Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860

By Aileen Fyfe

With the overwhelming amount of new information that bombards us each day, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when the widespread availability of the printed word was a novelty. In early nineteenth-century Britain, print was not novel—Gutenberg’s printing press had been around for nearly four centuries—but printed matter was still a rare and relatively expensive luxury. All this changed, however, as publishers began employing new technologies to astounding effect, mass-producing instructive and educational books and magazines and revolutionizing how knowledge was disseminated to the general public.

In Steam-Powered Knowledge, Aileen Fyfe explores the activities of William Chambers and the W. & R. Chambers publishing firm during its formative years, documenting for the first time how new technologies were integrated into existing business systems. Chambers was one of the first publishers to abandon traditional skills associated with hand printing, instead favoring the latest innovations in printing processes and machinery: machine-made paper, stereotyping, and, especially, printing machines driven by steam power. The mid-nineteenth century also witnessed dramatic advances in transportation, and Chambers used proliferating railway networks and steamship routes to speed up communication and distribution. As a result, his high-tech publishing firm became an exemplar of commercial success by 1850 and outlived all of its rivals in the business of cheap instructive print. Fyfe follows Chambers’s journey from small-time bookseller and self-trained hand-press printer to wealthy and successful publisher of popular educational books on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating along the way the profound effects of his and his fellow publishers’ willingness, or unwillingness, to incorporate these technological innovations into their businesses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jan 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226276540

Aileen Fyfe

Aileen Fyfe is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, UK. She is a social and cultural historian of science and technology, who researches the publication and popularisation of the sciences. She is the author many articles and books, including Science and Salvation (2004), Steam-Powered Knowledge (2012), and the briefing paper Untangling Academic Publishing (2017). She is currently writing about the history of peer review and research evaluation, and the economic models underlying journal publishing.

Book preview

AILEEN FYFE is lecturer in modern British history at the University of St Andrews, United Kingdom. She is the author of Science in Salvation and coeditor of Science in the Marketplace, both published by the University of Chicago Press, and editor of Science for Children.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27651-9 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-27651-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27654-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fyfe, Aileen.

Steam-powered knowledge: William Chambers and the business of publishing, 1820–1860 / Aileen Fyfe.

pages; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27651-9 (cloth: alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-27651-1 (cloth: alkaline paper) 1. William and Robert Chambers—History. 2. Chambers, William, 1800–1833. 3. Chambers, Robert, 1802–1871. 4. Publishers and publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Booksellers and bookselling—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Railroads—Economic aspects. 7. George Routledge and Sons—History. I. Title.

Z325.C44F94 2012

070.5094109′034—dc23

2011029615

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Steam-Powered Knowledge

WILLIAM CHAMBERS AND THE BUSINESS OF PUBLISHING, 1820–1860

AILEEN FYFE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS,   Chicago and London

This book is for

Alastair and Morag Fyfe,

who have often questioned

but never doubted.

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

A Note on Money

Preface

Introduction: The Flood of Cheap Print

1 W. & R. Chambers and the Market for Print

Part I: Organizing a Proper System of Publishing

2 Industrial Book Production

3 Reaching a National Market

4 Production and Steam Power

5 New Formats for Information

6 Reaching an Overseas Market

7 A Modern Printing Establishment

Part II: Railways and Competition

8 The Coming of the Railways

9 Centralizing Business in Edinburgh

10 Routledge and the New Competition

11 Railway Bookstalls

12 Instructionin the Railway Marketplace

13 The Dignitaries of the Trade Take on Routledge

Part III: Steamships and Transatlantic Business

14 Transatlantic Opportunities

15 Getting to Know the American Market

16 The Dissemination of Cheap Instruction

17 A New Spirit of Engagement

18 Building Relationships with Boston and Philadelphia

19 Piracy and Shipwreck!

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The research and writing of this book would have been impossible without the support of the National University of Ireland, Galway, and its staff. Writing a historical monograph is entirely contingent on having the time and money needed to visit archives and rare book collections, and, later, having time to write. These necessary conditions of historical research are coming under increasing pressure in our modern universities, so I feel extremely fortunate to have received such strong support during the progress of this book. I would like to acknowledge the National University of Ireland, Galway, for providing research funding and, most important, the freedom of a sabbatical year; the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, for the glorious luxury of another year free from teaching; and the Bibliographical Society of America, for funding my trips to Boston and New York.

