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Bradbury & Evans (est.1830) was a printing and publishing business founded in London by William Bradbury (1799–1869)^[1] and Frederick Mullett Evans (1804–1870).^[2]^[3]^[4]

History

For the first ten years Bradbury & Evans were printers, then added publishing in 1841 after they purchased Punch magazine.^[3]^[4] As printers they did work for Joseph Paxton,^[5] Edward Moxon and Chapman and Hall (publishers of Charles Dickens).^[3] Dickens left Chapman and Hall in 1844 and Bradbury and Evans became his new publisher.^[3] Bradbury and Evans published William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair in 1847 (as a serial), as well as most of his longer fiction.^[3]^[4] The firm operated from offices at no.11 Bouverie Street, no.85 Fleet Street, and no.4-14 Lombard Street, London (now Lombard Lane).^[6]^[7]

The inclusion of a monthly supplement, Household Narrative, in the weekly Household Words edited by Dickens was the occasion for a test case on newspaper taxation in 1851. Bradbury & Evans as publishers might have found themselves in the forefront of the ongoing campaign against "taxes on knowledge"; but the initial court decision went in their favour. The government then tried amending the existing law, to duck public opinion, reversing the stand taken by the revenue on the definition of "newspaper".^[8]^[9]

After Bradbury & Evans broke with Dickens in 1859, they founded the illustrated literary magazine Once a Week, which competed with Dickens' new All The Year Round (the successor to Household Words).^[3] Among the artists who contributed illustrations to the firm's publications: John Leech^[10] and John Tenniel. In 1861 Evans' daughter, Bessie Evans, married Dickens' son, Charles Dickens, Jr. The founders' sons, William Hardwick Bradbury (1832–1892) and Frederick Moule Evans (1832–1902), continued the business, with the much needed financial backing of William Agnew and his brother Thomas.^[11]^[12]

References

^ England, Derbyshire, Church of England Parish Registers, 1538–1910.
^ General Register Office: Birth Certificates from the Presbyterian, Independent and Baptist Registry and from the Wesleyan Methodist Metropolitan Registry.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f John Sutherland (1989). "Bradbury and Evans". Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction.
^ ^a ^b ^c Bradbury and Evans at Victorian Web, last accessed January 2011.
^ Paxton, Sir Joseph. Paxton's Magazine of Botany and Register of Flowering Plants. London Bradbury & Evans for Orr and Smith and W. S. Orr and Co, 1834-1849.
^ Post Office London Directory. 1852. p. 628 – via University of Leicester, Library.
^ John Timbs (1867), "Whitefriars", Curiosities of London (2nd ed.), London: J.C. Hotten, OCLC 12878129
^ Martin Hewitt (5 December 2013). The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the 'Taxes on Knowledge', 1849-1869. A&C Black. pp. 62–3. ISBN 978-1-4725-1456-1.
^ The Law Journal for the Year 1832-1949: Comprising Reports of Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King's Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer of Pleas, and Exchequer of Chamber. E. B. Ince. 1852. pp. 12–24.
^ "Exhibition of Pictures by Mr. John Leech", Saturday Review, 24 May 1962, Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly
^ Laurel Brake; Marysa Demoor (2009). "F.M. Evans". Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press. ISBN 978-90-382-1340-8.
^ Frederic Boase (1908). Modern English Biography. Netherton and Worth.

External links

Bradbury and Evans at Victorian Web
Portraits of Bradbury, Evans, and sons
Morgan Library. Letter from Dickens to F.M. Evans, 1849
UK National Portrait Gallery. Portrait of "Frederick Evans, associate of Charles Dickens"
Oxford University, Bodleian Library. Correspondence of Bradbury and Evans, mainly relating to Punch