John Murray, Albemarle Street Family Library 1831 History of England

he great publishing house of J. Murray was founded in London in 1768 by Edinburgh-built-in John McMurray (1737-1793), a sometime Royal Marines officeholder. Having acquired Willliam Sandby's London bookselling business organisation at 32 Armada Street in 1768, McMurray dropped the "wild highland Mac" from his name, probably because of the and then prevailing prejudice against the ever more numerous and influential Scots in the book trade (Smiles, p. thirteen). He presently built up a list of authors, including future Prime Government minister Benjamin Disraeli'due south father, Isaac D'Israeli (Curiosities of Literature [1791-1823]), with whose whole family both Murray Senior's family unit and that of his son and successor John Murray II maintained a long and close friendship, and from whom both Murrays repeatedly sought and received advice (Paston, pp.17-22), and the Swiss physician Johann Kaspar Lavater. The translation of the latter's Essays in Physiognomy (1788-99), which included illustrations by Thomas Holloway and William Blake, was John Murray I's financially most successful publication, making him a profit of around £1,000.

Murray published many scientific and medical studies, every bit well as books in the developing fields we would at present define as folklore and economics, such equally Cesare Beccaria'south Soapbox on Public Oeconomy and Commerce (1769) and Glasgow professor John Millar's groundbreaking Observations on the Stardom of Ranks in Lodge (1771). In literature, he reprinted Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Expressionless of 1760 (1768 and 1774) and Walpole's Castle of Otranto of 1765 (1769); and published an abridged version of Hugh Blair'south Essays on Rhetoric (1784), also as translations of Marmontel'south Contes moraux (1769) and of various tales by Voltaire (1774, 1776). In addition, he partnered with Strahan and Millar's successor, Thomas Cadell, in putting out editions of novels by Smollett, of Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey (both 1774), and a ten-book edition of Sterne'south Consummate Works (1780). He likewise took shares in the sixth, corrected edition of Johnson's Lexicon (1778), a new 9-book edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (1784) and Johnson's edition of The Works of the English Poets in 58 volumes (1779-81). In another field entirely, he was one of the founding sponsors of the London evening newspaper, The Star, in 1788.

John Murray Two (1778-1843)

John Murray. Albumen menu-de-visite by Maull & Co. mid-1870s. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Click on paradigm to enlarge it.

John Murray Senior was succeeded by his Edinburgh University educated son, John Murray II, who -- in the words of some other Scot, the great nineteenth-century liberal and progressive journalist Samuel Smiles, writing in 1873 -- made the house of Murray "a business destined to carry the proper noun of John Murray wherever the English language was spoken, and wherever English books were read, equally the well-nigh venturesome and yet the virtually successful publisher who has always, in London at all events, encouraged the struggles of authorship and gratified the tastes of half a globe of readers" (Curwen, p. 165). Later on Jane Austen'due south father failed to have her work accustomed by Millar's successor Thomas Cadell (in 1796 he declined Pride and Prejudice, so entitled Beginning Impressions) and after the publisher Benjamin Crosby, having purchased the copyright of Northanger Abbey (so entitled Susan) in 1803 for £10, did nada to publish the novel (Jane's brother bought the copyright back for her in 1816), Jane Austen finally succeeded in having Sense and Sensibility (completed in 1798 nether the championship "Elinor and Marianne") published in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813, and Mansfield Park in 1814 by Thomas Egerton. In 1815, however, Austen moved her piece of work to Murray, who put out Emma in 1815 and a 2d edition of Mansfield Park in 1816.

