Frederick Mullett Evans

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Frederick Mullett Evans

Frederick Mullett Evans[1] (1803–1870) was an English printer and publisher. He is known for his work as a partner from 1830 in Bradbury & Evans, who printed the works of a number of major novelists, as well as leading periodicals.[2]

Life[edit]

He was the second son of Joseph Jeffries Evans and his wife Mary Anne Mullett, daughter of Thomas Mullett; his elder brother Thomas Mullett Evans was an early associate of Benjamin Disraeli.[3][4][5] A business partnership as printer in Southampton with Francis Joyce was dissolved in 1829.[5][6]

With William Bradbury he founded Bradbury & Evans, who, for a decade from 1830, were solely London printers, in Bouverie Street and then Lombard Street.[7] They had a modern press, powered by steam, and specialised in legal printing. They took on Chambers's Edinburgh Journal and other work for the Chambers brothers.[5][8]

The firm acquired Punch magazine in 1842; its editor Mark Lemon was to become a close friend of Evans, who sustained the social side of Punch, Bradbury being more comfortable with printing.[8][9] Evans was responsible for proofs and payments.[10] The communal weekly dinner for Punch staff was also his domain. The magazine thrived on its paternalism as well as a willingness to pay salaries, and give credit.[5]

During the 1840s, Evans lived at 7 Church Row, Stoke Newington, where both W. M. Thackeray and Charles Dickens visited. It had earlier belonged to Benjamin D'Israeli, grandfather of the Prime Minister.[11] Thackeray commented in 1855 on his period with Punch, that the arrangements were always with Evans rather than Lemon.[12] The Daily News launch of 1846, with Dickens as editor, proved however a costly failure that Evans regretted for decades.[5] An arrangement of the 1840s with William Somerville Orr was dissolved in that year.[13]

In the 1850s, Bradbury & Evans published Household Words, the weekly edited by Charles Dickens. But a disagreement came to a head in 1858/9, when Punch would not run an announcement that Dickens was separating from his wife.[14] Two new publications resulted, All the Year Round run by Dickens in competition with Once a Week, which was edited successfully by Samuel Lucas.[15][16] Also involved in the contractual basis of Household Words were John Forster and William Henry Wills.[17] The quarrel had a personal impact on Evans, whose daughter married Dickens's eldest son, with Dickens refusing to attend the wedding and reception.[18]

A trustee of the estate of Edward Moxon (died 1858), who published Tennyson and Swinburne, Evans pursued John Camden Hotten who was pirating Tennyson's works.[19] Evans and Bradbury retired from running the firm in 1865, with their sons taking over:[20] William Hardwick Bradbury and Frederick Moule Evans. The arrangement broke down in 1872, with Frederick Moule Evans being forced out, and the company became Bradbury, Agnew & Co.[21]

Evans died on 24 June 1870 at 18 Albert Road, Regent's Park, London, his son's house.[22]

Family[edit]

Evans married Maria Moule (died 1850), youngest daughter of George Moule of Melksham, on 21 October 1830.[3][23] His sister, Mary Mullett Evans, second daughter of Joseph Jeffries Evans, had married Henry Moule, brother of Maria, on 1 July 1824; Henry was the sixth son of George Moule.[24][25][26][27]

Frederick and Maria had 12 children, eight of whom survived to become adults.[5] They included:

  • Frederick Moule (1883–1902), the eldest son, who married Amy Lloyd, daughter of Richard Lloyd of Henley, in 1859.[21][28]
  • Margaret Moule, the eldest daughter, who married the barrister Robert Orridge (died 1866) in 1860.[29][30]
  • Elisabeth Matilda Moule (Bessie), who married Charles Dickens, Jr. in November 1861, against his father's wishes.[21]
  • Horace (born 1841), who became a general and was knighted, and married in 1866 Elizabeth Annie Tresidder, daughter of John Nicholas Tresidder.[23]

There were also Tom, Lewis, Godfrey and a further daughter.[21]

