9

PUBLISHER: ‘SIX HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-FIVE WAYS TO DRESS EGGS’

In 1812 the gregarious and wily publisher John Murray moved his growing business from rooms in Fleet Street into elegant new premises in Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly. This was Murray’s expression of faith in himself and in his business. As the owner of the publishing house which he had inherited from his father, the first John Murray of that tribe, he had made a series of courageous and perceptive (or foolhardy) business decisions which led to the creation of bestsellers. These included an early example of what was to become and remain the staple of successful publishers, the cookery book: Murray published A New System of Domestic Economy by the capable domestic goddess Maria Rundell in 1805. Cookery, in Murray’s list, was joined by pacy historical romance: he took a quarter-share in an extended narrative poem by Walter Scott, a rising and prodigious Lowlands poet, who could produce verse with the speed and colour with which a loom can weave ribbon. So while Maria Rundell taught her many readers how to carve a joint, how to make a potato pudding, how to make chicken curry in a book which soon found its place at thousands of kitchen hearths, with Marmion (1808) John Murray introduced Walter Scott, a young man who brought a new hero to the world with the lines:

So daring in love, and so dauntless in war,
Have ye e’r heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?

Within five years Marmion had sold 28,000 copies, and John Murray, the Young Lochinvar of publishing, was rightly satisfied. So was his author: Scott wrote admiringly of the ‘capital and enterprise’ of this personable bookseller who had visited him on the banks of the River Tweed and who had ‘more good sense and propriety of sentiment than fall to the share of most of his brethren . . . I found his ideas most liberal and satisfactory.’ By these publishing successes Murray had gathered enough wind in his sails to propel himself west to Albemarle Street. Using the copyrights of A New System of Domestic Economy and Marmion as security, he bought for nearly £4,000 the freehold of 50 Albemarle Street, and began to sell books from its downstairs front rooms and to publish them from its first floor.

The year before he departed Fleet Street, Murray had ninety-four titles either lately published or in the press, and was publishing the literary journal Quarterly Review. This was not, however, enough to bring the family firm the security it needed. Such an outlay, before the certainty of a balancing income, was a potentially crippling liability, containing as it did printing, paper and binding costs, storage and packing, distribution and delivery, as well as the sums promised or advanced to authors. Murray’s books went to booksellers all around Britain and Ireland, and over the seas to India and Australia, the West Indies and America. Such wide potential readership demanded clean texts, on which the company lavished great care, expecting due diligence from authors and editors. But care cost. Murray’s editor William Gifford pointed out proofing errors in an article to be published in Quarterly Review:

In Southey’s article there are two slight alterations which, if it falls your way, you might make. Sieks is in one place misspelt Seeks: and Persic should be printed instead of Persian . . . I hope you will see that the corrections of the Proof are all made. The Printers, you see, cannot be relied on.

Authors themselves tended to make poor copy-editors, as Gifford warned Murray in the case of Isaac D’Israeli, whose ‘pencil marks are so loose & imperfect, that I cannot discover, with any certainty, what he means to omit’.

With hindsight, John Murray – all seven generations of that name and line – had marked success and influence through their business acumen and courage. However, the business was on a knife-edge in the early nineteenth century, and the second John Murray realized only a year after moving to Albemarle Street that he might have made a big mistake. Spitting with rage, he expressed himself to William Miller, the former publisher (not the engraver) who had sold him the house:

Your Good Will and Business for which I paid so liberal a sum comprised all your customers generally and particularly with such exceptions as were either specified in our contract or mutually agreed afterwards . . . The fact is – Miller – I have never received from you any one act of friendship since I purchased your house, where you appeared to leave me to my fate, never entering the door, as was remarked even by the common porter in my shop, except for your own service. Your Good will has never produced me an Hundred pounds – & the books, which you said ‘were you upon our deathbed, as my friend, you would advise me to take of you’ will prove a considerable loss. There are heavy disadvantages and such as must have prevented me, were it not from my own connexions and ulterior views, forever from realizing even your kind, but scanty wish, ‘every prosperity which I could reasonably look for’.

Like all publishers, Murray was a gambler on futures, and a regular sufferer from problems of cash flow. ‘Mr Murray is really so very poor at this time,’ his clerk wrote to a customer in Enfield in 1811. ‘He trusts you will excuse his sending again his Account. Mr Murray desired me to say He will feel very happy if you will occasionally favour him with an order.’ A new gamble that Murray took at this difficult time for his business was to publish in March 1812 the first two Cantos, or sections, each of over 200 verses, of a poem by a mouthy and unreliable young peer, Lord Byron. Murray had not yet moved into Albemarle Street before Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage appeared, but with its rapidly increasing notoriety it sold out reprint after reprint, reaching 4,500 copies in six months. Byron, as he himself put it, awoke one morning and found himself famous. He was of course being disingenuous: he was already famous enough, not least because a week earlier he had made trouble in the House of Lords by attacking in his maiden speech the Tory government bill which proposed to make machine-wrecking an offence punishable by hanging. ‘How will you carry this bill into effect?’ he asked the Lords.

Can you commit a whole country to their own prisons? Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows? . . . Are these the remedies for a starving and desperate populace?

