Thomas Cadell (publisher)

Thomas Cadell (1742–1802) was a successful 18th-century English bookseller, who published works by some of the most famous writers of the century.

Thomas Cadell was born in Bristol to William and Mary Cadell and baptized on 12 November 1742. On 7 March 1758, Cadell’s father apprenticed him for a fee of £105 to London bookseller and publisher Andrew Millar. Cadell became Millar's partner in April 1765, having just finished his seven-year apprenticeship, and took over the business with the help of Millar's assistant, Robert Lawless, upon Millar’s death in 1768. Now a successful bookseller, Cadell married the daughter of Reverend Thomas Jones on 1 April 1769.

Cadell ran his business out of 141 Strand for over 25 years, sometimes partnering with William Strahan and later Andrew Strahan. He published works by notable authors, whom he paid well. For example, Cadell and Strahan published Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and the poetry of Robert Burns. Cadell wrote to Gibbon in 1787: “I had rather risk my fortune with a few such Authors as Mr Gibbon, Dr Robertson, D Hume … than be the publisher of a hundred insipid publications”. He also published works by the jurist William Blackstone, the philosopher David Hume, the author and critic Samuel Johnson, the philosopher and economist Adam Smith, the novelist Tobias Smollett, the novelist Frances Burney, the historian Catharine Macaulay, and the moralist Hannah More. He also published the novels of Charlotte Turner Smith until her works became too radical, refusing to publish Desmond in 1792.

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