Gerald Duckworth

Gerald de l'Etang Duckworth (1870 – 28 September 1937) was a British publisher.

Duckworth was a son of Herbert Duckworth, a London barrister, by his wife Julia Jackson. His middle name, de l'Etang, was the surname of one of his mother's ancestors, Antoine de l'Etang, a page to Queen Marie Antoinette. His mother was a niece of Julia Margaret Cameron, the photographer, after whom she was named.

Duckworth's father died before his birth, and when he was eight his mother married the author Leslie Stephen, and had four more children: Virginia Stephen, later the author Virginia Woolf, the painter Vanessa Bell, and two sons, Thoby and Adrian Stephen. Woolf eventually accused Gerald and his elder brother, George, of having sexually abused her and Vanessa when they were children and teenagers. Woolf published her first two novels with her brother's help before forming the Hogarth Press.

Gerald Duckworth was educated at Eton College and Clare College, Cambridge.

In 1898, Duckworth founded the publishing company which bears his name, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd, in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. In his first year, 1898–99, he published Henry James's In the Cage; Leslie Stephen's English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century; Jocelyn by John Sinjohn, a nom-de-plume of John Galsworthy; a translation of August Strindberg's Der Vater; and Mother Goose in Prose, the first children's book by L. Frank Baum, and the first book illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. (Baum's most famous work, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was published in Chicago just a year later.)

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