Chapter III: Part 3

For the _Mysteries of Udolpho_ Mrs. Radcliffe received five hundred guineas, the largest sum that had at that time been given for a novel, and Peter Pindar (Dr. Wolcot) made a still better bargain for his poems. They had already acquired a prodigious popularity, and in selling the copyright a question arose, as to whether they should be purchased for a lump sum or an annuity. While the treaty was pending Wolcot was seized with a violent and rather ostentatious attack of asthma, which sadly interrupted him in discussing the arrangements, and he was eagerly offered an annuity of £250. The arrangement was made by Walker, a partner with Robinson in this transaction. Walker soon called to inquire after his friend’s illness, “Thank you, much better,” said Wolcot, “I have taken measure of my asthma, the fellow is troublesome, but I know his strength and am his master.” Walker’s face grew longer, and when he rejoined his wife in the next room, the doctor heard a shrill, feminine expostulation, “There, you’ve done it, I told you he wouldn’t die!” He outlived all the parties concerned, and was in his own case, perhaps, scarcely justified in originating the famous saying, “that publishers quaff champagne out of the skulls of authors.”

This over-eager parsimony was not in any way due to Robinson; his generosity to his authors was well known, and his house became a general rendezvous for the literary men of the day, who were heartily welcome whenever they chose to turn up, provided always that they did not come late for dinner. After Robinson’s death in 1801, his son and brother carried on the business, but met with reverses, principally through loss of stock at a fire; but the wonderful prices that were realized at the auction, consequent on their declared bankruptcy, fairly set them afloat again. One bookseller, alone, is said to have invested £40,000 at the sale, and even the copyright of Vyse’s _Shilling Spelling Book_ was sold for £2,500, with an annuity of fifty guineas a year to the old schoolmaster Vyse.

James Lackington, in his _Memoirs and Confessions_ has left plenty of material, had we space, for an amusing and instructive biography. He was born at Wellington in 1746, and his father, a drunken cobbler, would not even pay the requisite twopence a week for his son’s education. Loafing about the streets all day as a child, he thought he might turn his wanderings to account by crying pies, and as a pie-boy he acquired such a pre-eminence that he was soon engaged to vend almanacs. At fourteen he left this vagrant life to be apprenticed to a shoemaker, and his master’s family becoming strong adherents to the new sect of Methodists, he too was converted, and would trudge, he says, through frost and snow at midnight to hear “an inspired husbandman, shoemaker, blacksmith, or a woolcomber” preach to ten or a dozen people, when he might have quietly stopped at home to listen to “the sensible and learned ministers at Taunton.”

However, what he heard “made me think they knew many matters of which I was totally ignorant,” and he set to work arduously at night to learn his letters, and when he was able to read, he bought Hobbe’s _Homer_ at a bookstall, and found that his letters did but little in assisting his comprehension; however, in his zeal for knowledge he allowed himself “but three hours’ sleep in the twenty-four.” The art of writing was acquired in a similar manner, and then he started on a working tour, making shoes on the road for sustenance, but suffering many hardships and miseries. To make matters worse, at Bristol he married a young girl of his own class, whose ill-health, though he was passionately fond of her, added no little to his troubles. Accordingly he went to London, that for her sake he might earn higher wages, and not altogether unhopeful of the fortunes he had heard were to be gained there by dogged hard work and endurance. They arrived with the typical half-crown in their pockets, and then Lackington, anxious to obtain the small legacy of £10 he had left at home, went for it personally; “it being such a prodigious sum that the greatest caution was used on both sides, so that it cost me about half the money in going down for it, and in returning to town again.” After working some time as a journeyman bookseller he opened a little cobbler’s shop; and, thinking he knew as much about books as the keeper of an old bookstall in the neighbourhood, wishing also to have opportunity for study, he invested a guinea in a bagful of old books. To increase his stock he borrowed £5 from a fund “Mr. Wesley’s people kept to lend out, for three months, without interest, to such of their society whose characters were good, and who wanted a temporary relief.... In our new situation we lived in a very frugal manner, often dining on potatoes and quenching our thirst with water; being absolutely determined, if possible, to make some provision for such dismal times as sickness, shortness of work, &c., which we had frequently been involved in before, and could scarcely help expecting not to be our fate again.” He soon found customers, and “as ‘soon laid out the money’ in other old trash which was daily brought for sale.”

1746-1816.]

In a short time he had realized £25, and was able to take a book-shop in Chiswell Street; and here he almost immediately lost his wife, which for a time involved him in the deepest distress, but in the following year he married again, and then resolved to quit his Wesleyan friends, a sect he thought incompatible with the dignity of a bookseller; indeed “Mr. Wesley often told his society in Broadment, Bristol, in my hearing, that he could never keep a bookseller six months in his flock.” From this time success uniformly attended his undertakings, and was due, he says, primarily to his invariable principle of selling at very low figures and only for ready-money. When he began to attend the trade sales he created consternation among his brethren. “I was very much surprised to learn that it was common for such as purchased remainders to destroy or burn one-half or three-fourths of such books, and to charge the full publication price, or nearly that, for such as they kept on hand.” With this rule he complied for a short time; but afterwards resolved to keep the whole stock. The trade endeavoured to hinder his appearance at the sale-rooms, but in time they were forced to yield, and he continued to sell off remainders at half or a quarter the published price.[8] “By selling them in this cheap manner, I have disposed of many hundred thousand volumes, many thousand of which have been intrinsically worth their original prices.” Such a method attracted a crowd of customers, and he soon began to buy manuscripts from authors. As to how his circumstances were improving we read, “I discovered that lodgings in the country were very healthy. The year after, my country lodging was transformed into a country house, and in another year the inconveniences attending a stage coach were remedied by a chariot,” on the doors of which “I have put a motto to remind me to what I am indebted to my prosperity, viz.:--Small Profits do Great Things.” Again, he was very fond of repeating, “I found all I possess in small _profits_, bound by _industry_ and clasped with _economy_.”

