William Duckett (journalist)

William Duckett (12 December 1805 – 17 February 1873) was a French journalist, best known for having edited the Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture, an encyclopedic dictionary that was successful in its time.

Biography

He was the son of William Duckett, an Irishman living in Paris, an activist member of the Society of United Irishmen, translator for the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror, teacher at Sainte-Barbe, and the author of a Nouvelle Grammaire anglaise ("New English Grammar") as well as poems and translations often wrongly attributed to his son.

The young William Duckett became known as the editor of the Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture. Created by the publisher Ambroise Firmin Didot, this encyclopedia had 52 volumes in octavo, published between 1832 and 1851, and he himself gave a fairly large number of articles. The title, the format and the arrangement of the subjects were borrowed from the Conversations-Lexikon published by Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus and very popular in Germany. William Duckett then published an abridged edition of his Dictionary for Ladies and Young People in 1841 in 10 volumes, followed by a second complete edition of the Dictionary, published between 1853 and 1860 in 16 volumes. A supplement of 5 volumes "offering the summary of the facts and ideas of our time" was published between 1864 and 1882.

Between 1834 and 1837, he directed a literary review, the Chronique de Paris. In 1835, Honoré de Balzac bought the journal with funds he did not possess. The Chronique eventually went bankrupt, leading to a resounding dispute between Duckett and Balzac and a mock duel that ended in a bar not far from the meadow.

After the February Revolution, he founded two newspapers, the Courrier de Paris, des départements et de l'étranger (1848) and L'Universel (1849), both of which only lasted a few months. Under the pseudonym of Henri Page, he then collaborated to the biographies that Eugène de Mirecourt published in his newspaper Les Contemporains, then moved to the editorial staff of Le Tintamarre where he remained until his death.

His son, William Alexander Duckett (1831–1863), contributed to the second edition of the Dictionary and published several works, including La Turquie pittoresque (1855) and Les Petites Ouvrières (1862).

References

• Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du xixe siècle, Vol. VI (1870), p. 1335.
• Gustave Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains, 5e édition (1880), p. 607.

External links

• Works by William Duckett at Gallica