Book Review by Hester Davenport
Published in Windlesora 23 (2007)
© WLHG
Recognition of the achievements of Charles Knight (1791-1873) in his native town of Windsor has not been lacking. He is remembered especially as the founder with his father of the Windsor & Eton Express in 1812, and as its editor for virtually a quarter of a century thereafter. His bust holds an honoured place in the Guildhall, his house in Castle Street is marked with a plaque, memorial gates stand at the entrance to Bachelors’ Acre burial ground and his grave is also marked with a blue plaque. In 2004 the Friends of the Windsor & Royal Borough Museum bid at auction for water colours of Knight and his wife Sally, and it is hoped they will eventually take pride ofplace in a new Museum. An exhibition curated in the Guildhall by Judith Hunter in 1991 was revived in 24 High Street in 2004.
Yet outside Windsor Knight is not well known, or where he is known often superficially dismissed. It is Valerie Gray’s ambition to establish his position as ‘one of the major social reformers of the nineteenth century’ [p.1] and to counter both criticisms and neglect. She believes that Knight should be ranked beside such progressive men as Chadwick, Shaftesbury, Wilberforce and Arnold, and she is lucid and vigorous in championship of him. Her book, the first to be devoted entirely to Charles Knight, is therefore to be welcomed.
During Knight’s years in Windsor, when his social conscience was stirred by the poverty and ignorance he observed, he became convinced that the key to the regeneration of society was education, and the provision of inexpensive but well-produced texts which would appeal to the working man and help his advancement in society. This was the basis of his life’s work. When he left Windsor for the wider publishing world in London he found others with similar aspirations and was made superintendent of publications for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, or SDUK. For twenty years under its auspices he was able to produce works such as the Library of Entertaining Knowledge (1828), The Pictorial Bible (1836) and The Pictorial Shakespere (1839), but above all The Penny Magazine (from 1832), which in its heyday sold 200,000 copies weekly as Knight was proud to boast. He knew of a man who went without sugar in his tea in order to afford it, drawn to its mixture of well-written, well-illustrated articles on a variety of subjects.
From today’s perspective one would have expected Knight’s efforts to have won universal praise, but as Gray reveals this was by no means the case.
On the one hand there were the die-hards who feared that educating the masses would lead to discontent and social unrest, while more liberal commentators were scornful of what they considered patronising attempts to force middle-class values on the workers. The SDUK proscribed fiction, and it has been claimed that Dickens had Knight in mind in Hard Times (1854), when under the watchful eye of Thomas Gradgrind schoolchildren in Coketown are taught hard facts only, any tendency to ‘fancy’ (imagination) being crushed in them. But Gray is able to quote a letter from Dickens to Knight, a personal friend, exonerating him from being among those ‘who see lizures and averages, and nothing else…Bah! What have you to do with these?’ [p.126].
In a series of chapters Gray discusses in detail, and with impressive scholarship, Knight’s apprentice years as a journalist in Windsor, as publisher lor the SDUK, as populariser in literature, educational innovator, economic theorist, and pioneering publisher. Introductory and retrospective chapters lrame the main essays. She reveals his ‘multi-faceted’ talents, his ability to sustain professional relationships, and his considerable influence on the whole publishing world, arguing that his ‘unique combination of artistic flair, journalistic talent and grass roots printing layout skills gave him an edge, which he employed effectively to attract the widest possible audience’ [p.155].
So far, so admirable. It should not be possible hereafter for any commentator on nineteenth-century popular culture to ignore Charles Knight, or damn him with faint praise. But there is a downside. In Gray’s second ambition to ‘fill a gap’ and popularise the great populariser she unfortunately luils. This is not a study to appeal to the general reader, for neither the man nor his age come to life. Gray justifies her non-biographical approach by claiming that ‘The materials do not exist to write a personal biography’ [p.1]; documents have been lost or destroyed, and in his 3-volume autobiography, Passages of a Working Life (1864) Knight declares that he has ‘steadily resisted the temptation of entering up any details of my private circumstances or domestic relations’ – more’s the pity! Nevertheless far, far more material exists for a biographical study of Knight than he himself had access to when lhe embarked on his own biography of Shakespere (his spelling). And he was such a natural communicator that he cannot but reveal both himself and his age in his writings. Thus, to take a small example, when he sets out on a chilly November morning to lay an important project before Henry srougham and other SDUK supporters in Brougham’s chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, he encounters a fog:
so heavy that I remember feeling my way by the iron railing in front of Apsley House, and so groping through Piccadilly. I began to despair of keeping the appointment which I deemed so important. But I persevered.
The tenacity of the man, and the London we recognise from Dickens are vividly revealed here; Knight himself took the fog as ‘a type’ of the difficulties he expected to encounter. Inclusion of such personal information as does exist (his mother’s death when he was two gets only a passing mention and there is no discussion of his relationship with his father), plus judicious use of anecdote, evocations of time and place, quotations from word portraits of the many distinguished men Knight engaged with, would have lifted this study from the Gradgrind school of factual writing to something nearer the universal appeal that Knight himself achieved.
GRAY, Valerie, Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2006, 256pp., colour frontispiece, 14 b/w illustrations.
Windsor Local History Group 