Abstract
William Kidd saw himself as a struggling small publisher of illustrated books operating during the 1830s in a marketplace that favoured large scale firms. His response to his perceived disadvantages was twofold. In seeking to reach a rapidly expanding cohort of leisure-based readers, Kidd deployed aggressive marketing policies that frequently sailed close to the law and generated considerable controversy. He was also less than honest about just who had written or illustrated his books. At the same time, he initiated new genres of relatively cheap illustrated publications based on the recreational interest and habits of an emerging lower middle class and artisan reading public. In particular, he took advantage of the wood engraving as a cheap reprographic medium, and employed highly capable draughtsmen such as Robert Cruikshank, Robert Seymour and George Bonner to illustrate his books and pamphlets. His pocket guides to British seaside resorts, his development of the illustrated reprints known as jeu d’esprit or Facetiae and his packaging up of sayings, mottos and nuggets of information into small format gatherings all show a lively minded and innovative response to the rapidly changing literary marketplace. Kidd’s career suggests both the legally chaotic nature of the literary marketplace and the entrepreneurial opportunities offered to a shrewd if unscrupulous publisher in late Regency London.
Highlights
William Kidd saw himself as a struggling small publisher of illustrated books operating during the 1830s in a marketplace that favoured large scale firms
On limited a scale, Kidd was, a significant publisher of cheap illustrated books in the 1830s, specialising in small-scale or pocket-sized books, many of them brief enough to be called pamphlets. He inaugurated an extensive series of popular guide books aimed at the supporting the leisure activities of newly mobile tourists, and was a major force in the publishing of jeux d’esprits – reprints of short humorous texts extensively illustrated by wood engravings
Robert Cruikshank was his most prized artist, but his lists drew on a range of significant illustrators including Robert Seymour and George Bonner
Summary
In the most detailed available study of William’s Kidd’s sharp practice as a small-scale publisher and bookseller operating in the 1830s, “The Two Versions of Sketches of Young Gentlemen,” William F. The remainder of this essay provides a summary of what seems to me Kidd’s substantial achievement as a lively presence and as an innovator in the development of mass market illustrated literature in the 1830s It builds on the accounts of Kidd by Browning (1991), Long (2020) and Maidment (2021), but concentrates attention on two print forms widely visible in his lists of publications from the 1830s, the pocketsized travel guides and the illustrated jeux d’esprit. The illustrations clearly aimed to build a bridge between the aesthetic ambitions of the vignette, which were being explored at exactly the same time in such diverse publications as Turner’s illustrations to Rogers’s Italy (1830) and the emergence of humorous wood engraving in George and Robert Cruikshank’s varied contributions to comic publications In this sense Kidd’s facetiae are puzzling, at once downmarket but maybe upmarket once bound, recycling the old and yet avant-garde in their experimentational spirit. For all the repackaging, retitling, and recycling, some of which condescended to an emerging class of readers, Kidd’s commercial enterprises integrated the humorous wood engraving into a literary market poised to communicate to a mass audience in a dynamic new idiom
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