per ton per mile for a much slower service.17 Railways could carry greater bulk than wagons, and their well-engineered tracks enabled them to move swiftly over difficult terrain. However, on routes where there was competition from water transport—whether coastal steamships or canals—railways had to fight harder. Businesses that did not specifically need railway speed might well prefer to save money by ordering raw materials by canal or dispatching their goods by steamer.

Passenger Travel For passenger travel, the railways won the competition wherever they opened. In 1847, the British railways were carrying 139,400 passengers per day, for an average journey of about fifteen miles, and the companies had a combined income of over £8.5 million a year.18 That year, Chambers’s Journal attempted to explain the profits of the railway companies by suggesting that “benevolence toward the public is the root of all trading success.” The writer of the front-page article (probably Robert Chambers) argued that “the most prosperous concerns” were always those that served “the public needs in every available way” rather than aiming merely for profits. Providing some sort of public service, at a cheap price, was the surest way of gaining public support and making profits. Although Chambers did not say so, this was, of course, the modus operandi of his own company, though its public service was education rather than transport. In contrast to the “uncertainty, the narrow accommodations, the slowness, of the comparatively expensive stage-coach, with its barbarian attendants requiring to be bribed into a rough civility,” railways offered “frequent trains, always sure of giving accommodation . . . , certainty and rapidity of transit, and the rationality and courtesy of its officials.” According to Chambers, the public could see the benefits of railways, and made use of them accordingly.19 Much of the interest of Dickens’s account of his Paris journey in 1851 lay in the way he caricatured his fellow travelers and described their reactions The Coming of the Railways [ 105

to the journey and to each other. He described a “demented” Englishman who was unfamiliar with railway travel, constantly worried that his luggage would be lost, and was nearly left behind at one of the refreshment stops.20 Yet for all Dickens’s superiority, this traveler deserves our sympathy: railways must have been deeply confusing and unfamiliar to many of their early users, whether they were experienced travelers or members of the urban working classes on their first trip to the seaside. The British railways in the midnineteenth century were not a “system” in any planned or centralized sense. Each separate stretch of line was owned and run by its own company. Each company had its own style of doing things, ranging from rules about luggage to the outfitting of passenger accommodation. Passengers traveling long distances might use the lines of multiple companies: they would have had to change trains at breaks of gauge and, prior to the establishment of the Railway Clearing House in 1842, would have had to buy separate tickets for each section of their journey. Lardner measured one aspect of this unfamiliarity through the gruesome statistics on railway accidents compiled in his 1850 book Railway Economy. Passengers were regularly injured when they misjudged speed while trying to join or leave moving trains or failing to bring their heads or arms back inside the windows before reaching bridges and tunnels. Passengers also forgot that they had no means of communicating with the driver; a train driver would not wait for passengers who decided “to leap from a train to recover their hats when blown off or accidentally dropped.”21 A passenger on a stagecoach might well be able to jump safely in pursuit of his hat and shout to the driver to wait, but on a train, the hundreds of passengers became part of the machine, compelled by railway regulations. The design of British railway compartments displayed the innate connections to the older mode of transport. Railway carriages were divided into stagecoach-sized compartments with no connections between them. While traveling, passengers were isolated in small groups, just as in a stagecoach, and it was the dynamics of the small group that provided the interest in Dickens’s journey to Paris, just as it did on stagecoach journeys. Different grades of accommodation continued to be available. The “outside” seats on top of the stagecoach were cheaper than “inside” seats because they were exposed to wind and rain, as were the unglazed third-class carriages in the early days of railways. But while “outside” travel had been a fact of life for many male travelers, the bigger capacity of trains meant that third-class travel was used only by those who could really not afford to pay for something better. Like stagecoaches, railway carriages had no artificial light, and passengers had to bring their own rugs and cloaks to keep warm. Food could be purchased only at a station, and passengers often complained about the 106 ] Chapter Eight

rush and the crush of refreshment stops, when entire train-loads of people had only twenty minutes to get to the buffet, order their food or drink, wait for it to cool, and eat it. Dickens’s companions ate sandwiches, pork pies, sausages, and gooseberries during their wait at Folkestone. Lavatory facilities were available only at these refreshment stops. Various printed guides were available to help passengers negotiate the railways, the most important of which were the “time tables” (a new English word coined around 1840). The tables listed the times of departure from each station on the line, the distances, and fares. With so many different railway companies, trying to make a long journey could involve complicated investigations of routes and connections across several different time tables. In 1847, Ralph Waldo Emerson reported back to America that “every man in England carries a little book in his pocket called ‘Bradshaws Guide.’ ”22 This was the Railway Companion compiled by Manchester engraver George Bradshaw, updated monthly to keep up with the frequent changes made by the railway companies. Punch poked fun at the incomprehensible Bradshaw tables, and in 1862, The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book of Hints needed several pages to explain its “intricacies.”23 Yet Chambers’s Journal was full of praise for the amount of valuable information “compressed into the smallest possible compass, and bound up in a neat cloth cover.”24 The very existence of that Handy Book suggests that travelers needed more assistance negotiating the railways, though it was actually one of the few books to dedicate itself to the topic. In the early 1850s, A. & C. Black added a page of “Hints to all railway travellers” to the front of their bestselling guidebooks to England and Wales. Black offered eminently practical advice, such as “Be at the station some minutes before the time,” to allow for dealing with luggage, purchasing tickets and finding seats; trunks and cases should be clearly labelled and deposited in the luggage van (and paid for, if weighing more than 56lbs); carpet-bags or hat-boxes, with items necessary during the journey or immediately after it, could be taken into the carriage, so long as they were “not so bulky as to annoy your fellow-passengers.” “Neither smoking nor dogs are allowed in the carriages,” but children under ten years were carried at half-price, and female attendants would be available “at the refreshment station, to wait on ladies and children.” Passengers were urged to take care “to prevent the necessity of your leaving the carriage before you reach the refreshment station,” a delicate reminder about the lack of lavatories.25 One essential item for all railway travelers was a book or newspaper. The Handy Book suggested it could be used to claim and retain a seat, before being turned into “an excellent weapon” to fend off unwanted conversation with “impertinent, intrusive, and inquisitive” fellow passengers. These pracThe Coming of the Railways [ 107

tical purposes aside, the key advantage of the printed word was in providing “an exhaustless fund of recreation” for the period of leisure enforced by the railway carriage.26 As the New York Norton’s Literary Gazette admitted, “there is nothing so convenient, so respectable, and so universal, for such an occupation, as reading.” It regarded reading while traveling as a “modern innovation” that “belongs to the age of steam exclusively.”27 In earlier times, books had been too large and expensive to be carried while traveling, while the condition of the roads and the close camaraderie of the confined space made reading an unlikely activity for the stagecoach traveler. Although British trains were no better lit and equally confined, the far wider variety of people who used the railways raised anxieties about how to behave with complete strangers. If you could not risk talking to your companions, and the scenery passed the window too swiftly, then you had either to sleep or read.28 It is difficult to know how pleasant an undertaking this was. The British Quarterly Review complained in 1855 that it was “an unaccountable popular delusion, that it is possible and pleasant to read in a railway-carriage,” while the Handy Book urged those wishing to try the experiment to choose books with “large and clear” type and to stop at the first hint of “pain and weariness in the eyes.” It also recommended wearing “eye-preservers” (green or black spectacles to protect the eyes from dust, ashes, and cold draughts) and purchasing a portable lamp designed specially for reading in a railway carriage.29 But against this pessimism, Norton’s Literary Gazette claimed that “the easy motion” of the railway carriages and the provision of “wellcushioned and well-lighted seats” made it possible not merely to read but even to write while traveling.30 This might be a particular advantage of the design of American railway cars and their slower speeds, but Anthony Trollope is known to have written several of his novels on a portable desk while traveling around Britain on Post Office business in 1850s.31 And the Handy Book reported that at least half of all train passengers read books and newspapers, and admitted that “we are not aware of the existence of any national ophthalmic disease.”32 In 1844, Chambers’s Journal had made an explicit comparison between railways and instructive publishing. In an article in February, the Journal was complaining about the high fares on railways. This was a common complaint that year, only partially salved by the new legislation that forced companies to provide at least one train a day at the new “parliamentary” fare of a penny a mile. Chambers’s Journal expressed surprise that the directors of railway companies had not yet realized a basic fact, “so obvious to private comprehension”: that markets expand as price gets lower. The writer reckoned that 108 ] Chapter Eight

halving the price might increase passengers one hundred-fold, and backed up its claim by referring to its own circulation: “if raised to fourpence, its circulation would probably sink to a thousand, and then it would not be worth anybody’s while to issue it.” Chambers’s Journal was accusing railway directors of thinking like the eminent publishers, and relying on a small number of customers to pay high prices, rather than embracing the mass market.33 By the late 1840s, both railway companies and publishers had changed their attitude. Fares had come down, and cheap publications were far more widely available—especially for railway travelers. This newly competitive context would create significant challenges for W. & R. Chambers, but the railways also brought positive opportunities for the firm to be in closer contact with their distant agents and to modify their distribution arrangements.

The Coming of the Railways [ 109

Figure 9. On January 5, 1852, William Orr responded to W. & R. Chambers’s suggestions for the future organization of their London business. This is the first page of a lengthy six-page letter. Courtesy of the Chambers family and National Library of Scotland.

9

Centralizing Business in Edinburgh

When Chambers’s Journal was first launched, William Chambers had been dependent on agents to manage its distribution in areas beyond the Scottish lowlands (see chapter 3). These arrangements with publishers in London, Liverpool, Aberdeen, Belfast, and Dublin were advantageous to a newcomer, but by the 1840s, Chambers was beginning to appreciate the disadvantages of relying on agents he barely knew (or had never even met) and whose activities he could not oversee on a daily basis. It was easy for agents to be upbeat in their letters while concealing poor sales, bad debts, or general inactivity. Getting money out of a recalcitrant agent was difficult when a stern letter could simply be ignored. By the late 1850s, W. & R. Chambers had dispensed with almost all of their agents within Britain, consolidating the management and control of the firm in the head office at 339 High Street, Edinburgh. This was the organizational counterpoint to the expansion of their printing plant discussed in chapter 7. As with printing, they were trying to get as much control over their business as possible, and they were able to do so because of the improvements in communications and transportation brought by the railways.

Managing Distant Agents Whenever possible, William and Robert Chambers clearly preferred to do business in person, finding it easier to exchange views, discuss, negotiate, and compromise than in a prolonged correspondence. For instance, their surviving correspondence [ 111

with authors frequently refers to personal conversations, either confirming arrangements already discussed or seeking further clarification. The fact that the brothers were so often able to meet authors in person implies that they must have been regular visitors to London, even before the completion of the railway line. For instance, in late September 1846, William Chambers wrote daily letters—sometimes twice daily—to Robert on his progress in dealing with the financial affairs of William Orr, their London agent. He was also meeting authors and expanding his acquaintance among the London book trade.1 During the mid-1850s, Robert and younger brother David both lived in London, but remained in regular postal and personal contact with Edinburgh. By then, the ten-hour rail journey meant that going to London—or back to Edinburgh—for a few days at a time had become a practical possibility. The enhanced ease of personal travel also helped publishers to manage their regional agents and their network of retail booksellers. From the start, Chambers had kept their connections advised of their latest publications by sending copies of their trade catalog, the list of new publications, and appropriate publicity material. By the 1840s, they and their agents were employing “commercial travelers” to make personal calls on existing and potential contacts in provincial towns all over Britain and Ireland.2 The arrival of the railways raised expectations about how many visits such travelers could make and how extensive an area they could cover. Chambers’s competitor, George Routledge, would become infamous for using the railways to make his sales pitches in person. It was, apparently, “no uncommon sight” to see him “conducting his affairs with booksellers still in their night-caps,” because he had arrived on an early morning train and wanted to catch the next train on.3 During the 1850s, a Mr. Roberts was one of the travelers for W. & R. Chambers. He had originally worked in the English midlands, but by 1857, his route had expanded to include the northeast of Scotland, much to the disapproval of Lewis Smith, Chambers’s long-standing Aberdeen agent.4 Roberts carried with him a stock of trade catalogs—that is, lists of Chambers publications giving both the expected retail price and the discounted price to the trade—as well as samples of the publications that Chambers most wanted to promote. He visited existing customers to collect outstanding payments and take new orders for publications; he also called on new booksellers to persuade them to stock Chambers publications. Where Chambers had once formed unique arrangements with just one bookseller in each town, in an age of increasing competition, it seemed advisable to contact as many booksellers as possible—and Roberts paid calls on several booksellers in each town he visited. He reported back to the London office every two working days, and letters were sent to wait for him at a hotel in his next 112 ] Chapter Nine

destination. For instance, in early 1854, Roberts was touring the midlands. On Monday, January 16, he was in Northampton, famed for its shoe factories, and based at the George Hotel. A fortnight later, he spent several days in Derby, sixty-five miles to the north, in the heartland of the industrial revolution, and by Monday, February 6, he had reached the steel city of Sheffield. He then turned southward again, visiting the farming town of Uttoxeter and the industrial city of Wolverhampton. He reached the Talbot Hotel in Stourbridge (famous for its glass) on Friday, February 17. He traveled well over two hundred miles that month, and what is striking is not his average speed, because he spent several days in each town, but the apparent ease with which he moved from one town to another and the fact that his correspondence kept up with him.5 Cities and towns that were linked by the railways had next-day postal deliveries, which meant that a reply could be expected just two days after the original letter, rather than taking at least a week. The increased speed and frequency of correspondence enabled Chambers to keep a closer watch on the activities of their agents. Correspondence with agents revolved around two main topics: promoting new publications and settling payment for stock sold. Both areas had plenty of potential for misunderstanding, willful or otherwise. Chambers produced publicity material to help (and encourage) their agents to promote new publications. A package of posters or handbills would be accompanied by a covering letter explaining when the new work would appear, urging particular efforts, and setting down the terms on which the agent himself (as against the ordinary retail bookseller) would be supplied. The agent was then expected to do his utmost to increase trade for Chambers in his particular area, perhaps by sending out prospectuses by mail or by personal visits to explain the merits of new publications to individual booksellers. For instance, in September 1854, Chambers wrote to James McGlashan, the Scottish partner in William Curry Jr. & Co. who had succeeded to that firm’s Dublin business, announcing that they had just sent him “per this Evening’s Rail” (i.e., railway to Glasgow, for the steamer to Dublin), 12,500 copies of the prospectus for their forthcoming publications. They asked that 2,500 copies be inserted in the next issue of the Dublin University Magazine, but left the use of the remaining 10,000 entirely to McGlashan’s discretion.6 Although the Dublin agents seem to have coexisted happily with McComb of Belfast, competition between agents with adjacent territories needed to be controlled to avoid damaging the interests of W. & R. Chambers. Chambers had realized the dangers as early as 1832, when they found it necessary to persuade all five Glasgow agents to sign an agreement not to release copies Centralizing Business in Edinburgh [ 113

of the latest Journal issue before a specified time.7 An individual agent might increase his own sales by being the first to have the Journal available, but such tactics would redistribute the sales in Glasgow rather than increasing them. Chambers wanted an efficient nationwide system, with clearly defined responsibilities for each region. This would make it simple for retail booksellers and individual customers to know whom to deal with, and should ensure that each region received the full attention of an agent. The agents, on the other hand, simply wanted to increase the number of Chambers’s publications they sold. This would improve their standing in Edinburgh, by making them look active and reliable, and benefited them financially since they earned a small commission on all sales to retail booksellers. In the 1840s the problems with the English agents, William Orr in London and George Philip in Liverpool, became apparent on a grander scale. Philip had an important role as supervisor of Chambers’s overseas business passing through the port of Liverpool, but Chambers regarded Orr as responsible for the English trade in general. In late 1848, they discovered that Philip was clearly intruding on Orr’s business by supplying booksellers not just in nearby Manchester, but in Hull on the east coast and in London itself. Philip’s actions did not benefit Chambers, since they merely moved business from Orr to Philip, and they had the severe disadvantage of confusing the provincial booksellers. In December 1848, Chambers remonstrated with Philip, complaining that “the present ill assorted system” was causing them great “vexation of mind.” They warned him that things had almost reached the stage where they would have to decide to “supply either you or him alone, for to supply both, leads to a degree of exasperation, whatever be the consequences, we are not inclined to endure.” Philip was instructed to limit his activities to “Liverpool and its immediate neighbourhood, also Wales and the Isle of Man.” Otherwise, Chambers assured him that they would terminate his agency “at whatever pain to our feeling, or loss of sales.” And this was what happened. In 1850, Philip was again cautioned against supplying London booksellers, and shortly thereafter, he disappeared from the Chambers correspondence.8 The other key topic of communication with agents—and focus of much anxiety—was money. The office in Edinburgh kept track of how many copies of each publication were sent to the firm’s agents and on what basis. Publications sent “to order” were usually those requested by customers, which had to be paid for directly. Publications held as “stock” were held in the shop of the agent and paid for only when sold. Periodicals were usually sent to order, but books were more likely to be held as stock. Agents were allowed only a certain amount of stock—Orr in London had the largest allowance— and Chambers kept track of who held what, while agents kept track of what 114 ] Chapter Nine

they sold. Each quarter, Chambers and their agents compared their statements of account. Once the lists of stock held, stock sold, and publications ordered had been reconciled—and all of this done long distance by correspondence—Chambers could expect payment to be transmitted, less whatever discounts had been offered to the agents. William Chambers made it a point of honor to pay the firm’s own debts in cash, but he followed standard business practice by accepting paper payments, in the form of bills or promissory notes due at three or six months. A bill was usually drawn on a bank, whereas a promissory note was simply an individual’s promise to pay, but both could circulate in the commercial world far beyond the parties to their original creation and have their value renegotiated at each transaction. Thus, accepting a bill or note meant granting credit for its term, along with the risk that it might not be settled in cash when it expired, depending on the creditworthiness of the original signatory or private bank. Chambers’s cash flow in Edinburgh was thus intimately tied to the cash flow of their agents, and they offered a 10 percent discount for cash payments. Chambers found it frustrating to be at the mercy of other people’s business habits, especially if those habits did not meet their own standards. This became a particular point of grievance with William Orr, who repeatedly fell behind with his payments in the late 1840s. By 1849, Chambers were sufficiently desperate to see some actual financial return from London that they offered “to take the type metal you have on hand, at the price you can obtain for it in London” in partial payment. By 1852, Orr himself admitted that his “money arrangements” were in “a little confusion,” and that he was now a thousand pounds behind in his “remittances.”9 W. & R. Chambers began the process of reducing their dependence on potentially unreliable and troublesome agents during the 1840s. By 1848, William and Robert’s younger brother David had opened a branch office in Glasgow. Whereas an agent was an independent bookseller or publisher who offered his services for a commission, and whose own business would naturally be his main priority, David Chambers had familial ties to the parent company, was on a (small) salary, and had no occupation other than to promote W. & R. Chambers business. As well as managing the accounts with Glasgow and west of Scotland booksellers, David sold Chambers publications direct from his premises. Between June 1848 and June 1849—a time of depression in the book trade generally—David sold £475 of stock directly and managed £1,792 of orders from other booksellers, demonstrating the relative importance of the two aspects of branch office business.10 This new arrangement gave Chambers far greater control over their Glasgow operations, though it would be difficult to replicate elsewhere in the absence of additional brothers. Centralizing Business in Edinburgh [ 115

Consolidating the Scottish business was a relatively minor matter. The importance of the English market is clearly demonstrated by surviving information about the sales of the Miscellany of Tracts and Chambers’s Journal. In 1847, the Miscellany sold 71,000 copies. Of those, 2,000 were sold in Edinburgh; 3,000 were sold direct to retail booksellers; 4,000 were exported; 11,000 were sold by agents in Liverpool, Glasgow, and Dublin; and a staggering 51,000 were sold in (or via) London.11 Similarly, in 1852, the circulation of the Journal in Scotland was only 15,000 copies, but 43,000 copies were sold via Orr in London.12 Orr’s special status among Chambers’s agents had been created by the separate London edition of the Journal but was maintained by the substantial sales he managed. In the 1830s, a London edition had seemed essential to avoid the difficulty and expense of transporting cart-loads of paper for a weekly deadline, while Orr’s London connections gave him access to the English book trade that Chambers could not match. By the late 1840s, Chambers wanted more control over their English trade. Rethinking their relationship with Orr, and the very existence of a London edition of the Journal, was a key part of this.

Reorganizing the London System W. & R. Chambers started using the railway as soon as Edinburgh was connected to Glasgow in 1842. Large quantities of books, instructive tracts, and Journals were regularly dispatched to Glasgow, most of them intended for onward shipping to the firm’s agents in Belfast, Liverpool, and Dublin or to booksellers overseas. Dublin was twenty-four hours by steamship from the Clyde, while Liverpool took thirty-two hours.13 Before the railway, all these bales of publications had traveled to Glasgow by road (or occasionally by canal). Once the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway opened, Chambers quickly transferred their business, and their archive contains regular monthly invoices from the railway company for parcels, packages, boxes, and bales.14 The slow progress of construction of the through line to London meant that railways took longer to affect Chambers’s English business, though the Royal Mail would have transferred their correspondence to the railway at its then-northernmost point. The North British Railway was building southward from Edinburgh to meet George Hudson’s York, Newcastle & Berwick Railway building northward. Until the line was completed, passengers and freight had to transfer to coaches for part of the journey and to ferries across the as-yet-unbridged rivers Tyne and Tweed. It was not until August 1850 that Queen Victoria opened Robert Stephenson’s impressive curved railway bridge over the river Tweed at Berwick, finally enabling trains to run through from London to Edinburgh. 116 ] Chapter Nine

Although faster communications removed some of the need to allow individual discretion to a London agent, Chambers knew that London’s status as the center of the British book trade meant there were still many advantages to having a London presence. What they wanted was a London office that was more firmly under their control than was William Orr, whose ongoing money problems caused the firm perpetual anxiety. In 1853, one of the brothers wrote that “it appears necessary that increased energy should be applied at the London centre.”15 Yet Orr and Chambers had a long history together, were “on excellent terms” socially, and enjoyed “not a little pleasant intercourse.”16 How, then, could Chambers pursue their consolidating ambitions? Chambers had two particular grievances with Orr’s involvement in their business. The first lay in the financial settlement regarding the Journal: what had seemed equitable in the early 1830s appeared in a different light in the 1840s. The second issue was Orr’s increasingly regular inability to pay the amounts he owed to Edinburgh. The financial settlement was eventually renegotiated, but Orr’s debts doomed the relationship. The agent’s debts were so large that once he lost Chambers’s support, he had to declare bankruptcy. Many years later, William Chambers would characterize the nowdeceased Orr as “the skeleton in the house” that had come perilously close to destroying the prosperity of W. & R. Chambers.17 Back in 1832, W. & R. Chambers had granted Orr a licence to print an English edition of the Journal on extremely favorable terms (see chapter 3). Orr appears to have paid a fee of just 17s. per 1,000 copies printed, but took on all the expenses and the risk of production.18 This meant that Chambers received only a tiny fraction of the income from the sales of the Journal in England. For those copies that they printed and sold themselves, they would expect to receive just over £4 per thousand (after offering booksellers a discount of about a third on the stated retail price). When making the agreement with Orr, Scotland had been the Journal ’s main market, and Chambers seem to have assumed (slightly oddly) that any English sales would be relatively small. But by 1853, over 70 percent of the Journal sales would be passing through Orr’s hands.19 Chambers had an opportunity to renegotiate the terms of the arrangement with Orr in 1846. That summer, to try to simplify his debts, Orr terminated his partnership with Bradbury & Evans. Despite Chambers’s disapproval, Orr had been sharing the profits of the London edition of the Journal with Bradbury & Evans as a way to keep the printers intimately involved with the Journal and to prevent them from launching a competing magazine. Severing the partnership proved more difficult than Orr had anticipated and cost him £1,750 as compensation for loss of earnings. The only Centralizing Business in Edinburgh [ 117

way Orr could find that sort of money was by accepting loans from both W. & R. Chambers and William Chambers personally.20 Orr wrote to Robert that “I cannot help feeling just now an almost oppressive sense of his & your kindness and of my obligations to you both.”21 These loans gave Chambers more leverage with Orr, while the need to find new printers for the London edition gave the firm an opportunity. From the end of 1846, the entire run of the Journal was printed in the newly expanded Chambers printing establishment in Edinburgh (see chapter 7). Orr continued to manage distribution to the English market, but he was supplied with printed copies just like any other agent and would pay accordingly. It is not clear how those copies were transported, but steamer is the most likely option. In contrast to 1832, Chambers would now have seen the cost of shipping as more than offset by the greater income they would receive from Orr. Orr promised to make monthly payments toward the settlement of his account, which Chambers hoped would “vastly simpl[if ]y our book-keeping and keep us in cash, besides lessening our chance of loss from monstrously large accounts.”22 The only special treatment Orr now received over other agents was a better discount on his copies of the Journal, in recognition of long service.23 Despite his promises, Orr fell behind on his payments. As early as December 1846, William Chambers was expressing surprise that Orr was so “very strangely violating” the terms of the agreement, and the correspondence over the following years contains repeated apologies from Orr and expressions of disappointment from Chambers.24 Their relationship was further strained when William made a rare poor decision. Wanting to increase the visibility of his firm in London and using the leverage that Orr’s debts gave him, William persuaded Orr to open a second shop, bearing the Chambers name, in a “large suite of premises” near Somerset House on the Strand. The timing was terrible, and the shop struggled through the economic crisis of 1847–48 before closing in 1849. It had done only £1,500 of business the previous year, compared to £40,000 transacted via Orr’s own shop at the lessfashionable Amen Corner, near St. Paul’s Cathedral. Orr claimed that he had looked “with serious dread on the hasty arrangements” for such an expensive shop and felt fully justified by its closure.25 Things came to a head in 1852–53. Chambers still wanted to increase their visibility, and they were yet again worried about the proportion of the English income that was due to Edinburgh and Orr’s tardiness in paying it. After the debacle of the Strand shop, Chambers were willing to think on a smaller scale in terms of premises, but they were more ambitious about what they hoped to achieve. In early 1852, they were considering moving the Jour118 ] Chapter Nine

nal ’s editorial work to London, in an effort to give its contents a fresher, more up-to-date air. They also raised the possibility of a member of the family (probably David) entering into partnership with Orr, thus tying the firms more closely together and ensuring W. & R. Chambers would have more knowledge of Orr’s financial condition.26 Orr was absolutely opposed to both proposals, and figure 9 reproduces the start of his lengthy response. He pointed out that contributions could be secured from London authors without moving the editorial department, and he even suggested that being in Edinburgh gave the Journal’s editors a useful distance from “Society and its turmoils,” essential to the “collected, thoughtful state of mind so essential to the literary character.” It seems unlikely that the brothers considered their distance in such a romantic light! Orr also rebuffed the suggestion of a partner, pointing out that he had become quite used to being “a sort of Dictator in a small way.” The only sort of partnership he would consider, he hinted, would involve him becoming a partner in W. & R. Chambers itself.27 In 1853, William and Robert did indeed reorganize the firm, admitting both David and Robert’s son Robert secundus as minor partners, but they were far too canny to make Orr a partner. Apart from the general desire to enhance their London presence, the Chambers brothers were concerned about Orr because, once again, he was slipping far behind with his payments. Their patience and optimism was wearing thin. They simply could not understand why Orr could not pay what he owed. For the Journal, they were charging him an extremely favorable £2.18s. per thousand, and they estimated that, after expenses, Orr must be receiving £3.15s. from sales of each thousand, giving him a profit of 17s. Given the size of the English circulation, that meant Orr ought to be making a profit of around £1,900 a year on the Journal alone. So why could he not settle his debts? The question was even more vexing when the brothers worked out that, by giving Orr such a favorable rate, their firm was gaining only 3s.6d. per thousand over and above the production costs—or just under £400 a year from the entire English circulation.28 These calculations survive because Chambers cited them to Orr in June 1852, to demonstrate the need for a more equitable arrangement. In early 1853, Robert was in London to sort out a final separation with Orr and locate suitable premises for a new W. & R. Chambers branch office. He called on old rival Charles Knight to ask for suggestions and eventually took an establishment in St. Bride’s Passage, convenient for the publishing world and far cheaper than the Strand. In February, he had reported to William that Orr was being “stoical” about the coming split, but the following month, Orr began to fight for compensation for loss of earnings if deprived Centralizing Business in Edinburgh [ 119

of the Chambers agency. To be rid of Orr with the minimum of fuss, Chambers agreed to pay Orr the equivalent of one year’s earnings from the Journal, a substantial goodwill gesture.29 The severance with Orr went through in summer 1853. David Chambers’s Glasgow office was closed (the west of Scotland could be managed directly from Edinburgh), and David moved to London to open a new branch office in September. Once Chambers also dispensed with the services of Lewis Smith in Aberdeen, in 1857, the entire British operations were brought under the direct control of the partners in the firm, all of whom were members of the family. In a memorandum written in February 1853, W. & R. Chambers acknowledged that they expected “some practical difficulties in organising and conducting a concern in London,” but were not worried. After all, they were “not exactly like literary men plunging into a new and troublesome relation in life.” They already had twenty years of experience running what they regarded as “a complete system of publishing” and were convinced that its “perfect success” would enable them “with a little additional trouble to conduct a London concern also.”30 Implicit in this confidence was the far greater ease of communications and control that the rail network made possible. A letter from David Chambers in early 1854, just four months after he established the London office, illustrates the role that the railways were supposed to play in W. & R. Chambers’s nationwide distribution. It also demonstrates the extent to which railways had already become taken for granted. David was in the midst of a big effort to capitalize on the launch of the third series of Chambers’s Journal. Each Monday, he received the new issues of the Journal and the Repository of Tracts, giving him time to supply, by rail, the booksellers of the midlands, southern England, and London by the end of Friday, for publication on Saturday. At the start of January, David had specifically requested his parcels from Edinburgh be sent “by rail until the Steamers are sailing more regular.” He worried that any “delay is most injurious to the Sale.”31 As this comment reveals, coastal steamer remained Chambers’s normal means of shipping consignments to London. Their books were not urgent, and the long-standing tradition of preparing the Journal and instructive part works ahead of their publication date meant that railway speed was not necessary. What the railway could offer, however, was nextday correspondence, year-round reliability, and, therefore, a fallback option for freight during the winter months. However, on this occasion, the railway failed David Chambers. On the morning of Monday, January 9, David received an invoice through the post from Edinburgh confirming the dispatch of his consignment—but no consignment. Tuesday brought another invoice reporting the dispatch of a fur120 ] Chapter Nine

ther 2,000 copies—but no sign of either consignment. He was, as he said “at a complete stand still,” unable to fill any of his orders.32 The episode demonstrates that customers had become so used to railway reliability that they took overnight deliveries for granted and were surprised and annoyed when things went wrong. Edinburgh wholesaler John Menzies wrote strong letters to the railway companies when he experienced similar problems with orders traveling northward.33 The fact that letters were delivered more reliably than parcels reflects the priority the railway companies gave to the Royal Mail to avoid losing their valuable mail contracts. Private freight customers had far less influence. Fortunately, there was a new communications technology available that could send information faster than an express train. Thus, on that Tuesday in January 1854, David Chambers turned to the electric telegraph to sort out his delivery problems. He sent a message to Edinburgh requesting the urgent shipment of 4,000 copies of the Journal, which he would expect by train on Wednesday morning. Had he sent a letter, his consignment could not possibly have arrived until Thursday. But the telegraph’s formidable speed came at a price, both literally and metaphorically. The brevity of telegraphic messages was not conducive to effective business, especially between partners who were used to expressing themselves at length in writing. When David Chambers arrived at his office on Wednesday morning, he found nothing but a telegraphic reply seeking clarification. Having been failed by both railways and telegraph, David vented his frustration in a longhand letter to his brother Robert.34

Centralizing Business in Edinburgh [ 121

Figure 10. Reading on the railway, 1859. From the Illustrated Times, December 24, 1859, 412. Detail, John Johnson Collection (Railways Folder 2), Bodleian Library. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

10

Routledge and the New Competition

On March 22, 1845, the front page of Chambers’s Journal was devoted to “railway literature,” arguing that its effect on publishing was one of several “very great alterations in our social system” produced by the railway. As well as speeding up communication, personal transport, and freight deliveries, the railways had created “a whole literature of their own.”1 There was Bradshaw’s Railway Companion and newspapers like Herapath’s Railway Journal, which reported shareholders’ meetings and printed statistics of track miles built and income generated. Governmentpublished “Blue Books” appeared, containing the evidence gathered by parliamentary investigations into contested new railway routes, amounting to around sixty thousand pages every year. And celebratory publications marked the opening of a line; John Bourne’s History and Description of the Great Western Railway (1846), for example, was a large folio volume with full-page illustrations of the key engineering achievements along the line. Printed matter was also needed for the internal running of the railways: tickets and rule books, as well as books to help passengers, such as George Measom’s series of Official Illustrated Guides to the regions served by each railway company.2 In retrospect, what is striking about the Chambers’s Journal survey is that it made no mention of the man whose name would soon be virtually synonymous with railway publishing: George Routledge. The writer made a passing reference to new periodicals filled with “lighter matters,” “general facts and stray witticisms” that entertained railway travelers during their long hours of enforced inactivity.3 The publishers of these periodicals were responding to a new market for reading material. From 1848, [ 123

George Routledge would be the king of this sort of railway literature, and would transform the public’s expectation of cheap reading material.

Routledge and Remainders George Routledge began his working life apprenticed to a bookseller in the northern English town of Carlisle, made a fortune from publishing cheap literature, and became a local political figure. Despite broad similarities with the life of William Chambers, Routledge was a rather different character. Chambers remained in Edinburgh, where he had apprenticed, whereas Routledge moved to London. Chambers’s decision to begin publishing was strongly motivated by a determination to promote education, and even when his firm expanded, the focus on cheap instructive nonfiction remained. Routledge was twelve years younger; he had still been a schoolboy when Chambers and Knight were making their first, short-lived efforts at periodical publishing; he was not yet apprenticed when the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) was founded; and he still had two years of training ahead of him when the first numbers of Chambers’s Journal and the Penny Magazine appeared. Routledge’s business persona was not formed by a Scottish respect for education refracted through the “March of the Intellect” and the Reform years, but by the commercial realities of making a living in the intensely competitive atmosphere of the London book trade in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Chambers was a shrewd businessman, but he always had an ideological ambition behind his endeavors. Routledge, on the other hand, seems to have been pure businessman.4 Routledge left his Carlisle apprenticeship a year early and moved to London in 1833. At first he worked for the publishers and booksellers Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, starting with the job of collecting the orders requested by country customers from the shops of their respective publishers, and later graduating to an indoor clerk’s position. By 1836, he was able to set up his own shop, just off Leicester Square. Like Chambers, he was at first just a bookseller, but gradually he began to experiment in publishing. However, rather than buying a press and printing his own books, Routledge worked with the book trade around him. Some of his earliest ventures took the form of participating in “share books,” a system developed in the eighteenth century to spread the risk among a number of publishers, each of whom held “shares” in the publication. By the 1840s, the share system was declining, as individual publishers increasingly had sufficient funds to publish on their own account, but for young men like Routledge, it offered a relatively low-risk introduction to publishing.5 Even before he became a full-fledged publisher, Routledge established 124 ] Chapter Ten

a reputation in cheap literature by dealing in remainders, the stock that remained after a publisher had given up hope of selling any more copies. Traditionally, remainders had been sold for waste paper, to recoup a small amount of their cost, but in the late eighteenth century, James Lackington had shown that significant profits could be made by selling them to customers for vastly less than the original asking price. The profits on individual book sales were tiny, but, as Lackington had said, “small profits do great things.” As long as the turnover of stock was high, those small profits could build up into substantial ones. In the nineteenth century, fierce competition was common at the auctions. Thomas Tegg was the acknowledged leader of the contemporary remainder trade, but Routledge might also have encountered the bookseller Henry G. Bohn, who would later become one of his key rivals in cheap publishing.6 George Putnam, the American publisher, was in the process of establishing his firm’s agency in London during the very years in which Routledge was starting in business. Putnam later recalled Routledge as “a pleasant, brisk, and active dealer in books from a little shop in one of the nooks near Leicester Square,” who bought small lots of remainders and would “push round himself among the second-hand and other dealers to sell his bargains.” Putnam admired Routledge’s indefatigable search for a good deal and his willingness to barter, and saw his eventual transformation into a “magnate” of publishing as a “peculiarly American” success and “just what any honest American would be proud to trace.”7 As well as establishing his remainders business and making some small experiments in publishing, Routledge established a network of connections among retail booksellers, especially in the north of England. Although he would later become firmly linked in the public consciousness with railway bookstalls, he did work through the usual trade channels. Just as he personally walked round London to press his remainders on book dealers, so he was committed to building personal relations with the booksellers he supplied elsewhere in the country, traveling by railway to meet them in their own shops. These personal connections helped Routledge to persuade booksellers that they could make a living by selling very cheap books—at first, the remainders, and later, Routledge’s own publications. Both as bookseller and publisher, Routledge pursued the strategy of high sales of cheap works, where the volume of sales would compensate for the small profit on individual items.

Books for a Shilling Routledge’s first successful publishing experiment came in 1846, when he started to issue the Rev. Albert Barnes’s Notes, Critical, Explanatory and Routledge and the New Competition [ 125

Practical . . . on the Bible. Barnes was a Princeton-educated Presbyterian minister, and his Notes on the various books of the Bible sold extensively on both sides of the Atlantic. As an American, his works had no copyright protection in Britain, and several London and Glasgow publishers reprinted them. Routledge became one of them, and he demonstrated his early awareness of the need for a competitive advantage by announcing his edition as being “Carefully revised and compared with the last American edition, by the Rev. John Cumming, D.D.” His publicity assured potential purchasers that “the greatest care” had been taken in the editorial work and that his was “the most correct” edition.8 It may have been the success of Barnes’s Notes that drew Routledge’s attention to the possibilities of reprinting American works in Britain. If he wanted to move into publishing more extensively and continue his strategy of high sales at low prices, he had to find a way of publishing his books cheaply. As Putnam noted, there was often something American about Routledge’s business style, and this was certainly true of his solution to this problem. Like many publishers before and since, he decided to reprint noncopyright works, thus avoiding payment for literary labor. But where most previous British reprint publishers—from W. F. Dove’s English Classics to Chambers’s People’s Editions—had worked with out-of-copyright British works, Routledge launched his publishing business by making extensive use of foreign works. He would do to American authors and publishers just what Carey & Lea and Harper & Brothers had been doing to British authors and publishers since the start of the century. And like them, he would take advantage of the latest production technologies to make his reprints available at one shilling. Steam printing had been a rarity in Edinburgh when Chambers began to use it in 1832, but in London in 1846, Routledge had easy access to steam printers and stereotypers. Belfast publishers Simms & McIntyre were the first to launch a series of shilling books in Britain, with their Parlour Library of reprinted novels in 1847, but it was Routledge who became synonymous with the format. His Railway Library was launched in late autumn 1848 with very little fanfare in the book trade press, and new titles appeared roughly fortnightly.9 According to later advertisements, its aim was to contain “some of the best works of fiction by popular Authors.”10 Of the first ten volumes, seven were by James Fenimore Cooper, including The Last of the Mohicans (Philadelphia, 1826). Although Cooper’s novels had already been reprinted in Britain, Routledge’s shilling format brought them to public attention. The Railway Library immediately became Routledge’s headline series, offering fiction by a mixture of contemporary American and deceased British authors. The name Routledge chose for his series reflected a new awareness that 126 ] Chapter Ten

reading need not take place in the home, and his targeting of railway travelers was inspired. In 1848, William Henry Smith Jr. was just beginning his takeover of railway bookstalls (see chapter 11) and was searching for cheap books that would offend no moral sensibilities. Smith was careful not to associate his firm with any single publisher, but he is reported to have placed a standing order with Routledge for a thousand copies of each new volume in the Railway Library.11 This new retail outlet, added to his existing distribution networks, enabled Routledge to achieve the high volume of sales that shilling volumes needed for success. In January 1850, Routledge launched another series of shilling volumes, the Popular Library “of first-rate Works on Biography, History, Travels &c.”12 By the end of 1850, the series included twenty-eight volumes, and Routledge continued his strategy of borrowing from the Americans: fifteen of the volumes issued in the first year were by Washington Irving (including his biographies of Columbus, Oliver Goldsmith, and Mahomet); others included George Bancroft’s History of the United States (Boston, 1834) and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men (Boston, 1850). Although the Popular Library contained mostly nonfiction and the Railway Library mostly fiction, there was never a totally clear distinction between the two series. By 1851, Routledge was forced to rethink his use of American works, due to changes in the understanding of copyright law. In the early nineteenth century, British law was ambiguous about whether noncitizens could hold copyright; in contrast, American law was quite clear that only citizens could do so. In the 1830s and 1840s, British literary publishers John Murray and Richard Bentley had paid substantial sums to American authors, believing that British copyright law would protect the authors’ work if it were first published in Britain. In fact, it became common for publishers to issue new American works first in Britain and then, several weeks later, in the United States, to secure both British and American copyrights. But by the late 1840s, several legal decisions implied that no foreigner could hold British copyright regardless of place of first publication. This encouraged Routledge and fellow remainder-merchant-turned-reprinter Henry G. Bohn to begin reprinting Washington Irving, even though Murray and Bentley claimed Irving had British copyrights. Routledge also issued Herman Melville’s narratives of Polynesian life, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), in the Popular Library in 1850, despite their prior publication by Murray. Routledge and Bohn gained a certain amount of public support for their activities, which were seen as “measures of reprisal” against the “American pirates.”13 But in summer 1851, another legal decision made it almost certain that Murray and Bentley would win their pending case against Bohn and Routledge. Routledge settled out of court, paid compensation, and destroyed Routledge and the New Competition [ 127

his stock and stereotype plates of Irving’s works. Thus, from autumn 1851, Routledge had to be more careful about his reprinting of foreign works and needed to focus on those that could have no claim whatsoever to British copyright. He began to pay small fees to translators to work on contemporary European works. Ida Pfeiffer’s widely reprinted travel narrative A Lady’s Travels round the World (Vienna, 1850) made its first appearance in English in the Popular Library, as did Alphonse de Lamartine’s The Stone-Cutter of St. Point (Paris, 1851). Nevertheless, American literature remained attractive to British publishers. American authors needed no translation, and many of them had not yet published in Britain. Some of these would become phenomenal best sellers. Elizabeth Wetherell’s Wide, Wide World (New York, 1851) was a runaway success when issued by Sampson Low in London later that year. The following year, at least eighteen British publishers reprinted Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston, 1852), which is said to be the first book to have achieved sales of a million copies.14 Routledge issued both, and it was surely his desire to find the next best seller that inspired him to begin plans for an American branch office, something that no other British publisher had yet done successfully. Routledge’s New York office opened in late 1854. By then, the House of Lords had decided that foreigners were indeed able to hold British copyright, but only if the book was first published in Britain (or its possessions) and the author resided there at the time. The new residency requirement finally destroyed Cooper’s and Irving’s claims to British copyrights, much to the distress of Bentley who had paid them over £15,000. Although it was now possible for American authors to secure British copyright, only a few bothered to make the trip to Canada or to Britain. Routledge’s New York office therefore continued to play the role he had originally envisioned for it: as a means of gaining prior access to the latest American works. Routledge paid to acquire advance sheets, enabling him to be the first to release a British edition. As well as being adept at acquiring texts for little cost, Routledge became a master of boosting sales by marketing to different audiences. For instance, Cooper’s novels had originally appeared in the Railway Library, but Routledge would also advertise them as a separate set of “Cooper’s Novels, in fancy boards,” as he did with Austen, Hawthorne, and Miss McIntosh (“the American Miss Edgeworth”). Longfellow’s poetic works appeared in the sets of American Poets and “Longfellow’s Prose and Poetical Works,” as well as in the Cheap Series (which replaced the Popular Library). Routledge also excelled in offering multiple physical forms of the same text. Although the standard binding for the Railway Library and Cheap Series was decorated yellow boards (see chapter 15), most volumes were also 128 ] Chapter Ten

available in a cloth binding for an extra 6d. This enabled Routledge to benefit simultaneously from economies of scale by printing large numbers of sheets of the text, and from targeting specific sectors of the market by sending batches of the sheets to be bound up in different ways. He developed an even more elaborate version of this technique for the children’s classics that he issued from the early 1850s. His reprints of Sandford and Merton, Robinson Crusoe, Evenings at Home, and Swiss Family Robinson were most commonly advertised as “Illustrated Juveniles for Young People” at 3s.6d., but all were also offered in editions at 4s., 5s., and 8s.6d.15 The printed sheets of text were the same in each case, but the price difference lay in the amount of added decoration: gilt page edges, decorated binding, gilt decorated binding, the insertion of six or eight color printed plates, or all of the above.16 The most highly decorated editions were aimed at the school prize and Christmas gift market, and they gave Routledge more opportunities to sell the same basic item to a variety of audiences. When Routledge began issuing shilling literature, he must have expected to find average sales of around 3,000 copies, as Chambers and Knight had done. In fact, the new outlet of the railway bookstall enabled shilling literature to demonstrate its true potential. By 1853, the volumes of the Cheap Series were generally being planned on the basis of 10,000 copies (though printed in five impressions, to follow demand).17 The actual sales varied enormously, but the overall picture is clear from the buoyant nature of Routledge’s business. He was able to strike headline deals with living British authors. Most famously, in December 1853, Routledge promised to pay Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton the incredible sum of £20,000 over ten years for permission to include his nineteen novels in the Railway Library. Lytton’s novels were already available in a midpriced edition by Chapman & Hall, but Routledge’s would be the only cheap edition.18 That deal—and Routledge’s ability to keep his promise—demonstrated both that new audiences could be found for works that had already sold well in more expensive editions and that substantial amounts of money could be made from shilling volumes. These points were confirmed by subsequent deals. As the Times reported in 1854, Captain Frederick Marryat’s Children of the New Forest (1847) had not sold well in its 10s. edition, but when Routledge bought the rights to it and issued it at 5s., he sold 10,000 copies. Henry Colburn had been unable to sell out his edition of James Grant’s Romance of War (1847) at £2.2s., but when Routledge issued it at 2s., he sold 22,000 copies.19 By the mid-1850s, therefore, Routledge was simultaneously one of the most prominent reprinters of American works and an increasingly important publisher of British works (both original and reprinted). He was now issuing more expensive works, such as gift and prize books, but his core busiRoutledge and the New Competition [ 129

ness remained cheap literature, particularly the shilling volumes. His business was striking both for the sales of individual titles and for the rapid rate of new publications: between May and July 1854, for instance, Routledge added fourteen titles to the Cheap Series alone. Charles Knight reckoned that sales had been “much exaggerated” and that once the novelty had worn off, having so many books “each jostling the other in the race for popularity” could not be a viable long-term business strategy.20 That misplaced skepticism marked Knight as a member of an older generation.

A New Generation of Cheap Literature Routledge’s success was one of the most visible signs that a new generation of cheap literature had arrived in midcentury Britain, but the change had in fact begun a few years earlier. In early 1845, when Routledge was still a bookseller and remainder merchant, Chambers’ Journal celebrated the fact that “there are not fewer than half a million of cheap sheets published every week” in Britain, as well as a “very considerable number of cheap book-publications.” Now, at last, “for the first time . . . the powers of the printing-press have been turned to their right account.”21 In contrast to the 1830s, when W. & R. Chambers and Charles Knight had seemed to be fighting an uphill battle to provide cheap print, by the mid-1840s cheap print seemed to be everywhere. In 1846, the SDUK announced that its work was at last complete, since “the public is supplied with cheap and good literature” to an extent unimaginable twenty years earlier.22 The trigger appears to have been a group of new penny magazines offering readers a diet of tales, romances, and trivia. The Family Herald (1842), the London Journal (1845), and Reynolds’s Miscellany (1846) pushed circulation figures to 100,000, to 250,000, and by the mid-1850s, the London Journal had reached 450,000 a week.23 By then, Routledge and others were selling 10,000 copies of their shilling volumes. The enormous sales figures were a clear indication that the new forms of cheap literature had found a new generation of readers. It was no longer the case that the majority of British readers were educated and affluent. The Sunday schools and charity schools had done their work well, and their graduates were now turning with enthusiasm to those publishers who catered to their tastes and their pockets. The prices of these penny magazines and shilling books were similar to those offered by Chambers and Knight, but the contents were very different. Suddenly, cheap literature no longer had to be instructive. Entertainment became the key to success. The Penny Magazine had carried wood engravings and Chambers’s Journal carried fiction, but the way these elements were used in the London Journal and Reynolds’s Miscellany was new. These 130 ] Chapter Ten

new journals specialized in thrilling stories, which middle-brow commentators found poorly written and overdrawn, with too much emphasis on plot and not enough on style.24 Author Margaret Oliphant was bemused by the strange success of one J. F. Smith, whose novels were rapturously welcomed by “the everybody, who is nobody,” even though the author was known by “nobody (who was anybody).”25 Despite advertising themselves with the familiar “instructive and amusing” tag line, the new magazines devoted from half to three-quarters of their total text to fiction. The remaining pieces were descriptions of recent fashions, reviews of theater productions, poetry, and the innovative feature of letters from readers. As one critic put it, the small amount of information included in these journals had been excerpted from other sources by “a pair of scissors, with an incredibly small amount of intelligence to guide them.”26 The British Quarterly Review suggested that the magazines of the 1840s had the advantage over their predecessors of a reduced rate of paper duty and the possibility of railway distribution.27 But the older magazines that survived to the 1840s (including Chambers’s Journal ) were able to share those advantages. Charles Knight reckoned that the real key was the “external cheapness” of the new magazines, or their ability to give as much printed paper for as low a price as possible. The quality of the paper, let alone the quality of the contents, was not an issue for readers whose desideratum was quantity. Similar comments were made in the United States, where it was alleged that “scores of eyes were ruined” by “books got up in such a shabby style,” their tiny text crammed into as little paper as possible. In such a market, Knight feared, writers and editors with higher standards stood little chance.28 There was widespread agreement that the new generation of magazines had a public appeal and a readership that the older magazines could not match. This was illustrated by the fate of the Leisure Hour, a weekly penny periodical launched by the Religious Tract Society in 1852 specifically to compete with the London Journal and its siblings, but dedicated to providing instruction and fiction with a high moral tone. Literary commentators praised it for eschewing “the objectionable or doubtful features that are cultivated by its contemporaries.” It offered serialized fiction dealing with realistic, everyday scenarios, and articles “on subjects of value and interest.” Equally important was what it did not contain: “There are no answers to correspondents, real or fictitious; no contributions to gaping credulity, no bad jokes, no stale anecdotes.”29 The Leisure Hour was kin to Chambers’s Journal rather than the London Journal. The Leisure Hour’s sales figures were substantial—around 67,000 a week by 1855—but it came nowhere near matching those of the new generation periodicals. It seems that literRoutledge and the New Competition [ 131

ary commentators were not the only readers who could spot the difference between amusement and improvement.30 By the early 1850s, cheap literature had been transformed. It had once been dominated by societies and firms with philanthropic ambitions to help readers improve their minds. Rather than gracious recipients of benevolently provided instruction and information, those readers were now consumers whose demand regulated supply. Charles Knight reported glumly that “it is useless to urge an adult, whether male or female, to buy a solid book when an exciting one is longed for. . . . If they want fiction, they will not look at science or history.”31 William Chambers admitted that his firm was having “to compete with demoralizing trash.”32 In many ways, Routledge and the new penny periodicals were simply building on techniques that W. & R. Chambers had been using for over a decade: steam-powered printing, stereotyping, and cheaply acquired texts were the keys to literature for the masses. The difference was in the type of literature produced. Routledge did not publish works that were grossly immoral or scandalous, but he seems to have had no particular commitment to popular education. He always published with an eye to what would sell rather than what was intrinsically wholesome, and he shared this approach with the proprietors of the new magazines. However, it was not simply the new focus on entertainment that helped these forms of cheap print to sell in such huge numbers. They had the advantage of a new distribution outlet: the railway bookstall.