The shop in Chiswell Street was now changed into a huge building at the corner of Finsbury Square, grandly styled the “Temple of the Muses;” above it floated a flag, over the door was the inscription “Cheapest bookshop in the world,” and inside appeared the notice that “the lowest price is marked on every Book, and no abatement made on any article.” “Half-a-million of volumes” were said, according to his catalogue, “to be constantly on sale,” and these were arranged in galleries and rooms, rising in tiers--the more expensive books at the bottom, and the prices diminishing with every floor, but all numbered according to a catalogue, which Lackington compiled himself, and even the first he issued contained 12,000 volumes. During his first year at the “Temple of the Muses” he cleared £5000. In 1798, he was able to retire with a large fortune, and he again joined the Methodists, building and endowing three chapels for them, in contrition for having maligned them in his rambling _Memoirs_. Latterly he was fond of travelling, and made a tour of bookselling inspection through England and Scotland, seeing discouraging signs in every town but Edinburgh, “where indeed a few capital articles are kept.” “At York and Leeds there were a few (and but very few) good books; but in all the other towns between London and Edinburgh nothing but trash was to be found.” In Scotland, he looked forward with great curiosity to seeing the women washing soiled linen in the rivers, standing bare-legged the while, and indeed this incident seems to have afforded him more gratification than any in his travels except the following: “In Bristol, Uxbridge, Bridgewater, Taunton, Wellington, and other places, I amused myself in calling on some of my masters, with whom I had, about twenty years before, worked as a journeyman shoemaker. I addressed each with ‘Pray, sir, have you got any occasion?’ which is the term made use of by journeymen in that useful occupation, when seeking employment. Most of these honest men had quite forgotten my person, as many of them had not seen me since I worked for them; so that it is not easy for you to conceive with what surprize and astonishment they gazed on me. For you must know that I had the vanity (I call it humour) to do this in my chariot, attended by my servants; and on telling them who I was all appeared to be very happy to see me.”

James Lackington died in his country house in Budleigh Lutterton, in Devonshire, in 1815. His life is an eminent example how a man of no attainments or advantages can conquer success by sheer hard work and perseverance.

Lackington was not the only man of his time who perceived that the conditions of literature were displaying at least a chance of change; that the circle of the book-buying public was incessantly enlarging, and that, by supplying the best books at the cheapest remunerative rates, not only would the progress of education be accelerated, but that the very speculation would bring fortune as well as honour to the innovators in the Trade. One of the first booksellers to adopt this principle was John Bell, whose name is still preserved in _Bell’s Weekly Messenger_. His _British Poets_, _British Theatre_ and _Shakespeare_, published in small pocket volumes, carried consternation into the trade, but scattered the English classics broadcast among the people. He was the first to discard the long s. He was soon rivalled by Cook and Harrison, and all three were distinguished, not only by publishing in little pocket volumes, exquisitely printed, and embellished by the best artists for the many, what had before been produced in folios and quartos for the few, but as the inventors of the “number trade,” by which even expensive works were sold in small weekly portions to those to whom literature had hitherto been an unknown luxury. Such were the _Lives of Christ_, _The Histories of England_, _Foxe’s Book of Martyrs_, _Family Bibles with Notes_, and _The Works of Flavius Josephus_. Many of these “number books,” though of no great literary merit, exhibited every possible attraction on their copious title-pages, and were announced with the then novel terms of “beautiful,” “elegant,” “superb,” and “magnificent.”

(_From an Etching by Kay. 1789._)]

(_From an Etching by R. Cole. 1750._)]

But the pioneer to whom the cheap book-buying public is most indebted was Alexander Donaldson, who, though an Edinburgh man, fought out his chief battles among his London brethren. Donaldson’s contemporaries in Edinburgh in the middle of the eighteenth century were Bell, Ellis, and Creech, the only bookseller worth recording before that date being Alexander Ramsay, the poet. Donaldson having struck out the idea of publishing cheap reprints of popular works, extended his business by starting a bookshop in the Strand, London--a step that brought him into collision with the London publishers--and authors, for Johnson calls him “a fellow who takes advantage of the state of the law to injure his brethren ... and supposing he did reduce the price of books is no better than Robin Hood who robbed the rich in order to give to the poor.” In 1771, Donaldson reprinted Thomson’s _Seasons_, and an action at law was brought against him by certain booksellers. He proved that the work in question had first been printed in 1729, that its author died in 1748, and that the copyright consequently expired in 1757; and the Lords decided in his favour, thereby settling finally the vulgar and traditional theory that copyright was the interminable possession of the purchaser. To follow this interesting question for a moment. In Anne’s reign it was decided that copyright was to last for fourteen years, with an additional term of fourteen years, provided that the author was alive at the expiry of the first. In 1773-4, following upon Donaldson’s prosecution, a bill to render copyright perpetual passed through the Commons, but was thrown out in the Lords, and in 1814 the term of fourteen years and a conditional fourteen was extended to a definite and invariable period of twenty-eight years. Finally in 1842, the present law was passed, by which the term was prolonged to forty-two years, but the copyright was not to expire in any case before seven years after the author’s death.

