[3] George Bentley's education included a period at the school run by the nonconformist minister, John Potticary, in Blackheath, which also numbered Benjamin Disraeli among its alumni.
[2] Bentley's father had launched a literary magazine in 1836 to which the son contributed positive reviews of novels by the still relatively unknown Wilkie Collins.
A later admirer was the novelist Michael Sadleir,[4] who wrote that no rival publisher "went in so thoroughly and so persistently ... for all the panoply of glitter and colour ... [that betokened ] ... prosperity, confidence, and peace".
Under Bentley's editorship and direction published authors and contributors to Temple Bar included the brothers Thomas and Anthony Trollope, Rhoda Broughton, Ellen Wood, Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Reade, Henry Kingsley, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing, Arthur Conan Doyle, Maarten Maartens, and Henry James.
[2] Bentley was also able to introduce readers to translated contemporary classical works from writers including Honoré de Balzac, Alphonse Daudet, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and Hans Christian Andersen.
The strategy failed, however, and Bentley accepted defeat, buying a share in Charles Mudie's commercial lending library business when it was floated as a public company in 1864.
Old Richard Bentley suffered an accident at Chepstow railway station in 1867 in which he broke a leg, and was forced to retire from the firm.
During the mid-1880s George Bentley found a time-consuming new project, having spent twenty years buying up a number of contiguous plots of land as they became available, beside Upton Park, the residential quarter of Slough[6] where he had lived with his family since 1860.
[5] They now commissioned the fashionable architect George Devey to design and build The Mere a futuristic half-timbered mansion constructed using cavity walls and double glazed windows.
[7] Robert Patten describes the house, which was named "The Mere", admiringly as "a refuge from the fierce cost-cutting competition of late Victorian publishing".
[2] After moving into it in 1887, George Bentley ran his publishing business from his new home, also devoting increasing energy to meteorology which became a consuming interest during the final part of his life, and one that was taken up keenly by his son Richard after he died.
[8] By the time George Bentley died at The Mere, of "angina pectoris" at the end of May 1895, the publishing business had become more cut-throat and less lucrative.