Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/298

258 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. only forty years previous estimated the number of readers in this country at 80,000 ! Among the con- tributors it will be sufficient to mention Long, De Morgan, Creswick, Allan Cunningham, and Thomas Pringle, whilom editor of the Whiggish Blackwood, One writer, however, stands out from the rest, both by his misfortunes and his attainments coming not only under the " curse of poverty's unconquerable ban/' but being completely deaf and almost dumb. Recommended to Mr. Knight as an extraordinary, though unknown genius, who had been brought up in a charity school, stricken with a sudden and melan- choly affliction, who had worked his way to St. Peters- burg, and thence through Russia to Moscow, and on to Persia and the Desert ; who knew French and Italian perfectly; the kind-hearted publisher, from the very first, took a liking to Kitto soon to be known as an eminent traveller, Orientalist, and Biblical commentator. After the first trial article of " The Deaf Traveller," Kitto was regularly engaged to assist Mr. Knight personally in his own room ; and here in his spare time he managed to acquire German. In spite of the somewhat scurrilous attacks made upon the Penny Magazine by Colburn in his New Monthly it was a continuous success, and ultimately paved the way to a work infinitely more important the " Penny Encyclopaedia." It will be essential here to understand the position of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. This Society was founded in 1826 by Lord Brougham and other gentlemen, described by Mr. Knight as the leading statesmen, lawyers, and philan- thropists of the day. " It was a blow aimed at the monopoly of literature the opening of the flood-gates