132 ] Chapter Ten

Figure 11. Virtually no images of early railway bookstalls have survived, but Punch included one in the background of this 1852 joke about the dangers of railway accidents. From Punch 13 (1852): 134.

Railway Bookstalls

11 By early August 1851, the event of the year, the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, had been open for three months, and the newspapers were having trouble finding anything new to report, apart from the exhibition’s daily visitor numbers, which kept exceeding expectation. To generate some news, Times reporter Samuel Phillips decided to investigate the contents of the bookstalls at London’s rail terminals. The resulting article appeared on Saturday, August 9, and his discovery that a “worthless mass” of “unmitigated rubbish” was piled indiscriminately on the shelves of virtually every bookstall created a gratifying stir. It was widely discussed and excerpted in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, and was reissued as a pamphlet with an extended preface. This exposé inspired several British and American publishers to launch new series of cheap books aimed at railway travelers, while in Paris, Louis Hachette ambitiously contracted with seven major railway companies both to run station bookstalls and to publish books for them to stock.1 Some railway travelers had, no doubt, read while traveling as early as the 1830s, but only in the late 1840s did the phenomenon of railway reading become so marked as to occasion repeated comments. Samuel Phillips’s observations in 1851 that “men read with avidity in the railway carriage” and “millions of readers have been created under a new system of travelling” stated what many people already knew.2 The railway bookstall was one of the most visible ways in which cheap print came to the attention of the educated middle classes in the late 1840s and 1850s. Members of respectable society—those whom Wilkie Collins would later characterize as “the [ 135

subscribers to this journal [Household Words], the customers at the eminent publishing-houses, the members of book-clubs and circulating libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of newspapers and reviews”—became conscious that they were no longer “the great bulk of the reading public of England.” In earlier decades, cheap print had been marginal, becoming most visible in respectable society as solicitations for funds for philanthropic or religious organizations. By the mid-1840s, upper- and upper-middle-class readers started to realize that whole other audiences were purchasing hundreds of thousands of copies of the penny magazines of fiction and tens of thousands of copies of railway novels. Although the more scurrilous forms of cheap print remained on the margins—Collins claimed to have spotted them “in fruit-shops, in oyster-shops, in lollypop-shops”—railway bookstalls were highly visible and patronized by readers of all classes.3 Moreover, the railway carriage transformed reading into a public activity, thus enabling travelers to learn far more about the reading habits of their fellow citizens than ever before. And railway journeys offered a reason why the middle classes might themselves become purchasers of (certain sorts of ) cheap literature, rather than regarding it as something intended for the lower classes. Samuel Phillips reckoned that virtually every first- and second-class passenger bought something from the station bookstall. By transforming the availability of cheap print, the railway bookstall was an unexpected solution to the problem that had for years beset the publishers of cheap instructive works. In 1847, Chambers’s Journal had pointed out the failings of the traditional system of publishers, agents, and retail booksellers: namely, that this system did not “reach the masses.” The Journal admitted that, even with prices on “the verge of non-productiveness . . . the persons for whom we write and incur hazards are not those, generally speaking, who become our purchasers.” And this was quite simply because those sorts of people did not enter traditional bookshops, seeing them as stuffy and intimidating bastions of the affluent classes. According to the Journal, the distribution of literature had “fallen considerably behind” the industrial processes of production. Chambers’s Journal suggested that “a new class of tradesman” was needed, who would reach beyond existing distribution systems and act “aggressively on the masses.” Chambers imagined the use of door-to-door salesmen, but the railway bookstall soon proved an equally viable alternative.4

Marketing Print on Railways The earliest booksellers on the railway stations were the boys who roamed the platforms hawking newspapers. By the 1840s, they had expanded their 136 ] Chapter Eleven

range of publications, and in 1849, a traveler on the London & North Western Railway reported a youthful vendor offering: “ ‘Ballet Girl! By Halbert Smith’; ‘Biscuits and Grog!’ ‘Tuft Hunter by Hangus Reach’; Times! Chronicle! Daily News! Morning Herald!” He commented that the novels of Albert Smith and Angus Reach were so badly written—lacking “any knowledge, experience, or information of any kind whatsoever”—that they were fit for nothing else than “to be read in a railway carriage or steamboat.” The traveler also described how the book vendors went about their business, operating from the platform. He complained that they would “persist in poking [their wares] through the carriage windows into the face of the traveller,” until he donated “a few eleemosynary shillings” to regain his peace and quiet.5 The itinerant vendors were gradually joined by a growing number of station bookstalls, where a wider range of reading material—and other necessaries—were offered to passengers before they joined their train. The early stalls acquired a reputation as sinecures for injured railway employees or their widows, who knew nothing about literature and presented their newspapers and novels “in amicable jumble with beer-bottles, sandwiches, and jars of sweets.”6 It was these early bookstalls that drew the ire of Samuel Phillips and gave railway literature such a bad name. Phillips described their operators as “without credit, without means, without education, without information” and caring only for what could be bought cheaply and sold for profit.7 After his denigration of the bookstalls at most London railway terminals, Phillips was pleased to note a “wholesome change” when he arrived at Euston, the terminus for the London & North Western Railway (LNWR). In November 1848, the LNWR had contracted with W. H. Smith & Son, the newspaper distribution agency, for the operation and stocking of all bookstalls on its system. The younger William Smith’s negotiations with the railways for carrying his firm’s newspapers—and especially his growing friendship with Mark Huish of the LNWR—helped him to see the potential of railway bookstalls. In 1848, he offered the LNWR £1,500 a year for exclusive access to its stations. He subsequently contracted with other railway companies and created a bookstall empire that would ultimately cover most of England, Wales, and Ireland. His thirty stalls in 1850 had already grown to seventy by 1853, and he had almost three hundred stalls by 1870, serving the passengers on more than thirty railway companies.8 Edinburgh news agent John Menzies developed a similar system of bookstalls on the Scottish railways. Such bookstalls were not merely a valuable service to passengers, but a lucrative source of income for the company. In 1854, a letter in Norton’s Literary Gazette claimed that “the facilities of purchase afforded by the book-stalls at most of the railway stations” had substantially increased the sales of cheap literature in Britain.9 Five years Railway Bookstalls [ 137

later, the British Quarterly Review agreed and remarked that “an incredible amount of the retail business of the kingdom passes through the hands of these stall-booksellers.” In some country towns, the railway bookstall had “almost entirely superseded the little stationer . . . , whose shop, in the good, sleepy old times, was the resort of the gossips and loungers.” The railway bookstall had become a familiar and important element of the book trade, particularly in small towns, and was recognized as a valuable resource for the entire community, not just travelers.10 The bookstalls also formed links in the chain that supplied newspapers to agencies in towns across the country, and from 1860, they would become branches of the W. H. Smith Library, enabling customers to borrow, rather than purchase, their reading material.11 By controlling so many bookstalls, Smith enabled publishers to deal with one respectable and creditworthy firm rather than trying to negotiate individual arrangements with unknown bookstall clerks all over the country. This made it easier for the bookstall to be accepted into the mainstream of the book trade. Itinerant vendors did not disappear from British stations but came under the control of the bookstall firms, whose contract typically covered all retailing of books or newspapers anywhere on the company’s system. Contracts sometimes included a travel pass to allow an employee of the bookstall agency to travel on business. For instance, John Menzies was able to make arrangements with the Scottish North Eastern Railway for passes for newspaper boys, to enable them to travel with the train. The gray-uniformed boys did all their business on the platform, but were able to provide a valuable service in those remote areas where a bookstall on every station was not feasible.12 Railway bookstalls created a new relationship between customers and print: the experience of buying print changed, as did expectations of what could be bought. Visiting a bookshop was a considered affair: a person might go to acquire a book that had been positively reviewed, or to collect the weekly magazine, or to ask the owner if any new books had come in. Visiting a bookstall at a railway station was different. It encouraged spur-of-the-moment decisions. With its wares on display to passengers walking by, the bookstall enabled potential customers to look without having to cross a threshold. As part of a crowd, customers could retain their anonymity, engaging the bookstall clerk only for as long as it took to hand over a few coins. This anonymity was why, Samuel Phillips reported, travelers seeking “publications of the worst character” asked at the bookstalls and not in their local shops.13 And, importantly, where the latest novel in the bookshop would cost more than 30s., at a bookstall, a customer could be sure of getting something to read for just a shilling or two. The bookstalls did stock some expensive books, but, as 138 ] Chapter Eleven

the clerk on the Euston bookstall explained to Phillips, the vast majority of business was done in the shilling or 1s.6d. price bracket. The logistics of the railway bookstall, along with the expectations of travelers, resulted in a substantial transformation of cheap print in Britain. The effects could be seen in both the appearance of the books and in their contents.

Judging Books by Their Covers According to the Saturday Review in 1857, books priced below 2s. accounted for nine-tenths of the sales, and three-quarters of the sales income, at railway bookstalls.14 Large numbers of these books were from George Routledge’s various series. But although these books were in the same price bracket as Charles Knight’s Shilling Volumes, Chambers’s People’s Editions, and publications by other “improving” publishers, they were immediately identifiable at a glance. Publishers aiming specifically at the bookstall market knew that customers would be making their decisions hurriedly and on the basis of what they saw. By the mid-1850s, railway publishers competed for the most dazzling and colorful cover designs, and expectations of what cheap literature ought to look like—of what a shilling ought to be able to buy—had changed forever. The paperback books we know today were not developed until the 1930s. In the nineteenth century, therefore, books were almost always bound in hard covers.15 The traditional material for covering the hard boards was leather, which a craftsman could then decorate with embossing and gilt to make an extremely attractive binding. But the materials and skill involved made this an expensive option, and books in the early nineteenth century were usually issued by their publishers with their boards uncovered, awaiting the purchaser’s decision about binding. Without a full binding, uncovered boards were a fragile, temporary binding. The societies and publishers who were involved in issuing cheap print in the 1830s realized that their intended readers needed publications that were ready-to-read but whose binding did not increase the price. This was a further advantage of weekly magazines, religious tracts, and instructive pamphlets: publications with so few pages could survive without a binding; all they needed was a few stitches through the spine, and the first page could be printed up to act as a cover. But anything longer than about twenty-four pages would need a proper binding. The only real option for a cheap but substantial binding in the 1830s was to cover the boards in a sturdy cotton known as book cloth. Beneath their jackets, modern hardback books are still bound in book cloth today. Modern books have the advantage of synthetic chemical dyes to produce book cloth in a wide range of vibrant colors, but early Victorian cloth-bound books were Railway Bookstalls [ 139

generally dull browns, greens, or blues, or sometimes a brighter red. Binding in cloth was still a fairly new technique in the 1830s, and over the following decades, binders would discover ways to embellish it with embossing, gilt, and colored inks to produce beautiful decorated bindings. But as with the decorated leather bindings, such embellishments added to the price and were irrelevant to the cheapest literature. The instructive cheap literature produced by Chambers and Knight, therefore, had looked visually dull. In contrast, the colorfulness of railway literature attracted attention from the start. In 1849, travelers on the LNWR might encounter a “strange miscellany of little blue and buff, and pink and green, and crimson volumes” with “quaint designs engraven thereupon.”16 Samuel Phillips claimed that the idea for his article came from observing his fellow passengers devour green copies of a novel by Eugene Sue and having seen “a huge heap of such covers as we hastily passed the book-stall.” Phillips remarked that the few serious books on the stall could be easily identified because they looked so out of place among the “questionable society” of the green covers.17 These colorful covers were created by covering the hard boards in glazed paper (paper-bound, but not paperback; this form of binding is usually referred to simply as “boards”). The result was less durable than cloth or leather bindings, but cheaper. The first shilling novels were issued in green boards, as were the early volumes of Routledge’s Railway Library. There had been earlier experiments with paper-bound boards—Chambers’s People’s Editions, for instance, were issued in a hybrid binding with leather on the spines and marbled paper on the covers—but what was striking in the late 1840s was the proliferation of books bound in boards and a new attention to cover design as a means of generating sales. Whereas the traditional embellishments of gilt and embossing were added to a binding afterwards, covers made of paper could be printed in advance. Printing could add text, patterns, and images quickly and far more cheaply than a skilled craftsman working on leather. Simms & McIntyre’s green volumes carried their titles on their front covers, along with a series-standard image of a domestic scene. Routledge’s volumes did the same, but with a railway scene. This may sound like a very simple innovation, but it had a significant effect on the book-buying experience. Cloth-bound books typically had a cryptic version of their title in small gilt letters on their spine. If viewed from the front, or from a distance, there was little immediate indication of the book’s identity. The genre of the new shilling volumes was immediately identifiable by color and cover image, and then the title and author were easily located on the front cover. Cover designs helped attract passing customers to the bookstall. The intense competitiveness of the railway bookstall fostered the rapid 140 ] Chapter Eleven

development of cover designs that were more elaborate and more individualized. The volumes of the Railway Library in the mid-1850s would look almost as different from their own predecessors as those volumes had done from cloth-bound books. The most striking innovation was the use of color printing on colored paper. Printers had long known that, by passing a sheet through the press twice, it was possible to print, for instance, initial capitals in red and the rest of the text in black. In the late 1840s, George Baxter developed a process for printing images in an equivalent way. Baxter’s process needed at least four colors for convincing effects, but Routledge used a simplified version on his shilling volumes. If the background (the paper) was already colored, printing in just two or three colors could produce striking results. Yellow was the most common background color and was usually printed with red and black.18 To make the most of the new technique, Routledge also began commissioning unique cover art for each volume. Now, the cover image identified the individual book, not just its series, at a glance.

Under the Covers Commentators routinely criticized railway reading material as poorly written, trivial, frivolous fiction, and assumed that you could distinguish railway literature not just by its appearance, but by its content. The contemporary debates focused on fiction because the middle classes were used to thinking of cheap print as a means by which “intellectual darkness must gradually be dispersed,” through the provision of “wholesome popular literature for the instruction and amusement of the mass of the people”—yet this was not what Samuel Phillips reported finding on the railway bookstalls.19 Publishers with fewer ideals or scruples than Chambers and Knight were giving the new readers what they wanted, rather than what was good for them. Railway literature was described as “sordid,” with a coarse enthusiasm for “exposures of the vulgarities of the semi-genteel.”20 The content of cheap print was starting to be determined by its audience’s demands, rather than its supplier’s ideals. Yet, as a closer examination will show, the undoubted presence of a large amount of cheap fiction did not prevent railway bookstalls from also selling a wide range of nonfiction. The first extended discussion of the phenomenon of railway literature appeared in 1849, by which time it is clear that railway literature already had a reputation for being cheap, trivial, and undemanding reading material for travelers willing to spend little.21 In 1853 the Times expressed a common view when it declared that the early bookstalls stocked “unmitigated trash, worthless in a literary point of view, and for the most part debasing to the morals.”22 Commentators sought to understand why there was so much Railway Bookstalls [ 141

demand for such material among travelers. Although the Saturday Review suggested that bookstalls might not truly reflect reading tastes, because those who wanted “graver books” would have most likely brought them from home, it was widely believed that people’s tastes for reading were inevitably different on the train than in the home. As an American writer observed, in reality, “no one reads his Dictionary or his Shakspeare, and scarcely any one his Bible, in the cars.”23 Journalist David Masson wondered if the inclination for trash was a consequence of the jolting nature of railway travel, which induces a “semicomatose state” in which the traveler is unable to concentrate on a serious work. But he concluded cynically that the explanation lay in weakness rather than conscious choice: mediocre literature succeeded because the experience of “waiting at a railway-station either for or in a train” made one “weak for every species of expenditure,” including sweets, pencils, and books.24 Much of the credit for improving the railway bookstalls was given to W. H. Smith & Son, who ensured that all the bookstalls on their system were run by respectable young men with experience in the book trade. As an advertisement for a stall clerk for the LNWR in 1850 stated, “No one need apply who is not thoroughly acquainted with the Bookselling Business, or whose character will not bear the strictest inquiry.”25 The younger William Smith has often been presented as a moral enforcer because although his clerks had a great deal of discretion, their choice of stock was limited to the list of publications that were approved by (and supplied by) head office. Smith himself had strong personal religious convictions and had hoped to become a Church of England clergyman until his father insisted he join the family firm. He was clearly a sound businessman, but, somewhat like William Chambers, he had ideals beyond commerce. In later life, he stepped aside from the daily business of his firm and entered national politics, eventually becoming a cabinet minister. Yet, as far as Smith’s business dealings were concerned, his morals played less of a role than did the scruples of the railway companies. Smith had gained the trust and cooperation of so many companies partly by his payments, but also by ensuring that neither the bookstalls nor the advertisements he also managed became a source of embarrassment to the companies whose premises they graced. No company wanted a repeat of the 1846 incident when a vendor at Euston had to be disciplined for selling improper publications. Railway companies were very unwilling to attract bad publicity, and the terms of Smith’s contracts routinely banned advertisements for medicines for “indelicate” complaints as well as the retailing of indecent or immoral publications. But this desire to please the railway companies was the extent of Smith’s allegedly “vigilant censorship”: his firm would not stock 142 ] Chapter Eleven

anything that could be legally prosecuted or was of “an openly immoral character,” but that was as far as it went. Smith’s bookstalls did, for instance, stock Byron’s Don Juan and the novels of Alexandre Dumas.26 One story relates that Smith once found himself standing on the platform at Rugby station, gazing in “mournful contemplation” at his firm’s bookstall. He saw “a coruscation of yellow novels and white newspapers,” while the “volumes of essays, secular and religious, travels, science, poetry—all were thrust into odd corners or out of sight, for the public would have nothing but fiction.” 27 The story implies that Smith did not wholly approve of the dominance of novels and newspapers on the bookstalls. But it also illustrates the striking range of publications that railway bookstalls stocked. Fiction may indeed have dominated, but essays, travels, science, and poetry were all there as well. The story encourages us to think about the other types of publications that were found on bookstalls, and its impression of a wide range of genres is supported by the small amount of surviving evidence for actual bookstall holdings, all derived from W. H. Smith. Just two of the weekly forms that Smith’s bookstall clerks filled out are known to have survived from the 1850s, listing the stock received, sold, and returned to head office.28 The forms have a preprinted list of available periodicals and space to record book sales. The list of periodicals potentially available at Smith’s stalls was lengthy and extremely catholic. It included improving, instructive magazines such as Chambers’s Journal and Cassell’s Family Paper alongside the fiction-filled London Journal and Family Herald. However, in May 1855, the bookstall at Bletchley, a small town fifty miles north of London, stocked only about half of the thirty-five daily and weekly newspapers listed. Nor did it stock any of the four cheap weekly magazines, yet both the Civil Service Gazette and the Mining Journal were available. Its best-selling weekly title was the six-penny Illustrated London News, which sold 22 copies. The newspaper stamp, plus the additional penny Smith charged for express delivery to its bookstalls, meant that newspapers were too expensive to achieve high sales on the stalls. Even in 1856, once the stamp duty had been repealed, the bookstall at the major railway junction of Rugby still got only about a quarter of its weekly income from newspapers and magazines. It was not until the growth of the provincial newspaper press, following the repeal of the paper duty in 1861, that newspapers became common railway reading in Britain. The Rugby bookstall also made a reasonable income from the sale of rugs, wrappers, pencil cases, diaries, knives, and traveling caps. But its most significant sector was easily books, whose sales accounted for half the weekly income. The Rugby clerk’s return does not generally identify individual works, though it does reveal that a book on dogs costing 11s., the annual volume of Railway Bookstalls [ 143

Dickens’s weekly periodical Household Words, and a book on English sacred poets at the astonishing price of £1 were not only stocked, but bought. Most of the books sold at Rugby—there were over 160 of them that week— were identified only by price, at 1s., 1s.6d., or 2s. Most would have belonged to cheap series such as those of Routledge and others; and many would have been fiction. The best-selling named title at Rugby, however, was Bradshaw’s Railway Companion. For a broader picture of the types of books that were available on the bookstalls, we can turn to an article in the Saturday Review in 1857, whose information on “Railroad bookselling” had been supplied by W. H. Smith & Son.29 Smith revealed that their book sales fell into three major genres: fiction, poetry, and history. Novelists Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Captain Frederick Marryat were the most popular, while Walter Scott, Frances Trollope, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Lever sold well, but were a long way behind the top two: works by these authors might sell anything from 25 to 1,200 copies a month through the whole Smith network. Poetry was the next most reliable genre: Shakespeare, Pope, Byron, and Moore had sold about 100 copies each in the last six months. The third dominant genre was history. In 1851, Phillips had reported that Macaulay’s History of England had “sold rapidly,” while his short biographies of Lord Clive and Warren Hastings “found a market at once.”30 It was a similar story in 1857, although travelers seem to have been willing to pay higher prices for historical works. It was presumably the cheap 1853 edition of Archibald Alison’s History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution (Blackwood) that Smith reported as selling 200 to 300 copies in the last six months, yet even that ran to twelve volumes costing 4s. each. Bentley’s “authorized” editions of foreign historians were also reported to be “in steady demand” despite their prices; these included William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru (1850, three volumes for 18s.) and François Guizot’s History of Charles I and the English Revolution (1854, two volumes for 28s.). After fiction, poetry, and history, there was far more variety on the bookstalls than most commentators assumed. Samuel Phillips noticed in 1851 that books from such eminent houses as John Murray and Longman & Co. were stocked alongside the cheaper volumes from Routledge, Bohn, and others. Murray had a strong line in travel narratives and guidebooks, and Phillips noted George Borrow’s best-selling account of his heroic efforts to evangelize the Spanish, the Bible in Spain (1843, three volumes for 27s.), and Austen Layard’s description of his recent excavations at Nineveh (1851 abridged edition, 5s.). Murray’s guidebooks, including the Handbook for Travellers in France (1843, 10s.) and Handbook to Modern London (1851, 3s.6d.), were a natural option for the bookstalls.31 Murray and Longman both found it 144 ] Chapter Eleven

worthwhile to reissue popular works in 5s. editions to meet the demand for cheaper print. For instance, Longman issued Kirby and Spence’s Introduction to Entomology at that price in 1858; it had already sold 7,000 copies, even in its two-volume, 31s.6d. format.32 Both of the eminent publishing houses also experimented with 1s. volumes in 1851 (see chapter 13), though neither was truly comfortable in that market. Railway bookstalls provided a new retail outlet for cheap print. They brought the latest London releases to every town with a railway station, and they transformed the experience of book buying by enabling casual browsing and nonintimidating purchasing. Bookstalls brought their publications into the public thoroughfare and displayed them to people who might never have dared enter a bookshop. And they did most of their business with cheap print. Chambers, Knight, and the RTS had all bemoaned the difficulty of getting their cheap books and magazines to the readers who needed them, but here, at last, was a way of doing it. The fact that most customers were travelers in a rush to board their train placed a premium on attractive reading material and on cheapness. The older generation of instructive publications found themselves competing with a new generation of books: equally cheap, but clad in colorful garb and often with a stronger emphasis on entertainment than instruction. As is so generally true after 1850, the new technologies for the production and distribution of print were given full range in fiction, rather than the nonfiction they had served in the 1830s and 1840s. But this must not overshadow the fact that informative and instructive print continued to benefit from these technologies, alongside the flood of cheap trash emphasized by critical commentators. Clearly, many hundreds of thousands of readers preferred to read fiction while traveling, but equally clearly, tens of thousands read—at least occasionally—natural history, history, biographies, and travel narratives. The presence of such works on the bookstalls would lead the British Quarterly Review to claim in 1859 that the stalls were “already advancing far beyond the limits of romance and literary buffoonery; and interspersed amongst their gay bindings are even now to be seen numerous works of solid interest.” There was hope, he thought, that the bookstalls would eventually become “the most efficient agents of the soundest and healthiest productions of the press.”33 In fact, by the end of the 1850s, a significant range of cheap instructive and educational print was available, not just from the old pioneers but from new competitors. This meant that the context of W. & R. Chambers’s ambitions for cheap instructive print had changed dramatically as a consequence of the rise of railway reading. Railway Bookstalls [ 145

Figure 12. Putnam’s Semi-Monthly Library was an American imitator of Murray’s Reading for the Rail. Its generic cover designs featured the railroad and the printing machine: the twin progenitors of cheap railway literature. Reproduced by permission of the American Antiquarian Society.

12

Instruction in the Railway Marketplace

Samuel Phillips’s 1851 article in the Times ignited a debate about railway literature, and publishers took note of his argument that they were missing a great opportunity to raise “the intellectual tastes of all classes” and convey “valuable instruction to minds able and willing to receive it.” Phillips justified his attention to railway literature by arguing that travel was an educational experience, well known to broaden the mind, for “men cannot move their bodies and leave their minds behind them.” People who never could have left their villages in the days of stagecoach travel were now able to experience “the cheap and manifold enjoyments of the rail,” an experience that should be enhanced by informative books provided “for the hungry minds that sought refreshment on their feverish way.”1 Phillips’s rousing refrain that “we cannot promise to instruct by steam, or to convey knowledge by express speed, but we may at least provide cheap and good books for willing purchasers” was not substantially different from what Chambers, Knight, and the charitable societies had been arguing for years.2 But the public attention surrounding his article drew the attention of publishers who previously had ignored the lower end of the market. If railway bookstalls could help existing instructive publishers sell their wares to those who needed them and encourage more publishers to start issuing cheap books, then perhaps railway bookstalls would mark the final coming-of-age of efforts to promote popular education.

[ 147

Instructing by Steam Phillips’s optimism about the railway’s role in popular education came from his discovery that, according to the bookstall clerks he interviewed, “working men generally and some country people” were good customers for “cheap and useful” books. Phillips was told that John Weale’s Rudimentary Course of science books were “very generally purchased by the mechanics, engine-drivers and others employed upon the line.”3 Six years later, the Saturday Review reported that “the engine-drivers and fitters are fond of buying books on mechanics,” and cited Dionysius Lardner’s latest publication, the Museum of Science and Art (Walton, 1854–56), issued in twelve parts at 1s.6d. each.4 John Weale had been publishing textbooks on science, architecture, and engineering since the 1820s, and he launched his Rudimentary Course of ten-penny works in August 1848. The treatises were to introduce “the leading principles of various sciences” for use in schools and other educational institutions and be “within the reach of all classes earning their daily bread.” Titles included Rudimentary Chemistry, The Steam Engine (written by Lardner), and The Art of Constructing Cranes. Weale claimed that a knowledge of scientific principles—and not merely facts—would be “a positive gain in the common pursuits of life” for readers of all classes and lead them toward more “noble and worthy objects of study.”5 As the Times remarked in 1854, Weale’s cheap manuals were not the sort of books that would be “hastily read in the carriage, and then thrown aside for ever.” They seemed the very antithesis of the trashy novels that were always taken to be typical railway reading—yet the Times reported that the three titles just mentioned had managed to sell more than 40,000 copies.6 The Times used Weale’s publications to argue that cheap books did not have to be trivial to be profitable. Weale’s success reiterates the fact that there was clearly a railway market for nonfiction, even for scientific and technical works, and demonstrates that books that were not specifically intended for the railway market could easily be sold there if the price was low enough. This should have been heartening news for the earlier generation of philanthropically motivated pioneers of cheap instructive publishing who were eager for more effective distribution methods. Unfortunately, most of these publishers were so busy struggling to cope with the increased competition from the new forms of cheap literature that they had little energy for exploiting the railway market. All the older penny magazines were losing readers in the 1840s: the SPCK’s Saturday Magazine ceased publication in 1844, and the Penny Magazine followed in 1846. Chambers’s Journal survived with a relaunch in 1844, but that was the high point for its circulation.7 Knight’s Shilling Volumes and Chambers’s Miscel148 ] Chapter Twelve

lany of Useful and Instructive Tracts came to an unexpectedly early ends. The most high-profile casualty was the SDUK, whose members—faced with the declining circulation of the Penny Magazine and the sprawling, unfinished embarrassment that was the Biographical Dictionary—decided to wind up the society in March 1846. It was only saved from substantial debt by Charles Knight’s purchase of its copyrights and stock.8 Chambers, Knight, and the religious publishers were forced to consider that the success of their publications in the 1830s and early 1840s might have been due to their uniquely low prices, rather than a widespread thirst for knowledge. And on top of all this, the entire book trade was put under strain during the economic depression of late 1847 and 1848. With debts being called in throughout the business world, some publishers found themselves in trouble. In Dublin, William Curry Jr. went into bankruptcy in July 1847, creating problems for the many British publishers—including Chambers—who had relied on him as their Irish agent.9 In London, Charles Knight had to sell most of his stock and copyrights, including those he had purchased from the SDUK. The Penny Cyclopaedia, the Pictorial History of England, and the Pictorial Family Bible were sold to a publishing consortium that included W. S. Orr, from whom they later passed to Chambers in partial settlement of his debts.10 Knight shifted the focus of his firm to more lucrative government printing contracts and spent more of his own time on authorship. By the 1850s, Knight appears to have lost the faith that sustained him through the 1830s and 1840s. Years of experience drove him to the conclusion that volumes of cheap instructive nonfiction were doomed never to sell well, no matter what new methods of distribution were introduced. He claimed in 1854 that his Shilling Volumes would not benefit from railway bookstalls because, as nonfiction, “they scarcely presented sufficient attractions for the travelling readers for amusement.”11 But Knight’s pessimism surely stemmed from his personal lack of success. He later tried to explain that “I found that the new competition of excessive cheapness, without regard to the quality of the reading made cheap, was not suited to the habits in which I had been so long trained.”12 He had sunk large amounts of money into the SDUK for very little return, and he was widely recognized to have had “singular ill-luck” in losing money on projects which were “incontestably . . . productive of a very large amount of benefit to the world at large.”13 It was not that his ideas were poor, but that his execution was somehow lacking. The Times remarked that “good books that have failed under the control of Mr Knight have proved profitable speculations as soon as they have passed into other hands,” perhaps referring to the fact that the Shilling Volumes were later marketed as “Books for Railway Travellers.”14 In contrast to Knight, the religious publishing societies had the advanInstruction in the Railway Marketplace [ 149

tage of strong support from their subscribers, healthy publishing programs, and less interest in profits. A commercial publisher had to feed his family, but a charity usually sought only to break even. At the worst, a society could use its charitable income and reserves to rescue it from financial loss, but commercial publishers would have to turn to loans from friends or face bankruptcy. The societies’ editors could also be reassured in difficult times by the support of a committee of twenty or thirty backed by a membership of several thousands. And, for the officers and members of the SPCK and the RTS, the arrival of the new forms of cheap literature, few of which had any spiritual value, meant a new and powerful enemy to be fought. It forced the RTS to shift from publishing on religious topics to publishing in a Christian tone on any topic, and thus engaging more directly with the general book trade. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, both it and the SPCK were major players in the provision of cheap instructive print, keeping alive that sense of a mission for education that had characterized the instructive publishers of the 1830s.15

Chambers and the Competition W. & R. Chambers were not immune to the new competition, and it occurred in the midst of their worries about William Orr and the management of their London business. In 1853, one of the brothers wrote in a memorandum that “a crisis seems now to have arrived in our business.” Quite simply, there was “now more competition than formerly, and consequently greater difficulty in our maintaining our ground.”16 In contrast to Knight (and Orr), Chambers did not come close to bankruptcy. Their profits certainly dipped in 1848, but the Journal still turned £2,500 profit that year.17 They could afford to remain more optimistic than Knight. In 1851, William could still voice his conviction (to cheers from his listeners) that “people were longing for mental elevation and improvement” and that “such was the strength” of the improving literature that the “trash” would “ultimately be driven from the field.”18 The 1853 memorandum expressed a determination not to be “thrust down from the pre-eminence we have hitherto maintained,” even if it would “be necessary to make changes in existing works and to start new ones.”19 Despite their increasingly tense relationship with Orr, the brothers continued to consult him about the London book trade and general strategy until the final break. In January 1846, Orr wrote at length about the likely impact of “rivals of a formidable character” that were “springing up” both in Scotland and London. In his opinion, what Chambers’s Journal needed was “some fresh literary blood” to compete with the newcomers. He felt that, despite the relaunch, “the same tone has pervaded” the Journal throughout its 150 ] Chapter Twelve

existence and “nearly the same readers have perused it.” Although such consistency was a reason for the Journal’s success, Orr argued that it left the Journal poorly prepared to attract the “totally new class of minds” who had become readers by the 1840s and “who require a different pabulum to that of our younger days.”20 Orr went on to suggest ways in which new contributors to the Journal might be found and encouraged. Six years later, Orr and Chambers were still discussing how to adapt the Journal to the new circumstances. In 1846, Orr had mentioned the comic journal Punch (1841) and the serial novels of Charles Dickens and Charles Lever as representing the new spirit of literature that Chambers’s Journal might wish to emulate. By mid-1852, he had realized where the true threat lay, and was adamant that Dickens was “not the rival we have to fear.” Dickens’s Household Words magazine was priced at 2d. and reached about 35,000 readers a week, while Chambers’s Journal remained a half-penny cheaper and had 22,000 more readers. Rather, “the real opposition” was “the Mass of Penny Publications,” which were selling well over 200,000 a week not because of any superior literary style, but simply because (said Orr) they had illustrations and offered “nearly half as much again” in terms of contents.21 Chambers had wondered if the Journal would compete better if it had more up-to-date contents and more engagement with passing events, but Orr dismissed this as the realm of the newspapers.22 Yet Orr had little concrete advice to give. In 1848, Chambers launched a new series of general nonfiction books, under the title of the Instructive and Entertaining Library. This was to be a revitalized set of People’s Editions in a more modern format (slightly larger text and no double columns). Unfortunately, as with their relaunch of the Journal in 1844, Chambers had perhaps been so alert that they responded before the full extent of the changes taking place in the book trade could be appreciated. Within a few months, the Instructive and Entertaining Library’s price tag of 2s.6d. looked uncompetitive alongside the shilling novels of Simms & McIntyre and George Routledge. By 1852, Chambers stopped adding new titles to the series, apparently accepting that reprinting nonfiction by steam power at cheap prices was no longer a unique advantage for their firm, and might even be something that other publishers could do better. A more subtle response to the changing demands of the reading audience can be found in the growing amount of fiction and “light literature” incorporated into Chambers’s instructive publications by the late 1840s. The Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts (1844–47), the Papers for the People (1850–51), and the Repository of Instructive and Amusing Tracts (1852–54) were rather a contrast to the original Information for the People. The original essays in the Information had all been nonfiction, although descripInstruction in the Railway Marketplace [ 151

tions of certain leisure activities were included in later editions. The later series of tracts moved away from the encyclopaedia style and made more use of narrative. History, travel, and biography could all be told as narratives with dashing heroes or heroines, and the series also included some fictional narratives. The increasing use of narrative in general, and of fiction in particular, reflects a growing acceptance that most readers found fiction more appealing than instruction. Chambers did not abandon their instructive mission, but they did try to make it less dry. The Miscellany was to be a “lively fireside companion.” Its contents would “cheer the lagging and desponding by the relation of tales drawn from the imagination of popular writers—rouse the fancy by descriptions of interesting foreign scenes—[and] give a zest to every-day occupations by ballad and lyrical poetry.”23 Of all the later series of instructive tracts, the Papers for the People had the most overt emphasis on self-improvement, with advertisements specifically targeting those who had benefited from “improved schooling,” “popular lectures,” and the instructive publications of the previous two decades. The planning notes for the series survive in the W. & R. Chambers archive. It was organized around eight genres: Biographical, Historical, Geographical or Descriptive, Natural History, Physical & Chemical, Political & Social, Mental or Psychological, and Literary. The editors were keen to make the series relevant to their readers: historical topics should be chosen for their “bearing on current events,” political and social topics should be “of current interest,” and biographies should deal either with “eminent men as they die off ” or with historical figures whose acts have some “bearing upon the occurrences of the present day.” They also wanted their authors to avoid “mere matter of fact detail” in history, “mere topographical description” in geography, and “technical or professional” language in science (a “general and philosophical manner” would be more appropriate).24 As the series developed, the original eight categories evolved. Several were merged, and none of the topics proposed for Psychological was ever written, despite Robert Chambers’s known interest in such matters. But most obviously, as with the other series, the quantity of “light literature” was expanded. The publicity material implied that “Literary” was the most substantial category, by listing “Criticism, Fiction, Personal Narrative, and other branches of Light Literature” as if they were each on a par with “History, Archaeology, Biography, Science.”25 Most volumes ended up with two literary papers (of eight) and more biography, history, and geography than science. For instance, the fifth volume opened with “Secret Societies of the Middle Ages” and closed with a biography of the recently deceased Poet Laureate, William 152 ] Chapter Twelve

Wordsworth. In between, there were two short stories (one by Dinah Mulock); an account of “Jewish life in central Europe”; a description of James Brooke, the Rajah of Sarawak; an essay on education by Thomas Hogg, the editor of Hogg’s Instructor; and a survey of “Antarctic Explorations” by Walter White, following up an earlier essay on the Arctic. The lack of scientific topics was fairly typical (and in contrast to the Information), although there were essays in other volumes on “The science of the sunbeam,” “The microscope and its marvels” and “Electric communication.” In contrast to the Information for the People, the later series of tracts made little effort to be encyclopaedic. As their names suggest, they were to be “miscellanies” or “repositories” from which readers could pick and choose rather than cut-down encyclopaedias containing everything a well-informed reader needed to know. The change reflects shifts in both the target audience and the competition since the 1830s. On the positive side, as Chambers remarked in advertising the Miscellany, they could now aim their publications at a slightly more educated readership: they could presume to be building on a modest education rather than supplying its lack. The negative aspect, however, was that increasing competition meant instructive publishers no longer had a monopoly on cheapness, and instructive publications did not seem to be competitive in the marketplace. This led Chambers to place more emphasis on entertainment, by including fiction, emphasizing narrative, and stressing the contemporary relevance of their nonfiction. But it also led to the ultimate decline of the format of instructive tracts. Chambers made very few efforts to target the railway market specifically, perhaps because they were well aware that the audience for cheap print was much wider than just railway travelers and because their target market was the barely educated, not those who traveled in first class. But, like everyone else, they noted Phillips’s Times article, and in December 1851, they announced their Pocket Miscellany, for reading on “the Railway, the Fireside, or the Bush.”26 Unlike the other series of tracts, the Pocket Miscellany contained articles reprinted from the early volumes of Chambers’s Journal— “now irrecoverably out of print, and unknown to the young generation of readers.” Each volume of the Pocket Miscellany cost 6d., came in paper wrappers, and contained a variety of articles. Chambers argued that the miscellaneous format—rather than a single narrative—would ensure a “light and entertaining” read. This series proved particularly successful in the United States, where importers Gould & Lincoln of Boston marketed it as a reader in schools, under the title Chambers’ Home Book and Pocket Miscellany (see fig. 16), and the American press commended it for helping to “drive away the miserable flashy-trashy stuff.”27 A few years later, Chambers also reissued seInstruction in the Railway Marketplace [ 153

lections from the Papers for the People, rebranded as Tales for Travellers, but this seems to be the sum total of their attempt to engage directly with the railway market.28 During the 1850s, the business of W. & R. Chambers was changing. William and Robert were becoming less active in the business: as well as taking David and Robert secundus into the partnership, they were delegating more to paid editors and managers. The Journal was still going strong, but where it had once been one of the best-selling cheap magazines, the firm now had to be content with publishing one of the better-selling magazines of family instruction. Its circulation of 55,000 in 1855 was no match for the 450,000 of the London Journal that year.29 The People’s Editions and the instructive tracts had had their day. The Miscellany had sold over 107,000 sets by the end of 1847, but the several series of the 1850s would sell only 30,000 or so. The last, the Repository, did not even make a profit.30 Despite Chambers’s continuing provision of cheap information, and their attempts to combine it with lighter entertainment, that particular niche in the market seemed to have disappeared by the mid-1850s. On the other hand, their Educational Course was still in demand and still gaining new volumes. Although it had originally been created with the needs of autodidacts in mind, by the 1850s, it was proving its worth as a source of reliable but cheap textbooks to “schools of a humble order” in Britain and throughout the colonies.31 That shift toward more formal education was mirrored in the decision to produce a proper encyclopaedia, although, in keeping with the firm’s ideals, Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (1860–68) was initially issued in parts. In 1872, the firm issued Chambers’s English Dictionary; again this was a relatively affordable practical one-volume work, a far cry from the etymological scholarship produced by the Oxford English Dictionary team in the 1880s. The firm had always published books by William and Robert, with the famous exception of Robert’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which he went to great lengths to keep anonymous.32 In the 1850s, Chambers published Robert’s Life of Robert Burns (1851) and two volumes by William dealing with the modern United States, Things as They Are in America (1854) and American Slavery and Colour (1857). They acquired copyrights and plates from less successful publishers and reissued some of their works, including Charles Knight’s Pictorial History of England and W. S. Orr’s Gallery of Nature by Thomas Milner. They commissioned and published books that explained current events, such as Pictorial History of the Russian War and the Indian Mutiny. Thus, by the late 1850s, W. & R. Chambers was becoming a more general book publisher, with a strong edu154 ] Chapter Twelve

cational line. The firm still owned a well-equipped print shop, but neither its technology nor the products that resulted from it were as innovatively pioneering as they had been in the 1830s. The Times confidently asserted in December 1853 that “no man with open eyes can doubt the general intellectual improvement of the working classes.” This ought to have been a matter of celebration for all those who had been campaigning for it since the 1830s. The activities of Knight, the SDUK, Chambers, and the religious societies had succeeded in demonstrating to the book trade as a whole that a huge new readership existed and that using new technologies enabled respectable cheap print to be profitable. As the Times pointed out, “Messrs Chambers, of Edinburgh have amassed wealth by the enormous sale of their three-halfpenny journal and of their penny books of instruction.”33 Yet competition from commercial cheap print drove some of the older generation of publishers out of business, while others had to fight an uphill battle or acknowledge that their appeal was limited and specialized. It is worth reflecting on why both Knight and Chambers were wary of targeting their publications at the railway bookstalls. Their works were at a disadvantage in terms of their appearance, especially once Routledge introduced individualized colorful cover designs (see chapter 11). Chambers did experiment with colored paper wrappers for Papers for the People, but the geometric patterns in pink, blue, and gold were a far cry from Routledge’s striking images. Another problem both firms faced was that they had a reputation as purveyors of serious, high-minded “instruction and amusement.” For two decades they had been promoting popular education, and receiving critical acclaim for their high standards of information provision, literary style, and moral tone. For many potential readers, the Chambers imprint guaranteed trustworthy contents and a serious tone. For schoolteachers, ministers, or parents, this was undoubtedly a useful guarantee, but the fickle traveling public, seeking distraction for an hour or two, might find it less appealing. A final element may be that Chambers knew their potential market to be far wider than those who traveled by railways, and while they would welcome sales of their publications through the railway bookstalls, creating new books or tract series specifically for railway travelers would be to restrict their usefulness. Unlike Knight and the SDUK, W. & R. Chambers survived the arrival of railway literature and shilling volumes. They had a sound business system and an efficient printing establishment. Even though they did not expand significantly into the railway bookstall market, they were able to continue Instruction in the Railway Marketplace [ 155

their core business with respectable success. At the same time, as part 3 will investigate, they began to pay greater attention to English-speaking markets overseas. Yet Chambers’s lack of engagement with the railway market did not mean that railway literature completely failed to live up to Phillips’s hopes of “knowledge at express speed”: it was just that other publishers provided that cheap knowledge.

156 ] Chapter Twelve

Figure 13. The first page of George Routledge’s August 1856 catalog shows the range of instructive and informative works published by the firm, despite its reputation for cheap fiction.

13

The Dignitaries of the Trade Take on Routledge

In December 1853, the Times felt able to report that W. H. Smith had ensured that “the rubbish and the dirt have been swept away” from the railway bookstalls. But, as the Times acknowledged, Smith needed something to replace the “rubbish,” and his success depended on the willingness of publishers to supply suitable publications. It interviewed a bookstall clerk who claimed that the railway publishers had now improved their publications because “people have not rested satisfied with the cheap and bad commodity, but have insisted upon better stuff.”1 But it was also the case that new publishers had entered the railway market, many of them with the explicit aim of providing better-quality publications. Samuel Phillips’s 1851 article had been taken up by the Publishers’ Circular, which called on members of the book trade to embrace the crusade for an “improved supply of literature to the various railway stations” as a means of improving “the social condition of the inhabitants of the length and breadth of the land.” It echoed the views of many quarterly reviewers, who saw a need for the masses—especially in the industrial cities—to be weaned off “the miscalled cheap literature” of recent years, in other words, frivolous fiction. The Circular tried to enlist provincial booksellers by hinting of the advantages for “the ready supply of the best publications throughout the country”—apparently unaware that railway bookstalls were more likely to replace than assist provincial booksellers in the long term.2 Despite its close resonance with their own goals, this plea for action had little impact on W. & R. Chambers’s business plans, but it did convince a wide [ 159

range of other publishers. In the early 1850s, therefore, cheap nonfiction— with a more or less instructive element—was being issued by several of the long-established senior publishers, as well as by George Routledge himself, who had broadened his activities far beyond fiction. After Phillips’s article, at least ten series of 1s. (or occasionally 1s.6d.) books were launched between 1851 and 1853. Some of their publishers promised high-quality fiction, while others focused on nonfiction. Some specifically targeted railway travelers in their series titles, while others merely implied it in their marketing. Nonfiction series were launched by Longman & Co. (Traveller’s Library), John Murray (Reading for the Rail), Simms & McIntyre (The Bookcase), Chapman & Hall (Reading for Travellers), John Chapman (Library for the People), Clarke & Beeton (Illustrated Library of Readable Books), and Ingram & Cooke, publishers of the Illustrated London News (National Illustrated Library). This was in addition to Routledge’s Popular Library and Bohn’s Shilling Series, which had been launched before Phillips’s article. By 1853, therefore, it was no wonder that W. H. Smith, and his customers, had a much wider range of informative publications to choose from.

