William Hall (publisher)

William Hall (19 October 1800 – 7 March 1847) was a British publisher who, with Edward Chapman, 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.

[3] With Edward Chapman (1804–1880) he founded a bookselling and publishing business at 186 Strand, London, in 1830, having bought out a small journal called Chat Of The Week.

[4] In 1835, Chapman and Hall published Squib Annual of Poetry, Politics, and Personalities by the illustrator Robert Seymour.

Following the suicide of Robert Seymour, Dickens suggested to William Hall that Hablot Knight Browne should be the new illustrator.

Dickens also arranged for his friends such as Thomas Carlyle to be published by Chapman and Hall and for John Forster to become the literary advisor to the company.