William James Linton

The young Linton was educated at Chigwell Grammar School, an early 17th-century foundation attended by many sons of the Essex and City of London middle classes.

[2] After working as a journeyman engraver, losing his money over a cheap political library called the "National," and writing a life of Thomas Paine, Linton went into partnership in 1842 with John Orrin Smith.

The following year Orrin Smith died, and Linton, who had married a sister of Thomas Wade, editor of Bell's Weekly Messenger, found himself in sole charge of a business upon which two families were dependent.

He helped to found the "International League" of patriots, and, in 1850, with George Henry Lewes and Thornton Leigh Hunt, started The Leader, an organ which, however, did not satisfy his advanced republicanism, and from which he soon withdrew.

Linton was a singularly gifted man, who, in the words of his wife, if he had not bitten the Dead Sea apple of impracticable politics, would have risen higher in the world of both art and letters.

He carried on the tradition of Bewick, fought for intelligent as against merely manipulative excellence in the use of the graver, and championed the use of the "white line" as well as of the black, believing with Ruskin that the former was the truer and more telling basis of aesthetic expression in the wood-block printed upon paper.