William Bradbury

William Hardwick Bradbury (December 1832–13 October 1892) was a printer and publisher and a partner in the firm Bradbury, Evans & Co. Early life W. H. Bradbury was one of five children and the second son of Sarah née Price (c1803-1896) and William Bradbury (1799-1869), the co-founder of the printing and publishing firm of Bradbury and Evans. When W. H. Bradbury's older sister Letitia Jane died in 1839 aged 11 Dickens wrote to his father William Bradbury offering his 'earnest and sincere sympathy and warm regard', saying that he knew what Bradbury was going through as he himself had lost 'a young and lovely creature' in the person of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, almost two years before. W. H. Bradbury attended a private school in Brighton before going to the University College School in Gower Street, London (1843-1848). His original intention was to study for the Bar, but printing was in his blood and instead he spent a two-year 'apprenticeship' working in publishing and bookselling in Dublin before joining the family firm of Bradbury and Evans, then in Bouverie Street in London. It is claimed that Bradbury and his older brother Henry Riley Bradbury (1829-1860) joined Frederick Moule Evans, son of their father's business partner Frederick Mullett Evans, in printing the serialisation of Charles Dickens's novel David Copperfield, published in twenty parts between May 1849 and November 1850. Printer and publisher Bradbury and Evans published the works of Charles Dickens from 1844 until 1859, when they refused to carry an advertisement by Dickens in Punch explaining why he had separated from his wife, Catherine Dickens. Furious at their refusal, Dickens immediately cut all business and personal connections with them, returning to his old publisher, Chapman and Hall. While his father William Bradbury, on behalf of his firm Bradbury and Evans, was involved in a complicated legal dispute with Dickens, W. H. Bradbury's older brother, the writer Henry Bradbury, committed suicide by drinking acid, possibly on being refused in marriage by a daughter of Frederick Mullett Evans, his father's partner, or perhaps as a result of being accused of plagiarism by the botanical illustrator Alois Auer.