William Andrew Chatto

Newcastle, 1799 - 1864, London

BiographyLC name authority rec. n81108645.
LC Heading: Chatto, William Andrew, 1799-1864
Biography:
Chatto, William Andrew [pseud. Stephen Oliver] (1799–1864), writer, only son of William Chatto, a merchant who died at Gibraltar in 1804, was born at Newcastle upon Tyne on 17 April 1799. After a good education at a grammar school in the north, he became a merchant, and about 1830 acquired the business of his cousin, a wholesale tea-dealer, in Eastcheap, London. He married Margaret, daughter of Luke Birch of Cornhill, London, in 1823 and they had five sons and three daughters. In 1834 he relinquished business to devote himself to literature. Under the pseudonym of Stephen Oliver, he published Scenes and Recollections of Fly-Fishing in Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland (1834), and Rambles in Northumberland and on the Scottish Border (1835).

Chatto was also something of an expert on wood-engraving. His Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical (1839) with 300 illustrations by John Jackson was particularly influential, and ran to two further editions, in 1861 and 1877. In this vein he also produced The History and Art of Wood Engraving (1848), and Gems of Wood Engraving from the ‘Illustrated London News’ (1848).

Chatto's more humorous publications included A Paper: of Tobacco (1839) under the pseudonym Joseph Fume with illustrations by H. K. Browne (Phiz), and the popular Facts and Speculations on the Origin and History of Playing Cards (1848). In 1838 he wrote, as Stephen Oliver, the words to the song ‘The Old English Squire’, to music by W. Blake. In its published form it was also illustrated by H. K. Browne. From 1839 to 1841 Chatto was editor of the New Sporting Magazine, and in 1844 projected a penny daily comic illustrated paper entitled Puck, a Journalette of Fun. He edited this paper with considerable skill and secured the services of several able contributors, including Tom Taylor, afterwards editor of Punch, but there was not sufficient demand for a daily comic paper, and it had only a brief and sporadic existence, running to twenty-two numbers from 6 May to 29 June 1844. In 1839 Chatto was elected an honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne. He died in the Charterhouse, London, on 28 February 1864, and was buried in Highgate cemetery. His epitaph, by his lifelong friend Tom Taylor describes him as a ‘true-hearted and upright man’. His third son, Andrew Chatto (1840–1913), became a partner in the publishing firm of Chatto and Windus.
(T. F. Henderson, “Chatto, William Andrew (1799–1864),” rev. M. Clare Loughlin-Chow, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, 2004, accessed September 2015. www.oxforddnb.com.)

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Last Updated8/7/24

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