The Dignitaries of the Trade Longman & Co. and John Murray were among the most respected literary publishers in London, and the Times referred to them as “the dignitaries of the trade.”3 They were the publishers of the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, respectively, and published many famous historians, novelists, poets, and men of science. Thomas Babington Macaulay was one of Longman’s most prestigious authors, while Murray’s list included Charles Darwin as well as Lord Byron and Jane Austen. In the middle of the century, Longman was developing a strong educational line, and Murray was well known for travel. Both already had a history of not-quite-successful involvement in cheaper literature. Back in 1829, Longman had asked science writer Dionysius Lardner to edit a series of 6s. volumes to form a Cabinet Cyclopaedia. The series did not sell well enough, and Longman was still trying to shift the stock in 1851. Murray had experimented with cheaper books with his Family Library in 1829 and his Home and Colonial Library in 1845. The Family Library had offered original works at 5s., but Murray had to sell 100,000 volumes to the remainder merchant Thomas Tegg in 1834, and the 6s. volumes of the Home and Colonial Library became victims of the trade depression in 1849.4 The problem Murray and Longman both faced was that it was extremely difficult to make a profit from 5s. or 6s. books if you paid your authors well. 160 ] Chapter Thirteen

In May 1851, as visitors congregated in London for the opening of the Great Exhibition, Longman announced that Macaulay’s biography of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal, would form the opening volume of a new Traveller’s Library, a shilling series containing “valuable information in a form adapted for reading while travelling.”5 The idea was rumored to have come from Macaulay himself, who had spotted Lord Mahon’s Narrative of the Insurrection of 1745 on a bookstall and suggested that his own works might sell equally well there.6 Longman’s sales figures reveal that Macaulay was right about his own marketability: he was the author of almost all the best-selling volumes of the Traveller’s Library. John Murray, on the other hand, reacted directly to Phillips’s Times article. He arranged to reprint it, with an introduction, as a pamphlet, called Literature for the Rail, and it was freely quoted in the advertisements for his Reading for the Rail series. Murray used the same language of dispersing “sound and entertaining information and innocent amusement” in order to minimize the effects of “the trivial, and often immoral, publications at present destroying the taste and corrupting the morals of Railway readers.” Murray’s volumes were promised to be “cheap, valuable, and instructive” and “not merely to be read on the Railway, and thrown aside at the end of the journey” but deserving of “a permanent place on the shelves of the library.”7 The key distinguishing feature of the series for travelers produced by Longman and Murray was their claim to contain works of superior literary merit. Although Phillips suspected that even educated readers “lose their accustomed taste the moment they enter the station,” the cheap series produced by the eminent publishers assumed that this was not so, and that certain members of the reading public would wish to read history, biography, or science while traveling.8 An American commentator pointed to the needs of “the care-worn business man, whose only hour for literary culture is snatched in traveling” and “the man of many books, who wants a change from his daily studies, but yet finds stories tedious.”9 Murray’s series was particularly strong on history and biography, with only a few travel narratives; Longman included history, biography, travel, and a number of works on natural and social science. Although their topics were broadly similar to those offered by Chambers and Knight, these distinguished publishers were aiming at a very different audience, with a new recognition that cheap literature need not be only for the uneducated masses. Longman’s Traveller’s Library was the most successful of the “quality” series of cheap nonfiction, surviving for five years compared with Murray’s two years. Its seventy-three works (in 102 volumes) illustrate both the variety of subject matter included in these series and the means the firm used to minimize payments to authors. Five of the first thirteen volumes were historical The Dignitaries of the Trade Take on Routledge [ 161

biographies (including Warren Hastings, William Pitt, and Lord Clive) by Macaulay, to which Longman already owned the rights. The essays had originally been written for the Edinburgh Review, and though some had been reprinted in his Critical and Historical Essays (1843), others now appeared in book format for the first time. Altogether, the Edinburgh Review contributed seventeen of the seventy-three titles in the series, including essays by such eminent authors as Francis Jeffrey (on Jonathan Swift), William Coneybeare (on Mormonism), and John Forster (on Daniel Defoe). A further ten titles came from the Longman backlist, including an account of London excerpted from J. R. M’Culloch’s Geographical Dictionary (1841) and an abridgement of Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative of His Shipwreck (3rd ed., 1841). Longman was willing to pay for occasional translations and for original works, but carefully kept the payments low in both cases. Fifteen works were translated from French and German, including Everiste Hüc’s Recollections of a Journey through Tartary, Thibet and China (Paris, 1850) and a new English translation of Ida Pfeiffer’s A Lady’s Voyage round the World (Vienna, 1850; it had already appeared in Routledge’s Popular Series). Although American works were an obvious source for cheap texts, that was a strategy closely linked in the public mind with Routledge, Bohn, and the type of railway literature Longman was trying to supplant. Longman’s only American reprints appeared late in the series, Charles Lanman’s Adventures in the Wilds of North America, which seems to have been created from chapters of several of Lanman’s works from the late 1840s, and William Hurlbut’s Pictures of Cuba (Boston, 1854). The remaining twenty-five or so volumes of the Traveller’s Library were commissioned for the series. Having learned the lesson from the 1830s, Longman paid only modest fees for these volumes. T. Lindley Kemp got £21 for his Natural History of Creation, as did George Wilson for Electricity and the Electric Telegraph, but John R. Leifchild was paid just £31.10s. for the two volumes of Our Coal and Our Coal-Pits.10 Longman’s decision not merely to include these (and three more) volumes on the sciences but to actively commission them is noteworthy. Although the sciences had regularly figured in the schemes for the diffusion of useful knowledge of the 1830s philanthropists and in the publications of Chambers and Knight, publishers of railway literature tended to focus on travels, history, and biography. Although it may have been true that engine drivers and mechanics bought John Weale’s scientific treatises, most of the publishers of railway literature did not think travelers would find the sciences appealing. Murray’s only gesture to the sciences was the inclusion of essays on the flower garden and on the honey bee. It was perhaps easier for publishers (and readers) to see the escapist possibilities in history and travel, whereas the sciences and mechan162 ] Chapter Thirteen

ical arts seemed more likely to take the aim of education and improvement seriously. In an effort to make Our Coal more palatable to Longman’s jaded travelers than it sounded, Leifchild introduced himself in his preface as “a traveller underground” and emphasized the effort and time expended, not to mention the dirt and danger encountered, in his “subterranean travels.” By presenting himself as the kin of the African or Arctic explorer, whose narratives were a standard part of such series, he tried to locate his volume as anthropology as well as geology. He promised his readers a “natural history of Pit-coal and Pit-people.” It would explain how coal was formed and mined, but the reader would also learn what it was like to go down a coal mine (and “what you look like when you come up”!), and what the life of a collier was like, including “religion, or irreligion; their lives and their deaths—natural or accidental.”11 It was to be a crossover between economy, engineering, and geology, on the one hand, and biography, ethnography, and social science, on the other. Of course, as Chambers and Routledge both knew, acquiring cheap texts—from the firm’s backlist or from modestly remunerated authors—was only part of the solution to making cheap print profitable. Careful use of paper and a cheap binding were essential, and steam printing and stereotyping would also help to reduce costs. Both Longman’s and Murray’s volumes used small typefaces, but did not go as far as the early Chambers’s People’s Editions: like Routledge’s volumes, there were no double columns or miniscule type. Most of the Traveller’s Library volumes were printed by the firm of Spottiswoode and, given the runs involved, would surely have been machine printed. The volumes were certainly stereotyped, and this allowed Longman, like Routledge, to print several impressions rather than one long run, thus reducing the risk of being left with unsold copies.12 The most striking thing is that Longman’s and Murray’s volumes were very plain, with simple undecorated covers and title pages; Longman’s predicted costs for the series included no entry for illustrations or decorative work. Despite using many of the same techniques, the Longman and Murray volumes would have looked sober and respectable alongside Routledge’s on the railway bookstall, suggesting that these publishers had not yet fully grasped the different marketing techniques required for the new distribution outlet.

Reputation versus Success When launching the Traveller’s Library, Longman must have been uncertain about how many sales could be expected, but the early volumes were encouragingly successful. Macaulay’s Warren Hastings sold 4,000 copies immediately and more than 14,000 copies within a year. Buoyed by this sucThe Dignitaries of the Trade Take on Routledge [ 163

cess, Longman printed runs of 5,000, 6,000, and even 9,000 of the subsequent volumes. However, by the tenth volume, it was becoming clear that while Macaulay’s name could sell around 10,000, most other authors sold only 5,000 to 7,500 copies in a year. Longman started 1852 with a typical print run of 5,000 copies, but this fell to a more cautious 4,000 copies by September, and by 1853, 3,000 copies had become standard for all new issues, except those by Macaulay.13 Three thousand copies was just above the breakeven point for the series. The most significant variable was the cost for literary labor since some volumes were free while others had editors, translators, or authors to be paid.14 Leifchild’s Our Coal was fairly typical, costing £155 for two volumes, while the series average was £82 per volume, for 3,000 copies. The breakdown of its costs was: Paper Production Literary labor Advertising Miscellaneous

25% 25% 20% 21% 9%

As with all cheap books, the single biggest cost was for paper: the 40 reams of paper used to print Coal cost as much as the typesetting, manufacturing of stereotype plates, and printing together. The advertising costs were surprisingly substantial—more than on literary labor!—which suggests that Longman had not completely adapted to the economics of cheap mass publishing. Longman anticipated a profit of £29.1s. if all 3,000 copies of both volumes were sold; however, selling only 2,500 copies would result in a loss of £1.13s.15 The Traveller’s Library volumes were stereotyped from the start, so it was easy to print additional copies if necessary. The first volume of Coal had four further (small) impressions, and ended up selling 5,982 copies by the end of 1860 (although, intriguingly, the second volume sold more).16 Without stereotype plates, Longman would have had to take the risk of guessing the ultimate sales. The firm’s gamble on Wellington’s funeral showed how badly wrong that could go (even with plates). Journalist Samuel Phillips’s Memoir of the Duke of Wellington (1852) sold 32,800 copies within a year—making it the best-selling volume in the series by a long way—but this was far less than the 64,000 that had been printed. Twenty thousand copies were sold as waste paper in 1854, followed by another 4,800 the following year.17 By the end of 1854, the new volumes in the Traveller’s Library were selling barely 1,500 copies on their release with slow sales thereafter; and in May 1856, the series closed.18 In its heyday, the Traveller’s Library achieved sales 164 ] Chapter Thirteen

at the same level as Chambers and Knight had managed for their People’s Editions and Shilling Volumes. Around 3,000 copies was respectable, but not impressive. It was not only far lower than Routledge’s fiction sales, but also lower than the sales of Routledge’s nonfiction. In December 1853, the Times diagnosed what it already saw as the failure of the well-meaning efforts of Murray, Longman, and their peers. It reported that the great publishers of “Paternoster Row” (Longman) and “Albemarle Street” (Murray) had discovered at settling day that “there has been hardly a profit for the author, and very little more than his trouble for the publisher,” despite offering “volumes of repute and of lasting utility.” Yet at the same time, George Routledge had just signed his £20,000 deal with Bulwer-Lytton. Clearly, some railway literature could be made to pay. Why then, the Times wondered, could “Farringdon-street” do what “Albemarlestreet” could not?19 To find an answer, Samuel Phillips went back to interview the bookstall clerk at Euston Station. He reported that the business in cheap volumes had undoubtedly increased, and the quality had improved. Routledge’s early books had done “no credit to author, publisher or purchaser,” but the firm had “steadily raised the standard of their publications” and the current range of books “provided they are only interesting” can “command a much larger sale than their first questionable ventures.” Simms & McIntyre and Ingram & Cook were also said to have learned from experience how to combine low prices with good books. Given this improvement in standards, allegedly driven by consumer demand, why were Murray and Longman unable to benefit? The bookstall clerk’s answer was simple: reputation. The public had no faith that the senior publishing houses could supply “the exact article they want, or what they consider value for their money,” and by aiming at first-class passengers when choosing texts and eschewing cover art, Murray and Longman did little to counter that prejudice. In a few short years, the Routledge name had become a guarantee for “the masses” of being “gratified and pleased,” and that reputation carried over to the nonfiction. The names of Murray and Longman held out no such promise of entertainment to the new reading public (and nor did Chambers or Knight).

The Transformation of Routledge & Co. By the mid-1850s, George Routledge had emerged triumphant in the realm of cheap publishing. He had taken on two partners, and the firm was now Routledge & Co.20 It was publishing some of the most famous novelists— British as well as American—and had an extensive range of nonfiction series that were intended to assist their readers with life outside the railway carThe Dignitaries of the Trade Take on Routledge [ 165

riage. Although its prices remained low, and it continued to be a master in the art of repackaging, Routledge & Co. had become a major commissioning publisher and one of the most important producers of cheap literature in Britain. The firm was also now an important publisher of cheap knowledge. In 1854, the Times reviewed Routledge’s publications alongside John Weale’s Rudimentary Series and Dionysius Lardner’s Museum of Science and Art, under the heading “Literature for the People.” Where review magazines had once ignored Routledge as beneath them, the Times praised his efforts. To emphasize that he was no longer simply an unscrupulous reprinter of American works, it gave the example of John George Wood’s Illustrated Natural History (1853), “one of the most recent and best of Messrs Routledge’s publications.” Routledge had commissioned this work from a young nature-loving clergyman who had been forced to give up his parish by ill health, but went on to become an important popularizer of natural history in Victorian Britain.21 His Natural History had so many illustrations that the total cost for literary and artistic labor was reported to be £650. Sales of 3,000 copies would not produce sufficient profit to cover such large literary and artistic expenses, but Routledge was now so confident of being able to sell tens of thousands of copies of his books that he could take the risk. The Times was confident that Wood’s work would “pay well in the long run, simply because the price finds an entrance for the book at doors that do not belong exclusively to the rich.”22 This, of course, was exactly what Chambers had been arguing for years, but had discovered that price alone could not open up enough doors. Routledge had the advantage of a different sort of reputation and an ability to market his wares effectively through the new distribution outlet. For Routledge, the cost of commissioning new works made it more risky than using reprints with a known track record of sales and critical acclaim. Routledge followed Chambers’s strategy of selecting little-known authors who would not expect handsome payments (most of the £650 for Wood’s Natural History was for the illustrations), and he relied on the lowness of the price, rather than the author’s reputation, to make the sales. But where Chambers’s vision of cheap nonfiction always tended toward an academic definition of general knowledge and saw little need for frills, most of Routledge’s nonfiction was marketed as an aid to leisure rather than education, and he was fully aware of the appeal of illustrations, colorful covers, and gilt edging. In early 1853, Routledge replaced his Popular Library with a “New Series of Universally Popular Books,” which became known as the Cheap Series, and, like its predecessor, continued to mix fiction with the nonfiction. Routledge claimed this series would contain “works that are worth reading 166 ] Chapter Thirteen

and worth preserving,” rather than discarding at journey’s end.23 Although Routledge would not have accepted the denigration of his Railway Library by high-brow commentators, he was shrewd enough to know that certain sections of the reading public might be tempted by a cheap series promising higher-quality reading. American works continued to appear in the Cheap Series, but they were soon joined by newly written biographies—by British authors—of Admiral Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and Sir John Franklin. Then there were new accounts of travel in New Zealand and Australia, to cash in on interest in emigration in general and in the Australian gold fields in particular. George Butler Earp’s Gold Colonies of Australia (1853?) sold over 20,000 copies, although his What We Did in Australia (1853) and New Zealand (1853) sold only around 6,000 copies.24 And like many other publishers, Routledge spotted a market for descriptions of Russia and Turkey as hostilities grew in the Crimea, and he later published accounts of the war itself. The War; or Voices from the Ranks (1854) was in its fourteenth thousand by April 1855, while Our Heroes of the Crimea (1855) sold 10,000 in four months.25 The Cheap Series was Routledge’s longest series other than the Railway Library, and it clearly shows that Routledge was issuing large quantities of nonfiction (both titles and numbers of copies) from the mid-1850s onward. The Books for the Country series is a good example of a project that initially demonstrated Routledge’s skill at repackaging reprints, but became a vehicle for new works and new authors. When Charles Knight sold off his copyrights during the economic crisis of 1847–48, Routledge purchased the rights to his Farmer’s Library, a series of encyclopaedic works dealing with the management of cattle, poultry, sheep, horses, and pigs. Routledge reissued these books as shilling Books for the Country in 1852, with unusual covers of illustrated paper (rather than boards), which made them one of the few early experiments in true paperbacks.26 A year later, Routledge began spending money on heavy revisions for the Knight volumes and on newly commissioned volumes. The volume on The Poultry Yard, by William Martin, a prolific popularizer of natural history, had already sold 6,000 copies, but Routledge had it revised by Elizabeth Watts, editor of the Poultry Chronicle. The result clearly illustrates the changing perception of the series’ intended audience.27 Watts cut up and rearranged the original chapters, creating a new first chapter of introduction and a new final chapter on diseases and their management. Sections that had once been labeled with Latinate terms for subgroups of poultry were turned into chapters with common English names, such as “The Turkey” or “Ducks, Swans and Geese,” and a completely new chapter on “Shows” ofThe Dignitaries of the Trade Take on Routledge [ 167

fered tips to potential exhibitors on which breeds to keep and how to present them in competitions.28 Watts’s revision turned a scientific reference work into a manual for the amateur poultry fancier, which sat alongside newly written volumes on Bees: Their Habits, Management and Treatment (1853, by J. G. Wood) and Cage and Singing Birds: How to Catch, Keep, Breed and Rear Them (1854, by H. G. Adams). These were followed by volumes on angling and shooting, on pigeon rearing and rabbit keeping. Where Knight had sought to instruct and educate farmers in the natural sciences related to their occupation, Routledge’s series was a set of short, friendly manuals offering tips to would-be smallholders, pigeon fanciers, or gardeners. Payments to authors for these short books were generally small, about £20 or £30, which helped keep the price down.29 The books were costed on the assumption that five impressions of 2,000 copies would be printed. Pigeons and Rabbits (1854) and Kitchen Garden (1855) both reached 10,000 copies printed at the end of 1857, while Small Farms (1853) reached 8,000.30 Charles Knight had struggled to sell 5,000 copies of his Shilling Volumes in the 1840s, but Routledge seemed to be having no trouble selling almost twice that many copies of his shilling nonfiction in the 1850s.31 The most successful of all the Books for the Country were those added in the later 1850s, which represent yet another twist in the conception of “the country.” Routledge’s long-standing connections with publishing for railway travelers meant that he was ideally placed to spot commercial opportunities in the growth of domestic tourism. New additions to the series at the end of the 1850s promoted a love of the out-of-doors and could be marketed at tourists heading to the coast, the moors, or the Highlands. Those dealing with natural history covered such topics as butterflies, wild flowers, ferns, and birds eggs, instructing their readers on where to find them, how to identify them, and how to collect them. The most successful ones were those written by John George Wood using the title “Common Objects of . . . ,” starting with The Common Objects of the Sea-Shore (1857), and followed by The Common Objects of the Country (1858). Fifteen thousand copies of the Sea-Shore volume were needed within two months of publication; most of them were in the usual 1s. yellowback format, but Routledge issued 3,000 in a cloth binding at 3s.6d. The following February, the Country volume appeared, and there was demand for 24,000 copies by the end of May. Again, Routledge offered it in a mixture of formats: with color illustrations, cloth binding, and gilt edges for 4s.; minus the gilt, for 3s.6d.; and in fancy yellowboards with uncolored illustrations for 1s. Demand for both continued into the early 1860s. With Routledge’s usual flair for multiple marketing strategies, these volumes were also advertised separately as “Reading for the Sea-Side.”32 168 ] Chapter Thirteen

Most of Routledge’s nonfiction output was very clearly aimed at leisure and pleasure: the books catered to seaside holiday makers, pigeon fanciers, and would-be anglers. This tendency was reinforced by his 1858 series of Six-Penny Handbooks dealing with sports, for which the prolific J. G. Wood wrote (under a pseudonym) the volumes on Swimming and Skating and Gymnastics. The closest Routledge came to a more practical sort of nonfiction was in the Useful Library, though the definition of “useful” knowledge on offer was far removed from that of Chambers: Routledge offered his readers skills for daily life, rather than abstract academic knowledge. The advertisement for this 1854 series bemoaned “the great dearth of books of a thoroughly practical nature” and promised to help those who wished “to become acquainted with common things” at affordable prices.33 The first two volumes were A Ladies’ and Gentleman’s Letter Writer, Containing Letters on the Simplest Matters of Life (1854) and Household Economy, or Domestic Hints for Persons of Moderate Income (1854). Later volumes dealt with the law of landlords and tenants (1857), the law of wills (1858), and health (1860). These shilling and eighteen-penny volumes (almost all of which were newly written for the series) addressed themselves to the daily fears of a skilled working- or lower-middle-class audience who felt ill prepared for a social world that required formal letter writing or legal documents such as wills. This audience seems similar to that imagined for the earlier volumes of the Books for the Country. Routledge’s most successful volumes achieved truly impressive sales that were far beyond those achieved either by the railway series of Longman or Murray, or by the older series of Chambers and Knight. Celebrity chef Alexis Soyer’s A Shilling Cookery for the People (1854) had reached its tenth thousand by the end of that year, and, if the imprints are to be believed, had sold 185,000 by the end of 1858.34 And even Routledge’s less successful volumes were routinely selling around 6,000 copies, helped by the sales outlet of the railway bookstall and the attraction of the Routledge reputation. He was publishing so many books that the mild losses were more than outweighed by the spectacular successes. By the time of his death in 1888, he had a personal fortune of £80,000 and had become an extremely important source of informative and instructive reading, and nonfiction more generally, for huge numbers of readers.35 One of the intriguing things about Routledge’s publishing activities is how little media attention they received. The Times excepted, it is almost as if the higher-class weekly literary reviews, such as the Athenaeum and the Examiner, had entered into a conspiracy to ignore Routledge. They carried articles about cheap literature, but regularly failed to mention Routledge. For The Dignitaries of the Trade Take on Routledge [ 169

instance, in 1850, the Examiner announced that “much improvement is . . . becoming visible in the general literature provided for purchasers of humble means,” but it attributed the improvement to “Mr Charles Knight and the Messrs Chambers,” despite the fact that neither of those publishers was doing anything particularly new in 1850.36 The Examiner’s disapproval of railway literature can also be seen in its praise of H. G. Bohn’s Shilling Series for offering serious literature to “compete with the railway issues.”37 But even after Routledge expanded into nonfiction and began commissioning original works, the snooty disapproval remained. The Examiner carried a regular monthly column in which its editorial staff reported the latest additions to the many shilling libraries of the day. Bohn’s library was regularly mentioned; so too were the libraries offered by Longman, Murray, and Chapman & Hall; but Routledge was virtually never mentioned. It seems that contemporaries were blinded by the success of Routledge’s Railway Library, his largest and most famous series. Even though the literary magazines did review Wood’s Illustrated Natural History and the original volumes in Books for the Country, they do not seem to have appreciated that, by the late 1850s, Routledge was no longer only, or even predominantly, a ruthless reprinter of foreign fiction. The Useful Library, the Books for the Country, the Six-Penny Handbooks, and the post-1854 volumes of the Cheap Series show us a different George Routledge: a respectable publisher commissioning and paying for new works, with a good eye for spotting an opportunity to address the needs of the new reading audiences, either in fiction or nonfiction. William Chambers had once remarked that one reason for his firm’s success, compared with the failure of the SDUK, was that he recognized that people wished to be entertained as well as instructed. George Routledge went much further in that direction than Chambers ever did and published just about anything that he thought lower-middle-class or skilled working-class readers might wish to buy. The sheer amount of fiction that he included in the mix was startling to commentators who were used to the more restrained “instructive and entertaining” publications of Chambers, the Religious Tract Society, or the other longer-established instructive publishers. Commentators found it difficult to perceive Routledge as a benefactor to the reading public at large (and not just railway travelers)—yet that is surely what he had become.

Coda to Part II The railway network brought Edinburgh, and north Britain generally, into much closer contact with London and the south. For businesses of all sorts, 170 ] Chapter Thirteen

this promised faster correspondence and a reliable fast service for freight, if that was required. Businesses that had in the past relied on distant agents now had the opportunity to assert tighter control and even to consolidate the management of their affairs. In this respect, publishers were presumably little different from other business users, and W. & R. Chambers’s efforts to control their London affairs, first through Orr and later through their brother David, must have been reflected in many other firms. But the railways also had a very specific impact on the book trade. The railway bookstall offered a new distribution channel, which made it possible to sell cheap literature in large quantities to customers of all classes. As well as making it easier for nonhabitual book buyers to acquire printed matter, the railway bookstalls encouraged more publishers to issue cheap print. And since the popularity of reading while traveling was not limited to third-class carriages, the presumed demand for quality literature from first- and second-class passengers encouraged new players to begin providing cheap print. Thus, traditional literary publishers and new entrepreneurs rubbed shoulders on the bookstalls. The intense competition of the bookstall market left many battered and bruised. Charles Knight clearly felt well out of it, and, watching the many failures, William and Robert Chambers may have agreed. One of the key effects of the flood of interest in railway literature in the early 1850s was that a far wider range of British publishers became aware of, and involved in, the market for cheap print. In that respect, it is entirely unsurprising that the pioneers of cheap print did not get directly involved. They already believed in the importance of low prices aimed at large reading audiences. The rest of the British trade learned that lesson from railway literature.

The Dignitaries of the Trade Take on Routledge [ 171

III

Steamships and Transatlantic Business

W. & R. Chambers’s seeming disinterest in railway bookstalls and their readers was not repeated when it came to the North American market. Just as railways promised to improve commerce and business within Britain by swifter and more reliable communications and freight transport, so the promoters of transatlantic steamships made similar claims for the north Atlantic world. The development of ocean-going steamships in the 1840s did not transform the market for cheap print in the same way that railways did, but it held out the hope of easier and more remunerative access to an international English-speaking audience. This was what W. & R. Chambers were concentrating on during the boom years of railway literature. Chambers had long hoped to reach English-speaking readers overseas. But their early efforts in the colonies were small-scale, and their attempts to do business with the United States were frustrated by the lack of copyright protection and the difficulty of finding appropriate contacts. The establishment of Cunard’s Royal Mail-contracted transatlantic services—to Halifax and Boston from 1840, and to New York from 1848—proved an enormous benefit to American publishers seeking the latest literary news and texts from London, and it stimulated a range of British publishers to become more active in the American marketplace. The opportunities for transatlantic literary business gave new impetus to Chambers’s ambitions for a worldwide audience, which must have been given a new piquancy by the simultaneous encroachments of railway literature on Chambers’s traditional domestic audiences. [ 173

Like railways, transatlantic shipping was not under Chambers’s direct control. They had to work with the services offered by Cunard, Collins, and their competitors, trying to choose the best options for the needs of their particular business. Whereas Chambers had been able to integrate and adapt the new printing processes into their business system, they and their American partners had to fit their business plans to what was possible and affordable in terms of transatlantic shipping. Steamships did offer far better reliability than the sailing packets they replaced, but their absolute speed was not comparable to railway speed; and Chambers soon discovered that cultural and commercial differences were at least as much of a challenge as geographical distance. It is generally assumed that American reprinters were so active in purloining British texts that British publishers and authors had little chance of doing substantial business with imports. However, W. & R. Chambers’s experience contrasts with that of the big literary publishers. American reprinters could have exploited the majority of Chambers’s catalog, secure in the knowledge that these cheap instructive works had sold well in their home country and that there would be no competition from an authorized reprint, yet Chambers did manage to do business with imports. It was a difficult challenge, but is further proof of the efficiency of Chambers’s commercial and technical systems, and their true commitment to the economics of the mass market.

174 ] Part III

Figure 14. This 1856 edition of Appleton’s Railway and Steam Navigation Guide (the American equivalent of Bradshaw’s Railway Companion) shows the uses of steam—for railways, steamboats, and urban industry—in an idealized setting. Reproduced by permission of the American Antiquarian Society.

14

Transatlantic Opportunities

Monday, April 23, 1838, was widely hailed as the advent of a new era in steam navigation and transatlantic communication. That morning, the steamship Sirius arrived in New York, eighteen days after leaving Cork. She had been lying outside the harbor since the previous evening, and huge crowds had gathered to greet her. Visitors crowded onboard, and the day became “quite a gala” for the New Yorkers. The British Consul sent a congratulatory letter to the captain of the Sirius, drawing attention to the convenient coincidence that it was on St. George’s day that a British steamship had become the first to cross the Atlantic. On the next day, the mayor and corporation of New York planned to attend a celebratory dinner aboard the Sirius. But in the late morning, as the newspapers put it, the excitement “was increased ten-fold by the appearance, over Governor’s Island, of a dense black cloud of smoke, spreading itself upward.” The smoke signaled the imminent approach of another steamship, the Great Western, which had left Bristol four days after the Sirius.1 Back in Britain, meanwhile, people waited anxiously for news of both steamers. On April 11, the Times had reported that another ship had passed the Sirius on April 5, “bravely encountering a heavy westerly gale” one day into her voyage. On April 16, it reported that the Sirius had been seen still voyaging on April 7.2 In the days before wireless telegraphy (radio), chance encounters between outbound and inbound ships were the only way that news from a ship in transit could travel back to her home port. No further news of the Sirius was reported for a month. Then, on May 17, the sailing packet Westminster returned to Plymouth from New York, bringing news that she had passed the Sirius just [ 177

outside New York on April 22. Her captain also reported seeing the Great Western twelve hours later.3 This welcome news confirmed that both ships had survived and suggested that the race between them had been tight. The full details of the close finish did not arrive in Britain until two days later, when the Sirius herself returned to Falmouth after another eighteen-day voyage. Even then, it took several days before most British newspaper readers learned the news. The Sirius’s arrival on Saturday evening made only the late editions of the Times on Monday, was fully reported on Tuesday, and reached the Manchester newspapers only on Wednesday, a full month after the steamers had arrived in New York.4 As well as reporting her own reception in New York and the safe arrival of the Great Western, the Sirius brought the latest newspapers and magazines from New York and (unexpectedly) the Royal Mail from Nova Scotia. Sirius had encountered the sailing packet Tyrian three days out from Falmouth, and the captains had decided to transfer Tyrian’s Canadian mails to Sirius as the fastest way to get them to shore.5 In 1838, steamships were already familiar features of British and North American rivers, lakes, and coasts. But the voyages of the Sirius and the Great Western were the first ocean crossings, made far beyond the reach of repairs or refueling. Within a few years, regular transatlantic steam services would be available, transforming the delivery of the mails and offering new options for business with North America.

Ocean-Going Steamships Guests at the celebratory dinner marking the Sirius’s arrival in New York toasted the queen, the president, and Anglo-American business relations. Then the British Consul offered a toast to “that great man, Robert Fulton.”6 This was a diplomatic acknowledgment that, amidst all the British jubilations, the Americans had their own claims to be steamship pioneers. Inventors on both sides of the Atlantic had made earlier attempts, but Robert Fulton was the man who built the first successful steamboat, the Clermont, which steamed up the Hudson River in 1807.7 This was just three years after Richard Trevithick demonstrated his steam railway locomotive at a Welsh ironworks. The Americans could also lay claim to the first Atlantic crossing by a steamboat in 1819, but since the Savannah had made much of her journey under sail, the Sirius and the Great Western could still claim to be both the first to do the journey westward and the first to do it wholly under steam. Steamboats required less infrastructure than railway locomotives, and by the 1820s, paddle steamers, usually with side-mounted paddle wheels, were 178 ] Chapter Fourteen

being used on rivers, lakes, and coastal routes on both sides of the Atlantic (see fig. 14). In 1838, as the Sirius and Great Western crossed the Atlantic, there was already a wide range of steamship services available from London.8 The General Steam Navigation Company ran steamers along the east coast of Britain, serving Newcastle, Sunderland, Berwick, and Leith. Their Leith service, so widely used by W. & R. Chambers and other Edinburgh publishers, departed from London every Wednesday and Saturday. Other companies offered five daily services down the Thames to Ramsgate, and weekly cross-channel steamers to Antwerp, Le Havre, Boulogne, and Rotterdam. The Peninsular Packet Company (later the Peninsular & Oriental, P&O) operated a service all the way to Alexandria, via Lisbon, Cadiz, Gibraltar, and Malta. The steamboats’ great advantage was their independence from weather and tidal conditions, which made journey times more predictable. However, the need for coal limited their range unless refueling stops were available, and their paddle wheels did not cope well with rough waters. Although the Peninsular steamers traveled impressive distances from London, their route followed the coast for shelter and refueling. And even on coastal routes such as Leith to London, it was common for steamer services to be suspended in winter due to stormy weather. Yet when they were in operation, steamboats offered greater reliability and punctuality than sailing ships and quickly became the preferred form of inland and coastal water transport. If, however, there was an alternative overland route, the decision was more complicated, as steamers were not necessarily faster than land transport, even in the days before the railways. In the United States, river steamers had an important role reaching settlements poorly served by roads, but on well-maintained coach roads, such as those between Edinburgh to London, stagecoaches were much faster. In the 1830s, for instance, the Leith to London steamer took around three days, whereas the mail coach took just forty-three hours. However, the mail coach could not carry cargo: thus, when Edinburgh publishers dispatched bales of publications to London or ordered new machinery, these bulky consignments routinely went by water and, preferably, weather permitting, by steam. As Chambers’s Journal would later point out, the Sirius and the Great Western launched a new era of ocean steam navigation, in which steamers traveled further from land and became key elements of global, not just regional, transport and communications. By 1854, the Journal could optimistically identify two further advances in the last two years: the first steamer to Australia and the first steamer to circumnavigate the world. Sixty-four days for a voyage to Australia, round the Cape of Good Hope, seemed amazing, but the Journal enthusiastically prophesied a future round-the-world Transatlantic Opportunities [ 179

trip in forty days.9 Yet even in his enthusiasm, the Journal’s writer could not ignore the major obstacles facing oceanic steamship travel, principally the supply of coal. Either a ship had to carry all her own fuel or refueling stations would be needed along the way. The first option severely limited a ship’s cargo-carrying capacity, while the second was dependent on geography and geology. These problems meant that, on certain routes, modern sailing ships were able to rival steam for the transport of bulky, low-value commodities until the early twentieth century.10 What sailing ships could not promise was regular year-round journey times, and the need for such a service for government communication and the mails kept up the pressure on steamship designers. In comparison to the voyage to Australia, the 3,000-mile Atlantic crossing was relatively short. Both Sirius and Great Western managed to carry sufficient fuel (around 450 tons of coal) to make the crossing, though the Manchester Guardian’s report made clear that the true winner was the Great Western. She had not only completed the journey four days faster, but had done so with marginally less fuel despite being a substantially larger ship with more powerful engines.11 This was hardly surprising since the Great Western had been designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel specifically for the Atlantic crossing and was the largest steamer in the world. Her tonnage (a measure of internal volume) was almost twice that of the Sirius, enabling her to carry 600 tons of coal and a small amount of cargo.12 On the Atlantic crossing, the speed and reliability of the steamships is clearly illustrated by statistics released by the steamship companies for marketing purposes. In 1839, sailing ships from the major packet companies took between twenty-five and forty-five days to make the westward crossing of the Atlantic, depending on the weather conditions. In the same year, the Great Western’s average westward journey took just over sixteen days, and the variation between her journeys was only a couple of days. The eastward crossing of the Atlantic was always faster than the westward, thanks to favorable winds and currents, but with steam, the crossing times became more similar. In 1839, sailing packets crossed eastward in an average of twenty-two days, while the Great Western took an average of fourteen days.13

Cunard and the Mails The company that was to dominate transatlantic travel and communication from the 1840s was the British and North American Steam Packet Company, founded by the Nova Scotian businessman Samuel Cunard. Cunard formed a partnership with businessmen and shipbuilders in Glasgow and Liverpool, and in May 1839, their company won the British government contract to de180 ] Chapter Fourteen

liver the Royal Mail to Halifax and Boston. Mail contracts were extremely valuable to both railway and steamship companies, for the government paid substantial sums for the safe and fast delivery of the mail. Mail contracts subsidized routes that had little potential for freight or passengers and enabled companies to invest in bigger or better equipment. But mail contracts always came with conditions. Cunard’s initial mail contract required the steamship company to run a monthly service using four ships, to carry military forces at reduced rates, and to pay penalties for delays.14 The first of Cunard’s Clyde-built paddle steamers, Britannia, sailed from Liverpool on July 4, 1840. A year later, Charles Dickens crossed the Atlantic on the Britannia and wrote a vivid description of his experience in American Notes (1842). The Britannia was not as large as the Great Western, and the start of Dickens’s account is devoted to the overwhelming lack of space. His expectations had been raised by pictures displayed in the booking office, and he and his wife received a shock on being shown to the “utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box” that was their cabin. Although her engines were expected to consume around 420 tons of coal during a fourteen-day crossing, Britannia carried 640 tons of coal just in case, leaving little space for anything else. Dickens’s other abiding memory of the voyage was of being “excessively sea-sick.”15 Cunard’s company went from strength to strength. Its government contract was renewed in 1847, and by the early 1850s, its steamers were leaving Liverpool every Saturday, alternating between Boston and New York.16 The original four ships had been decommissioned, and the service was now provided by the Hibernia and Cambria (built in the mid-1840s) and the America, Canada, Niagara, and Europa (launched in 1848). It was the America that William Chambers boarded one foggy morning in mid-September 1853. Crossing to the ship from the Liverpool docks had been a more exciting experience than anticipated, since a mild collision in the fog had sent some of the luggage overboard, but once aboard the America, Chambers’s first transatlantic crossing went smoothly. He was fascinated by the organization of the ship, noting everything from the duties of the crew and the power of the ship’s engines to the accommodation provided for the ship’s cow. Twelve days later, the ship entered the great natural harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she landed the mails and government dispatches, and was refueled for the remaining thirty hours’ journey to Boston. Chambers did remark on the mechanisms for making best use of the limited space, but the America was substantially bigger than the Britannia (and the Great Western), and he was happier with his shipboard experience than Dickens had been. He was also less seasick.17 By the 1850s, the Cunard Line’s steamers had been joined on the AtlanTransatlantic Opportunities [ 181

tic by steamships from French and American companies. The United States Mail Steamship Company, run by Edward Collins of New York, was one of Cunard’s most serious competitors. Collins held the American government’s mail contract, and his ships had a reputation for speed and luxury. Even William Chambers’s admiration for Cunard did not prevent him commenting that their ships “fall considerably short of the Collinses in point of spaciousness and elegance of accommodation” and that “they do not sail so fast as the Collins steamers.”18 But Cunard had one great advantage over both Collins and William Inman’s Liverpool & Philadelphia Steamship Company: safety. Much like early railway locomotives, steamboats did not have a good safety record: their boilers were prone to explode. With a certain ghoulish glee, the piece of American news that the Times chose to reprint from the newspapers carried back by Sirius in 1838 concerned a steamboat explosion just outside Cincinnati. “Both the boilers burst with a very loud noise. Nearly all on board . . . were killed or wounded. . . . The pilot was thrown about 100 perpendicular feet into the air, came down to the water, and sank beneath its surface, never to rise with life again.”19 If such an accident happened in the middle of an ocean, it was likely to be completely fatal, particularly if it caused a fire. Once iron-hulled ships started to replace wooden steamers, the fire risk was lessened, but new problems emerged in the reliability of magnetic compasses.20 Nevertheless, William Chambers reassured his readers in 1854, after describing the potential problems of magnetic compasses and the risks of “rocks, collisions and conflagrations,” that so much care was taken onboard Cunard ships—tests on compasses, all lamps being put out at midnight, spare parts kept for the machinery—that even “the most timid class of passengers” need not be worried.21 The Cunard company was always fixated on the absolute reliability required by its mail contract. Cunard ships were not at the technical forefront: they were still commissioning wooden paddle steamers in the 1850s, when Inman was using iron-hulled ships with screw propellers. And Cunard officers did not take risks: raw speed was not as important as ensuring the mails were delivered. This conservative approach helped Cunard avoid the accidents and disasters to which other steam shipping lines seemed prone.22 The Collins ship Arctic was lost in 1854, with three hundred lives (including several members of Collins’s family), and the Pacific was lost in 1856.23 In 1854, one Inman ship disappeared without trace, and another ran aground. By the end of the 1850s, Collins had ceased to trade and Inman was barely surviving, but Cunard continued to deliver the transatlantic mails. The delivery of the mails was the raison d’etre for the steamers: the governments of Britain and the United States were willing to pay substantial 182 ] Chapter Fourteen

amounts of money for the speediest possible delivery of the mails, and most of the early transatlantic steamers had little cargo space for anything larger. Even Brunel’s Great Western, on her return from New York in 1838, carried just the mail (20,000 items), sixty-eight passengers, newspapers, and a small cargo of cotton, indigo, and silks.24 As larger transatlantic steamers were launched, more passengers and cargo could be carried, but the mails continued to take precedence. Chambers reported his departure in 1853 being delayed until the arrival of “at least two cart-loads of well-stuffed leather bags” containing the mails and several boxes of “special dispatches for Canada.”25 The new generation of larger Cunard ships, on which Chambers sailed, could accommodate 160 first-class passengers, who were served breakfasts of “Irish stew, cold meat, ham . . . eggs, tea, coffee, and hot rolls” and dinners of “the best soups, fish, meat, fowls and game, with side-dishes in the French style; followed by a course of pastry of various kinds, with a dessert of fresh and preserved fruits.” A trip across the Atlantic was not cheap—Chambers paid £25 for his first-class return—but it became a real possibility for thousands of upper-middle-class men and women, as is attested by the number of Americans who visited London for the Great Exhibition in 1851 and British (including Chambers) who visited New York for the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1853. Importantly, as well as carrying passengers and their food, these new ships were large enough to carry 900 tons of coal and still have space for 900 tons of cargo. As the Great Western’s 1838 return cargo suggests, newspapers were one of the obvious articles to send by steam, being small and relatively urgent. With so many business interests dependent on transatlantic information— such as cotton and tobacco prices—getting the latest news had real commercial value. Similarly in the book trade, the latest literary news was valuable to those on both sides of the Atlantic who wished to be the first to announce a reprint of the latest literary sensation, and also to those who wanted to gain a better understanding of how the transatlantic trade operated. With faster and more reliable delivery of correspondence, and the possibilities of personal transatlantic travel and faster freight delivery, the years around 1850 were marked by a growing interest in doing transatlantic literary business (see chapter 17), particularly from the British perspective. Up to this point, British publishers had remained relatively aloof from both American literature and the American market. During the late 1840s, editorials in the Literary World and the Publishers’ Circular regularly quoted each other. But the American book trade had developed in quite different ways from the British book trade, and successful transatlantic business Transatlantic Opportunities [ 183

would not come easily. This was partly why William Chambers became one of those transatlantic tourists, spending two-and-a-half months in North America in the fall of 1853. Chambers’s explicit goal was to investigate the conditions of settlement, since Chambers’s Journal had been recommending North America as an emigration destination since its launch in 1832.26 Chambers sought out emigrants (especially those from his native Scotland), inquired after their new lives, and investigated the cost of land, average wages, and the ease of finding work. His observations ultimately bolstered his belief that North America— more so than Australia—was an extremely suitable new home for industrious and sober workers and small capitalists. Chambers was also supposed to be enjoying a change of scene on his doctor’s recommendation, and he did play the tourist some of the time. Being out of season meant that the famed resort of Saratoga Springs was a disappointment, but it enabled him to sit alone at Niagara Falls, contemplating the “simple dignity and beauty” of the falls without the annoyance of the “army of parasitic guides.”27 He enjoyed a steamboat trip up scenic Lake Champlain, en route to Montreal. But Chambers’s idea of being a tourist was intrinsically linked with social observation. He routinely visited schools, libraries, hospitals, and prisons, and he did the same in America. He visited schools in Toronto, libraries in Boston, manufactories in Cincinnati, waterworks in Philadelphia, and a slave auction in Richmond. The accounts of the United States written by previous British travelers—including Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, and Charles Lyell—inspired many educated Britons to visit the youthful, idealistic republic for themselves. Chambers hoped that learning how other countries handled education, justice, religion, and politics might enable him to influence improvements for the humbler classes in Britain. After his death, Chambers’s memorialist noted that “when he took a holiday anywhere, he generally combined work with it.”28 On one level, this meant that he would write up his experiences for publication, and indeed, twenty articles—conveying his heartily good opinion of most things in North America—duly appeared in Chambers’s Journal between February and October 1854. They were subsequently issued as a book titled Things as They Are in America (1854) (see fig. 15), in which Chambers appears as yet another intelligent and curious British tourist, distinguished, perhaps, by perceptive remarks on hotel organization and accommodation. In contrast to other writers at the time, Chambers said very little about slavery, reflecting the fact that his tour focused on the northern and midwestern states. He would return to the topic in 1857, however, with another series of ar184 ] Chapter Fourteen

ticles and a book, American Slavery and Colour.29 But “work” for Chambers did not just mean social observation and publishing his travel experiences. Chambers’s private diary for this trip survives in the National Library of Scotland and records his visits to booksellers and publishers, as he sought to make contacts and understand how the American trade worked. His trip had a strong, though unofficial, business purpose.

Transatlantic Opportunities [ 185

Figure 15. Title page of William Chambers’s Things as They Are in America (1854), reporting on his experiences in Canada and the United States.

15

Getting to Know the American Market

During the 1830s, W. & R. Chambers had developed a small number of regular customers among the booksellers of the Canadian and Australian colonies. But satisfactory long-term contacts in the United States proved much more difficult to find (see chapter 6). Yet William Chambers’s interest in education meant that he had long been aware of the possibilities that the United States might offer for his firm. Back in August 1832, a short paragraph in Chambers’s Journal had reported that the United States had schools for “the education of all the youth in reading, writing, and arithmetic,” which were “supported by a public and general tax.” Apparently, everyone in America could read and write, and England “has therefore been completely outstripped” by her former colonies.1 Earlier in the same issue, an article about the Scottish education system opened with a scathing indictment of England. Nowhere in Europe, Chambers claimed, was “ignorance more prevalent, than in England.” By contrasting England unfavorably with both Scotland and the United States, Chambers implicitly suggested a natural kinship between the latter two countries, based on a shared respect for education. In Scotland and the United States, the origins of the educated and informed society of the nineteenth century lay in Protestant religion. Because Scottish Calvinists and Puritan settlers emphasized Bible reading, they established schools, as well as churches, in every parish. By the time of Chambers’s visit to America, the northern states had already achieved 99 percent white literacy, far better even than Scotland.2 Chambers certainly understood how valuable a market such a highly literate English-speaking [ 187

population would be. Throughout his visit, he observed American attitudes to print and even interrogated fellow hotel guests on the topic. He was clearly delighted to learn from a traveling book auctioneer in Ontario, for instance, that expatriate Scots were among the auctioneer’s best customers.3 Although he was well aware how cheaply books and newspapers were sold in the United States, Chambers was extremely struck to see the effects for himself. He reported seeing boys selling newspapers “in the streets, at the doors of hotels, and in railway-cars,” and he reckoned that virtually every male guest in the Astor Hotel in New York bought a newspaper every morning. As far as he could tell, “nobody ever seems to grudge buying a paper,” and they had become “not a casual luxury, but a necessary of life” for “the labouring as well as the wealthy classes.”4 Earlier British travelers had been fiercely critical of what they saw as the inferior quality and sensationalism of the American newspaper press. According to Dickens, people in America seemed to read nothing but newspapers, and since these were in an “abject state,” any hopes of “high moral improvement” were unlikely to be fulfilled.5 But Chambers reported that “the prevalence of education throughout the United States leads . . . to a taste for reading, which finds the widest indulgence in easily acquired newspapers and books.”6 He was amazed that there was so much cheap print, that it was so widely available, and that—unlike the flood of railway literature in Britain—it was treated as a perfectly normal phenomenon.

An Informed Citizenry The ideology of an informed citizenry that emerged in the early American republic gave a further boost to the highly literate society of the northern states. Being informed became the duty of every citizen. Thus, the provision of cheap printed matter was an essential aid to the formation of republican society.7 Newspapers were allowed to travel through the postal system at a special cheap rate, and there were no taxes on knowledge.8 The proliferation of newspapers helped every American keep himself informed on commercial and political news, while other forms of print helped him to gain that general knowledge of history, geography and philosophy that would make him a respectable citizen. As the mothers and educators of future citizens, women were routinely included in the republican rhetoric of education and information, though its application to blacks was a divisive question.9 Chambers was particularly impressed that, with schools funded by taxation, “no fees are paid by the pupils.” This not merely helped poorer families, but created a system in which children from all backgrounds attended school together as equals—something that Chambers found quite distinctive about 188 ] Chapter Fifteen

the American system. He also approved of the nonsectarian nature of the education offered, noting that this did not undermine the moral and religious convictions of the children (as many British commentators feared) since children also attended classes offered by their parents’ various churches on the Sunday. Chambers filled Things as They Are in America with statistics to impress on his British readers just how extensive the American education system was: 230 schools in New York City, 23,000 pupils in Boston, and 165,000 pupils in Massachusetts. He noted that the state of Massachusetts spent over a million dollars a year on education, compared with $300,000 a year to support the poor. In Boston, the education budget amounted to a quarter of annual municipal expenditure. Chambers remarked, “In what city in Great Britain could we find the inhabitants voluntarily taxing themselves to give every child an education at £3 a head?” And the education on offer went beyond basic literacy: in New England and elsewhere, Chambers discovered public schools offering arithmetic, history, and geography. He was even more impressed that provision was made for higher branches of study. He visited the Free Academy of New York, where 400 youths were studying classics, modern languages, and natural sciences. There were no fees, and admission was solely on the basis of examination performance.10 In reality, the high levels of literacy and education that impressed Chambers were not universal. His comments reflected only what he had seen: the old Northeast, some of the new West (now called the Midwest), and virtually none of the South. By 1853, most American states had indeed passed legislation that allowed schools for children of all social backgrounds to be funded from taxation. But outside New England—and particularly in the South— the establishment of such “common schools” was still highly contested. In contrast to British debates, opposition typically came from taxpayers unwilling to subsidize other people’s children, rather than from conservatives arguing against the need to educate such children.11 Something Chambers did notice was that free schooling alone did not lead to universal education. He reported that school attendance was around 80 percent in Massachusetts, but barely reached 35 percent in New York City, where some districts contained many families who could not afford decent clothes for their children and were too poor to survive without their children’s earnings. But even these problems could not detract from the fact that both elementary and intermediate education was freely and widely available to parents who wished their children to benefit from it. As novelist Anthony Trollope would notice on his own trip to the United States in 1861–62, literacy was a normal expectation for all classes. Thus, “a porter or a farmer’s servant in the States is not proud of reading and writing. It is to him quite Getting to Know the American Market [ 189

a matter of course.”12 Where free education in Britain was available only as “charity,” in America, said Chambers, “it is a right.”13 Chambers saw the consequences of the universal respect for education and print everywhere he looked. On his first American railroad journey, between Boston and Albany, he was astonished that no fences kept the public safe from passing trains. His ingrained assumptions about low literacy rates made him skeptical of the power of notices warning “Look out for the locomotive when the bell rings!”14 Later, while touring furniture factories in Cincinnati, he was surprised to discover that employers routinely expected their workers to be literate. This, he reported, meant that Scottish or English emigrants would be at a disadvantage in the labor market because American or German workers were assumed to be more sober and better educated.15 In a valedictory letter to the New York Times just before departing, Chambers expressed his admiration for the Americans’ “admirable educational systems, their many excellent libraries, and universal fondness for reading” as well as “their press, free from fiscal exactions.”16 He subsequently reported to his British readers that the Americans “have got completely the start of the people of Great Britain,” for they are “carrying the triumphs of free and universal education to limits scarcely so much as dreamed of in this country.”17 Everything William Chambers saw on his tour made him more convinced than ever that the United States could be an important market for Chambers publications. He noted the high literacy rates and a respect for knowledge, conditions that seemed similar to those in lowland Scotland on which the firm’s early success had been based. But to reach that audience, W. & R. Chambers would need to learn how to operate in a very different commercial context.