For hosting me during various periods of research leave, I am grateful to the following institutions and individuals: the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge (Iain Donaldson); the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge (the late Peter Lipton); Linacre College, Oxford (Paul Slack); the School of Modern History, University of Oxford (Robert Fox); the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts (Caroline Sloat and David Hall). I benefited enormously from the different intellectual contexts of these places and the stimulating conversation of their various staff, students, and visiting researchers.

Over the years, I have spent many happy hours in the North Reading Room of the National Library of Scotland, delving among the somewhat dusty files and boxes of the Chambers archives, and special thanks must go to the NLS staff, who were the epitome of helpful, speedy, and knowledgeable. I would also like to acknowledge the staff of Cambridge University Library; the Bodleian Library Oxford, especially the John Johnson Collection; the British Library; the library of the American Antiquarian Society; and the New York Public Library.

Parts of this book have been presented and discussed over the years at seminars and conferences of historians of science, historians of technology, book historians, and literary scholars. I have benefited from many conversations with Jim Secord, Jon Topham, Bernie Lightman, Leslie Howsam, and Juliana Adelman; and I would like to thank Sondra Miley Cooney for her encouragement (and her tips for using the Chambers archive!). I would particularly like to mention the support and encouragement of my friends and colleagues who are fellow members of the British Society for the History of Science, and whose many conversations have provided a valuable blend of moral support and intellectual stimulation. For generously sharing their expertise by commenting on sections (or more!) of the typescript, I wish to acknowledge Enrico Dal Lago, Graeme Gooday, Laura Kelly, James Sumner, and the anonymous readers at the University of Chicago Press.

It was the late Susan Abrams who first brought me to the University of Chicago Press; her successor Catherine Rice encouraged me in the early stages of this project; and the final stages have been under the steady hand of Karen Darling, with help, as ever, from Abby Collier, Micah Fehrenbacher, Stephanie Hlywak, and Michael Koplow. Lisa Wehrle was an efficient and sympathetic copyeditor.

And finally, I could not end without mentioning my husband Paul. It is such a joy to share my life with someone who encourages my enthusiasm for my research and whose eye for narrative, style, and clarity I respect enormously.

Abbreviations

A Note on Money

In the nineteenth century, Britain used a predecimal

monetary system with three units: pounds (£), shillings (s), and pennies (d). The United States used a decimal system of dollars ($) and cents (¢).

British money:

£1 = 20s. = 240d. 1s. = 12d.

U.S. money:

$1 = 100¢

Exchange rate (approximate):

£1 = $5

4s. = $1

1s. = 25¢

6d. = 12½¢

1d. = 2¢

Preface

William Chambers bought his first printing press in 1820. Aged twenty, he had recently completed an apprenticeship with an Edinburgh bookseller and was now running a tiny bookshop of his own. He slept in a room behind his shop, and frugal living had allowed him to save enough money to purchase a secondhand printing press.¹ The press was small, old, and temperamental, and the types that came with it were very worn, but printing helped fill the long empty hours in the shop. In the printers’ workshops of Edinburgh, highly skilled compositors set the type and trained pressmen performed the printing, but Chambers chose to do everything himself.² As he taught himself the skills of composition and printing, he was learning techniques that had barely changed since the time of Gutenberg or Caxton four centuries earlier.

During quiet periods in the shop, Chambers would carefully select individual pieces of type to place on his composing stick and spell out (in mirror image) a line of poetry by Robert Burns. He would justify each line of type and place it into a galley until he had enough completed lines to tie them into pages. Once he had eight pages, Chambers locked them into the forme that would hold them in the bed of the press. On rainy days, when customers were rare, the self-taught printer would work the press in his back room: covering the surface of the type with just the right amount of ink, placing a sheet of paper carefully into place, pulling the lever that brought the paper and the inked surface together with a firm and even pressure, retrieving the sheet of paper and placing it to dry, and then repeating the process. After printing 750 copies, Chambers unlocked the type and returned the letters to their places in the case. Next he arranged the type for another eight pages, which he printed on the backs of the sheets. Once the ink was dry, he could fold each sheet in half once, twice, and three times. The resulting gathering would contain the first sixteen pages of the Songs of Robert Burns. It took months for Chambers to finish printing the six sheets that made up the entire book. His final step was to stitch the gatherings together and add a cover. Despite the worn type, the uneven print quality, and the primitive sewing and binding, Chambers managed to sell the copies at a shilling each, and claimed to have cleared £9 over and above his original purchases of ink and paper.

