Business and Reading Across the Atlantic: W. & R. Chambers and the United States Market, 1840–60

Abstract

In autumn 1853, the Edinburgh publisher William Chambers made a tour of British North America and parts of the United States. Although he had been doing business with Canada since the mid-1830s, and with the United States since the mid-1840s, this was his first trip across the Atlantic. Officially, it was a holiday timed to coincide with the New York Great Exhibition. He visited the Crystal Palace on 19 November, and recorded in his diary that he ‘Admired the American machinery and tools’ and saw ‘Good American sculpture, few American pictures’.¹ But Chambers was too much interested in the cause of education and literature to refrain from using his travels to call upon publishers and literary men, and to pay careful attention to the publications he encountered. In a series of articles later published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (CEJ), he explained how amazed he was to see newspapers ‘everywhere in the hands of the labouring as well as the wealthy classes… In the streets, at the doors of hotels, and in railway-cars, boys are seen selling them in considerable numbers … Newspapers, in a word, are not a casual luxury, but a necessary of life.’² Chambers was exceedingly impressed with the prevalence of education, the ubiquity of print, and the taste for reading that he encountered in the United States.³