Charles Knight Jnr
Charles Knight, to whom, more than to any other Englishman, popular knowledge is indebted, was born on the 15th March, 1791, at Windsor, where his father was a bookseller. Young Knight imbibed a love for literature a very early age. He was educated at a private school at Ealing, kept by the Rev. Dr. Nicholas, where he was ‘ really happy.’ After two years, and in the midsummer of 1805, he was, as he says, uprooted from this congenial soil, and planted once more in the arid sands of Windsor.’
It was a stirring epoch. The victorious Bonaparte threatened to hurl 150,000 men on England; a ‘ threat which produced,’ says M. Thiers, ‘ a shiver of terror in the hearts of all Englishmen.’
‘Well do I remember,’ says young Knight, ‘ how we school-boys shivered. Our games assumed a semi-military character. We sang “Rule Britannia” in the play-ground. A son of Charles Incledon, who inherited his father’s glorious voice, and who slept in the same bed- room with me, kept us awake nightly with some of Dibdin’s most stirring songs.’
From his fourteenth to his seventeenth year Charles Knight was learning the printer’s trade, and reading old novels and old poetry. Newspapers, too, occupied much of his time. He tells us in his most entertaining autobiography some of the conditions of English life at that time. There was no education in Windsor, except what the Free School offered to some thirty boys and twenty girls. The poor-rates were enormous, and at the close of the war the condition of the labouring classes very serious. The demands of pauperism had increased in forty years from one and a half to eight millions. The people were miserably housed. The services at church were cold, formal, and slovenly. There was no congregational singing. An absence of all solemnity and even of decency prevailed at confirmation; insomuch that the youthful candidate tells us he went home and said to his father, in a passion of tears, he wished to become a Quaker or Unitarian.
A small estate falling to his lot, he asked leave of his father to enter as a student at one of the Inns of Court; but a barrister’s Success in life seeming very uncertain, the notion was abandoned, and in 1812 the youth repaired to London, as a reporter to a morning and evening newspaper. He now began to attend the House, and listen to the great speeches of Brougham, Canning, and Perceval. Newspapers were then, he tells us, more seriously taxed than any other commodity, except salt. A cheap newspaper seemed an impossibility, and yet he ventured on publishing one, viz. The Windsor and Eton Express. It ‘ struggled into life ‘ on the 1st of August 1812. The period was one of gloom. The United States had declared war-Wellington was barely holding his own in the Peninsula. In little more than a fortnight, however, the strains of ‘ God save the King,’ and the cheers of the exulting multitude, announced the great victory of Salamanca, which ‘ gave confidence to Russia, and awakened the hopes of Germany.’
Among other matters of great interest, the young editor gives us a melancholy account of the burial of the ill-fated Princess Charlotte. The officers and soldiers on duty were insolent, the undertakers were tipsy, and, though Knight had a ticket of admission to the organ-loft of the Chapel, he was roughly thrust back, jammed against the wall, and treated ‘like an intrusive hound’
The Editor of the Windsor and Elon Express tells us his life varied, healthful, and instructive. Much of his time was spent on horseback; for he was his own reporter, and would ride out to ascertain the truth of what he had heard; as, e.g. the want of employment in certain districts, and the like. His ordinary costume was knee-breeches and top-boots.
In 1820 the first number of the Plain Englishman appeared; a monthly serial devoted to the diffusion of healthy popular literature, and the obstruction of irreligion and disloyalty. Dr. Sumner, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was among the earliest contributors to this magazine. It advocated, among other things, Catholic emancipation, cleanliness, ventilation, &c., and, after running through three volumes, came to a close in December 1822.
In 1819 the Eton boys had set up a College Magazine, and some of their contributions were printed for them at the office of the Windsor and Eton Express. Next year Blunt and Praed proposed to Charles Knight the publication of an Eton miscellany; and on Nov. 1 appeared the first number of the Etonian.
And when the Etonians had gone (as most of them did) to Cambridge, Mr. Knight was invited to that famous seat of learning, and there, during a most pleasant sojourn, the plan of Knight’s Quarterly was agreed upon. To this Lord Macaulay contributed some articles of enduring value. In the sixth number occurs the famous passage, so often quoted, or rather misquoted, about the glory of Athens, and how it will survive, ‘ when the sceptre shall have passed away from England…. when travellers from distant regions shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of her proudest temple, and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of ten thousand masts,’ &c.
When the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was started by several noblemen and gentlemen (among whom were Lord John Russell and Mr. Brougham), Charles Knight saw in a way of realising his own splendid dream, ‘ to make knowledge a common possession instead of an exclusive privilege.’ He lost no time in suggesting to the newly formed Society his plan of the British Almanac and Companion. This was intended (and in this intention it succeeded) to counteract those vicious old almanacks which the common people delighted in, almanacks full of the impudent nonsense which is so greedily swallowed by uneducated rustics. Several other most valuable works were about the same time brought out by Knight, to correct various errors which had taken possession of the public mind – errors, for instance, respecting machinery, and other Improvements. The mob used to imagine threshing-machines were evil things, because they (as it seemed to them) wronged the man who used the flail his father and grandfather had wielded before him ; and, in consequence of this error, many of the new engines for threshing out grain were set on lire. The Results of machinery published by Mr. Knight, did much to correct this stupid violence.