And further, he was famous within a limited social circle as a traveller, lover and altogether irresponsible sexual adventurer, a worry to his friends and a danger to young women. So becoming famous overnight was false modesty, a bit of a tease on the future. Byron and John Murray were well matched as author and publisher. Both were buccaneers in the way they ran their affairs, risking in Byron’s case social opprobrium, in Murray’s business disaster. In business Murray could hope beyond his present difficulties and survive handsomely, while Byron would separate from his wife and in April 1816 would leave England, never to return. But the pair were forever bound together, as Byron so perfectly expressed it:

Along thy sprucest bookshelves shine
The works thou deemest most divine –
The ‘Art of Cookery’ and Mine
My Murray.

In correspondence in 1839 with Edward Copleston, Bishop of Llandaff, Murray ruminated on the ‘risque’ he ran as a publisher. Copleston, who was editing the letters between himself and the Earl of Dudley for publication by Murray, had complained about the great distance between St Paul’s Cathedral and Albemarle Street, and about the ‘inordinate profits’ of the publisher. Murray considered his reply:

My Lord when I had the honor to publish for Sir Walter Scott & Lord Byron the one resided in London, the other in Venice – & with regard to the supposed advantage of a publisher they are only such as custom has established and experience proved to be no more than equivalent to his peculiar trouble and the inordinate risque that he incurs . . . After what has passed on your Lordship’s side . . . I feel that it would be inconsistent with my own character to embarrass you any longer and I therefore release your Lordship at once from any promise or supposed understanding whatever regarding the publication.’

In the event the bishop backed down, and the letters were duly published.

John Murray was just one of a powerful group of commercial publishers in early nineteenth-century London who carefully considered the market potential of an increasingly literate population, rapidly developing towns in the regions of Britain, a freer money supply, and expanding trade to English-speaking colonies and communities overseas. The trick he had continually to perform was to balance bestsellers such as Byron’s Childe Harold with books of very limited appeal such as the Llandaff–Dudley letters. While the one made the money, the other, along with a multitude of specialist titles, made his company’s solid and reliable reputation. As a company, John Murray would not have survived as long as it did without a careful balance being maintained between the two principles. As we have seen in the case of Turner, Martin, Landseer, Chantrey, Flaxman, Pye and Lewis, the conditions of success for a painter, sculptor or engraver included business acumen, an understanding of market forces, and a willingness to give the public what it wanted; at the same time it was necessary for these men to push at the boundaries of taste and practice, and to accept the imperative of attention to detail, distribution and material supply. Just these same conditions applied to a publisher such as Murray.

Central among Murray’s competitors was Thomas Longman, whose company published Robinson Crusoe and had early responsibility for Dr Johnson’s Dictionary. Another was Archibald Constable, who first negotiated the £1,000 advance for Scott’s Marmion, later sold off in part to Murray, and came to publish the Encyclopaedia Britannica. These were big players, the founders of two leading publishing houses whose names continue in business into the twenty-first century. Others included the brothers James and John Ballantyne, and the Rivington family, who had been the first publisher of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and became the leading publishers for the Church of England.

An author who continually dogged John Murray’s footsteps and accepted his hospitality, but was largely the creature of Murray’s rival Longman, was the Irish poet, song-writer and biographer of Sheridan and Byron, Thomas Moore. Famous for his lyrical poems, Moore became to Ireland what Robert Burns has been to Scottish lore and culture, though without such lasting international resonance. His charming versification was, at the time, widely read, sung and admired, the jokes in his songs, poems and prose duly raised a laugh, without having the pinch of any couplet by Byron:

‘Come, come’, said Tom’s father, ‘at your time of life,
There’s no longer excuse for thus playing the rake –
It is time you should think, boy, of taking a wife’ –
‘Why, so it is father – whose wife shall I take?’

Before he had written anything, Moore was given in 1817 a £3,000 advance by Longman for his oriental verse saga Lalla Rookh. This caused Byron in a flush of jealousy to refuse Murray’s offer of 1,500 guineas as an advance for the fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. ‘I won’t take it. I ask two thousand five hundred guineas . . . if Mr Moore is to have three thousand for Lalla.’ Literary gossip of this kind was rife in the circles that John Murray frequented. Thomas Moore noted down a classic example in his journal, concerning the ageing dandy George ‘Beau’ Brummel:

Much talk in town about Brummel’s Memoirs – Murray told me a day or two ago that the report was that he had offered Brummel £5000 for the Memoirs, but that the Regent had sent Brummel £6000 to suppress them! – Upon Murray saying he really had some idea of going to Calais to treat with Brummel, I asked him . . . what he would give me for a volume, in the style of the Fudges, on his correspondence & interviews with Brummel? ‘A thousand guineas’ he said, ‘this instant’.

