MR. CHARLES KNIGHT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.*
Ma. Kstones two volumes of autobiography remind us of the story told by Charles Lamb about Coleridge. Charles Lamb had paid a visit to the philosopher at Highgate, and, as usual, was detained in the garden by an eloquent peroration on some obscure point in metaphysics. To make sure of his friend, Coleridge seized him by the coat-button, delivering his grand monologue with closed eyes, legs firmly set, and his head thrown backward as if addressing the clouds. There seemed no escaping the terrible flow of eloquence, but Charles Lamb's ready wit suggested a means. He quietly took a penknife from his pocket, cut the fatal button, and then made off in great haste to visit another friend at Highgate. Returning the same way, some hours after, he peeped in at Coleridge's garden gate, and—there stood the great metaphysician, exactly as he had left him, the button between his fingers, and the head thrown up into the sky. The soft flow of his silvery speech was pouring forth as melodiously as -ever, without stop and without break. Si non e vero,e ben trovato. Mr. Charles Knight is no Coleridge, but his written speech is wonderfully like the address to Charles Lamb's button. The autobiographical confessions come pouring out like a brook from a gentle eminence, calmly, uninterruptedly, melo- diously, but, if the truth be spoken, wearisome in the unbroken flow of thin water. Mr. Knight tells with great circumstantiality, but with wonderful lack of animation, the story of a very quiet life : how he was born ; how he was put into breeches ; how he was sent to a boarding-school at Ealing; how he started a news- sheet at Windsor ; how he saw the King of Prussia buying a penny roll and a small slice of cheese at Ascot races, and so forth, in uninterrupted flow of monotonous speech. There is no interval, no pause, no division, no change of tone, manner, and gesture throughout the whole two volumes of autobiography. Mr. Knight quietly looks up into the sky, and clutches the button in his hand. Unfortunately the eloquence is not of the skies.
Mr. Knight's labours for the diffusion of cheap literature have been undoubtedly of very considerable value, and a short account of his life therefore, with regard chiefly to these labours, might have made an interesting little book. But it was ill- j udged to spin such a readable little book out into three octavo volumes, in the fashionable novel style. Two of the volumes have now been issued, and, owing tothe diluting process resorted to, consisting in the not novel expedient of reprinting scraps from old books• and• newspapers, the interest is of the most meagre kind. Mr. Knight tells us that he was born "close to the great entrance to the lower ward of Windsor Castle," where his father kept a stationer's shop. Ile was an only son, lost his mother early, was sent to a boarding-school for a couple of years, and then apprenticed to his father, who had added meanwhile the business of printer and publisher to his other avocation. The apprenticeship proved a time of " morbid thoughts," described at great length in some score of pages. To put a stop to these, young Mr. Knight went for two months to London, to go through a round of "intellectual excitements," including visits to the House of Conimons and to the " Club of the Eccentrics," at a tavern in St. Martin's Lane ; and at the end of the period °,' went back to Windsor with some enlargement of intellec- tual vision." Out of this visit to the metropolis arose the conception of a local weekly paper, the Windsor and Eton Express, which saw the light of the world in 1812, the proprietor, editor, and manager being then twenty-two years old. What said editor, proprietor, &c., wrote in the Windsor and Eton Express, for the next seven or eight years, gives rise to very elaborate details, extending over more than a hundred pages. The whole political, social, and criminal history of the period is passed in review, for the purpose of tacking thereto articles from the Express, often very little to the purpose. It was not, how- ever, the news-sheet to which the author devoted his sole atten- tion, for, he tells us, " as early as 1814 I had the notion of becoming a Popular Educator." Constantly brooding on the subject, the notion at last shaped itself into tangible form in the year 1820, when there was published the first number of the
• Passages of apTorking Life during Half a Century, with a PreQe of Early Remin- ounces. By Charley Knight. Two volumes. London : Bradbury and Evans.
Plain Englishman, a monthly serial, edited by Mr. Knight. Its existence was short, but before death had terminated its career, Mr. Knight transferred his activity to London by becoming editor and part proprietor of the Guardian. Extracts from the Guardian are given, of course. The paper, as far as can be made out from dark hints to the effect, did not pay ; at any rate Mr. Knight " could not resist the temptation to enter upon a career of usefulness in which there were reputation and pos- sible wealth to be won." That is, the author and editor became again a bookseller. The summer of 1823 found Mr. Knight established as publisher in Pall Mall East, " the next house to the College of Physicians."
