1942
by Knight, Charles
1942. To see our catalogue of the collection please visit our website. "Charles Knight was a prime force in a great movement. He was in the forefront of the movement to provide cheap, quality literature for all readers, but particularly for the newly literate working classes. His active career spanned the period 1812-1869. In those years Knight was instrumental in the creation of a mass market in literature designed to satisfy the needs of the steadily rising literate population . . . "Knight deserves to be ranked as one of the major social reformers of the nineteenth century. Hindsight allows us to place Knight’s contribution to educational progress and reform alongside the work of such outstanding figures as Edwin Chadwick in public health, Shaftesbury in factories, Wilberforce and slavery, and Thomas Arnold in education” (Valerie Gray, Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer, p. 1)." Charles Knight was born in 1791 in the town of Windsor, not far from Windsor Castle (one of the British monarchy’s royal residences) and Eton College. His father, Charles Knight senior, was a printer, publisher and bookseller who served as mayor of Windsor in 1806 and 1817 (interestingly, Knight senior was rumored to be the illegitimate brother of George III, who often frequented Knight’s shop during his stays in Windsor). At the age of fourteen, after only five years of formal education, Knight began an apprenticeship under his father, spending the next seven years learning all aspects of the printing and publishing trade. In the final months of his apprenticeship he spent a few weeks in London working as a reporter for two daily papers, which gave him a taste for journalism. In March 1812, when he turned 21, Knight became a partner in his father’s business; the following August he and his father began publishing a new local weekly newspaper,the Windsor and Eton Express. Knight served as editor of the Express for the next fifteen years, using the paper as a platform to express his views on the pressing issues of the day. These were many, as the early years of Knight’s career were marked by great political and economic upheaval. The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 brought large numbers of British soldiers back to England, swelling the ranks of the unemployed and driving down wages; the increasing use of agricultural machinery was putting more and more farm laborers out of work; and a series of bad harvests in the 1810s drove up the price of food, sparking “bread riots” and other rebellions against authority. Political radicalism flourished, stoked by cheap “twopenny trash” pamphlets attacking the British government, which found a ready audience among the increasingly literate working classes. Knight deplored these developments: While he had largely liberal views, supporting a free press, religious toleration and moderate parliamentary reform, he had no use for seditionist pamphleteers who exploited the misery of the poor to advance their own political aims. He believed strongly that education, rather than political revolution, was the best way to improve the lives of the laboring classes; he also recognized that British working men and women had almost no access to the sort of “useful” instructive literature available to the wealthy and highly educated. By late 1819 he had formulated his first concrete plan (which he announced in two articles on “Cheap Publications”) to address this lack by publishing “good, cheap, and interesting reading material” (Grey, p. 33) for the benefit of the wider British public. In 1823 Knight and his family moved to London where he set up his own publishing business, while at the same time maintaining his interest in the Windsor Express (coincidentally, this was the year that the printer William Clowes, who would become one of Knight’s closest business associates, began using high-speed mechanized presses in book production). The following year Knight drew up a proposal to publish a “National Library” of inexpensive popular works on science, history and the arts, but this ultimately came to nothing. The financial panic of 1825-26 ruined both of Knight’s businesses and left him almost penniless, but in November 1826 his fortunes improved when his good friend, Matthew Davenport Hill, introduced him to Lord Henry Brougham, the liberal politician and founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK). The SDUK and Knight shared a common goal: To publish works that, in the words of Brougham, would provide “useful information to all classes of the community, particularly to such as are unable to avail themselves of experienced teachers, or may prefer learning by themselves” (quoted in Grey, p. 43). To do so, the SDUK proposed to issue a series of inexpensive books on science, technology, economics, practical arts and British history; politics and religion were avoided as being too controversial. In July 1827 the SDUK hired Knight to superintend its publications; in 1829 he became the SDUK’s publisher and editor; and by the 1830s he was involved in nearly all aspects of the Society’s business. Among the first works that Knight produced “under the superintendence” of the SDUK were his (now very scarce) Address