Trading between 1765 and 1836, the publishing firm Cadell and Davies (C & D), in its various incarnations, published ‘many of the most important and enterprising works of the late eighteenth century’. The firm is especially noteworthy for its publication of several influential female authors of the period, including Frances Burney, Hannah Cowley, Felicia Hemans, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and Helen Maria Williams, to name only a handful of the well-known women they published during this period. This chapter will offer a detailed analysis of the nature of the relationships between C & D and their female authors, by examining the surviving correspondence and the bibliographical history of their publication of women's writing. This method allows for both a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the firm's business practices and women's engagement with the commercial world of print.

Throughout this chapter we use the shorthand of C & D, though in fact the firm operated in a variety of different configurations over its seventy-one years of operation (1765–1836). In 1765 Thomas Cadell, Sr. (1742–1802) became Andrew Millar's partner, taking over the business in 1767. Cadell Sr. published Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), along with novels by Henry Mackenzie and Tobias Smollet, the poetry of Robert Burns, the legal writing of William Blackstone, and the philosophy of David Hume and Adam Smith. Cadell was an original member of a famous dining club of booksellers which met monthly at Shakespeare Tavern. His son, Thomas Cadell, Jr. (1773–1836), succeeded him in 1793, with Cadell, Sr. choosing William Davies as his son's partner. The new partners located their firm at 141 Strand in London, with Davies managing most of the partnership's affairs until he became ill in 1813. Cadell consequently became more involved with the business and continued to run the firm after Davies's death in 1820, publishing under his own name until he died in 1836.

C & D's dates roughly mirror those of the Romantic period itself, a period which in turn tracks the huge increase in book publication that commenced in the final third of the eighteenth century.