John Chapman (publisher)

John Chapman (16 June 1821 – 25 November 1894) was an English publisher who acquired the influential radical journal, the Westminster Review.

He acquired the philosophical radical journal the Westminster Review in 1851, and provided a platform for emerging ideas of evolution.

His assistant Mary Anne Evans brought together authors including Francis William Newman, W. R. Greg, Caroline Cornwallis, Harriet Martineau and the young journalist Herbert Spencer, and later John Stuart Mill, William Carpenter, Robert Chambers, George Holyoake and Thomas Huxley.

Charles Darwin was a user of it and his old friend Dr. James Manby Gully (1808-83) had a thriving hydropathic institution in Malvern.

Chapman lived with both his wife and mistress, and Mary Ann Evans is believed to have had an affair with him,[7] as well as having an earlier relationship with suffragette and women's rights activist Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (who refused to marry Chapman and lose her legal rights as married woman).

[2] His body was returned to England and buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery and the inscription records that his wife took over the editorship of the Westminster Review.