Edward Chapman (publisher)

Edward Chapman (13 January 1804 – 20 February 1880) was a British publisher who, with William Hall founded Chapman & Hall, publishers for Charles Dickens (from 1840 until 1844 and again from 1858 until 1870), William Thackeray, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,[1] Anthony Trollope, Eadweard Muybridge and Evelyn Waugh among others.

[2] With William Hall (1800-1847) he founded a bookselling and publishing business at 186 Strand, London in 1830, having bought out a small journal called Chat Of The Week.

Chapman is thought to have had the literary skills to be able to spot a saleable book while Hall had the business acumen to sell it.

[5][6] In 1842 they moved into a house on the Old Brompton Road where they had three children: Margaret “Meta” Sophia (afterwards Simpson, later Gaye, 1842–1933), Florence (afterwards Roeder, b.

[1][7] Chapman's daughter Meta recalled in her eighty-eighth year that she ‘used to wonder what he did at the office as when ever Mama took me to 193 Piccadilly, Papa was standing with his back to the fire’.

[n 1] He spent the next decade travelling throughout Europe before his poor health forced him to return to his home at Royal Tunbridge Wells before moving to Elm Lodge in Hitchin in Hertfordshire, where he and his wife had family.