A Nation of Reprinters During colonial times, American readers had been largely dependent on publications imported from London. There seemed to be few American authors, and printers were legally unable to produce cheap reprints locally because groups of London publishers maintained perpetual rights over all the regular sellers. This had prevented American (and British provincial) reprints of authors both recent and long-dead, from Alexander Pope to William Shakespeare and John Milton. But in 1774, the House of Lords ruled that the 1710 Copyright Act had limited copyright to fourteen years, with the possibility of a further fourteen if the author was still alive. An enormous quantity of copyrights came into the public domain overnight, giving provincial and colonial printers the opportunity to try their hand at publishing. Re190 ] Chapter Fifteen

prints of the great works of English drama and poetry soon became widely available at around 6s.18 In theory, the American publishing trade could have followed the British pattern, with large wealthy publishers focusing on authors and new copyrights, and smaller publishers exploiting the public domain works. But the domination of the book trade by London during the colonial period meant that the American printers who became publishers in the early national period were not substantial firms with access to capital; nor did they have an existing list of authors.19 Reprinting existing texts was cheaper and easier than finding marketable authors. Reprinting became the mainstay of the American book trade, and the big publishing houses of the nineteenth century— such as Carey & Lea of Philadelphia and Harper & Brothers of New York— were reprinters. Furthermore, American printers had a huge advantage over their British counterparts: far more works were in the public domain. Independence had released American printers from British laws entirely, and the first U.S. copyright law, passed in 1790, granted copyright protection only to books by American citizens published in America.20 Magazines were not covered, and nor were any foreign publications. Given that American readers still expected their authors to be British—having previously read them as imported copies—the permissibility of reprinting modern foreign works made reprinting a lucrative business. French, German, and Italian books were equally unprotected, but language, culture, and history ensured that Americans relied heavily on British literature. In one sense, the culture of reprinting simply continued the dependence of the American reading public on British authors that had existed since the colonial period, but in contrast to early nineteenth-century publishers in London, who produced expensive books aimed at a limited circle of affluent readers, most American publishers specialized in midpriced and cheap books. (Those American readers who wanted elegant books were wealthy enough to import them from London, as they had done before independence.) Some of these were American-authored textbooks, practical manuals, and children’s books, but most were British-authored, reprinted in cheaper formats as soon as an imported copy arrived on American soil. By consciously choosing a simpler, less elaborate physical format, and printing a text without having to pay an author’s fee, American reprinters could make their editions available at a fraction of the cost of the British originals (even before shipping charges were taken into account). This was how Harper & Brothers’ edition of Edgeworth’s Helen (1834) could be sold for 75¢, equivalent to a tenth of its British price. These strategic decisions, coupled with a literate population and no repressive government regime, enabled American publishers to make a commercial success from cheap literature. Getting to Know the American Market [ 191

From the British perspective, however, there was an important difference between Americans reading reprints and reading imports: books exported to the United States generated revenue for British publishers and authors, but books reprinted there often brought nothing at all. Surviving customs figures show that American importation of British books was actually increasing in absolute terms, but the growth of the American book trade meant that imports represented a relatively small proportion of the total number of books in circulation. In 1855, $580,000 of British printed matter was imported into the United States (three times as much as in 1845, and far more than the $22,000 of American printed matter that went the other way), but the total value of the American publishing trade was $11.5 million in 1850, rising to $31 million in 1860.21 The orientation of the American trade toward reprints explains why contemporary commentators routinely remarked on the cheapness of American books. Reprints were cheaper in Britain, too, but they were only a small part of the entire book trade. In fact, reprints of public-domain works could be found for very similar prices on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1820s: 5s. or 6s. in Britain versus $1 or so in the United States. American prices fell in the early 1840s, but once British prices did the same in the late 1840s, the price of reprints equalized again: 1s. or 2s. in Britain versus 25¢ or 50¢ in the United States. What was constant throughout this period was the very high cost of original works in Britain: 31s.6d. for a new novel, against about $2 (10s.) in the United States. The price of original authorship pushed up the average price of British books and perpetuated the perception of American cheapness. Despite the lack of copyright protection for foreign works, a system of “trade courtesy” developed in the American trade, through which the publisher who was first to announce his intention to reprint a particular work would be allowed to sell his edition without competition from his fellows. This “courtesy” enabled publishers to spend money to acquire early proof sheets or authorial revisions with some expectation of being able to reap the benefits.22 Some of the bigger publishing houses prided themselves on making arrangements with British authors and publishers, which enabled them to announce themselves as the “authorized” American publishers and enhanced their claim to have a “right” to an author and his or her works. Such arrangements were generally only worth making for those famous authors whose works would be in great demand. Histories, travel narratives, schoolbooks, sermons, dictionaries, children’s books, and scientific treatises were all typically reprinted without their originators being any the wiser. As long as reprints of British-authored works were a substantial proportion of 192 ] Chapter Fifteen

American publications, British authors and publishers believed they were losing out. Things were in fact changing by the time William Chambers visited the United States. American literary commentators increasingly argued that it was a matter of national honor for the United States to reduce their dependency on British culture and to develop a native literature. Publishers were decreasing their reliance on reprinting, and it was estimated that 80 percent of American-published books were now by American authors. Even Harpers, the most famous reprinting firm, published 722 original works (as well as 827 reprints) in the year of Chambers’s visit. By the end of the 1850s, Harpers would still be reprinting British fiction and poetry, but their dictionaries, gazetteers, textbooks, travel writing, and theological works would be almost entirely homegrown.23 Despite the existence of modestly priced reprints, and even with George Routledge’s efforts (see chapter 10), Britain did not have a culture of reprinting anything like that of the United States. For Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century, reprinting was a widespread and normal element of everyday life. The biggest and most famous publishing houses were reprinters, whether brash and competitive like Harper & Brothers or more gentlemanly, like the Boston houses of Ticknor & Fields and Little, Brown & Co. Reprinting did not merely produce cheap copies of old or dated books; it also provided citizens of all classes with access to the most up-to-date information, news, and novels.

Transatlantic Trade Practices American publishers relied on the British trade as a source of texts, so much so that the New York firms of Daniel Appleton and Wiley & Putnam both opened branch offices in London in the 1830s, long before any British firms opened New York offices.24 Such offices helped the firms to develop their connections in the British book trade and gain a competitive advantage (as either importers or reprinters) by their privileged access to the latest publications. Wiley & Putnam regarded their office as sufficiently important that it was run from 1838 to 1847 by the firm’s junior partner, George Putnam. As well as making arrangements with British authors on behalf of his own firm, he acted as agent for several other firms, including Harper & Brothers. He also visited auctions and antiquarian book dealers on behalf of clients seeking rare or out-of-print books—he was responsible for purchasing the first Gutenberg Bible to go to America—and he turned his London shop into a reading room and general literary agency promoting all things American.25 Getting to Know the American Market [ 193

Publishing houses that did not have transatlantic partners or agents had to rely on long-distance correspondence. The inadequacy of this methods, with its time delay and its impersonality, meant that it became common practice for major American publishers to travel to Europe every couple of years, renewing acquaintances and hearing firsthand about the latest literary news. Such transatlantic trips continued well into the 1850s: in the summer of 1853 ( just before William Chambers’s trip in the reverse direction), representatives from at least nine American publishers were in Europe: Appleton, Harper & Brothers, John Wiley, Charles Norton, two lesser New York firms, two New England firms (including Little, Brown & Co.), and the New York book auctioneer Bangs, Brother & Co. As Norton’s Literary Gazette commented, “they must meet each other in almost every Book Store” in London and Paris.26 Both Wiley & Putnam and Appleton ran substantial book importing businesses, but most American publishers were looking for texts to reprint. One option was to wait and see what was published by the British trade. This cost no money, but there was the risk that someone else might have the same idea. It might be fine for specialist works that were of interest to a small subset of publishers, but it was no use for famous novelists or essayists who were sought after by every publisher. An alternative was to keep an eye on the announcements in the British literary press to see what was forthcoming and select a likely title or author. Trade courtesy meant that simply announcing one’s intention to reprint a forthcoming work would be enough to fend off competitors. Such an announcement did not cost anything, but it did require the reprinter to make a judgment about the likely profitability of an as-yet unpublished work on the basis of very little information. When such profitability was in no doubt—as with very famous authors—intending reprinters might offer to pay the author or publisher for advance access to a set of proof sheets (or, by the 1840s, plates), which would guarantee that their edition was first to appear in the American market. Such payments were not necessarily large: Putnam paid only £10 for the texts that Wiley & Putnam reprinted in their Library of Choice Reading in the mid-1840s.27 British publishers seeking better remuneration for themselves and their authors had two main options: they could cooperate with an American reprinter and hope to secure higher payments by the establishment of trust or the offer of additional services; or they could try to convince an American agent to import and sell copies of their British-printed publications. Importation would generate a return proportional to actual sales, but the imported copies would almost certainly find themselves competing with locally reprinted editions that the British publisher had no power to curtail. Publications with expensive British price tags would be competitive against 194 ] Chapter Fifteen

reprint editions only if heavily discounted. Thus, British publishers with famous authors generally concentrated on securing a good payment for advance proof sheets. Publishers of cheap instructive works had little bargaining power for such deals, but we will see that their competitive pricing gave them more chance of making deals for bulk importation, as Chambers would do in the late 1840s. It was not simply the existence of so much cheap print in the United States that was striking to commentators, but the fact that it was almost all produced by commercial firms. When William Chambers started publishing, respectable cheap print was widely seen in Britain as a benevolent project for charitable societies rather than the basis for a commercial enterprise. Although the antebellum northern states certainly had their share of charitable societies, these groups played a relatively insignificant role in the cheapening of print. As in Britain, the American Bible and tract societies were active in the production and dissemination of cheap religious reading material and were swift to adopt new processes or techniques that would help their cause.28 But the religious publishing societies did not acquire a near monopoly on cheap print in the way that the British societies did in the 1810s and early 1820s, and there were sufficient commercial sources of nonreligious cheap print that there was little need for secular publishing charities. It says much about the contrasting transatlantic context that the two American societies that were inspired by the (London) Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge largely sought to manage and control an existing cheap literature, rather than create one.29 The Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded in 1829, and its principal aim appears to have been the organization of an annual series of evening lectures for young men of the middle and lower middle classes. Its members worried that the “excessive multiplication of books” in America might actually have “retarded instead of promoting, the diffusion of useful knowledge.”30 With so many books being produced, readers were being faced with an unmanageable amount of choice and could hardly be expected to distinguish the small number of authoritative, reliable, and wholesome titles from the mass. In 1831, the society announced the American Library of Useful Knowledge, a series on which readers could rely—but only six volumes were issued, selling at 62.5¢ (equivalent to 2s.6d.).31 In 1837, the New York–based American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge proposed an ambitious fifty-volume American Library for similar reasons, but none of the 40¢ volumes were ever issued.32 The significance of commercial, rather than philanthropic, practices can be clearly seen in the early 1840s, when American books became dramatiGetting to Know the American Market [ 195

cally cheaper, making a mockery of the modest cheapening of British print that had been occurring during the 1830s. Banking failures in 1837 and 1839 caused bankruptcies throughout American business, including the book trade. Publishers who survived faced severe credit difficulties, became conservative about risk taking, and relied more heavily than ever on regular sellers. Carey & Lea dropped most of their fiction line, reasoning that schoolbooks and legal and medical books would continue to sell even if people gave up such luxuries as novels. Similarly, their great rivals, Harper & Brothers, issued more schoolbooks than usual.33 But the most significant response to the difficult times came from the publishers of weekly newspapers, who started reprinting books for just 18¾¢ (9d.) or 25¢ (1s.) and forced book publishers to follow suit to survive. The Brother Jonathan (1839–44) and the New World (1840–45) were New York weekly newspapers whose editors discovered such a demand for serialized fiction that they began to produce “extra” issues containing entire novels. Newspaper offices provided both a printing plant and a steady stream of income, and the “extras” were printed to newspaper standards, on cheap paper, in tiny print, and issued unbound. The first “extras” fitted whole novels onto a single enormous newspaper sheet. By 1841, they had become pamphlets of thirty-two or forty-eight large pages, but the production qualities remained those of newspapers, and prices stayed low. The proprietors could make a profit on sales of 5,000, but their circulation often reached 20,000. Fiction was most common, but the proprietors included nonfiction that had been successful in Britain: there were “extras” of Thomas Arnold’s Introductory Lectures on Modern History (1842), George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain (1843), and Dickens’s American Notes (1842). American Notes was said to have sold 50,000 in the United States, much to the chagrin of its (unrecompensed) author.34 Both the New World and Brother Jonathan had closed by the end of 1845, but they had created an enormous public demand (and expectation) for extremely cheap print. Their “extras” had quickly produced competitors, including book publishers who were unhappy about their readers being stolen. Harper & Brothers had long specialized in the same sort of reprinted literature that featured in the “extras.” By 1842, they retaliated by reducing the prices of the volumes of their famous Family Library series from $1 to 25¢ (1s.), and issuing certain volumes, including American Notes, at just 12½¢. Other publishers did likewise. Thus, in the early 1840s, cutthroat commercial competition allowed American readers to enjoy prices for reprints far below those imaginable in Britain. The initial reduction in price was made possible by the use of newspaper technologies and methods: steam-powered printing machines, “very 196 ] Chapter Fifteen

poor paper,” and print so small as to require “a microscope to hold the letters apart.”35 But the book publishers who retaliated must have done so largely by reducing their profit margins and counting on high sales. The success of this risky strategy can be seen in the fact that, even after the rigorous competition of the depression years had died away, Harpers continued to issue a selection of titles at 25¢, and the enterprising T. B. Peterson of Philadelphia built his entire business on pamphlet novels at 25¢ or 12½¢. Books were widely available for less than a dollar, and 50¢ was a common price. In certain respects, W. & R. Chambers’s attitudes toward cheap print and its audiences were similar to those of American publishers. Chambers always assumed that there was a large literate audience who would be eager to buy printed matter, if only it were cheap enough. This confidence may derive from William Chambers’s conviction of the superiority of the Scottish education system, for, beyond the circles of the evangelical publishing and education charities, it was shared by few in England before the 1850s. Chambers were also fully aware that the cheapness they needed could be achieved only by sacrificing the traditional elegant and luxurious physical appearance of British books. Plain and simple bindings, thinner paper, and narrower margins were essential to the cause. And when Chambers first began publishing books, they followed the typical model—common to provincial printers and to Americans—of reprinting public domain texts to keep costs low. From this point, however, we start to see the differences between Chambers and their American contemporaries. Not only did Chambers have to work within the British tax regime, they also had to respect British copyright laws, which limited their options. Chambers’s dedication to providing instruction for those with little education made it difficult to find texts for reprinting: British public domain works were out of date and intended for the well educated, while foreign works were equally ill matched to the needs of the British working and lower middle classes. Commissioning new works for the Educational Course and the various series of instructive tracts gave Chambers control over length, style, and focus and enabled them to create coherent, well-planned series adapted to the needs of their market. And if they were careful to choose the right kind of authors, publishing original works did not need to be prohibitively expensive. Despite the differences in their context and their strategies, W. & R. Chambers had one final similarity with the American trade: an admiration and enthusiasm for new technologies. Thus, when William Chambers visited the large, industrialized printing establishment of Harper & Brothers in November 1853, he was a knowledgeable and interested guest. His own firm was the same age as Harpers: James and John Harper had established a printing Getting to Know the American Market [ 197

firm in 1817, around the same time as Robert and William Chambers had set up their first bookshops, and (with two more brothers) they became publishers in 1833, the year after the creation of W. & R. Chambers. Both firms acquired their first steam-powered printing machines in 1833. After their expansion in the mid-1840s, Chambers owned ten steam-printing machines, a stereotype foundry, and a bindery (see chapter 7). Although Harpers owned smaller, cheaper Treadwell machines rather than perfectors based on Applegath’s designs, William was undoubtedly impressed to see thirty-four steam-printing machines in operation at Harpers.36 While he was in New York in December 1853, some of William Chambers’s acquaintances suggested that he should emigrate. As he admitted, the idea had its attractions. To be a publisher in a country where there was near universal literacy, widespread elementary schooling, an extensive newspaper press, no taxation on printed matter, and a growing population increasingly accessible by railways and steamships was a wonderful prospect for anyone accustomed to the British context.37 Chambers cited personal ties as his reason for declining, but the fact is that, despite the disadvantages of the British context, he had already made a substantial success (and a personal fortune) from publishing cheap literature and had little reason to emigrate.

198 ] Chapter Fifteen

Figure 16. Gould & Lincoln later imported sheets of several Chambers works and issued them with redesigned title pages to appeal to the American market. Their title page for the Pocket Miscellany includes their Boston imprint and an idealized scene showing books at the center of pioneer life. Reproduced by permission of the American Antiquarian Society.

16

The Dissemination of Cheap Instruction

As William Chambers discovered during his travels, the reputation of W. & R. Chambers assured his welcome into the literary and publishing circles of any town. His name and his firm’s publications were clearly well known, despite the relatively few American reprints the firm had authorized (Chambers had sold plates of the Journal to William Jackson of New York between 1838 and 1840 and plates of the Cyclopaedia of English Literature to Gould, Kendall & Lincoln in 1846; see chapter 6). Chambers’s American reputation was more likely based on the circulation of their works in other ways, such as imported British-printed copies or the oft-feared unauthorized reprints of “pirate” American publishers. In 1842, the New York newspaper the New World defended the limitations of U.S. copyright law by arguing that it actually enhanced a cause close to William Chambers’s heart: the dissemination of knowledge. Domestic copyright legislation did not protect contributions to periodicals, so articles and stories were routinely reprinted by magazines throughout the United States, thus achieving a circulation and influence far beyond anything that a single periodical could achieve and helping to create an informed and intelligent citizenry.1 Similarly, the lack of international copyright recognition enabled British books to be reprinted (by the New World and others) far more cheaply than if they were reprinted under licence or imported—again, enhancing the dissemination of knowledge in the United States. Despite William Chambers’s sympathy for popular education, he was adamant that he could have “little respect” for this flagrant disre[ 201

gard for British intellectual property.2 He would surely have agreed with the sentiments of the Literary World (reprinted for British readers in the Publishers’ Circular), which insisted that “the dissemination of cheap knowledge” should not be allowed to outweigh “common honesty.”3 One of the magazines that suffered most from unauthorized reprinting was the Edinburgh monthly Blackwood’s Magazine. Launched in 1817, in 1819 it had the dubious honor of becoming the first British magazine to be reprinted in its entirety (rather than excerpted) in the United States. The story of its adventures nicely demonstrate the financial issues behind reprinting and importing. In Britain, a year’s subscription to Blackwood’s cost 30s. (equivalent to $7.50), but shipping and import tax meant that an American subscription in the 1820s cost around $11 or $12. Since the New York reprint edition cost just $8, there was a clear incentive for readers to choose the reprint. William Blackwood offered a discount to encourage the importation of the Edinburgh edition, but it enabled the import only to match the reprint price. With the arrival of a $5 reprint in the mid-1830s, the import was again uncompetitive (and in the cutthroat price cutting of the early 1840s, there was briefly a $2 newspaper-extra reprint). George Putnam negotiated a more sharply discounted price for imports, enabling Wiley & Putnam to offer Blackwood’s for $5 in the 1840s, but even this could not secure the market for the imported edition.4 British publishers had clear incentives to offer discounts for importation since otherwise they received nothing at all from the American edition. The reprint of Blackwood’s was selling just over 4,000 copies by the late 1840s. Since the British circulation was probably around 8,000 copies, American sales should have added a substantial sum to the magazine’s profits.5 Discounts slashed the profit margin, but some income from America was surely better than none. Unfortunately, discounts just reinvigorated the reprinters, and the imports kept falling victim to new, cheaper reprint editions. Blackwood’s, like most of the other major monthlies and quarterlies, was being reprinted by Leonard Scott of New York, who turned out to be willing to pay a fee for assistance from Blackwood. In 1848, he agreed to pay $300 a year for advance sheets, and by 1853, this had risen to $500 a year (equivalent to £100).6 Although not a large sum, it was at least a regular source of income, and by bringing the reprinter into cooperation with the British publisher, it removed the perpetual competition between imports and reprints. Thus, by the 1850s, the publishers of all the major British literary magazines had turned to arrangements based on the provision of advance proof sheets. Strikingly, the negotiations over Blackwood’s did not involve the sale of stereotype plates, which reemphasizes the fact that only the very high circulation magazines used stereotype technology. 202 ] Chapter Sixteen

The American Market for Cheap Instruction Readers in the northern states in the 1830s and 1840s had access to many different sources of information, from their daily newspapers to the flourishing public lectures, sermons, and debating societies of this period.7 If they wished to pursue a specific area of interest, cheap instructive books and magazines were available from a range of sources, including reprints of British works (both authorized and unauthorized), British imports, and a limited selection of American-authored works. Unauthorized reprinting was the ever-present fear for British publishers, and the major American publishing firms were certainly willing to reprint nonfiction as well as novels. For instance, Harper & Brothers’ Family Library (1830–45) contained more than 180 volumes of nonfiction, ranging from the travels of African explorer Mungo Park to Robert Southey’s Life of Lord Nelson, and including such Scottish authors as Andrew Combe on Physiology, David Brewster’s Life of Isaac Newton, and Thomas Dick’s Improvement of Society. The Family Library volumes had originally cost $1, but the competition of the early 1840s led Harpers to drop some of the prices to just 25¢.8 In 1847, Harpers launched a New Miscellany series of 50¢ volumes (equivalent to 2s.), promising “History, Science, Voyages and Travels, Biography &c.” Again, the volumes were serious works by well-known authors, including Dick’s Practical Astronomer, Mary Somerville’s Connection of the Physical Sciences, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of a Naturalist.9 In Britain, all these books cost at least 6s., so Harpers’ cheap editions could be seen as a substantial contribution to the circulation of knowledge, just as the New World had claimed. Harpers choice of texts focused on well-respected authors and works that had already been critically acclaimed in Britain, as the surest ways to profitability. Cheap instructive popular works did not usually fall into that category. Imported copies were the other way British texts circulated in the United States. Big book importing firms such as Wiley & Putnam generally focused on the literary fiction and scholarly nonfiction that suited the tastes of affluent citizens who could pay a premium for imported British books. Instructive and educational works were usually imported by specialist firms. William Jackson of New York was one of the most significant of these in the 1830s. He focused on British instructive and educational books (both religious and secular), as well as publishing some children’s books of his own. He became the American agent of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1833, and was the authorized reprinter of the Penny Magazine and its rival, the Saturday Magazine (published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), as well as Chambers’s Journal. From his shop on Broadway, Jackson sold imported copies of the Religious Tract Society’s The Dissemination of Cheap Instruction [ 203

periodicals, a series of mathematical textbooks by J. R. Young, the fifty-three volumes of Valpy’s Family Classical Library, and a range of other broadly educational works.10 Jackson sold the Penny Magazine for 3¢ retail, the treatises of the Library of Useful Knowledge for 15¢, and the bound volumes of the Library of Entertaining Knowledge for $1.25, whereas the British prices were 1d. (2¢), 6d. (12½¢), and 4s.6d. ($1.12½), respectively.11 British imports clearly carried a markup due to the American import duty on manufactured products and shipping charges, and it affected cheaper publications proportionately more than expensive ones: the Penny Magazine was 50 percent more expensive, whereas the longer LEK treatises were only 11 percent more expensive. However, Jackson’s prices do show that it was possible for importers to sell British publications surprisingly close to their original price. With the onset of the economic depression, however, Jackson left the trade, selling part of his business (including the agency for the Penny Magazine) to Edmund Baldwin in 1841.12 Relatively few American-authored instructive publications equivalent to those of Chambers or the SDUK seem to have arisen in the United States. There were imitative magazines with titles involving “useful knowledge” or “entertaining instruction” in the 1830s, but few had staying power. The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge (Boston, 1834–37) survived longer than most. Its monthly issues covered the usual range of topics, from natural history and geography, to history, literature, and the useful arts, but it was “designed to be American.” In contrast to the studied avoidance of political or religious material in the Penny Magazine and Chambers’s Journal, in 1835, the American Magazine’s new editor openly admitted that he hoped to encourage an “admiration of the wisdom, intelligence and benevolence of the Great First Cause of all things.” The editor also explained his conviction that the sober dissemination of “useful information among the many,” without “excitement” or “inflammatory appeals,” would help to unify the citizens of the United States in a common commitment to civil liberty as provided by the constitution.13 Such an explicit political agenda would have been highly unusual in Britain, and even in the United States its appropriateness may be indicated by the fact that this editor was soon replaced.14 After the cessation of the Penny Magazine in 1846, and in the absence of an authorized reprinter or bulk importer of Chambers’s Journal, there was a clear gap in the market for instructive and entertaining magazines in the United States by the later 1840s. The American SDUK tried to revive the genre in July 1847 by publishing Wright’s Paper for the Dissemination of Useful Knowledge (Philadelphia, 1847–48). A. E. Wright was one of the officers of the society, and he promised to serve “the good of the people, 204 ] Chapter Sixteen

unbiased by party, sect, or local prejudices.” He offered sixteen pages every month, for 3¢, containing paragraphs on such topics as “perseverance,” “affection,” “sowing seeds,” “how to save expense in clothing,” “salting meat,” and the “age of trees.”15 As its editor claimed, it was cheap—the British reprints had been the same price, but weekly—but the contents exemplified the scissors-and-paste editorial technique and poor production quality that had depressed William Chambers fifteen years earlier. It closed toward the end of 1848. Eclectic magazines such as Littell’s Living World (from 1844) and Harper’s Monthly Magazine (from 1850) filled the niche in a different way. Rather than reprinting entire issues of a single British magazine, the eclectic magazines reprinted selected articles from a range of sources. This gave the editor more control over the contents: he could omit paragraphs that filled dead space and choose only what he considered the best articles or those most relevant to his readers. Early issues of Living World, for instance, tended to contain articles with an American angle.16 The Living World’s source magazines ranged from Chambers’s Journal to the North British Review, Blackwood’s Magazine and the Athenaeum, as well as American magazines. Chambers’s Journal, along with the Christian Spectator and the Leisure Hour (both published by the Religious Tract Society), was also one of the sources for the more serious minded National Magazine, edited on behalf of the Methodist Book Committee from 1852–58, which mixed original contributions with articles from British magazines. These eclectic magazines provided a way for the Chambers name and some parts of the Chambers’s Journal experience to circulate in the United States. The exception to the general dearth of indigenous American instructive texts was schoolbooks since a large and regular demand existed for books appropriate to the American education system.17 In contrast to the uncertain and variable demand for “instructive and entertaining” works for family or leisure reading, textbooks were steady sellers and, increasingly, were American-authored. By 1850, children’s author Samuel Goodrich would report that “more than a million of [Noah] Webster’s Spelling-books are published every year.”18 Goodrich would also estimate that schoolbooks, written “wholly by American authors,” accounted for around 40 percent of the American book trade’s output.19 By the time Goodrich wrote, the flourishing trade in American-authored schoolbooks was attracting attention from British reprinters and importers. American textbooks covered a much wider range of disciplines, particularly at a higher level, and American college professors were writing textbooks on subjects that had little presence or status in British universities. And unlike German textbooks, American-authored books needed no translation for use in the British market. The Dissemination of Cheap Instruction [ 205

Other than schoolbooks, however, instructive works by American authors seem to have occupied only a small corner of the market, presumably reflecting the widespread availability and low prices of the imported British works and their authorized reprints.

Chambers and the Unauthorized Reprinters Reprinters were usually attracted by works that sold well, and Chambers’s best-selling and most profitable works were the Journal and the series of instructive tracts. Chapter 6 outlined the early attempts to reprint the Journal, and a later attempt is described in chapter 19. None of these were successful in the long term. Equally strikingly, with one exception (see below), the instructive tract series were not reprinted in the United States. Rather, it was Chambers’s Educational Course that attracted the most attention from the reprinters. By the early 1850s, this series contained more than fifty volumes covering English literature, science, history, modern languages, and the classics, at prices ranging from 1s. to 4s. Although the series was originally conceived for autodidacts in Britain, Chambers had already recognized its importance to schools with small budgets. Several of the firm’s books and maps appeared on the list drawn up by the Committee of Council on Education in 1848, in its efforts to improve the quality of elementary education in Britain. Publishers discounted listed books if ordered by a school under government inspection or a workhouse school.20 Chambers also offered reduced rates of around 40 percent (and up to 66 percent) to schools in Canada in the early 1850s.21 Given the range of textbooks and readers already available in the United States, it might seem odd that there was any demand for the Chambers series. Nevertheless, the Educational Course was unusual in being a complete system, covering a full range of subjects, and being low priced. The first reprints of it seem to have been those of Sorin & Ball in Philadelphia, who reprinted the First Book of Drawing and the Rudiments of Geology in 1846.22 A year later, both Harper & Brothers and Lea & Blanchard (formerly Carey & Lea) began to reprint the classical volumes of the course, and in 1848, A. S. Barnes of New York reprinted some of the science volumes. Barnes was one of the biggest educational publishers in the United States (it would become one of the founders of the American Book Co., which controlled 50 to 90 percent of educational publishing in the 1890s23), so its interest in Chambers is relatively unsurprising. But Harper & Brothers specialized in fiction, while Lea & Blanchard were developing into specialist medical publishers. In both their catalogs, the classical section of Chambers’s Educational Course stood out, so its inclusion indicates clear expectations of profitability. 206 ] Chapter Sixteen

Lea & Blanchard began reprinting the Latin books of the series as small volumes priced between 50¢ to 75¢ in mid-1847.24 In May 1850, the firm (now Blanchard & Lea) contacted Chambers and announced, “We are republishing your Series of Classical Educational Books, & propose continuing them.”25 They had issued six of the series with no assistance from Chambers, but now sought help with the forthcoming Latin-English dictionary. Dictionaries were complex works to reset, involving two languages, several sizes of type, and plenty of opportunity for errors to creep in. Thus, while Blanchard & Lea were reprinting the readers and grammars from locally made stereotype plates, they were keen to purchase plates of the dictionary. The negotiations went smoothly, for the Chambers firm was willing to oblige, and although Blanchard & Lea argued about terms of settlement, they had no complaints about the proposed price. The plates were dispatched in batches during 1850, and Blanchard & Lea advertised it in May 1851. A review the following February praised not just the dictionary’s content, but its physical format: “The paper is good, the type excellent, and the typographical execution . . . almost unexceptional.”26 The latter two qualities were, of course, a reflection on Chambers rather than Blanchard & Lea. Inspired by Blanchard & Lea’s polite expression of hope that “this may prove the commencement of a business that will result to our mutual interests,” Chambers tried to interest the Philadelphia firm in plates for the other volumes in the classical series and those for the equivalent German series.27 Blanchard & Lea had no interest in the German schoolbooks (nor had Gould, Kendall & Lincoln). But they also turned down the offer of plates for the remainder of the Latin series, saying “we suspect it would be best if we reprint that work, to have it done here so as to match the other volumes of the Series we have done.”28 There may have been some truth in that, but the reality was that Blanchard & Lea’s Classical Series was well established, so there was little competitive advantage in acquiring stereotype plates; with no illustrations, the composition costs of resetting the work were reasonable; and Blanchard & Lea were already finding a ready market with the current price and format. They had little need of plates. The dictionary, with its special typography, had been a one-off occasion and did not mark the start of a long-term relationship, as Chambers had surely hoped. Chambers’s instructive serials did not suffer extensive unauthorized reprinting, despite their high sales in Britain, perhaps because the wider availability of cheap print made the tract format less appealing.29 Notably, neither the (authorized) reprint of the Cyclopaedia of English Literature nor the (unauthorized) reprint of Information for the People was issued as a series of short tracts. Gould had wanted to issue the Cyclopaedia in complete volumes, but had to settle for monthly parts (see chapter 6). The Information The Dissemination of Cheap Instruction [ 207

for the People (in its 1842 revised and expanded edition) was reprinted by a Philadelphia publisher in 1846 or 1847. George B. Zieber made a brief success from 25¢ historical romances, and claimed to own “the greatest cheap publication depot in the US.”30 He made stereotype plates for an edition of the Information for the People, which he advertised as being edited by “an accomplished American Scholar” and adapted “to the wants of the American public.” In reality, apart from rearranging the sections, the “editor” did little more than add some suggestions for further (American) reading to the first few topics. In early 1847, Zieber issued the Information in sixteen fortnightly parts (the Edinburgh edition had been one hundred fortnightly tracts), at 25¢ each, or two complete volumes for $4.31 Thus, the price for the completed work in bound volumes in Philadelphia was equivalent to that in Edinburgh (at 16s.). When Zieber went out of business in 1848, the stereotype plates were purchased by a group of small Philadelphia publishers. The fact that they continued to reprint it almost yearly until 1859, even though the contents were almost two decades old and despite the fact that the newer 1848 edition was available as an import, indicates that, in certain markets, a slightly cheaper and locally produced reprint could be successful. All the publishers who reprinted Chambers’s works had to market them to a new audience, and their efforts illustrate how texts could be transformed by their removal to a new location. A common strategy was to announce revisions by an American editor, as Zieber had done. A. S. Barnes prominently announced the name of physician David Meredith Reese in their advertisements for Chambers’s scientific textbooks, while Harpers used Professor Charles Anthon of Columbia College in the same way for the classical textbooks. The classical textbooks had originally been written by Professor Carl Gottlob Zumpt of Berlin University, and after Chambers had arranged for the Rev. Leonard Schmitz, the rector of Edinburgh High School, to work with Zumpt on the translation and revisions, the books were advertised in Britain under the names of both Zumpt and Schmitz. In the United States, however, the Edinburgh connection was downplayed. Harpers marketed their reprint simply as Anthon’s editions of Zumpt’s books, ignoring both Schmitz and Chambers (some reviewers did acknowledge the role of Schmitz, but not Chambers).32 The “accomplished American Scholar” who edited Zieber’s Philadelphia reprint of the Information for the People remained suspiciously anonymous. However, this edition illustrates the substantial changes that a reprinter could make without significantly altering the content. The articles in Zieber’s edition remained unchanged textually from the 1842 Edinburgh edition, but they were totally rearranged: the group of geographical and historical description of nations (which had a strong emphasis on Britain and 208 ] Chapter Sixteen

its empire) moved from the start of the first volume to the end of the second volume, thus de-centering Britain. Similarly, the preface was rewritten to remove references to the British class system and inadequate educational provision, and to recast the potential audience in carefully democratic terms. The American Information was no longer aimed at “the lower regions of society” but became an important work for “all classes of the people” and “the people generally.”33

Discounted Bulk Imports The relative lack of reprinting, especially of the instructive serials, suggests that the low British price of Chambers’s publications removed the profit margin for American reprinters. American editions of most British publications were cheaper not only because U.S. publishers did not pay for copyright, but also because they used cheaper paper, smaller print, and simpler bindings. Reprints undercut imports even before any markups for shipping or customs duty were added. But Chambers’s publications—unlike those of the elite London publishers—were already produced about as cheaply as possible, which meant that an American reprint’s only price advantage came from the absence of shipping and import costs. This was a small margin, and Chambers hoped to undermine it by offering more generous trade discounts to American importers. Chambers had first attempted to interest American publishers in bulk importation for the Journal back in the early 1830s. The retail price of 1,000 copies of the Journal was £6.5s.0d., and British trade customers routinely received 30 percent off, paying £4.6s.6d. per 1,000.34 Chambers offered the Journal at £4 per 1,000 to a New York publisher in 1833, and then at £3.7s.6d. per 1,000 to Gould, Kendall & Lincoln of Boston in 1847.35 The additional 15 percent discount should have enabled the importer to cover shipping and take his own cut, while still offering a discount to the end retailer. Neither of Chambers’s offers was accepted, however, as the Americans wanted to purchase plates. Nonetheless, in late 1846, Chambers convinced Gould to place orders for the Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts, with a minimum of 1,000 copies. Although Gould had wanted to purchase plates, Chambers instead offered a 40 to 50 percent discount on imported sheets.36 Most bulk exportations of Chambers publications involved unfolded, printed sheets. This reduced the import duty (since sheets were not as valuable as finished books) and enabled the importer to make the decision about the final format, grounded in local knowledge of his audience. In making their arrangement, Gould, Kendall & Lincoln had to balance Chambers’s discount against The Dissemination of Cheap Instruction [ 209

the cost and effort needed to sell not just a few imported copies, but hundreds of copies. They were worried about competition from other importers; one New York firm, in fact, had already announced its intention to reprint the Miscellany. Nevertheless, Gould decided to go ahead, and fortunately the New York reprint never appeared. Gould found a regular market for the Miscellany and continued to place orders for a few hundred copies at a time through the 1850s.37 In their efforts to find a market for the Miscellany, Gould were able to use their local knowledge to make small changes to adapt it to American tastes and expectations. By working with sheets printed in Edinburgh, they clearly had less freedom to alter the text than did Barnes or Zieber. But they could bind the sheets in whatever format suited them and insert additional advertising or new title pages or frontispieces. Gould changed the title of the series to the Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge (rather than “Tracts”).38 A few years later, Gould would also alter the title of the Pocket Miscellany, issuing it as the Home Book and Pocket Miscellany with a new title page bearing the Gould imprint and an idealized image of a frontier family, complete with chickens strutting in the yard (see fig. 16).39 The title change for the Miscellany might have been intended to broaden the appeal of the series beyond the religious and philanthropic connotations of the word tract, but it was also a reflection of the most obvious difference between Chambers’s and Gould’s marketing strategies. Chambers were firmly convinced of the value of cheap part works, but Gould preferred to issue nothing smaller than a volume and ideally only complete sets. Gould did not issue the Miscellany as individual tracts. Part of their reasoning derived from the tiny profit margin on such short cheap works. For Chambers, this was a necessary part of the mission to improve the working classes and simply meant that very large numbers had to be sold to yield a respectable profit. Gould, however, were dealing with only several hundreds of copies. Given the “expense of advertising &c to create a demand,” they preferred to work with bound volumes, on which they could charge a price that “would remunerate us for the trouble & outlay.”40 Gould also believed that, after the intense cheapening of print in the United States in the early 1840s, “the public are” tired of numbers and would prefer better-quality, slightly more expensive works.41 This was quite a contrast from Chambers’s usual situation in Britain, where the shortage of very cheap print continued, and numbers were still welcome. W. & R. Chambers’s somewhat haphazard dealings in the United States during the 1830s and 1840s were more reactive than proactive. Other than contacting William Jackson in 1838, they initiated no other first contacts with 210 ] Chapter Sixteen

American publishers or booksellers to import or reprint their works. Those Chambers publications that did circulate in the United States, then, did so through multiple routes and in a variety of formats. Chambers’s Journal was available in a small number of imported copies throughout the 1830s and 1840s; for three years around 1840, there was also Jackson’s New York reprint; and by the later 1840s, the Journal became better known to American readers through the inclusion of its articles in the pages of such eclectic excerpting magazines as Littell’s Living World and the National Magazine. Imported editions of the books and instructive tracts could be found in bookstores in the three main publishing cities: C. S. Francis in New York, Gould, Kendall & Lincoln in Boston, and J. W. Moore in Philadelphia, though each stocked a different selection of titles. Their wholesaling activities presumably spread the imported copies further afield, and it is possible that in some towns, imported copies from different sources competed with each other. A few would also be competing with locally reprinted editions, most likely of the Educational Course. It must have been difficult for individual booksellers (or purchasers) to know whether they were buying Edinburgh-finished publications, Edinburgh-printed-but-locally-bound publications, local reprints from imported plates, or local reprints entirely reset. It has been estimated that only a fifth of the British works circulating in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century were imports rather than reprints.42 In the case of Chambers’s instructive and educational works, however, imports were almost certainly more significant than this suggests. There is no doubt that reprinting was a major part of the American book trade, but it affected a surprisingly small proportion of Chambers’s catalog: the classical and scientific volumes of the Educational Course and the Information for the People. No reprinter made a long-term success out of Chambers’s Journal, perhaps because the eclectic magazines mined its pages so regularly. On the other hand, there is little evidence that Chambers had a substantial export trade to the United States before the late 1840s. The firm’s archive contains few communications with American booksellers or publishers before Gould, Kendall & Lincoln’s first contact in 1846; few references were made to the firm in the American periodical press until then; and only a small number of copies of early Chambers publications survive in American academic libraries today. It is striking that most of the firms mentioned in this chapter became involved between 1846 and 1850, at the same time as Chambers became more alert to the possibilities of the American export market. As we will see, the pattern was not unique to Chambers: the late 1840s saw a notable rise in interest in transatlantic literary business from both sides of the ocean. The Dissemination of Cheap Instruction [ 211

Figure 17. In October 1847, the Publishers’ Circular carried an entire page of advertisements from firms trying to attract transatlantic business from British publishers.

17

A New Spirit of Engagement

The faster exchange of correspondence and news that transatlantic steam shipping facilitated brought the British and American book trades closer and inspired a new desire for cooperation in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Advertisements started to appear in the Publishers’ Circular from late 1847 onward encouraging British publishers to dispatch books and stereotype plates to the book trade auctions in New York. This was the period when Cunard’s fleet had expanded and the service frequency increased, but it also broadly coincided with the recovery of the American trade from the depression of the early 1840s and with the emergence of a new American interest and confidence in Americanauthored works, sometimes known as the American literary renaissance.1 Together, these things spawned a new enthusiasm for transatlantic literary business and, in particular, encouraged British publishers to join George Routledge in taking more interest in American books. Literary business had been crossing the Atlantic since the days of the earliest settlers, but it had typically been a one-way, westward, affair: British books were imported, and, after American independence, reprinted. But when Sydney Smith notoriously asked in 1820, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?,” he reflected a prevailing British assumption that there were few original works of American authorship, and fewer still that were worth reading.2 The American book trade, therefore, had a long history of engagement with the British trade, but the reverse was not necessarily true. However, the popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin on both sides of the Atlantic in 1852 was a clear demonstration that Smith’s jibe belonged to an older era. [ 213

Steam or Sail? This increased cooperation required physical copies of publications (as well as letters) to cross the Atlantic. Amidst the advertisements in the Publishers’ Circular in the late 1840s, Greaves, McNicol & Co. of Liverpool announced their international shipping services. They offered to arrange transit for publications, parcels, samples, and correspondence on the Royal Mail (Cunard) steamships, with onward delivery in the United States, if necessary, through express company Adams & Co. of Boston.3 (The U.S. mail did not carry bound books until 1851, so publishers relied heavily on private express companies.)4 In March 1848, the shipping firm drew publishers’ attention to the improved frequency of Cunard’s sailings, announcing that the service was now “every Saturday till further notice.” They also offered to clear packages at the Custom House, as another way to make transatlantic business easier for their customers. The company hinted that “Monthly and other Publications” might benefit most from steamship services, but stated their willingness to make arrangements with the “First Class Packet Ships leaving this Port daily” for those seeking a cheaper option.5 As Greaves’s advertisements indicate, publishers had to consider carefully whether and how to use the new services offered by Cunard. Even though the new ships were larger, space for cargo remained at a premium and was charged accordingly. It was a clear question of cost versus urgency. Bookseller J. W. Moore of Philadelphia explained the options for customers who wished to order books directly from Britain: “If by the steamer, in about thirty days; if by the packet, and at a less expense, in fifty or sixty days.”6 Members of the book trades had to make the same choices. American reprinters would certainly pay for steam shipping because they needed only a single copy of a British magazine or novel to have it reset and printed, and Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839) had traveled to New York on one of the early journeys of the Great Western.7 The major New York book importers, such as Wiley & Putnam and Appleton, also paid for steam shipping and explicitly advertised their new stock as having arrived via the Cunard steamships Cambria and Hibernia to emphasize their close connection to the London trade.8 These large importing firms had a clear interest in getting the latest publications as soon as possible, and the expensive literary and scholarly publications they imported could bear a markup for steam shipping. In contrast, instructive and educational publications, such as the series of W. & R. Chambers, had small profit margins, which could not easily absorb extra shipping costs, and were aimed at less affluent customers, who could not easily afford markups. Importers of these works were far more likely to continue using sailing ships. British publishers who were actively exporting publications were also 214 ] Chapter Seventeen

likely to stick to sail, especially if they were paying and there was no immediate rush. The question of who was paying was, however, important. For instance, if Chambers were sending consignments of publications ordered by American or Canadian booksellers, the bookseller was supposed to pay for shipping. Yet exported publications were eligible for a “drawback,” or tax rebate, on their paper, and Chambers informed an American correspondent in 1851 that “in large shipments, the drawback usually covers all expences, and leaves a surplus,” making the shipping effectively free.9 However, that claim was largely based on their experience with colonial booksellers, who received a relatively small number of crates each year by sailing ship. The new enthusiasm for transatlantic literary business in the late 1840s would involve far more frequent deliveries, with the potential of steam shipping— and in that context, the drawback did not necessarily cover the full cost. Thus, in 1846, when dispatching the plates for the Cyclopaedia of English Literature to Gould, Kendall & Lincoln in Boston (see chapter 6), Chambers initially assumed that Gould would want them as soon as possible, and shipped the first batch by the steamship Britannia as soon as it was ready— only to be tartly requested to send the remainder in a single consignment “by the cheapest conveyance.”10 As Greaves & Co.’s advertisement made clear, the most likely items to travel by steamer in the late 1840s and early 1850s were letters, samples, and “Monthly and other Publications”—in other words, correspondence and time-critical publications.11 Surviving letters in the W. & R. Chambers archive from the mid-1840s have “per Britannia” or “per Cambria” marked on the outside, indicating the correspondents’ awareness of the Cunard steam packet service. The speedier mail service enabled information to travel between the British and American book trades more rapidly, and negotiations (over access to advance sheets or the sale of stereotype plates) could take place more easily. With a journey time of thirteen or fourteen days to Boston and twelve days to New York, a correspondent in Liverpool could communicate with the United States at the rate of a letter a fortnight. For Chambers in Edinburgh, however, the transit time from Liverpool to Edinburgh forced their reply to wait for the departure of the sister ship a fortnight later, resulting in a gap of a month between letters in the correspondence between Edinburgh and Boston in 1846. The slow progress of the negotiations between Chambers and Gould in 1846 illustrates how correspondents learned to make the best use of the new steamship service. Gould’s letter of October 15 did not reach Edinburgh until November 17, presumably delayed by waiting for a steamer in Boston and being delivered from Liverpool to Edinburgh.12 Chambers hoped their reply would catch the November 19 steamer from Liverpool, but the timing was A New Spirit of Engagement [ 215

too tight, and their letter “laid over in Liverpool till the 4th Decr,” leaving Gould waiting almost two and a half months for a response.13 The dating of subsequent letters suggests that both parties were more careful in future: they made themselves well aware of the shipping schedules and wrote specifically to catch the next steamer, thus ensuring that their news would be as up to date as possible. This was a short-lived caution, however: by the 1850s, as the frequency of transatlantic mail steamers increased, Chambers were routinely writing more frequently (about monthly) to their major American contacts, and they also felt able to write as business needs dictated, with no obvious reference to the next steamer. Although steam quickly became routine for correspondence, for cargo, Chambers and their American contacts were still carefully specifying whether to use sail or steam throughout the early 1850s. But in 1856, Cunard reduced its freight charges on two separate occasions and, by December, was charging just £3 a ton, compared to £6 at the start of the year.14 And by that year, even Chambers were dispatching book consignments on ships whose names reveal them to be steamers. The last explicit mention of sail that I have found in the Chambers archives was in October 1856, when Chambers requested an American contact to return unsold copies of the Pictorial History of England “by first sailing vessel to Liverpool.”15

American Books in Britain George Routledge’s use of American novels as a cheap source of texts for his Railway Library from late 1848 (see chapter 10) helped to associate American literature with fiction, yet there was plenty of evidence in the late 1840s that the United States also had an excellent range of nonfiction publications. Routledge was one of several British publishers reprinting the Rev. Albert Barnes’s Notes on the Bible, while the Edinburgh educational firm of Maclachlan & Stewart had announced plans for a series of “Cheap American reprints,” to include Brown University professor Francis Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science (1835) and a Commentary on the Apocalypse by an Andover Theological Seminary professor.16 Although Maclachlan & Stewart’s series did not flourish (at 4s.6d., its volumes were not “cheap” in the same sense as Routledge’s shilling volumes), it demonstrates that the United States could be seen as sources of well-respected scholarly and educational works.17 Looking at the books that were imported from the United States reveals a similar picture. Notably, the London offices of American firms (rather than specialist British firms) initially dominated the import of American books, again indicating that American firms had a longer-standing interest in doing transatlantic trade. As the preeminent American firm in London, Wiley & 216 ] Chapter Seventeen

Putnam’s prominent advertisements in the Publishers’ Circular alerted the British trade to the American books and magazines available at their Paternoster Row premises. In autumn 1847, their range (from a variety of U.S. publishers) featured The Earlier Prophecies of Isaiah by Princeton professor J. A. Alexander, a translation of Neander’s History of the Church by Vermont professor Joseph Torrey, and Charles Anthon’s edition of Xenophon’s Anabasis, as well as the North American Review and the Literary World. A few months later, they were offering the third edition of John Draper’s Textbook on Chemistry, a History of Virginia, and Travels over the Table Lands and Cordilleras of Mexico, along with a wider range of periodicals.18 Wiley & Putnam’s choices indicate their perception of which American works and authors could be successful in Britain. On the history or geography of the Americas, American authors had an obvious authority, but the focus on educational and theological works—and not, say, fiction—indicates the genres in which Wiley & Putnam believed American authors could be internationally marketable. John Wiley and George Putnam dissolved their partnership at the end of March 1848, shortly after Putnam’s return to New York. Both men tried to retain their firm’s former position in London, and the importation of American books into London became suddenly and briefly competitive. Putnam had secured the services of London publisher John Chapman to act as his agent, but by 1849, this relationship had also broken down, leaving Putnam and Chapman in competition with each other as well as with Wiley. All three operations were importing a broadly similar range of books—often the very same works—with a focus on nonfiction and educational works. Schoolbooks by professors at the American colleges were one of the mainstays of imports, as were works on the history, geography, geology, botany, and archaeology of the Americas. In the medium term, John Chapman established his premises at 142 Strand as an American literary agency and meeting place for visiting literary Americans, just as Putnam had done the decade before. Ralph Waldo Emerson stayed with Chapman while visiting Britain in 1847–48, and newspaper editor Horace Greeley recommended Americans visiting the Great Exhibition in 1851 to seek Chapman’s help in locating affordable accommodation. As well as importing American books, Chapman campaigned for an Anglo-American copyright agreement and published British editions of works by American transcendentalists and Unitarians, including Emerson and the Rev. William Ellery Channing. However, in 1851, he bought the Westminster Review, which he edited with help from Marian Evans (who lodged at 142 Strand for several years before she became famous as novelist George Eliot). The Westminster Review brought perpetual money worries, A New Spirit of Engagement [ 217

and by the mid-1850s, Chapman had given up his bookselling and publishing business.19 By then, British publisher Sampson Low had emerged as a major player in transatlantic literary business. Low was the editor and publisher of the Publishers’ Circular. In 1846, he agreed to act as London agent for Harper & Brothers, who believed that George Putnam was no longer giving their business his full attention. Low then took on more American agencies: for the Literary World (the closest equivalent to the Publishers’ Circular), for the New York book auctioneers Bangs, Brother & Co., for Charles Norton and Norton’s Literary Gazette, and (once he had given up his London office) for George Putnam and Putnam’s Magazine. Low also began to offer services that would help British publishers in their dealings with the United States. For instance, in 1853, he issued an American Book List to complement the list of new British books that appeared in each issue of the Publishers’ Circular.20 Low also began importing American books. In July 1849, he advertised an edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and a Commercial Digest and Ship-master’s Assistant.21 Later that year, he was advertising Harpers’ three-volume edition of Richard Hildreth’s History of the United States of America, a History of the American Bible Society, and S.T. Wallis’s Glimpses of Spain.22 In the autumn and winter of 1852, Low undertook an extensive campaign to secure his position as the main conduit for transatlantic business, being “Literary Agents, Export and Import Booksellers.” He opened a new shop in Fleet Street specifically to sell American publications. He sent a circular to American publishers soliciting consignments of stock for his “extensive premises” and announced the shop’s opening on both sides of the Atlantic, via the Literary World and the Publishers’ Circular. His thirty-year-old son Sampson Low Jr. spent three months in the United States making contacts in the book trade. His trip was advertised in the Literary World, and Americans who wished to make contact were asked to write care of Harper & Brothers, Low’s first and longest-standing American client.23 Low also announced his publication of a series of books by American authors, by arrangement with those authors or their publishers. Low had reprinted occasional American works since 1849, but the new series was more widely advertised and made a clear distinction between itself and those of Routledge or Bohn: “No American Publication will be reprinted by Messrs Low & Co without such arrangements [for compensating the author] being previously made.”24 The series would include works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and the geologist Edward Hitchcock of Amherst College. One consequence of all this activity by Low and others was that American books became far better known in Britain, both as imports and as reprints 218 ] Chapter Seventeen

(authorized and unauthorized). As with British books in America, fiction seems to have suffered more from unauthorized reprinting than nonfiction, thanks to its greater marketability. Apart from increasing the range of works available to British readers, the growing British interest in American works meant that securing an Anglo-American copyright agreement suddenly became a matter of greater concern to American publishers and authors. A successful lobbying campaign got a draft agreement before Congress in 1854, but the refusal of the Senate to ratify it dashed hopes.25 (Not until 1891 did an Anglo-American copyright act finally pass.)

