John Camden Hotten

Artist Info

John Camden HottenLondon, 1832 - 1873, London

LC name authority rec.n82062580

LC Heading:Hotten, John Camden, 1832-1873

Biography:

Hotten, John Camden (1832–1873), publisher and writer, was born at 45 St John's Square, Clerkenwell, London, on 12 September 1832, the son of William Hotten of Probus, Cornwall, a master carpenter who was variously described as an undertaker and a builder, and his wife, Maria, née Cowling, of Roche, Cornwall. John Camden Hotten's original middle name was William and it is not clear when or why he adopted the name Camden.

In 1846 Hotten was apprenticed to the antiquary, author, publisher, and bookseller John Petheram of 71 Chancery Lane, London. He did not complete his time with Petheram (Mark Twain suggested that he was caught selling some of Petheram's books on his own account) and he left for North America with his brother in 1848. He seems to have tried his hand at many jobs while in the USA including coalmining and journalism. He was probably back in Britain by 1853 and was acting as some form of travelling salesman. A diary he left from this period shows him unhappy in his home life and agonized by worries about his spiritual and physical health, the latter problem being associated with occasional drinking binges. By mid-1855 he had set up a bookselling and publishing business in London—possibly having taken over Messrs Cockburn and Campbell—at 151B Piccadilly (he later moved to larger premises at 74–5 Piccadilly), publishing his first recorded pamphlet in 1856. On 14 September 1867 he married Charlotte Stringer (d. 1888), daughter of William Stringer, designer. They had three daughters, two of whom survived to adulthood.

Hotten was frantically busy as a bookseller, publisher, journalist, author, controversialist, and general textual entrepreneur. His range of publishing interests was wide, and included comic books (such as W. S. Gilbert's Bab Ballads, 1868), ‘How to’ books on conjuring tricks (1871) and stamp collecting (1864), collections of political speeches (Bright's, 1869, Disraeli's, 1870), and dictionaries. His particular strengths lay in illustrated books (he was a pioneer in the use of chromolithography); in producing historical facsimiles and works of popular antiquarian history (such as The History of Signboards, 1866); and in local and family history, where he offered a full ancestor-tracing service under the title St James' Heraldic Office. In literature he published works by European writers such as Balzac (1860), Baudelaire (1869), and de la Barca (1870), and was responsible for promoting (at low prices between 1s. and 2s. 6d) a number of American writers in the British market including Artemus Ward, J. R. Lowell, Bret Harte, O. W. Holmes, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain.

Not all these books were authorized editions but, as no copyright agreement then existed between the UK and the USA, these publications were not illegal. However, Hotten was frequently tempted to intervene in his publications and Twain and others reasonably objected to seeing their texts amended or added to others they had not written. On other occasions Hotten was more clearly on the wrong side of the law. In 1862 Tennyson took Hotten to chancery over the republication of suppressed poems originally published in the 1830s—and won. This may not have stopped Hotten selling Poems MDCCCXXX / MDCCCXXXIII under the counter. Hotten was a natural risk-taker: he published or republished books on phallic worship (1869) and aphrodisiacs (1869); he had a particular line in flagellation literature, which ranged from A History of the Rod (1870) to a collection of mostly eighteenth-century flagellation pamphlets under the general title of Library Illustrative of Social Progress (1873). There is some evidence that he also dealt in pornographic paintings and photographs and operated a small circulating library of pornographic works available to a select mailing list.

Hotten the publisher was also capable of nobler projects: he published Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) when its original publisher, Moxon, got cold feet and, despite worsening relations with the poet, went on to produce a number of Swinburne's other works, including William Blake: a Critical Essay (1868), which was illustrated by hand-coloured lithographs. Hotten was also the first publisher to reprint an entire work by Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1867), since the poet's death. Hotten's interest in radical Romantic poets was also expressed in a planned three-volume (finally four) edition of Shelley's Poetry and Prose (1871–5), and in 1872 he published MacCarthy's ground-breaking Shelley's Early Life from Original Sources, the first to use the spy-reports in the Public Record Office. Hotten's journalistic training made him a great occasional publisher, and he produced a flurry of cheap books and pamphlets in response to the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent invasion scares over the period 1870–72. He was able to publish biographies of Macaulay, Thackeray, and Dickens, each within a month of the respective author's death, writing the first two himself.

As an author Hotten was diverse and prolific, his works including A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words (1859), A Hand-Book to the Topography and Family History (1863), The History of Signboards (with Larwood) (1866), Abyssinia and its People (1867), Literary Copyright (1871), The original lists of persons of quality ... and others who went from Great Britain to the American plantations, 1600–1700 [1873], and The Golden Treasury of Thought (1874). In addition he contributed articles on literary news to the Literary Gazette (1862), The Parthenon (1862–3), and the London Review (1863–4). Hotten was a man of furious energy and indestructible enthusiasm, often working for twelve hours and more a day. He managed to alienate many of the writers he dealt with, and was always regarded with suspicion by other publishers. Nevertheless he was a great publishing innovator—for instance, the first to issue complete paperback editions of novels at 6d. (Hotten's Library of World-Wide Authors) as early as 1866.

Hotten's last year was made miserable by ill health, a feckless brother-in-law, and a strong sense that his chief clerk, Andrew Chatto, was negotiating behind his back. He died on 14 June 1873 at his home, 4 Maitland Park Villas, Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, London, of an intestinal canal embolism and was buried in Highgate cemetery. He died intestate. His widow sold the business as a going concern to Chatto and his sleeping partner W. E. Windus for the substantial sum of £25,000.

Simon Eliot

Sources S. Eliot, ‘“Hotten, rotten, forgotten”?: an apologia for a general publisher’, Book History (2000), 61–93 · Mark Twain's letters, ed. L. Salamo and H. E. Smith, 5 (1997) · D. Ganzel, ‘Samuel Clemens and John Camden Hotten’, The Library, 5th ser., 20 (Sept 1965), 230–42 · O. Warner, introduction, A century of writers, 1855–1955, ed. D. M. Low and others (1955) · D. Welland, Mark Twain in England (1978)

Archives Bodl. Oxf., bills and corresp. with Sir Thomas Phillips · U. Edin. L., corresp. with James Halliwell-Phillips · U. Reading L., Chatto and Windus archive

Wealth at death under £20,000: administration, 4 July 1873, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

Simon Eliot, ‘Hotten, John Camden (1832–1873)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2010 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/13859, accessed 22 Oct 2015