Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer

Charles Knight is a figure likely to evoke in readers’ minds those energetic and earnest years in the first‐half of the 19th‐century. At that time there was much interest in social reform, the impact of technology, the role of religion, and the drive for wider literacy and working‐class education. Knight (1791‐1873) was one of several contemporary worthies (Brougham and Ewart, Carlyle and Martineau were others) who advocated cheap but quality publications for a market increasingly literate and increasingly interested in what we call “leisure reading” today. Like others too, Knight was accused of wanting social control through what he wrote and published, above all with and through the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) with which he is usually associated.

In this interesting study of Knight's life and times, organized in a broadly chronological manner with themes like pioneer publisher or popularizer of education or of political economy, Valerie Gray (a librarian at the University of Reading library in the UK) draws on a wide range of archive and secondary sources to remind and inform us of the historical importance of what went on in popular, religious and educational publishing at the time, and of Knight's place in it. He was politically engaged from the early days in Windsor as a journalist. He was a key figure in the SDUK from 1827 until 1846, publishing many books and periodicals such as the Penny Cyclopaedia (1832 in 27 volumes), dealing with printers like Clowes, denouncing the stamp duty taxation on periodicals, and manoeuvering through a minefield of financial ups‐and‐downs.

For any student of the 19th‐century – its social and cultural, educational and publishing, technological and political changes, above all those in the decades up to the 1850s – Gray's study is readable and well‐researched. She succeeds in representing and filtering the views of many critics and commentators of this well‐populated era and only occasionally seems to let sources carry the argument along. Her conclusion is that Knight – and indeed the SDUK itself – have been accused of wanting social control but that Knight himself demonstrates time and time again his belief in encouraging and enabling working‐class readers to think for themselves. He was an articulate advocate of religious tolerance and a critic of commercial avarice, and, though rash and idealistic at times, a man of unbounded imaginative energy (he wrote and/or published Shakespeare and Caxton and natural history and much else) and a pragmatic publisher alert to contemporary innovations (like steam presses, stereotyping, and wood engraving). If anything, then, Gray's book will affirm Knight as a complex character and remind readers of his place in a complex period.

He influenced and was influenced by Dickens. He was an important commentator on education, publisher to the Poor Law Commissioners, author of works like The Results of Machinery (on technology and political economy), an advocate of change but not violent reform, a supporter of Ewart's plans for public libraries, and a canny entrepreneur in the contemporary publishing scene (alert to changing fashions among readers, aware of rivals from Lackington to the Religious Trace Society, inspired in getting illustrators like Jackson and Harvey to illustrate his books and periodicals, and tenacious over finance). The two chapters on Knight's involvement with education and with political reform will be of interest to students and lecturers in the period. Librarians, cultural historians, and publishing history addicts will like the book. It is one in “The Nineteenth Century” series from Ashgate, a series that includes studies of The London Journal by Andrew King and English Socialist Periodicals by Deborah Mutch (information at www.ashgate.com).

A value feature, too, is an extensive bibliography, of both Knight's own materials and of secondary and critical material about Knight and his period. References to sources like Altick and Berg, Feather and Kelly, Vincent and Weedon indicate the range there: this feature is a good starting point for independent research and for identifying additions to your collection (accepting that such literature extends over a long period and some key works are now out‐of‐print). Illustrations (a coloured frontispiece and 13 black‐and‐whites) add to the pleasure of reading the book.