Moore’s most successful work in his lifetime was his satire in comic verse on the English abroad, The Fudge Family in Paris (1818). Within its first year of publication it had reached its fourth edition and was being read throughout the nation. Even en route to Leamington Spa by coach Moore had no peace from its fame, as a fellow passenger talked to him about the book, without realizing he was the author. ‘I have always found it a trying thing to be spoken of behind-my-back-before-my-face in this manner’, he wrote later in his journal. The Fudges, an English family visiting Paris after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, demonstrate all the characteristic rivalries and prejudices between the now triumphant English and the French. In length and metre Moore parodies Byron and Scott, though his writing falls far short of both these contemporaries in wit and narrative drive. Here is the son, Robert Fudge, writing home about French cooking:

Yet spite of our good-natur’d money and slaughter –
They hate us, as Beelzebub hates holy water!
But who the deuce cares, Dick, as long as they nourish us
Neatly as now, and good cookery flourishes . . .
Forbid it, forbid it, ye Holy Allies,
Take whatever ye fancy – take statues, take money –
But leave them, oh leave them their Perigord pies,
Their glorious goose-livers, and high pickled tunny!
Though many I own, are the evils they’ve brought us,
Though Royalty’s here on her very last legs,
Yet, who can help loving the land that has taught us
Six hundred and eighty-five ways to dress eggs?

Moore, Byron and Scott were the three giants of early nineteenth-century literature, holding the stage before Dickens, Thackeray and the Brontës had taken their places, and before Jane Austen became an institution. Their popularity followed different tracks: Byron becoming notorious in absentia, both by deliberately absconding and by his romantic early death; Scott by gripping his readers by the throat and bouncing them through one costume drama after another; and Moore by becoming the people’s poet, an easy and stylish read and a light laugh in the early years of massproduced books and journals. This communicated itself easily to Moore himself:

Received a letter from a gentleman (or Lady, perhaps) in Scotland . . . telling me he is the centre of a little circle of admirers of mine, who all feel interested about me as a man, not less than as a poet, & entreating I would tell them the ages, names &c of my children – as they had seen in the papers lately that I had just had a fourth child – The letter is intelligently and feelingly written . . . It is strange how people can summon up all this interest & take all this trouble about one who is a perfect stranger to them.

A popular writer of a rarer and quieter kind, and one who had a particular influence on artists, was Maria Callcott. During the twenty-eight years of her working life she witnessed the initial influence of Byron, Scott and Moore, the final victory over Napoleon in 1815, the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, a rampant cholera epidemic across the country in 1830, and the early turbulent years of parliamentary reform. The reigns of four monarchs cross these years, as do astronomical discoveries that began to widen human horizons, the dawning awareness of the manifold uses of electricity, the spread of gas lighting in city streets, improvements in the steam-engine, early flights of balloons, and the railway boom that began to knit Britain together and revolutionize its time-keeping. It also saw the beginnings of the rise of women in the arts and sciences.

As the eldest child of a naval officer turned revenue inspector, Maria Callcott had an upbringing that provided all the ingredients for the breadth of interest and understanding that she came to reveal in later life. From a succession of homes in the Isle of Man, Cheshire, Oxfordshire and Edinburgh, Maria travelled with her father, George Dundas, on visits to lighthouses, bridges and canals. Her knowledge of languages smoothed her way across the world; the liberal arts gave her an understanding of science and society; and instruction in drawing gave her the foundations she needed to look, select and record people and landscapes in India, Italy and South America. However, even in these early years, Maria suffered intermittently from the tuberculosis that was to dog her throughout her life.

Maria Callcott is an important paradigm figure, as she straddles four fertile sources for intellectual life: world travel, in the nineteenth century still a rare experience, particularly for a woman able to reflect and to write about it; literature, an area that women had long occupied but in a secondary role to the men who called the shots and commanded the world of publishing; art, a form of expression which she practised at an amateur level but wrote about percipiently and with profound understanding; and society, in which her charm, engagement and evident beauty brought her to some challenging social environments in Edinburgh, London and Rome. While she travelled in India, Italy, Brazil and Chile, some of Maria Callcott’s toughest encounters were in the drawing rooms of Kensington and Mayfair.

Before leaving for India with her father, sister and brother in December 1808, she was Maria Dundas. In India, however, she married a young naval officer, Thomas Graham, whom she had met on the voyage from England. Maria Graham, as she had now become, looked closely at the country she found herself in, and wrote her Journal of a Residence in India in which she spotted a new perspective, an exploration of the country’s scenery and monuments, and ‘the manners and habits of its natives and resident colonists’. In her Preface she explains why this is necessary, and why her observations are so fresh:

[F]ew people go to this remote region as mere idle or philosophical observers . . . Of the multitude of well-educated individuals who pass the best part of their days in it, the greater part are too constantly occupied with the cares and duties of their respective vocations as statesmen, soldiers, or tradesmen, to pay much attention to what is merely curious or interesting to a contemplative spectator.

In Journal of a Residence in India, which she illustrated with her own drawings, Maria Graham introduces readers to some strange new words, including: ‘Bungalo – a garden-house, or cottage’; ‘Cummerbund – literally waist-band’; ‘Kooli – a porter. This is a very low caste’; ‘Sherbet – a drink little different from lemonade’; ‘Tank – a reservoir for water’; ‘Tomtom – a kind of drum’. The originality of Maria Graham’s approach was immediately obvious to the Edinburgh publishers Archibald Constable and Longman, who published the Journal in 1813. It sold well immediately; Maria noted:

I have been six weeks in London, and in that period I have made some agreeable acquaintance, and my Indian Journal has been published. It has drawn upon me the public’s eyes and perhaps might have made me a little vain of the entrances I have made into the world of Literature, especially by a yet untrodden path.

