William Jeffs, Victorian Bookseller and Publisher of French Literature

This article examines the activities and cultural significance of William Jeffs's foreign bookshop, based at 15, Burlington Arcade in London. The shop is now primarily remembered as the setting for George Eliot's and G. H. Lewes's first meeting, but to nineteenth-century readers Jeffs was widely known as one of the most important disseminators of French literature in England. William Jeffs worked as both bookseller and publisher, with the aim of appealing to British readers keen to keep abreast of Gallic literature as well as to French exiles eager to obtain and circulate political literature banned on the Continent. Most strikingly, Jeffs agreed to lend his imprint to Victor Hugo's Napoléon-le-Petit (1852), and struggled to form a working relationship with, and benefit commercially from, the prickly French writer. The article draws attention to a little-known yet important nineteenth-century bookseller-publisher, and in doing so seeks to shed new light on how the Victorians consumed French literature.