Charles Knight (1791-1873) was a
publisher, writer, Shakespeare scholar, social reformer, and compiler of this
capacious three-volume autobiography published in 1864-65. The son of a Windsor
bookseller, he traces to his place of birth his later interests in history,
Shakespeare, politics, publishing, and philanthropy, While Knight does not make a
point of it, many of later acquaintances had Eton connections. He himself, apart
from a couple of years in an Ealing grammar school, was largely self-educated. Like
Samuel Johnson, Knight acquired the habit of reading in his father’s
bookshop.
Though he spent his adult life
working closely with a coalition of Utilitarians, Liberals, Whigs, and
Evangelicals, Knight was a Tory by inclination, a Conservative long before the
Conservative Party existed. He was an opponent of unions and believer in limited
government and free trade. Unlike most conservatives of his generation he regarded
technology and free enterprise as social benefits, especially when placed in the
service of popular education. He dedicated his life to the production of
“cheap books”—not pious tracts distributed to encourage submission to
authority but works of information sold to encourage invention and industry. Knight
was confident that semi-literate readers would take to geology and physics, history
and Shakespeare—provided costs could be kept low by selling in large quantities. It
was a risky business strategy to say the least.
Knight divides his autobiography
into three “epochs,” to each of which he assigns a volume. The first
describes his childhood in Windsor and occasional encounters with George III and
more frequent mingling with the artists and scholars attracted to the neighborhood.
As a young man he left the shop to train as a reporter in London, returning to
Windsor to go into the publishing business with his father and to edit his own
newspaper, the Windsor and Eton Express. In 1818 he did service as an
overseer to the poor, which proved to be a transformative experience. In 1820
Knight became the editor of The Etonian, a short-lived but impressive
publication drawing upon the young talents of W. M. Praed, John Moultrie, and
William Sidney Walker. This was continued, with the addition of T. B. Macaulay, as
Knight’s Quarterly Magazine (1823-24).
These periodicals owed much to
Blackwood’s, Byron, and dandyism. Knight published R. C.
Dallas’s Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron (1824) but rejected
William Parry’s The Last Days of Lord Byron (1825), both of which led
to court proceedings. John Cam Hobhouse prohibited Dallas and Knight from
publishing the letters Byron to his mother that would later figure prominently in
Moore’s Life of Byron. Charles Knight was not the Knight of
“Knight and Lacey” that published Parry’s book; having
“declined having anything to say to the affair,” he was later called to
testify that the manuscript he read had been rewritten by an amanuensis. By the
time of Byron’s death Knight had left Windsor for good (his father also died
in 1824); he was married and making headway as a London publisher.
The second “epoch,”
covering the years 1824-44, is chiefly concerned with Knight’s work as a
publisher for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, an organization
headed by Henry Brougham whom Knight first met in 1826. In 1828 Knight toured the
Midlands, organizing local chapters of the SDUK; his tours of the factories and
conversations with their captains of industry had a profound effect on his ideas
about publishing. Knight gives a lengthy and detailed account of how innovations in
technology, management, transportation, and communication were transforming the
publishing business—enabling higher profits from the sale of less expensive books,
magazines, and newspapers. The new business model was developed in SDUK
publications, notably the British Almanac, Penny Magazine, and
Penny Cyclopaedia. Knight pioneered new processes of book illustration.
His third “epoch”
takes the story down to the 1860s. While Knight was adept at organizing and funding
large and complex publishing projects he was nearly undone by the expense of the
Penny Cyclopaedia (1833-1843) which consumed most of the profits made in
his other ventures. Having completed the Cyclopedia and seen the SDUK
bankrupted by the cost of its never-completed Biographical Dictionary
(1842-44), Knight increasingly turned his attention to editing and authorship,
writing a biography of Caxton (1844), a Popular History of England
(1855-62), two histories of publishing, The Old Printer and the Modern Press
(1854) and Shadows of Old Booksellers (1865), and his autobiography, which
is itself a history of publishing.