Donaldson left a very large fortune, which was greatly augmented by his son, who bequeathed the total amount, a quarter of a million, to found an educational hospital for poor children in Edinburgh, under the title of “Donaldson’s Hospital.”

During the period under review the localities affected by the bookselling and publishing trade had greatly changed and altered. The stalls of the “Chap. Book” venders had disappeared from London Bridge and the Exchange, and even Little Britain had been entirely vacated. Little Britain, from the time of the first Charles to Mary and William, was as famous for books as Paternoster Row afterwards became. But, even in 1731, a writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ says, “The race of booksellers in Little Britain is now almost extinct; honest Ballard, well known for his curious divinity catalogues (he was said to have been the first to print a catalogue), being then the only genuine representative ... it was, in the middle of the last century, a plentiful and learned emporium of learned authors, and men went thither as to a market. This drew to the place a mighty trade, the rather because the shops were spacious and the learned gladly resorted to them, where they seldom failed to meet with agreeable conversations.” The son of this Ballard died in 1796, and was by far the best of the Little Britain booksellers. When the “trade” deserted Little Britain, about the reign of Queen Anne, they took up their abode in Paternoster Row, then principally in the hands of mercers, haberdashers, and lace-men--a periodical in 1705 mentioning even the “semptresses of Paternoster Row;” for the old manuscript venders, who had christened the whole neighbourhood, had died out centuries before. It now became the headquarters of publishers and more especially of old booksellers, but with the introduction of magazines and “copy” books, that latter portion of the trade migrated elsewhere, and the street assumed its present appearance of wholesale warehouses, and general and periodical publishing houses. It was not long indeed before the tide of fashion carried many of the eminent firms westward, and the movement in that direction is still apparent.

_THE LONGMAN FAMILY._

CLASSICAL AND EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE.

The family of Longman can trace a publishing pedigree back to a date anterior to that of any other house still represented amongst us--the Rivingtons only excepted. As in the previous chapter, we shall select one member--necessarily that one to whom most public interest is attached--as the typical representative of the firm, touching lightly, however, upon all. And, in accordance with the scheme of the present volume, our remarks will primarily be devoted to a narrative of their business connections with that branch of literature--classical and educational works--with which the name of Longman is more immediately associated.

For the whole of the seventeenth century the Longman family occupied the position of thriving citizens in the busy seaport town of Bristol, then the Liverpool of the day, and acquired some considerable wealth in the manufacture of soap and sugar, achieving in many instances the highest honours in civic authority. Ezekiel Longman, who is described as “of Bristol, gentleman,” died in the year 1708, leaving, by a second marriage, a little boy only nine years of age, who, as Thomas Longman, is afterwards to be the founder of the great Paternoster Row firm.

By a provision of his father’s will, Thomas was to be “well and handsomely bred and educated according to his fortune;” this, we presume, was duly accomplished, and in June, 1716, we find that he was bound apprentice for seven years to Mr. John Osborn, bookseller, of Lombard Street, London--a man in a good, substantial way of business, but not to be confused with the other Osbornes of the time. Unlike Jacob, Longman served his seven years, and reaped a due reward in the person of his master’s daughter; and, as at the expiry of his time, the house of William Taylor (known to fame as the publisher of _Robinson Crusoe_) had lost its chief, Osborn being appointed executor for the family, we find that in August, 1824 “all the household goods and books bound in sheets” according to valuation were purchased by Longman for £2,282 9_s._ 6_d._--a very considerable sum in those days, and, towards the end of the month, £230 18_s._ was further paid for part shares in several profitable copyrights.

In acquiring this business Longman took possession of two houses, both ancient in the trade, the _Black Swan_ and the _Ship_, which, through the profitable returns of _Robinson Crusoe_, Taylor had amalgamated into one; and here on the self-same freehold ground, the immense publishing establishment of the modern Longmans is still standing.

The first trade mention we find of his name occurs in a prospectus dated Oct., 1724, of a proposal to publish, by subscription, _The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq._ (the father of chemistry, and brother of the Earl of Cork), “to be printed for W. and J. Innes, at the West End of St. Paul’s Churchyard, J. Osborn, at the _Oxford Arms_, in Lombard Street, and T. Longman, at the _Ship_ and _Black Swan_, in Paternoster Row.” In a few months after this Osborn followed his daughter to the Row, and, adding his capital to that of his son-in-law, remained in partnership with him until the end of his days.

In 1726, we find their names conjointly prefixed to the first edition of Sherlock’s _Voyages_, and between that date and 1730 to a great variety of school books.

All the works of importance, many even of the minor books, were, at that time, published not only by subscription in the first instance, but the remaining risk, and the trouble of a pretty certain venture, were divided amongst a number of booksellers: and the share system was so general that in the books of the Stationers’ Company there is a column ruled off, before the entries of the titles of works and marked “Shares,” and subdivided into halves, eight-twelfths, sixteenths, twenty-fourths, and even sixty-fourths. Much of the speculative portion of a bookseller’s business in those days consisted, therefore, not in the original publication of books, but in the purchase and sale of their shares, and to this business we find that Thomas Longman was especially addicted. As early as November, 1724, he bought one-third of the _Delphin Virgil_ from Jacob Tonson, junior; in 1728 a twentieth of Ainsworth’s _Latin Dictionary_, one of the most profitable books of the last century, for forty pounds, and, much later on, one-fourth part of the _Arabian Nights’ Entertainment_ for the small sum of twelve pounds.

