Cadell & Davies records

The Cadell & Davies Records consist primarily of correspondence, receipts, bank notes and legal agreements relating to the publishing and bookselling business of Cadell & Davies. The records are organized into one series, Series I. Business Files , and are alphabetically arranged by correspondent. The papers span the dates 1767 to 1831 though the bulk of the material falls in the period 1790 to 1820.

Incoming correspondence from authors and prospective book purchasers, some annotated by the publishers, is interfiled with copies of replies written by Thomas Cadell and William Davies. The records also include a few letters addressed to the elder Thomas Cadell, as well as notes from printers such as Richard Watts and Luke Hansard. These letters have been interfiled chronologically within the correspondence files.

The correspondence typically concerns negotiations between the author and Cadell & Davies. The letters offer insight into the complex network of relations among printer, engraver, publisher, and author; the roles that subscribers and patrons played in supporting the printing of specific works; the impact that advertising and literary reviews were believed to have on sales; and the difficulties of contemporary transport. The records also detail financial transactions, printing expenses, and the firm's contractual arrangements with authors and other booksellers.

The largest single correspondence is that between Charlotte Turner Smith and Cadell & Davies, which numbers over 130 letters, and provides an ongoing account of the circumstances prompting her literary career. In a letter dated October 20, 1797, she wrote that she was "too acutely sensible of the misery, the humiliation of being compelled, with so handsome a fortune of my own, and such claims on behalf of my children to be dependent on my writing... doomed from year to year to invent fable for the public & to take as a favor any price offered." The correspondence also includes Charlotte Smith's opinions of her worth as a writer, details about her family life and writing process, and information about the publication of Elegiac Sonnets (1789-1800), Rural Walks (1795), and Rambles Farther (1800).

The records also contain a significant amount of correspondence between Cadell & Davies and the travel writer Edward Daniel Clarke, primarily regarding the publication of his Travels (1810-1824) and ongoing contractual disputes. The historian Nathaniel Wraxhall's letters offer heated commentary on the Napoleonic Wars (1800-1815). Other correspondents with substantial material include George Huntingford, William Magee, Edward Maltby, Isaac Milner, and Charles Simeon.

Wrappers that previously enclosed the records have been placed at the end of the series in two folders. These wrappers include earlier cataloging information and occasionally provide biographical notes about correspondents.