Hesitant and finding it extraordinary to be successful, Maria blinked her way from the Indian sun into the limelight of both Edinburgh and London. However, in doing so she came under fire from her own family, and added:

But it is said no man is a hero to his valet de chambre and a prophet has no honor in his own country. So my own family not only keep me in humility on my own account but affect to despise my little work which after all considering it is the first of its kind is not so very despicable. It has procured me the acquaintance of the Romillys and I think their esteem, also that of Rogers, the Marcets, Tennant, Wishaw, the esteem tho unknown of the Hollands the Landsdowns [sic] etc, can it be so very very despicable? Besides to use even a bookseller’s argument in less than a month 400 copies were sold – 300 in London and 100 in Edinburgh, and my publisher offers terms for a second edition!

An extract from her journal of 1813 shows just how deep into London society this intelligent young woman from Edinburgh had travelled:

I spent the day with Mrs James Abercromby, whom I find more kind & amiable than ever. She was good enough to say that her party was on purpose for me. It consisted at dinner of Lord Landsdown, Ld Mulgrave [Melgrue?], Wishaw, Sharp, Hallam, Dupont, Horner & ourselves in Mr & Mrs A[bercromby]: & me.

They talked about Walter Scott’s new long poem Rokeby, Samuel Rogers’s interminable poem Columbia, and the new configuration of the House of Commons after the Tory victory in the 1812 parliamentary election. Maria found that Robert Smith, widely nicknamed ‘Bobus’ Smith, well known as an eloquent speaker and just elected to Parliament,

in his first speech disappointed expectation, was abashed & faltered like a blushing youth. Horner augurs well of his speeches not on the side of eloquence but reason & sense & hopes for wit. A new member Courtenay seems to have the suffrage of all parties, he is apparently enlisted under Canning’s banners.

After dinner the party was joined by others including the senior lawyer and politician Sir Samuel Romilly and his wife, and the distinguished physician Alexander Marcet and his equally if not more distinguished wife, the mathematician Jane Marcet. With these and the politician Francis Horner and the businessman Richard ‘Conversation’ Sharp, so called because he would talk a great deal, this was indeed a starry gathering. Maria left a clear record of her conversations, which were typical, no doubt, of the high and colourful standard of political and literary talk that would go on in intellectual society. She held her own because she could, and she knew what she was talking about:

Horner, Sharp, & I got upon critical topics – Thompson [sic] – Milton – Gray – Dryden – Corneille – Racine – Sir Saml Romilly joined us. I seldom have passed such an hour!

The next morning conversation kicked off again: ‘I breakfasted tête à tête with James [Abercromby] more & more delighted with him.’ At the weekend Maria’s social round continued at the home of the author Mary Berry in North Audley Street:

[T]here were the Davys, J[ame]s Abercrombys, Mr Ward, Fred. Douglas, Mrs Tighe the sister of Psyche & two or three others some for ornament & some for use.

There she heard more about Rogers’s agonies as a poet:

I saw Rogers’ strange publication – for 12 years he has so touched & retouched Columbia that at length it is only a bundle of fragments of 12 cantos, the 11th being quite wanting, made up with woodcut vignettes. Now he has published it he is so ashamed of it that he is buying up all the copies in order to suppress it entirely. He came into the room at Miss B’s.

It was the literary fruits of Maria’s Indian adventure, her Journal of a Residence in India, that had so marked her as a magnet for hostesses. She was on her own now, unaccompanied by her husband, as Thomas was presumably at sea. Her first hostess, Mary Anne Abercromby, was the wife of the Whig MP for Calne, James Abercromby, who would one day become Speaker of the House of Commons: ‘She was good enough to say that her party was on purpose for me.’ This was a serious political salon, where Maria met Whig grandees, including Richard Sharp, the MP for the pocket borough of Castle Rising in Norfolk. She was particularly taken by ‘Conversation’ Sharp, a glamorous, witty bachelor who had made his fortune in the hatter’s trade; thence he had moved to a house in Park Lane and another in the country, with an easy-going parliamentary seat to occupy during the week. What struck Maria particularly about Sharp was the route he had taken to reach his eminent social position, and the energy he had put into getting there:

He was a manufacturing hatter who spent all his spare time at the Theatres, & was amazingly struck with Henderson the actor; not knowing how to get introduced to him he called upon him. Henderson pleased with his promising disposition gave him literary helps to cultivate himself. His circle of acquaintance enlarged and by his own meritorious exertions he is now a partner in Boddington’s house, passes his time most agreeably in the best circles in London and is respected and well received everywhere as a man of taste and letters.

