Charles William Daniel

Charles William Daniel (1871-1955) was a writer and publisher who did much to disseminate Tolstoyan and pacifist ideas, and ideas about food reform and alternative medicine, in the first half of the twentieth century. During the First World War he was twice prosecuted for works that he published. The first prosecution was for his own pamphlet, The Knock-Out Blow; when fined he refused to pay and was imprisoned. Later he was prosecuted for publishing the controversial novel Despised and Rejected by Rose Allatini, and was again fined. The magazines that he edited and published included work by many of the advanced thinkers of the time.

Charles William Daniel was born on April 23, 1871 at 35 Kings Cross Road, London. His father, an employee of the Frederick Warne & Co. publishing house, died when he was 12 years old. Young Charles had to earn his living from the age of fourteen, first as an office boy in Hatton Garden, and then in the office of an advertising agency. Eventually he became an employee of the Walter Scott publishing company in Paternoster Row. The manager of the company was F.R. Henderson, who later ran the left-wing bookshop on Charing Cross Road popularly nicknamed ‘The Bomb Shop’. This company published the works of Tolstoy, a thinker in whom Charles was already interested. He was strongly influenced by the Tolstoyan lecturer J. C. Kenworthy, and eventually he started the Sunday discussion group that eventually became the London Tolstoyan Society. One of the visitors to these meetings was Florence Worland, whom he married some years later.

In 1902 Charles Daniel started his own small publishing business in Cursitor Street (off Chancery Lane). He became associated with the Free Age Press, which had the agency for Tolstoy’s writings, and distributed them at such low prices that they could not have made a profit. The firm also issued a series of ‘People’s Classics’ (at 1d or 2d a copy) ‘printed to place in the hands of the masses, at the cheapest price, the richest thoughts of the world’s greatest thinkers’. The series included writings by Emerson, Aristotle, Socrates, Rousseau and others. In the early 1900s the firm of C. W. Daniel began publishing magazines. One of these was at first called The Tolstoyan, but later The Crank, a name chosen by Mary Everest Boole, because, she said, quoting Henry George, 'a crank was a little thing that made revolutions'; in 1907 the magazine was renamed The Open Road. Another magazine published by the Daniel company was The Healthy Life. ‘The Cranks’ Table’ was an unofficial luncheon club that met in a Bride Street vegetarian restaurant, and discussed the problems facing the world. Members included journalists from the Liberal papers the Daily News and The Star.

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