British Books in America At the same time that more American books were being imported, reprinted, and (presumably) read in Britain, British publishers were investigating the opportunities to profit from their American markets. In the late 1840s, their business was actively solicited by a range of transatlantic shipping companies, American literary agencies, and auction houses. Although the American literary papers routinely carried British news, the reverse was not true. The Publishers’ Circular had been Anglocentric; but from 1847, its pages started to feature advertisements from firms importing American books into Britain and from those firms offering a range of transatlantic book trade services to British publishers hoping to break into the American market (see fig. 17). The first prominent American firm to advertise in the Publishers’ Circular was the New York auction house of Cooley, Keese & Hill. J. E. Cooley’s firm was experienced both in handling the sale of private libraries and in organizing huge twice-yearly book trade sales, attended by booksellers and publishers from throughout North America. Their January 1847 advertisement drew the attention of the British book trade by its offer to sell “every kind of Literary Property, Paintings, Engravings, and Works of Art” in “spacious Show and Sales Rooms” in “the heart of the city.” Cooley, Keese & Hill were one of the major auction houses in New York, but, recognizing that trade reputations did not extend across the Atlantic, they directed interested parties to seek references from the two American publishers most well known in Britain at that time: Wiley & Putnam and Daniel Appleton (who happened to be Cooley’s father-in-law).26 Trade sales—and Cooley’s were not the only ones—were an unfamiliar concept to British publishers, but they were a distinctive feature of the American book trade. Provincial booksellers traveled to New York, Boston, or Philadelphia to acquire new stock from publishers at the trade sales. Booksellers were on the lookout for a bargain, while publishers found it a A New Spirit of Engagement [ 219

useful distribution method. Writing about the trade sales in 1854, William Chambers noted that publishers did not offer “mere parcels of books, but whole editions prepared for the purpose,” and that these were “transmitted from publishing houses in different parts of the Union.” Purchasers too came “from great distances,” and “literary wares are disposed of on a scale of extraordinary magnitude.”27 So important were trade sales that they usually had a committee of publishers advising on the organization, and in 1855, one of the key tasks of the newly founded New York Publishers’ Association was to oversee the running of a trade sale according to its own rules.28 Although American publishers routinely used these sales to move new publications, Cooley, Keese & Hill initially suggested that British publishers might find them a good opportunity “for the sale of Remainders or Surplus Stock.”29 Cooley’s advertisement reappeared in October, on the same page as one from a competing New York auction house. Lemuel Bangs, of Bangs, Richards & Platt, had once been in partnership with Cooley but was now one of his most significant competitors. Whereas Cooley devoted a lot of time to private sales, trade sales had been Bangs’s speciality since 1838, and he would run the first Publishers’ Association sale.30 Like Cooley, Bangs organized twice-yearly trade sales, claimed to have the attendance of booksellers from all over the United States and Canada, and offered “liberal cash advances” to publishers sending consignments. Bangs also claimed to have better connections with the New York publishing trade and had arranged for Sampson Low to act as his agent in London.31 British books could appear in these auctions (either as imports or reprints) without the direct involvement of their British publishers. For instance, at Bangs’s fifty-first New York trade sale, held on March 25, 1850, the works of W. & R. Chambers were listed under the name of their importer, Gould, Kendall & Lincoln.32 Nevertheless, Bangs clearly had some success in encouraging the active participation of British publishers in his trade sales. The spring 1850 sale also featured direct consignments from twenty-one British publishers. That from the Glasgow evangelical publisher William Collins included dictionaries and prayer books, while John Murray sent works on Japan and Newfoundland, John Loudon’s Botany for Ladies, and more prayer books. Chambers appear to have sent a direct consignment to Bangs’s sales only once, in spring 1853, when they sent Robert Chambers’s Select Writings, Redhead’s French Revolutions, and Gostick’s German Literature.33 Since the British book trade did not use auctions the way the Americans did, British publishers were initially unsure how the sales worked. Certainly, Chambers’s letter to Bangs in 1853 wondered what size of lots their 220 ] Chapter Seventeen

publications should be sold in, and ended, “We leave the matter however to your discretion.”34 The correspondence does not reveal how many copies Chambers sent, but they were not all sold.35 This may not have been uncommon, for Bangs, Brother & Co. began selling unsold British stock to private customers rather than keeping it for the next trade sale. By 1855, perhaps encouraged by Sampson Low’s equivalent shop in London, Bangs was advertising a “Commission Depot for English Books.”36 Following usual American practice, the English Book Depot held stock on sale or return and was thus willing to accept stock from whichever British publishers cared to send their publications. It gave American customers (retail or individuals) a convenient single point-of-call for the immediate purchase of a wide range of British books. British publishers found the English Book Depot very useful, as is apparent from their concern when Bangs & Co. looked likely to go bankrupt in 1857. Several firms in the New York book trade declared bankruptcy or came close to it that year, and rumors of the impending closure of Bangs & Co. were of such concern that Sampson Low Jr. was dispatched to New York on behalf of the British book trade. Young Low’s trip to the United States in 1852 had focused on extending his father’s connections, but he had also offered to perform commissions for British publishers. His trip had given publishers a valuable opportunity to have someone they knew and trusted (at least by reputation) carry out their business in person rather than relying on correspondence.37 By 1857, Low & Co. were well established as conduits for Anglo-American trade, and Low Jr. was again called on. He went armed with powers of attorney from several British publishers, and instructions to do his best to secure the stock, get payment for amounts owed, and, if possible, arrange for the English Book Depot to continue in operation. Among the publishers with books in the Depot were W. & R. Chambers, who were worried about the fate of copies of Robert Chambers’s Life of Robert Burns (1851), a Pictorial History of the Russian War (1856), and a Handbook to the Naval and Military Resources of the Principal European Nations (1856).38 Low circulated a formal six-page report to his clients and presented it in person at the London Coffee House on January 11, 1858.39 He reported that, on his arrival in New York, things were even worse than he had feared: the “general feeling of insecurity” was followed by a “panic . . . pervading all classes” during which “business was altogether suspended, the Banks paying no specie . . . and no property or securities [were] realisable.” Low managed to secure the British stock held on sale or return by Bangs, but he found it incredibly difficult to get payment for the amounts owed, not least because the banking house that Bangs used for transatlantic payments was one of A New Spirit of Engagement [ 221

the casualties of the Panic. By December 1857, Bangs & Co. had just about sorted out their affairs. They had to sell their premises and abandon the English Book Depot, but were able to continue the auctioneering business. Low was able to report that he had succeeded in getting cash payments for half the debts to British publishers, and six-month bills for the remainder. And importantly, he had arranged for the Depot to continue, with much the same staff (managed by Englishman Charles Welford) and new support from publisher Charles Scribner.40 In 1860, Robert Chambers would visit the Depot, which was then holding over £750 of W. & R. Chambers stock.41 British readers in the late 1840s and 1850s could see the American infiltration of the British book trade simply by looking at the contents of a railway bookstall. In addition, imported educational books, theological treatises, and literary nonfiction were available from several firms in London and were being reviewed in the newspapers and literary magazines. American readers, already well used to reading British works, would have noticed less change, but it was there nonetheless. When American reprinters controlled the flow of British works into the United States, their eagerness for the next best seller and the pressure of competition encouraged them to choose a certain type of book: not always fiction, but usually by a known author, and certainly with a good track record in Britain. As chapter 15 showed, simple, short, cheap instructive works did not often attract the attention of reprinters and could be imported with moderate success. Transatlantic shipping services, book auctions, and Bangs’s English Book Depot all helped make it easier for British publishers to sell their choice of works in the United States, and thus broadened the range of British publications in circulation. The surge of enthusiasm for cooperative transatlantic literary trade occurred around ten years after the Sirius and the Great Western successfully crossed the Atlantic by steam. Clearly, American reprinters had always been dependent on the British trade, even through the years of depression after 1840. But from 1846 onward, we see American publishers and importers working harder to promote their works in London; British publishers starting to import and reprint American works; and other British publishers responding to the efforts of American auctioneers and transatlantic shipping companies to solicit their business. Sampson Low became agent for Harper & Brothers in 1846, and his position as editor of the Publishers’ Circular gave him the ability to raise awareness of American publications and American opportunities throughout the British trade. Yet the most obvious American material in the Publishers’ Circular is not editorial comments, but the stream of advertisements appearing from 1847 on. This cannot all be due to Low’s efforts. But equally, the other chronological coincidence—the 222 ] Chapter Seventeen

growth of the Cunard fleet—cannot take full credit for the change. Certainly, the increased service frequency, the direct route to New York, and the larger cargo capacity of the ships launched in 1848 all made it easier to do transatlantic business—but publishers still had to be convinced that they wished to make use of these facilities. And even publishers who were convinced—such as W. & R. Chambers—would have to learn how to build fruitful relationships across the Atlantic.

A New Spirit of Engagement [ 223

Figure 18. William Chambers was enormously impressed by the wholesaling operations of Lippincott, Grambo & Co., which were among the largest in the United States. From Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1852. Reproduced by permission of the American Antiquarian Society.

18

Building Relationships with Boston and Philadelphia

In May 1851, the Literary World reported on a new fashion for importing British books into the United States in such large quantities that they could be sold more cheaply “than the cheapest of the usual reprints.” According to the Literary World, these imports were often “books of science, illustrated, and other works where there has been a large outlay in the original production,” such as those published by the well-known Anglo-French firm of Baillière. Illustrated and technical works were complicated to reprint because of their nontextual elements, so importing was a more attractive option than usual. But the Literary World went on to mention the works of H. G. Bohn and W. & R. Chambers as also imported and “in general circulation,” “at prices which defy opposition.”1 It was not illustrations that enabled imports of Chambers’s publications to be sold more cheaply than “the usual reprints.” It was a combination of the fact that, like American reprints themselves, they were produced cheaply by industrial processes and that Chambers was offering a large discount to carefully selected American importers. Although this strategy was sound in principle, for Chambers to make it work in practice was complicated. Doing any sort of transatlantic business required an extension of credit and trust, both of which were notoriously difficult to ascertain at a distance. Chambers needed to choose a responsible and reliable business partner, negotiate terms by correspondence, and arrange the essential details of credit agreements and payment schedules. By the late 1840s, all of this was done through steamships—mostly by correspondence, but occasionally by personal travel—and Chambers’s experiences clearly demonstrate [ 225

that steamships did not solve all the challenges. For British publishers to do business with American publishers on some kind of equitable footing, negotiation, trust, and compromise were essential.

Establishing Trust with Boston At its most basic, the book trade relied on trust because publishers needed to be confident that they would receive payment for the books and magazines ordered. It was common practice for British publishers to fill orders from colonial booksellers only if payment was included with the initial order, since transit times were long and uncertain. But as the British and North American book trades became more interconnected during the mid-nineteenth century, American booksellers began to expect to deal with British publishers on equal terms. The problem for British publishers was getting sufficient information to decide who could be trusted to settle their accounts. With retail booksellers, the value of publications involved was not usually very great, but once Chambers were hoping to make export arrangements for thousands of copies of their instructive serials, the question of the American partner’s trustworthiness became critical. Within Britain, the network of trade connections helped publishers decide who to trust, but in the 1840s, those networks barely connected to the American book trade. Few British firms knew much about any American publishers. The name Harper & Brothers was certainly known, but their “piratical” reputation was not necessarily a useful indication of their business abilities or creditworthiness. The exceptions were Wiley & Putnam and Daniel Appleton because they had offices in London and their representatives associated with members of the London trade. They were therefore often called on to provide references for other members of the American trade and were the key contact points between the trades until Sampson Low took over that role in the 1850s. The question of transatlantic trust has particular poignancy in light of Chambers’s difficulties with W. S. Orr at the very same period as they were trying to establish their firm in the United States. If Chambers could not find a reliable agent in a city 400 miles away, how could they hope to do so across 3,000 miles of ocean? Yet finding an agent or a business partner was essential to becoming more competitive in the American market. Until William Chambers’s visit to North America in 1853, all Chambers’s decisions about who to work with in the United States and Canada were based on correspondence, the published record, and a very few personal connections. Without the luxury of a personal meeting, key decisions had to be reached on the basis of such unreliable methods as correspondence, letters 226 ] Chapter Eighteen

of reference, and that intangible but all-important “reputation.” Chambers agreed to allow credit to a young bookseller in Pictou, Quebec, on the basis of a reference from his former employer who had been doing business with Chambers for at least a dozen years.2 Some connections were more personal: Chambers’s first contact with Harper & Brothers was made through Mr. Wilson of Poughkeepsie, New York, a Scots emigrant and old family friend.3 When Gould, Kendall & Lincoln first made contact with Chambers in 1845 (see chapter 6), they enclosed a copy of their trade catalog. Even though they were one of the major publishing houses in Boston, they were not sure whether their reputation was known in Edinburgh. From the catalog, Chambers would have gained an impression of the scope of Gould’s publishing activity, which indicated that these potential partners had a substantial—and therefore presumably creditworthy—business. But it might also have suggested to Chambers that Gould’s business was of a rather different kind to their own: there was no emphasis on the sort of very cheap instructive works that Chambers specialized in and that, as they well knew, needed a particular sort of marketing to achieve the necessary high-volume sales. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Chambers responded positively to Gould’s request to purchase plates for the Cyclopaedia of English Literature. The initial negotiations, which might have taken just an hour if conducted in the same room, took five months. From Gould’s perspective, the delay was frustrating because they wanted to issue the Cyclopaedia before anybody else began to reprint it. Yet from Chambers’s perspective, it was difficult to know what sort of a firm they were dealing with, what their expectations and resources were, and how hard a deal Chambers could strike. Over the next few years, Chambers continued to do business with Gould, but it is clear from the correspondence that the American firm was not as wholeheartedly enthusiastic about Chambers’s popular educational mission as Chambers would have liked. Gould declined to stock Chambers’s Journal, and they routinely issued the instructive serials in volumes rather than the individual cheap tracts. In December 1846, Gould offered to become Chambers’s agent for the United States, a role that would have made them responsible for taking orders from booksellers throughout the Union. Gould assured Chambers that “we enjoy good facilities for reaching all parts of our country” and “have no doubt we could dispose of large quantities, if invoiced very low.” Recognizing that appointing an agent was a far bigger issue for Chambers than the sale of a set of plates, Gould offered references, confidently directing Chambers to “any in the trade in this country” or to George Putnam in London to confirm their “standing & pecuniary responsibility.”4 Chambers probably had no doubts about Gould’s “standing” or creditworthiness, but they still wondered whether Gould’s firm was the right fit Building Relationships with Boston and Philadelphia [ 227

for their own enterprise, and they may have been unsympathetic to Gould’s expectation of further discounts. Chambers did not appoint Gould as agent. One consequence is that their transatlantic correspondence continued to include a surprisingly eclectic range of American publishers and retail booksellers. In addition to their publishing and importation deals with Gould, Chambers made one-off arrangements with Lea & Blanchard (for the Latin dictionary) and Harper & Brothers (for a life of Robert Burns). They also filled orders placed (and paid for) by individual American retail booksellers. For instance, in 1852, Chambers expressed willingness to supply the Journal to P. Davies, a bookseller of Boston; and they assured the Rev. A. C. Thomas of Philadelphia that they would supply their publications to his local bookseller in bulk.5 Had they appointed Gould as agent, all these inquiries and orders would have passed through Gould’s hands, for better or worse. Not appointing an agent left Chambers free to make their own arrangements and to amend those arrangements as their understanding of the American trade deepened. Nevertheless, when William Chambers arrived in Boston in October 1853, his first action after settling at the Revere Hotel was to visit Gould & Lincoln (as the firm had now become), and the two firms were still doing business occasionally in the late 1850s.6 They had succeeded in developing trust through their transatlantic correspondence, but what they did not have— and did not gain, even after meeting in person—was rapport.

Chambers’s Reputation in America It was far less important for W. & R. Chambers to establish their own trustworthiness in the United States. They were trying to sell their publications to America and were not in the business of buying American texts or books. Nevertheless, their reputation in the United States was important—not for what it said about their credit rating, but for encouraging booksellers and individuals to purchase their publications. Reputation was a form of marketing. In the early 1840s, W. & R. Chambers cannot have been widely known in the United States: Chambers’s Journal was not regularly reprinted there, and the importation of the firm’s books and part-work publications was on a small scale. But by 1853, the New York Literary World, reporting that William Chambers was about to cross the Atlantic, could remark that his firm’s “numerous and valuable publications” were “part of the staple . . . of the civilized world on both sides of the water.” 7 Chambers’s reputation had surely benefited from the general increase of interest in transatlantic literary business in the mid- to late 1840s, but it had been fashioned not by Chambers 228 ] Chapter Eighteen

themselves but by the importers and reprinters, with Gould, Kendall & Lincoln key among them. Gould were particularly active promoters of Chambers’s reputation because they needed to secure substantial sales for their reprint of the Cyclopaedia of English Literature and for the various serials they imported. Their marketing drew heavily on the British advertisements to describe the contents and aims of each publication, but Gould supplemented this with details of the British sales, reassuring potential customers that they would be buying something that thousands of other people had also bought. Thus, Gould’s advertising for the Cyclopaedia was headed “Important Work! Forty Thousand Copies sold in England!!”8 In fact, Chambers had informed Gould that it had sold “from sixty to seventy thousand copies within three years; and is still selling largely.” Can Gould have feared that “sixty to seventy thousand copies” would sound too impressive to be convincing?9 For the Miscellany of Useful and Instructive Tracts, Gould’s catalog reported that it had sold “more than eighty thousand copies in England” (although again, by the time this claim was printed, it had sold considerably more) and claimed that it had “already reached nearly the same sale in this country.”10 Gould’s preferred marketing tool was to provide evidence of American success or relevance by reference to (usually unspecified) large sales and the liberal inclusion of fulsome praise from the periodical press or from public individuals. Gould’s advertisements for the Home Book and Pocket Miscellany used quotations from reviews in the Chicago Tribune, the Albany Express, the Puritan Recorder, and Scientific American; the range of national, local, and denominational periodicals implied that the work had a wide attraction.11 Many reviewers drew attention to the literary and moral qualities of the texts. One newspaper assured its readers that “coming from the source they do, we need not say that the articles are of the highest literary excellence,” and another described the Miscellany as “distinguished by the good taste which has been shown in all the publications of the Messrs. Chambers.” These quotations were used in Gould’s advertising, and their combined effect on the page is powerful. Gould turned the Chambers name into a guarantor of literary style and unexceptional morality. As well as sending review copies to the press, Gould sent specimen copies to selected scholars and individuals to secure testimonials to augment the published reviews. In December 1846, after issuing the first two numbers of the Cyclopaedia, they were able to report to Chambers that the press was already speaking “in high terms of the design & its execution” and that William H. Prescott, the respected historian, had “sent us a letter expressing a high opinion of the work & also of your Mr Chambers, the Author.”12 FaBuilding Relationships with Boston and Philadelphia [ 229

vorable testimonials were also received from politician Edward Everett and Francis Wayland of Columbia College.13 Gould quoted lavishly from these private testimonials in their advertisements. They selected their testimonializers with care. To advertise John Kitto’s Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature (originally published by Charles Knight), Gould managed to gather an impressive array of interdenominational support from individuals representing the Congregational, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches, as well as from college professors. For Chambers’s Miscellany, which they were marketing as a school reader, testimonials were acquired from the chairman of the Boston schoolbook committee, and the superintendents from three towns in New York State: Castleton, Macedon, and Concord.14 Unlike Gould, unauthorized reprinters had no legal or moral obligation to acknowledge the Chambers name. However, in the absence of eminent authors or editors, the name of Chambers could be a useful part of the marketing, especially as that name became more known and respected. When reprinting the scientific volumes of the Educational Course, A. S. Barnes assured potential purchasers that Chambers were “known in Great Britain and America” for their attention to “the diffusion of intelligence on all scientific and practical subjects.”15 Reviewers responded to this strategy, and the Literary World assured potential readers of the volume on Physiology that “the name of Chambers is a sufficient guarantee as to the worth of all popular scientific works they publish.”16 It was clearly in Barnes’s interests to enhance and publicize Chambers’s reputation, and the strategy must have worked, as Barnes’s reprints went through at least three editions. In contrast to Gould’s emphasis on literary quality and morality, Barnes represented Chambers’s name as a guarantee of low prices, high circulation, and reliable information. American literary reviewers helped to consolidate Chambers’s reputation for both morality and cheap, wholesome instruction. Reviewers in the United States uniformly praised the moral tone of the works, with none of the qualms about the omission of explicit religious sentiments that troubled some British evangelical reviewers. The Chicago Tribune assured its readers that “we have never yet met with any thing which bore the sanction of their names, whose moral tendency was in the least degree questionable,” and the Evening Gazette concurred that Chambers’s works were “calculated to have the very best effect upon the minds of young readers.” This reference to “young readers” reminds us that Chambers’s publications were often recommended for schools and children in the United States, rather than uneducated working-class readers, reflecting different perceptions of the target audience for cheap instruction. 230 ] Chapter Eighteen

Notably, despite the fabled cheapness of American publications, the American press regularly commended Chambers’s works for prices “which defy opposition.”17 The Scientific American admitted, “We do not know how it is possible to publish so much good reading matter at such a low price.”18 Comments like this demonstrated that Chambers’s commitment to steam printing, stereotyping, limited paper, and cheap literary labor truly paid off since it enabled their publications to remain cheap even when transported across the Atlantic.

Agreeing Terms with Philadelphia William Chambers’s trip to the United States in 1853 was his first opportunity to meet many of W. & R. Chambers’s existing correspondents, along with other key figures of the American book trade. Arriving in Philadelphia in December, he found a city whose book trade was “a formidable rival to Boston and New York.” Chambers was amazed that there could be a dozen daily papers and forty weekly magazines produced in a single city.19 Toward the end of his published account of Philadelphia, Chambers unusually devoted a paragraph to a specific, named business: that of Lippincott, Grambo & Co. (see fig. 18). He described their “spacious building, several stories in height” as stocked “floor above floor, with books gathered from all the publishers in the Union,” and reported that it was visited by “retail-booksellers coming from every part of the States.” Unlike Boston or New York, Philadelphia had trade connections to the southern states, as well as the old Northeast and the expanding West. Lippincott claimed to have connections “in every seat of population of any importance from New Orleans to Toronto, and from the Atlantic to beyond St Louis.” Chambers mused in bewilderment: “Think of commercial travellers being despatched on a journey of 2000 miles—as far as from London to Cairo or Jerusalem!”20 Joshua B. Lippincott had been in bookselling since the late 1820s, and later began publishing religious books on a small scale. In 1849, he bought the business of Grigg & Elliott, one of the largest medical publishers in the United States. As well as publishing, Lippincott developed a wholesaling business. By 1854, fellow publisher Henry C. Carey described it as possibly “the largest book distributing house in the world.” According to Carey’s informant, the firm employed “nearly eighty clerks; a fact that astonished me, as I knew how large a business we had done with half a dozen.” Carey revealed that the firm distributed “more than ten tons per day” of publications and intriguingly noted that it had “recently been a matter of boast” that “Chambers & Co., of Edinburgh, had sent out ten tons in a fortnight.” The comparison Building Relationships with Boston and Philadelphia [ 231

with Chambers was unfair since Chambers did not have a wholesaling business, but the fact that it was made at all suggests that William Chambers had successfully raised his firm’s profile in Philadelphia six months earlier.21 Chambers had actually had a brief contact with Lippincott & Grambo in 1851, one of many contacts with Americans that (apparently) led nowhere. When visiting Britain for the Great Exhibition in 1851, Joshua Lippincott had written to Chambers asking for their export terms. Chambers offered the same discount as that given to Gould and urged Lippincott to consider taking the Journal. Chambers added, “We think you might be able to push the Sale to a considerable extent in the States,” implying that the Edinburgh firm already knew something about the size of Lippincott’s business. However, Lippincott requested a larger discount, and Chambers refused. There the matter rested until William Chambers spent three days in Philadelphia in 1853. We do not know what he and Joshua Lippincott talked about, but the personal meeting seems to have brought home to Chambers the nature of Lippincott’s business; and by meeting Joshua Lippincott in person, Chambers was able to assess his character and interests. It seems clear that Chambers felt Lippincott to be far more of a kindred spirit than was Charles Gould, whom he had met for the first time only two months earlier. During their discussions in December 1853, Lippincott & Grambo placed “an obliging order” for the Journal and several thousand copies of the instructive part works. After consulting with Robert on his return to Edinburgh, William assured them that “my brother feels satisfied with me that our various productions will suit your trade, and our wish is to give you every facility for making the very most of them.”22 Chambers promised to give “early notice” of any new works, to enable Lippincott “to make a good start in the States” by publicizing the forthcoming works before any potential competitors could yet have learned of their existence. It is not clear whether Lippincott was offered any additional discount at this point, but Chambers did allow them to hold works on sale or return, which, from Chambers’s perspective, was granting an unusual privilege.23 As a further sign of their confidence in Lippincott’s distribution channels, Chambers arranged for the remaining portion of their consignment to Bangs, Brother & Co.’s 1853 trade sale to be transferred to Philadelphia.24 It was undoubtedly Lippincott’s extensive wholesaling activities that attracted Chambers. They hoped that all their publications would benefit, and Lippincott proved gratifyingly willing to stock a wide range of Chambers’s publications. Lippincott imported all of the instructive serials and many of the book publications, and their experiences of importing the Journal are discussed in the next chapter. But Lippincott did occasionally disagree with Chambers. In 1854, Chambers had acquired (via Orr) the rights to several of 232 ] Chapter Eighteen

Charles Knight’s pictorial publications. They persuaded Lippincott to stock the reissue of the Pictorial Bible and Pictorial History of England despite American doubts about the marketability of a History of England, even with revisions to the section on the American Revolution.25 Lippincott was proved correct, and in the future, Chambers sent advance specimens of new works for Lippincott’s inspection. In return, Lippincott appears to have placed a standing order for 500 copies of “any new work likely to sell.”26 Although Lippincott clearly became Chambers’s preferred contact in the United States, they were not appointed agent, and Chambers continued to keep their options open. They were still doing business with Gould & Lincoln, filling orders from individual booksellers (including one for several hundreds of the Latin and German schoolbooks from Edmond Barrington of Philadelphia27), and seeking advantageous new openings. In 1856, for instance, they were sending publications to Bangs & Brother’s English Book Depot, and beginning a relationship with Dix, Edwards & Co. of New York. The relationship with Gould & Lincoln was clearly suffering as that with Lippincott flourished. In 1854, Gould complained that Chambers were supplying the Cyclopaedia of English Literature to Lippincott, which was interfering with sales of Gould’s authorized American reprint. Chambers responded that they had “scrupulously observed” the terms of the 1846 agreement between the firms, which bound Chambers not to sell another set of plates to the United States, but did not prevent them filling orders from other booksellers. Chambers admitted having sent substantial numbers of copies of the Cyclopaedia to Lippincott, but remarked pointedly that Lippincott had become a good customer, having placed “large orders for other publications” and that he had access to “peculiar channels” of distribution that Chambers believed were unlikely to “interfere to any serious extent with your sales.”28 The tone of this response surely confirmed Gould & Lincoln’s fears about being usurped by Lippincott.29 The Chambers-Lippincott relationship was far more active and wideranging than that between Chambers and Gould. By 1855, the only publication Gould was still importing was the Miscellany, although they continued to print from their plates of the Cyclopaedia of English Literature.30 Lippincott, on the other hand, was importing not just the Miscellany but also its successor the Repository, the Papers for the People, and the new edition of Information for the People, as well as a range of book publications, including William Chambers’s travel account, Things as They Are in America, and volumes on the French Revolutions and American Literature. At the end of the decade, Chambers would seek Lippincott’s advice about the American marketing of the new Chambers’ Encyclopaedia, and Lippincott would organize contributions from American authors (including the one on “bibliography”), Building Relationships with Boston and Philadelphia [ 233

which not only enhanced the work’s American coverage but enabled Lippincott to defend the copyright of those articles against an unauthorized New York reprint.31 The relationship with Lippincott flourished through several generations of both families, well into the twentieth century.

Financial Matters Critically, the point of Chambers’s arrangement with Lippincott was not simply to increase the circulation of their publications in the United States. Selling a set of plates of the Cyclopaedia to Gould had increased its circulation, but most of the profit had gone to Gould. Later deals with Gould, and all those with Lippincott, involved bulk importation of sheets printed in Edinburgh. Chambers’s remuneration would therefore be proportional to actual sales. From their experience of negotiating with William Orr over the Journal’s English circulation, Chambers knew that it was essential to offer agents or importers enough discount for them to make a profit (and be competitive enough to fend off any local reprints), but not so much that Chambers had no profit left themselves. Chambers offered different purchasers different discounts on the retail price for their various publications, often depending on the quantity ordered. This makes it difficult to give a figure for their typical trade discount. The prices they set for the Miscellany of Tracts illustrate the problem. In 1846, William Orr in London and George Philip in Liverpool were allowed 3d. off per shilling (i.e., 25 percent) on the unbound parts and numbers, but could also have twenty-six bound volumes for the price of twenty-five (an extra 3.8 percent), plus a further 5 percent if they settled in cash (which Orr never did).32 In 1855, Chambers offered four different options to Daniel Appleton of New York, ranging from 38 percent (for a smaller order, on account) to 46 percent (for an order of more than 250 copies, paid in cash). Chambers stressed that these higher-than-usual discounts were “only for exportation.”33 No negotiations about the original arrangement with Lippincott for the Miscellany survive, but subsequent correspondence refers to both Lippincott and Gould being charged £2 per 1,000, or “half price,” for the Miscellany and Repository. In 1855, Chambers renegotiated this to £2.10s. per 1,000, explaining that they found they were losing money on their American exports.34 The publication ledger in the firm’s archive reveals the extent of this effect. From 1844 to 1848, the production cost for the Miscellany (unbound) averaged £1.19s. per 1,000. Once the fixed costs of literary labor and making stereotype plates were all paid off and no more numbers were being issued, one would expect the costs to decrease to just printing and paper, giv234 ] Chapter Eighteen

ing Chambers more profit. In fact, during the 1850s, the Miscellany cost just over £2.3s. per 1,000 to produce, due to what Chambers called the “greater cost of [printing] small impressions,” as the Miscellany was no longer in great demand.35 Astonishing as that increase is, it is perhaps even more astonishing that Chambers had initially entered into a deal that gave them barely a shilling profit on each 1,000 copies exported to the United States. It indicates just how keen Chambers were in the late 1840s and early 1850s to persuade American publishers to work with them by offering jaw-droppingly attractive discounts. Yet, making the right financial deal was only the first step in getting payment from the United States. Even if the American partner had funds and was trustworthy, actually sending money across the Atlantic was not straightforward. Although British banking regulations had been tightened in 1844, there were no international banking conventions, and a variety of methods existed for transferring money, each with its own cost and duration.36 Chambers’s first experiences of transatlantic finance went very smoothly, as both Gould, Kendall & Lincoln and Lea & Blanchard paid with sterling bills drawn on the Liverpool company of Brown, Shipley & Co. (provided by a sister company in the United States). Such bills were paid in cash in Liverpool sixty days after their dates, and Chambers thanked Gould for their “prompt and upright manner of doing business with us.”37 This was actually better for Chambers’s cash flow than dealing with most members of the British trade, who settled their accounts only once a quarter and were likely to do so with bills that would take an additional three or six months to fall due. The new relationship with Lippincott, however, nearly foundered on Lippincott’s inexperience with international money exchange. Rather than drawing a sterling bill on an international banking firm like Brown & Co., Lippincott wrote their own bills promising payment at three, six, and nine months. Such bills were common practice within both the British and American trades, but not—it turned out—easily transferable internationally. Chambers reported that turning Lippincott’s American bills into cash caused enormous hassle and extra expense: once the bills fell due, Chambers’s British bankers had to arrange for an American bank to turn them into sterling bills, which took a month and incurred charges, and then the bill would take a further sixty days to be processed. Chambers, forced to extend credit to Lippincott for two to three months longer than they had expected, were also losing money on the banking charges. The explanations and negotiations put a severe strain on the relationship, until Lippincott began paying directly in sterling bills of exchange.38 Things ran more smoothly after that, although Lippincott had trouble finding ready money to send to Britain in the aftermath of the 1857 Panic and, later, during the Civil War. Building Relationships with Boston and Philadelphia [ 235

Fortunately, neither Gould nor Lippincott would give Chambers cause to fear their liquidity. When Orr was in trouble in 1846, William Chambers went to London to conduct negotiations in person; Robert did the same in 1853; and in 1855, David went to Dublin to see what could be done about the difficulties in which agent James McGlashan found himself.39 Even with Cunard’s weekly steamers, a trip at short notice to Boston or Philadelphia would have been more difficult to arrange and would have had to be conducted without the benefit of daily correspondence (or emergency telegrams) back to Edinburgh. Sampson Low Jr’s trip to New York in 1857 was an indication of the extreme seriousness of the rumors of multiple bankruptcies. Chambers were sometimes able to use their transatlantic contacts to help them sort out problems with other members of the trade, either by providing more accurate information or by acting as agent to receive monies due on the winding up of a business. In 1854, Chambers authorized one of the partners in Armour & Ramsay of Montreal to accept a settlement of 7s.6d. for every pound owed them by Campbell Bryson, a bookseller in the same city.40 In 1859, they asked Joshua Lippincott if he knew anything about the situation of his fellow Philadelphian, John W. Moore, a long-term customer whose payments had become slow and irregular. The news was presumably bad, for Chambers refused to fill Moore’s next order.41 Part of the reason for the immediate success of Chambers’s relationship with Lippincott, compared to their relationship with Gould, was that one relationship was built through correspondence while the other began with a personal encounter. Without that personal encounter, which allowed William Chambers and Joshua Lippincott to size each other up, the abortive contact of 1851 might have been the end of the story. The long-term success of that relationship surely lies in the better fit between the two companies and the ideals of their principals. A personal encounter alone, however, was no guarantee of a good relationship, even when the encounter was positive. A case in point is Chambers’s brief relationship with Dix, Edwards & Co. of New York, the publishers who had taken over Putnam’s Magazine. One of the investors in Dix, Edwards was Frederick Law Olmsted, a journalist who was later the landscape gardener behind New York’s Central Park. He met one of the Chambers brothers while visiting London, probably in 1856, and persuaded Chambers that Dix, Edwards could become an important New York contact for them, complementing the existing Boston and Philadelphia connections. Chambers offered to put the Dix, Edwards imprint on William Chambers’s forthcoming American Slavery and Colour if the firm would import a substantial quantity, and commended the firm’s “zeal.”42 Such was the power of the personal meeting that Chambers contin236 ] Chapter Eighteen

ued to trust Olmsted’s recommendation despite growing rumors in the book trade about the instability of Dix, Edwards. So when, in August 1857, Chambers discovered that Dix, Edwards’s successors, Miller & Curtis, had become one of the victims of the Panic and had entered bankruptcy, they vented their fury in an uncharacteristically frank letter to Olmsted. Chambers assumed that Dix, Edwards must already have been “embarrassed” when Olmsted was soliciting Chambers’s business, and accused Olmsted of a “moral wrong” for misleading them. The connection “would never have been formed, if true representations had been made.” Olmsted had also displayed “a great want of forethought in not investigating thoroughly into the pecuniary condition” of the business in which he had invested and had further wronged Chambers by allowing their property to be transferred to Miller & Curtis without explicit permission. Olmsted objected to this “unjustifiable misstatement and unprovoked insult,” and Chambers would ultimately apologize.43 But the episode demonstrates how thoroughly transatlantic business relied on trust, and how badly wrong things could go when trust was misplaced, for whatever reason. Even personal meetings were no guarantee. By the middle of the 1850s, W. & R. Chambers had become far more confident in their dealings with the United States. They knew what sort of arrangements they wanted to make (the exportation of printed sheets, not the sale of stereotype plates) and had a far better grasp of the logistical issues that had to be overcome. Their arrangements with Gould, Kendall & Lincoln and subsequently with Lippincott were broadly successful both in improving the circulation of Chambers’s publications in the United States and ensuring that they received payment from it. There was a steady demand for imports of the Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts and the other instructive part works, and also for the handbooks to literature and histories of recent wars and revolutions that Chambers issued in the mid-1850s. And, at last, they had found a kindred spirit in Lippincott, Grambo & Co., a firm with an equal dedication to disseminating books to readers across wide geographical and social distances. The Chambers-Lippincott relationship of the 1850s, therefore, is an ideal opportunity to investigate the role played by the transatlantic steamship services in British publishers’ efforts to do business with the United States.

Building Relationships with Boston and Philadelphia [ 237

Figure 19. Peter D. Orvis’s unauthorized cheap reprint of William Chambers’s Things as They Are in America was bound in blue paper covers and carried a portrait of the author. This rare surviving copy has suffered the ravages of time. Reproduced by permission of the General Research Division, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

19

Piracy and Shipwreck!

In December 1853, shortly before returning home on the steamer Europa, William Chambers visited some of the printing houses of New York. He had already seen the massive establishment of Harper & Brothers, and he was now taken to see a house that was reprinting Household Words, the weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens. This “American edition” would be sold at a cheaper price than the genuine copies imported from London. Chambers knew that such reprinting was perfectly legal, but he could not feel that it was “consistent with a sense of justice” and was grateful that his own Journal was not suffering the same fate.1 By using the facilities of their extensive printing establishment, exporting their publications as unbound printed sheets, and offering an extra discount to carefully selected importers, Chambers were able to make their publications available at competitive prices in the United States. The prices were sufficiently low to eliminate most of the incentive for unauthorized reprinters. However, within weeks of William Chambers returning to Edinburgh, a New York printer did indeed begin reprinting Chambers’s Journal. Peter D. Orvis, who had launched the New York Journal in July 1853, owned a tiny operation, but during 1854, he was an extremely serious threat to Lippincott’s imports of Chambers’s Journal and of William Chambers’s book, Things as They Are in America (1854) (see fig. 19). The speed with which the imports crossed the Atlantic suddenly became critical, and the difficulties Chambers and Lippincott faced in dealing with Orvis illustrate the ambivalent utility of steamships to British publishers. [ 239

Chambers’s Journal William Chambers’s first letter to Joshua Lippincott after returning to Edinburgh reveals that Chambers had succeeded in convincing Lippincott to import Chambers’s Journal. It was twelve years since William Jackson’s New York edition of the Journal, printed from Edinburgh stereotype plates, had ceased, and since then, there had been no bulk source of the Journal in the United States. Chambers no longer wished to sell stereotype plates: their experience with Gould, Kendall & Lincoln showed that this was not a remunerative strategy for high-circulation works (and even less so if their Canadian contacts were to switch allegiance to the American reprint). Bulk importation was the obvious solution, but Gould had not been keen. Lippincott was another matter. The planned relaunch of the Journal in January 1854 (third series) would provide Lippincott with a convenient opportunity to relaunch the Journal in the United States, while William Chambers’s forthcoming series of articles about his journey in Canada and the United States offered a particular attraction for American readers. No record remains of the size of Lippincott’s Journal order, but extrapolation from the surviving circulation figures suggest that it may have been as high as 16,000 copies in 1854, compared to a British circulation of 50,000.2 As a dated publication (even though it still could not carry news), it was important for Lippincott’s marketing that they should get the Journal quickly. William Chambers’s letter of January 17, 1854, announced that their order of the Journal was being sent immediately on the new Cunard steamer Andes, while the books and tracts would be sent “in a few days” by “sailing vessel, for the sake of economy.”3 A clear distinction was being made between “the most urgently wanted” publications—for which steam shipping was worth paying—and the rest. (Unfortunately, the Andes was fully laden by the time the Chambers consignment arrived, so the “urgent” shipment was late, much to Chambers’s embarrassment.4) Since Chambers were still printing the Journal two or three weeks ahead of time, it was relatively simple for them to ensure that Lippincott’s consignment could arrive in Philadelphia to be issued on the same day as the publication of the monthly part in Britain. The timing depended on using steamships. If Lippincott had sought to save more money by using sailing packets, he would have had to be content with issuing the January part sometime in mid- to late February, depending on the state of the Atlantic weather system. Even with steamers, the timing was tight since the few days of land transport at either end of the Atlantic crossing stretched the total journey time to just over two weeks. However, the principal problem with this strategy would be Peter Orvis. Orvis had no recorded involvement with the book trade before launching the New York Journal in 1853. This was an eclectic illustrated paper with 240 ] Chapter Nineteen

pretensions to “open a new era in our national periodical literature.” It was to be cheap (at 3¢ weekly or 12½¢ monthly), but it hoped to stand out by its literary and typographical quality. The contents were a mixture of articles reprinted from British magazines (including serial fiction by Harrison Ainsworth and Charles Dickens) and a few pieces by American authors. Illustrations accompanied both the fiction and the articles on needlework and ladies’ fashions, which would allow “lady subscribers in the rural sections an opportunity of ascertaining with certainty the modes and styles as they appear on Broadway.”5 The journal’s advertising claimed that it was “instructive and amusing,” but the balance of the articles gave it far more in common with the newer British penny periodicals with their fiction and gossip (see chapter 10) than with the older generation of instructive magazines such as the Penny Magazine and Chambers’s Journal. Orvis quickly discovered the mechanical difficulties associated with a successful weekly magazine. He had trouble meeting the demand each week and had to reprint almost immediately, but this was difficult and expensive since he did not initially use electrotype plates. By the end of August 1853, the New York Journal’s average weekly circulation was around 23,000 copies—not dissimilar to the early figures for the Edinburgh-printed edition of Chambers’s Journal—but Orvis had already missed his weekly deadline several times, with the editions “often appearing several weeks after the proper time for their issue.”6 He sensibly decided to transform the magazine into a monthly. At some point in late 1853 or early 1854, just as William Chambers was making arrangements with Lippincott for the importation of Chambers’s Journal, Orvis decided to launch an American reprint edition of the new series of Chambers’s Journal. It was an ambitious decision for a newly established printer who was already having trouble getting one journal out on time. On the other hand, reprinting a British journal in its entirety had the advantage of requiring no editorial or literary input whatsoever, and the absence of illustrations in Chambers’s Journal made it easy to reset. It could be sold for the same 3¢ weekly price tag as the original New York Journal, but ought to be much simpler and cheaper to produce. With no way of knowing about Chambers’s plans with Lippincott, Orvis expected to have the market to himself. By spring 1854, he would have discovered his error, though he presumably did not realize that Chambers were actively assisting Lippincott to import the Journal. Had he realized, he presumably would not have written to Chambers offering to purchase advance sheets of the Journal, which would have enabled him to bring out his edition simultaneously with the British edition (and ahead of Lippincott). Unsurprisingly, Chambers refused him twice.7 Orvis therefore had to rely on a copy of the Journal sent from Piracy and Shipwreck! [ 241

Britain immediately on publication. Allowing a week for resetting the type and printing, his reprint could be on sale in New York within three weeks of the publication date. For instance, William Chambers’s article on American railways, telegraphs, and newspapers was published in the Journal on September 30 and noted in the New York Times on October 20, 1854.8 In advertising his reprint of Chambers’s Journal, Orvis made the most of the Chambers’s reputation. The magazine itself was “old and very distinguished,” its “brilliant pages” had always been characterized by “genius, spirit and ability,” and its contributors have been “the very first minds.” Like Lippincott, he could use the launch of the third series to argue that 1854 would be “a peculiarly appropriate time” to launch a reprint, forming “a satisfactory point from which American readers can date their subscriptions.” By referring to “having effected the necessary arrangements,” Orvis gave the misleading impression that he was reprinting with permission and assistance from Edinburgh. He reassured his potential readers that the American edition would be “an exact typographical fac-simile” of the original, would be sold at the same low price, and would be issued punctually. As particular attractions for American readers, he highlighted two upcoming features: a serial novel, Wearyfoot Common, by Leitch Ritchie that would allegedly “become the most distinguished work of fiction of the present year”; and William Chambers’s own series of articles, Things as They Are in America, “the ablest and most interesting sketches of this country yet written.”9 Orvis was able to sell his reprint at 3¢ weekly (or $1.50 a year), a price directly equivalent to the Edinburgh price of 1½d. and far cheaper than the $2.25 a year that C. S. Francis of New York was charging for imported monthly parts.10 With the advantage of their discounted deal with Chambers, Lippincott’s imports must have been cheaper than Francis’s. Yet even with the extra discount, if Lippincott were to match Orvis’s price, they would have slim profits. Lippincott were presumably paying no more than £3.7s.6d. per 1,000 for the Journal (the price proposed to Gould in 1847), which works out at $16.87½ per 1,000. If Lippincott’s copies did have a retail price of 3¢ each ($30 per 1,000) and he offered the trade a 30 percent discount, he would have received $21 per 1,000, giving him $4.12½ to cover advertising, shipping, and his own profit. On an order of 16,000 copies, that would be worth $66 ( just over £13) for each weekly issue. Chambers themselves were making barely £10 a week on Lippincott’s order (whereas the equivalent sales in Britain would have brought them £26), but since Chambers did not have customers for another 16,000 copies of the Journal in Britain, discounted American sales were clearly better than nothing.11 Orvis would turn Lippincott’s expectations of profit on their head. His New York reprint, rumored to have a circulation of 10,000, made it diffi242 ] Chapter Nineteen

cult for Lippincott to sell all their imported copies.12 Just two months in, in March 1854, Lippincott asked Chambers for help. Chambers suggested that Lippincott could try to use American copyright laws to pursue Orvis in the courts. This was how William Blackwood had persuaded the reprinter of Blackwood’s Magazine to come to terms in 1847–48. The idea was that if Lippincott could send Chambers some articles on which Lippincott already held the American copyright, and Chambers printed them in the Journal, then Lippincott would eventually be able to sue Orvis for reprinting copyright content.13 No evidence proves the experiment was tried, although Lippincott and Chambers used it later on Chambers’s Encyclopaedia under similar circumstances. In any case, it is not clear what the outcome would have been: Blackwood had persuaded the reprinter to pay him for advance sheets, whereas Chambers and Lippincott wanted Orvis stopped entirely. In a published remark on the effect of American reprinting a few months later, William Chambers acknowledged the damage that Orvis’s reprint was doing to “interests concerned in importing and supplying the original edition.”14 Lippincott asked for further discounts, which may suggest that they had not initially matched Orvis’s price but were now trying to do so, or that they were having to spend more than expected on marketing. In March 1854, Chambers offered a further 2s.6d. per 1,000 (worth $9.20 to Lippincott on 16,000 copies) if Lippincott would agree to settle accounts more often.15 By the following April, Lippincott were in such despair that Chambers were persuaded to reduce their price to £3 per thousand, a massive 52 percent off the British retail price (and an unsustainable price for them given that production costs of the Journal had risen with the launch of the new series).16 That would give Lippincott a further $30 (£6) leeway on their entire order. But it was to no avail. Lippincott could not make an adequate profit from the Journal in the face of Orvis’s competition, and they canceled their Journal order in May 1855. Chambers were disappointed, but replied that “we are sorry the Journal cannot be made to pay, but there seems to be no remedy for it, and we shall now discontinue sending any more.”17 Orvis had two significant advantages. The first was simple geography: New York was served direct from Liverpool by both Cunard and Collins services, but direct steamers to Philadelphia were rarer. Orvis could therefore expect to receive packages from Britain a day or two earlier than Lippincott. Second, Orvis needed only one copy of the Journal, whereas Lippincott were importing thousands of copies. Lippincott’s order was so substantial that they asked Chambers not to send weekly consignments but to prepare one large consignment each month, so that they could benefit from discounts for bulk shipments. This meant that Lippincott could issue the Journal only monthly. In itself, that would have seemed sensible, since two-thirds of the Piracy and Shipwreck! [ 243

sales in Britain were of the monthly edition of the Journal rather than the weekly numbers. But with Orvis getting his single copy weekly, Lippincott’s decision to cling to a monthly issue enabled Orvis to be first in the American market two weeks out of four. Chambers usually shipped the monthly parts to Philadelphia around the twentieth or twenty-first of the month, which would enable Lippincott to have them on sale in the first week of the following month, the same time as the monthly parts were sold in Britain. But by that time, Orvis would already have issued his reprints of the first and second weekly issues of that month. In June 1854, Chambers pointed out that weekly shipments were the obvious solution, but Lippincott were simply not willing to bear the cost.18 It was deeply unfortunate that Lippincott did not persevere for just a few more months because Orvis was already in trouble. He had abandoned the New York Journal in July 1854, and in February 1855, he sold his interest in Chambers’s Journal to Bunce & Brother, a recently formed New York publisher that had also been his main stockist. Bunce & Brother used the opportunity to assure readers that their edition of Chambers’s Journal was “the cheapest publication in the world.”19 Their claim that it was “sold at considerably less price than the Original in this country” again raises the question of whether Lippincott was in fact matching Orvis’s 3¢ price. But Bunce, in New York, may simply have been referring to C. S. Francis’s imports. Bunce referred to the “great success” of the American reprint, but cited no details (the sales figures they quoted were explicitly for the British sales, which they massively exaggerated to 115,000 copies monthly). Bunce appears to have kept Chambers’s Journal going until July 1856, but the firm was in difficulties, and this reprint, too, came to an end. Despite the disappointing outcome for Chambers, one of the side effects of Lippincott’s struggle with Orvis was to increase the profile of Chambers’s Journal in the United States. During 1854–55, large quantities of the Journal were being printed in New York, even larger numbers were being imported to Philadelphia and distributed through Lippincott’s network, and small numbers were being imported by C. S. Francis in New York. The New York Times had occasionally reacted to articles in Chambers’s Journal in the past, but did so far more often in 1854 (and not just to William Chambers’s articles about the United States). When Norton’s Literary Gazette discussed what it termed “family magazines” in March 1854, Chambers’s Journal was the first of the seven magazines mentioned (it was described as “highly popular with both English and American readers”), and Norton’s scrupulously listed all three stockists.20 The ultimate beneficiary of the Journal’s increased profile may have been C. S. Francis, since after mid-1856, he would again become the only major 244 ] Chapter Nineteen

