page_title: Charles Knight (publisher)
section_title: Editor
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Knight (publisher) / Editor
caption_attribution_description: English: the frontispiece from Knight's Pictorial Shakespere
context_page_description: Charles Knight was an English publisher, editor and author. He published and contributed to works such as The Penny Magazine, The Penny Cyclopaedia, and The English Cyclopaedia, and established the Local Government Chronicle.
context_section_description: In 1827 Knight was forced to give up publishing, and became the superintendent of the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, for which he projected and edited The British Almanack and Companion, begun in 1828. In 1829 he resumed business on his own account with the publication of The Library of Entertaining Knowledge, writing several volumes of the series himself. In 1832 and 1833 he started The Penny Magazine and The Penny Cyclopaedia, both of which had a large circulation. The Penny Cyclopaedia, as a result of the heavy excise duty, was only completed in 1844 at a financial loss.
  Besides many illustrated editions of standard works, including in 1842 an edition of the works of William Shakespeare entitled The Pictorial Shakspere, which had appeared in parts (1838–1841), Knight published a variety of illustrated works, such as Old England and The Land we Live in and The Pictorial Gallery of Arts – Useful Arts, the latter based on the Great Exhibition of 1851. He also undertook the series known as Weekly Volumes, himself contributing the first volume, a biography of William Caxton. Many famous books, Harriet Martineau's Tales, Anna Brownell Jameson's Early Italian Painters and G. H. Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy, appeared for the first time in this series.
  In 1853 Knight became editor of The English Cyclopaedia, essentially a revision of The Penny Cyclopaedia. Knight also launched the Local Government Chronicle in 1855, and at about the same time he began his Popular History of England (8 vols., 1856–1862).
caption: Title page of Knight's Pictorial Shakspere, 1867 edition. The non-standard spelling of Shakespeare's name set a trend.
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