Hodder & Stoughton is a British publishing house, now an imprint of Hodder Headline.
The firm has its origins in the 1840s, with Matthew Hodder's employment, aged fourteen, with Messrs Jackson and Walford, the official publisher for the Congregational Union. In 1861 the firm became Jackson, Walford and Hodder; but in 1868 Jackson and Walford retired, and Thomas Wilberforce Stoughton joined the firm, creating Hodder & Stoughton.
Hodder & Stoughton published both religious and secular works, and its religious list contained some progressive titles. These included George Adam Smith's Isaiah. for its Expositor’s Bible series, which was one of the earliest texts to identify multiple authorship in the Book of Isaiah. There was also a sympathetic Life of St Francis by Paul Sabatier, a French Protestant pastor. Matthew Hodder made frequent visits to North America, meeting with the Moody Press and making links with Scribners and Fleming H. Revell.
The secular list only gradually accepted fiction, and it was still subject to "moral censorship" in the early part of the twentieth century. Matthew Hodder was doubtful about the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the company refused Michael Arlen's The Green Hat. In 1922 Hodder and Stoughton published an edition of Lewis Carrol's "Alice in Wonderland" which was likely very controversial at the time given the fantastical nature of the work.
In 1928, the company became the exclusive British hardback publisher of Leslie Charteris's adventure novel series, The Saint, publishing all 50 UK first editions of the series until 1983.
In the 1980s they acquired the rights to publish the English translations of the Asterix comics from the company Brockhampton Press Ltd. as "Hodder Dargaud". Hodder & Stoughton continued to publish them through the 1990s. They have since relinquished the rights to Orion Books. Beginning in 1988, the company took over first UK publishing rights for the James Bond book series from Jonathan Cape.
In the 1970s Hodder & Stoughton was still known primarily as a Christian company. However, it is now merely a secular imprint of the larger Hodder Headline, alongside a number of imprints such as Delta, which produces erotic novels.
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