Charles Knight (publisher)

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Knight was born on the 15th of March 1791, the son of a Windsor bookseller and printer. He grew up surrounded by paper and type, apprenticed to his own father, learning the trade from the inside. By the time he died on the 9th of March 1873, he had spent more than four decades reshaping what ordinary British people could read, and how much they had to pay for it. The questions his life raises are worth sitting with. How does a publisher's son become a figure who puts encyclopaedias and magazines into the hands of working people? What drove Knight to keep writing and editing well into his seventies, long after he had left the business of publishing? And what does it mean to be remembered not as a literary titan, but as the man who invented the stamped newspaper wrapper?

• 2. The Apprentice Turns Publisher

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  Windsor gave Knight his start, but journalism pulled him away from his father's shop. After completing his apprenticeship he took up newspaper work and had an interest in several ventures, including the Windsor, Slough and Eton Express. His editorial instincts sharpened quickly. Between 1820 and 1821 he served as publisher of The Etonian, a periodical that brought him into contact with writers who would define the coming generation. Those friendships proved durable. In 1823, together with those same literary acquaintances, he launched Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and among the contributors were Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Derwent Coleridge, and the young Thomas Macaulay. The magazine ran for only six issues, but that was enough. Knight's name was established as both publisher and author, and a career of over forty years began from that modest run. The Quarterly also left a curious bibliographic mark: an 1824 review within its pages attributed Frankenstein to Percy Bysshe Shelley rather than to his wife, drawing a comparison with her second novel, Valperga. Before the Quarterly folded, Knight had already published an earlier curiosity, the diary of the naval chaplain Henry Teonge, who had lived from around 1620 to 1690. From 1826 to 1827 he also published the second series of Alaric Alexander Watts' monthly magazine The Literary Magnet, keeping his hand in across multiple projects at once.

• 3. Penny Wisdom

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  A financial crisis in 1827 forced Knight out of independent publishing, at least temporarily. He took a position as superintendent of publications for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and there he found his calling. He projected and edited The British Almanack and Companion, which began in 1828. By 1829 he was back on his own account, launching The Library of Entertaining Knowledge and writing several volumes of the series himself. Then came the two projects that would define his reputation. In 1832 he started The Penny Magazine, and in 1833 The Penny Cyclopaedia. The Magazine's circulation reached 200,000 by the end of its first year. The Cyclopaedia met a harder fate. Heavy excise duty on paper ground the project down, and it was only completed in 1844, at a financial loss of forty thousand pounds. That number is worth holding in mind: forty thousand pounds absorbed, and Knight kept going. The same year the Cyclopaedia finally closed, he contributed the first volume to his own series, Knight's Weekly Volume for All Readers, writing a biography of William Caxton. The series went on to publish, for the first time, works by Harriet Martineau, Anna Brownell Jameson, and G. H. Lewes.

• 4. The Scale of His Ambition

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  Knight's appetite for large reference projects never diminished. He edited and published London in 1841, a heavily illustrated history of the city in three volumes. In 1842 he released an edition of William Shakespeare's complete works under the title The Pictorial Shakspere, which had originally appeared in parts between 1838 and 1841. His illustrated works ranged widely: Old England, The Land We Live In, and The Pictorial Gallery of Arts, the latter drawing on the Great Exhibition of 1851. His 1845 contribution to the Weekly Volume series was a biography of Sir Thomas Gresham. The National Cyclopaedia of Useful Knowledge appeared between 1847 and 1851 across twelve volumes. He followed that with The English Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Useful Knowledge, published between 1854 and 1862 in twenty-two volumes with a four-volume supplement. That encyclopaedia was essentially a revision of the original Penny Cyclopaedia, the project that had cost him forty thousand pounds. In 1855 he launched the Local Government Chronicle, and at roughly the same time he began his Popular History of England, which ran to eight volumes published between 1856 and 1862. A single biography of William Caxton had grown into a publishing operation that spanned encyclopaedias, illustrated histories, literary editions, and chronicles of local government.

• 5. Writer to the Last

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  Knight stepped back from the business of publishing in 1864, but he did not stop writing. His autobiography, Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century, appeared in three volumes between 1864 and 1865, alongside a separate memoir-like work, The Shadows of the Old Booksellers, published in 1865. He also wrote an historical novel, Begg'd at Court, which appeared in 1867. Earlier in his career he had written The Results of Machinery in 1831, and Knowledge is Power, which was published in 1855. His output as an author ran in parallel to his work as publisher and editor across decades; the two roles were never entirely separate. He had taken out a patent as far back as 1838 for improvements in producing coloured impressions on paper, vellum, parchment, and pasteboard by surface printing, an early sign that his interests reached beyond words into the physical craft of the printed page. Knight continued to write nearly to the close of his life, which ended at Addlestone, Surrey, on the 9th of March 1873.

• 6. A Gateway in Windsor

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  After Knight's death a gateway was erected in his memory at the cemetery adjacent to Bachelors Acre in Windsor, where he was buried. The memorial sits near the town where he had grown up in his father's print shop, a quiet loop back to his origins. He is credited as the first person to propose the use of stamped newspaper wrappers, in 1834, and is therefore attributed as their inventor. His many reference books, aimed squarely at a general audience, mark him as a pioneer of what would later be called self-improvement. The man who absorbed a forty-thousand-pound loss on the Penny Cyclopaedia and kept publishing is now remembered at a cemetery gate in Windsor, a few steps from where the whole thing began.