Three decades later, William Chambers crossed the Atlantic for the first time. After enjoying twelve days of elaborate meals and socializing in the first-class accommodation on the Cunard steamship America, he arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the end of September 1853.³ During his visit, he was overwhelmed by a complimentary and undeserved address thanking him for his role in providing cheap instructive schoolbooks to the English-speaking world.⁴ He then embarked on a two-and-a-half-month tour of the United States and Upper and Lower Canada. He took another Cunard steamer to Boston, and then traveled to Montreal by railroad and steamboat. The speed and reliability of these modern methods of transportation enabled him to cover vast distances, visiting Toronto, Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Buffalo, and New York. In Boston, he was made an honorary member of the Mercantile Library Association, while in Washington, after observing the opening of Congress, he was rather amazed—yet delighted—to be introduced to President Franklin Pierce.⁵

Such an extensive (and expensive) foreign tour shows how far William Chambers had come from his small and cranky press. Having founded the publishing house of W. & R. Chambers in 1832, he was now coproprietor of one of Edinburgh’s larger printing and publishing operations, employing 150 staff and the latest technical processes to bring instructive and educational cheap print to Britain and to the world. The New York Literary World declared that William and his brother Robert had done more, perhaps, than any other two individuals of the age for the promotion of sound and useful knowledge, and as Chambers prepared to leave New York, the Times of London was reporting that he had amassed wealth by the enormous sale of cheap publications of lasting good.⁶

By this time, Chambers had abandoned the traditional skills associated with hand printing and become an enthusiastic convert to the latest innovations in printing processes and machinery: machine-made paper that was produced in ever-larger sheets; stereotype plates that preserved the form of moveable type long after the original type was dispersed; and, especially, printing machines that could be driven by steam power. These techniques had existed in 1820, but the British book trade did not adopt them until much later. William Chambers’s firm would become one of the pioneers, transforming printing from a handcraft to a great Victorian industry and doing so, moreover, not simply in search of profit but as a means of bringing cheap instructive print and education to a universal readership.

Introduction

The Flood of Cheap Print

We take print so much for granted that it is perhaps difficult to remember that the widespread availability of the printed word was once a novelty. Of course, the novelty in the nineteenth century was not the mere existence of print—Gutenberg’s printing press had been around for four centuries—but rather the quantity and cheapness of printed matter. As a journalist remarked in 1855, the quantity of printed matter that now issues from the press, and passes through the shops of booksellers to the public, is something totally unprecedented.¹ Another commentator pointed to the significance of price, noting that the small and low-priced volume which is accessible to all was rapidly replacing the huge costly tomes of former years.² Literary reviews in the 1850s were full of articles headed Cheap Literature, New and Cheap Forms of Popular Literature and Reading for the Million.³ The multiplication of cheap books in Britain attracted envy even across the Atlantic, which was a notable feat given the American book trade’s reputation for cheapness throughout the 1830s and 1840s.⁴

Ever since Gutenberg’s day, most printed books had been expensive luxuries for wealthy customers, and even teachers, ministers, or lawyers would have had to think carefully before purchasing a new book. Throughout the nineteenth century, the latest works of the famous novelists and poets—the works that we now consider part of the Victorian literary canon—remained too expensive for most lower or middle-class readers. New novels were routinely issued in three volumes at a total cost of 31s. and sixpence, yet weekly wages could be just 12s. for agricultural laborers, rising to 25s. for skilled compositors in the Edinburgh print trade, yet still only 40s. for low-ranking professionals such as ministers or teachers.⁵ Charitable bodies had been teaching the working classes to read since the late eighteenth century, but the skill was of limited use when the only affordable forms of print were secondhand books; a limited range of ballads, chapbooks, and pamphlets costing just a penny or two; and the tracts given away by religious organizations.⁶

However, the great literary works were far less representative of the output of the print trades of their day than we might imagine. Almanacs, spelling books, and dictionaries had long been the bread and butter of publishing, and by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, publishers were issuing enormous quantities of schoolbooks, railway timetables, cookery books, and cheap instructive texts on a wide range of topics. These sorts of books were usually available for a few shillings, making them far more accessible than the famous literary works.

