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Bentley's Miscellany - Book Web |
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 Bentley's Miscellany was a literary magazine started by Richard Bentley. It was published between 1836 and 1868.
Already a successful publisher of novels, Bentley began the journal in 1836 and invited, then up-and-coming author, Charles Dickens to be its first editor. Dickens
serialized his second novel Oliver Twist but soon fell out with Bentley over editorial control, calling him a "Burlington Street Brigand". He quit as editor in 1839 and William Harrison Ainsworth took over. Ainsworth would also only stay in the job for three years but would buy the magazine from Bentley a decade later. In 1868 Ainsworth re-sold the magazine back to Bentley who merged it with the Temple Bar Magazine.
Aside from the works of Dickens and Ainsworth other significant authors published in the magazine included: Wilkie Collins, Catharine Sedgwick, Thomas Moore, Thomas Love Peacock, The Ingoldsby Legends and some of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories. It was also the first place to publish cartoons of John Leech who became a prominent Punch cartoonist.
Richard Bentley
Richard Bentley (1794-1871), British publisher, was born in London in 1794. His father owned the General Evening Post in conjunction with John Nichols, to whom Richard Bentley, on leaving St Paul's school, was apprenticed to learn the printing trade. With his brother Samuel (1785-1868), an antiquarian of some repute, he set up a printing establishment, but in 1829 he began business as a publisher in partnership with Henry Colburn in New Burlington Street. Colburn retired in 1832 and Bentley continued business on his own account.
In 1837 he began Bentley's Miscellany, edited for the first three years of its existence by Charles Dickens, whose Oliver Twist, with Cruikshank's illustrations, appeared in its pages. Bentley and his son George (1828-1895), as Richard Bentley & Son, published works by R. H. Barham, Theodore Hook, Isaac D'Israeli, Judge Haliburton and others; also the "Library of Standard Novels" and the "Favorite Novel Library." In the latter series Mrs Henry Wood's East Lynne appeared.
In 1866 the firm took over the publication of Temple Bar, with which Bentley's Miscellany was afterwards incorporated. Richard Bentley died on the 10th of September 1871. His son, George Bentley, and his grandson, Richard Bentley, junior, continued the business until it was absorbed (1898) by Macmillan & Co.
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