C. Kegan Paul & Co.

Artist Info

C. Kegan Paul & Co.active London, 1877 - 1912

LC name authority rec.: no2006002324

LC heading: C. Kegan Paul & Co.

Biography:

Paul, (Charles) Kegan (1828–1902), publisher and author, was born on 8 March 1828 at White Lackington, near Ilminster, Somerset, the eldest of the ten children of the Revd Charles Paul (1802–1861) and his wife, Frances Kegan Horne (1802–1848) of Bath. His father's family was Scottish and his mother's of Dutch and Irish descent; both had West Indies connections. Paul was educated first at Ilminster grammar school (1836–9), and later at Eton College, where he entered Dr Hawtrey's house in 1841. He matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, in January 1846. At this stage he regarded himself as ‘a very broad High Churchman, broad that is in doctrine, but with a strong feeling for pomp of ritual, for music in church, paintings and symbolism of all kinds’ (Paul, Memories, 166). He hoped to model his own life's work on that of Charles Kingsley, whom he met in 1849, by combining the Anglican priesthood with social reform and literature. He graduated BA in October 1849, was ordained deacon in the Lent of 1851, and spent a year as curate of Tew, in the diocese of Oxford, and a further six months—having been ordained priest in 1852—as curate of Bloxham, near Banbury, Oxfordshire. A sermon on the communion of saints was his first published work, in 1853. He developed a reputation for holding radical political opinions, and was associated with Frederick Dennison Maurice, J. M. Ludlow, and other co-operative and Christian socialist leaders.

After a stint as tutor to pupils travelling in Germany, Paul was appointed, in November 1853, to a chaplain's post at Eton, where he remained until 1862, having discovered a vocation for teaching. On 11 December 1856 he married Margaret Agnes Colvile (1829–1905), daughter of Andrew Colvile and his wife, the Hon. Louisa Mary Eden; Margaret had just published her first two novels, Dorothy: a Tale and DeCressy. The first three of their five children were born at Eton. Paul contributed to Tracts for Priests and People, brought out by Maurice and Hughes, a piece called ‘The boundaries of the church’ (1861), in which he stated that the very minimum of dogma was required from lay members of the Church of England. Partly because of a controversy over this view, he left Eton in 1862 to become vicar of an Eton living at Sturminster Marshall, Dorset. As the endowment was small, he took pupils. During these years he embraced a policy of total abstinence from alcohol and also experimented with vegetarianism. He contributed twenty-three articles to the Theological Review between 1865 and 1876. In 1870 he joined a unitarian society called the Free Christian Union, and in 1872 he associated himself with Joseph Arch's movement on behalf of the agricultural labourers in Dorset. He gradually found himself out of sympathy with the teaching of the Church of England, and in 1874 abandoned his living and moved to London.

For some years Paul had been reading manuscripts for Henry Samuel King, the publisher in Cornhill who had brought out several of his books, as well as those of his wife; he now became King's manager and editor, and in 1877 he purchased the publishing business at 1 Paternoster Square, which became C. Kegan Paul & Co. and continued King's general publishing programme of theological, literary, and scientific works. Ideologically he now associated himself with Comtist positivism, and he took great pleasure in friendships with George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. He judged Hardy, Walter Pater, Cardinal Newman, and Hesba Stretton to be those living stylists who showed ‘the perfection to which, in this age, our language can be wrought’ (Paul, Faith and Unfaith, 225). He edited and published the New Quarterly Magazine from January 1879 to April 1880. Alfred Chenevix Trench (1849–1938) joined the firm about 1878, and from 1881 it was styled Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. Among the publications it inherited from King were Tennyson's works (until 1883) and the International Scientific series. Other important series were the Parchment Library of English Classics and the Pulpit Commentary, both dating from 1880, as well as works by Hardy, George Meredith, and Robert Louis Stevenson. After various vicissitudes, including a fire in 1883, the firm was amalgamated as a limited company in 1889 with two others, George Redway and the heirs of Nicholas Trübner. It moved into large new premises, Paternoster House in Charing Cross Road, in 1891. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd, as the firm was now styled, flourished until 1895, when the profits fell with alarming abruptness, the directors resigned, and the capital was reduced. Paul at the same time lost money as director of the Hansard Printing and Publishing Company, and other enterprises. The traffic accident that occasioned his disability and retirement also occurred in that year. The business survived until 1911 when it was incorporated into George Routledge & Sons Ltd, who operated it as a separate enterprise until 1946, after which date the old name survived in the Routledge and Kegan Paul imprint until 1985.

Paul's own literary work included translations of Goethe's Faust in 1873, Blaise Pascal's Pensées (as Thoughts, 1885), and Joris-Karl Huysmans's En Route in 1896; he edited William Godwin's essays in 1873 and Mary Wollstonecraft's letters in 1879. William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries appeared in 1876, Biographical Sketches in 1883, Faith and Unfaith, and other Essays in 1891, and in 1899 his collection of verse, On the Way Side.

From 1888 Paul began to attend mass, and in 1890, during a visit to France, he decided to enter the Roman Catholic church, and he made his submission at the church of the Servites at Fulham, London, on 12 August 1890. A volume, Memories (1899), which is largely made up of stories of his early life at school and Eton, ends with his conversion. His new views were displayed in tracts issued by the Catholic Truth Society and in Confessio viatoris (1891). Paul's friend Wilfrid Meynell recorded in an obituary that he:

always remained in general society a great favourite: a grave man, with serenity of discretion; a general lover of his race, but with a shrewdly sharp tongue for individual weaknesses; a man indeed of prejudices as well as of more agreeable prepossessions; seemingly aloof and independent, yet possessed ... by the overmastering personalities of two men [Kingsley and Newman] whose ‘acolyte’ he was. (The Academy, 115)

Kegan Paul died at his home, 9 Avonmore Road, West Kensington, London, on 19 July 1902 and was buried at Kensal Green in London.

Leslie Howsam

Sources L. Howsam, Kegan Paul, a Victorian imprint: publishers, books and cultural history (1998) · C. K. Paul, Memories (1899) · [W. Meynell], ‘Charles Kegan Paul: by one who knew him’, The Academy (26 July 1902), 113–16 · L. Howsam, ‘Sustained literary ventures: the series in Victorian book publishing’, Publishing History, 31 (1992), 5–26 · L. Howsam, ‘Forgotten Victorians: contracts with authors in the publication books of Henry S. King and Kegan Paul, Trench, 1871–1889’, Publishing History, 34 (1993), 51–70 · ‘Publishers of today: Messrs Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Limited’, Publisher's Circular (10 Oct 1891), 424–6 · F. A. Mumby, The house of Routledge, 1834–1934, with a history of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and other associated firms (1934) · C. K. Paul, Faith and unfaith, and other essays (1891) · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1902) · m. cert.

Archives King's AC Cam., letters to Oscar Browning · Trinity Cam., letters to Henry Sidgwick

Likenesses photograph, repro. in Mumby, The house of Routledge · photograph, repro. in Publishers' Circular (26 July 1902) · photograph, UCL, Routledge & Kegan Paul Archives [see illus.]

Wealth at death £2897 9s. 10d.: probate, 15 Oct 1902, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

Leslie Howsam, ‘Paul, (Charles) Kegan (1828–1902)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/35416, accessed 15 Oct 2015]