Of course, this flood of cheap print was not the only significant change to nineteenth-century life. Robert Chambers reminded his readers that when I first saw and sailed on salt water, there was no such thing as steam-navigation. . . . Gaslight was then spoken of, but not effected.⁷ Years later, on the half-centenary of Chambers’s Journal, William Chambers himself reflected on the changes he had seen over his lifetime:

Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is the change as to facility of transit by sea and land through the agency of steam, while telegraphic communications are effected with the swiftness of lightning. Life may not be extended in point of years, but time is immensely economised.⁸

By the time Chambers wrote those remarks in the early 1880s, commentators had been praising the lightning speed of the electric telegraph for thirty years.⁹ Even when the British cable network was still being developed, journalists were insisting that it would alter the very habits of social life and improve the social condition of all the races of mankind.¹⁰ Such claims have frequently been mirrored by modern writers who find the origins of the modern digital information revolution in the Victorian electric telegraph.¹¹

The electric telegraph’s ability to transmit information almost instantaneously over long distances undoubtedly made the device a modern marvel. However, the excitement about the electric telegraph should not overshadow the fact that, in the mid-nineteenth century, it had yet to establish its global reach and, crucially, played only a very limited role in the provision of knowledge and information to ordinary people. Its services came at a cost, based on length of message and distance of transmission. In the early 1850s, a twenty-word telegram from London to Edinburgh would have cost 8s.6d., whereas a penny postage stamp would have ensured that a letter, containing as many words as the writer could fit onto the page, was delivered the next day, for just a hundredth of the cost.¹² Nor could the telegraph compete with the printed word in publishing, or broadcasting, information to large numbers of people. Nor could it form a repository of knowledge for future generations. The telegraph’s domain was the almost-real-time communication of brief, valuable information between two (or a small number of) affluent correspondents. Throughout the nineteenth century, therefore, the printed word continued to convey the widest variety of forms of information to the widest variety of people.

In his reflective article, Robert Chambers suggested that of all the changes he had seen over his lifetime, the most striking were the improvements in what I would call, comprehensively, access to knowledge. Without mentioning the contribution made by the Chambers firm, he recounted the increased availability of newspapers, magazines, and cheap books, all of which had added prodigiously to the educational means of the country.¹³ The telegraph might seem the revolutionary Victorian information technology, but in terms of everyday impact, the transformation of the printed word, from rare luxury to an everyday commodity for most of the population, was far more significant.

In economic terms, the printing and allied trades were a very small sector of British industry, employing less than 2 percent of the British workforce in 1851. But the key to understanding the peculiar excitement surrounding cheap print is to understand that print was not a commodity like any other.¹⁴ Walter Bagehot, editor of the Economist magazine in the 1850s, was one of those who expressed skepticism of the true value of most scientific and technological advances, noting that we go by the train, but we are not improved at our journey’s end. We have railways, and canals, and manufactures—excellent things, no doubt, but they do not touch the soul. Somehow, they seem to make life more superficial.¹⁵ Unlike screws, hat pins, printed muslin, or Wedgwood vases, print had the power to affect consumers’ minds and souls.

The majority of nineteenth-century Britons took this power of print for granted. As staunch Christians—mostly of Protestant denominations—they believed that reading certain printed texts could save souls from eternal damnation. This was the age of the great Bible, tract, and missionary societies, which used printed matter to bring Christianity to the entire world.¹⁶ But the belief in the power of print was not limited to religion, for it was regarded as a civilizing and improving force by a wide range of commentators. In an age before television, radio, telephony, and the Internet, printed matter was the most significant medium for the transmission of information.¹⁷ And this was not only true for things like news, financial information, and theater reviews: for the vast majority of the population, any knowledge of very basic facts about the world—such as its history, geography, and natural history—was likely to come from printed matter. Print could introduce its readers to political economy and natural science, to great literature and distant lands, and to philosophy and theology. It offered instruction to readers who wished to become educated and informed, and it could awaken the higher powers of thought—reflection, imagination, and taste.¹⁸ It was true that print sometimes encouraged less uplifting developments: young women might be tempted to waste their leisure hours on novel reading, while young men might discover radical politics or heterodox religion.¹⁹ But despite the ongoing fears about the bad effects of certain sorts of print, the general consensus in British society was that print was, overall, a power for good and the mightiest agency of modern times.²⁰ Cheap print influenced people’s minds, not just the material conditions of their daily lives. It represented a potential force for true social improvement.

