The Story of the House of Cassell/Part 1, Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
THE GROWTH OF EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE
Cassell had already begun his most characteristic work when he moved to La Belle Sauvage. "Cassell's Library" was being published, and on April 3, 1852, the first weekly number of the "Popular Educator" had appeared.
"Cassell's Library" was the earliest venture of a cheap edition of paper-covered books at sevenpence. It inaugurated seventy years ago the form of publishing enterprise so brilliantly revived in the ninth decade of the century. The twenty-six volumes of the collection included a History of England in four volumes and a History of Scotland in two, by Robert Ferguson, LL.D., and "The History and Sources of the British Empire," by Benjamin Parsons. There was a "People's Biographical Dictionary," by J. R. Beard, D.D.; popular science was provided by Professor Wallace in his "Account of the Steam Engine," and by John Kennedy, M.A., who wrote a "Natural History of Man."
The "Popular Educator" was pure Cassell. It was the crown and culmination of John Cassell's experience and judgment of the needs of those to whom general education had been denied. To any man who wished to supply those needs, so far as he could by private study, Cassell meant to offer the material and the machinery. The "Popular Educator" was "a school, an academy, and a university" all in one, as the Dublin University Magazine said. Something quite new, it aroused "real wonder" in the minds of the reviewers who wrote about it, and was acclaimed by public men everywhere as a great civilizing influence. Its popular success was immediate.
Cassell had confided his design to Professor Wallace, of Glasgow University, and appointed him first editor. Wallace formed a staff of university men, experts in their subjects, and from the beginning made the "Educator" quite sound in quality. Its weekly numbers correspond to a week's work at school or college, with progressive lessons in a variety of subjects, illustrated by drawings and diagrams where necessary. In the curriculum of the first volume there were ancient history, architecture, arithmetic, biography, botany, geography, geology, geometry, and so forth, down the gamut of the alphabet to zoology. There were lessons in Latin and in English; French, Spanish, and German were also taught. This list of subjects received additions in later issues of the work, which Cassell endeavoured always to keep abreast of the educational movement.
A section of "Miscellaneous Articles" need be mentioned only to recall one circumstance. A short essay with the sententious title, "The Influence of Morality or Immorality on the Countenance," was illustrated by an engraving taken from a French publication. It must be familiar to every Englishman of the last generation under the title of "The Child: What will he become?" Cassell, with his unfailing flair for a striking bit of réclame, had a huge poster version of the picture made and lavished it on hoardings and bare walls. It was the first breakaway from the common form of newspaper advertising, and the stir it made is not easy to realize now that every wall within sight of a human being blazes with a picture poster.
The public welcome given to the "Popular Educator" gratified everybody concerned in its production. Wallace expressed his feelings in his own delightfully formal way: "It cannot be but pleasing for us to reflect that each successive week nearly 100,000 families are undergoing a course of useful instruction by means of this periodical … and it is not only among the humbler classes that our work is read and appreciated, but many among the affluent welcome its appearance. As we were sitting in the House of Commons the other evening a member for one of our large boroughs came up to thank us for the publication of the "Popular Educator," and exclaimed, 'I find it invaluable; indeed, I have begun my education over again.'"
Cassell anticipated the "class" of the modern University Extension course. Large numbers of the people who were eager to seize the chance of getting through the gates of knowledge discovered that even the "Popular Educator" was not a sufficiently elementary guide; they could not get on without personal help. They were induced to form classes in agreed centres so that they could help each other, or, with the assistance of a schoolmaster or of any educated person willing to give it, follow up the courses set in the book. La Belle Sauvage sent the necessary bills and circulars free to any place where a class was to be formed. Even so, there were some expenses, and many of the would-be students were too poor to subscribe them. To meet this difficulty a "Popular Educator Fund" was established, and, liberally supported, it paid for this work for many years.
The "Popular Educator," in short, speedily became a national institution. Its fame reverberated in the speeches of statesmen dealing with education. Robert Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke) used it to illustrate his thesis that elementary instruction gave to a child the potentiality of possessing any amount of knowledge he pleased. For the benefit of young men who were wishful to get knowledge, there were, he said, one or two excellent books. "But the first one I would recommend is Cassell's 'Popular Educator.' A man who has read and thoroughly mastered the contents of this is the man who will understand the greatest part of what is going on around him, which is a great deal more than can be said of the best Greek scholar, or even the accomplished lawyer." In later days a striking tribute to the value of the "Popular Educator" was paid by Mr. Lloyd George. Describing his early life, he said it was this work which enabled him to supplement the scanty education he received at the village school when intermediate schools were unknown in Wales, and largely helped to make him what he was.
Cassell's office was flooded with letters of gratitude from all sorts of people, and in after years fascinating accounts came in of the harvest of success which had been reaped where Cassell had sown. "To the 'Popular Educator' alone my intellectual and worldly progress is to be attributed." So wrote one of the merchant princes of the nineteenth century. Each in his own locution, so wrote the Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, who was a cobbler till Cassell came to his aid, the Arch-Druid who had been a railway porter, the policeman's son who became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales.