Murray II was a close friend of many leading writers of the day, notably Walter Scott and Byron. He helped with the sale of Lawman'south editions of Scott, and Scott in turn was a regular contributor of articles and reviews to Murray'south Quarterly Review, of which the starting time editor was John Gibson Lockhart, Scott's son-in-constabulary and biographer, and a writer himself. In the example of Byron, Murray was the chief publisher of the phenomenally successful poet. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron's second book, which was put out by Murray on March 10, 1812, sold out in five days, while 10,000 copies of The Corsair were sold on the twenty-four hour period of its publication in 1814 – a remarkable effigy past the standards of the day, when, because of the loftier price of paper, the similarly high cost of printing and production, and the limitation and doubt of the market, "the average edition of a serious book was around 750 copies," in the words of Richard Altick, and "only in very infrequent circumstances, such as Scott's novels, did editions in the early nineteenth century run to vi,000 copies" (pp. 263-64). According to Philip Gaskell, "every bit late as 1738-85, more than than 90 pr cent of the 514 books printed at Strahan's large London printing-house were in editions of less than 2,000 copies" (p. 161). Many other works by Byron followed, including the "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte" in 1814. A 12-volume edition of the Consummate Works appeared in 1814-24, and in 1826, Murray commissioned the popular poet Thomas Moore, a friend of his and of Byron'south, to write Byron's biography. The first volume of Messages & Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life, published on Jan ane, 1830, was extremely well received, as was the second, which appeared xi months later. Murray also commissioned Moore to prepare a new edition of Byron'southward Complete Works, and this was published in 1837.

It was Murray who, having sought, afterward the great poet'southward expiry, to have Thorwaldsen'southward handsome statue of him placed in Westminster Abbey and been turned down past the Dean, arranged for it to be moved from the warehouse where it had been stored and placed in the great library of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Thank you largely to Scott, Murray got to know, befriended, and published – anonymously or under the pseudonym "Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman" -- the American writer Washington Irving (Bracebridge Hall, 1822, and Tales of a Traveller, 1824) and the poet George Crabbe (much admired in his own solar day past Austen, Scott, and Byron and in ours past T.S. Eliot). In improver, he maintained his father's close relationship with the Disraeli family and published several works by Isaac, the elderberry D'Israeli -- the drove of curt stories entitled Vaurien, 1797, and the second edition of Romances, 1801 (both in conjunction with T. Cadell); Flim-Flams, or The Life and Errors of my Uncle and the Amours of my Aunt, 1805; Despotism, or The Autumn of the Jesuits: A Political Romance, 1811 – as well as the immature Benjamin's novel Contarini Fleming. A Psychological Motorcar-Biography (iv vols., 1832), which "excited considerable sensation and was very popular at the time of its publication," and the almost 300-page long pamphlet England and France, or A Cure for the Ministerial Gallomania, which the immature Disraeli edited and to which he himself contributed substantially (Smiles, pp. 228-31). In 1813 Murray published a translation of Madame de Staël's De l'Allemagne and in 1814 he proposed to Coleridge, who had translated Schiller's Piccolomini, the second part of the Wallenstein trilogy in 1800, that he undertake a translation of Goethe's Faust. Unfortunately, this proposal did not work out. Murray'southward reputation every bit a publisher was such, nonetheless, that Coleridge (in 1814-15), Wordsworth (in 1826), and Carlyle (in 1831) all sought him out as a publisher of their works, though, for various reasons, with the exception of Coleridge's long gothic narrative poem Christabel (1816), none of their proposals was successful (Smiles, I, 297-302, Two, 245-46, 321-27, 349-55).

The Murray drawing room at 50 Albemarle Street in Mayfair was "for some time the heart of literary friendship and intercommunication at the Westward End." The young George Ticknor from Boston described it in June 1815 every bit "a sort of literary lounge where authors resort to read newspapers and talk literary gossip." According to John Murray III, "it was in Murray's drawing-room that Walter Scott and Byron first met" and and so "met there nigh every 24-hour interval." Other habituees included Southey, Mackintosh (of The Human being of Feeling), the poets Crabbe and Coleridge, Washington Irving, and Madam de Stael (during her brilliant reception in England in 1813 [Ticknor, I, 58]). In 1809, with Scott'southward help, John Murray Ii launched the Quarterly Review as a Tory-inclined competitor to the already historic and highly successful Whig-inclined Edinburgh Review, which was put out by swain-Scot Archibald Constable (for many years a close friend and collaborator of Murray) in Edinburgh, and for which Murray himself had for a time been the London amanuensis. Like its Edinburgh rival, The Quarterly Review did much to popularize literature in nineteenth-century Britain. It ceased publication only in 1967.

