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Charles Knight, the son of Charles Knight, a bookseller, was born in Windsor in 1791. One of his customers was King George III. On one morning he was horrified to find the king reading in his shop, a copy of The Rights of Man by Tom Paine. Although the king made no comment the book was soon banned and Paine was charged with seditious libel.

In 1812 Knight began writing for The Globe. Later that year Knight and his father began publishing the Windsor and Eton Express. Other publishing ventures included Plain Englishman, The London Guardian and Knight's Quarterly Magazine.

In March 1828 Charles Knight joined with Henry Brougham to form the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Knight became the society's publisher and over the next few years produced the Quarterly Journal of Education (1831-36), Penny Magazine (1832-45) and Penny Cyclopedia (1833-44).

Other innovations included the publication in parts of The Pictorial Bible (1836), The Pictorial History of England (1837), Pictorial Shakespeare (1838) and Biographical Dictionary (1846). Some like the 27 volume, Penny Cyclopedia were very successful, others were not and when the publication of the Biographical Dictionary lost £5,000, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge came to an end.

Knight continued with the idea of pictorial part-works. In 1847 he began The Land we Live In, that contained pictures and descriptions of everything noteworthy in England. The following year he started the weekly periodical, The Voice of the People, but it only lasted for three weeks.

The English Cyclopedia, a revised version of the Penny Cyclopedia appeared between 1853-61, and the Popular History of England (1856-1862). Knight said that his latest venture was "to trace through our annals the essential connection between our political history and our social history" that will enable the people to "learn their own history - how they have grown out of slavery, out of feudal wrong, out of regal despotism - into constitutional liberty, and the greatest estate of the realm.". Knight also wrote his autobiography, Passages of a Working Life (1864). Charles Knight died on 9th March, 1873.

 

 

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