1797 British publishing has always been dynastic in its character. This has been its strength, and the means by which its strongest elements have survived in a business little better than gambling on the public’s notoriously fickle taste in reading matter.
The most venerable ‘houses’ in the history of the book in Britain, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, can both of them claim half a millennium’s existence – and dispute among themselves which was actually, by a few years, the first in the field.
The longest-surviving commercial house is Longmans. In the 17th century the family were successful Bristol soap-makers. Thomas Longman (1699–1755), the patriarch of the publishing firm, was born in Bristol, and was sent by his family, aged seventeen, to be an articled apprentice in the London book trade. He exchanged soap for ink.
Following the financial securities brought in by the Queen Anne copyright act of 1710, print products enjoyed a boom during this period. Having served his time and learned his business, Thomas borrowed money (over £2,000 – a huge sum at the time) from the family’s Bristol coffers to set up his own house at the ‘Sign of The Ship’ (which would be the firm’s emblem), near Paternoster Row, the home of the British book trade (see also 29 December).
Thomas was not a publisher in the modern sense, but a ‘bookseller’. He traded in books – both their production and their retailing. But, since he was childless, there was no expectation that the name Longman would survive four centuries as an imprint.
On his death, the firm passed into the proprietorship of his nephew, another Thomas Longman (1730–97). He had twelve children, and the family interest was continued. But not with any great flair or trade prominence. It was with this Thomas Longman’s death, on 5 February 1797, that the company’s root was finally planted.
Thomas’s eldest son – inevitably another Thomas Longman (1771–1842) – made the firm a publishing powerhouse. The age, with industrialisation, urbanisation, increased literacy and modern transport systems, was propitious for the book trade. Longman III (so to call him) imaginatively expanded into papermaking and printing. But, as the historian Asa Briggs records in his history of the firm: ‘The basis of the house’s strength was capital. Thomas Norton Longman had left nearly £200,000 in 1842, when he died accidentally after falling from his horse on his way back from Paternoster Row to his house in Hampstead.’
This Thomas Longman was the first of the family to enter Parliament. Among other things, publishing was now clearly a ‘profession for gentlemen’.
Longman would continue as a family dynasty – and as the most eminent imprint in the London publishing community – until the early 1970s, when it was swallowed into the maw of the Viking- Penguin-Pearson multinational combine. The age of family publishing had passed.