The Compositor’s Chronicle
Subtitle: “An Epitome of Events Interesting to Printers”
Related Journals
Start Date(s)
End Date(s)
Editor(s)
Printer/Publisher(s)
City
Type of Content
- Association reports, meeting reports, composition, a fortnight's notice, the apprentice question, the printers' asylum, facts and scraps, poetry, society news, Dublin Society, regional printing/publishing, labour strikes/disputes (Waterloo)
- In Nov. 1842, the lead story is a call for a “General Union,” “a proposed plan for sustaining members of the profession.” It reported on several “disputes” (“General Union,” no. 28, 1 Nov. 1842, p. 217)
Notes
- Official organ of the London Compositors’ Association
- The Compositor's Chronicle is the first printing trade union periodical published in Britain (St. Bride)
- The opening address notes "innumerable evils" in the profession and the journal's object "to promote a better understanding [of] the trade, and to ensure a more perfect and sincere co-operation on the part of its members" ("Address," vol. 1, no. 1, 7 Sept. 1840, p. 1)
- According to this journal, "The press has been, for the most part, the unwilling slave of error, and the instuments [sic] of kings, priests, aristocrats, and imbeciles, in carrying out their irrational, ambitious, uncivilised, and uncivilising designs" (1 Oct. 1842, p. 213) (qtd. in Jones 10)
- "In parallel with the growth in printing union membership, the period 1840–65 saw a succession of trade union periodicals, including The Compositor’s Chronicle (1840–43), which was produced by the London Compositors’ Association and was later continued as The Printer (1843–45)" (Score 275)
- This is one of a number of printing trade journals that opposed the "mechanization of the printing trade" (Score 282)
- "News for the printer of the 1840s is significant from a historical point of view" (Ulrich and Kup 18)
- Shattock says this "continued as The Printer”; Score agrees (275), as does Finkelstein (111)
- Publisher's address: Little James Street, Gray's Inn Lane (journal itself)
Subject Categories
Issues
Sources that Discuss this Journal
- Baillet passim
- Bateson p. 88
- Benson p. 421
- COPAC
- Finkelstein p. 111
- Jones p. 10
- NSTC
- Score pp. 275-82
- Shattock 51
- St. Bride Catalogue (print) 6
- Stewart vol. 1, p. 622
- Ulrich and Kup 18
Works Cited
- Baillet, Françoise. “‘Gall and Wormwood’: The Compositors’ Chronicle (1840–43) as a Collaborative Journal.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, vol. 95, Spring 2022. Open Edition Journals.
- Bateson, Frederick Wilse. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Vol. 3: 1800-1900. Series editor George Watson. Cambridge UP, 1969.
- Benson, Charles. “Ireland.” The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 3: Ambition and Industry 1800–1880, edited by Bill Bell, Edinburgh UP, 2007, pp. 418-29. EBSCOhost.
- COPAC: Consortium of Online Public Access Catalogues. Library Hub Discover, JISC.
- Finkelstein, David. Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World. Oxford UP, 2018.
- Jones, Aled. Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England. Ashgate, 1996.
- NSTC (Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue), in C19: The Nineteenth-Century Index, Chadwyck-Heaney, 2020. ProQuest.
- Score, Melissa. “Pioneers of Social Progress?: Gender and Technology in British Printing Trade Union Journals, 1840–65.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 47 no. 2, 2014, pp. 274-95. Project MUSE.
- Shattock, Joanne. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Vol. 4: 1800-1900. Edited by Frederick W. Bateson. 3rd ed. Cambridge UP. 1999.
- St. Bride Foundation Catalogue of the Technical Reference Library of Works on Printing and the Allied Arts. Governors, 1919. Google Books.
- Stewart, James D., editor. British Union-Catalogue of Periodicals. 4 vols. Butterworths, 1968.
- Ulrich, Carolyn F., and Karl Kup. Books and Printing: A Selected List of Periodicals, 1800-1942. W. E. Rudge, 1943.