Sharp was one of the leaders of fashion: his hats bobbed about at all great social gatherings, from a Royal Academy exhibition to a Sunday walk in Hyde Park. The money he made from making and selling hats, and from his business partnership with West Indies sugar merchant Samuel Boddington, ensured his prosperity, while his sunny, talkative personality drew him to the best drawing rooms. Sharp’s interest in theatre, politics, literature, trade and art caused him to spread his friendship widely, and as a result sightings of him and accounts of his character are plentiful. ‘Thoroughly amiable, good-tempered, well-informed, sensible’ was the verdict of his friend John William Ward, the foreign secretary in George Canning’s government in the 1820s. ‘He is a very extraordinary man’, wrote Francis Horner. ‘His great subject is criticism, upon which he always appears to me original and profound.’ Sharp had met everybody, and talked freely and fairly of those ‘great men of the last generation and he appears to have seen them well . . . [he] makes you live for a moment in their presence’. ‘Conversation’ Sharp was a junction through whom many people passed. Charles Dickens ran across him and, nearly twenty years after Sharp’s death, wound him into Bleak House (1853) in the person of the chancery lawyer Conversation Kenge:

He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice . . . it was mellow and full and gave great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand.

Such were the beginnings of Maria’s journey into literary and political society in London. Her example throws a strong light on the way art, politics, literature and expression met, and thus how the wheels of the art and publishing businesses would turn by talk and encouragement.

Maria Graham continued her practice of exploring ‘untrodden paths’, travelling in 1818 with her husband to Italy, where she gathered material for an illustrated book about life in the bandit-ridden mountains around Tivoli and for a biography of the painter Nicolas Poussin, both books also to be published by Longman and Constable. Four years later, in a steam-powered sailing ship captained by Thomas Graham, she crossed the Atlantic, rounded Cape Horn, and entered the waters off Valparaiso. There Thomas died of fever, stranding his widow in Chile. But refusing offers of a passage home, or the cool comfort of the English community in Chile, Maria Graham went travelling some more, experiencing the terrible Chilean earthquake of 1822, making long journeys by land and sea, and, in Brazil, becoming tutor to the princess Maria. Her controversial report on the earthquake was published by the Geological Society. Maria Graham was a doughty correspondent, determined, in her writings and through the many illustrative drawings she made for her book about Chile and Brazil, to bring the rich lives and landscapes of South America to the British fireside, by living that life even in the faint but persistent tubercular shadow of what would develop into her terminal illness. Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822; and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 was published in 1824 by Longman, this time in partnership with John Murray. ‘Yes I have been ill,’ she wrote to John Murray on a brief home visit in 1821,

but I am sick of saying so for every half hour changes ‘I have been’ for ‘I am’. This day I am particularly unwell with a cough, perhaps tomorrow I shall feel as if I were fifteen, well and merry. I shall be much the better for something to be busy about.

On her final return to England in 1826 Maria Graham wrote anonymous articles for Quarterly Review and became one of John Murray’s readers. Sending him ideas for publications and suggesting artists to be engaged as illustrators, she showed herself in her long and detailed correspondence to be a hawk-eyed reader and a perspicacious adviser.

Marrying Augustus Wall Callcott in 1827, Maria Callcott successfully reinvented herself as an influential opinion-former and a distinguished, gregarious and independent woman of letters. She was always frank and direct with Murray, writing a note marked ‘Private’ to disarm a misunderstanding:

Nothing would be further from my intention than to write anything unkind to you or yours – if it seems so forgive me and attribute it to the real illness that leaves me often without power to think.

One of Maria’s particular successes with Murray, when she had become Maria Callcott, was Little Arthur’s History of England, published in 1835 and written for children with a Preface addressed ‘For Mothers’: ‘I have endeavoured to write it nearly as I would tell it to an intelligent child.’ She uses the classic pedagogic method of starting a chapter by recalling what she had told in the previous chapter; then by telling the story of the chapter, sometimes even highlighting what she is about to say; and finally by saying what she will tell in the next chapter. In a small octavo format, and with large, clear type, Little Arthur went into many editions and became a healthy source of revenue for both author and publisher. More specialized was the book Maria Callcott published the following year with Murray, Essays towards the History of Painting. This she admitted was written as ‘the best means of alleviating the weariness of an increasing and incurable disorder’, her tuberculosis. The book reads as if it is just the beginning of an entire history of art, but gets bogged down in Egyptian and classical art to the extent that the Renaissance is touched on lightly, and the author becomes attracted most particularly to discussion of painting materials and methods. This suggests a close reading of sources, and her attentiveness to conversations with Humphry Davy.

To sell in the large quantities they did, the books published by Murray, Longman, Constable and others required the word of mouth and buzz that could be generated in the soirées and parties that Maria attended – both as ‘Graham’ and ‘Callcott’ – and that John Murray, Samuel Rogers, the Hollands, the Abercrombys, the Berrys, the Lansdownes and others might arrange. They also required the shelf and table space provided by such booksellers as John Hatchard in Piccadilly and George Lackington at the Temple of the Muses in Finsbury Square; and they needed the conviviality and cosiness of a club, the traffic of a high street, and the whiff of gossip and intrigue that coffee-houses or taverns provided.