Analyzing Cheap Print

The Victorians loved statistics, and contemporary descriptions often used numbers to convey awe.²¹ Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the mechanical computer, visited the printing office of the Times in 1832 and reported that in one hour, 4000 sheets of paper are printed on one side; and an impression of 12,000 copies, from above 300,000 moveable pieces of metal, is produced for the public in six hours!²² Other commentators described the enormous size of the printing machines, the number of people employed to run them, or the reams of paper they consumed, and so too, the cheap print revolution was described numerically. The publisher and educational campaigner Charles Knight sought to quantify the increase in book production by examining the numbers of books published per year. This enabled him to report that the output of the British book trade had increased from 842 titles a year in 1828 to 2,530 titles in 1853, while the number of monthly periodicals had risen from 177 to 362.²³ Historians have expended considerable energy trying to improve on these estimates, and the absolute numbers are now believed to be rather higher than Knight thought.²⁴ But he was right about the growth: recent figures suggest that the number of new titles issued per year rose from about 2,000 in 1800 to about 4,000 in 1840.²⁵

The modern estimates also confirm contemporary impressions that the years around 1850 were particularly special. Not only was this the time of the most rapid rate of growth in the output of the book trade in the entire century (albeit short lived), but, as historian Simon Eliot has shown, it was when the price structure of the British trade changed: the time when cheap books became more common than expensive ones. Eliot has defined cheap books as those under 3s.6d.²⁶ Knight, too, drew attention to the fall in prices; he claimed that the average price of a new book had fallen from 16s. in the 1820s to 8s.4d. in the 1850s. By using average prices, Knight was barely doing justice to the flood of cheapness that his contemporaries saw around them, though he commented that the system of cheapness in books has been carried further than I ever contemplated it could be carried.²⁷ With reprints widely available for five shillings, and certain novels, histories, and travel books now sold on railway station platforms for just a shilling or two, the sheer quantity of cheap books was striking.

Nothing better illustrates the dramatic fall in British book prices around 1850 than the reactions of Americans. Ever since the United States gained their independence—and their freedom from British legislation and taxation—American book prices had been lower than British prices. In the 1830s and 1840s, this fact was often used as ammunition by British campaigners. In 1834, for instance, Knight reported that Harper & Brothers in New York was planning to sell Maria Edgeworth’s novel Helen: A Tale (London, 1834) for just 75 cents, equivalent to 3s. and thus a tenth of the price of the London edition.²⁸ When American prices dropped dramatically during the depression of the early 1840s, the contrast became even more striking.²⁹ The latest London novels and the first volumes of Thomas Macaulay’s History of England (London, 1848) were selling in New York for 25¢, and the most celebrated were even issued in 12½¢ editions.³⁰ But by 1853, the Boston Transcript was reporting that the English press has entirely distanced our own in the honor of issuing substantial literature at a low cost.³¹ And by the 1860s, the respected New York publisher George Putnam had to admit that "our boasted cheapness in book-making has been actually eclipsed, and many popular and useful books were actually sold cheaper in England" than their equivalents in the United States.³² British print had become so cheap that it was cheaper even than American print.

For the Victorians, the most striking symbol of the new world of abundant, cheap print was the steam-powered printing machine. It was said to have caused a great revolution in printing and to have finally realized the full capability of printing by moveable types.³³ Knight chose the title The Printing Machine for his new magazine for the many, and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal assured its readers that its cover price could be so cheap only because it was steam-printed.³⁴

But by highlighting the role of the steam-printing machine in the flood of cheap print, the Victorians placed too much emphasis on a machine. The printing machine may have been the most dramatic of the technical changes in the printing trade, but it was accompanied by the arrival of machine-made paper, stereotype plates and edition bindings, and several new techniques for reproducing illustrations.³⁵ The more extended of the contemporary accounts of the progress of printing, such as those published in Knight’s Penny Magazine and Chambers’s Journal, did give detailed descriptions of all these techniques and their relations to one another.³⁶ But even so, in their emphasis on technology, they largely ignored the social, political, and commercial factors in which the new processes operated. The exception was their recognition of increased literacy rates, since this underpinned the conviction that a new mass market existed for print.

