Steam Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing 1820–1860 by Aileen Fyfe (review)

In her first book, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (see The Library, vii, 6 (2006), 207–09), Aileen Fyfe examined the work of the Religious Tract Society in disseminating cheap print to the masses. Here she continues this theme, focusing on the early decades of a more secular and commercial publisher, William and Robert Chambers of Edinburgh. In the course of nine teen chapters Fyfe takes her readers through the early decades of the firm founded by the two brothers. She describes how they used the latest printing and transport technology to compete against rivals and plagiarists in Britain and abroad. The mainstay of the business was the popular weekly Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal started in 1832, which only expired in 1956 having outlived its many rivals by a century.

The Chambers came from humble beginnings. Following their father’s bankruptcy in 1813 the Chambers family moved in greatly reduced circumstances to Edinburgh where the brothers took up bookselling. Apart from selling books they published and wrote them. At first a small sixteen page Songs of Robert Burns was laboriously typeset and printed sheet by sheet before being clumsily sewn together. Short-lived periodicals and books on Scottish history and literature, principally from the pen of Robert, appeared in the 1820s. This combination of bookselling, publishing, and writing was not uncommon. What was uncommon was the success of their weekly. Launched in February 1832 it speedily secured a huge sale in lowland Scotland among working class readers. Much to the surprise of William Chambers, the business brain of the firm, it also did unexpectedly well south of the border with a demand for 10–20,000 copies a week from London in the second month of publication. Maintaining this circulation necessitated a rapid switch from the hand press to heavy investment in steam presses. Outsourcing to other Edinburgh firms was only a temporary solution and reprinting in London was not to the satisfaction of William Chambers. Stereotyping followed rapidly. This allowed plates to be sent south to London for reprinting for the English market. It was not until direct Edinburgh to London rail links were established in 1846 that printing was concentrated in Edinburgh. To cater for the English market the proportion of Scottish content diminished from an early date. Curiously despite centralizing production in Edinburgh virtually all Chambers’s publications have the imprint ‘London and Edinburgh’ in that order.

Not all of their publications were successful. There was a short lived monthly supplement to the Journal entitled Chambers’s Historical Newspaper, which ran between November 1832 and January 1836. A more lasting series Chambers’s Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts came out weekly for the quarter century between 1844 and 1869. As detailed here George Routledge was to be a formidable opponent trumping Chambers in the emerging railway passenger market. The book devotes much space to William Chambers dealings with America in the 1840s and 50s where the problems (and some of the solutions) echoed those of his first decade.

The main source of this study is the Chambers’s archive in the National Library of Scotland. These are drawn upon to telling effect. It may be true that Chambers were paternalistic employers with no serious labour problems, but it would have been interesting to have consulted the surviving Edinburgh trade union records to confirm this and to see if the wage differentials between London and Edinburgh had an important role in concentrating production in Edinburgh. One wonders if the circulation figures published in the Journal are always confirmed by the archive.

At one level the success of the Journal is something of a mystery. Unlike its rival the Penny Magazine, which closed in 1846, the Journal was completely devoid of illustrations. This decision was made on cost grounds. Volume six of Chambers’s Papers for the People included...