The chief interest of the career of the house at this period lies in their connection with the _Cyclopædia_ of Ephraim Chambers, which was not only the parent of all our English encyclopædias, but also the direct cause of the famous _Encyclopédie_ of the French philosophers. Longman’s share in this work, first published in 1728, cost but fifty pounds, and consisted, probably, only of one sixty-fourth portion; as, however, the proprietors died off, Longman steadily purchased all the shares that were thrown on the book-market, until, in the year 1740, the Stationers’ book assigns him eleven out of the sixty-four--a larger number than was ever held by any other proprietor.

One of the few direct allusions to Longman’s personal character relates to his kindness to Ephraim Chambers. A contemporary writes in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_:--“Mr. Longman used him with the liberality of a prince, and the kindness of a father; even his natural absence of mind was consulted, and during his illness jellies and other proper refreshments were industriously left for him at those places where it was least likely that he should avoid seeing them.” Chambers had received £500 over and above the stipulated price for this great work, and towards the latter end of his life was never absolutely in want of money; yet from forgetfulness, perhaps from custom, he was parsimonious in the extreme. A friend called one day at his chambers in Gray’s Inn, and was pressed to stay dinner. “And what will you give me, Ephraim?” asked the guest; “I dare engage you have nothing for dinner!” To which Mr. Chambers calmly replied, “Yes, I have a fritter, and if you’ll stay with me I’ll have two.”

After the death of his partner and father-in-law, who bequeathed him all his books and property, Thomas Longman seems to have prospered amazingly. In 1746 he took into partnership one Thomas Shenrell; but, except for the fact that this name figures in conjunction with his for the two following years, then to disappear for ever, little more is known. In 1754, however, he took a nephew into partnership, after which the title-pages of their works ran:--“Printed for T. and T. Longman at the _Ship_ in Pater-Noster-Row.” Before this, however, he is to be found acting in unison with Dodsley, Millar, and other great publishers of the day, in the issue of such important works as Dr. Samuel Johnson’s _Dictionary of the English Language_. On the 10th of June, 1855, only _two_ months after the publication of the dictionary, he died, and Johnson is obliged to put off his well-earned holiday-trip to Oxford. “Since my promise two of our partners are dead (Paul Knapton was the second) and I was solicited to suspend my excursion till we could recover from our confusion. Thomas Longman the first had no children, and left half the partnership stock to his nephew and namesake, the rest of the property going to his widow.”

Thomas Longman, the nephew, was born in 1731, and, at the age of fifteen, entered the publishing firm as an apprentice, and at the date of his uncle’s death was only five-and-twenty.

Under his management the old traditions were kept up--more copyrights of standard books were purchased, the country trade extended, and more than this the business relations of the house were very vastly increased in the American colonies. One of Osborn’s earliest books, by-the-way, had been entered at Stationers’ Hall in 1712 as _Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Old and New Testament. For the edification and comfort of the Saints in Public and Private, more especially in New England_. The nephew probably followed up the colonial trade of his uncle and master, for at the first commencement of hostilities in that country he had a very large sum engaged in that particular business, and, to the honour of the succeeding colonists, several of his correspondents behaved very handsomely in liquidating their debts in full, even subsequent to amicable arrangements and to the peace of 1783.

As in the case of the founder of the house, the folio _Cyclopædia_, still the only one in the field, occupied the chief attention of the firm. Already in 1746 it had reached a fifth edition; “and whilst,” adds Alexander Chalmers, “a sixth edition was in question the proprietors thought that the work might admit of a supplement in two additional folio volumes. This supplement, which was published in the joint names of Mr. Scott and Dr. Hill, though containing a number of valuable articles, was far from being uniformly conspicuous for its exact judgment and due selection, a small part of it only being executed by Mr. Scott, Dr. Hill’s task having been discharged with his usual rapidity.” There the matter stood for some years, when the proprietors determined to convert the whole into one work. Several editions were tried and found wanting, and finally Dr. John Calder, the friend of Dr. Percy, was engaged, but provisionally only, for the duty. He drew up an elaborate programme, containing no less than twenty-six propositions. The agreement, as it illustrates, in some degree, the relative positions of authors and publishers, may be quoted. Dr. Calder agreed to prepare a new edition of _Chambers’s Cyclopædia_ to be completed in two years. He received £50 as a retaining fee upon signing the agreement, and £50 a quarter until the work was finally out of the printer’s hands. In spite of this retaining fee the proprietors appear to have been smitten with fear, perhaps dreading a repetition of Dr. Hill’s inaccuracies, and sent round a specimen sheet to the eminent _literati_ of the day, asking their opinions upon the matter and the style. All the verdicts were unfavourable, one contemptuous critic complaining that the author had twice referred favourably to the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, “a Scots rival publication in little esteem.” Dr. Johnson cut away a large portion of his sheet as worthless; but, at poor Calder’s request, who began to be perplexedly alarmed by all these adverse reviews, explained this superfluity as arising simply from _trôp de zèle_. “I consider the residuum which I lopped away, not as the consequence of negligence or inability, but as the result of superfluous business, naturally exerted in the first article. He that does too much soon learns to do less.” Then apologizing for Calder’s turbulence and impatience, the kindly doctor prays “that he may stand where he stood before, and be permitted to proceed with the work with which he is engaged. Do not refuse this request, sir, to your most humble servant, Samuel Johnson.” Again and again the doctor interposed his influence, but in vain, and Abraham Rees, a young professor in a dissenting college near town, was engaged, and a new issue of the _Cyclopædia_ (still Chambers’s), in weekly parts, was commenced in 1778, running on till 1786, attaining a circulation of four or five thousand, then a large one, for each number; and Longman, as chief proprietor, must have profited exceedingly by the work.