Recent scholarship has retained the assumption that the most important factors in the expansion of the nineteenth-century marketplace for print were the arrival of new print processes and the improvements in literacy. However, it is striking that we have a far more sophisticated understanding of the latter than the former, thanks to several generations of scholars who have situated literacy and education in the social, political, and religious context of nineteenth-century Britain.³⁷ Research on the social, economic, and cultural contexts of print has built on this work, investigating the ways in which authors and their publishers responded to the challenges and opportunities of the expanding audience for print. These studies rarely pay more than lip service to the new technologies.³⁸ Technology does take a more prominent role in the scholarly efforts to quantify the economic changes taking place in the book trade, in terms of output, prices, and print runs, but it is usually held up as the explanation, without itself being interrogated or explained.³⁹

In contrast to our histories of literacy and education, our histories of the new print processes still tend toward the descriptive. Bibliographers and historians of printing have provided us with explanations of each of the new processes, descriptions and illustrations of the printed product that resulted, instructions on how to identify surviving specimens, and descriptions of the various types of machinery that made it all possible.⁴⁰ But we know surprisingly little about how such technologies were used in practice or how their use fitted into wider commercial or social objectives. Despite the fact that strong technological determinism is out of fashion, there remains a widespread assumption in the history of publishing that it is sufficient to remark that the arrival of new technologies and methods of production were hugely significant, without asking why, or how, or to whom, or where.⁴¹

Meanwhile, historians of technology have demonstrated that technology rarely, if ever, has the straightforward, world-changing effect that the Victorians took for granted. We know that new technologies, even if technically more advanced, rarely gain immediate or automatic acceptance. They have to compete in a marketplace with existing technologies and emerging rivals.⁴² Commercial decisions about marketing strategy, pricing policy, and associated equipment or applications can be far more significant in determining the rate of uptake and success of a new technology than anything intrinsic to that technology. Most recently, a new emphasis on users has shown that technologies can end up being used in quite different ways and contexts from those intended by their inventors and designers, and that even nonusers influence the development and marketing of technology.⁴³

Most of these studies of technologies in social context have focused on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and despite a clear interest in information and communication technologies, we do not yet have any nuanced account of the way that the new print technologies of early Victorian Britain were integrated into existing business systems to enable them to reach new audiences for print.⁴⁴ We know when and by whom steam-printing machines, stereotyping, and machine-made paper were invented, but we do not yet know how and why certain printers and publishers started using them while others did not. The existing studies of later periods would lead us to expect to see the new technologies used in a variety of ways, for different purposes, at different times, and in different contexts, and particularly so in the early years of those technologies, when their uses and meanings had not yet stabilized.⁴⁵ In the case of print technologies, this suggests a focus on the period from the 1820s to the 1850s.

It is already well known that the first commercial steam-printing machine was commissioned by the proprietor of the Times newspaper and brought into use in 1814. The earliest users of the machines were also proprietors of newspapers or high-circulation weekly magazines, who welcomed steam printing for its ability to extend circulations while keeping deadlines tight.⁴⁶ The later a newspaper could go to press, the more up to date its news could be, but the fewer copies could be printed. It was possible to increase output by running multiple hand presses simultaneously, but steam-printing machines were the only way of substantially increasing circulations. In contrast, most literary book publishers saw no need to abandon a system that was working well. They prided themselves on selling books of high production quality to a relatively small but affluent audience.⁴⁷ Such a business model did not require rapid or mass production, but it did require print quality that was believed to be possible only with hand presses. Stereotyping follows a similar story.

The real question, then, concerns what was going on in the period between the newspapers’ adoption of the new technologies, around 1820, and their eventual percolation through most of the British book trade, sometime after 1850.⁴⁸ Studies of particular publishing houses give some hints. Historians of the great nineteenth-century Bible and tract societies have noted that those organizations were using both steam printing and stereotyping earlier than might have been expected.⁴⁹ So too was the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), most notably with its Penny Magazine, first published in 1832.⁵⁰ Despite their disagreement over the inclusion of religious sentiments, these organizations shared a commitment to the cause of popular education and a relative lack of interest in profit. They found the steam-powered printing machine attractive—for not only was the machine fast, but, once set up, it required less labor to run. Over long print runs, therefore, the machine was cheaper than hand printing. Charitable societies were confident that such large numbers of copies would sell, and, unlike most traditional publishers, they were willing and able to take the risk.

