‘A Bread and Cheese Bookseller’

This book provides an edition of a previously unpublished manuscript autobiography of a bookseller who lived and worked in Manchester in the first half of the nineteenth century. James Weatherley sold second-hand books and his recollections provide a vivid portrait of the hand-to-mouth existence of street sellers and small shopkeepers who in Manchester as elsewhere played a critical role in the book trade, contributing to the dissemination of cheap literature. Alongside the material on his fellow booksellers and book hunters, Weatherley also writes about other events - some parochial, some like Peterloo which had a national significance - in a town that was one of the first to cross the threshold of industrialisation. Awkwardly written and erratically punctuated, it achieves a directness and vividness of language which is rarely communicated by those professional writers who visited and wrote about Manchester in these years.