American stockist of Chambers’s Journal. It is notable that while the New York Times had cited the Orvis edition of the Journal in 1854, by 1855, it was routinely linking the Journal with Francis. Charles S. Francis had been running a bookstore and publishing business from the mid-1830s, specializing in Unitarian authors and in children’s books. He had been one of the stockists of Jackson’s reprints of British instructive magazines in the late 1830s, and in 1848, he bought out Edmund Baldwin, who had purchased part of Jackson’s business. From then on, C. S. Francis & Co. became the New York specialist in British instructive magazines and books ranging from the Mechanic’s Magazine to the Civil Engineer’s and Architect’s Journal.21 In 1854, Francis’s catalog of his imported books and magazines ran to over a hundred pages, and listed works by Chambers, Knight, and John Weale, as well as the volumes of Bohn’s Scientific Library and Classical and Philological Library, and a range of atlases and textbooks. His Chambers range included the Journal, the revised Information for the People, the Cyclopaedia of English Literature, the Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts, the Papers for the People, the Repository of Tracts, and over eighty volumes of the Educational Course; he pointedly noted that his stock of the Information and the Cyclopaedia were the “Edinburgh edition,” not the American reprints.22 Chambers, of course, gained from each copy Francis sold (and at a higher rate than from Lippincott), but there is no easy way to find out how many copies Francis imported or whether his sales increased in 1855. Until 1854, Francis had acquired his stock via a third party in London, and the only correspondence between him and W. & R. Chambers in Edinburgh is a letter from December 1854, in which Chambers indicated that their new London branch office would be very happy to supply Francis.23 No response survives, though it is also the case that little of the London office’s business correspondence survives. The W. & R. Chambers publication ledger shows that the global circulation of the Journal increased substantially in 1854, from 53,500 a week to 66,500 a week. By 1856, however, it had fallen back to 49,000 a week, and would continue falling slowly.24 It is impossible to disentangle the American sales, but it is clear that any increase in American sales was insufficient to offset the declining British sales. However, Chambers did not give up, and by the mid-1860s, Lippincott was again importing monthly parts, and Willmer & Rogers had become New York agents.25

Things as They Are William Chambers’s articles on the United States were appearing in Chambers’s Journal between February and October 1854, and this helped generate Piracy and Shipwreck! [ 245

some of the American interest in the Journal. W. & R. Chambers planned to issue the articles as a book under the title Things as They Are in America, and they suggested that the book might appear in the United States under the Lippincott imprint. This generous offer was to encourage Lippincott to place a substantial order, and Lippincott agreed to take 2,000 copies. Chambers were creating the stereotype plates for the book pages as the Journal articles appeared, and described the anticipated result as “a handsome book . . . of about 400 pages, printed on fine paper,” which they expected to sell for 5s. in boards. Then news arrived that Orvis was planning to issue book versions of both the current serials in the Journal: Leitch Ritchie’s Wearyfoot Common and Things as They Are in America.26 Lippincott reduced their order to 1,500 copies, but the ongoing problems with their Journal importation meant that Chambers were determined to help Lippincott succeed with Things as They Are in America.27 This should have been an easy task. Orvis depended on the articles in the Journal for his access to the text. In May 1854, Chambers promised Lippincott that they would “take care to finish, print, and land the work in America, before the last article is inserted in the Journal, by which you would have a month’s start.” The sheets Lippincott received would also contain corrected versions of the articles. For instance, on June 10, 1854, a comment on international copyright was accidentally left out of the Journal article describing Harper’s establishment in New York, but was reinserted into the book.28 Chambers also assumed—correctly, as it turned out—that Orvis would use a very cheap format, probably double columns, whereas Lippincott could market the “handsome” Edinburgh edition differently.29 Lippincott announced the forthcoming work in Norton’s Literary Gazette on July 1, 1854, thus staking their claim publicly.30 Lippincott’s subsequent marketing campaign praised William Chambers for having “so rigid an impartiality, and so inflexible a love of truth” and an ability to write “with the smallest amount of individual prejudice” that would make him a particularly notable commentator on American affairs.31 As well as accumulating the stereotype plates, Chambers were starting to print off the book pages when they had spare capacity in the printing house. By July 21, they were able to send 1,000 copies of the first part of the book to Lippincott. They promised to send a second consignment with another 500 copies of the first part and a full 1,500 copies of the end of the book.32 This was dispatched in late August—by which time, Orvis, ignoring trade courtesy, had also formally announced his intention to issue the work33— and Chambers reiterated the promise that the final article would not appear until the entire book had reached Philadelphia. At that point, three articles were yet to appear in the Journal, with the final one due in mid- October.34 246 ] Chapter Nineteen

The second consignment for Things as They Are in America left Edinburgh around August 21. Chambers’s agent in Liverpool chose not to send it on the first steamer out, but booked it on to the 2,168-ton City of Philadelphia. This was the latest screw steamer commissioned by the Inman Line, due to depart on her maiden voyage just as soon as a “slight derangement” with her engines was fixed.35 Unlike the Cunard ships, City of Philadelphia would take the sheets directly to Philadelphia, saving time at the end of the voyage. She left Liverpool on the afternoon of August 30, with 549 passengers and 88 crew under the command of Captain Robert Leitch, and was expected to reach Philadelphia around September 11.36 This would enable Lippincott to issue Things as They Are in America well ahead of the publication of the final article and the release of the British edition. Orvis would probably complete his edition by copying the text from Lippincott’s book, but Lippincott would have had the market to themselves for at least a week. Unfortunately, Chambers and Lippincott now encountered the other problem with steamships in the early 1850s. Their plans for the Journal had been balked by the cost of freight, and their plans for Things as They Are in America would nearly be ruined by the poor safety record of certain steamship companies. On September 10, a Cunard steamer arrived at Halifax with the news of the City of Philadelphia’s departure.37 Telegraph cables took the news on to New York and Philadelphia. But when she failed to arrive in Philadelphia, fears arose “that her machinery has become deranged.” Optimists could hope that there was a problem with the engines and she was completing the journey (slowly) by sail, but accounts from sailors of “frightful weather” in the mid-Atlantic did not calm fears.38 It was not a good year for steamship safety on the Atlantic: the Humboldt had been wrecked on the approach to Halifax harbor, and the Arctic collided with another vessel off Newfoundland. The City of Philadelphia’s sister ship, the City of Glasgow, had completely disappeared with 430 passengers on her way to Philadelphia in March.39 In all, seven steamships were lost or wrecked in 1854. At last, on September 26, a mail steamer from St. Johns, Newfoundland, arrived in Halifax to report that, on September 7, the City of Philadelphia had become the latest statistic. The news was immediately delivered by telegraph to the ship’s owners in Philadelphia and the newspapers in New York. The London Times learned the news by a different route, just two days after its American counterpart, and reported the story: On the night of the 7th September, at about 11 p.m., in a fog, breakers were seen on the starboard bow, when the engines were immediately reversed, but not in time to prevent her going on to the point of Cape Race; soundings gave 15 to 30 fathoms of water, and she was backed off and Piracy and Shipwreck! [ 247

steered for St John’s, Newfoundland; but, finding the water gaining on the pumps, she was put ashore on a sandy beach six miles north of Cape Race (Chance Cove) to save passengers, &c; the passengers, about 540, were all landed and provided for at St John’s, and their baggage was being got on shore. One of the officers had dived to the leak, which was found to be small, and with extra pumps and diving apparatus she was expected to be got off in a few days. There was only eight feet water in her hold at last accounts, and being of a height of 35 feet, the cargo was all likely to be saved, although partially damaged.40 By the time the news broke, the passengers had all been transferred to St. John’s (and some had traveled with the mail to Halifax), but most of the cargo and crew were still with the ship at Cape Race. The fact that it had taken nineteen days to reach the telegraph station at Halifax is a striking reminder of how slowly news could travel even in the days of steamships and electric telegraphs. The subsequent inquiry revealed that the City of Philadelphia’s compasses had been causing trouble throughout the voyage, and the crew’s estimates of speed had been thrown off by unusual currents off Newfoundland.41 The passengers on the City of Philadelphia were more fortunate than those on her sister ship, but the Times report was overly optimistic about the prospects for the ship herself. Her brief career as a transatlantic steamer ended in Newfoundland. For Chambers and Lippincott, this was a severe blow to their plans. Lippincott heard the news of the wreck on September 26, and Chambers learned it from the Times two days later. At this point, Chambers and Lippincott had no idea whether their cargo was damaged or whether it had perhaps been safely salvaged and was already en route to Philadelphia. The report in the Times was optimistic, but Lippincott would have learned that the ship had “a hole in her bottom,” that there had been fires on board, and “all in the lower hold was damaged.”42 Although Lippincott would already have been anxious about the ship’s nonarrival for more than a week, Chambers would have had no idea anything was wrong until the Times report appeared. Then, they knew they had to act swiftly. With only a fortnight until the final article was due to be published, it was almost certainly already in print. Chambers could not delay its publication without delaying the entire Journal issue for October 14, which would be bad for sales and reputation. Meanwhile, for all they knew to the contrary, Lippincott was stuck with 1,000 copies of half a book, and Orvis was nearly ready to complete his edition. On October 2, Chambers dispatched 500 sets of sheets for the second half—presumably all they had on hand at such short 248 ] Chapter Nineteen

notice—along with 50 bound copies of the book. Lippincott could put these books on sale at once, even while the printed sheets were still being folded and bound. Chambers were in such a rush to catch the steamer of October 4 that—most unusually—they did not take the time to register the shipment for a tax refund at the Custom House. They apologized to Lippincott that the books carried the imprint of Chambers rather than Lippincott, but that was all that was available.43 The next two months must have been frustrating for Chambers, as they waited for definite news from across the Atlantic. The first news arrived on October 16, but this was Lippincott’s panicked announcement of the wreck and contained nothing more about the state of the cargo than Chambers had learned from the newspaper reports.44 Still in ignorance, Chambers did not want to print and dispatch yet more sheets that might not actually be needed, so they waited for more information from Lippincott. The final article in the series had now appeared, so the race with Orvis was drawing inevitably to a close. On November 15, Lippincott announced the publication of Things as They Are in America (costing $1.25) in both Norton’s Literary Gazette and the New York Times. Yet on the very same day, the New York Times also carried a small announcement from Orvis to the effect that “Mr. Chambers’s Notes on America” was now ready, price just 25¢ with “a portrait and biography of the author.”45 Both editions were reviewed in the New York Times on November 21. The race seemed to have ended in a dead heat. As Chambers had predicted, Orvis issued Things as They Are in America in double columns on thin paper in blue paper wrappers. It looked and felt like a 25¢ publication, though the New York Times commended it for being “neatly got up for the price.”46 Thankfully, Chambers and Lippincott had done better than these simultaneous advertisements and reviews would suggest. Although Lippincott’s advertisement of November 15 said “just published,” Lippincott had written to Chambers five days earlier to report “the safe arrival and speedy sale,” of 500 copies of Things as They Are in America (although Chambers did not receive this happy news until November 28, two full months after learning of the emergency).47 The fact that Lippincott did not request Chambers to dispatch any further copies suggests that at least some of the damaged cargo from the City of Philadelphia finally turned up. When the marine insurers eventually settled the case—the following May—the payment included £26 for Things as They Are in America, the equivalent of about 200 complete copies at Lippincott’s discounted rate.48 It seems likely that Lippincott managed to salvage the makings of perhaps 1,000 more copies. Piracy and Shipwreck! [ 249

Despite (or because of ) their reliance on the most up-to-date steamships, Chambers and Lippincott nearly failed to bring off what had seemed like a simple enough task: to get the printed sheets for Things as They Are in America to Philadelphia before Orvis could reprint it from Chambers’s Journal. Unreliable compasses in an iron ship and fog off Newfoundland cut their lead from six weeks to barely one week, and transatlantic news suddenly seemed to travel appallingly slowly. Steamships offered publishers speed and (usually) reliability, but this had to be weighed against cost. Unsurprisingly, it was time-critical publications— magazine issues and specific new releases that were likely to attract unwanted attention from reprinters—that were the first to be sent by steamer. But there is a sense in which steamers worked against the interests of British publishers in the United States, simply because they provided a new transatlantic shipping option that was more affordable to unauthorized reprinters needing a single copy of a publication than to authorized partners importing in bulk. Lippincott’s need to transport thousands of copies across the Atlantic made it difficult for them to compete with Orvis’s edition of Chambers’s Journal, and they were further hindered by the fact that Philadelphia had a poorer steamship service than New York. Moreover, the steamships’ promise of reliability and regularity could be dangerously seductive. It seemed easy for Chambers to help Lippincott be first in the field with Things as They Are in America, but their plans were almost ruined by the poor safety record of the Inman Line. Nevertheless, in the end, that situation was saved by another steamship, the Baltic of the Collins Line, which got the replacement sheets there in time.49 Four years after the City of Philadelphia was wrecked, the North American telegraph system had been extended to Newfoundland. This meant that the New York Times could announce the “Success of the Atlantic Telegraph Enterprise” the day after the arrival of the cable-laying ship USS Niagara at Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, compared with the nineteen days it had taken for news of the 1854 wreck to travel the same route.50 And the Niagara’s arrival promised the imminent connection of the North American and British telegraph systems, which would bring London and New York—or Edinburgh and Philadelphia—into direct contact. Once the cable was fully connected and tested, eleven days later, the Times assured its readers that “instantaneous communication” will “render hostilities between the two nations almost impossible for the future” and predicted “an enormous growth of the commercial relations between the two countries.”51 It is tempting to wonder whether the telegraph would have made it eas250 ] Chapter Nineteen

ier for Chambers to do business with their American partners. It would certainly have removed the stress and worry of so many weeks not knowing what had happened to the City of Philadelphia and its cargo. During the short working life of the 1858 cable, one of the messages it transmitted was from Samuel Cunard, reporting a nonfatal collision between two of his firm’s steamers off Cape Race.52 As would be more fully demonstrated after the laying of the 1865 and 1866 cables, the telegraph was an excellent medium for the communication of commercially or politically valuable news. In the late 1860s, the transatlantic electric telegraph could have brought the news of the wreck within hours rather than weeks, and would have enabled Chambers to find out whether any of the cargo had made it to Philadelphia undamaged. But its existence would have made little difference to the other key challenges Chambers faced: how to build trust over great distances and how to transport bulk quantities of printed sheets. The first required correspondence at greater length than the telegraph allowed and, ideally, personal visits; the second required the capability to move cargo. Thus, the solutions would still have had to rely on sea transport, just as they did in the 1850s.

Coda to Part III Chambers’s and Lippincott’s experiences with steamships clearly demonstrate that new technologies are rarely as straightforwardly beneficial as we might think. Cunard’s service frequency and routes developed over the years, his ships’ capacity for passengers and cargo increased, and the competition from other companies fluctuated. Against this background, publishers had to make difficult decisions about how best to make use of the new transport and communication options to suit their own interests. Even in the early days, when cargo rarely traveled by steamship because of the limited capacity and the expense, the ability to communicate more quickly and more reliably across the Atlantic was extremely useful to publishers—and presumably to businesses of all sorts. Getting information, placing orders, and submitting payments became easier. Yet communication and negotiation conducted by the written word continued to have the same limitations they had always had: it was difficult to assess potential partners, to judge their commitment, or to build a rapport. Personal visits across the Atlantic did become slightly more feasible once they required an absence of “only” a month or two, but that was a rather minor effect of steamships. On the surface, the transatlantic steamship services offered similar advantages to the railways in terms of increased speed and reliability. But since it still took almost a fortnight to deliver a letter or a package from Edinburgh Piracy and Shipwreck! [ 251

to Philadelphia, the effect on day-to-day business operations was far less dramatic than the railways’ ability to deliver overnight within Britain. The steamship services certainly alleviated, but could not relieve, the challenges of transatlantic business. Ultimately, the most striking consequence of the improvements in communication across the Atlantic in the late 1840s and early 1850s was the British book trade’s new interest and engagement with its American counterpart, exemplified both by the American titles on sale in British bookshops and bookstalls, and by certain British publishers’ determination to conquer the American market.

252 ] Chapter Nineteen

Epilogue

W

illiam Chambers died on Sunday, May 20, 1883, after several months of physical frailty and failing memory.1 Press reports were colored by regret that he had died before his baronetcy could be formally conferred by the queen; and that he would not see the newly renovated St. Giles’ Cathedral reopened on the following Wednesday. Since the mid-1840s, the editorial offices of W. & R. Chambers had faced St. Giles across High Street, and in later life, the childless William had devoted a large part of his personal fortune—and his energy—toward restoring its crumbling interior. The baronetcy was widely seen to be a reward for his public service in Edinburgh, rather than for his long-standing devotion “to the intellectual and social elevation of the people.”2 At both the opening ceremony and at Chambers’s funeral service in St. Giles a few days later, the officiating ministers made much of William Chambers’s supposed rags-to-riches life. Chambers was “the poor lad by honest industry rising to eminence,” who had risen “from poverty to opulence, and from obscurity to the highest service and honour which his city could bestow.”3 The truth of the financial element of this tale became a matter of public record a month later, when his last will and testament was reported in the newspapers: even after spending an estimated £50,000 on St. Giles, Chambers had left an estate of £90,000.4 This very substantial wealth for the son of a one-time handloom weaver contrasts sharply with Charles Knight’s estate of under £3,000.5 But rather than celebrating Chambers’s acquisition of filthy lucre, the ministers drew two lessons from his life. First, as Chambers himself had often implied, his story could be cast as one “of which Scotsmen may be proud,” displaying the supposedly national characteristics of “perseverance, endurance, foresight, perfect integrity”—or, in another formulation, “patient, earnest, and victorious struggle.”6 In addition, Chambers’s record of public service and his commitment to improvement was celebrated. Most emphasis was [ 253

given to his civic service in Edinburgh. As well as organizing and substantially funding the restoration of St. Giles, he had served as the city’s Lord Provost between 1865 and 1869, during which time he had introduced “sanitary measures which lowered the terrible death-rate of the inhabitants” (this involved an extensive program of slum clearance in the Old Town and the creation of new streets, one of which is named after him).7 Perhaps surprisingly, his other public service, namely his firm’s contribution to popular instruction and education, tended to be mentioned only briefly. He was “the founder of that popular literature which is so marked a feature of our time” and responsible for “that stream of pure and healthy literature, of useful information” that has been sent “into every land and nearly every home in which the English tongue is spoken.”8 Perhaps the achievements of W. & R. Chambers were so well known by the 1880s that they could be taken as read. After all, ten years earlier, Henry Curwen’s survey of British “booksellers” (i.e., publishers) had given the Chambers firm pride of place in the chapter on “Literature for the People,” ahead of rivals Charles Knight and John Cassell.9 The lesson from the perspective of this book is that William Chambers’s ultimate success and wealth clearly indicates the potential of the mass market for print, for those who understood how best to supply it. Cheap print had existed before the foundation of W. & R. Chambers, but the cheapest of it had been either illegal or charitably funded. Others in the 1820s and 1830s—most notably Charles Knight—tried to make instructive and improving cheap print available on a commercial (and legal) basis, but most failed. William Chambers undoubtedly did have perseverance, endurance, and integrity, as well as a dedication to the cause of popular education; but he also had a brother with considerable literary talent; and he himself had the ability to draw together the disparate literary, commercial, and technical elements needed to create a successful business. After his death, his memorialist remarked that had William been apprenticed to a grocer instead of a bookseller, he would no doubt have “have risen to the first rank of merchants.” Unlike his brother Robert and his rival Knight, William did not appear to have an innate love of literature, despite his undoubted commitment to popular education and improvement. But his business acumen was crucial to the success of W. & R. Chambers.10 As his memorialist points out, William Chambers was not an untested youth when he started Chambers’s Journal, nor was the Journal “a chance effort . . . , which, by strange good luck, took root and flourished, nobody could tell how.”11 He and Robert were in their early thirties and had spent over a decade establishing themselves in Edinburgh’s literary and bookselling circles. Robert was an established author, able to sell the copyrights of his 254 ] Epilogue

books for several hundred pounds; and William was a hard-working bookseller who had already “gathered not a few golden eggs into his basket.”12 Yet, despite the truth of this, starting the Journal was surely a bold venture, and it originated from William’s dream of bringing cheap instructive publications to a universal readership. Remarkably quickly, the success of Chambers’s Journal revealed the practical limits of traditional methods for the production and distribution of printed matter in 1830s Britain. Chambers turned to the relatively new processes of stereotyping and steam printing. In retrospect, their advantages seem obvious, but Chambers’s decision was anything but obvious for a small, newly established publishing house in Edinburgh in 1832. During those months, Chambers might have heard from William Orr about how easy it was to print the London edition of the Journal by steam; and he might have read about the Penny Magazine’s use of stereotype plates to increase the production capacity of printing machines even further. But against this knowledge, he had to set the fact that only a handful of Edinburgh printing firms had any experience with either steam printing or stereotyping. If Chambers had been any less committed to the goal of a mass readership, he would surely have rested satisfied with his Journal’s local success. But he did not. Instead, he sought out local men with the skills and equipment to help the Journal succeed in a national market. The Journal’s stereotype plates were initially made at the office of the Caledonian Mercury, while the printing machine was built by an engineer from the office of the North British Advertiser, a pattern that emphasizes the local context and reaffirms the importance of newspapers as early adopters of the new print technologies. It took around fifteen years for W. & R. Chambers to create the centralized printing and publishing establishment that we tend to associate with industrial technologies and that was so admired by visitors to Edinburgh. In the intervening years, they were testing the speed, capacity, and applications of their new techniques, and working out how best to use them to reach a national market before such a market had really been created. In some respects, the way in which Chambers used stereotype plates for the Journal was the most surprising decision of all. Most early adopters used a set of plates to keep a steady-selling work, such as the Bible or a school text, in print over a long period of time, while some used multiple sets of plates to increase the production of a high-circulation periodical or newspaper within tight time constraints. For Chambers’s Journal, the basic problem of producing sufficient copies was combined with the expense and delay of transporting those copies to London by water. Printing separate editions in Edinburgh and London solved both of those problems, yet it could be done—and inEpilogue [ 255

deed, was done initially—without stereotype plates. But in its early months, the Journal also faced the problem of an unexpected demand for back numbers, which its printers struggled to fulfill. Stereotype plates were originally a solution to that problem, and the fact that they could also be used to control and coordinate the London edition seemed almost coincidental.13 Very quickly, however, Chambers had switched emphases and enthused about the usefulness of plates for coordinating multiple printing centers and enhancing long-distance distribution. And later still, Chambers realized that stereotype plates were a form of literary property that could be traded across the Atlantic in the absence of international copyright. The case of stereotyping thus demonstrates how a firm might adopt a new technology for one reason and subsequently find other, perhaps more important, uses for it. Chambers’s use of steam printing shows a similar pattern. Acquiring a steam-printing machine in Edinburgh in the early 1830s was not a straightforward process, if one were unwilling to endure the expense of shipping the machinery, and the expertise to install and maintain it, from London. Thus, Chambers decided to commission a young and untried—but local— engineer. Having acquired their machine to improve the production speed of the Journal, however, Chambers soon began to experiment with its capabilities. Although delighted that the machine could work faster than originally specified, that very speed emphasized the necessity of finding more work for it to do, so that this expensive machine and its attendants were not left idle. Given contemporary prejudices about cylinder printing and its unsuitability for anything other than newsprint-quality periodicals, it is not surprising that Chambers initially used their machine for related genres: the Historical Newspaper and the tracts of Information for the People. Newspaper proprietors would have had other priorities for their machines, but Chambers had the opportunity to experiment. By 1835, they were experimenting with printing books by steam, and the sales figures of the early People’s Editions demonstrated the correctness of their belief that, in some markets, low prices might be a more important selling point than high-quality press work. The subsequent development of the Chambers firm, with an increasing emphasis on book publications, reiterates that early predictions of limited utility for steam printing were disproved by experience. As this book has shown, new technologies like steam printing and stereotyping do not operate in isolation. They become part of business systems, intertwined with all the other aspects of a publishing enterprise, from the literary to the commercial. Those other aspects may well place limits on what a technology can actually be used for, as happened when low literacy levels and poor distribution networks terminated the Journal’s Dublin printing, and when different trade practices in New England made it more difficult 256 ] Epilogue

to sell British stereotype plates than had been anticipated. Moreover, when one part of a business system changes, there is likely to be a knock-on effect. Thus, stereotype plates lost their role in coordinating the Journal’s two British editions when Chambers decided to break their long-standing agreement with Orr. And steam printing became even more important to the operations of the Edinburgh establishment once railway connections made national distribution easier. Railways and steamships provided my two key examples of the changing contexts in which W. & R. Chambers had to operate. Both were themselves mechanical developments, but, unlike stereotyping and steam printing, they could not be internalized and brought under the firm’s control. Like taxation, copyright legislation, and literacy rates, they had profound effects on the firm’s business, but Chambers were almost always in the position of reacting, in contrast to their much more proactive engagement with the processes of printing. The effect of railways on the British book trade in general, as well as on Chambers in particular, is intriguingly double edged. As was the case with other commercial enterprises, publishers benefited from the ability to conduct business correspondence and move certain types of freight more rapidly and more reliably. But unlike other businesses, the growth of passenger rail transport offered significant new marketing opportunities to publishers. The effects of improved communications are relatively obvious. With letters (and passengers) traveling from Edinburgh to London overnight instead of over two days, business partners, agents, and branch office staff could work more closely with the head office in the 1850s than had been possible twenty years earlier. This facility was an important part of Chambers’s decision to replace Orr’s agency with a London branch office in 1854. In earlier times, they had needed to rely on Orr’s on-the-ground knowledge for dayto-day business in the English book trade. But enhanced communications conveyed information—about sales, competitors, and new possibilities—to Edinburgh in a timely manner and allowed decisions and instructions to return to London in time for the appropriate action to be taken. A greater number of decisions could be made in Edinburgh, removing the need to allow a London agent substantial independence. As far as freight is concerned, the effect on Chambers’s business was less striking. Railways were certainly swift, but they were more expensive than the existing option of coastal water transport. Although Chambers bemoaned the unreliability of coastal shipping in the winter months, at other times of the year, the Leith to London steamers provided a service that—at around three days—was perfectly adequate for the needs of a weekly magazine, the instructive tracts with a weekly or fortnightly issue, and books with Epilogue [ 257

no specific date of issue. It was, as ever, newspaper proprietors—with their rapid frequency of issue and their time-critical contents—who were more immediately interested in railway distribution. Although the Chambers archive contains little surviving evidence on this issue, it appears that the firm continued to use steamers into the 1850s, with the railways limited to providing a backup service through the winter months and in emergencies. In this case, the new transport technology offered a service—extreme speed— that Chambers needed only occasionally. The significant impact of the railways on Chambers was more indirect: its role in creating both a new market for cheap literature and a new channel for selling such literature. Once railway passengers needed something to read on their journeys—something that could be purchased without agonizing over price and could potentially be disposed of at journey’s end—then the audience for cheap literature was no longer simply the working classes, of interest only to religious charities and educational campaigners, but a large segment of the British public, first and second class as well as third. The result was that cheap literature became a more prominent part of the British book trade, and more firms became interested in publishing it. The development of the railway bookstall, and particularly the centralized network of bookstalls provided by W. H. Smith, made it easier than ever before for publishers to achieve the high sales that were needed to turn a profit on cheap literature, thus solving a problem that had bedeviled Chambers, Knight, and their fellow pioneers for years. George Routledge, and others who were successful in this new market, used the same techniques that Chambers had pioneered ten to fifteen years earlier, and relied on the same new print technologies. The new commercial competitiveness of cheap print could be seen as the final culmination of William Chambers’s ambitions, yet the consequence was that his firm lost its privileged position as supplier of the masses. Despite the furor over railway literature, it is worth noting that the growing middle-class interest in consuming cheap print, the increased interest from publishers in supplying that demand, and the emergence of bookstalls as a means to do so did not necessarily help to achieve William Chambers’s original ambition of spreading popular instruction to every man and woman in the British dominions. Many of the readers of cheap railway literature were far more educated than the newly literate autodidacts that Chambers originally had in mind; and much of the railway literature produced could not be termed instructive. This perhaps explains why W. & R. Chambers made so few attempts to engage in the market for railway literature: it would have been a distraction from the firm’s central mission of popular education. Nevertheless, the mania for railway literature did increase the amount of cheap nonfiction on the market, and by the end of the 1850s, it had matured 258 ] Epilogue

into a more general awareness of the possibilities of cheap literature, along with a willingness from more publishers to engage in that field. The emergence of cheap books for railway travelers in the late 1840s, coming as it did on the heels of a new generation of fiction-filled penny magazines in the mid-1840s, created a challenging commercial climate for the older pioneers of cheap instructive print. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge wound up its operations. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge gave up its Saturday Magazine. Charles Knight struggled through difficult times before entering semiretirement. The Religious Tract Society reoriented its publishing operations and launched new publications in response to the changing conditions. And W. & R. Chambers survived. They consolidated their strengths and reaped the benefits of the efficient and modern system of business established over the previous decade. Much of their activity in the late 1840s and early 1850s concerned modernizing the printing plant, gaining control over their London operations, and seeking out new markets overseas. These behind-the-scenes projects, coupled with an ongoing steady share of the market in instructive books, enabled them to weather the worst years of competition and to emerge in good shape, ready for ambitious new publishing projects, such as their Encyclopaedia. At the same time that railway literature was transforming the market for cheap print in Britain, the new transatlantic steamship services were raising hopes of increased business opportunities in North America. Like all British publishers, Chambers were well aware of the potential market offered by the Canadian colonies and the United States. The shared language meant that North American readers were avid consumers of British-authored works, and Chambers were particularly attracted by the idealized image of hardworking emigrants seeking to improve themselves intellectually as well as economically. Such people ought to be an ideal market for cheap instructive works of the sort produced by W. & R. Chambers. Of course, this was not a new market—Chambers had been trying to reach American and Canadian readers since the 1830s—but what changed in the late 1840s were the new possibilities offered by steamships. If steamships were indeed the railways of the oceans, as their promoters suggested, then perhaps steamships could bring the Atlantic world closer together, as railways did within the British Isles. Communication, passenger travel, and freight transport would all become quicker and more reliable, and this ought to help British publishers become effective players in North American markets. But Chambers’s experiences reveal that steamships in the 1850s did not live up to those expectations. The increased interest and contact between the British and American trades did help to change the balance of transatlantic literary trade, so that it Epilogue [ 259

became less unidirectional. More American books were available in Britain, and a wider range of British books became available in the United States. Where American reprinters had once cherry-picked the books most likely to make a profit for them, British publishers could now try to market their own choice of books to American audiences. As with the railways, steamships did improve communications and make it easier to do business, but Chambers’s negotiations with Boston and Philadelphia show that it was not always straightforward. A letter from Edinburgh to Boston in 1850 still took four times as long as one from Edinburgh to London had done fifty years earlier. Agents or business partners with local knowledge remained essential, even while it remained tricky to establish trust and rapport with these distant agents. And communications alone could not solve the problems of different technological or commercial practices, market expectations, or the lack of copyright law or an international banking system. Early steamships carried small quantities of freight, but, as with railways, the service came at a high price, and Chambers and their partners initially used it only for special cases. Unlike railways, this had the interesting consequence of putting them at a disadvantage against unauthorized reprinters in the United States. In the case of importing just one copy of a book or magazine, anyone willing to pay for steam had an immediate advantage over competitors who were relying on sail. When several reprinters were competing over the same British novel, all were likely to pay for steam shipping and the playing field would be level again. But with instructive works like those issued by Chambers, fewer reprinters were interested; and if the competition was between a reprinter and a bulk importer, as occurred with Orvis and Lippincott in 1854, steam gave the reprinter a clear advantage. This situation would change only when steam shipping prices came down sufficiently to make it feasible to send larger quantities of cheap publications by steam. This seems to have happened by the late 1850s—although the real change would come only when an international copyright agreement was finally signed, in the 1890s, and removed the threat from unauthorized reprinters. Although the story of Chambers and Lippincott’s inability to defeat Orvis’s edition of Chambers’s Journal suggests a gloomy picture of Chambers’s transatlantic business, we should remember that Lippincott (and Gould before them) had much greater success with the other Chambers publications, the tracts and books. One of the striking features of Chambers’s American business dealings in the late 1840s and 1850s is that their publications were not merely in demand among readers in the United States, but were competitive in that notoriously price-sensitive market. The culture of cheap reprinting usually made it difficult for British imports to be attractive on price—yet Chambers’s instructive tracts and books did sell in 260 ] Epilogue

substantial numbers after crossing the Atlantic as printed sheets. This is a striking demonstration of the effectiveness of the firm’s use of the new print technologies, and their willingness to trust the economics of a mass market by operating with small profit margins. As ever, the technologies alone were not enough; to be most effective, they had to be complemented by appropriate commercial practices. W. & R. Chambers were moderately successful in their American business dealings, but it was a hard-won and carefully managed success. William Chambers was not alone in hoping to improve popular education by providing “information for the people”: the religious publishing societies, the SDUK, Charles Knight, and a variety of lesser-known publishers shared that dream. It is sometimes argued that commerce and social conscience do not mix, and Chambers himself was scathing of charities’ attempts to engage in the book trade. Yet W. & R. Chambers managed to develop a successful business model for a product that was philanthropically motivated but also genuinely in demand from consumers. Many of the challenges the firm faced were similar to those encountered by the others, but its location in Edinburgh created some additional difficulties. This book has investigated how William Chambers developed his business despite these obstacles, with a particular emphasis on the ways he incorporated, and reacted to, new technologies, whether of print production or of transportation and communication. Success was not simply a question of being open to the possibilities of new machines and processes, and experimenting with their capabilities, though Chambers certainly did this. If users were to fit the new printing techniques into a system of business, they needed to adapt them to commercial practices, legal limitations, and existing communication options. The ways in which the techniques were used might have to change over time, and be adapted to new circumstances. William Chambers understood this and demonstrated a shrewd understanding of how to adapt his business practices to make effective use of the new machinery and processes. From inauspicious beginnings, he shaped a modern, efficient, industrial printing and publishing firm—as he said, “a proper system”—that was able both to withstand the challenges of railway literature and be competitive in the United States. It was his understanding of how to integrate new technologies with the other elements of his business system that allowed Chambers to prosper where so many others failed: by making a commercial success of bringing cheap instructive print to the people.

Epilogue [ 261

Notes Preface 1. The following account is based on W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 128–42. 2. Bell, Ambition and Industry, chap. 1. 3. This American tour was described in a series of articles in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal during 1854 and published as W. Chambers, Things as They Are. 4. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 30. 5. “Personal,” Norton’s Literary Gazette, December 1853, 218 (Boston); W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 265 (the president). 6. F.S. [Frederick Saunders], “The Publishing Business,” Literary World, January 5, 1850, 12; “Christie Johnston and Cheap Literature,” Times, December 15, 1853, 8.

Introduction 1. [Masson], “Aspects of Literature,” 157. 2. Pearson, Infidelity, 478. 3. “Cheap Literature,” British Quarterly Review, April 1859, 313–45; “New and Cheap Forms of Popular Literature”; [Oliphant], “Reading for the Million.” 4. “Literary Intelligence,” Norton’s Literary Gazette, March 1, 1854, 107. 5. Compositors’ wages in 1845, from Bell, Ambition and Industry, 485, table 9.9. 6. On print and the working classes, see Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, chap. 6; Vincent, Literacy. See also Neuburg, Popular Literature; J. Rose, Intellectual Life. 7. [Robert Chambers?], “Things of My Time,” CEJ, August 27, 1859, 129. Attribution of authorship is my own, based on internal evidence. 8. W. Chambers, Long and Busy Life, 7–8. 9. On the development of the telegraph in Britain, see Marsden and Smith, Engineering Empires, 187–99; Headrick, When Information Came of Age, chap. 6. There is a wealth of detail at Steven Roberts, Distant Writing: A History of the Telegraph Companies in Britain between 1838 and 1868, accessed March 13, 2011, http://distantwriting.co.uk. 10. “Electric Telegraph,” North British Review, February 1855, 545. This writer, too, compared the telegraph to lightning. 11. For instance, Standage, Victorian Internet. 12. For a very useful survey of prices, see Roberts, “What the Companies Charged,” Distant Writing. 13. [Robert Chambers?], “Things of My Time,” 129–31. 14. Employment figures from 1851 census, see Bell, Ambition and Industry, 480, table 9.3. 15. Bagehot, Collected Works, 3:191. 16. Bebbington, Evangelicalism; Stanley, Bible and the Flag. 17. On Victorian information technologies, see Headrick, When Information Came of Age. See also Fyfe, “Information Revolution.” 18. W. Chambers & R. Chambers, eds., Information for the People (2nd ed., 1842), 2:iii.

[ 263

19. Flint, Woman Reader, esp. chaps. 4–5; Webb, Working Class Reader; Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, pt. 3. 20. Pearson, Infidelity, 473. On the fears, see Fyfe, Science and Salvation, chap. 1. 21. Porter, Rise of Statistical Thinking; Higgs, Information State, chaps. 4–5. 22. Babbage, Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, para. 332. This description was quoted with approval by CEJ, March 7, 1835, 46. 23. Knight, Old Printer, 261–63. An early version of these statistics appeared in “The Market of Literature,” Printing Machine, February 15, 1834, 1–4. 24. See Weedon, Victorian Publishing; Eliot, Patterns and Trends; Eliot, “NSTC, Part I.” 25. Weedon, Victorian Publishing, 46, fig. 2.2. 26. Eliot, “Some Trends in British Book Production,” 39–40. 27. Knight, Case of the Authors, 4. 28. “Cost of English Books Reprinted in America,” Printing Machine, September 27, 1834, 64. 29. McGill, American Literature. 30. “International Copyright,” Examiner, April 7, 1849, 220. 31. Quoted in “Cheap Books,” Literary World, July 9, 1853, 548. 32. Quoted in Greenspan, House of Putnam, 272. 33. Savage, Dictionary of Printing, 448; “Cheap Literature,” 315. 34. Knight’s periodical ran from February 1834 to May 1835. “Mechanism of Chambers’s Journal,” CEJ, June 6, 1835, 150. 35. These processes are described in Gaskell, Bibliography, pt. 2; Twyman, Printing, chaps. 2–4. 36. See, e.g., the four supplements of “Commercial History of the Penny Magazine,” Penny Magazine 2 (1833): 377–84, 417–24, 465–72, 505–11, reprinted in Cohen, Paper and Printing; and “Mechanism of Chambers’s Journal,” 149–51. 37. Webb, Working Class Reader; Laquer, Religion and Respectability; Harrison, Learning and Living; Vincent, Literacy; Mitch, Rise of Popular Literacy; Ó Ciosain, Print and Popular Culture. 38. For instance, see the very brief discussion in Finkelstein, House of Blackwood, 13. For examples of studies that do emphasize practical and commercial (though not technological) issues, see Cross, Common Writer; Sutherland, Victorian Novelists. 39. Eliot, Patterns and Trends; Eliot, “NSTC, Part I”; Eliot, “NSTC, Part II”; Weedon, Victorian Publishing. St. Clair, Reading Nation, does a good job of combining economic and literary aspects, but focuses on the period before the new technologies had their impact. 40. Gaskell, Bibliography; Moran, Printing Presses. 41. On technological determinism, see Smith and Marx, Does Technology Drive History? 42. See Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, Social Construction of Technological Systems; Bijker, Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs; Gooday, Domesticating Electricity, esp. chaps. 3–4. 43. Oudshoorn and Pinch, How Users Matter. 44. Secord, Victorian Sensation, chap. 2, emphasises the role of the new technologies

264 ] Notes to Pages 4–7

in feeding a demand for print, but the rest of the book pays little attention to technology. On information technology in American business in the later nineteenth century, see Yates, Control through Communication. 45. On the “interpretive flexibility” of technologies in their early years, see Bijker, Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs, 73–77. 46. Gaskell, Bibliography, 252; Twyman, Printing, 51–52. 47. On British book trade practices, see Feather, British Publishing, chaps. 4 and 7. St. Clair, Reading Nation, chap. 6, discusses the “explosion of reading” arising from midpriced reprints before the new technologies. 48. Both technologies appear to have been used earlier in the United States (although the U.S. machines were not always steam-powered and were usually a different design). See Silver, “Power of the Press.” 49. Howsam, Cheap Bibles, chap. 3; Fyfe, Science and Salvation, chap. 4. The U.S. Bible and tract societies were equally early adopters. See Nord, Faith in Reading, esp. chap. 5. 50. Gray, Charles Knight, chap. 6, has some mention of Knight and the SDUK’s use of new technologies, especially for the reproduction of images. Kinraide, “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” is relatively silent about this aspect of the SDUK’s work. 51. The standard history remains Feather, British Publishing. 52. Gray, “Special Relationship”; Gray, Charles Knight. One of the reasons Knight is well known is that he left substantial memoirs and other writings on the book trade, including Old Printer and Passages of a Working Life. He is particularly notable for his engagement with techniques of image reproduction. 53. There is as yet no modern biography of either Chambers brother, although Robert is featured in Secord, Victorian Sensation. There are collected editions of Robert’s literary and scientific writings, and a memoir, W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers; but for William, there is only a very short autobiographical account, W. Chambers, Long and Busy Life, and the supplementary chapter added to the 12th edition of his memoir of his brother, W. Chambers, Memoir of William and Robert Chambers. 54. The combination of printing and publishing in one establishment was not uncommon in the Edinburgh context. See Bell, Ambition and Industry, 33–34. 55. Gray, Charles Knight, chap. 3 and app. 1. 56. The W. & R. Chambers archive is Deposit 341, at the NLS. A hand list is available. 57. Bagwell, Transport Revolution, chaps. 4–5. 58. For instance, see Curwen’s account, which barely mentions William’s contribution; Curwen, History of Booksellers, 235–51. 59. W. Chambers, Memoir of William and Robert Chambers, 389 (Robert Chambers quotation); 379. 60. Ibid., 385, 388.

Chapter 1 1. R. Chambers, Picture of Scotland, 1:178. 2. This account is based on W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, chap. 5. 3. Ibid., 154.

Notes to Pages 7–14 [ 265

4. Robert may have wished that William would stop going on about the old days, retelling—perhaps exaggerating—the story of their early difficulties. See, for instance, the comment by Robert’s friend, James Payn, in Payn, Some Literary Recollections, 142–43. 5. The blasphemous implications of Lawrence’s science are discussed in Jacyna, “Immanence and Transcendence.” 6. On taxation, and (illegal) efforts to avoid it in the 1810s, see St. Clair, Reading Nation, chap. 16. 7. “Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal,” CEJ, April 28, 1832, 52; Editorial, CEJ, February 2, 1833, 2. 8. Robert Chambers’s 1850 speech, mentioning the Miscellany of Tracts, is quoted in Knight, Case of the Authors, 21–22, and the basic story is repeated in W. Chambers, Long and Busy Life, 93–94. The statistics of the Penny Cyclopaedia are given in Knight, Struggles of a Book. Knight had argued against the taxation since the 1830s. See Knight, Newspaper Stamp. 9. Prices and circulations for many periodicals can be found in North, Waterloo Directory (Scotland), and North, Waterloo Directory (England), though figures for the Times are from Twyman, Printing, 51–52. 10. Topham, “Mirror of Literature,” 41. 11. Desmond’s account of the Oracle of Reason makes this clear; Desmond, “Artisan Resistance.” 12. Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 1:234–57. 13. Topham, “Mirror of Literature”; Topham, “John Limbird, Thomas Byerley.” 14. Twyman, Printing, 51. The Tribune had daily, semiweekly, and weekly editions. See Borchard, “New York Tribune.” 15. Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, 16. 16. Historians have also pointed to the highly political nature of the American press, particularly during the heated debates about slavery in the 1850s. See Loughran, Republic in Print, chaps. 6–7. 17. The Association issued a Gazette, the fourteenth number of which (November 1854) survives in WRC 130 (Misc. Reports). 18. See, for instance, Neuburg, Popular Literature, chap. 4; St. Clair, Reading Nation, chap. 16. 19. The cost of books in the Romantic period is extensively discussed and documented in St. Clair, Reading Nation. 20. For the evangelical revival, and the formation of societies, see Bebbington, Evangelicalism; Hilton, Age of Atonement; Laquer, Religion and Respectability; Lewis, Lighten Their Darkness; R. H. Martin, Evangelicals United. 21. Evangelical Magazine, July 1799, 307. 22. For the societies, see Fyfe, Science and Salvation; Howsam, Cheap Bibles. 23. The classic study on reading and radical politics is Webb, Working Class Reader. 24. On the wider influence of evangelicalism, see Hilton, Age of Atonement. 25. Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 2:184. 26. Robert married Anne Kirkwood in December 1829. William married Harriet Seddon in June 1833. Harriet was the daughter of a London engraver. See ODNB.

266 ] Notes to Pages 14–21

27. W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 208–9. 28. Some time later in 1832, probably around October, the format of the Journal was changed from folio to quarto by adding a second fold (and cut edges) to the sheet—thus producing a half-sized paper with eight pages. After the 1844 relaunch, it became sixteen pages (octavo). See surviving imprints, and W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 215. 29. “Editor’s Address to His Readers,” CEJ, February 4, 1832, 1; reprinted in W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 210–11. 30. Editorial, CEJ, February 2, 1833, 1–2. 31. For “weekly trash,” see Knight, Old Printer, 242. For “commerce of books,” see Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 2:183. Knight’s memoirs are very London-centric and have very few direct references to the work of the Chambers brothers, except when absolutely necessary. 32. Their pioneering activities were noted by contemporaries. Curwen, History of Booksellers, devotes an entire chapter to them (and to John Cassell, a publisher of the 1850s). 33. This argument is made in Barnes, “Depression and Innovation.” 34. For Murray’s series, see Bennett, “John Murray’s Family Library.” 35. Knight assumed a print run of 6,000 in his discussion of costs for the library, and this is supported by St. Clair’s figures for some of the most popular volumes. See Knight, Case of the Authors, 8; St. Clair, Reading Nation, 565. 36. Colburn & Bentley’s volumes also cost a shilling more than Murray’s. 37. On images in the cheap press, see Anderson, Printed Image, esp. chap. 2. 38. W. Chambers, Long and Busy Life, 115–16. 39. W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 213. 40. Sales figures pre-1844 are given intermittently in CEJ. Later figures (for print runs) are given in WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger 2), fols. 4–5. 41. Knight gives the 25,000 figure in Knight, Struggles of a Book, 12. 42. The valuation for 1857 was £54,038, as recorded in WRC 304 (Balance Sheet Book), fols. 93–96. By the end of the century, the firm was worth £100,000, according to Bertram, Some Memories, 130. The brothers’ annual incomes are also recorded in WRC 304. The only year during the 1840s in which they drew less than £1,000 from the business (and they often drew much more) was in 1845, when all profits went into the new printing works.

Part 1 Introduction 1. Bertram, Some Memories, 143. 2. “Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal,” CEJ, February 1, 1834, 2n.

Chapter 2 1. “Mechanism of Chambers’s Journal,” CEJ, June 6, 1835, 151. 2. “Commercial History of the Penny Magazine,” Penny Magazine 2 (1833): 377–84, 417–24, 465–72, 505–11. 3. Twyman, Printing, 61–63. On wages, see Weedon, Victorian Publishing, 76–79. 4. Weedon, Victorian Publishing, 87.

Notes to Pages 21–32 [ 267

5. Weedon, Victorian Publishing, 66–67. 6. McKitterick, 1830–1914, 92–96. 7. See entries in WRC 161 (LB 1851), passim. 8. David Chambers to Robert Chambers, May 6, 1854, in WRC 126 (Misc. Letters). 9. George Clowes, 1837, quoted in Weedon, Victorian Publishing, 65. 10. Winship, “Printing with Plates.” 11. “Printing and Stereotyping,” CEJ, September 29, 1832, 278. 12. Ibid. 13. Howsam, Cheap Bibles, chap. 3; Nord, Faith in Reading, 68. 14. Knight, Old Printer, 255–56. 15. “Printing and Stereotyping,” 278. 16. “Mechanism of Chambers’s Journal,” CEJ, June 6, 1835, 150. 17. Many histories of printing and printing machines are available. The account in Gaskell, Bibliography, is straightforward; that in Twyman, Printing, is well illustrated; those who are particularly interested in the presses and machines may wish to consult Moran, Printing Presses. For a comparison of the relative claims of Nicholson and König as inventors, see Savage, Dictionary of Printing, 449–62. 18. Twyman, Printing, 52. 19. Twyman, Printing, 51; McKitterick, 1830–1914, 76–77. 20. On newspaper printing machines, see Moran, Printing Presses, chaps. 12–13. 21. Gaskell, Bibliography, 289. 22. Gaskell, Bibliography, 251–63; Twyman, Printing, 51–52. 23. On labor, see Gaskell, Bibliography, 290. 24. Knight, Old Printer, 255–56. 25. Savage, Dictionary of Printing, 465–67. 26. St. Clair, Reading Nation, 19–20.