Passages of a Working Life
is arranged as a chronicle of the author’s publishing projects interspersed
with long digressions on economics, technology, and social history. While Knight
did not keep a diary, he had to hand a string of publications documenting his
activities going back to his newspaper days in Windsor. He constructs his
autobiography from “passages” in these writings much as other
biographers would work from correspondence. The result is not altogether happy
since we hear much more about “the times” than “the life,”
and that delivered in the deadly tone of newspaper prose. This was by design;
Passages of a Working Life is, above all, an extended exposition of
Knight’s ideas about economics and technology. He observes all of the
Victorian proprieties, studiously omitting anything that might trespass on domestic
life.
The one letter he does print is
telling in this respect—an 1823 epistle from Macaulay in which the Cambridge
undergraduate explains why he is withdrawing from Knight’s Quarterly
Magazine. It begins, “You are probably aware that there are among my
family connections several persons of rigidly religious sentiments....”
Knight’s mature work as a journalist and publisher strove to reach the
largest possible audience by offending the fewest number of readers. He avoided
party associations by employing a stable of writers from across the political
spectrum. It almost goes without saying that he would avoid personalities in his
autobiography. Of the notorious William Maginn he ventures no more than, “It
cannot, however, be denied he was best of a morning,—the double excitement of the
table and the talk was sometimes too much for him.”
If there is nary a joke or
witticism in the thousand pages of Passages of a Working Life this is not
because the author lacked companionable qualities. His friendships with Praed and
Hunt, Jerrold and Dickens suggest quite the contrary. Apart from the charming
memoir with which it begins, the autobiography reads rather like a utilitarian
tract. It does, nonetheless, contain valuable information and anecdotage about a
host of Knight’s associates, much of which later found its way into the
Dictionary of National Biography. For a more colorful treatment of
Knight and his circle, there is Charles Macfarlane’s Reminiscences of a
Literary Life, belatedly discovered and printed in 1917.
Like other publishers, Knight
provided services for writers apart from payment. He took in Thomas De Quincey for
a time, and, Macfarlane tell us, provided housing for Leigh Hunt: “He had let
him a cottage at Old Brompton, in which he had been living himself, and which was
nicely furnished. Hunt and his family stayed there, without ever paying a sixpence
of rent, for nearly two years, when K. got rid of them by sending them a receipt in
full of all demands, and then he had the additional satisfaction of finding that
they had ruined nearly all the furniture” (p. 103). Knight does not make much
of such charitable actions, but they seem to have been extensive.
Macfarlane, who did not approve of
Knight’s Liberal connections, wrote in 1855 of his former employer,
“With a little more ballast, with a little more fixity of purpose and
principle, and a great deal less of his evil associations, Charles Knight, now a
very poor man, might have been prosperous and even wealthy, and might also have
obtained a very good standing as a man of letters. But I must say that with his
innate and contracted defects he has proved himself, in spite of his ready
arithmetic and great skill in every kind of calculation, about the worst man of
business that has ever belonged to the ‘Trade,’ or that has ever
speculated, in any other line, with his own, or other people’s, money”
(p. 96).
While Macfarlane saw in
Knight’s commitment to conservative social principles and liberal economics
as a lack of “fixity,” Knight was steady in his willingness to
sacrifice profit to principle. He sought to be a kind of “John Murray for the
masses.” Passages of a Working Life was well received, the first
volume attracting favorable reviews in the Eclectic,
Blackwood’s, and the Quarterly. The later volumes received
less attention, doubtless for a reason identified by Blackwood’s:
“Mr Knight has not succeeded—where on every account he ought to have
succeeded—in making us interested in Mr Knight. Perhaps he wanted that frank
egotism which, while it would have exposed him, with captious critics, to the
charge of vanity, would nevertheless have diffused life over his pages, and given a
unity to his book” (April 1864, 413). But in offering more information than
entertainment Knight was true to his lights as a publisher.
David Hill Radcliffe