Here is a striking contrast. From one end of the social scale: The venerable Dr. Alexander Whyte wrote in 1913: "There is no House I would rather praise than Cassell's. Many, many years ago, as an apprentice boy in Kirriemuir (Thrums), I bought, when published, John Cassell's Working Man's Friend, and as John Cassell went on to publish I went on to buy and read the 'Popular Educator.' Yes, the Working Man's Friend, the 'Popular Educator,' the 'Biblical Educator,' and 'The Pathway,' were invaluable to me in my early days, and John Cassell's name is deeply written in my heart. I could not say more, and I cannot say less."
From the other end: A man wrote to the late Mr. F. J. Cross, publicity manager at La Belle Sauvage, stating that he was just out of prison. While serving his term he had studied the "Popular Educator," and had mastered many of its lessons, including some foreign languages. Now he wanted advice about his future, and he appealed to the publishers of the work which had awakened his higher instincts. Mr. Cross invited him to call at the Yard, and had the satisfaction of knowing that the man was shortly able to get a job in which his new knowledge was useful, and to restore himself to a reputable life.
The success of the "Popular Educator" in the field of general knowledge immediately suggested to people interested in religious studies a work on similar lines. The proposal was made to Cassell, who, in October, 1852, announced his intention to adopt it, and in May following a fortnightly serial, the "Popular Biblical Educator," was begun. Crown quarto in form, it was published at twopence a number. The editor, the Rev. E. H. Plumptre, combined in it a Biblical encyclopædia of chronology, geography, and natural history, of literature and prophecy, with a course of theological studies. He secured as contributors Dr. Ginsburg, Canon Rawlinson, F. W. Farrar, Stanley Leathes, C. J. Vaughan, S. G. Green, and others who became famous in their day. With a more limited appeal this work was naturally less widely circulated than the "Popular Educator." It reached a second edition, but then the demand fell off, and it was not re-issued. Twenty years later the scheme was revived in the "Bible Educator."
The year 1853 was one of enormously fertile activity for Cassell. Having dealt with popular needs in secular and religious instruction and introduced solid books at a cheap price into homes where books were formerly unknown, he now turned to the question of literary recreation. He was, perhaps, the first entrepreneur of literature and journalism to regard the family as a unit for this purpose. Once more his intimate knowledge of the conditions of life among the proletariat came into play. There was a plenitude of papers. But they were either mainly political, mainly religious, or mainly instructive. Cassell conceived a family circle in need of a paper which might or might not be all these, but should certainly be something more. From that point it was but a step to the Illustrated Family Paper, which came out in 1853. It offered for popular consumption biography, history, art, science, and poetry, but assisted their deglutition with topical pictures (the Crimean War was very fully illustrated), and above all, with fiction.
It is not easy now to get the angle of the mid-nineteenth century and to realize that, in the eyes of the people who most strongly approved of Cassell's formally educational work, fiction was dangerous stuff for the "lower classes." Cassell, to his great credit, broke clear from this point of view. Arguing from universal experience the immortal need of romance, he saw that if they could not get decent fiction the awakening masses would buy bad fiction in a market always well supplied. He therefore made serial novels a leading feature of his new paper, and paid their authors well. One of the prizes he offered for stories, a sum of £250, produced an interesting competition, in which Lord Brougham, Davenport Hill, and Cassell himself were the adjudicators. It was won by Francis H. Keppell with a story called "Contrast, or the Oak and the Bramble." A leading "serialist" of that day was John Frederick Smith. He wrote much for the Illustrated Family Paper. One of his stories may be recalled because of its sequel. During the gloomy time of the Lancashire cotton famine he wrote for Cassell "The Warp and the Weft," a tale of Lancashire mill hands which reproduced the agony of the North so vividly that a relief fund sprang out of it, and the working men and women who read the Illustrated Family Paper contributed out of their poverty £1,900 to relieve the misery of the cotton operatives.
Here is a picture of John Cassell at this strenuous point in his life by Thomas Frost, on the occasion of the visit already mentioned. He found Cassell at La Belle Sauvage "in a sparsely furnished room on the first floor. A tall, sallow-complexioned man, with straight black hair and a pleasant expression of countenance. When I entered he was sitting at a table strewn with letters and papers, smoking as he read, but he rose on my entrance, and, as there was only one chair in the room, leaned against the table, still smoking. He was generally to be found there from eleven to four, smoking a cigar, with which indulgence he solaced himself for his abstinence from wine and beer."