In the books of the Stationers’ Company we find repeated entry of Longman as publisher or shareholder in such miscellaneous works as _Gil Blas_, _Humphrey Clinker_, and _Rasselas_; and, true to the old traditions of the firm, educational works were by no means neglected. Among others we note a record of _Cocker’s Arithmetic_, since proverbially and bibliographically famous.

Cocker was an unruly master of St. Paul’s School, twice deposed for his extreme opinions, but twice restored for his marvellous talents of teaching. “He was the first to reduce arithmetic to a purely mechanical art.” The first edition, however, was published only after his death by his friend “John Hawkins, writing master”--a copy sold by Puttick and Simpson, in 1851, realized £8 10_s._ The fifty-second edition was published in 1748, and the last reprint, though at that time the work was in Longman’s hands, bears “Glasgow, 1777,” on the title-page.

“Ingenious Cocker now to rest thou’rt gone,
No art can show thee fully, but thy own,
Thy rare arithmetic alone can show
The vast _sums_ of thanks we for thy labour owe.”

In those days the publishers clave together in a manner undreamt of in these latter times of keener competition. Nichols, in speaking of James Robson (a Bond-street bookseller), and a literary club of booksellers, observes that Mr. Longman, with the late Alderman Cadell, James Dodsley, Lockyer, Davies, Peter Elmsley, Honest Tom Payne of the Mew’s Gate, and Thomas Evans of the Strand, were all members of this society. They met first at the “Devil’s Tavern,” Temple-bar, then moved to the “Grecian,” and finally from a weekly gathering, became a monthly meeting at the “Shakspeare.” Here was originated the germ of many a valuable production. Under their auspices Davies (in whose shop Boswell first met Johnson) produced his only valuable work, the _Life of Garrick_. Poor Davies had been an actor till Churchill’s satire drove him off the stage--

“He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone.”

From this he fled to the refuge of a bookselling shop in Russell-street, Covent-garden. He is described variously as “not a bookseller, but a gentleman dealing in books,” and as “learned enough for a clergyman.” Here he strived indifferently well till we come upon his epitaph--

“Here lies the author, actor Thomas Davies,
Living he shone a very _rara avis_;
The scenes he played life’s audience must commend--
He honour’d Garrick, Johnson was his friend.”

At this club meeting, too, Johnson’s _Lives of the Poets_ were first resolved on, and by the club clique the work was ultimately produced.

William West, a bookseller’s assistant, who died at a great age at the Charter House, in 1855, has left in his _Fifty Years’ Reminiscences_, and in the pages of the _Aldine Magazine_, a number of garrulous, amusing, but sometimes incoherent stories of the old booksellers. West says he knew all the members of the club, and bears witness that “Longman was a man of the most exemplary character both in his profession and in his private life, and as universally esteemed for his benevolence as for his integrity.” He mentions in particular Longman’s generosity in offering George Robinson any sum he wished on credit, when his business was in a critical condition.

West adds, “I was in the habit of going to Mr. Longman’s almost daily from the years 1785 to 1787 or 1788, for various books for country orders, being what is termed in all wholesale booksellers’ shops ‘a collector.’ Mr. Norton Longman had been caused by his father wisely to go through this same wholesome routine of his profession; and I am informed that the present Mr. L. (Thomas Norton Longman), although at the very head of the book trade, has pursued a similar course with his sons.”

Longman--and this brings us to the subject--had married a sister of Harris, the patentee, and long the manager of Covent Garden Theatre. By her he had three sons, and of these Thomas Norton Longman, born in 1771, about 1792 began to take his father’s place in the publishing establishment; and about this time Thomas Brown entered the office as an apprentice. In 1794, Mr. Owen Rees was admitted a member, and the firm’s title was altered to “Longman and Co.;” and at this time, too, the younger Evans, “rating,” we are told, “only as third wholesale bookseller in England,” became bankrupt, and the whole of his picked stock was transferred to 39, Paternoster Row. The stock was further increased by a legacy from the elder Evans to Brown’s father in 1803. This elder Evans, as the publisher of the _Morning Chronicle_, had incurred the displeasure of Goldsmith, who, mindful of Johnson’s former valour, “went to the shop,” says Nichols, “cane in hand, and fell upon him in a most unmerciful manner. This Mr. Evans resented in a truly pugilistic method, and in a few moments the author of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ was disarmed and stretched on the floor, to the no small diversion of the bystanders.”

1771-1842.]

Seven years, however, before this, Thomas Longman the second died, on the 5th February, 1797. Of the position to which he had attained it is sufficient to mention that when the Government were about to impose an additional duty on paper, subsequent to that of 1794, the firm of Longman urged such strong and unanswerable arguments against it and its impolicy that the idea was relinquished; and at this time the house had nearly £100,000 embarked in various publications.

Longman left his business to his eldest son, and to his second son, George, he bequeathed a handsome fortune, which enabled him to become a very extensive paper manufacturer at Maidstone, in Kent, and for some years he represented that borough in Parliament. As a further honour, he was drawn for Sheriff of London, but did not serve the office.

Edward Longman, the third son, was drowned at an early age in a voyage to India, whither he was proceeding to a naval station in the East India Company’s service.

