Chambers and the Popular Education Press

The firm's publications and dates are well documented, and the fullest modern account of its periodicals is Laurel Brake's chapter on "The Popular 'Weeklies'" in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 3 (2007), which draws on the Journal's own statements, library records and the New Statistical Account. Circulation figures come largely from the Journal itself and from William Chambers's later memoir, so they should be read as the publishers' claims; sources differ slightly on the 1840s peak, giving about 80,000 or over 87,000. They differ on the launch too: Brake gives a first Scottish print run of 31,000, while the historian Jonathan Rose, in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), following William Chambers's memoir and Sondra Miley Cooney's research, says the first issue sold 25,000 copies, all in Scotland, and that circulation peaked at 87,000 in 1844. A print run and a sale are not the same thing, which may explain part of the gap. Who read the Journal is a matter of interpretation: the evidence points to a wide readership in the 1830s and a more middle-class one later.

From Leith Walk to the New Town

established After their father's business in Peebles failed, the family moved to Edinburgh and the boys made their own way. William entered the book trade in 1819 and both kept stalls in Leith Walk; they began printing in 1824. Robert became a professional author in the 1820s as well as a bookseller. In 1832 he handed his shop in Hanover Street to their younger brother David, and the two elder brothers joined forces as W. & R. Chambers.

The Journal

established Chambers's Edinburgh Journal first appeared on 4 February 1832. It was an eight-page, three-column broadsheet costing three halfpence, and promised to take "advantage of the universal appetite for instruction". It carried no news, which kept it free of the fourpenny newspaper stamp and out of religious and political controversy. William later named his models as The Scotsman and Blackwood's, both founded in 1817, and his spur as the flood of "low-priced periodicals, mostly worthless and ephemeral". After the fourteenth issue the brothers agreed that William would run the business while Robert edited and did most of the writing.

established Demand outran the presses. Four months after launch the firm began stereotyping: plates were cast in Edinburgh and sent weekly by mail to London, where steam presses printed "twenty thousand or more copies in a few hours after their arrival". In 1835 a steam machine designed by Robert Gunn was printing the Journal at 750 impressions an hour. By 1845 Chambers was reputed to print as many sheets in a week as the whole Scottish press had printed in a month only ten years before.

shared The numbers were remarkable. The first Scottish print run was 31,000, rising to 50,000 by February 1833 once English sales took off, and the Journal peaked at about 80,000 in the 1840s. At the time Blackwood's sold around 10,000 a month and the Edinburgh Review about 9,000 a quarter. The Journal also spread through institutions: in 1836 a subscription library at Ballantrae in Ayrshire took two copies, circulated round the parish, and the minister of Banff reported that it was "frequently bought by farm-servants and artisans".

Who read it?

shared The Journal claimed working people as its audience, but its tone was high-minded and, unlike its London rivals, it carried almost no pictures. By 1841 its editors admitted it reached no lower than "the elite of the labouring community". In 1844 it shrank to a sixteen-page magazine with a cover and added a monthly edition in a printed wrapper; by 1847 nearly two-thirds of sales were monthly and were "purchased by the higher-class families". In January 1854 the title dropped "Edinburgh" and became Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts. The firm announced this as "a change from particular to general, from local to universal". By 1882 William could boast that it was "as well known in the United States and in the colonies as at our own door".

shared A working-class readership after all? Jonathan Rose reads the scattered evidence more generously. He accepts that a social profile of the Journal's readers is hard to build, but concludes they were largely working-class. In its early years a bookseller reported it popular among country milk-boys; the editors claimed to sell eighty-four copies a week to a single cotton mill near Glasgow, and listed letters from a mechanician, a bootmaker, a tailor, a coal miner, a weaver and a millhand. In the 1870s it was still among the most borrowed magazines at a Newcastle working men's club. The radicals Thomas Cooper, G. J. Holyoake and W. E. Adams and the Fife labourer-poet Alexander Bethune all recorded their debt to Chambers publications, and Rose notes that Chartists and Owenite socialists relied on them for science. The two views can be reconciled: the Journal may have lost its poorest readers in the 1840s while keeping a large following among skilled and self-improving workers.