But now the time arrived when a very great revolution in literature was to take place, and Charles Knight was one of the ringleaders, If, on the first day of a new month, we step into a bookseller’s shop, we see his table crowded with piles of pleasant magazines. There are new and attractive numbers of this and that, got up to suit all ages and all tastes, and few people there are now-a-days who do not look forward to the new moon without pleasing anticipations of something good in the way of a book. How different all this was before Charles Knight lived!
More than fifty years ago his far-seeing eye beheld the vision or these bright monthly visitors – a vision that became a reality through the efforts of his own benevolent and persevering labours.
The foundation of the Society we have already mentioned encouraged him to launch one of his great ventures, The Penny Magazine. In the pages of this ever-valuable publication we read articles written by the ablest scholars of the age, and illustrated by excellent Woodcuts. If the pictures which meet our eyes in almost every page the Penny Magazine do not compare favourably with the higher – wrought productions of our own day, they were at least regarded in their time as marvels in their line.
Side by side with the Penny Magazine appeared the Penny Cyclopedia. A ‘Penny Cyclopedia ‘ sounded strange in the ears or men in those days, and the venture seemed to many like madness, but it was to Charles Knight a wise and righteous thing to do. It left him however, a poorer man than it found him, as he tells us in his pamphlet, the Struggles of a Book. The greater part of the loss was caused by the paper duty, a tax that ‘ killed the Penny Magazine, after it had bravely struggled on for fifteen years.’
Mr. Knight was, in this struggle, a martyr for the grand cause he had espoused, the cause of ‘ making knowledge a common possession instead of an exclusive privilege.’ The Athenaeum tells us he spent on the Penny Cyclopaedia, for letterpress and engravings, the sum of 42,000L, and of this the Excise, to its shame, netted the amount of 16,500L. After this, Mr. Knight published a work illustrating the manners and customs of the metropolis. It came out in six volumes, and was profusely illustrated. After bringing out a Pictorial Shakespeare he produced a long series of shilling volumes, at the rate of one every week, for more than two years. These useful little works dealt with subjects most varied and wide. Half-hours with the Best Authors and Half-hours of English History followed. Then came from Knight’s hands the four noble volumes entitled Old England and Old English Worthies. These fine, handsome books, treat of the antiquities of our dear country, and the lives of the great men it has reared. They were followed by The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature, in two volumes, with more than 4000 woodcuts, and, side by side, was a work on a similar scale, entitled the Pictorial Gallery of the Fine Arts.
Between the years 1855 and 1861 Mr. Knight was taken up with his greatest original work, the Popular History of England. This was the first history of the English people that had ever appeared. Many drum-and-trumpet ‘ histories had been written, histories in which kings and courtiers, battles, crimes, and executions, were prominent, but in which the people were ignored. Mr. Knight, however, struck out a new line, and in that line he has had, and will yet have, followers. He was the first to tell us of the habits and thoughts of the people; he was the pioneer of historians into the region (so near and dear to us all) where popular ideas and popular rights develop themselves, and slowly but most surely assert their claim to the consideration of ‘ the powers that be.’
This great work of Mr. Knight’s consists of eight volumes compilation demanded and received the expenditure of much study and constant toil.
Perhaps Mr. Knight’s most amusing work is yet to be mentioned This is the Passages a Working Life during Half a Century, a work of three volumes. When the last pages of this book were written the author had nearly completed his seventy-fourth year. On his seventy- sixth birthday he had completed an historical romance. dictated to a kind helper, for his devotion to books had nearly blinded him. Then appeared a second series of Half-hours with the best Letterwriters, &c., and this was Charles Knight’s last work.
He was, without controversy, a great and good Englishman. He soared above the petty aims of mere money-makers. His ambition to publish useful books, and he took the risk of success or failure. He winced not at loss, if he could but instruct the popular mind. To use the words of a writer in Atheneum, ‘He was too much of a social reformer to be a prosperous man of business; in his eagerness ordinary people wiser he let slip the opportunities of making himself rich.’
When he could neither read nor write, when the eyes were dim the right hand had forgot its cunning, he was still a listener you could not tire. After various changes of’ residence, for the sake of declining health and strength, his home was fixed at Addlestone, in Surrey. Here, on the of Sunday, March 9, 1873, he passed away peacefully, and, as it seemed, without pain. And we may say of him what Douglas Jerrold, one evening, when he was retiring from the company, said, with a twinkling eye and a tender voice, ‘Good Knight!’ G.S.O