At the time of Thomas Norton Longman’s accession to the chiefdom of the Paternoster Row firm, the literary world was undergoing a seething revolution. Genius was again let loose upon the earth to charm all men by her beauty, and to scare them for a while by her utter contempt for precedent. The torpor in which England had been wrapped during the whole of the foregone Hanoverian dynasty was changing into an eager feeling of unrest, and, later on, to a burning desire to do something, no matter what, and to do it thoroughly in one’s own best manner, and at one’s own truest promptings. No man saw the coming change more clearly than Longman; and anxious to profit by the first-fruits of the future, yet careful not to cast away in his hurry that ponderous ballast of dictionary and compilation, he soon gathered all the young writers of the day within the precincts of his publishing fold.

Down at Bristol, the ancestral town of both Longman and Rees, Joseph Cottle had been doing honest service--without, we fear, much profit--in issuing the earliest works of young men who were to take the highest rank among their fellows. Cottle had published Southey’s _Joan of Arc_ in 1796, and in 1798 had issued the _Lyrical Ballads_, the joint composition of Coleridge and Wordsworth. When, in 1800, Longman purchased the entire copyrights of the Bristol firm, at a fair and individual valuation, the _Lyrical Ballads_ were set down in the bill at exactly nothing, and Cottle obtained leave to present the copyright to the authors. In connection with Cottle and Longman, we must here mention a story that does infinite credit to both. At the very close of the eighteenth century, Southey and Cottle in conjunction prepared an edition of Chatterton’s works, to be published by subscription for the benefit of his sister, whose sight was now beginning to fail her. Hitherto, though much money had been made from the works of the “boy poet,” they had been printed only for the emolument of speculators.

The edition unfortunately proved a failure, but Longman and Rees entered into a friendly arrangement with Southey, and he was able to report in 1804 that Mrs. Newton lived to receive £184 15_s._ from the profits, when, as she expressed it, she would otherwise have wanted bread. Ultimately, Mary Ann Newton, the poet’s niece, received about £600, the fruits of the generous exertion of a brother poet, and of the good feeling of a kind-hearted publisher.

The first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ did eventually sell out, and then Wordsworth, detaching his own poems from the others, and adding several new ones thereto, obtained £100 from Longman for the use of two editions, but the sale was so very slow that the bargain was probably unprofitable.

In this same year 1800 the house of Longman also published Coleridge’s translation of Schiller’s _Wallenstein_, written in the short space of six weeks. Very few copies were sold, but after remaining on hand for sixteen years, the remainder was sold off rapidly at a double price.

Southey (a Bristol man himself) met, too, with much kindness from the firm, but after his first poem with but little, as a poet, from the public. We have seen before that “the profits” on _Madoc_ “amounted to exactly three pounds seventeen shillings and a penny.” No wonder that he writes to a friend, “Books are now so dear that they are becoming articles of fashionable furniture more than anything else; they who do buy them do not read, and they who read them do not buy them. I have seen a Wiltshire clothier who gives his bookseller no other instructions than the dimensions of his shelves; and have just heard of a Liverpool merchant who is fitting up a library, and has told his bibliopole to send him Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, and if any of those fellows should publish anything new to let him have it immediately. If _Madoc_ obtains any celebrity, its size and cost will recommend it to those gentry _libros consumere nati_, born to buy octavos and help the revenue.” Southey’s prose, however, proved infinitely more profitable, and for some years he was the chief contributor to Longman’s _Annual Review_ started in 1802, the same year as the _Edinburgh Review_. About this time Longman first went to Scotland, paid a visit to Walter Scott, and purchased the copyright of the _Minstrelsy_ then publishing; and in the following year Rees crossed the borders, and returned with an arrangement to publish the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ on the half-profit system, Constable having, however, a very small share in it. Scott’s moiety of profits was £169 6_s._, and success being then ensured, Longman offered £500 for the copyright, which was at once accepted. They afterwards added £100, “handsomely given to supply the loss of a fine horse which broke down suddenly while the author was riding with one of the worthy publishers” (Owen Rees).

Already in the first few years of the century we find the house connected with Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Scott, but it was by no means entirely to poetry that Longman and Rees trusted. In 1799 they purchased the copyright of Lindley Murray’s _English Grammar_, one of the most profitable school books ever issued from the press--for many years the annual sale of the _Abridgment_ in England alone was from 48,000 to 50,000 copies. Chambers’ _Cyclopædia_ was entirely re-written, re-cast, and re-christened, and again, under the management of Abraham Rees, after whom it was named, came out in quarto form in parts, but at a total cost of £85. The ablest scientific and technical writers of the day were retained, and among them we find the names of Humphry Davy, John Abernethy, Sharon Turner, John Flaxman, and Henry Brougham. For the first twenty years of this century Rees’ _New Cyclopædia_ filled the place that the _Encyclopædia Britannica_--“a Scots rival in little esteem”--was afterwards to occupy.

In 1803, we find the trade catalogue has extended so much in bulk and character that it is divided into no less than twenty-two classes. Among their books we note Paley’s _Natural Theology_ (ten editions published in seven years), Sharon Turner’s _Anglo-Saxon History_, Pinkerton’s _Geography_, Cowper’s _Homer_, and Gifford’s _Juvenal_.

