Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/310

270 270 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. Lincolnshire his eloquent zeal won him not only a convert but a wife, and from this time he found that temperance lecturing was but a sorry provision for a family.* Supported by his friends he now determined to aid the movement in another manner and he started a temperance publishing office and bookshop at the very house in the Strand now occupied by Mr. Tweedie, the present temperance publisher. For some time his trade went on successfully, but he en- deavoured to add to his resources by the congenial management of a large tea and coffee business in Fenchurch Street, and the liabilities he thus incurred overreached his capital. Now, however, Cassell had many influential friends, and one of these had sufficient faith in his capacity to start him afresh in life this time on a much larger scale. In his new business in La Belle Sauvage Yard, he was associated with Messrs. Fetter and Galpin, who before then were not very considerable printers in the neighbourhood and they determined to devote themselves to the broader work of pro- ducing cheap and popular books, then commencing to be in great demand not from policy only, though as the life of Robert Chambers shows it was a moment when the tide of fortune might be advantageously made use of by those brave enough and wise enough to see it but also because it had by this time been discovered that before the masses could be in any signal way really raised in social condition they must be educated. commenced life also as a temperance lecturer, and was at one time editor of the Teetotaller Newspaper.
 * Mr. G. W. M. Reynolds, of the "Mysteries of London" notoriety,