Related Journals

• Printer, or Compositors’ and Pressmen’s Chronicle
  • Becomes The Printer, or Compositors’ and Pressmen’s Chronicle, which runs from November 1843 through 1845

Start Date(s)

• 1840 (journal itself)

End Date(s)

• 1843 (journal itself)

Editor(s)

• Thompson, Robert

Printer/Publisher(s)

• R. Thompson

City

• London, England (journal itself)

Type of Content

• Association reports, meeting reports, composition, a fortnight’s notice, the apprentice question, the printers’ asylum, facts and scraps, poetry, society news, Dublin Society, regional printing/publishing, labour strikes/disputes (Waterloo Online)
• In Nov. 1842, the lead story is a call for a “General Union,” “a proposed plan for sustaining members of the profession.” It reported on several “disputes” (“General Union,” no. 28, 1 Nov. 1842, p. 217)

Notes

• Official organ of the London Compositors’ Association
• “The Compositor’s Chronicle is the first printing trade union periodical published in Britain” (St. Bride's Catalogue)
• “News for the printer of the 1840s, is significant from a historical point of view” (Ulrich and Kup p. 18)
• This is one of a number of printing trade journals that opposed the “mechanization of the printing trade” (Score p. 282)
• The opening address notes “innumerable evils” in the profession and the journal’s object “to promote a better understanding [of] the trade, and to ensure a more perfect and sincere co-operation on the part of its members” (“Address,” vol. 1, no. 1, 7 Sept. 1840, p. 1)
• According to this journal, “The press has been, for the most part, the unwilling slave of error, and the instuments [sic] of kings, priests, aristocrats, and imbeciles, in carrying out their irrational, ambitious, uncivilised, and uncivilising designs” (1 Oct. 1842, p. 213) (qtd. in Jones p. 10)
• “In parallel with the growth in printing union membership, the period 1840–65 saw a succession of trade union periodicals, including The Compositor’s Chronicle (1840–43), which was produced by the London Compositors’ Association and was later continued as The Printer (1843–45)” (Score p. 275)
• Shattock says this “continued as The Printer” in 1843; Score agrees (p. 275), as does Finkelstein (p. 111)
• It was sold by W. Strange on Paternoster Row (journal itself)
• Publisher's address (R. Thompson): Little James Street, Gray’s Inn Lane (journal itself)

Subject Categories

• Printing Trade
• Trade Unions

Issues

• The Compositors' Chronicle no. 1 (September 1840)
• The Compositors' Chronicle no. 2 (October 1840)
• The Compositors’ Chronicle no. 3 (November 1840)

Sources that Discuss this Journal

• Baillet passim
• Bateson p. 88
• Benson p. 421
• COPAC
• Finkelstein p. 111
• Jones p. 10
• NSTC
• Score pp. 275-82
• Shattock p. 51
• St. Bride Catalogue (print) p. 6
• Stewart vol. 1, p. 622
• Ulrich and Kup p. 18
• Waterloo (online)

Works Cited

• Baillet, Françoise. “‘Gall and Wormwood’: The Compositors’ Chronicle (1840–43) as a Collaborative Journal.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, vol. 95, Spring 2022. Open Edition Journals.
• Bateson, Frederick Wilse. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Vol. 3: 1800-1900. Series editor George Watson. Cambridge UP, 1969.
• Benson, Charles. “Ireland.” The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 3: Ambition and Industry 1800–1880, edited by Bill Bell, Edinburgh UP, 2007, pp. 418-29. EBSCOhost.
• COPAC: Consortium of Online Public Access Catalogues. Library Hub Discover, JISC.
• Finkelstein, David. Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World. Oxford UP, 2018.
• Jones, Aled. Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England. Ashgate, 1996.
• NSTC (Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue), in C19: The Nineteenth-Century Index, Chadwyck-Heaney, 2020. ProQuest.
• Score, Melissa. “Pioneers of Social Progress?: Gender and Technology in British Printing Trade Union Journals, 1840–65.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 47 no. 2, 2014, pp. 274-95. Project MUSE.
• Shattock, Joanne. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Vol. 4: 1800-1900. Edited by Frederick W. Bateson. 3rd ed. Cambridge UP. 1999.
• St. Bride Foundation Catalogue of the Technical Reference Library of Works on Printing and the Allied Arts. Governors, 1919. Google Books.
• Stewart, James D., editor. British Union-Catalogue of Periodicals. 4 vols. Butterworths, 1968.
• Ulrich, Carolyn F., and Karl Kup. Books and Printing: A Selected List of Periodicals, 1800-1942. W. E. Rudge, 1943.
• The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals: 1800-1900, edited by John S. North. North Waterloo Academic Press, 2009.