George Bentley

George Bentley (7 June 1828 – 29 May 1895) was a 19th-century English publisher based in London.

Born into a family of publishers and printers, Bentley entered into partnership with his father around 1845, at a time when the firm's fortunes were in decline. Relations between father and son were sometimes difficult, and on at least one occasion George removed himself from the business. After 1857, he became more confident of his position in the firm, increasingly steering its progress. An early "find" was Wilkie Collins. During the 1860s George Bentley identified and published a number of other authors who later achieved notability. He became increasingly influential and knowledgeable as a publisher of fiction, formally taking control of the business after his father's death in 1871.

Bentley also diversified successfully into magazine publishing, exploiting the synergies available from simultaneously publishing novels serialized in monthly servings and thereafter in book form. at an address in Dorset Square, then on the western edge of London, fourth of nine recorded children of the publisher Richard Bentley (1794–1871) by his marriage to Charlotte Botten/Bell (1800–1871). An uncle was the printer-antiquarian Samuel Bentley. Two elder brothers died in infancy. who wrote that no rival publisher "went in so thoroughly and so persistently ... for all the panoply of glitter and colour ... [that betokened ] ... prosperity, confidence, and peace". By the time Richard Bentley senior died in 1871 the business had been renamed "Richard Bentley and Son". George Bentley was now 43 and during the 1880s George Bentley showed himself content, increasingly, to leave the daily running of the business to his own son, the next Richard Bentley (1854–1936). During the mid-1880s George Bentley found a time-consuming new project, having spent twenty years buying up a number of contiguous plots of land as they became available, beside Upton Park, the residential quarter of Slough where he had lived with his family since 1860. Other contiguous plots were purchased by his son, Richard, By the time George Bentley died at The Mere, of "angina pectoris" at the end of May 1895, the publishing business had become more cut-throat and less lucrative. The Bentleys' business was valued at £20,000 in a valuation which included a significant element for "goodwill", but George's son nevertheless sold the business in 1898 to MacMillans George's posthumously acquired daughter-in-law, Lucy, lived on at the house till 1961, when the "35 room mansion" was sold.

Personal George Bentley married Anne Williams from Aberystwyth at St. James's, Westminster in 1853 and the two of them set up home together on the edge of Regent's Park, a few minutes from the Bentley family home in Dorset Square. To the west of London, Slough had boasted a direct rail connection to London since 1840, and in 1860 the Bentleys relocated to 2 East Villas at Upton Park, a modern housing development at Slough where they lived together till 1887, when they moved to a larger house which they had built less than a mile away.