Short answers, pulled from the story.
Henry Colburn (1784-1855) was a British publisher who operated in London from the early nineteenth century. He is notable for popularising the "silver fork" mode of fashionable fiction, launching influential periodicals including the Literary Gazette and the New Monthly Magazine, and publishing foundational texts such as the diaries of Evelyn and Pepys.
The silver fork novel was a fashionable social fiction genre named by the critic William Hazlitt. Colburn was its leading publisher, bringing out work by Bulwer Lytton, Theodore Hook, Harrison Ainsworth, Disraeli, Lady Morgan, and others in his nineteen-volume Modern Standard Novelists series (1835-41).
Colburn launched the first number of the Literary Gazette on the 25th of January 1817, priced at one shilling. It was the earliest weekly newspaper devoted to literature, science, and the arts to gain lasting reputation and authority.
Colburn published the first edition of John Evelyn's Diary in 1818 and Pepys's Diary in 1825, along with expanded editions in 1848-49 and 1854. He also published Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas's seven-volume Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson between 1844 and 1846.
In 1830 Colburn took his printer Richard Bentley into a formal publishing partnership. The partnership was dissolved in August 1832. Colburn subsequently paid a financial penalty for breaching a covenant not to publish within twenty miles of London before opening a new house in Great Marlborough Street.
Colburn retired in favour of Messrs. Hurst and Blackett, retaining his name on a small group of titles including Burke's Peerage and the diaries of Evelyn and Pepys. The copyrights connected to those titles were auctioned at Southgate and Barrett on the 26th of May 1857, realising approximately £14,000.