Over the pleasant-faced man in the bare room with the single chair now hung a trouble common in modern commerce to all who undertake big enterprises with small capital. The printing machinery, bought from Cathrell and moved from the Strand, had been supplemented, but the plant was too small to cope with his quickly growing business. The premises in La Belle Sauvage Yard were cramped and ill-adapted to his purposes, and he was going to pull down and rebuild. He never had any doubt of his ultimate success, and he infected other people with his own belief in himself. Among them were Messrs. Petter and Galpin, a firm of printers, with a place in Playhouse Yard, where their machines were worked by the same "steam power" that printed the Times. The extraordinary progress of the young publishing business had attracted the notice of Galpin, who saw that before long Cassell would not be able to do all his own printing, and called upon him to inquire whether he would place any work with his neighbours. Cassell, it is recorded, walked with Galpin to the archway leading to Ludgate Hill, and, putting a hand on his shoulder, said: "I like you, young man. I will not only give you plenty of printing, but one of these days I will make your fortune." Thereafter they had intimate business relations. Also among the believers in Cassell was Mr. Crompton, a paper manufacturer and part proprietor of the Morning Post, who had given him unlimited credit for paper. Then, suddenly, Crompton was forced by ill-health to call in his accounts and retire from business, and Cassell found himself facing a situation of grave embarrassment. He surmounted it by arranging that Petter and Galpin should take over the Crompton account and purchase the Illustrated Family Paper, and that Messrs. W. Kent and Co., of Paternoster Row, should buy the entire stock and copyright of the "Popular Educator" and of other completed works. This was clearly intended by Cassell to be a merely temporary policy, to extricate him from his most pressing financial difficulties. He retained the editorship of the Illustrated Family Paper, and had an arrangement for the division of the profits with Petter and Galpin after a certain rate of interest on the capital had been paid, so that this was at first rather a working alliance than a partnership. Nevertheless, Petter and Galpin removed their business from Playhouse Yard to Nos. 1 and 2 La Belle Sauvage, which they rebuilt as a printing office. For some time, besides printing the Cassell publications, they carried on a separate business as general printers. Full and formal partnership came a few years later when the concern had developed still more largely. Then Cassell, his affairs once more prospering, repurchased the copyrights taken by Kent and Co. and restored them to La Belle Sauvage. From that time onward the tradition he had already created there was never broken.
But before this, and during the semi-partnership of Cassell with Petter and Galpin, some characteristic Cassell work was done: The "Illustrated Family Bible," for example, personally regarded by Cassell as the most important of his early enterprises, along with the "Altar of the Household," a compilation by a number of well-known divines, which had a considerable vogue. The Bible, with its 900 illustrations, was issued in penny parts over a period of four years, and cost about £100,000 to produce. The early numbers reached a sale of 300,000. They had a universal popularity, and were found in every sort of house. In the parish of Clerkenwell, according to the vicar, Mr. Maguire, 5,182 copies were sold in one year. Into the backwoods of America, or wherever in the world the English language was read—and into some places where it was not—the "Illustrated Family Bible" made its way. A missionary in the Far West sent the Red Indian names of ten subscribers; the engravings would "command their interest and attention where nothing else will." Dr. Perkins, a missionary in Persia, described the fascinated interest with which his pupils recognized in the pictures familiar likenesses of customs and costumes still common in their land. He also found that his most distinguished Persian visitors were intrigued by the illustrations, and he naively wrote:"Many are thus introduced to the leading facts and the truths of the Holy Scripture whom it would be difficult to interest in them in any other way. For example, a Persian prince of the highest rank who visited me turned over with his own hand every leaf of the Old Testament, looking with eager delight on every one of the hundreds of engravings, while I sat by his side and explained them to him."
Cassell, in this great and costly enterprise, again proved his deep knowledge of human nature and circumstance. His motto for it was: "Something to please old eyes and those who cannot read." "I know from experience," he said, "what an impression illustrations make upon ignorant minds. They were very ignorant in Lancashire when I was a boy, and an old Bible with a few illustrations was treasured in the most ignorant families. 'Thou canst read,' a proud mother would say to her son; "thou'lt jist tell me, lad, what the old Book says about yon picter.' I have done it myself, and seen tears trickling down old women's cheeks. They never forget the stories, fastened in their memories by the pictures." When the work was complete he had a copy handsomely bound in morocco and himself took it to Manchester to give to his mother. He counted this, he said, one of the happiest memories of his life.
Next came another famous serial, the "Illustrated History of England." This popularly written story of the nation, which aimed at describing its social and commercial as well as its political life, was issued in weekly and monthly parts, and finally reached eight volumes, containing about 2,000 illustrations. The novel writer, J. F. Smith, was first charged with the work, but he was a better romancer than historian, and the task was transferred to William Howitt. Mr. Farlow Wilson tells a moving story of the perils of serial publication:
Of the first version of the "History of England" more than a quarter of a million copies were sold. The book was re-issued time after time, but was so altered in each edition that at last very little of the original work was left.
At length the time came when it was decided that an entirely new work should be prepared—letterpress and illustrations. Specialists in history were commissioned to deal with different periods, and museums and galleries were searched for the most attractive pictures—an enterprise in complete accord with the traditional Cassell policy.