John Camden Hotten

He spent the period from 1848 to about 1853 in America but by mid-1855 had opened a small bookshop in London at 151a Piccadilly and went on to found the publishing business under his own name which after his death became Chatto & Windus.

He was author of minor biographies of Thackeray (under the name of Theodore Taylor), 1864, and Dickens, 1870, 1873; the History of Signboards (with Jacob Larwood) (1867); Literary Copyright, Seven Letters Addressed to Earl Stanhope (1871); and The Golden Treasury of Thought.

Hotten also undertook several translations of Erckmann-Chatrian's works, and edited among many other titles, Sarcastic Notices of the Long Parliament (1863), The Little London Directory of 1677 (1863), and The Original List of Persons who went from Great Britain to the American Plantations, 1600–1700 (1874), which remains important for genealogists today, and was reprinted in 1938, 1962, and 2012.

[6] Hotten was also a collector, author and clandestine publisher of erotica such as The Romance of Chastisement, Exhibition of Female Flagellants and the erotic comic opera Lady Bumtickler's Revels, some in a series entitled The Library Illustrative of Social Progress.

[11] Hotten was the first publisher to introduce into England the humorous and other works of American writers, including James Russell Lowell's Biglow Papers, Second Series (1862); Artemus Ward, His Book (1865); Oliver Wendell Holmes's Wit and Humour: Poems (1867 and 1872);[12] Walt Whitman's Poems (1868); Charles Godfrey Leland's Hans Breitmann's Barty and other Ballads (1869); Bret Harte's Lothaw and Sensation Novels (1871); Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (1870), Burlesque Autobiography (1871), Eye Openers (ca.

1871), Screamers: a Gathering of Scraps of Humour, Delicious Bits, & Short Stories (1872),[13] and Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (1874); and Ambrose Bierce's Nuggets and Dust: Panned Out in California (1872).