In 1797 John Hatchard, a devout, industrious evangelical Christian with Tory leanings, set up his bookshop at 173 Piccadilly with £5 in his pocket. As his business grew, he moved first, in 1801, to number 190, buying for 1,000 guineas a twenty-four-year lease on the house, indicating that his profits were great and his confidence sufficient to contemplate such a move. Then, in 1823, he moved the shop to the present premises of the firm, number 187. Hatchard rapidly became a fixture in the life of Piccadilly, attracting to his shop royalty and churchmen, philosophers and artists, politicians, pamphleteers and the passing crowd; members of the Clapham sect of evangelical Christians, including John Venn, Hannah More, William Wilberforce and Richard Heber, met there. His stock of books reflected the rich productions of the early nineteenth-century publishing trade: his fifty-page catalogue of 1814 listed 7,000 titles, including, of course, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – ‘new and neat’, as it was described. Hatchard’s was also a centre for the distribution of tracts and pamphlets, many of which he published himself. The causes he supported included the Society for the Bettering of the Condition of the Poor, the Anti-Jacobins, the anti-slavery movement, and, from its foundation in 1804, the Royal Horticultural Society. John Hatchard’s conservative nature led him to dress in a black frock coat like a bishop, and like Joseph Baxendale in the allied trade of inland transport, he encouraged his staff, from errand-boys to floor-walkers, to hard work, diligence and self-betterment. In Longman’s Guide to London the booksellers of the metropolis are pigeon-holed one by one:

Nicholl in Pall Mall is bookseller to the King, Hatchard to the Queen, Murray to the Admiralty, Black & Co to the East India Company, and Egerton to the War Office.

William Beloe, a writer, translator and one-time curator in the British Museum, put it more drily. He lists London booksellers thus: the Dry Bookseller, the Finical Bookseller, the Opulent Bookseller, the Honest Bookseller, the Queer Bookseller, the Cunning Bookseller, and the Godly Bookseller, whom he names as Hatchard, ‘a worthy and conscientious man’.

George Lackington was a bookseller of a very different temper. Trained by his cousin James Lackington, the proprietor of the Temple of the Muses, then Europe’s largest bookshop, he maintained the Lackington policy of displaying books in quantity and selling them cheap. The motto ‘Cheapest Bookseller in the World’ was written up over the entrance to the busy shop, which in the 1810s employed over 100 people. Lackington published catalogues listing books in their tens of thousands, and bought not only from publishers, but also entire libraries, thus dominating the secondhand book market. James Lackington was a staunch Methodist, writing two books of memoirs proclaiming the Methodist way of life and the joy of bookselling. The first, Memoirs of the Forty-Five First Years of the Life of James Lackington (1791), was dedicated to ‘1. The Public; 2. To Respectable Booksellers; 3. To Sordid Booksellers’. With respect to the first group, his customers, he hoped for ‘a progressive increase in the number and extent of your commands’; to the second, he acknowledged their ‘candour and liberality [that] he has in numerous instances experienced’; and to the third, ‘those sordid and malevolent booksellers, whether they resplendent dwell in stately mansions, or in wretched huts of dark and grovelling obscurity’, he promised, ‘I’ll give every one a smart lash in my way.’ Bookselling in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a cut-throat, dangerous and vengeful business. The Lackingtons made a fortune out of it, however, and they themselves provided a major part of publishers’ income and a vibrant economic life for Finsbury. Then, as now, big profits in publishing were made by printing trash, and it was with the continuation of profit in mind, and the promotion of his business, that Lackington brought out his volumes of memoirs. ‘Many gentlemen, who are my customers’, he wrote,

have informed me, that when they asked for [my memoirs] at several shops, they received as an answer, that they already had too much wastepaper, and would not increase it by keeping Lackington’s Memoirs: and some kindly added, ‘You need not be in haste to purchase, as in the course of the Christmas holidays, Mr Birch in Cornhill will wrap up all his mince-pies with them, and distribute them through the town for the public good.’

The connections between author, publisher, bookseller and reader form perhaps one of the simplest, even most primitive, economic chains of events that carry a product to its user. There are no primary essential external requirements here, such as land and fertilizer, factory and engine, coal and heat, disease and treatment, whose failure (or in the case of disease, presence) would damage the process of bringing the product to the consumer. It is a straightforward commercial transaction in which the author provides the words, the publisher makes the book or journal and sells it on to the bookseller, and the reader hands over the money to buy the product. Of course, a publisher requires a printing machine, but not any one machine in particular. A wet summer might damage crops, increase the price of a loaf and lead to social unrest, but it will not have a direct effect on book prices. An author might suffer from consumption, as did Maria Callcott, but his or her absence from the scene would make no noticeable difference to the overall picture; there will always be another author, and books still sell posthumously. Authors, publishers and booksellers do not need casts of thousands. Much the same can be said about the link between artist, dealer and patron, in which there is rarely any true rationale in the pricing structure, except comparison. The process is an organism of minimal complexity, and the transaction may be essentially bluff or barter.

