Cadell & Davies

LC name authority rec. n81066332

LC heading: Cadell & Davies

Biography:

Thomas Cadell the younger (1773–1836), bookseller, succeeded his father in the family business with William Davies as his partner. The firm operated as Cadell and Davies from 1793, although Davies is thought to have managed the business alone until a serious illness in 1813 prevented him from continuing. From that time until his own death in 1836, Cadell directed the affairs of the firm, having relocated the business from the Strand to his house in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Cadell had been admitted to the Stationers' Company in 1794, and was a member of the court in 1831. The position of the firm slipped somewhat in the nineteenth century; although still trying to uphold its former reputation for liberality to authors, Cadell and Davies undertook several expensive projects, including James Murphy's Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1815) and British Gallery of Contemporary Portraits (1822), which put a strain on the business's finances. Cadell married Sophia Elizabeth Smith, sister of the authors of Rejected Addresses, on 11 March 1802, and had a large family, including four daughters and a son, but none of his children carried on the family business, which was sold off after his death. Cadell died on 23 or 26 November 1836, at his residence in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, leaving his family in comfortable circumstances. Sophia Elizabeth Cadell died on 11 May 1848.

(Catherine Dille, ‘Cadell, Thomas, the elder (1742–1802)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/4302, accessed 3 Dec 2015])