1848 The leading British wholesaler and retailer of printed materials, the Smith (‘first with the news’) dynasty began in 1792, when Henry Walton Smith set up as a newsvendor in Grosvenor Street, London. By 1817 the firm was also a leading bookseller and purveyor of news materials (by horse-drawn coach) to the provinces.
Smith’s grandson W.H. Smith II (nicknamed ‘Old Morality’) originally hoped for a career in the church. It was under him that the firm gained its dominating position as a railway newsvendor and (linked, via station-stall) bookshop chain, selling and lending volumes. Between 1840 and 1870 nearly 15,000 miles of rail track were laid, effectively connecting the nation in a communication network for the first time.
The first W.H. Smith’s bookstall was opened on the Northwestern Line terminus at Euston, on 1 November 1848. The station was, with its famous Doric Arch, a temple to British world supremacy. Smith’s were given the monopolistic concession (for which they paid rent) on the understanding that they clean up the quality of reading material (‘purify the sources of instruction and entertainment’) for the travelling public. This they did.
By the 1860s the firm had bookstalls on all the main lines and main stations in the country. Smith’s not only sold fiction from their outlets (notably Routledge’s ‘Railway Library’) but they also went into production of so-called ‘yellowbacks’ (cheap volumes of fiction with illustrated board covers). In 1860 they set up a ‘circulating library’ that enabled subscribers to borrow a book at one station and return it at another.
Their library activities enlarged when they moved, in the late 19th and early 20th century, into High Street outlets. With the similarly censorious Mudie’s ‘Leviathan’ circulating library in London, W.H. Smith became what the novelist Wilkie Collins called one of the ‘twin tyrants of literature’. Smith’s continued their moralistic line to the late 20th century – banning, for example, the satirical magazine Private Eye (who returned the compliment by labelling their boycotter ‘W.H. Smut’). W.H. Smith’s lending libraries flourished until 1961 when they were finally killed off by the newly energised post-war public libraries.