When a further element is introduced – for example, the publisher adds the personality and economic requirements of an artist to that of an author – things become more complicated and interesting. John Murray found himself tied in knots when he allowed one of his authors, the architect and amateur topographical draughtsman James Hakewill, to get too far ahead of himself in commissioning illustrations for his book A Picturesque Tour of Italy when it was in production in 1818. Murray was being tempted to enter the world of print publishing in instalments, a process that had ruined many competent engravers and publishers, and one which was the initial format of Hakewill’s venture. Murray had undertaken to publish engravings after Turner’s improvements to a series of painstaking pencil drawings Hakewill had made on a tour of Italy in 1816 and 1817, and in June 1818 he paid Turner 200 guineas for ten completed watercolours. These gave the kiss of life, and a little harmless wit, to Hakewill’s works, but cost twice the amount that Turner was being paid by George and William Cooke for watercolours of the south and west of England for engraving as the Southern Coast series. Hakewill, however, a highly organized, determined and bossy individual, had not only engaged his friend Turner, but played the entrepreneur himself by inviting other fashionable topographers, including John Varley, Frederick Nash and Copley Fielding, to fan a sense of place and atmosphere into his drawings. Hakewill had also engaged distinguished engravers, including George Cooke, John Pye and John Landseer, to turn them into reproducible images at some considerable cost.

With all this expensive talent piling up on the costs side, Murray realized that it was he who would have to foot the bill in the end, and he hit the roof. ‘I will not be answerable in any way for any drawings, engravings or other expense that you may choose to incur for the Views in Italy,’ he told Hakewill, ‘without my positive consent being first given in writing.’ Acting swiftly to contain matters and to focus on the work of the one artist whom he knew would attract paying customers, he added:

It is necessary for me to say explicitly it was never my intention to extend this work beyond twelve numbers unless after making a reasonable trial of a portion of the said twelve numbers I found the sale of the work to prove sufficiently advantageous . . . it is not my intention to give out any other drawings to the engraver except those of Mr Turner. If you have of your own accord without my concurrence given orders for any other drawings or engravings it is at your own expense and risque and it is for this reason I advise you if you have done so, to order them to be immediately stopped.

Troubles with engravers came in their battalions for Murray in 1818, for in that same year he had a quarrel with Charles Heath over engravings for an edition of Byron’s works.

The cause of my suffering myself to be persuaded by you to engage in a new set of plates for Ld Byron’s works which I neither wanted nor contemplated – was your dwelling on the cheapness, dispatch, ability & absence of all trouble even as to payment with which they would be executed. The Drawings were to be done for 10£ or Guineas and the engravings in no instance to exceed £20 or Guineas. I was not to be asked for a shilling until the whole should be completed and be put into my hands for publication . . . You may have said differently – but if so it is the last transaction I ever will enter into with you. The whole of these engravings were to have been executed at least Eight months ago, & you now send me home only six that are finished & asked me to give you £300 . . . upon what principle of common justice do you expect your demand to be attended to the moment it is made when you set the example of such shameless deviation from all punctuality yourself – to say nothing of the gross indelicacy of making so instantaneous demand at a period of the year when my man of business is doing his books [i.e. accounts].

While illustrations made books and journals more attractive to buyers, the expense and complexity of publication led to a high increase in ‘risque’ to the publisher. This in turn led to a financial fragility in firms of publishers and engravers, and a lucrative flow of bankrupt property: Charles Heath, like Hurst and Robinson, went bust in 1825 when banks failed; and Francis Moon bought up Hurst and Robinson’s stock of engravings.

The wheeler-dealing publisher Charles Tilt, who muddied the waters for artists and publishers, was considered by many to be among the lower life in print publishing. Working for the publishers Thomas Longman and for John Hatchard at his bookshop in Piccadilly, Tilt learned the book trade from back to front, and discovered new ways to make money within it. Among his innovations, introduced to the market from his shop at 86 Fleet Street, was a miniature-format almanac that could be carried under a hat, and tiny volumes of Tilt’s Miniature Classics, which came in luxury rosewood gift boxes lined with satin, behind glazed doors with a little brass lock. Hundreds were given as Christmas presents; most would be opened once and left unread, their minuscule print requiring a magnifying glass, sharp eyes, good light and determination. Eliding innovation with invention, Tilt made a fortune. His shop on the corner of St Bride’s Passage and Fleet Street, near George Adams’s scientific-instrument shop, had extra window space and had to have rails fitted at peak times in the booksellers’ calendar to contain the crowds that pressed to look inside. One cause célèbre that Tilt took advantage of, and which brought crowds to his windows, was the case of the ‘Burkite’ murderers Williams and Bishop, who had killed a boy in 1831 to sell his body for dissection. After their conviction and hanging at the Old Bailey in front of a huge crowd – ‘a vast lake of life’, as The Times expressed it – Tilt published and sold a print of the condemned men.

Tilt operated across the spectrum of publishing, from lurid imagery such as the Burkite murderers, to complex productions such as the booklet Sketches of the Works for the Tunnel under the Thames from Rotherhithe to Wapping (1829). This celebrated the completion of Marc Brunel’s extraordinary engineering achievement with statistics, descriptions, a series of exquisite engravings by Robert Cruikshank and Thomas Blood, fold-outs and hinged flaps clearly showing how breathtaking and technically difficult the tunnelling was. In terms of engineering prowess it was on a par with the Crystal Palace of twenty years later, but with the additional challenge of being underground, underwater, and with the ever-pressing danger of influx from above. Tilt’s publication, one of many celebrating Brunel’s tunnel, was produced to catch the public mood of amazement that such heavy engineering evoked. Another of Tilt’s consummate productions was George Field’s Chromatography, published in 1835 (see page 190), a high-quality folio volume which had a limited market, but was paid for by subscription from interested parties, and dedicated to Sir Martin Archer Shee, president of the RA, and to the ‘Artists of Britain’.