The two chapters descriptive of the short and unsuccessful career of the Pall Mall publisher are among the most amusing of the Passages of a Working Life. Literature, then as now, had some queer characters among its devotees, some of whom thought the new bookseller fair game in their hunt after guineas. Dandies in fine linen, and dandies in rags, found their way into the parlour of Pall Mall East, and not a few succeeded in ob- taining an undeserved cheque. Mr. Knight, in 1824, had "heaps of unpublished manuscripts to look over, and, what was more troublesome, a good many indignant writers to bow out." The bowing-out process did not always answer, for some of the most indignant among the authors absolutely forced their services on the inexperienced publisher. One of the scribes mainly employed by Mr. Knight, and who, he says, " approached nearer to the idea of a hack author of the old times than any man I ever saw," is sketched as follows, life-size :—"A huge ungainly Scot walks in, dressed in a semi-military fashion; a braided surtout, and a huge fur cape to his cloak, spluttering forth his unalloyed dialect, and somewhat redolent of the whiskey that he could find south of the Tweed. He at length interested me. He had come to London a literary adventurer. He had been his own educator, for he was once a working weaver. Many were the schemes of books that he was ready to write—schemes that had been in the
hands of most publishers, famous or obscure He would undertake any work, however unsuited to his acquirements or his taste. Late in his career he produced a book—forgotten now, perhaps, and too much overlooked by scientific naturalists in his own day—which exhibits remarkable powers of observation and description. Before he had been condemned to a life of incessant literary toil in London, only made more heavy by sottish in- dulgence, he was a genuine naturalist, who had looked upon the plants, the insects, the birds, and other animal life of his own moors and mountains with a rare perception of the curious and beautiful." The work here alluded to, called "The Feathered Tribes of the British Islands," is, as remarked by Mr. Knight, little known to the public ; but we have reason to believe is well appreciated by some modem bookmakers, who get up original works on natural history by the aid chiefly of paste and scissors.
His failure as a publisher Mr. Knight records in a somewhat enigmatical way. " My boat was stranded," he says, " I would not be a burden, I would earn my own bread, I walked forth from my business home," &c. The act of heroism seems natural enough. Mr. Knight, " beginning a new and unambitious life," now engaged as writer in Mr. Buckingham's paper, the Sphinx, but quitted the post soon, on account of that touchy subject the "scale of remuneration." The proprietor of the Sphinx proposed an "amended scale," according to the length of article, " beginning at half-a crown and rising to a guinea." Seeing that this was only " at the rate of threepence a line," Mr. Knight left, transferring his services to Messrs. Smith and Elder, as editor of Friendship's Offering, one of the new annuals with splendid engravings, and text the contrary of splendid. But there was "a blockhead behind the scenes, in the confidence of the publishers," who interfered with the editing of the new annual, and the new place of editor also had to be thrown up. At this turn in his affairs, when more than disgusted with his labours, Mr. Knight succeeded in obtaining an appointment which, while it gave him a settlement for life, rescued him from that dread career of "literary hack," into which be was in great danger of drifting. On the 20th of July, 1827, the Committee of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge decided on giving Mr. Knight the superintendence of their publications. The activity of the society, of which, as is well known, Lord Brougham, or, we ought to say, Mr. Henry Brougham, was the leading spirit, was not very great at this time, but Mr. Knight, according to his own account, increased it to a wonder• ful degree. It was he who first conceived and started into life the "British Almanac; and Companion,"—the only one of the
periodical publications of the society alive at the present day.
The scheme was no sooner proposed to Mr. Brougham when he, with wonted rapidity, called together his committee, and in a few hours had everything ready and decided upon. In the middle of November, 1827, the proposal was made by Mr. Knight, and before the end of the year the "British Almanac" was issued. The "Companion to the Almanac" followed a few months after, in the spring of 1828, "and," exclaims Mr. Knight, with well-
justified pride, " the pair have travelled on together for thirty- seven years under my direction, through many changes of times and men, through many a social revolution, bloodless and bene- ficent, through a wonderful era of progress in commerce, in literature, in science, in the arts,—in the manifestations of the approach of all ranks to that union of interests and feelings which is the most solid foundation of public happiness."
The history of the establishment of the other periodicals of the society, the " Penny Magazine " and " Penny Cycloptedia," is told by Knight at great length, but in that diffuse manner which characterizes the whole of his work. There are long ex- tracts from old prospectuses, and elaborate accounts of Mr. Knight's journeys through England, with details of "Liverpool hospitality" in the shape of breakfasts and dinners, of Manches- ter life in villas, where people "partake that plenteous meal of the North which is called tea," and last, not least, of Use- ful Knowledge Society proceedings in the shape of eating and drinking. It is gratifying to find that the diffusers of knowledge enjoyed " a regular• dinner at five o'clock; a plain English dinner at a moderate fixed charge, to which each present contributed, with a subscription for wine." Rather more interesting than these culinary reminiscences is the account of the 'rise and fall of the famous " Penny Magazine," of which, as may be expected, Mr. Knight speaks in the highest terms of praise. But we cannot help feeling sympathetically inclined to Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, who described the contents as "all ramble-scramble."
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