Unlike the Minerva Printing or Thomas Norton Longman and partners, or fifty-fifty T. Cadell, with whom he often collaborated, or, for that matter, Edinburgh publishers Archibald Lawman or William Blackwood, Murray seems to have been disinclined to publish contemporary novels, Jane Austen and Washington Irving beingness exceptions to what was probably a business concern as well every bit a cultural decision, since comparatively few novels were published in Scotland. A listing of the place of publication of new novels in Peter Garside's "The English Novel in the Romantic Era" (p. 76) shows that the Scottish publishers did yet increase their role in the publication of novels in the early on decades of the nineteenth century: the numbers of novels published in Scotland rose from four, as compared with 714 in London and ix in Ireland, in the 1800s, to 29, as compared with 611 in London and 4 in Republic of ireland in the 1810s, and to 100, as compared with 703 in London and 14 in Ireland in the 1820s. Murray did respond positively at start, in 1808 – hence at an early point in his career — to a proposal, strongly supported past Scott, that he collaborate with Ballantyne of Edinburgh on a uniform edition of the "British Novelists," starting with Defoe and ending with the novelists of the finish of the eighteenth century. This collection would accept included works by 36 British and 18 strange authors in English translation and would take had to be published in some 200 volumes. Nevertheless, despite pressure level from the Ballantynes, Murray was apparently daunted past the financial gamble involved, and backed out of the project (Smiles, p. 41). A series, edited by Scott'south son-in-police John Gibson Lockhart and entitled "Murray's Family unit Library" was launched in 1829 but it lasted only until 1834 when, every bit it was running a deficit, it was sold to another publisher. Its 48 volumes included no works of fiction, simply works of history and biography, such as Lockhart's own Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Southey's Life of Nelson, Washington Irving's Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Sir David Brewster'due south Life of Sir Isaac Newton, Sir John Barrow'south Life of Peter the Great, Henry Hart Milman's History of the Jews, too equally a few reports of travel and exploration, such every bit John and Richard Lander'due south Adventures in the Niger, and an occasion work of natural history, such equally The Natural History of Insects, edited by the Scottish doctor Robert Ferguson. Information technology was notwithstanding a pioneering project; at 5/- per volume, it was less expensive than most similar publications at the time and in reaching out to a broader readership it anticipated the policies of other companies founded by Scots, such as Edinburgh-based Nelson and Glasgow-based Blackie, Collins, and Gowans and Grey.

In the mid-1820s, Murray began planning a daily paper, for which young Benjamin Disraeli provided the proper noun – The Representative -- and in the promotion and financing of which Disraeli was, at Murray's request, though even so barely twenty years erstwhile, extraordinarily active. Disraeli invested his own funds in it, travelled to Scotland to persuade Walter Scott and his son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart that the latter should accept on the editorship of information technology, and prepare up foreign correspondents for it all over Europe and the Eye Due east. The drastic failure of the newspaper barely six months after its launching on January 25, 1826 and Murray'south loss thereby of about £27,000, caused a serious rift, albeit subsequently mended, between the 2 closely related Murray and Disraeli families. Murray's own view was that he had "loved, not wisely, just as well well" the swain of whom he had simply shortly before, on September 25, 1825 written to Lockhart, by style of introduction, that he had "never met a young man of greater promise." "He is a skillful scholar, hard educatee, a deep thinker, of groovy energy, equal perseverance, and indefatigable application. His cognition of human nature, and the practical trend of all his ideas, have often surprised me in a young man who has hardly passed his twentieth year" (cited in Monypenny, I, 67; see Murray-Disraeli bibliography).

John Murray Three (1808–1892)

John Murray III by Charles Wellington Furse. c. 1891. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Click on paradigm to enlarge it.