Chapter 3 1. Bell, Ambition and Industry, 488, table 10.2. 2. Figures from searches in Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue on CD-ROM, series 1 and 2, 1800–1870 (Newcastle: Avero, 2002). 3. W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 214. 4. Figures are for the town and surrounding county, from the 1831 census; taken from R. Chambers and W. Chambers, Gazetteer of Scotland, xviii. 5. W. Chambers, Book of Scotland, v. 6. Ibid., 370. 7. Vincent, Rise of Mass Literacy, 9–10. 8. The posters are itemized on an invoice for printing done by John Johnstone for W. & R. Chambers, between February and August 1832, in WRC 312 (LL 1832–40, filed under K). See also Fyfe, “Steam and the Landscape of Knowledge,” fig. 2.1. 9. “Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal,” CEJ, February 1, 1834, 1. 10. Circulations and prices are from North, Waterloo Directory (Scotland). Receipts for the costs of advertising CEJ in 1832 and 1833 can be found in WRC 467–69 (Receipts) and 454 (Receipts). For the agency, Robertson & Scott, November 1833, see WRC 455 (Re-

268 ] Notes to Pages 32–45

ceipts). For more on the Advertiser, see R. Chambers and W. Chambers, Gazetteer of Scotland, 397. 11. See Johnstone’s invoice, February to August 1832, in WRC 312 (LL 1832–40, filed under K). 12. On agencies, see Bell, Ambition and Industry, 385–407. 13. Memorandum regarding conduct of Glasgow agents, November 12, 1832, in WRC 467 (Receipts). 14. On Curry’s Scottish connections, see Bell, Ambition and Industry, 418–29. 15. The mail coach connections are listed in R. Chambers and W. Chambers, Gazetteer of Scotland, 400. For journey time, see “Roads in Scotland,” CEJ, April 14, 1832, 43. 16. Transport connections are listed at R. Chambers and W. Chambers, Gazetteer of Scotland, 400. 17. [Robert Chambers?], “Things of My Time,” CEJ, August 27, 1859, 129. 18. Three weeks was normal in 1843. See W. Chambers, Long and Busy Life, 64–65. 19. Memorandum regarding conduct of Glasgow agents, November 12, 1832, in WRC 467 (Receipts). 20. Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 1:270. 21. “Mechanism of Chambers’s Journal,” 150. 22. In 1840, Orr held around £1,000 of stock, though by 1846, it had increased to £4,200. See Orr’s stock lists in WRC 473 (Receipts) and 481 (Receipts). On Orr, see Cooney, “William Somerville Orr.” His Scottishness is mentioned in Proceedings at Peebles, 12. 23. “Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal,” CEJ, February 2, 1833, 1. The print runs can be found in the certificates of printing, which were used to determine Orr’s fee to Chambers, in WRC 454 (Receipts). 24. The certificates of printing, in WRC 454 (Receipts), give the total number of each issue printed by each printer, but do not say when they were printed. 25. The information about this partnership comes primarily from the events surrounding its dissolution, in the autumn of 1846. See letters regarding Orr in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). The quotation comes from a memo from William Chambers to Robert Chambers, March 4, 1853, in WRC 320 (LL 1853). 26. Edition number and dates are given on the copies of the Journal in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 27. The introduction of stereotyping is briefly mentioned in Bell, Ambition and Industry, 37. SBTI lists only four names as stereotypers in Edinburgh in the late 1820s and early 1830s (of whom, two were at the University Printers). Allan’s name appears on the early stereotyped issues of CEJ. 28. Invoice dated November 1832, in WRC 467 (Receipts). The invoice from Aitken for December 1833 is in WRC 455 (Receipts) (the invoice names the printer as “M. Aitken.” The SBTI identifies an Aitken with the same address and dates as “Mrs. Aitken”). 29. “Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal,” CEJ, February 2, 1833, 1. 30. “Mechanism of Chambers’s Journal,” 150. A collection of Chambers stereotype plates (from later in the century) survives in the store of the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh. They are surprisingly heavy.

Notes to Pages 45–51 [ 269

31. “Printing and Stereotyping,” CEJ, September 29, 1832, 278. 32. “Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal,” CEJ, February 2, 1833, 1. 33. Invoices dated November 1832 and December 8, 1832, in WRC 467 (Receipts). Invoices from Thomas Allan are in the same file, while the certificate showing numbers printed in London is in WRC 454 (Receipts).

Chapter 4 1. W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 214. In August 1832, Johnstone launched his own imitation of Chambers’s Journal, later known as Johnstone’s Magazine. It was absorbed into Tait’s Magazine (which Johnstone also printed) in 1834. 2. Johnstone invoice, February 18, 1832, in WRC 454 (Receipts). 3. Rare copies in folio survive in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Library copies elsewhere demonstrate that the issues from February-September 1832 were later reprinted in quarto, for the ease of making up sets. 4. On working hours in Edinburgh print shops, see Bell, Ambition and Industry, 43. 5. “Mechanism of Chambers’s Journal,” 150. 6. Ibid. 7. On Neill and Ballantyne, see Bell, Ambition and Industry, 37. The Scotsman is mentioned in ibid., 39, caption 1.6. For the North British Advertiser, see Timperley, Dictionary of Printers, 857n. 8. On Ballantyne, see ODNB. 9. This was 19 Waterloo Place, which had been occupied by Henry Constable from 1828–31. H. Constable took over A. Constable’s business after his death, but did not make a success from it. 10. W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 280. 11. On publisher-booksellers moving away from printing, see Feather, British Publishing, chap. 5. 12. Finkelstein, House of Blackwood, 38 (Blackwood’s were printers by 1830, see 17). For the others, see Bell, Ambition and Industry, 34. 13. Donaldson’s invoice, November 13, 1832, in WRC 467 (Receipts). 14. Miller’s invoice, 1833, in WRC 456 (Receipts). There were some purchases throughout the year, but the bulk were in spring. Wilson & Sinclair’s invoice, December 12, 1856, is in the same file. 15. The invoice to Orr (from Robert Wood, broker), June 13, 1833, is in WRC 456 (Receipts), as is that for Ruthven, which covers May and June 1833. 16. SBTI lists no machine makers in Scotland until the 1840s. Timperley, Dictionary of Printers, 94, lists the main makers in 1838 as Applegath & Cowper (with London and Manchester offices), Napier (London), and an unnamed Derbyshire firm. 17. On Gunn’s machine for P. D. Hardy of Dublin, see Timperley, Dictionary of Printers, 857n. Bell, Ambition and Industry, 419–20, mentions Gunn setting up a newspaper in Dublin in 1837. 18. A draft of this letter, from Chambers to James Meikle (lawyer), dated February 19, 1833, survives in WRC 456 (Receipts). 19. The progress of the legal debate can be traced in the detail of the lawyer George

270 ] Notes to Pages 51–60

Rutherford’s invoice for work done for Chambers, December 1833, in WRC 456 (Receipts). 20. The machinery may have been moved earlier, but by December, the plumber John Watt was clearly referring to a “Machine Room” at the High Street premises (December 20, 1833, WRC 455 (Receipts)). It was also in early December that Norton overhauled the steam engine, perhaps settling it into the new premises (invoice dated February 1834, for work done on December 4, 1833, WRC 455 (Receipts)). 21. “Mechanism of Chambers’s Journal,” 151. 22. Ballantyne’s invoice for May 3, 1834, includes the earlier work. See WRC 468 (Receipts). Norton refers to night work forthcoming in February in his invoice of February 1834 (WRC 455 (Receipts)), though his bill specifying the repairs, costing £26, was not issued until May 21, 1834 (WRC 468 (Receipts)). 23. Robb’s invoices are scattered throughout WRC 472 to WRC 485 (Receipts), from 1838 until at least 1846. These examples come from spring 1838 and spring 1839. 24. All quotations are from “Mechanism of Chambers’s Journal,” 151. 25. Advertisement for Household Narrative, Examiner, April 27, 1850, 272; “The Newspaper Stamp,” Examiner, August 2, 1851, 481–82; “Taxes on Knowledge,” Examiner, December 4, 1852, 777. 26. On Knight’s Companion, commenced in February 1833, see Gray, Charles Knight, 64, 171. 27. “Editorial,” CEJ, January 31, 1835, 1. 28. “Editorial,” CEJ, February 1, 1834, 1–2. 29. Early years of LEK are discussed in Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 115–16. 30. Johnstone’s invoice, February 18, 1832, in WRC 454 (Receipts). 31. Annual costs (and print runs) for CEJ are given in WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger 1845– 67), fol. 4. In 1844, 4,698,000 copies of the Journal were printed. Composition cost £460, paper cost £2,277, and printing cost £729. 32. “Editorial,” CEJ, February 1, 1834, 2n.

Chapter 5 1. “Editorial,” CEJ, February 1, 1834, 2n. 2. Quoted in W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 217. 3. Neuburg, Popular Literature, 124, and chap. 4 more generally. See also James, Print and the People. 4. “Prefatory Information,” Information for the People (1835), [i]. 5. Preface to Information for the People (2nd ed., 1842), 1:iii. 6. For Penny Cyclopaedia sales figures, see Knight, Struggles of a Book, 5. See also Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 2:201–3. Sales for Information are given in “Editorial,” CEJ, February 1, 1834, 1. For “37 years,” see “Charles Knight’s English Cyclopaedia,” Times, October 12, 1854, 10, col. A. 7. CEJ gave the cumulated sales of Information as 130,000 in 1845. The firm’s publication ledgers reveal that the 1842 (2nd) edition had sold almost 85,000 copies by that time. See “Address to Readers,” CEJ, January 4, 1845, 1; and WRC 274 (Publ. Ledger 1842–45), fols. 261–62.

Notes to Pages 60–69 [ 271

8. Knight, Struggles of a Book, 6. 9. Gray, Charles Knight, 54–55. 10. Detailed cost and income figures for the later editions of Information survive in the firm’s publication ledgers. The costs for 1842–45 are in WRC 274, fols. 261–62; they are carried over to WRC 275, fols. 6–7, where the line for 1845 includes the 1842–45 totals. Journal profits are given in WRC 275, fols. 4–5. The average annual profit from 1844–47 was £3,419. 11. On the Encyclopaedia, see Cooney, “Chambers’s Encyclopaedia.” 12. Compare Information (1835), [i], with Information (2nd ed., 1842), 1:iii. 13. “Emigration,” CEJ, February 4, 1832, 2. See also Scholnick, “Intersecting Empires.” 14. Profit margins for the Miscellany were calculated in WRC 415 (Estimated profits on books), fol. 1. 15. On the quality of machine work, see Savage, Dictionary of Printing, 465–67. 16. The publishing history of Constitution is reconstructed in van Wyhe, Phrenology, app. C. 17. Constitution does not appear in the W. & R. Chambers publications ledgers, though there is no doubt that they printed it (it is occasionally mentioned in correspondence between Robert Chambers and Combe). My examination of the entries in the Longman archives regarding Constitution suggests that Combe published at his own risk (thus taking all profits), using his publishers only as agents. Thus, it would have been his decision to ask Chambers to print a cheap edition. 18. van Wyhe, Phrenology, 217–20. 19. “Chambers’s Educational Course,” CEJ, November 14, 1835, 336. On this series, see Cooney, “Publishers for the People,” chap. 4. 20. For 1837, see advertisement for the series in Literary Gazette, September 2, 1837, 567. Sales to 1843 for the best sellers in the series are given in Cooney, “Publishers for the People,” 207. 21. The Lamartine volume is mentioned in “Entertainments by Employers to Their Workmen,” CEJ, July 13, 1839, 200. 22. On the meeting with Quételet, see W. Chambers, Long and Busy Life, 49. 23. On the publishing history of Paley’s Natural Theology, see Fyfe, “Publishing and the Classics.” 24. Costs, print runs, sales figures, and profits are taken from WRC 274 (Publ. Ledger 1842–45 [sic]), fols. 351–54. The calculations of profit are my own. 25. The Religious Tract Society sold its tracts at 1s.2d., 2s.4d., or 4s.8d. per hundred, depending on length. See the listings in “RTS Publications,” RTS archives, item 39. 26. Fyfe, Science and Salvation. 27. See Brougham, preface to Discourse. 28. On Robert’s faith, see Secord, Victorian Sensation, 84–85. William’s diary from his North American tour records church attendance on Sundays (see WRC 35). 29. See Cooney, “Publishers for the People,” chap. 2, § 1. 30. “Editorial,” CEJ, January 31, 1835, 1. 31. Knight, Old Printer, 242.

272 ] Notes to Pages 69–76

32. Crowe to Chambers, September 3, [1841?], in WRC 120 (Corresp. A- G). 33. Crowe to Ritchie, [n.d.], in WRC 120 (Corresp. A- G). Ritchie worked for Chambers from 1847 to c. 1858. The letter seems to date from the time when he took on the editorship, in the 1850s. 34. This phrasing comes from the “advertisement” inserted at the front of the American edition of Miscellany (Boston: Gould, Kendall & Lincoln, n.d.), i. 35. Chambers’s advertisement, Publishers’ Circular, October 15, 1852, 360. 36. Chambers’s advertisement, Publishers’ Circular, January 1, 1850, 13. 37. [Coventry Patmore], “Popular Serial Literature,” North British Review, May 1847, 124. 38. On William’s “precision,” see W. Chambers, Memoir of William and Robert Chambers, 380.

Chapter 6 1. Lumsden invoice, April 20, 1837, in WRC 470 (for Monarch). Ferguson invoice, March 15, 1837, in WRC 470 (for Jean Hastie). 2. Invoices for the shipping of packages to these firms in the late 1830s survive in the various files of Receipts in the Chambers archive, e.g., WRC 459–60, 470–71, and 495–96. McKinlay and Gilchrist still feature regularly in the correspondence from the 1850s (although Crombie seems to have disappeared). See WRC 163 (LB 1853–67). 3. “Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal,” CEJ, February 2, 1833, 1; “Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal,” CEJ, January 31, 1835, 2. 4. Very little has been written on the transatlantic book trade in the nineteenth century. But see West, “Book Publishing 1835–1900.” More attention has focused on the issue of copyright. See Barnes, Authors, Publishers, and Nowell-Smith, International Copyright Law. For the earlier period, see Raven, London Booksellers and the essays in Howsam and Raven, Books between Europe and the Americas. 5. “Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal,” CEJ, April 28, 1832, 52n. 6. A. Waldie of Philadelphia later reprinted excerpts under the title The Portfolio, and companion to the select circulating library: A semi-monthly publication, on the basis of Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal (1835–36). 7. Chambers to Hobart, July 20, 1833, in WRC 312 (LL 1832–40); the New York edition is noted in “Editorial,” CEJ, January 31, 1835, 2. Copies of the Richards edition of CEJ survive at the AAS: He appears to have printed volumes 1 and 2 (without original dates) over the course of 1834 and 1835. 8. Copies of all three editions survive at the AAS; their wrappers are an invaluable source for pricing information. 9. Agents are listed on wrappers to Jackson’s edition of Penny Magazine, January 1838 (held at AAS). 10. For “machinery,” see preface to Jackson’s 1832 volume of Penny Magazine, November 28, 1833. The printer’s imprint appears on the wrappers of the loose monthly parts and the bound volumes at AAS. 11. The offer to Jackson is recorded on June 21, 1838, in WRC 414 (Notes of Transac-

Notes to Pages 76–83 [ 273

tions). A New York edition of the Journal is noted in “Entertainments by Employers to Their Workmen,” 200 (where William Chambers notes that it costs the equivalent of 2½d. per issue). 12. Gould to Chambers, December 31, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 13. For Gould’s status, see “Correspondence [re: Boston Publishing Trade],” Norton’s Literary Gazette, May 1, 1854, 220. 14. See the trade catalog (April 1844) sent by Gould to Chambers, October 15, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 15. Preface to Information for the People (2nd ed., 1842), 2:iii. 16. Gould to Chambers, October 15, 1845, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 17. Gould to Chambers, January 1, 1846 and Chambers to Gould, January 31, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 18. Gould to Chambers, February 27, 1846, and Chambers to Gould, March [n.d.] 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 19. Gould to Chambers, February 27, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 20. Nowell-Smith, International Copyright Law, 78; Winship, “Printing with Plates.” 21. Lea & Blanchard to Chambers, July 5, 1850, in WRC 317 (LL 1850). 22. Gould to Chambers, February 27, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 23. Gould to Chambers, May 30, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 24. Gould to Chambers, December 31, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 25. See Gould’s advertisements in Literary World, February 13, 1847, 46 (repeated throughout February and March); and “Review: Chambers’s Cyclopaedia,” Literary World, April 3, 1847, 204. 26. See imprint of 1859 ed. (held at AAS). 27. Chambers to Gould, September 30, 1847, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47).

Chapter 7 1. “Memorandum: Reasons Which Urge Us to the Establishment of a Warehouse of Our Own in London,” February 12, 1853, in WRC 320. 2. “Mechanism of Chambers’s Journal,” 151. 3. Invoice from Scotsman, June 19, 1839, in WRC 459 (Receipts). 4. On Middleton, see Moran, Printing Presses, 129. 5. For the two Norton machines, see Norton’s invoices for February 1, 1838, in WRC 470 (Receipts), and for August 1, 1841, in WRC 474 (Receipts). For Middleton’s 1841 machine, see his invoice for February 9, 1839, in WRC 459 (Receipts). 6. For hydraulic press, see Alexander More’s invoice, June 12, 1839, in WRC 459 (Receipts). For board cutting, etc., see Sherwin, Cope & Co. to Chambers, November 6, 1840, in WRC 473 (Receipts). For Middleton, see Middleton’s invoice, February 23, 1839, in WRC 459 (Receipts). 7. On Smibert’s origins, see Proceedings at Peebles, 23. On his starting pay, see Smibert to Chambers, July 28, 1840, in WRC 312 (LL 1832–40). On his leaving Chambers, see the several letters between Smibert and Chambers, July-September 1842, in WRC 313 (LL 1841–44). For Wills’s starting salary, see Wills to Chambers, November 4, 1842, in WRC

274 ] Notes to Pages 83–91

313 (LL 1841–44). On contributors and editorial assistants more generally, see Cooney, “Publishers for the People,” 64–81. 8. Chambers balance sheet for 1845, in WRC 304 (Balance-sheet book), fols. 33–36. 9. Masonry work is detailed in the invoices from Wilsons, June 1845, in WRC 477 (Receipts) and August 1845, WRC 478 (Receipts); and from the “Measurement of Work Done,” July 18, 1845, in WRC 479 (Receipts). 10. The engine was listed against December 14, 1844, in Norton’s invoice, June 1845, in WRC 477 (Receipts). 11. Middleton’s invoice, March 1845, in WRC 478 (Receipts). 12. Middleton’s invoices, March 1845 and June 1845, both in WRC 478 (Receipts). 13. More’s invoice, July 31, 1845 (for work done June 12–13), in WRC 478 (Receipts). 14. Robb’s invoice, July 1845, in WRC 478 (Receipts). 15. “Address to Readers” CEJ, January 4, 1845, 1–3. 16. Chambers to Henry Wylie (Engineer to the Railway Station Access Company), June 4, 1858, in WRC 325 (LL 1858), and other papers in the same file (under “Railway”). 17. “Messrs Chambers’s Soiree,” CEJ, September 6, 1845, 157. 18. Paternalism in business is most often discussed in the context of religion, particularly evangelical religion. See, for instance, the essays in Jeremy, Business and Religion. 19. See financial documents and printed circular for 1850, concerning the Edinburgh Public Baths, in WRC 318 (LL 1851). 20. Donation of books is reported in the Report of Directors of Peebles Institution, 1849, in WRC 636 (Press Cuttings). Founding of the library is described in W. Chambers, Long and Busy Life, 98. 21. The library, religious instruction, and Saturday afternoons were mentioned in the speech of thanks given by a compositor at the soirée, reported in “Messrs Chambers’s Soiree,” 159; the teacher Robert Johnstone’s invoices for the second half of 1841 are in WRC 475 (Receipts). 22. On the difference between the Chambers’s soirées and others, see the explanatory note to “Entertainments by Employers to Their Workmen,” 199n. 23. For food and drink, see invoice from George Johnston of the Temperance Coffee House, July 8, 1840, in WRC 472 (Receipts). For the band, see invoice from W. G. Spindler, July 8, 1840, in WRC 472 (the number of men was not specified that year, but it was six in 1838 and 1841). 24. “Notes of a Trip to Scotland; What May Be Seen in a Fortnight, with a Lady in the Case,” Literary World, November 20, 1847, 379. 25. F.S. [Frederick Saunders], “The Publishing Business,” Literary World, January 5, 1850, 12.

Chapter 8 1. Lardner, Railway Economy, 2. 2. [Robert Chambers?], “Things of My Time,” CEJ, August 27, 1859, 129. The 1832 journey time comes from “Roads in Scotland,” CEJ, April 14, 1832, 43.

Notes to Pages 91–101 [ 275

3. Putnam, Tourist in Europe, 122. 4. On the competition between locomotives to service the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, see McGowan, Rail, Steam and Speed. 5. “A Flight,” first published in Household Words, August 30, 1851, reprinted in Dickens, Selected Journalism, 138, 139, 145. 6. Wilson, First with the News, 90. 7. Putnam, Tourist in Europe, 81. 8. Lardner, Railway Economy, 56. 9. Daunton, Royal Mail, chap. 4. 10. Simmons, Victorian Railway, 222. 11. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, table F8. 12. Wilson, First with the News, chaps. 2–3. 13. Ibid., chaps. 4–5 (for the 1847–48 speeds, see 96–97). 14. Daunton, Royal Mail, 55; Simmons, Victorian Railway, 230–31. 15. Daunton, Royal Mail, 55–66 (where the exceptions are discussed). 16. Arthur Young, 1770, quoted in Lardner, Railway Economy, 34. 17. Lardner, Railway Economy, 35. 18. Ibid., 168, 277. 19. “One and All,” CEJ, April 17, 1847, 241–42. 20. Dickens, Selected Journalism, 137–45. 21. “Plain Rules for Railway Travellers,” in Lardner, Railway Economy, 333–47. 22. Emerson to Thoreau, December 2, 1847, quoted in Ashton, 142 Strand, 35. 23. Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, 22ff. 24. “Railway Literature,” CEJ, March 22, 1845, 177. 25. “Hints to All Railway Travellers,” Black’s Picturesque Tourist, ix–x. 26. Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, 65. 27. “Reading for the Rail,” Norton’s Literary Gazette, June 15, 1852, 108. 28. The move from conversation to reading is discussed in Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, chap. 4, especially 64ff. 29. [Masson], “Aspects of Literature,” 175; Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, 65–66. 30. “Reading for the Rail,” Norton’s Literary Gazette, 108. 31. Trollope, Autobiography, 87. 32. Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, 65–66. 33. “Weekly Chit-Chat,” CEJ, February 3, 1844, 80.

Chapter 9 1. See letters from William Chambers to Robert Chambers, September 25–28, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 2. Orr’s traveler is referred to in Orr to Chambers, January 18, 1840, in WRC 121 (Corr.). On commercial travelers, see Bell, “Pioneers of Literature”. 3. Mumby, House of Routledge, 55. 4. Smith to Chambers, [n.d.] November 1857, in WRC 324 (LL 1857) and November 27, 1857, in WRC 122 (Corr.).

276 ] Notes to Pages 101–12

5. See the many letters from Chambers to Roberts, e.g., January-February 1854, in WRC 162 (LB 1853–54). 6. Chambers to McGlashan, September 18, 1854, in WRC 162 (LB 1853–54), fol. 195. On McGlashan, see Bell, Ambition and Industry, 419. 7. Memorandum from Glasgow agents, November 12, 1832, in WRC 467 (Receipts). 8. Chambers to Philip, December 5, 1848, in WRC 315 (LL 1848); Chambers to Philip, August 10, 1850, in WRC 317 (LL 1850). 9. Robert Chambers to Orr, November 16, 1849, in WRC 316 (LL 1849); Orr to Chambers, August 28, 1852, in WRC 319 (LL 1852). 10. See David Chambers’s accounts for 1848 and 1849, in WRC 315 (LL 1848) and WRC 316 (LL 1849), respectively. The accounts for the first half of 1849 suggest that David was paying himself a salary of £106 a year. 11. “Miscellany Sales, 1847,” in WRC 415 (Estimated Profits on Books, 1850–78), fol. 24. 12. Chambers to Orr, June 29, 1852, in WRC 320 (LL 1853). 13. R. Chambers and W. Chambers, Gazetteer of Scotland, 492. 14. Monthly invoices from the company for spring 1845 and spring-summer 1848 survive in WRC 478 (Receipts) and WRC 484 (Receipts). 15. “Memorandum: Reasons Which Urge Us to the Establishment of a Warehouse of Our Own in London,” February 12, 1853, in WRC 320 (LL 1853). 16. W. Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 273. 17. Ibid., chap. 13. See also Cooney, “William Somerville Orr.” 18. Orr to Chambers, July 10, 1852, in WRC 319 (LL 1852). 19. “Memorandum,” February 12, 1853, in WRC 320 (LL 1853). 20. William Chambers to Robert Chambers, March 4, 1853 (regarding his memory of the 1846 negotiations), in WRC 320 (LL 1853). 21. Orr to Robert Chambers, October 3, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 22. William Chambers to Robert Chambers, September 28, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 23. Chambers to Orr, June 29, 1852, in WRC 320 (LL 1853 sic). 24. William Chambers to Orr, December 17, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 25. William Chambers to Robert Chambers, September 28, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47) (“large suite”); “Gross Profits, 1847” and “Amount of business, 1848” in the Orr file of WRC 316 (LL 1849) (which contains further correspondence relating to the Strand shop); Orr to Chambers, November 23, 1849, in WRC 316 (LL 1849) (“serious dread”). 26. These suggestions can be deduced from Orr’s reply to a (lost) letter of December 31, 1851. See Orr to Chambers, January 5, 1852, in WRC 319 (LL 1852). 27. Orr to Chambers, January 5, 1852, in WRC 319 (LL 1852). 28. Chambers to Orr, June 29, 1852, in WRC 320 (LL 1853 sic), sets out costs and income for the Journal for 1851. 29. Robert Chambers to William Chambers, n.d. [February 15, 1853]; William Chambers to Robert Chambers, February 26, 1853; Robert Chambers to William Chambers, March 2, 1853; William Chambers to Robert Chambers, March 4, 1853, all in WRC 320 (LL 1853).

Notes to Pages 113–20 [ 277

30. “Memorandum,” February 12, 1853, in WRC 320 (LL 1853). 31. David Chambers to Robert Chambers, January 11, 1854, in WRC 109 (Corr.). 32. Ibid. 33. Colclough, “John Menzies,” 143–44. 34. David Chambers to Robert Chambers, January 11, 1854, in WRC 109 (Corr.).

Chapter 10 1. “Railway Literature,” CEJ, March 22, 1845, 177–80. 2. On Measom, see G. H. Martin, “Measom and His Railway Guides.” 3. “Railway Literature,” CEJ, March 22, 1845, 179. 4. On Routledge, see ODNB and Mumby, House of Routledge. 5. Fyfe, “Copyrights and Competition.” 6. Feather, British Publishing, 120. 7. Putnam, “Rough Notes of Thirty Years in the Trade” [1863], reprinted in Greenspan, House of Putnam, 276. 8. Routledge trade catalog, December 1852 (RKP 207), 5. 9. Most publishers announced their new works in the fortnightly Publishers’ Circular. The earliest mention I have been able to find of the Railway Library was a listing (not an advertisement) for the third volume, in February 1849—and it was not even identified as belonging to the Railway Library. Nor did Routledge advertise the Railway Library in the Publishers’ Circular once he was more established. 10. Routledge trade catalog, December 1852 (RKP 207), 38. 11. This figure is often cited by historians of railway publishing, but it is not clear when this order was in place. In the 1934 history of the firm, the order (for 1,040 copies) is mentioned in the chapter dealing with the 1880s. See Mumby, House of Routledge, 140. There is no doubt, however, that Smith’s bookstalls were selling large numbers of Routledge’s volumes from the beginning. 12. Routledge trade catalog, December 1852 (RKP 207), 35. 13. “Bohn’s Shilling Series,” Examiner, March 23, 1850, 181. 14. On Uncle Tom, see Parfait, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 108. See also St. Clair, Reading Nation, 522. 15. See Routledge’s trade catalogs, e.g., December 1852 and August 1854 (RKP 207). 16. On Routledge and decoration, see Mumby, House of Routledge, chaps. 3 and 5. 17. See individual titles in HRAM, Publications Books 1 and 2. 18. Mumby, House of Routledge, 59–60. 19. “Literature for the People,” Times, February 9, 1854, 10. 20. Knight, Old Printer, 268. 21. “Address to Readers,” CEJ, January 4, 1845, 1. 22. Quoted in Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 2:327. 23. 1855 circulations given in Anderson, Printed Image, 14. 24. For example, Knight, Old Printer, 281–82; [Oliphant], “Reading for the Million,” 206–210. 25. [Oliphant], “Reading for the Million,” 211. 26. “Cheap Literature,” British Quarterly Review, April 1859, 330–31.

278 ] Notes to Pages 129–31

27. Ibid., 329. 28. Knight, Old Printer, 278–9. The American comment is from “Reading for the Rail,” Norton’s Literary Gazette, June 15, 1852, 108. 29. “Cheap Literature,” 344. 30. On the Leisure Hour, see Fyfe, “Periodicals and Book Series,” sales figures at 268. 31. Knight, Old Printer, 247. 32. “Repeal of the Paper Duty,” Times, January 30, 1851, 5. Subsequent articles refer specifically to William’s involvement in the campaign in early 1851.

Chapter 11 1. deMarco, Reading and Riding, 26 and n16. DeMarco suggests that Hachette was inspired by seeing W. H. Smith’s bookstalls while visiting London for the Great Exhibition in 1851, but her discussion also reveals that Phillips’s article was reprinted in France. 2. [Phillips], Literature of the Rail, 7. 3. Collins, “Unknown Public,” 217. 4. “Booksellers,” CEJ, February 6, 1847, 88–89. 5. “Railway Literature,” 281, 280. 6. Maxwell, Life of William Henry Smith, 48. 7. [Phillips], Literature of the Rail, 18. 8. Wilson, First with the News, chap. 5; Hammond, Formation of Literary Taste, chap. 2. 9. “Literary Intelligence,” Norton’s Literary Gazette, March 1, 1854, 107. 10. “Cheap Literature,” 324. 11. Colclough, “Library of W. H. Smith.” 12. Colclough, “John Menzies,” 148–49. 13. [Phillips], Literature of the Rail, 20. 14. “Railroad Bookselling,” 101. 15. On bindings, see Sadleir, Publishers’ Binding Styles. On paperbacks, see Schmoller, “Paperback Revolution.” For some nineteenth-century exceptions, see Fyfe, Science and Salvation, chap. 4; Topp, Victorian Yellowbacks, introduction to vol. 1 (on “Books for the Country”). 16. “Railway Literature,” 281, 280. 17. [Phillips], Literature of the Rail, 15–17. 18. On the history of color printing, see Twyman, Printing, chap. 3. On Routledge’s use of it, see Topp, Victorian Yellowbacks, introduction to vol. 1. 19. “Literature for the People,” Times, February 9, 1854, 10; [Masson], “Aspects of Literature,” 165. 20. “Railway Literature,” 281. 21. Ibid., 280. 22. “Christie Johnston and Cheap Literature,” Times, December 15, 1853, 8. 23. “Railroad Bookselling,” 102; “Reading for the Rail,” Norton’s Literary Gazette, June 15, 1852, 108. 24. [Masson], “Aspects of Literature,” 175–76. 25. Smith’s advertisement appears amidst the “assistants wanted” listings in Publishers’ Circular, June 15, 1850, 215.

Notes to Pages 131–42 [ 279

26. On Smith, morality, and the role of the railway companies, see Wilson, First with the News, 108–9. Compare Maxwell, Life of William Henry Smith, 48–55, who emphasized Smith’s image as enforcer. For quotes, see “Railroad Bookselling,” 101. 27. Maxwell, Life of William Henry Smith, 85. 28. All discussion of the contents and sales at W. H. Smith’s bookstalls at Bletchley and Rugby is taken from Colclough, “ ‘Purifying the Sources of Amusement.’ ” 29. “Railroad Bookselling,” 100–102. 30. [Phillips], Literature of the Rail, 19, 22. 31. Ibid., 17, 19, 21. 32. “Railroad Bookselling,” 101. The 1858 edition identifies itself as the eighth thousand. 33. “Cheap Literature,” 326.

Chapter 12 1. [Phillips], Literature of the Rail, 9–16. 2. Ibid., 23. 3. Ibid., 22. 4. “Railroad Bookselling,” 101. 5. Publishers’ Circular, August 1, 1848 (adv. 767). This advertisement announces the price of the first ten volumes as 10d., but it was later raised to 1s. 6. “Literature for the People,” Times, February 9, 1854, 10. 7. WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger 1845–67), fols. 4–5. 8. Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 2:327. Knight’s account makes clear the declining sales of the Penny Magazine, e.g., 2:325. On the SDUK, see Kinraide, “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” esp. 73–83 (for the decline and closure). 9. Date of Curry’s bankruptcy deduced from Jones to Curry, June 7, 1847, and July 5, 1847, in Correspondence file, Religious Tract Society archives, School of Oriental and African Studies, London. 10. For Chambers’s involvement with these works, see the memoranda and correspondence between Chambers and Tyler & Manning between April and October 1854, contained in WRC 321 (LL 1854). In June, Chambers were planning to revise and publish the Cyclopaedia, which they believed to be owned by Tyler & Manning, but by October, the memorandum regarding the copyright of the Family Bible also cancels the earlier agreement about the Cyclopaedia. Orr is mentioned in these documents, but it is not clear what his connection was with Tyler & Manning. Knight used the copyright as the basis of the English Cyclopaedia. See Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 3:270–73. 11. Knight, Old Printer, 247. 12. Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 1:ix. 13. “Charles Knight’s English Cyclopaedia,” Times, October 12, 1854, 10. 14. “Literature for the People,” Times, February 9, 1854, 10; Cox’s advertisement, Publishers’ Circular, November 15, 1851, 380 (adv. 948). On Knight’s finances, see Gray, Charles Knight, app. I. 15. See Fyfe, Science and Salvation; Clarke, History of SPCK. 16. “Memorandum,” February 12, 1853, in WRC 320 (LL 1853). 17. The firm’s balance sheets are in WRC 304 (Balance Sheet Book).

280 ] Notes to Pages 143–50

18. “Repeal of the Paper Duty,” Times, January 30, 1851, 5. 19. “Memorandum,” February 12, 1853, in WRC 320 (LL 1853). 20. Orr to Chambers, January 3, 1846 [dated 1845], in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 21. Orr to Chambers, July 19, 1852, in WRC 319 (LL 1852); Household Words circulation, as cited by Orr; Chambers’s Journal circulation, in WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger 1845–67), fols. 4–5. 22. Orr to Chambers, January 5, 1852, in WRC 319 (LL 1852). 23. This phrasing comes from the “Advertisement” inserted at the front of the American edition of Miscellany (Boston: Gould, Kendall & Lincoln, n.d.), i. 24. The “Plan for Papers for the People” appears in WRC 291 (Author’s Book), 281–311. There are also two sets of loose papers inside the covers of this volume, listing the topics that appeared in the series (with authors’ names) and topics that were considered but not published. 25. Publishers’ Circular, January 1, 1850, 13 (adv. 53). 26. Publishers’ Circular, December 15, 1851, 448 (adv. 1087). 27. Gould & Lincoln, descriptive catalog 1854/55 (AAS), 15. 28. W. & R. Chambers trade catalog 1858 (WRC 600), 10. 29. CEJ circulation from WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger 1845–67), fols. 4–5; London Journal from Anderson, Printed Image, 14. 30. Sales and profit figures are listed in WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger 1845–67). The Miscellany (see fols. 10–11) was in profit by £2407 by the end of 1847. Its sales reached 132,500 by 1860. The Papers for the People (see fols. 12–13) had sold 32,180 by the end of 1852 and was £492 in profit. Its sales had reached 38,590 by 1860. The Repository (see fols. 16–17) had sold 29,037 by the end of 1854 and still owed £1,855. By 1860, its sales were still only 33,842, with £1,104 to pay off. 31. WRC 598 (Educational Catalogue, 1851), [3]. 32. Secord, Victorian Sensation, chap. 11. 33. “Christie Johnston and Cheap Literature,” Times, December 15, 1853, 8.

Chapter 13 1. “Christie Johnston and Cheap Literature,” Times, December 15, 1853, 8. 2. “Literature of the Rail,” Publishers’ Circular, September 1, 1851, 281. 3. “Literature for the People,” Times, February 9, 1854, 10. 4. For Murray, see Smiles, Publisher and His Friends. See also Bennett, “John Murray’s Family Library”; Fraser, “John Murray’s Colonial and Home Library.” 5. Publishers’ Circular, May 1, 1851, 150 (adv. 341). 6. See [Phillips], Literature of the Rail, 16–17. 7. Publishers’ Circular, September 1, 1851, 292 (adv. 733). 8. [Phillips], Literature of the Rail, 6. 9. “Reading for the Rail,” Norton’s Literary Gazette, June 15, 1852, 108. 10. A full listing of the series, with details of prior publication, can be found in Topp, Victorian Yellowbacks, vol. 6. Payments to authors are recorded in Longman Archive H15, fols. 30, 31, and 81 (whereas print runs and sales are in F2, passim). 11. [Leifchild], Our Coal, vii.

Notes to Pages 150–63 [ 281

12. Predicted costs for the Traveller’s Library, unnumbered page at the front of Longman Archive F2, including 25s. for stereotyping. The printer’s name appears on surviving copies. 13. The actual print runs and sales figures are given in Longman Archive F2, passim. 14. Predicted costs, Longman Archive F2. 15. The production costs are itemized in Longman Archive H15, fol. 81. The total given there is £122.9s.1d., which, like some of the other Traveller’s Library entries, seems to be the total without including the advertising costs. 16. Longman Archive F2, fol. 15. 17. Ibid., fol. 11. 18. Ibid., passim. 19. “Christie Johnston and Cheap Literature,” Times, December 12, 1853, 8. 20. For partnerships, etc., see Anderson and Rose, British Literary Publishing Houses, 262. 21. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, chap. 4. 22. “Literature for the People,” Times, February 9, 1854, 10. 23. Routledge trade catalog, June 1853 (RKP 207), 31. 24. HRAM Publ. Books, vol. 1, passim. These ledgers give print runs not sales figures. 25. Sales figures from Topp, Victorian Yellowbacks, vol. 1. 26. The paperback format was continued only until 1855, when it was replaced with limp cloth bindings and yellowback bindings. 27. On Martin, see Fyfe, “Conscientious Workmen.” For sales to 1853, see HRAM Publ. Book, vol. 1, fol. 158. 28. Compare W. Martin, “Poultry,” and W. Martin, Poultry Yard. 29. HRAM Publ. Books, vol. 1, fol. 356 (Small Farms, £20), vol. 1, fol. 391 (Angling, £25), and vol. 2, fol. 12 (Kitchen Garden, £30). 30. HRAM Publ. Books, vol. 1, fol. 394, and vol. 2, fol. 267 (Pigeons and Rabbits), vol. 1, fol. 12 (Kitchen Garden), vol. 2, fol. 112 (Small Farms). 31. Knight, Old Printer, 246. 32. Print runs from HRAM Publ. Book, vol. 2, fol. 373 (Sea-Shore), and vol. 2, fol. 424 (Country). Format details and “Reading for the Sea-Side” from advertisements in the shilling edition (copy in Bodleian Library, Oxford), title-page verso and back cover. 33. Routledge trade catalog, August 1854 (RKP 207), 39. 34. See entry in Topp, Victorian Yellowbacks, vol. 1. 35. On Routledge’s fortune, see ODNB. 36. “Review: The Periodicals for October,” Examiner, October 5, 1850, 638. 37. “Bohn’s Shilling Library,” Examiner, March 23, 1850, 181.

Chapter 14 1. R. Roberts, “The ‘Sirius’ and ‘Great Western’ Steamers,” Manchester Guardian, May 23, 1838, 3. 2. “Liverpool,” Times, April 11, 1838, 5; “Ship News,” Times, April 16, 1838, 7. 3. “Money-Market and City Intelligence,” Times, May 17, 1838, 5.

282 ] Notes to Pages 163–78

4. “Express from Falmouth,” Times, May 22, 1838, 6; Roberts, “ ‘Sirius’ and ‘Great Western’ Steamers,” 3. 5. “Express from Falmouth,” 6. 6. Roberts, “ ‘Sirius’ and ‘Great Western’ Steamers,” 3. 7. On American steamboats, see Cowan, American Technology, 105–12. 8. These services were routinely advertised on the front page of the Times; my examples all come from May 1838. 9. “The Three Eras of Ocean Steam-Navigation,” CEJ, September 16, 1854, 188–90. 10. Marsden and Smith, Engineering Empires, 89 (for the ongoing competition from sailing ships), 119–27 (on the coal question). 11. Roberts, “ ‘Sirius’ and ‘Great Western’ Steamers,” 3. 12. Great Western’s tonnage was 1,340 tons, but, unlike sailing ships, some of this volume was occupied by her engines and paddle wheels, so the available cargo space was not as substantial as might be expected. 13. Figures reprinted in Bowen, Century of Atlantic Travel, 31. 14. Marsden and Smith, Engineering Empires, 108–11; Hyde, Cunard, chap. 2. 15. Dickens, American Notes, 9, 21. 16. On contracts, see Hyde, Cunard, chap. 2. 17. Chambers described his voyage in W. Chambers, Things as They Are, chap. 1. 18. Ibid., 6. 19. Cincinnati Evening Post, reprinted in Times, May 22, 1838, 6. 20. On the problems of magnetism, see Marsden and Smith, Engineering Empires, 27–33. 21. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 12–13. 22. Smith, Higginson, and Wolstenholme, “ ‘Imitations of God’s Own Works’ ”; Smith and Scott, “ ‘Trust in Providence.’ ” 23. Hyde, Cunard, 38–39. See also [William Chambers], “Steam Vessel Disasters,” CEJ, December 23, 1854, 405–7; [William Chambers], “A Few More Words on Steam Vessel Disasters,” CEJ, February 10, 1855, 86–87. 24. “Arrival of the Great Western,” Times, May 23, 1838, 5. 25. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 4. 26. Scholnick, “Intersecting Empires.” 27. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 108–9. 28. W. Chambers, Memoir of William and Robert Chambers, 382. 29. He also added a new appendix to Things as They Are, warning emigrants to avoid the United States until the “continued political distractions” were resolved. W. Chambers, Things as They Are (2nd ed.), 369–74.

Chapter 15 1. “Popular Information on National Institutions: Schools,” CEJ, August 18, 1832, 113; “Education in America,” ibid., 116. 2. Zboray, Fictive People, app. I. 3. WRC 35 (American Notebook), entries for October 15 (Boston) and November 3 (Ontario).

Notes to Pages 178–88 [ 283

4. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 203–4. 5. Dickens, American Notes, 269. 6. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 209, 203. 7. Loughran, Republic in Print. 8. U.S. postal rates are discussed in Casper et al., Industrial Book, 183. 9. On informed citizenry, its relationship to educational initiatives, and the place of women and African Americans within it, see Brown, Strength of a People, chaps. 4–6. 10. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 199–200 (New York), 238–43 (Massachusetts). 11. Brown, Strength of a People, 133–51. 12. Trollope, North America, 271. 13. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 159–60. 14. Ibid., 48. 15. Ibid., 151–55. 16. William Chambers, letter to the editor, New York Times, December 19, 1853, 6. 17. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 247–48. 18. The history of British copyright and the full story of the 1774 decision is found in Feather, Publishing, Piracy and Politics; Rose, Authors and Owners. A highly readable account of print culture in the late eighteenth century is found in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, chaps. 3–4. 19. The emergence of publishing in early national America is discussed in Green, “From Printer to Publisher”; Remer, Printers and Men of Capital; Kelley and Gross, Extensive Republic. 20. Schreyer, “Copyright and Books.” 21. Casper et al., Industrial Book, 10–13 (value of publishing trade), 151–52 (value of imports/exports). 22. On trade courtesy, see Schreyer, “Copyright and Books”; Winship, “Transatlantic Book Trade” (who argues that courtesy was more important than scholars have recognized and gave publishers de facto, if not legal, copyright). 23. Statistics from Tebbel, Creation of an Industry, 221–22. See also McGill, American Literature, 271–72. On American authorship, see Casper et al., Industrial Book, chap. 3. 24. West, “Book Publishing 1835–1900.” On colonial publishing, see Weedon, Victorian Publishing, 40–44. 25. American contacts in London are traced in West, “Book Publishing 1835–1900.” For more on Putnam, see Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam. For the Bible and Putnam’s efforts to find a purchaser for it, see “Selected Correspondence” reprinted in Greenspan, House of Putnam. 26. “The Trade,” Norton’s Literary Gazette, July 1853, 116. 27. Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 172. 28. Nord, Faith in Reading. 29. Very little has been written on the American useful knowledge societies. The Boston society is mentioned in Tebbel, Creation of an Industry, 241–42; the New York society is mentioned in Brown, Strength of a People, 121–26. For contemporary criticisms of the unruly and uncontrollable cheap print culture of 1840s and 1850s America, see Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, chap. 6.

284 ] Notes to Pages 188–95

30. “Prospectus for American Library of Useful Knowledge,” 1, bound into AAS volume PubSer.A40.(02).1831. 31. This price was the same as the volumes of the London SDUK’s Library of Entertaining Knowledge, but five times the price of the original Library of Useful Knowledge treatises. 32. For foundation of ASDUK, see the Prospectus issued April 1837, AAS Nat In. S678. Amer 1837. For the “American Library,” see the October 1837 circular, AAS Nat In S678. Amer 1837a. 33. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, 4–6. 34. Brother Jonathan and New World are discussed in Tebbel, Creation of an Industry, 242–45; Barnes, Authors, Publishers, chap. 1; McGill, American Literature. 35. Criticism of “Cheap Books,” quoted from the Boston Transcript, in Literary World, July 9, 1853, 548. 36. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 207; WRC 35 (American Notebook), entry for November 19. 37. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 209, 203.

Chapter 16 1. See McGill, American Literature. 2. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 208. The portion of this passage discussing the legality and fairness of reprinting did not appear in the original Journal article. 3. Literary World quoted in Publishers’ Circular, March 15, 1848, 107. 4. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, 30–34. 5. U.S. reprint circulation at Barnes, Authors, Publishers, 41; UK circulation (for 1831) in Bell, Ambition and Industry, 352. 6. This discussion of Blackwood’s Magazine is drawn from Barnes, Authors, Publishers, chap. 2. 7. On the availability of information, to whites of all classes, in the 1840s, see Brown, Knowledge Is Power, chap. 9. 8. Tebbel, Creation of an Industry, 242–44. 9. Harper advertisement, Literary World, February 20, 1847, 69. 10. For background on Jackson, see the trade catalogs held at the AAS, particularly that for November 1831. See also the wrappers of the AAS set of Jackson’s Penny Magazine (for instance, the February 1834 wrappers list Young’s works, and those for January 1837 list Valpy’s). These wrappers do not advertise the Saturday Magazine until January 1837, but the existing copies of that magazine suggest that Jackson had begun printing the 1835 volume during 1836. 11. “Circular / Penny Magazine,” William Jackson, June 20, 1833 (AAS). 12. For the sale to Baldwin, see Barnes, Authors, Publishers, 32. 13. “Introduction to the Second Volume,” American Magazine, September 1835, 1–2. 14. His replacement is clear from the introduction to the third volume of the American Magazine, October 1836. 15. Wright’s promise appeared in the banner of the periodical. The listed articles all appeared in Wright’s Paper, October 1847.

Notes to Pages 195–205 [ 285

16. McGill, American Literature, 24–26. 17. Casper et al., Industrial Book, 212–19. 18. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, 389. 19. Ibid., 385 (figures calculating educational trade at 44 percent of total), 389 (quote, and a different estimate of 30–40 percent). 20. Committee of Council’s circular, 1848, filed under C in WRC 316 (LL 1849), along with correspondence between Chambers and the Committee. See also Poor Law Board to Chambers, December 18, 1848, in WRC 315 (LL 1848). 21. See MS note on front cover (and in margins) of “Catalogue of Chambers’s Educational Course” (1851), WRC 598. 22. Information from library catalog entries. 23. Casper et al., Industrial Book, 219. 24. Lea & Blanchard were advertising the series from July 1847. See Literary World, July 31, 1847, 616. 25. Lea & Blanchard to Chambers, May 27, 1850, in WRC 121 (Corresp.), 40. 26. See Lea & Blanchard correspondence with Chambers (July, September, and November 1850), in WRC 317 (LL 1850). See also Blanchard & Lea advertisement, Literary World, May 10, 1851, 383; “Review: Kaltschmidt’s Dictionary of the Latin Language,” Literary World, February 14, 1852, 117. 27. Lea & Blanchard to Chambers, July 5, 1850, and Chambers to Lea & Blanchard, September 6, 1850, in WRC 317 (LL 1850). 28. Lea & Blanchard to Chambers, July 5, 1850, in WRC 317 (LL 1850). 29. Apart from the Zieber reprint discussed below, the only other (possibly) unauthorized reprint of an instructive serial that I have been able to trace is of Papers for the People by J. W. Moore. Surviving copies (in the AAS) make clear that this was stereotyped in Philadelphia, and I have found no record of approval for this in the Chambers archive. However, Moore was a regular and long-standing customer of Chambers, so it would have been slightly odd for him to risk antagonizing them. 30. See Dzwontoski, American Literary Publishing Houses. 31. Zieber advertisement, Literary World, February 27, 1847, 96. 32. “Zumpt’s Latin Grammar,” Literary World, April 17, 1847, 251. For instance, see Harper advertisement, Literary World, February 6, 1847, 23. 33. Preface to Information for the People (1st American ed., 1848), 1:[1]. Compare with Preface to Information for the People (2nd ed., 1842), 1:[iii]. 34. UK trade price was 1s.1½ d. per dozen, with 13 counting as 12. See, for instance, WRC 600 (1858 Trade Catalogue). 35. Chambers to Hobart, July 20, 1833, in WRC 312 (LL 1832–40); Chambers to Gould, September 30, 1847, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47), specifying a minimum order of 5,000 copies. 36. Gould to Chambers, December 31, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 37. For later Miscellany orders, see Chambers to Gould, August 15, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 39; August 16, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 97. 38. Gould to Chambers, December 31, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). The AAS holds a copy of Gould’s edition.

286 ] Notes to Pages 205–10

39. A copy survives at the AAS. It is not clear if this was imported as sheets or printed from plates: Gould routinely asked for plates, and Chambers usually refused, but in this case, they did offer plates if they could be sent unfinished. See Chambers to Gould, April 23, 1852, in WRC 319 (LL 1852). 40. Gould to Chambers, December 31, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 41. Gould to Chambers, May 30, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 42. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, 238.

Chapter 17 1. Matthiessen, American Renaissance; Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance. 2. [S. Smith], “Statistical Annals of the United States of America,” Edinburgh Review 33 (January 1820): 79. 3. Publishers’ Circular, October 1, 1847, 338. 4. Casper et al., Industrial Book, 187. 5. Publishers’ Circular, March 15, 1848, 115. 6. Literary World, February 13, 1847, 46. 7. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, 6–7. 8. For example, Wiley & Putnam’s advertisements, Literary World, February 6, 1847, 22; and Appleton’s advertisement, Literary World, April 10, 1847, 238. 9. Chambers to Lippincott, June 30, 1851, in WRC 318 (LL 1851). 10. Gould to Chambers, May 30, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 11. Publishers’ Circular, October 1, 1847, 338. 12. Gould to Chambers, October 15, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). An MS note on the letter shows that it was dealt with on November 17. 13. Gould to Chambers, January 1, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 14. Chambers to Lippincott, May 8 and December 18, 1856, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fols. 143, 197. 15. Chambers to Lippincott, October 24, 1856, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 185. 16. Publishers’ Circular, February 1, 1848, 42. 17. Price is given in the firm’s advertisement, Publishers’ Circular, August 1, 1849, 262. 18. Publishers’ Circular, October 15, 1847, 347; November 1, 1847, 362; and December 1, 1847, 397. 19. On Chapman and the circle at 142 Strand, see Ashton, 142 Strand, especially chap. 1 for his American connections. For Greeley’s recommendation, see Greeley, Glances at Europe, 46. 20. On Low, see ODNB; West, “Book Publishing 1835–1900,” 363–64; Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 66. 21. Publishers’ Circular, July 16, 1849, 241. 22. Publishers’ Circular, November 15, 1849, 387; and December 15, 1849, 428. 23. Publishers’ Circular, August 16, 1852, 304, and October 1, 1852, 346; Literary World, November 13, 1852, 318, and November 27, 1852, 336. 24. Publishers’ Circular, November 15, 1852, 402. 25. On the failed copyright agreement, see Barnes, Authors, Publishers, chap. 12. 26. Publishers’ Circular, January 1, 1847, 24.