shared Why 1832? Rose argues that it took a generation of political activism, and the popularity of Burns, Scott, Byron and Wordsworth, to prepare working readers for a magazine of secular "useful knowledge". An earlier Scottish attempt, George Miller's fourpenny Cheap Magazine of 1813–14, failed partly because, according to the farm labourer Alexander Somerville, potential readers found it not pious enough.

established Rivals soon followed. On 31 March 1832 the London Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge launched the illustrated Penny Magazine, which reached 200,000 a week by the end of the year. In Scotland the decisive challenge came in 1858 from John Leng's Dundee People's Journal, a penny weekly that added news, Scots-language writing and readers' letters, which Chambers's had discouraged. By 1875 its local editions sold nearly 130,000 a week. Chambers's answered the new shilling monthlies of the 1860s with more fiction: James Payn's serial Lost Sir Massingbird in 1864 raised sales by 20,000. Over the century its contributors included Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, James Hogg and Hugh Miller.

An empire of cheap print

established Around the Journal the brothers built a list for self-improvers. The monthly Historical Newspaper (1832–36) gave the month's events in a form that escaped the stamp. Information for the People ran to 104 fortnightly parts, "of which every number is a distinct branch of human knowledge". The People's Editions of standard authors began in 1838. The twenty-volume Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts, issued weekly from 1844, was designed for school, parish and prison libraries, and Papers for the People ran to 96 numbers in 1850–51. The Educational Course, a series of school books, began in 1835. Robert Chambers's History of the English Language and Literature and his Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1844) were, Rose notes, the first history and the first annotated anthology of English literature aimed at a popular audience. An 1862 catalogue also offered cookery books and Hints to Improve the Kitchen Comforts and Homes of the Working Classes.

established The firm's "crowning effort", in William's words, was Chambers's Encyclopaedia, subtitled "A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People". In 1852 the brothers paid the German publisher Brockhaus £400 for the right to translate and adapt its Konversations-Lexikon. The encyclopaedia was issued in parts from 1859 and completed in ten volumes in 1868, with 240 contributors, 116 of them employed specially, and six full-time editorial assistants. Its aim, William wrote, was a "comprehensive yet handy and cheap Dictionary of Universal Knowledge; no subject being treated at greater length than was absolutely necessary". In an 1863 lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh he called "the extraordinary development of a cheap, wholesome, and popular literature" one of the most remarkable features of the age.

Vestiges

established In 1844 an anonymous book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, argued that the universe and life had developed by natural law. It was a sensation, condemned by many clergy and scientists and read avidly by the public. Robert Chambers wrote it in secret, and his authorship was publicly revealed only in 1884, after his death.

William Chambers, Lord Provost

established William Chambers was Lord Provost of Edinburgh from 1865 to 1869. He spent much of his term on the Old Town's sanitary conditions, demolishing nearly 3,000 decaying buildings and laying new streets, including Chambers Street, named after him. He recommended that the Advocates Library form the basis of a national library open to the public, a scheme realised in 1925. In the 1870s he took on the restoration of St Giles and, when promised funds were withdrawn, spent over £20,000 of his own money to finish it. In his home town he endowed the Chambers Institution, a reading room and library that held some 17,000 volumes by the 1890s.

• The Journal carried no news, partly to avoid the fourpenny newspaper stamp of 1832.
• Plates of the Journal were cast in Edinburgh and posted to London every week to be printed there.
• In its first decade the Journal sold about eight times as many copies as Blackwood's Magazine.
• The Encyclopaedia began as a translation of a German work, bought from Brockhaus for £400.
• Edinburgh's Chambers Street, home of the National Museum of Scotland, is named after William Chambers.
• In 1875 W. & R. Chambers employed four women compositors.
• Robert Chambers kept his authorship of Vestiges secret for the rest of his life.

• Do not treat the Journal's circulation figures as audited; they are the publishers' own, and sources give the 1840s peak as about 80,000 or over 87,000.
• Do not call the Journal simply a working-class paper; its readership moved up the social scale during the 1840s.
• Do not say Vestiges "anticipated Darwin"; it popularised transmutation, but its arguments were very different from natural selection.
• Do not present Chambers's Encyclopaedia as an original Scottish compilation; it began as an adaptation of the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon.