# The Story of the House of Cassell/Part 1, Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII
THE LAST YEARS
On his return from America, Cassell entered into full partnership with Messrs. Petter and Galpin. They brought a valuable store of business experience and capacity into the concern, and supplied qualities complementary to Cassell 's daring and pioneering spirit. Assisted by a staff of capable and ardent men (all the heads of departments were enthusiastic believers in Cassell), the firm prospered amazingly. It continued to be particularly successful in the production of illustrated editions of great books. The long list included "The Pilgrim's Progress," richly illustrated by H. C. Selous and Paolo Priolo, "Robinson Crusoe," "The Vicar of Wakefield," and "Gulliver's Travels." But perhaps Cassell's greatest achievement in this kind was the series of Doré books. To have secured Doré's services at all was a triumph. When the thing was accomplished the House set itself to the task of doing the great artist justice, and it succeeded perfectly—that is, up to the limit of possibility in illustration at that time. The "Inferno" with Doré's pictures was published in 1861. The next of the series was the "Don Quixote." To get his material for this Doré spent two years in Spain, and he gave the public of his best. Later on, the question arose whether Doré should be commissioned to illustrate the Bible. The Art Editor of those days had very serious misgivings about the proposal, as witness the following letter to John Cassell in Paris:
Whether Doré toned down his style to meet the Art Editor's views, or the Art Editor plucked up his courage to swallow Doré's ideas, there is no record to show, but Doré's Bible was published in 1865-6, and the public welcomed his weirdness and his solemnity and never complained of his grotesquerie.
Another notable book undertaken by the firm was the English translation of the third Napoleon's "Vie de César." This work was done by arrangement with the French Emperor himself, and while the book was in course of printing, he visited the Yard and passed some of the sheets for press in the composing-room.
The announcement that Cassell's were to introduce the Imperial biographer to the English public created a flutter in the London dovecotes. The firm had made a speciality of "popular" literature, and that Napoleon III should have sought its help in bringing out his study was a cause of startled speculation in the Press. They sought any explanation of the phenomenon but the right one. Thus the Guardian:
​The provincial papers followed suit. One of them reprimanded Lord Brougham for his lamentable violation of the proprieties of publishing, and reproved "the Imperial author" for passing over Mr. Murray, Messrs. Longman, "and the great dignitaries of Paternoster Row," and giving his patronage to "a firm which has never yet given a book of high standing to the world"!
All this farrago of nonsense was destroyed in due course by the London Review, which related the facts as they were:
Upon this the Guardian hastened to withdraw as "without foundation" the suggestion that Lord Brougham had anything to do with the matter, and apologized "for the imputation . . . against so respectable and influential a firm."
The business had now reached great dimensions. Cassell was its spring and inspiration. But he had the defects of his qualities. For the patient organization of a huge business concern he had no special capability. This he was content to leave to Petter and Galpin, and to the able men of business on the staff. His spirit was ​essentially adventurous, and he found it difficult to turn away from ideas even when they diverted much of his energy into by-ways and blind alleys.
Thus it was that in one of his frequent visits to Paris to attend to the Continental business of his firm, his eager mind caught at the commercial possibilities of petroleum. A new source of artificial light was coming into extensive use, and he saw in it princely fortunes for those who had the foresight to exploit it. He told his dreams to his partners, but failed to infect them with his enthusiasm, and finally they declined to join him in the enterprise. Undaunted, he went ahead alone, building distillation works at Hanwell, fitting up a miniature distillery at his house in Avenue Road, Regent's Park, and throwing himself energetically into the new venture.
But this time the sanguine temperament which had so often justified itself in his career betrayed him. In spite of all his efforts the venture failed, and though it did not involve financial embarrassment, it brought him some loss and much anxiety. Moreover, the demands which the two businesses together made upon his time and energy were excessive. He would be up in the morning long before anyone else in the house was astir, take a hurried breakfast prepared by himself, and be at the Hanwell works by the time the "hands" arrived. After hours of strenuous toil he would hurry off to Ludgate Hill, often leaving his lunch until late in the afternoon, when he would repair to a neighbouring coffee-house for a hasty meal. Then back to La Belle Sauvage to work, which, but for the petroleum, would have been done earlier in the day. This crowding of two days' work into one could not last. One who was associated with him in the business at Hanwell wrote long afterwards that there could be little doubt "that his closely continued application to this extraneous business, and the anxiety it entailed, were largely instrumental in causing his early decease." This may not actually have been so, for the cause of his death was an internal tumour, but it is certainly matter for ​regret that the last stages of so brilliantly successful a career should have been clouded with disappointment.
The late Bonavia Hunt, for many years editor of the Quiver, recorded a glimpse of Cassell in the last few months of his life: "His visits to the Yard were then so infrequent that his private room was occasionally used by others, the accommodation for the growing business of the House being more and more crowded; and I, as the last editorial 'fresher,' was given a small table in Mr. Cassell's room, which I might use on days when he was not expected. But the unexpected always happens; and one day he marched into the room with his attendant and caught me writing there. 'Ah!' he cried, 'who is this young man, and how dare he intrude himself here?' Instantly I snatched up my papers and bolted, but peace was made for me, and in future I was allowed the use of the room under specified conditions. After his death I was permitted to have the small table in my own office as a memento of the man and the incident, and I retained it till I left the House forty years afterwards—1905. I always had a sentimental regard for that table."
Cassell spent the Christmas of 1863 at Cannes with his wife and daughter, who were passing the winter there. Soon after his return it became evident to all that something was seriously wrong with his health. Various methods of treatment were prescribed, but they proved unavailing, and he continued to lose strength, although with characteristic courage he went on working hard, undertaking journeys to Scotland and Ireland; and he wrote to his daughter with much of his old buoyant cheerfulness. Up to within three days of his death he continued to dictate letters to his secretary.
Then, on April 2, 1865—the day also of his friend Cobden's death—the end came. It is said that he had begged to be moved from the bed to his favourite couch. As this was being done he whispered: "It is very dark." Presently his face brightened, and he murmured: "No! it is all light now." Six days later he was buried ​in Kensal Green Cemetery. There were many signs of widespread sorrow for his death. His widow survived him twenty-two years; his daughter, "my beloved Sophia," died in 1912.
Sir Sidney Lee reminds us that Ariosto imagined that at the end of every man's thread of life there hangs a medal stamped with his name, and that as Death severs the thread with the fatal shears, Time seizes the medal and drops it into the river Lethe. A few, a very few, of the medals, as they fall, are caught by swans, who carry them off and deposit them in a Temple of Immortality. Ariosto's swans are biographers. By what motive, asks Sir Sidney Lee, are they compelled to rescue any medals of personality from the flood of forgetfulness into which they let most of them sink?
It is not pretended that John Cassell's life, apart from his work as publisher, gave him a claim to a place in the Temple. He raised himself from extreme poverty to moderate wealth, but many others have done that. The factory lad at the time of his early death at the age of forty-eight was the head of a firm with five hundred employees; but there was nothing rare in that—other men had amassed greater wealth and created bigger businesses. He was a Temperance Reformer; but there were many more notable advocates of Temperance Reform. He was sincerely religious; he was a devoted husband and father; he was a good employer and an exemplary citizen; he had high courage and fine principle; but happily he shared those characteristics with a multitude of men. Perhaps the swans of Ariosto would not have caught John Cassell's medal, even adorned with so handsome a record. But there is something to add to this. Cassell did much to raise the moral and intellectual level of the mass of the people long before State education was inaugurated; as was said at his death, "he founded an Empire of literature in the hearts and homes of the working man"; he was a pioneer of a system of self-culture which benefited millions of his fellow-citizens and delivered from obscurity many who ​rose to eminence as national leaders and political and social reformers. Add to his personal qualities such fruitful services to the community as these, services multiplied in the generations which still profit by his enduring enterprise, and we have a record which surely ought not to drop into the waters of forgetfulness.
Surrounded by influential admirers, the friend of statesmen, his name known over a great part of the world in the most honourable connexions, this simple-minded man was never ashamed of his humble origin. Born of the people, his greatest ambition was to elevate them, not merely by improving their material environment and increasing their wages, but by the wider diffusion of moral and intellectual light. In his own person, too, he showed what self-culture could accomplish. Practically without any schooling, with little or no help from tutors in later years, he mastered the various literary and business knowledge required by a publisher. He conceived and carried through large schemes involving the expenditure of tens of thousands of pounds, and was able to direct the multi-farious details of the editing, production, and distribution of illustrated magazines and serial publications, and of books. His greatest business gift was an instinctive knowledge of what the common people wanted to read, although, as we have seen, his judgment, especially at the beginning of his publishing adventures, was by no means infallible. To this flair he added a shrewd insight into capacity and character, and he could so rule over men as to win their goodwill and turn their talents to the best account. He worked long hours himself, with close concentration and an undaunted determination to succeed, but he was considerate to those in his service, none of whom remembered an instance of harsh treatment or of more than passing irritation.
Self-culture had given him self-control and a sane and tranquil spirit. It saved him alike from the foolish pride that sometimes accompanies success, and from the arbitrariness that is often mistaken for strength.