As philanthropic charities, these publishing societies were somewhat apart from the regular commercial trade and usually have been marginalized in the histories of nineteenth-century publishing.⁵¹ But there were other, commercial publishers in the 1830s who shared both their ambitions for popular education and cheap print, and their early use of technologies. One of the best known is Charles Knight of London, who worked closely with the SDUK but also published on his own account.⁵² Another is the firm of W. & R. Chambers of Edinburgh.⁵³ Knight and Chambers were pioneering in their use of new processes to produce general knowledge works in a range of new formats, at a time when they were otherwise restricted to the big London newspapers, the most successful of the weekly magazines, and the charitable publishing societies. Both were convinced that knowledge ought to be widely available, and that, in the absence of a proper educational system for all classes, cheap instructive publishing was the most effective way of achieving this aim.

William and Robert Chambers were more actively involved with the new processes than Knight, for they quickly became printers as well as publishers and by 1850 owned one of Edinburgh’s most advanced printing houses.⁵⁴ They are also notable for running their firm entirely as a commercial undertaking, whereas Knight’s finances were tightly interwoven with those of the SDUK during the years of its existence.⁵⁵ And, whereas several close flirtations with bankruptcy drove Knight into semiretirement in the early 1850s, W. & R. Chambers was a commercial success and maintained their high reputation for sound instructive and educational publications into the twentieth century.

Organization of This Book

Previous histories of the new print technologies have tended to focus on invention and to assume that an obvious improvement must have had an immediate impact. What has yet to be described are the complex ways in which individuals decided whether to acquire the new machinery or techniques, when to do so, and what to use them for. The real interest lies in the ways the new technologies were used, often in combination with older methods and sometimes for purposes that the inventors had not imagined. It is these issues, dependent on human agency and linked to specific times, places, and contexts, that this book will address.

I have sought to investigate these issues through an examination of the activities of W. & R. Chambers in the early days of their history, roughly from the 1830s to the 1850s. The Chambers brothers are a revealing example because they were part of what we might call the second wave of adopters. Chambers came to steam printing and stereotyping some fifteen or twenty years after they had been invented, when they were relatively well developed but had yet to come into widespread use. Being ahead of the crowd meant that Chambers were choosing to use new processes at a time when their uses and roles in the publishing business were still fluid and open to negotiation. Chambers needed to—and yet also had the freedom to—configure the techniques in the best way for their particular philanthropic ambitions and commercial needs. Other companies were publishing cheap print before the 1830s, but it was William Chambers’s careful integration of those technologies into a well-run business system, where they had to be adapted to commercial, legal, and literary realities, that enabled his firm to make a commercial success from cheap print.

The W. & R. Chambers archive, deposited in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, provides a marvelous resource for anyone who wishes to investigate the business of publishing in these early years of the new print technologies.⁵⁶ The archive contains account books, author correspondence, and receipts for everything from new machinery to musicians for the company’s annual soirées. It is through those archives and the published record that I can tell the story of why and how W. & R. Chambers adopted and used stereotyping and steam printing in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s.

These new printing processes did not operate in a vacuum but were part of an increasingly large business operation, and had to be fitted around existing editorial, commercial, and technical practices. Moreover, the operation of those various internal business practices was constantly affected by things over which the Chambers brothers had little control, from tax regimes through transport networks to literacy rates. Changes in the wider world, and elsewhere within the business, could have knock-on effects on how particular techniques were used, and it is clear that the ways in which Chambers used both stereotyping and steam printing changed over time in response to changes in the company’s business model and in the wider commercial context.

Part 1 examines the early decades of W. & R. Chambers, during which they made the transition from hand-press techniques to stereotyping and steam printing and experimented with alternative ways of using those processes. By the 1840s and 1850s, Chambers were well known as publishers of books and instructive tracts, but the company had started by publishing a weekly magazine. It was the pressure of producing sufficient copies of this magazine, combined with an intense desire to increase its circulation, that originally led the firm to both steam printing and stereotyping. This in itself was not particularly unusual, but what was striking was their subsequent decision—having purchased a printing machine of their own—to experiment in printing different types of work by steam. They were among the first in Britain to print books