Notes to Pages 210–19 [ 287

27. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 206–7. 28. For American book auctions, see Brigham, “Book Auctions in America”; McKay, American Book Auction Catalogues; Winship, “Getting the Books Out.” 29. Publishers’ Circular, January 1, 1847, 24. 30. Circular for Fall Trade Sale, June 20, 1855, reprinted in Greenspan, House of Putnam, 7. 31. Publishers’ Circular, October 1, 1847, 338. 32. “Fifty-first New York Trade Sale” (Bangs, March 25, 1850), NYPL Stuart 2214, item 1. 33. Chambers to Bangs, February 10, 1853, in WRC 320 (LL 1853). The contents of the consignment are listed in Bangs’s catalog, “Parcel Sale of English and American Books” [n.d. 1853], in NYPL Stuart 2215, item 3, p. 53. 34. Chambers to Bangs, February 10, 1853, in WRC 320 (LL 1853). 35. Chambers to Bangs, January 17, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1863–67), fol. 25. 36. See advertisement on back cover of the catalog for “Regular Fall Parcel Sale,” December 3, 1855, held at AAS. 37. Publishers’ Circular, August 16, 1852, 304. 38. Chambers to Bangs, December 5, 1856, and February 27, 1857, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fols. 194, 212. 39. A copy of the report survives in WRC 325 (LL 1858), filed under “Low.” 40. On Scribner & Welford, see West, “Book Publishing 1835–1900,” 364. Welford ran the import business from London from 1864, and it became one of the largest such businesses, see Dzwontoski, American Literary Publishing Houses (under “Charles Scribner’s Sons”). 41. Robert Chambers’s American Notebook [1860], WRC 40, 8th opening (unnumbered pages).

Chapter 18 1. “Messrs Little & Brown’s English Publications,” Literary World, May 17, 1851, 393. 2. Dawson to Chambers, April 22, 1858, in WRC 325 (LL 1858). Dawson had been ordering books from Chambers since at least 1846. 3. See Wilson to Robert Chambers, July 2, 1851, and Chambers to Harper, July 25, 1851, in WRC 318 (LL 1851). 4. Gould to Chambers, December 12, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 5. Chambers to Davies, September 22, 1852, in WRC 319 (LL 1852); Chambers to Thomas, August 19, 1852, in WRC 319 (LL 1852). 6. William Chambers’s American Diary, WRC 35, entry for October 15, 1853. 7. “Miscellany and Gossip: Mr W. Chambers,” Literary World, October 8, 1853, 173. 8. See Gould advertisement, Literary World, February 13, 1847, 46. 9. Chambers to Gould, n.d. [March 1846], in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 10. See “Descriptive Catalogue of Valuable Works, published by Gould and Lincoln” [c. 1854/55], 13–19 (held at AAS). 11. All these examples come from Gould & Lincoln’s “Descriptive Catalogue” [c. 1854/ 55], 13–19. 12. Gould to Chambers, December 31, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47).

288 ] Notes to Pages 219–29

13. For instance, see the quotations used in Gould & Lincoln’s “Descriptive Catalogue” [c. 1854/55], 13. 14. Gould & Lincoln’s “Descriptive Catalogue” [c. 1854/55], 19. 15. Barnes advertisement, Literary World, September 16, 1848, 656. See also Barnes’s “Catalogue of Publications” (1854), 40–42 (held at AAS). 16. “Elements of Physiology,” Literary World, October 28, 1848, 769. 17. “Messrs Little & Brown’s English Publications,” Literary World, May 17, 1851, 393. 18. Quoted in Gould & Lincoln’s “Descriptive Catalogue” [c. 1854/55], 15. 19. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 318. 20. Ibid., 319. For more on Lippincott, see Dzwontoski, American Literary Publishing Houses. 21. Speech by Henry C. Carey, printed in Freedley, Philadelphia and Its Manufactures, 157. My thanks to Michael Winship for this reference. 22. Chambers to Lippincott, January 17, 1854, in WRC 321 (LL 1854). 23. Ibid. 24. Chambers to Bangs, January 17, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 25. 25. On Pictorial History, see Chambers to Lippincott, November 28, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 65, and Chambers to Lippincott, October 24, 1856, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 185. 26. Chambers to Lippincott, December 18, 1856, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 197. 27. Chambers to Barrington, October 31, 1855, WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), 116. 28. Chambers to Gould, August 15, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 39. 29. The letters from Gould in the later 1850s, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), at fols. 129, 207, 235, and 387, clearly demonstrate the deteriorating relationship by 1860. 30. Gould’s decision to discontinue taking the Repository is mentioned in Chambers to Gould, March 15, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 80. 31. On Lippincott’s contributions, see Chambers to Lippincott, October 11, 1859, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 350, and December 6, 1859, in WRC 326 (LL 1859). On competition from Appleton, see Chambers to Lippincott, April 29, 1859 and July 7, 1859, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fols. 314, 337. 32. Inglis (for WRC) to Orr, December 21, 1846, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47). 33. Chambers to Appleton, July 15, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 14. 34. Chambers to Lippincott, April 13, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 82. See also Chambers to Gould, August 16, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 97. 35. WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger), fols. 10–11. Calculations are mine, using figures from 1844–48 and 1848–62, for total production costs, minus binding costs, divided by total numbers printed. For “small impressions,” see Chambers to Gould, August 16, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 97. 36. Some of these issues are discussed in Winship, “Transatlantic Book Trade,” and Raven, “Importation of Books.” 37. Chambers to Gould, September 30, 1847, in WRC 314 (LL 1844–47); Lea & Blanchard to Chambers, July 5, 1850, in WRC 317 (LL 1850). 38. See Chambers to Lippincott, September 8, 1854, September 15, 1854, November 30, 1854, and May 18, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fols. 42, 43, 70, 86.

Notes to Pages 230–35 [ 289

39. Chambers to David Chambers, August 12, 1855, in WRC 322 (LL 1855). 40. Chambers to Bryson, November 28, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 69. 41. Chambers to Moore, January 26, 1855, and July 1, 1859, and Chambers to Lippincott, February 18, 1859, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fols. 74, 336, 298. 42. Chambers to Dix, Edwards, December 23, 1856, and March 25, 1857, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fols. 198, 213. 43. Chambers to Olmsted, September 4, 1857; Olmsted to Chambers, October 13, 1857; and Chambers to Olmsted, October 30, 1857, in WRC 324 (LL 1857) (the letter of October 13 is filed under “Dix Edwards”; the others are under “Olmsted”). The “serious mismanagement” at Dix, Edwards & Co is mentioned in Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 315–16.

Chapter 19 1. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 208. 2. WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger, 1845–67), fols. 4–5. The underlying trend in the figures is falling circulation from 1844 right through to the 1860s—except for a brief resurgence in 1854 and 1855. Part of the growth in those years may be the effect of the relaunch on British sales, but the underlying trend suggests that most of it is due to Lippincott’s imports. Circulation (rounded): 53,600 (1853), 66,500 (1854), 55,000 (1855), and 48,900 (1856). 3. Chambers to Lippincott, January 17, 1854, in WRC 321 (LL 1854). 4. Chambers to Lippincott, February 9, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 24. 5. “The New York Journal,” New York Journal, July 2, 1853, 12. 6. “Publisher’s Announcement,” New York Journal, August 27, 1853, 132 (circulation figures); “To the Reader,” New York Journal, preface to vol. 1, August 1853–January 1854. 7. The second refusal is mentioned in Chambers to Lippincott, May 2, 1854, in WRC 321 (LL 1854). 8. “Chambers’ Journal on the American Press,” New York Times, October 20, 1854, 4. 9. Orvis advertisement, New York Times, February 18, 1854, 4. 10. Francis catalog, 1854 (held at AAS). 11. Annual totals for production costs are recorded in WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger 1845– 67), fols. 4–5. The average for 1851–53, inclusive, was £2.15s. per 1,000. 12. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 208. The circulation figure appears only in the book version; since it was published in August, the circulation must be from no later than June. 13. Chambers to Lippincott, March 10, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 45. Chambers explicitly mentioned Blackwood by name. 14. W. Chambers, Things as They Are, 208. 15. Chambers to Lippincott, March 10, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 45. 16. Chambers to Lippincott, April 13, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 82. Journal costs averaged £3.1s.8d. per 1,000 during the years 1854–56. See WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger 1845–67), fols. 4–5. 17. Chambers to Lippincott, May 18, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 86. 18. Chambers to Lippincott, June 5, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 30. 19. Bunce advertisement, New York Times, February 27, 1855, 5. On Bunce, see the brief entry in Dzwontoski, American Literary Publishing Houses.

290 ] Notes to Pages 236–44

20. “Periodical Literature,” Norton’s Literary Gazette, March 15, 1854, 139. 21. For instance, see the advertisement in Literary World, October 28, 1848, 784. Biographical details for Francis are found in Dzwontoski, American Literary Publishing Houses. 22. Francis catalog, 1854 (held at AAS), 2. 23. Chambers to Francis, December 22, 1854, in WRC 322 (LL 1855). This letter reveals that Francis had been supplied with Chambers’s publications by a Mr. Baldwin, who had recently given up his business. This may have been a relation of Edmund Baldwin of New York and/or of the London publishers Baldwin, Cradock & Joy. 24. WRC 275 (Publ. Ledger 1845–67), fols. 4–5. 25. Chambers to Lippincott, January 23, 1864, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 607. The name of Willmer & Rogers appears on the wrappers of CEJ from 1864 on, alongside agents in the various colonies. They are the only U.S. agent listed, despite the evidence that Lippincott was also importing the Journal again. 26. Chambers to Lippincott, May 2, 1854, in WRC 321 (LL 1854). 27. Chambers to Lippincott, June 5, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 30. 28. Compare “New York Concluded,” CEJ, June 10, 1854, 355–59, with W. Chambers, Things as They Are, chap. 12. 29. These points are made in general terms in Chambers to Lippincott, May 2, 1854, in WRC 321 (LL 1854). The paragraph on copyright is specifically mentioned in Chambers to Lippincott, August 22, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 41. 30. Lippincott advertisement, Norton’s Literary Gazette, July 1, 1854, 347. 31. Lippincott advertisement, Norton’s Literary Gazette, November 15, 1854, 590. 32. Chambers to Lippincott, July 21, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 33. 33. Norton’s Literary Gazette, August 15, 1854, 411. 34. Chambers to Lippincott, August 22, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 41. 35. “Ship News,” Times, August 12, 1854, 12. 36. W. Chambers, “A Few More Words on Steam Vessel Disasters,” CEJ, February 10, 1855, 86. Chambers assumed the sheets would certainly have arrived by the fifteenth. See Chambers to Lippincott, September 15, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 43. 37. The Niagara made a particularly fast crossing, of just over eight days, and was thus able to report City of Philadelphia’s departure a mere eleven days after its occurrence. See “One Week Later from Europe,” New York Times, September 13, 1854, 1. 38. “Non-arrival of the New Steamer City of Philadelphia,” New York Times, September 19, 1854, 1; “No Tidings of the SS City of Philadelphia,” New York Times, September 21, 1854, 1; “Wreck of the Steamship City of Philadelphia,” New York Times, September 27, 1854, 1. 39. W. Chambers, “Steam Vessel Disasters,” CEJ, December 23, 1854, 405–7. 40. “Loss of the Steamship Philadelphia,” Times, September 28, 1854, 6, col. E. The news must have crossed the Atlantic via a ship passing Newfoundland on its eastward journey, presumably one of the sailing packets listed in the Times as having recently arrived from Canada. 41. Chambers, “A Few More Words on Steam Vessel Disasters,” 87. 42. “Wreck of the Steamship City of Philadelphia,” 1.

Notes to Pages 244–48 [ 291

43. Chambers to Lippincott, October 3, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 48. 44. Chambers to Lippincott, October 16, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 49. 45. Orvis’s advertisement, New York Times, November 15, 1854, 8. 46. “Notices of New Books,” New York Times, November 21, 1854, 8. 47. Chambers to Lippincott, November 28, 1854, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 65. 48. Chambers to Lippincott, May 18, 1855, in WRC 163 (LB 1853–67), fol. 86. 49. The Baltic sailed for New York on October 4, and so was presumably the steamer referred to in Chambers’s letter to Lippincott. 50. “Latest by Telegraph,” New York Times, August 6, 1858, 1. 51. Editorial, Times, August 23, 1858, 6. 52. The laying of the Atlantic telegraph is discussed in Marsden and Smith, Engineering Empires, 199–216. See also Headrick, Tools of Empire, chap. 11.

Epilogue 1. His decline, death, and funeral are described in W. Chambers, Memoir of William and Robert Chambers, 364–73. 2. Quote from “The Restoration of St Giles Cathedral,” Times, May 22, 1883, 4. The newspaper had published an obituary on May 21, 1883, 11. See also the notice in the Scotsman, May 21, 1883, 4. 3. Dr. Lees and the Rev. Scott, both quoted in W. Chambers, Memoir of William and Robert Chambers, 370, 375. 4. Estimate on St. Giles, from “The Restoration of St Giles Cathedral,” 4; details of the estate (and his legacies), “The Will of the Late William Chambers of Glenormiston, LL.D.,” Manchester Guardian, June 27, 1883, 5. 5. Knight’s wealth at death, from ODNB. 6. W. Chambers, Memoir of William and Robert Chambers, 370, 375. 7. Ibid., 370. 8. Ibid., 370, 375. 9. Curwen, History of Booksellers. 10. W. Chambers, Memoir of William and Robert Chambers, 379. On Chambers’s reading habits (he read Scott, but little other fiction or poetry), see 382–83 of the same memoir. 11. Ibid., 387. 12. Ibid., 385–86. 13. “[Note from the Editor],” CEJ, June 16, 1832, 80.

292 ] Notes to Pages 249–56

Bibliography Archival Collections The W. & R. Chambers archive is held as Deposit 341 at the National Library of Scotland. It includes Literary Labour files, Correspondence and Letter Books, and Publications Ledgers. The Longman publication ledgers are available on the House of Longman Archive on Microfilm. George Routledge’s publications ledgers are available on the House of Routledge Archive on Microfilm. Some additional materials are in the Routledge and Kegan Paul archive, University College London. The Religious Tract Society archive is part of the United Society for Christian Literature archive at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Nineteenth-Century Periodicals The following periodicals were consulted: Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (later Chambers’s Journal) Literary World Manchester Guardian New York Times Norton’s Literary Gazette Publishers’ Circular Times (London)

Printed Publications Anderson, Patricia. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790– 1860. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Anderson, Patricia J., and Jonathan Rose, eds. British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820– 1880. Vol. 106 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. Ashton, Rosemary. 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006. Babbage, Charles. The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. London: Knight, 1832. Bagehot, Walter. Collected Works. Edited by Norman St John-Stevas. 10 vols. London: Economist, 1968. Bagwell, P. S. The Transport Revolution, 1770–1985. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1988. Barnes, James J. Authors, Publishers and Politicians: The Quest for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement, 1815–1854. London: Routledge, 1974. ———. “Depression and Innovation in the British and American Book Trade, 1819–1939.” In Books and Society in History, edited by Kenneth E. Carpenter, 231–48. New York: Bowker, 1983. Bebbington, David W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

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Index Adams, Isaac, 37 Adams & Co., 214 advance proof sheets, 80, 194–95, 202, 241 advertisement tax, 16 advertising by publishers, 44, 45–46, 113, 163, 164, 222, 228–31 agents, for publishers, 46, 113, 149, 226, 260 Ainsworth, Harrison, 241 Aitken, Mrs. M., 51 Allan, Thomas, 50 almanacs, 2, 19, 22 American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, 204 American Slavery and Colour (William Chambers), 154, 185, 236 American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 195, 204 Anderson, John, 72 Anthon, Charles, 208, 217 Applegath & Cowper, 36, 37, 57, 59, 90, 198 Appleton, Daniel, 176, 193–94, 212, 214, 219, 226, 234 Armour & Ramsay, 236 Association for Promoting the Repeal of All the Taxes on Knowledge, 17 auctions for books, American. See trade sales, American Austen, Jane, 128, 144, 160 Australia, 79, 167, 184 authors: American, 126, 127–28, 190, 193, 213, 216–17; payments to, 71, 73, 160, 161–62, 164, 166, 168; reputation, 76, 166 Babbage, Charles, 4 Bagehot, Walter, 3 Baillière, Hippolyte, 225 Baldwin, Edmund, 204, 245 ballads, 2, 19, 68, 77, 96

Ballantyne, James, & Son, 36, 51, 57, 58, 60, 64 Bancroft, George, 127 Bangs, Brother & Co. (formerly Bangs, Richards & Platt), 194, 212, 218, 220, 232, 233 Barnes, A. S. & Co., 206, 208, 230 Barnes, Albert, 125–26, 216 Baxter, George, 141 Belfast, 46, 113, 116 Bentley, Richard, 23, 94, 127, 128 binding styles: boards, 128, 140–41, 168; cheap, 32, 71, 90, 139, 155, 167; cloth on boards, 129, 139–40, 168 biography, publications on, 23, 70, 127, 152, 161–62 Black, A. & C., 107 Blackwood, William: Blackwood’s Magazine, 43–44, 48, 49, 202, 205, 243; as printer, 58 Blanchard & Lea (formerly Lea & Blanchard), 85, 206–7, 228, 235 Bohn, Henry G., 125, 127, 144, 160, 170, 218, 225, 245 Bookcase, The (Simms & McIntyre), 160 Book of Scotland (William Chambers), 42 booksellers: customers of, 98–99, 136, 138; and publishers, 112; sale or return, 45, 79, 114, 232 Books for the Country (Routledge), 167–68, 170 bookstalls. See railway bookstalls book trade —British: attitudes to cheap print, 18, 96, 159, 258–59; remainders, 23, 125, 160; structure and organization, 3, 4, 19, 38, 41, 124, 149; traditional audiences of, 18, 96. See also individual publishers —colonial, 79, 187, 215, 226, 236 —transatlantic: American interests in

[ 303

book trade (continued ) London, 81, 125, 193, 216–18; British interests in U.S., 82, 83, 94, 128, 221–26; different trade practices, 183–84, 195, 219, 220–21, 226, 256–57; financial aspects, 79, 235–36; imports into Britain, 216–18; imports into U.S., 80, 83, 84, 174, 192, 195, 202, 203–4, 209–11, 225, 245; reprints (authorized), 83, 84–87, 192, 193–94; reprints (unauthorized), 80, 127, 162, 174, 192, 194, 202, 203; shipping, 173, 214–15, 222; speed of correspondence, 81, 85, 183, 194, 213, 227, 251 —United States: circulation of British publications, 81–83, 191–92, 245; culture of reprinting, 191, 193, 196–97, 260; distribution, 219–21; and the 1857 Panic, 221–22, 235, 237; instructive print, 83, 203–6; structure and organization, 83, 190–91, 192–93, 205, 211; trade courtesy, 192, 194, 246. See also individual publishers Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 195 Bradbury & Evans, 50, 52, 56, 117 Bradshaw’s Railway Companion, 107, 123, 144, 176 Brewster, David, 203 Bridgewater Treatises, 83 British and North American Steam Packet Company. See Cunard Line Brother Jonathan, 196 Brougham, Henry, 75 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 180, 183 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 129, 144, 165 Bunce & Brother, 244 Burns, Robert, Life of Robert Burns and Works of Robert Burns (Robert Chambers), 154, 221, 228 business systems, 7, 9, 27–28, 256–57, 261. See also Chambers, W. & R.: business system Byron, Lord, 143, 144

304 ] Index

Cabinet Cyclopaedia (Longman), 23, 160 Caledonian Mercury, 50, 255 Canada, 79, 86–87, 184 canals, 47, 103, 105, 116. See also under ships Carey, Henry, 231 Carey & Lea, 126, 191, 196 cargo. See freight Cassell, John, 254 Chambers, David, 22, 33, 112, 115, 119, 120–21, 154, 171, 236 Chambers, James (brother), 14, 22 Chambers, James (father), 13 Chambers, Janet, 91 Chambers, Robert: author, 14, 22, 42, 58, 67, 90–91, 154, 220, 230, 254–55; interests, 72, 152; life, 13–14, 21, 266n4, 266n26; in London, 112, 119; religious faith, 75, 93; role in the firm, 58, 119, 154; on technological change, 2–3, 101, 105; traveler, 222 Chambers, Robert secundus, 119, 154 Chambers, W. & R.: advertising, 44, 45–46, 85, 228; agents for, 46, 49, 50, 111–16, 149, 228, 234; American reprinters, 81–83, 206–9; authors, 73, 76, 91, 112; bindery, 90; book publishing, 71, 90, 154–55, 197; booksellers, relations with, 112–15, 228; business system, 52, 58, 63–64, 71, 77, 89, 95, 96, 120, 174, 251, 261; colonial business, 79, 86–87, 173, 187, 227, 236, 240, 259–60; competition, 145, 150–51, 153, 155; compositors, 58–59, 89, 91; distribution, 46–47, 55, 89, 120–21, 145, 179; Edinburgh office and plant, 58, 87, 88, 90, 91–92, 94, 118, 198, 255; editorial staff, 76, 90–91, 119; English sales, 116, 117–18; equipment costs, 58–59, 60, 64, 90, 91–92; fiction, 23, 24, 63, 76, 151–53; finances, 25, 58, 63, 69, 74, 77, 89, 90, 91, 150, 155, 267n42; financial transactions, 49, 50, 51, 57, 64, 80, 84–85, 87, 115, 118, 119, 234–36;

Glasgow branch office, 115, 120; imported publications in U.S., 209–11, 232–33; instructive tracts, 153, 197, 206, 232; London branch office, 118–21, 245, 257; management and organization, xvi, 22, 24, 92–93, 94, 111–12, 119, 154, 170–71, 259; moral and religious stance, 73, 75–77, 93, 155, 229; output, 92, 94, 231–32; paternalism, 92–94; personal meetings, importance of, 111–12, 226, 228, 232, 236–37; printing machines, 59–61, 61, 64, 89–90, 92, 256; publications (see individual titles); railway market, 153–54, 171; railways, use of, 116, 120–21, 170–71; reputation, 94, 155, 165, 170, 201; reputation in U.S., xvi, 201, 205, 228–31, 242, 244; sales figures, 129, 154, 229; steam engine, 59, 91–92; stereotyping, 50–51, 83–87, 89, 255–56; and technology, 9, 52, 58, 59–60, 63–64, 95, 155, 197–98, 255–61; trade connections, 45–46, 79, 112; United States, business with, 80–87, 153, 173–74, 184, 187, 201, 207, 209–11, 220–22, 225–37, 259–61 Chambers, William: author, 42, 154, 184; business acumen, 11, 77, 96, 254, 261; in Canada and the U.S., 181–83, 183–85, 188–90, 197–98, 220, 226, 228, 231, 232, 239; education, interest in, 93, 124, 187–90, 253, 255; income, 25, 91, 198, 253; life and death, xv, 13–14, 21, 184, 253–55, 266n4, 266n26; paternalism, 42, 93; Penny Magazine, 24; personal characteristics, 27, 115, 124, 246, 253; religion and morals, 75, 93; reputation, 51, 201; on slavery, 154, 184–85; social observer/reformer, 93, 184–85, 188, 190; St. Giles’ Cathedral, 253, 254; travels, 73, 112 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. See Chambers’s Journal Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, 70, 154, 233–34, 243, 259

Chambers’s Historical Newspaper, 61–62, 256 Chambers’ Home Book and Pocket Miscellany. See Pocket Miscellany (Chambers) Chambers’s Journal: audience, 27, 41–42, 43–44, 151, 108–9; back issues, 50, 55, 61, 80; closure in 1956, 25; colonial circulation, 79–80; commentary on railways, 105, 107, 108, 123, 242; contents, 23, 43, 47, 119, 151; current affairs, 47, 61–62, 151, 240; distribution, 46–49, 55, 80, 89, 143; Dublin edition, 79–80, 256; fiction and poetry, 23, 24, 63, 76; finances, 69, 150, 209, 242–43, 271n31, 272n10; format, 21, 56, 267n28, 270n3; lack of illustrations, 24; launch, 21–25, 124; London edition, 22, 48–50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 89, 116, 117–18, 255–56; and politics and religion, 22; printing, 5, 48–50, 52, 55–57, 60–61; print runs, 50, 52, 55; relaunch in 1844, 148, 151; relaunch in 1854, 120, 240, 242; sales figures, 22, 24, 43–44, 52, 62, 116, 240, 243–44, 245, 290n2; in the U.S., 81–83, 86, 204, 205, 206, 209, 211, 232, 240–45, 274n11 chapbooks, 68, 96 Chapman, John, 160, 217–18 Chapman & Hall, 129, 160, 170 cheap print: American, 84, 195–97, 203–6; British, 96, 109, 147, 171, 258–59; comparison between Britain and U.S., 5, 38, 188, 192, 209, 231; distribution, 136, 145; economics, 16, 32, 71–72, 77, 96, 124, 131, 155, 164, 191, 196–97; flood, 1–4, 96, 130, 195; marketing, 127, 210; physical appearance, 128–29, 131, 139–41; prices, 68, 71, 126, 139, 192, 195–96, 204, 216; purchasers, 14, 64, 136, 148, 161, 210, 258–59; on railway bookstalls, 127, 138–41, 143–45, 165, 171, 258; sales, 129, 137–38, 148, 163–65 Cheap Series (Routledge), 128, 129, 166–67, 170

Index [ 305

Children of the New Forest (Marryat), 129 children’s books, 19, 129, 192, 203, 230, 245 City of Philadelphia (steamship), 247–49, 251 Clowes, William, 33, 34, 37, 50, 56, 95 coal, 179–80, 183 Cobbett, William, 16 Colburn & Bentley, 23 Colburn, Henry, 23, 94, 129 Collins, Wilkie, 135–36 Collins, William, 220 Collins Line (steamships), 174, 182, 243, 250 color printing, 129, 140, 141. See also cover designs; illustrations; printing: technologies Combe, Andrew, 73, 203 Combe, George, 72, 73, 272n17 commercial travellers, 112–13, 136, 231 Companion to the Newspaper (Knight), 62 composition, xv, 31, 32, 33, 50, 51, 58– 59, 72 Constable, Archibald, 57 Constitution of Man (Combe), 72 Cooley, Keese & Hill, 212, 219–20 Cooper, James Fenimore, 126, 128 copyright: Anglo-American, 34, 80–81, 87, 126, 127–28, 173, 217, 239, 246, 260; British, 19, 71, 74, 127, 190, 257; U.S., 127, 191, 201–2, 234, 243 correspondence: within Britain, 101, 113, 115, 116, 120, 170; limitations, 111, 194, 251; transatlantic, 85, 180–81, 183, 213, 215–16, 251 cover designs, 139–41, 163, 165. See also color printing; illustrations Crimean War, publications on, 154, 167, 221 Crombie, A., 79 Crowe, Catherine, 76 Cunard Line, xvi, 173, 174, 180–83, 213, 214–16, 223, 236, 240, 243, 247, 251 current affairs, publications responding to, 16, 62, 154, 164, 167, 221

306 ] Index

Curry, William, Jr., 46, 113, 149 Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature (Kitto), 230 Cyclopaedia of English Literature (Robert Chambers), 71, 84–87, 207, 215, 227, 229, 233, 245 Darwin, Charles, 160, 203 Dick, Thomas, 203 Dickens, Charles: American Notes, 181, 196; Household Words, 62, 91, 144, 151, 239; and “news,” 62; novelist, 214, 241; and printers, 50; traveler, 102, 105–7, 181, 184, 188 dictionaries, 2, 154, 192–93, 207 Dictionary of Printing (Savage), 38 distribution of publications, 41, 47, 48–49, 96, 97–98, 136, 145, 231, 257 Dix, Edwards & Co., 233, 236–37 Donaldson, Alexander, & Sons, 58 Draper, John, 217 Dublin, 46, 113, 116 Dumas, Alexandre, 143 eclectic magazines, 205, 211 Edgeworth, Maria, 5, 128, 191 Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway, 116 Edinburgh, Leith, Glasgow and North British Advertiser. See North British Advertiser education: classical, 189, 204, 206–7, 217, 233; popular, 8, 43, 68–69, 77, 130, 132, 147–48, 153, 154, 159, 206, 227, 258; in Scotland, 42–43, 187; in U.S., 187–90, 205, 230 Educational Course (Chambers), 71, 72–73, 89, 154, 197, 206–7, 208, 211, 230, 233, 245 educational publishing: Longman, 160; Routledge, 158; in U.S., 192–93, 196, 203–4, 205–6, 217, 222, 230. See also Educational Course (Chambers) electrotyping, 35, 241. See also stereotyping

Eliot, George, 217 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 107, 127, 217 emigration, 70, 184, 190, 283n29 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 68 English Book Depot (New York), 221–22 English literature, publications on, 84–87 evangelicalism, 3, 7, 17, 19–20, 24, 44, 68, 74, 144, 195, 230 Everett, Edward, 230 Family Herald, 130, 143 Family Library (Harper), 196, 203 Family Library (Murray), 23, 160 fiction: more appealing than nonfiction, 62–63, 132, 145, 170; in periodicals, 130–31, 196, 241; as railway reading, 137, 141, 144, 160; reprinted without authorization, 196, 219, 222 financial transactions, 57, 79, 115, 221–22, 226 format of publications, 56, 68, 71, 74, 128–29, 139–41, 151, 163, 168, 191, 197, 209–10, 246, 249 Francis, Charles S., & Co., 211, 242, 244–45 Franklin, Benjamin, 70, 218 freight, carriage of, 47, 49, 102–5, 214, 216, 260 Fulton, Robert, 178 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 144 Gazetteer of Scotland (William and Robert Chambers), 42 General Steam Navigation Company, 179 geography, impact on business, 95–96, 97 geography, publications on. See travel literature Gilchrist & Alexander, 79 Giles Cathedral, St. (Edinburgh), 88, 91, 94, 253, 254 Girdwood, Claud, 59 Goodrich, Samuel Griswold, 205 Gould, Kendall & Lincoln (later Gould & Lincoln), 83–87, 153, 200, 207, 209–10,

211, 215–16, 220, 227–28, 229–30, 232, 233, 235, 236, 240, 260 government restrictions on the press, 15–17 Great Exhibition, 17, 135, 161, 183, 217, 232 Great Western (steamship), 177–78, 180, 183, 222, 283n12 Great Western Railway, 102, 123 Greaves, McNichol & Co., 212, 214 Greeley, Horace, 17, 217 Greenough, B. F. & J. J., 82 guidebooks, 107, 123, 144. See also travel literature Gunn, Robert, 59, 60, 90 Hachette, Louis, 135 Harper & Brothers, 5, 126, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197–98, 203, 206, 208, 218, 226, 227, 228, 239, 246 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 128 history, publications on, 62, 76, 127, 132, 144, 152, 161–62, 192, 196, 203, 217 Hobart (printer), 81–82 Hobart (town), 79 Hoe, Robert, 36 Home and Colonial Library (Murray), 160 Home Book and Pocket Miscellany. See Pocket Miscellany (Chambers) Huish, Mark, 104, 137 Illustrated Library of Readable Books (Clarke & Beeton), 160 Illustrated Natural History (Wood), 166, 170 illustrations, 24, 38, 62, 75, 84, 86, 90, 130, 163, 166, 168, 225, 241. See also color printing; cover designs India, 79 information, contemporary meaning of, 67–68 Information for the People (Chambers): contents, 70–71, 76, 151–52, 153; first edition, 62–63, 69, 89; format, 62–63, 84, 208, 256; production costs, 69;

Index [ 307

Information for the People (continued ) purpose, 67–68; revised editions, 68, 69–70, 207, 208–9; sales, 62, 69, 271n7; in the U.S., 207–9, 211, 233, 245 informed citizens, 70, 153, 188–90, 193, 204 Ingram & Cooke, 160, 165 ink, 38 Inman Line (steamships), 182, 247, 250 Instructive and Entertaining Library (Chambers), 151 Irving, Washington, 127–28 Jackson, William, 82–83, 203–4, 210–11, 240, 245 Johnstone, John, 55–56, 58, 63 Johnstone’s Magazine (initially the Schoolmaster), 22, 43, 270n1 journey times, 47, 48, 101, 102, 103, 104, 116, 179, 180 Kaleidoscope, 14, 17, 22, 58 Kitto, John, 230 Knight, Charles: commentator, 4, 76, 130, 131, 132, 149, 267n31; commitment to popular education, 8, 22, 76, 96, 162, 254; financial troubles, 167, 253, 259; lack of business acumen, 149; publisher, 70, 95–96, 119, 124, 129, 145, 148–49, 155, 168, 170, 230, 245, 254; interest in technology, 95. See also Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge; and individual titles knowledge: classification, 70; definitions, 67–68, 75, 166, 169; diffusion, 22, 162, 195, 201–2, 203, 204–5, 230; thirst for, 42–43, 62, 149, 150, 190; understanding of, 166 König, Friedrich, 35–36 labor, 31, 32, 37, 93 Lackington, James, 125 Lady’s Travels round the World. See Lady’s Voyage round the World (Pfeiffer)

308 ] Index

Lady’s Voyage round the World (Pfeiffer), 128, 162 Lardner, Dionysius, 105, 106, 148, 166 Latin-English Dictionary (Chambers), 85, 207 Lea & Blanchard. See Blanchard & Lea (formerly Lea & Blanchard) leisure activities, publications for, 70, 152, 166, 168–69 Leisure Hour, 131, 205 Leith, 13, 47, 79 Leslie, Edward, & Sons, 79 Lever, Charles, 144 liberal reformers, 20, 24 libraries, xvi, 93, 138 Library of Entertaining Knowledge (Knight/SDUK), 63, 204 Library of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), 62, 68, 204 Library for the People (Chapman), 160 Limbird, John, 17 Lippincott, J. B., & Co. (formerly Lippincott, Grambo & Co.), 224, 231–36, 237, 240–50, 260 Lippincott, Joshua Ballard, 231, 232, 236, 240 literacy: England, 43, 187; provision for, 1, 6, 14, 18, 20, 68–69, 130, 257; Scotland, 42–43, 187; U.S., 187 Literary Gazette (London), circulation of, 16 Literary Gazette (New York). See Norton’s Literary Gazette Literary World (New York), 94, 202, 217, 218 Literature of the Rail (Phillips), 161 Littel’s Living Age, 205, 211 Little, Brown & Co., 83, 193, 194 Liverpool, 46, 84, 114, 116 Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 102 Liverpool & Philadelphia Steamship Company. See Inman Line (steamships) London & North Western Railway, 103, 104, 137, 140, 142

London Journal, 130, 131, 143, 154 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 128 Longman & Co., 19, 23, 46, 58, 72, 94, 144, 160–65, 170 Low, Sampson: editor of Publishers’ Circular, 218, 222; transatlantic literary agent, 128, 212, 218, 220, 222, 226 Low, Sampson, Jr., 218, 221–22, 236 Lyell, Charles, 184 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 5, 144, 160–61, 163–64 machinery, used in printing. See printing Maclachlan & Stewart, 216 marketing. See advertising by publishers mail services: Britain, 103–4, 113; freight, 47, 183; mail coaches, 40, 46–47; railways, 103, 113, 116, 181, 251; steamships, 178, 180–83, 215–16, 251, 260; U.S., 188, 214 Marryat, Frederick, 129, 144 Martin, William, 167 Martineau, Harriet, 184 Masson, David, 142 McComb, R., 46 McGlashan, James, 113, 236 McIntosh, Maria, 128 McKinley, A. & W., 79 McPherson & Co., 79 Measom, George, 123 mechanics’ institutes, 20 Melville, Herman, 127 Menzies, John, 121, 137, 138 Methodist Book Committee (U.S.), 205 Middleton, Thomas, 37, 90, 92 Miller, Hugh, 83 Miller, William, & Co., 58 Miller & Curtis, 237 Mirror of Literature, 17 Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts (Chambers), 71, 74–75, 76–77, 116, 148–49, 151–52, 154, 209–10, 229, 230, 233, 234–35, 237, 245, 281n30 Moore, J. W., 211, 236, 286n29

morality, 75, 142–43, 155, 161, 229 More, Alexander, 92 Mulock, Dinah, 153 Murray, John, 19, 23, 94, 127, 144, 160–65, 170, 220. See also individual series narrative, use of, 152 National Illustrated Library (Ingram & Cooke), 160 National Magazine, 205, 211 natural history, publications on, 166, 167–68 Natural Theology (William Paley), 73–74, 75, 83 Neill & Co., 57 Nelson, Thomas, 58 news: legal definition, 16, 61–62; speed, 177–78, 248–50 newspapers: advertisements in, 45; distribution, 103–4, 138, 183; printing, 58, 255; taxed, 17, 143; U.S., 188, 190, 196, 242. See also periodicals, circulations New World, 196, 201 New York Journal, 239, 240–41, 244 New York Publishers’ Association, 220 New York Times, 190, 242, 244–45, 247, 249 North British Advertiser, 45, 57, 59, 255 North British Railway, 102, 116 Norton, Charles, 194, 218 Norton, Samuel & Hugh, 59, 60, 90, 92 Norton’s Literary Gazette, 108, 218, 244, 246, 249 Oliphant, Margaret, 131 Oliphant, William, 46 Oliver & Boyd, 46, 58 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 236–37 Orr, William Somerville: Chambers’s London agent, 46, 97, 110, 114, 118–20, 150–51, 171, 226, 232, 234, 257, 269n22; financial troubles, 112, 115, 117–20, 149, 234, 236; manager of London edition

Index [ 309

Orr, William Somerville (continued ) of Chambers’s Journal, 49–50, 52, 56, 80, 116, 117–18, 255 Orvis, Peter D., 238, 239–44, 246–50, 260 Our Coal and Our Coal-Pits (Leifchild), 162–64 Paine, Thomas, 15 paper: cost, 32, 71, 164; production process, xvi, 32–33; tax on, 16, 32, 131, 143 Papers for the People (Chambers), 151–52, 154, 155, 233, 245, 281n30, 286n29 Park, Mungo, 203 Parlour Library (Simms & McIntyre), 126 Patmore, Coventry, 77 Peebles, 13, 91, 93 Peninsular & Oriental Packet Company, 179 Penny Cyclopaedia (SDUK), 69, 70, 149, 280n10 Penny Magazine (SDUK/Knight): cheap publication, 5, 7, 22–23, 24, 31, 33, 34, 124, 148–49, 204, 241; circulation, 21, 24, 43; costs of, 37; stereotyping, 51, 255; U.S., 82, 203–4 penny magazines, 130–31, 149, 154, 240–41, 259 People’s Editions (Chambers), 71, 73–74, 77, 89, 126, 139, 140, 151, 154, 163, 165, 256 periodicals, circulations, 16, 17, 21, 24, 36, 43–44, 45, 130, 131, 151, 154, 202, 241. See also Chambers’s Journal: sales figures Peterson, T. B., 197 Philadelphia, 228, 231, 233 philanthropic ambitions, 8, 20–21, 23, 75, 94, 124, 132, 136, 142, 148, 255, 258 Philip, George (Liverpool), 46, 114, 234 Phillips, Samuel, 135, 137, 138–39, 140, 147, 159–60, 161, 164, 165 phrenology, 72, 272n17 Pictorial Bible (Knight), 149, 233, 280n10 Pictorial History of England (Knight), 149, 154, 216, 233

310 ] Index

Picture of Scotland (Robert Chambers), 42 Plain Englishman (Knight), 17 Pocket Miscellany (Chambers), 153, 200, 210, 229 poetry, 17, 143, 144, 152 Popular Library (Routledge), 127–28, 160, 162, 166 Post Office. See mail services Poultry Yard (William Martin), 167–68 Prescott, William H., 144, 230 printing —hand-press, xv, 31, 35–36, 55–56, 61, 63 —production costs, 32–38, 50, 63, 69, 71–72, 74, 96, 119, 163, 164, 166, 234–35, 271n31 —steam-powered machinery: adoption, 57, 59–61, 126, 256; advantages, 7–8, 33, 63, 132; for books, 72, 163, 256; cost, 63, 73–74; development, 35–37; machine makers, 59; quality, 37–38, 61, 72; speed, 4, 36, 57, 59, 61; in U.S., 83. See also Applegath & Cowper; Treadwell printing machine —technologies, 5–7, 27, 31, 265n48, 255–61; use of machinery, 32, 59–63. See also color printing; electrotyping; stereotyping Printing Machine, The (Knight), 5 print, moral power, 3–4, 21 Publishers’ Circular, 45, 159, 212, 213–14, 219 publishing. See book trade: British; book trade: transatlantic; book trade: U.S. See names of publishing firms Putnam, George, 5, 101, 102, 103, 125, 193, 194, 202, 217, 218, 227 Putnam’s Magazine, 218, 236 Quételet, Adolphe, 73 radical politics, 4, 15, 20, 38, 68 railway accidents, 106, 134 railway bookstalls: appearance, 134, 140–41, 143; book designs, 139–41, 155;

cost of books on, 4, 138–39; history of, 97, 136–39; importance to cheap print distribution, 129, 145, 258; typical stock, 135, 141–45, 159, 222. See also Smith, W. H., & Son; Routledge, George Railway Clearing House, 106 Railway Economy (Lardner), 106 Railway Library (Routledge), 126–27, 140, 167, 216 railway literature, 123–24, 141–45, 155–56, 159–70, 258–59 railways: and communication, 97, 101, 113, 120–21, 170–71, 257; development, 102–3, 178; Edinburgh, 92, 100; effect on book trade, 257–59; fares, 107, 108; freight, 33, 102–5, 120–21, 170, 257–58; passenger travel, 105–8, 112–13, 122, 147, 168; reading on, 108–9, 122, 135, 142, 147; speed, 101, 102, 104; in U.S., xvi, 190. See also individual railway companies Reach, Angus, 137 readership for print, 1, 18, 19, 23, 64, 67, 87, 123, 130, 135, 155–56, 165, 169 Reading for the Rail (Murray), 146, 160, 161 Reading for Travellers (Chapman & Hall), 160 Redfield, J. S., 82 Reese, David Meredith, 208 religion: and print, 3, 20, 75, 125–26, 150, 204, 205, 216–17, 230; and education, 42. See also evangelicalism Religious Tract Society, 20, 37, 46, 74–75, 131, 145, 150, 170, 203, 205, 259 remainders, 23, 125, 160 Repository of Instructive and Amusing Tracts (Chambers), 75, 76–77, 120, 151, 154, 233, 234, 245, 281n30 reprints, use in cheap series, 73, 126, 203 reputation of publishing houses, 165, 219, 221, 226–28 Reynolds’s Miscellany, 130 Richards, R. J., 82

Ritchie, Leitch, 76, 91, 242, 246 Rivington, 19, 58 Robb, Daniel (blacksmith), 60–61, 92 Roberts, Mr. (commercial traveler), 112–13 Routledge, George: American reprints, 125–28, 213, 216, 218; and booksellers, 112, 125; book series, 126–28, 130, 139, 144, 165–69; cheap fiction, 126, 151, 165, 193; cheap nonfiction, 127, 165–70, 258; finances, 129, 165, 169; life, 123, 124–25; marketing, 128–29, 141; New York office, 128. See also individual series and titles Royal Mail. See mail services Rudimentary Course (Weale), 148 Ruthven, John, 59 sailing ships. See ships: sailing sales figures of books, 23, 72, 74, 86, 129, 144–45, 148, 163–65, 167, 168, 196, 229. See also periodicals, circulations Saunders, Frederick, 94 Saunders & Otley, 94 Saturday Magazine (SPCK), 21, 148, 203, 259 Schmitz, Leonard, 208 science, publications on, 62, 70, 72, 132, 143, 145, 148, 152–53, 161–63, 192, 203, 225 Scotsman, 45, 91 Scott, Leonard, 202 Scott, Walter, 19, 36, 144, 292n10 Scottish North Eastern Railway, 138 Scribner, Charles, & Co., 222 Semi-Monthly Library (Putnam), 146 serial publication formats, 62, 82, 84–85, 154, 208 series publication, 23–24, 126, 127, 130, 139, 160, 170. See also individual series titles Shakespeare, William, 142, 144, 190 sheets, distributing publications as unbound, 68, 200, 209, 234, 237, 239 Shilling Series (Bohn), 160, 170

Index [ 311

Shilling Volumes (Knight), 139, 148, 149, 165, 168 shipping, coastal, 101. See also under ships shipping, international, 79, 81, 173–74, 179–80, 214–16. See also under ships ships —inland and coastal steamboats, xvi, 47, 48, 102, 105, 116, 120, 178–79 (see also canals) —sailing, 2, 47, 79, 101, 174, 177–78, 179, 180, 214–16, 240 —transatlantic steamships: cargo, 183, 214–15, 223, 240, 248, 260; costs, 183, 216; development, 2, 177–80; mail services, 178, 180–83, 215–16; passenger experiences, 181, 183; reliability, 174, 179–80, 250; safety, 182, 247; speed, 174, 240; transatlantic journey times, 177–78, 180, 214; transatlantic routes, 173; use to publishers, 239–50, 259–60 (see also Collins Line [steamships]; Cunard Line; Inman Line [steamships]) shipwrecks, 162, 182, 247–48 Simms & McIntyre, 126, 140, 151, 160, 165 Sirius (steamship), 177–78, 180, 182, 222 Six-Penny Handbooks (Routledge), 169, 170 slavery, 18, 154, 184–85, 266n16 Smibert, Thomas, 91 Smith, Albert, 137 Smith, John Frederick, 131 Smith, Lewis, 46, 120 Smith, Sydney, 213 Smith, W. H., & Son, 49, 104, 127, 137–38, 142–44, 159, 160, 258 societies as publishers, 8, 20, 22, 23, 38, 68, 149–50, 195, 259 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 22, 68, 150, 203, 259 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), 7, 8, 20, 22, 24, 67–68, 75, 82, 96, 124, 130, 149, 155, 170, 203, 259. See also Library of Useful Knowledge;

312 ] Index

Penny Cyclopaedia (SDUK); Penny Magazine (SDUK/Knight) Somerville, Mary, 203 Sorin & Ball, 206 South Eastern Railway, 102 sport. See leisure activities, publications for Spottiswoode (printers), 163 stagecoaches, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 147 stamp duty, 16, 17, 47, 61–62, 103 Standard Novels (Colburn & Bentley), 23 statistics, 4, 73, 180, 189 steady-selling publications, 34, 190, 196, 205, 255 steamboats (inland and coastal). See under ships steam engines: disruption from, 59–60; installed by W. & R. Chambers, 59, 90, 91–92; makers, 59, 90 steam-powered printing machine. See under printing steamships (transatlantic). See under ships Stephenson, Robert, 102, 116 stereotype plates: as property, 34, 81; sold to the U.S., 81–82, 83–87, 194, 202, 207, 240, 287n39; use in printing machines, 36, 72, 85; uses of multiple sets, 34, 51–52, 79 stereotyping: advantages of, 34, 50–51, 74, 81, 132, 163; process of, 33–35, 85–86, 96. See also electrotyping Stone-Cutter of St. Point (Lamartine), 128 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 128, 213, 218 Sue, Eugene, 140 Tait’s Magazine, 43–44 Tales for Travellers (Chambers), 154 taxes, 16, 18, 20, 62, 188, 257. See also stamp duty technology: adaptation to local circumstances, 95, 255–56, 261; adoption, 7, 9, 38–39, 261; early adoption, 34, 255; historiography, 6–7, 95; value, 3 Tegg, Thomas, 125, 160 telegraph, electric: Britain, 2–3, 121; North

America, 247, 250; publications on, 162, 242; transatlantic, 250–51; Things as They Are in America (William Chambers), 154, 184, 189, 233, 238, 242, 245–50 Ticknor & Fields, 193 Times (London), 4, 7, 16, 17, 35, 135, 147, 247–48 timetables, 107 tourism, 94, 107, 168–69, 184 tracts: American preference against the term, 210; as cheap forms of print, 139, 154; instructive, 64, 71, 74–75, 77, 152; religious, 2, 7, 20–21, 34, 37, 68, 71, 74– 75, 96, 195. See also Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts (Chambers); Religious Tract Society; Repository of Instructive and Amusing Tracts (Chambers) trade sales, American, 213, 219–21, 232 transatlantic book trade. See book trade: transatlantic translations, 73, 128, 162 Traveller’s Library (Longman), 160, 161–65 travel, advantages of, 147 travel literature, 62, 70, 127, 143, 144, 152–53, 161–63, 192–93, 194, 203, 217. See also guidebooks Treadwell printing machine, 36–37, 38, 198 Trevithick, Richard, 178 Trollope, Anthony, 108, 189–90 Trollope, Frances, 144, 184 type setting. See composition Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe), 128, 213

United States: availability of cheap print, 188, 203; emigration to, 184; literacy rates, 187; schools, 187–90. See also under book trade United States Mail Steamship Company. See Collins Line (steamships) Useful Library (Routledge), 169, 170 Wayland, Francis, 216, 230 Weale, John, 148, 162, 166, 245 Weekly Visitor (RTS), 21 Welford, Charles, 222 Wellington, Duke of, 164, 167 Westminster Review, 217–18 West Indies, 79 Whiting (printer), 50 wholesaling, 45, 49, 57, 95, 121, 211, 224, 231–32 Wide, Wide World (Elizabeth Wetherell), 128 Wiley, John, 194, 217 Wiley & Putnam, 193, 194, 202, 203, 212, 214, 216–17, 219, 226 Willmer & Rogers, 245 Wills, William H., 91 Wilson & Sinclair, 59 Wood, John George, 166, 168, 169 Wordsworth, William, 152–53 Wright’s Paper for the Dissemination of Useful Knowledge, 204–5 York, Newcastle & Berwick Railway, 116 Zieber, George B., 208 Zumpt, Carl Gottlob, 208

Index [ 313