About this time too, they engaged very extensively in the old book trade, a branch of the business discarded about the year 1840. In a catalogue of the year 1811 we find some very curious books. Here are the celebrated _Roxburgh Ballads_, now in the British Museum; a Pennant’s _London_, marked £300; a Granger’s _Biographical Dictionary_, £750; Pilkington’s _Dictionary of Painters_, £420; two volumes of _Cromwelliana_, £250; an extraordinary assemblage of Caxtons, Wynkyn de Wordes, and other early printed books, one supposed to date from 1446; a unique assemblage of _Garrickiana_, and many other articles of a matchless character.[9]

Longman was himself indefatigable in business, for fifty years unremittingly he came from and returned to Hampstead on horseback; but as the rious branches of the trade clearly prove, the superintendence of so vast a business was altogether beyond the power of any single man; and perhaps nothing tended more to raise the firm to the eminent position it soon attained than the plan of introducing fresh blood from time to time;--the new members being often chosen on account of the zeal and talent they had displayed as servants of the house. In 1804 Thomas Hurst, with the whole of his trade and connection, and Cosmo Orme (the founder of the hospital for decayed booksellers) were admitted. In 1811, Thomas Brown, whom we have already noticed as an apprentice, became a member of the firm, and until his retirement in 1859, took the sole management of the cash department, with so regular and just a system that an author could always learn what was coming to him, and when he was to receive it--a plan _not_ invariably adopted in a publisher’s counting-house. The firm was in 1824 further strengthened by the admission of Bevis Green, who had been apprenticed to Hurst in 1807. The title of the firm at this, its best known, period was, therefore, “Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.” When, however, Thomas Roberts entered, the title was changed to “Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green;” but we are anticipating, for Roberts died as recently as 1865, having acquired some distinction in private life as a Numismatist. For the sake of convenience, and for the sequence of the story, it will, perhaps, be as well to consider the firm as represented, as in fact from his leading position it was by Thomas Norton Longman, touching only upon the others individually when some directly personal interest arises. Before all these partnerships, however, were accomplished facts Longman had taken a much more precious, and even more zealous partner in the person of Miss Mary Slater of Horsham, Sussex, whom he had married as far back as the 2nd July, 1799.

Wordsworth of course continued his connection with the firm, though his profits were absolutely _nil_. Though a poetic philosopher he was not quite proof against the indifference of the public. In the edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ published in 1805 we find the significant epigraph, _Quam nihil ad genium, Papinique tuum_. In 1807, he published two new volumes, in which appeared many of his choicest pieces, and among them his first sonnets. Jeffrey, however, maintained that they were miserably inferior, and his article put an absolute stop to the sale. Wordsworth had, perhaps deprived himself of all right to complain, for his harshest reviewer did him far more justice than he was wont to deal out to his greatest contemporaries. In 1814, we find Longman announcing, “Just published, the _Excursion_, being a portion of the _Recluse_, by William Wordsworth, in 4to., price £2 2_s._, boards.” Jeffrey used the famous expression--“This will never do;” and Hogg wrote to Southey that Jeffrey had _crushed_ the poem. “What!” retorted Southey, “Jeffrey _crush_ the _Excursion_! Tell him he might as easily crush Skiddaw!” Wordsworth, who had invariably a high value of his own works, even of his weakest ones, writes also,--“I am delighted to learn that the Edinburgh Aristarch has declared against the _Excursion_, as he will have the mortification of seeing a book enjoy a high reputation to which he has not contributed.” For a while, however, Jeffrey’s curse was potent, and it took six years to exhaust an edition of only 500 copies. We need scarcely follow Wordsworth’s various publications (do their dates not lie on every table of every drawing-room in the land?), but the whole returns from his literary labours up to 1819 had not amounted to £140; and even in 1829 he remarks that he had worked hard through a long life for less pecuniary emolument than a public performer earns for two or three songs.

Longman had at one time an opportunity of becoming Byron’s publisher, but declined the _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ on account of the violent attacks it contained upon his own poets--those of the Lake school. With Scott we have seen that he had had dealings, and in these, at all events, Sir Walter’s joke, that _Longmanum est errare_, did not hold good. Before the collective edition of 1830, 44,000 copies of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ were sold. Though Longman was inclined to believe that Scott was not the author of _Waverley_, he was equally anxious to secure the publication of some of that extraordinary series of romances; and at a time when the Ballantynes were in trouble, purchased _Guy Mannering_ by granting bills in advance for £1500, and taking a portion of their stock, to the extent of about £600 more. The _Monastery_ was also published by him in 1820, and he is said, though the authority is more than dubious, to have paid Scott upwards of £20,000 in about fifteen years.

What Scott was to Constable, and Byron to Murray, that was Moore to Longman. “Anacreon Moore,” as he loved to be called, had gained a naughty reputation from _Mr. Thomas Little’s Poems_, and, in 1811, we find him writing to Longman--“I am at last come to a determination to bind myself to your service, if you hold the same favourable disposition towards me as at our last conversation upon business. To-morrow I shall be very glad to be allowed half-an-hour’s conversation with you, and as I dare say I shall be _up all night at Carlton House_, I do not think I could reach your house before four o’clock. I told you before that I never could work without a retainer. It will not, however, be of that exorbitant nature which your liberality placed at my disposal the first time.” Soon after this the Prince Regent threw over his old Whig friend, but Moore was so successful in his political warfare that he more than gained as a poet what he lost as a courtier, and his _Two-penny Post Bag_ went through fourteen editions. He was, however, anxious to apply his genius to the creation of some work more likely to raise his reputation than the singing of lascivious songs, or the jerking off of political squibs. Accordingly Perry, the editor of the _Morning Chronicle_, was sent to discuss preliminary matters with Longman. “I am of opinion,” said Perry, “that Mr. Moore ought to receive for his poem the largest price that has been given in our day for such a work.” “That,” replied Longman promptly, “was £3000.” “Exactly so,” rejoined the editor, “and no smaller a sum ought he to receive.” Longman insisted upon a perusal beforehand:--

“Longman has communicated his readiness to terms, on the basis of the three thousand guineas, but requires a perusal beforehand; this I have refused. I shall have no ifs.”