to the Labourers on the Subject of Destroying Machinery and (the even scarcer) A Few Observations Additional to those Addressed to Labourers, both written in response to the destructive “Swing riots” of 1830, in which English farm laborers rose up in violent protest against the increasing use of agricultural machinery. Knight’s Address, which sold for a penny, was his first attempt to explain the benefits of new technologies to workers threatened by increasing industrialization; it proved to be very popular, selling 10,000 copies in only a few days. The following year Knight published two more popular treatises on the same subject, The Results of Machinery and The Rights of Industry (also no. 21), both addressed to "the working-men of the United Kingdom.” He would return to the topic of ttechnological progress many times in his writings, both in general and with respect to the printing and publishing industries. His first decade with the SDUK was a fruitful time for Knight: He planned and executed the SDUK’s Library of Entertaining Knowledge, introduced a rapid and inexpensive method for printing wood-engraved illustrations simultaneously with text, and began publishing the SDUK’s Penny Magazine—the world’s first extensively illustrated, low priced, weekly mass-circulation magazine, and the publication for which Knight is best known. Thanks to its high-quality illustrations, the Penny Magazine could be enjoyed even by the semi-literate; it was an enormous success and inspired many imitations. Knight also maintained his own publishing business during this time, editing and producing a number of successful larger format picture books, including The Pictorial Bible, The Pictorial Shakspere (“a remarkable combination of popularization and scholarship”); and Old England. Most of these publications were printed at the firm of William Clowes, who, as noted above, had been the first to use high-speed mechanized printing in book production. Clowes’s imprint can be seen in many of the books he printed for Knight; sometimes the titlepages of these works include a vignette of Clowes’s mechanized press . Old England—and several of Knight’s later picture books—featured colored plates printed using Knight’s innovative four-color “illuminated printing” process. This process deserves special mention: Patented in 1838, it was devised "specifically to address the popular market . . . Knight was arguably the most important promoter of learning through pictures at the time and must have seen colour as a bonus. In his ‘Illuminated printing,’ successive colours were applied to the sheet from relief blocks in multiples of four on specially adapted iron platen presses, which allowed four blocks to be inked separately and swung across the paper for printing, one after the other, before the ink had dried. Further colours could be added by passing the sheets already printed with the first four workings to another four-unit press (Twyman, pp. 391-393). The method was particularly suited for producing multi-colored maps. William Hughes, whose Illuminated Atlas of Scripture Geography Knight published in 1840, described in his introduction to the atlas the many advantages afforded by Knight’s “novel method of printing”: "1st, . . . the various divisions of the countries are covered with distinct colours, so that the boundaries are clearly perceived at the first view; and 2nd, That the mountains, instead of being, as in maps engraved in the usual manner, indicated by black lines, are in white, distinctly and prominently relieved by the coloured ground. In the best engraved maps a serious imperfection has always been felt to result from the names and the hills being alike printed in black, in consequence of which, either names are obscured by the hills, or the hills must be omitted in order to allow of the names being read . . . In the ordinary process of map-engraving, the evil complained of appears unavoidable; but this is no longer the case when a different medium is used for conveying each part of the requisite information. By the method adopted in this series of Maps, the physical features of the countries—their hills and valleys—their lakes and streams—are clearly delineated, without in the least interfering with the exhibition of names and places; while their various divisions, distinguished by colours, are presented at once and distinctly to the eye of the student" (p. 6). Knight’s relationship with the SDUK ended with the Society’s dissolution in 1846; the , following a period of declining circulation, ceased publication the same year. In 1850, after a prolific two decades in publishing, Knight began stepping away from the business to concentrate on writing and editing. He issued books on printing, English history and an autobiography titled Passages of a Working Life during a Half Century. Knight died in 1873; his obituary in the eulogized him as “a highly useful man.” We are offering here a collection of 165 works (circa 300 volumes) and related items featuring Knight as a publisher and author, both in association with the SDUK and under his own auspices. The collection is offered only as a whole; the items listed in the catalogue are not for individual sale. .
(Inventory #: 52087)
(415) 892-3181
