"Days at the Factories": A Tour of Victorian Industry with the Penny Magazine

Abstract

Historians writing about 19th-century technology are often frustrated by the destruction of so many business records. Fortunately, firsthand accounts and descriptions of 19th-century industry survive in many contemporary technical and trade periodicals. The usefulness of the Industry series in Scientific American has been highlighted by Carroll W. Pursell, Jr.' This bibliographical note describes and assesses a similarly neglected source in the popular press on the other side of the Atlantic-the Days at the Factories series, published in The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in London under the editorship of Charles Knight. Charles Knight (1791-1873) was the son of a Windsor bookseller, Charles Knight. The latter was known as a man of cultivation and public spirit and, according to one authority, was a half-brother of George III. Apparently, the king frequented Knight's bookshop where he laughed over Gillray's caricatures of him and leafed through Paine's Rights of Man.2 Charles Knight went into his father's publishing business and in 1820 established the Plain Englishman, a venture that was intended to further Knight's career as a popular instructor. His mission henceforth was the diffusion of knowledge among the poor by means of cheap books. Knight's first venture was short-lived, but it provided a model