Bradbury and Evans (London)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

Bradbury & Evans was an English printing and publishing business founded in 1830 in London by William Bradbury (1799-1869) and Frederick Mullett Evans (1804-1870).

For the first ten years Bradbury & Evans were printers, then added publishing in 1841 after they purchased Punch magazine. As printers they did work for Joseph Paxton, Edward Moxon and Chapman & Hall (publishers of Charles Dickens). Dickens left Chapman & Hall in 1844 and Bradbury & Evans became his new publisher. Bradbury & Evans published William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair in 1847 as a serial, as well as much of his longer fiction. The firm operated from offices at 11 Bouverie Street; 85 Fleet Street, and 4-14 Lombard Street, London.

Bradbury & Evans broke with Dickens in 1859 and founded the illustrated literary magazine Once A Week, which competed with Dickens' new magazine All The Year Round. Among the artists who contributed illustrations to the firm's publications were John Leech, John Tenniel and Hablot K. Browne [i.e. Phiz]. In 1861 Evans' daughter, Bessie Evans, married Dickens' son, Charles Dickens, Jr. The founders' sons, William Hardwick Bradbury (1832–1892) and Frederick Moule Evans (1832–1902) took over the business in 1865. At the same time Manchester art dealers William and Thomas Agnew were taken into partnership to supply the firm with much needed capital.