Again Moore writes, “To the honour and glory of romance, as well on the publisher’s side as on the poet’s, this very generous view of the transaction was without any difficulty acceded to;” and again, “There has seldom occurred any transaction in which trade and poetry have shone so satisfactorily in each other’s eyes.” So Moore left London to find a quiet resting-place “in a lone cottage among the fields in Derbyshire,” and there _Lalla Rookh_ was written; the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters aiding, he avers, his imagination, by contrast, to paint the everlasting summers and glowing scenery of the East. The arrangement had hitherto been verbal, but on going up to town, in the winter of 1814, he received the following agreement from Longman.

“COPY OF TERMS WRITTEN TO MR. MOORE.

“That upon your giving into our hands a poem of yours of the
length of _Rokeby_, you shall receive from us the sum of £3000.
We also agree to the stipulation that the few songs which you
may introduce into the work shall be considered as reserved for
your own setting.”

Soon Moore writes to say that about 4000 lines are perfectly finished, but he is unwilling to show any portion of the work until the 6000 are completed, for fear of disheartenment. He requests Longman, however, “to tell our friends that they are done, a poetic licence to prevent the teasing wonderment of the literary quidnuncs at my being so long about it.” Longman replies that “we are certainly impatient for the perusal of your poem, but solely for our gratification. Your sentiments are always honourable.” At length, after very considerable delays on the part of the author, the poem appeared, and its wonderful success fully justified the publisher’s extraordinary liberality. Moore drew a thousand pounds for the discharge of his debts, and left, temporarily only, we fear, £2000 in Longman’s hands, the interest of which was to be paid quarterly to his father.

This was Moore’s greatest effort; nor did he attempt to surpass it. One substantial proof of admiration of the poet’s performance should not be overlooked: “The young Bristol lady,” says Moore in his diary, Dec. 23rd, 1818, “who inclosed me three pounds after reading _Lalla Rookh_ had very laudable ideas on the subject; and if every reader of _Lalla Rookh_ had done the same I need never have written again.”

As it was, however, he was soon obliged to set to work once more--this time as a biographer. The lives of Sheridan, Fitzgerald, and many others, bear testimony to his industry; but in spite, perhaps because, of their pleasant gossiping tone, they are far from accurate. At one time he had so many lives upon his hands together, that he suggested the feasibility of publishing a work to be called the _Cat_, which should contain nine of them. His _Life of Byron_ we have already alluded to, but we must again call attention to Longman’s generosity in allowing him to transfer the work to Murray. Longman was not less eager in his kindness to his clients in private than in business relations. His Saturday “Weekly Literary Meetings” were about the pleasantest and most sociable in London. As early as 1804 we find Southey writing to Coleridge: “I wish you had called on Longman; that man has a kind heart of his own, and I wish you to think so; the letter he sent me was a proof of it. Go to one of his Saturday evenings, you will see a coxcomb or two, and a dull fellow or two; but you will, perhaps, meet Turner and Duppa, and Duppa is worth knowing.” Throughout the day the new publications were displayed in a separate department for the use of the literary men, and house dinners were of frequent occurrence; the whole of the “Lake School” were steady recipients of Longman’s hospitality whenever they came to town.

As, perhaps, the strongest proof of a man’s kindliness of heart, Longman is invariably represented as being “almost adored by his domestics, from his uniform attention to the comforts of those who have grown gray in his service.” He was a liberal patron of the “Association for the Relief of Decayed Booksellers,” and was also one of the “Court of Assistants of the Company of Stationers,” but, with the characteristic modesty of his disposition, paid the customary fine to be allowed to decline the offices of warden and master of the company.

For many years the “House” had been London agents and part proprietors of the _Edinburgh Review_, and when the commercial crash of 1826 destroyed Constable’s huge establishment, the property was virtually in their own hands, and the number for December, 1826, is printed for “Longman, Rees, Orme, Browne, and Green, London, and Adam Black, Edinburgh;” and if we “read between the lines” of the new designation we learn that Hurst had been concerned in some bill transactions, and had been this year compelled to retire (he died an inmate of the Charter House, in 1847), and we may also gather something of the strong connection that was to be formed with the house of Adam Black.

Jeffrey retired from the editorial chair in 1829, but Macney Napier, the editor of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ was appointed in his stead, and the literary management of the journal was still continued in Edinburgh. Sydney Smith ceased to write for the _Review_ in 1827; but in 1825 an article was contributed on Milton, by a young man of five-and-twenty; and Mr. Thomas Babington Macaulay, who, as Moore said, could do any mortal thing but forget, was destined to be, not only the most brilliant of the daring and talented band of Edinburgh Reviewers, but eventually, one of the most powerful contributors to Longman’s fortune and reputation.[10]

To return again to educational works, we find that in Mangnall’s _Questions_ a property had been acquired that fully rivalled Murray’s _Mrs. Markham_. A type now of a hideously painful and parrot-like system of teaching (what negations of talent our sisters and mothers owe to this encyclopædic volume we shudder to sum up!) it was imitated and printed in every direction. Poor Miss Mangnall! who recollects now-a-days that in 1806 she commenced her literary life with a volume of poems? A very similar book, but on scientific questions, was _Mrs. Marcet’s Conversations_, which was not only profitable to Longman, but American booksellers, up to the year 1853, had reaped an abundant harvest from the sale of 160,000 copies.