John Russell Smith

active London, 1810 - 1894

BiographyLC Heading: Smith, John Russell, 1810-1894

Biography:

Smith, John Russell (1810–1894), bookseller and bibliographer, was born on 3 January 1810 and baptized on 10 June at Sevenoaks, the first of two known children of Thomas Smith, millwright, and his wife, Frances, the other child being George Claxon Smith, born on 29 January 1812, also at Sevenoaks. Thomas Smith had married Frances Hunt on 2 October 1808 at St Mary's, Lewisham, Kent. John Russell Smith was apprenticed to John Bryant, a bookseller in Wardour Street, Soho, London. Smith then opened a bookseller's shop at nearby 4 Old Compton Street, most probably in 1833 or 1834. During his Old Compton Street days he was one of the foremost promoters of dialect study, publishing a bibliography on the subject and a book on Westmorland and Cumberland dialects, both in 1839, and William Barnes's Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect in 1844. Smith also published John White Masters's Kentish ballad Dick and Sal. Interest in topography led to his Bibliotheca Cantiana (1837) and the purchase of William Upcott's topographical collection in 1841. Two copies of Bibliotheca Cantiana annotated by Smith are in the British Library.

In 1842 the Archaeological Association was split by a quarrel and some members transferred their publications to Smith, whose business consequently increased. On 3 August 1844 he married, at St Anne's, Westminster, Frances (d. in or after 1889), the daughter of a London printer, James Daniel Caigou. The couple had two children, Alfred Russell Smith, born on 30 April 1845, and Edith Charlotte Smith.

In 1852 Smith moved to 36 Soho Square, formerly George Routledge's shop, and from there issued several important catalogues: notably on English broadside ballads (1856), Shakespeare (1864), and America (1865). He also published a bibliography of English works on angling and ichthyology in 1856. Between 1874 and 1880 his son, Alfred Russell Smith, issued catalogues based on his father's extensive stock.

About 1884 Smith retired, and both his copyrights and stock were disposed of. His Library of Old Authors, a series of reprints, was sold to a bookseller, William Reeves, for £1000, and his collection of engravings went to another bookseller, Jonathan Nield. A probable reason for Smith's retirement was his growing blindness; when he made his will on 16 February 1889 he was nearly blind. He died of apoplexy on 19 October 1894 at his home, 40 Leverton Street, Kentish Town, London, leaving both a respectable fortune and a reputation for industry and integrity, as recorded in Frederick Saunders's anonymous Salad for the Social (1856), and William Carew Hazlitt's Four Generations of a Literary Family (1897).

R. J. Goulden
(R. J. Goulden, ‘Smith, John Russell (1810–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/25864, accessed 25 April 2016])

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Last Updated8/7/24

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