On Monday 3 May 1852 Dickens sent a brief note to the radical London publisher John Chapman about a meeting scheduled for the next day at Chapman’s bookselling business and family home, 142 Strand. ‘I have a previous appointment’, he wrote, ‘but will be with you as early as I can, and before the general hour.’1 The meeting in question had been called by Chapman, owner and nominal editor of theWestminsterReview, the quarterly periodical set up in 1824 by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill to support political reform, and publisher of books of a radical tendency in politics, philosophy, and religion. The object of the meeting, which Dickens was to chair, was to protest against the practice of fixing book prices. More specifically, the protesters were targeting the Booksellers’ Association, a grouping of large booksellers which had set prices, prohibiting smaller businesses like that of Chapman from offering discounts over 10 per cent. Dickens’s publishers Bradbury and Evans had protested against the Association, and Dickens was only one of a number of leading writers to support Chapman in his bid for free trade in books.
The April number of theWestminsterReview had carried an article by Chapman, ‘The Commerce of Literature’. In it he accused theAssociation of adding to the ‘taxes on knowledge’ represented by duty on paper and the Stamp Tax on newspapers – which was not abolished until 1855 – by its price fixing. A wider debate was sparked off, with the letters page ofTheTimes printing arguments for and against loosening the regulations governing the sale of books.
The meeting on 4 May attracted support for the cause from a large number of luminaries. Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and theAnti-Corn Law agitator Richard Cobden sent letters which Dickens read out. Those present at 142 Strand included Wilkie Collins, the socialphilosopher Herbert Spencer, and the medical lecturer and practitioner Edwin Lankester. Among the speakers were Richard Owen, naturalist, designer of dinosaur models for Crystal Palace, and prime mover in the establishment of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington; Francis Newman, brother of John Henry Newman and professor of Latin at University College London; and Charles Babbage the inventor. The meeting endorsed several resolutions to be sent to Lord Campbell, the Lord Chief Justice, who was chairing a committee set up to arbitrate between the free traders and the protectionists. Also there was George Henry Lewes. He was co-founder and editor of theLeader, a radical weekly newspaper, and a frequenter of Chapman’s regular soirées for authors.
Another man of note was Henry Crabb Robinson, ageing literary man, erstwhile friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb, andindefatigable diarist from 1811 until his death in 1867. Crabb Robinson not only attended the meeting, but noted the occasion in his diary. According to him, the best sp
