A greedy, randy idealist

Rosemary Ashton has rather cornered the market in dissecting the lives of the intellectual movers and shakers of early Victorian England. She has already written well about the Carlyles, and about George Eliot and her lover G. H. Lewes. Now, all these and more have walk-on parts (rather more than that in Miss Eliot’s case) in this new account of life at 142 Strand, where between 1847 and 1854 the radical publisher John Chapman ran his business.

Chapman was chaotic, often unscrupulous in both his business and his private dealings, but there is no doubt that he was an important piece of the jigsaw that made up the picture of London’s intellectual life at that time. In between attempts to stave off bankruptcy he managed some remarkable feats of publishing — notably Froude’s first and immensely controversial novel The Nemesis of Faith, which was publicly burned at Oxford. He was also a considerable talent-spotter, recruiting the highly gifted Marian Evans (later Mary Ann Evans, later still George Eliot) as de facto editor of his Westminster Review, a radical noticeboard that never made any money but which effectively put Chapman on the map.