Frederick was nicknamed "Pater", is described as "jovial, Pickwickian", and was taken by contemporaries as the typical Victorian paterfamilias.[2]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Also Frederick Mullet Evans, Frederic Mullet Evans, Frederic Mullett Evans
  2. ^ a b Paul Schlicke (3 November 2011). The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens: Anniversary Edition. OUP Oxford. p. 53. ISBN 978-0-19-964018-8.
  3. ^ a b "Marriages". Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette. 21 October 1830. p. 3. Retrieved 19 May 2016 – via British Newspaper Archive.
  4. ^ N. Roe (28 May 2010). English Romantic Writers and the West Country. Palgrave Macmillan UK. p. 110. ISBN 978-0-230-22374-5.
  5. ^ a b c d e f Patten, Robert L.; Leary, Patrick. "Evans, Frederick Mullett". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/76344. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  6. ^ The London Gazette. T. Neuman. 1829. p. 336.
  7. ^ John Sutherland (13 October 2014). The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. Routledge. p. 76. ISBN 978-1-317-86333-5.
  8. ^ a b Laurel Brake; Marysa Demoor (2009). Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press. p. 71. ISBN 978-90-382-1340-8.
  9. ^ Alan R. Young (2007). Punch and Shakespeare in the Victorian Era. Peter Lang. p. 50. ISBN 978-3-03911-078-0.
  10. ^ David Finkelstein (1 February 2015). Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. p. 152. ISBN 978-1-4426-5824-0.
  11. ^ A P Baggs, Diane K Bolton and Patricia E C Croot, 'Stoke Newington: Growth, Church Street', in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 8, Islington and Stoke Newington Parishes, ed. T F T Baker and C R Elrington (London, 1985), pp. 163-168. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol8/pp163-168 [accessed 20 May 2016].
  12. ^ Patrick Leary (2002). Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London: The Punch Circle, 1858–1874. Indiana University. p. 192 note 34.
  13. ^ The London Gazette. T. Neuman. 1846. p. 3566.
  14. ^ Harriet Martineau; Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle (1983). Harriet Martineau's Letters to Fanny Wedgwood. Stanford University Press. p. 184 note 9. ISBN 978-0-8047-1146-3.
  15. ^ Kathryn Ledbetter (9 March 2016). Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context. Routledge. p. 53. ISBN 978-1-317-04624-0.
  16. ^ Lesley Higgins (27 August 2015). The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks. Oxford University Press. pp. 322 note 489. ISBN 978-0-19-953400-5.
  17. ^ Laurel Brake; Marysa Demoor (2009). Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press. pp. 227–. ISBN 978-90-382-1340-8.
  18. ^ Paul Schlicke (3 November 2011). The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens: Anniversary Edition. OUP Oxford. pp. 55–6. ISBN 978-0-19-964018-8.
  19. ^ Simon Eliot, Hotten: Rotten: Forgotten? An Apologia for a General Publisher, Book History Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 61–93, at pp. 84–5. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30227312
  20. ^ Patten, Robert L.; Leary, Patrick. "Bradbury, William". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/76346. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  21. ^ a b c d Patten, Robert L.; Leary, Patrick. "Evans, Frederick Moule". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/76345. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  22. ^ Bookseller: The Organ of the Book Trade. J. Whitaker. 1870. p. 572.
  23. ^ a b Walford, Edward (1919). "The County Families of the United Kingdom; or, Royal manual of the titled and untitled aristocracy of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland". Internet Archive. London: R. Hardwicke. pp. 441–2. Retrieved 19 May 2016.
  24. ^ Dod's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage of Great Britain and Ireland, Including All the Titled Classes. 1914. p. 399.
  25. ^ "Married". Cambridge Chronicle and Journal. 9 July 1824. p. 3. Retrieved 18 May 2016 – via British Newspaper Archive.
  26. ^ "Marriages". Bell's Weekly Messenger. 25 August 1860. p. 8. Retrieved 18 May 2016 – via British Newspaper Archive.
  27. ^ Brock, W. H. "Moule, Henry". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/19426. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  28. ^ The Spectator. F.C. Westley. 1859. p. 1009.
  29. ^ The Gentleman's Magazine. R. Newton. 1866. p. 291.
  30. ^ Lillian Nayder (1 April 2012). The Other Dickens: a life of Catherine Hogarth. Cornell University Press. p. 278. ISBN 978-0-8014-6506-2.
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