Creating complex publications and lurid imagery was only one side of Tilt’s business. With authors and artists he made a practice of sailing close to the wind and would land himself in court in front of artists, authors and publishers incensed at his methods. John Martin, Augustus Callcott and a benchful of artists came to the Mansion House in October 1833 to support Turner in his formal complaint to the Lord Mayor of London against Tilt’s practice of employing artists to re-engrave images which were in copyright. In this case, three of Turner’s illustrations for Walter Scott’s Provincial Antiquities of Scotland, originally published about ten years earlier, had been re-engraved in a smaller format and passed off as Turner’s own work after the original copper plates for the Scott publication had been sold at auction and bought by Tilt. A similar infringement had been suffered by Callcott.

‘They were sold without my consent’, Turner told the court, but Tilt insisted that he had bought copyright in the images along with the plates themselves and had invited Turner to retouch, or correct, the image to be printed.

‘I don’t see why an artist should retouch without remuneration,’ Turner added. ‘But how could I retouch when the originals are in the possession of Sir Walter Scott’s executors?’ Tilt claimed that he had offered the artists involved the opportunity to retouch the plates, but Turner had refused. ‘I wished for a division of labour and profits, but Mr Turner wished to monopolize, and would not give a share to his brother artists. He knows he has not a leg to stand on’, taunted Tilt, ‘or he would not resort to this mode of complaint. I am proprietor of the plates, and I dare him to the test of our claims in a court of law or equity.’

Thus challenged, Turner responded: ‘I trust . . . that the public will be put in possession of the way in which these things are done, that works by other persons are foisted upon them as the works of distinguished men.’

‘Oh, Mr Turner,’ retorted Tilt, getting the last word, ‘you ought to let your brother artists have a little slice.’

The case revolved around the quality of the revised engraving, and the loss of income and reputational damage that Turner and other artists might suffer. It also had the added ingredient of legal uncertainty, which Tilt exploited, as many of Scott’s copyrights had been sold after the author’s bankruptcy in 1826. The plates to Provincial Antiquities were bought by William Cooke, who auctioned them. So it was not wholly clear what Tilt had acquired at auction and what he had not, and the only place to test it was in court. Nevertheless it was too much for the Lord Mayor, who gently suggested that Turner should take out an injunction in the Court of Chancery. That would have got him nowhere slowly, a process that Dickens would later painfully illuminate in Bleak House, and Turner wisely withdrew. Some weeks later, a notice appeared in the periodical Atlas advertising Tilt’s edition of Illustrations . . . to the Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott. The note drew particular attention to the inclusion of

a rather rabid but effective representation of sea, rocks and castle at Tantallon, one of the restored plates from TURNER’S drawings for ‘the Provincial Antiquities of Scotland,’ which TURNER begs the world will not believe to be his.

Tilt also abused the gentle and vulnerable Mary Lamb, the co-author, with her brother Charles, of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. She applied for a restraint on him for invading her copyright in this very popular book when publishing a new edition two years after Charles’s death. Tilt should certainly have known that Mary was co-author, but he omitted her name from the title page of early editions. The Times reported the matter partially and brutally, stating that, Miss Lamb having entirely failed to make her case, it was ‘unnecessary to give any detail of facts, which contained no interesting feature’. The court refused the injunction, on the grounds that, as Mr Lamb had been held out to be the author of the tales with his sister’s assent for a period of twenty-three years, the public had a right to assume there was no copyright existing in Miss Lamb. This was a complete rip-off, compounded the next day by Tilt’s solicitor, Thomas Hepworth, who pointed out in a letter to The Times that the copyright had not in fact expired, but that Tilt had not been told of Mary Lamb’s copyright claim until after printing had commenced. Tilt was aggrieved that he remained liable for further action in the courts and had not been granted costs.

Soon after his death in 1861, Tilt was described by an amateur genealogist researching the Tilt family as ‘Charles Tilt – the millionaire’. While that may have been an exaggeration, Tilt nevertheless made a fortune. In his portrait, representing the letter ‘T’ on the back cover of George Cruikshank’s Comic Alphabet (1836), Tilt stands self-possessed behind the counter of his shop, with a neat quiff in his well-cut hair, high collar, and cleft chin. He resembles no one so much as a scientist at a laboratory bench, or a teacher addressing his class. Around him are piles of books and printed sheets, one reading ‘National Gallery’, another ‘My Sketchbook’ by George Cruikshank in nine parts, yet another ‘The Epping Hunt’ by Thomas Hood. Charles Tilt, hero, victim and villain, is the epitome of the successful publisher, happy and able both to go with the flow and to seize his moment, and in the end to come out on top, ahead of fashion, technology and the market.