# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Daniel, Charles Henry Olive

​DANIEL, CHARLES HENRY OLIVE (1836-1919), scholar and printer, the eldest son of the Rev. Alfred Daniel, perpetual curate of Frome, Somerset, by his wife, Eliza Anne, daughter of Clement Wilson Cruttwell, was born at Wareham, Dorset, 30 September 1836. He was educated at Grosvenor College, Bath, King’s College, London, and Worcester College, Oxford, where he was elected scholar in 1854. After taking his degree in 1858, with a first class in literae humaniores, he returned to King’s College as classical lecturer in 1859. Four years later he was elected to a fellowship at Worcester College, and there he spent the remainder of his life. In 1878 he married his cousin Emily, third daughter of Edmund Crabb Olive, by whom he had two daughters.
From a very early age Daniel was interested in printing. His first ‘book’, printed ‘by the use of types and thumb and inking’, appeared about 1845. From that time until 1903 when he was elected provost of Worcester—he was the first provost of the college elected by the fellows—the Daniel Press continued at intervals to produce books. Some of these were reprints: Desiderii Erasmi Colloquia Duo (1880); Hymni Ecclesiae (1882); Sixe Idillia of Theocritus (1883), probably translated by Sir Edward Dyer ​[q.v.] from the unique copy in the Bodleian Library; Love's Graduate, an attempt by (Sir) Edmund Gosse to separate Webster’s work from that of William Rowley in A Cure for a Cuckold (1885); Blake’s Songs (1885) and Songs of Innocence (1893); Herrick, His Flowers (1891) and Christmas (1891); Odes, Sonnets, and Lyrics of John Keats (1895); Robert Jones, The Muses’ Garden for Delights (1901). Other books contain the work of contemporaries and of friends. Chief among these are the plays and poems of the future poet laureate, Mr. Robert Bridges, which form the contents of fifteen pieces printed between 1883 and 1903. Richard Watson Dixon, Henry Patmore, Mrs. Margaret Woods, Sir Herbert Warren, Walter Pater, Laurence Binyon and others are represented by one or more volumes. Two of the most interesting productions of the Daniel Press are The Garland of Rachel (1881) and Our Memories (1893). The latter, of which a second series was begun, but only two numbers printed, consists of personal reminiscences of Oxford by a number of senior members of the university. The former is the best known of all the Daniel Press books. At the suggestion of Mr. T. Humphry Ward, her father the printer, and seventeen ‘unknown friends’, celebrated in verse the first birthday of Rachel Anne Olive Daniel. Few of the seventeen names are unfamiliar. This is the first book in which large ornaments and miniation by Mrs. Daniel were used.
The smaller Daniel books are dainty, the larger, particularly such volumes as the Keats and the Shorter Poems of Bridges in five parts, are fine and handsome, but none of them reaches the typographical perfection of the best work from later famous presses. Daniel had admirable taste, but he did not set out with any serious intention of reforming or improving English printing. He was an amateur who did his own work and aimed at pleasing himself and his friends by printing as well as the means at his disposal would allow, rather than at showing how beautiful a book could be made. He was a pioneer who began printing at Oxford in 1874, seventeen years before William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press. None the less his hobby had considerable influence. This was largely due to his use of the Fell type which had lain unused at the Clarendon Press for one hundred and fifty years. Caslon’s old-faced type had been revived by William Pickering [q.v.] and Charles Whittingham ‘the nephew’ [q.v.] for the Chiswick Press some thirty-six years earlier. Fell type was first used by Daniel in A New Sermon of the Newest Fashion (1876), the second book which he printed at Oxford. He also used a black letter, of which the first example is Bridges’s The Growth of Love (1890).
Daniel first used a toy press; from 1850 to 1882 he used a small Albion press; and from 1882 onwards a large Albion hand-press. The large press was first used to print Hymni Ecclesiae. In 1920 it was presented by Mrs. Daniel to the Bodleian Library, and on it in 1921 was printed The Daniel Press, the first book printed in the Library.
Daniel died at Oddington, Gloucestershire, 6 September 1919. For fifty-three years he had been connected as fellow and provost with Worcester College, the history of which he wrote with W. R. Barker. He was chiefly responsible for the decoration of the chapel and the hall, carried out from the designs of William Burges. The former is, perhaps, the most important example in Oxford of the influence of pre-Raphaelite work. The years during which he was provost were uneventful so far as the internal history of the college is concerned. There is an unfinished portrait of Daniel by Charles Furse in Worcester College hall.
[The Daniel Press contains ‘Memorials of Dr. Daniel’ by Sir Herbert Warren, W. W. Jackson, Mrs. Margaret Woods; poems by John Masefield, W. Stebbing, Don F. de Arteaga y Pereira, F. W. Bourdillon; and a full and minute bibliography of every piece printed on the Daniel Press both at Frome and at Oxford, written by Falconer Madan.]
C. H. W.