John Murray Iii (1808–1892) connected the business and published Charles Eastlake's showtime English translation of Goethe's Theory of Colours (1840), David Livingstone'southward Missionary Travels (1857), and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Murray 3 likewise contracted to publish Herman Melville's first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) in England. Both were presented — in line with the Murrays' apparently considered continuing back from the publication of novels — as nonfiction travel narratives. Both were included in a new series, Murray's "Colonial and Home Library," launched by John Murray 3 in 1843 in response to a new copyright law intended to protect British publishers in both the homeland and the colonies from cheap imports of pirated English language-language works produced in the The states, France, and Belgium. Other books in the series, which ran until 1849 included Darwin'due south journals from his travels on the Beagle, George Borrow'south The Bible in Spain, and Thomas Campbell'southward Specimens of British Poets. The prospectus of the new series articulates aims that had already inspired the brusque-lived "Family unit Library" of 1829-34 and, as noted, were to inspire other publishing enterprises founded by Scots. It deserves to be quoted at some length:

The principal object of this undertaking is to furnish the inhabitants of the Colonies of U.k. with the highest Literature of the day, consisting partly of original Works, partly of new editions of popular Publications, at the lowest possible toll. It is called for in consequence of the Acts which take recently passed the British Parliament for the protection of the rights of British authors and publishers, by the rigid and entire exclusion of foreign pirated editions. These Acts, if properly enforced, will, for the first time, direct into the right channel the demand of the Colonies for English language Literature: a demand of which our authors and publishers accept hitherto been deprived by the introduction of piracies from the United States, France, and Belgium. In society, therefore, that the highly intelligent and educated population of our Colonies may not endure from the withdrawal of their accustomed supplies of books, and with a view to obviate the complaint, that a check might in outcome be raised to their intellectual advancement, Mr. Murray has adamant to publish a series of attractive and useful works, by approved authors, at a charge per unit which shall place them within reach of the means not only of the Colonists, merely as well of a large portion of the less wealthy classes at home, who will thus benefit by the widening of the market for our literature.

John Three'due south successor, John Murray Four (1851–1928), publisher to Queen Victoria, was responsible for the posthumous 3-volume publication in 1907 of The Letters of Queen Victoria. He too put out Murray'due south Mag from 1887 until 1891 and in 1917 he acquired the house of Smith, Elderberry & Co. The house of Murray continued to be active under the direction of the Murray family until it was taken over by the Headline publishing group in 2002 and two years later past the French publisher Hachette.

Bibliography

Altick, Richard D. The English Mutual Reader. second ed. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998.

Curwen, Henry. A History of Booksellers: The Former and the New (1873). Bristol: Thoemmes Press and Tokyo: Kinokuniya Company, 1996.

The English language Novel 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction in the British Isles. Ed. Peter Garside. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

Monypenny, William Flavelle, and George Earl Buckle. The Life of Benjamin Disraeli. London: J. Murray, 1910.

Paston, George. At John Murray's. Records of a Literary Circumvolve 1843-1892. London: John Murray, 1932.

Smiles, Samuel. A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of John Murray. Condensed and edited by Thomas MacKay. London: J. Murray, 1911.

Smiles, Samuel. A Publisher and His Friends: Memoirs and Correspondence of the late John Murray. London: John Murray; New York: Scribner's Sons, 1891.

Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909.

Spreading the Word: Scottish Publishers and English language Literature 1750-1900

• Scotland and the Mod World: Literacy and Libraries
• Scottish Publishers, London Booksellers, and Copyright Law
• Andrew Millar (London) 1728
• William Strahan (London) 1738
• Robert and Andrew Foulis, The Foulis Printing (Glasgow) 1741
• John Murray (London) 1768
• Bell & Bradfute (Edinburgh) 1778
• Archibald Constable (Edinburgh) 1798
• Thomas Nelson and Sons (Edinburgh) 1798
• John Ballantyne (Edinburgh) 1808
• William Blackwood (Edinburgh) 1810
• Smith, Elder & Co. (London) 1816
• William Collins (Glasgow) 1819
• Blackie and Son (Glasgow) 1831
• Westward.& R. Chambers (Edinburgh) 1832
• Macmillan (Cambridge and London) 1843
• Lesser Publishers
• Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century British Copyright Police: A Bibliography

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Last modified 31 Oct 2018

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Source: https://victorianweb.org/history/scotland/6.html

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