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Reviewed by:
  • Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer
  • Laurel Brake (bio)
Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer, by Valerie Gray; pp. xxii + 233. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, $99.95, £55.00.

To write a compact biography of a subject as productive and wide-ranging as Charles Knight (1791–1873) is necessarily a task of compression and shaping, and Valerie Gray's narrative manages both. Gray's volume, the first book-length assessment published since that of Alice Clowes's Sketch in 1892, provides clear milestones of Knight's professional life, as well as Gray's position on crucial questions of interpretation. These include the conditions and duration of Knight's connection with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK); the trajectory of his work as an independent publisher; his alertness to publishing issues; the extent of his anti-radicalism; the lineaments of his liberalism; and the claim that Knight was an educator, reflected in the precedence of that descriptor in the book's subtitle.

The absence of editor and journalist as descriptors is perhaps an indication of the low status of journalism, then and now. Throughout his life Knight worked in those capacities, yet Gray subsumes them into the more respectable publisher and writer. One explanation lies in the bibliography, where Gray adheres to a hierarchy of value appropriate to humanities rather than to media history, of which a professional life such as Knight's is part. "Works Authored by Knight" (books) take precedence, and "a sampling" of "Articles by Knight" comes last. Between is an uncomfortable category, "Works Edited and/or Published by Knight," in which Gray's conflation of editing and publishing is evident. Knight's landmark publications—his claim to fame in his period and ours—are here: periodicals that he edited, including the Penny Magazine and works that he published serially, such as the Penny Encyclopaedia, are listed haphazardly in an alphabetical, bibliographically undifferentiated list; nor does journalism appear in the [End Page 736] index. Likewise, if the importance of journalism is acknowledged in a first "professional apprenticeship" chapter, it is identified as a forerunner to his life's work as educator, publisher, writer. Chapters thus follow on Knight and the SDUK; on Knight as a "populariser" of education, literacy, and political economy; and on the "Pioneer Publisher." The whole is framed by a good introduction and conclusion.

The selection of illustrations is another missed opportunity. With few exceptions, it reflects Knight's established claim to pioneering publication of good quality illustrations in the cheap press, although the coloured frontispiece from Old England (1845) earns its place, as exemplary of Knight's innovative method of colour printing. Given the different kinds of publications limned by Gray, who justly extols Knight's breadth of endeavour, it is disappointing not to see plates of layouts, title pages, mastheads, adverts, and the whole array of graphics across them. Of the thirteen images included, the most interesting is "Patent Penny Knowledge Mill," Robert Seymour's satire on the Penny Magazine, from an 1832 sheet of caricatures.

These cavils apart, this is a scholarly, interesting, and readable book, packed with information on the vicissitudes of nineteenth-century media and publishing, and replete with arguments with which the reader is free to disagree. It is based on fresh archival research, evident in the text, generous endnotes, appendices, chronology, and bibliography.

Although Gray reminds us that Knight lacked a university education, his story is neither atypical nor regrettable. Parallel figures whose publishing career and empire might have been invoked in this regard and whose absence is evident at many points in this narrative are the Chambers brothers, who like Knight were born into the book trade. In light of the nature of their collective achievements, this lineage and education would be welcome. In Knight's case, his education continued after he left school at fourteen to serve a valuable apprenticeship in his father's printing and bookselling business; having finished, he spent two months in London as a reporter on two dailies, edited by a family friend. At twenty-one, in 1812, Knight was installed as joint proprietor with his father, and sole editor of a new local weekly paper in Windsor...

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