PUBLISHING: The Seven Lives of John MurrayBy Humphrey Carpenter John Murray, 368pp. £25/Now owned by Hodder Headline, John Murray is famous for its association with Lord Byron, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin, among many other writers
A STARK ANNOUNCEMENT tops and tails this elegant tombstone erected to the House of Murrayafter its fall on May 10th, 2002: a tearful JM7 opens the door to his mother, Diana, telling her he signed away 234 years of history at 7am that morning. The sale was to Hodder Headline, the corporation presided over by Irishman Tim Hely Hutchinson, which now belongs to Hachette Livre, which in turn is owned by Nicolas Sarkozy's friend Arnaud Lagardère , one of Europe's largest arms manufacturers. How thus?
The archives, from which this book has been constructed, were, fittingly, returned to source in Edinburgh, where Murray began in 1768, when the city was the seat of literary and intellectual exchange and booksellers throve. JM1 followed the money south to London and his books flowed along the spreading arteries and tendrils of Empire via India and overseas through his naval contacts and contracts. Number 32, Fleet Street, with its ship's signage, was purchased from William Sandby, bookseller, and McMurray now became Murray. Calvinist vigour combined with social ease (JM1 was a six-bottle man with a "whoring habit") and foundations were quickly laid with some thousand titles to his name by his death in 1793. JM2 forged an alliance with Archibald Constable, the son of a land steward, who had paid a young poet-novelist, Walter Scott, a thousand guineas advance unseen for Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field, published in February 1808 and selling 28,000 copies over three years; Murray's quarter share in the enterprise ensured their fortunes rose together.
BY 1809, STAPLES of the Murray list included Southey's two-volume Life of Nelson(perpetuating "all the colourful myths about its hero, with a scant regard for the truth" for nigh on a century), Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature, medical titles on midwifery, the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, Mrs Rundell's Domestic Cookery and a new 10-volume edition of Defoe, as well as the Quarterly Review, set up in opposition to the whiggish Edinburgh Review by born-again Tory Scott. By October 1812, Murray's was in a new stratosphere with 45,000 copies of Childe Haroldby Byron sold and a new premises at No 50, Albemarle Street to show for it. Murray memorabilia includes a lock of hair Lady Caroline Lamb sent to Byron: the pubic hair she sent him is, however, reported as "now vanished". At Albemarle Street Byron met Scott on April 7th, 1815, among the aspirational of a great metropolis and its provinces, with escapees of Napoleon's France like Mme de Staël. The firmament was established, feeding the growing appetites of a new generation of readers and writers in the stew of Regency London.
Byron died in Greece on April 19th, 1824. News reached London on Friday, May 14th. In a meticulous reconstruction of the weekend, Carpenter re-enacts the subsequent drama over 18 pages, and on Monday, May 17th, 1824 the Victorian era is born as JM2 insists on burning Byron's incendiary prose Memoir (deemed by Hobhouse "fit only for a brothel, and would damn Lord Byron to certain infamy if published"). The myth of Thomas Moore's complicity is scotched ("the little Irishman was outnumbered by English bullies"). As Byron's friend and biographer, who was entrusted with the work, he is often blamed for its destruction, though in fact he was negotiating with the Murray rivals Longman's as a back-up. The shame of the event was to haunt the family, and Byron's mocking ghost stalks these pages.
In 1816, Jane Austen, whose popularity and sales in time exceeded Byron's, appeared on the list. Her banker brother negotiated a deal with her fourth novel, Emma,and Jane complained to her sister Cassandra over the advance, calling Murray "a Rogue of course, but a civil one". In the same annus mirabilis he published Coleridge's Christabel and Other Poems, which included Kubla Khan, although it was savaged by Thomas Moore in the Edinburgh Review as "utterly destitute of value". In 1826, JM2 turned down the "great Laker", Wordsworth.
If the death of Byron was to mark the close of the long 18th century, the modern era was announced with the publication of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, in 1830, compounded by Darwin's The Origin of Species on November 24th, 1859 (whose first printing of 1,250 copies sold out by publication day). In 1836, the first of the Handbooks for Travellers appeared, JM3's own volume "on the Continent", succeeded by those on Southern Germany, Switzerland and Northern Europe. These were the Rough Guides of their day, before the railway era of the 1840s, like Ryanair, opened up travel to the masses. With the help of Dickens and Gladstone, JM3 established the 1842 Copyright Act, keeping "foreign" reprints out of UK and colonial markets. Other commercial spirit-of-age triumphs included Samuel Smiles's Lives of the Engineers (1861) followed by his Self-help, Thrift (1875) and Duty (1887), as well as a Memoir of JM2 in 1891.
CARPENTER DEVOTES two-thirds of The Seven Livesto the first 100 years of company history, reaching the regime of JM4 in 1892. JM4 obviously bores him as he adopts a tedious dramatic device of reconstructed dialogue, noting cocaine use by Mrs JM and melancholia in the menfolk (equally, his silent movie scenario at the end is scrappy and blunts the narrative).
JM5 was childless and his nephew Robin "Jock" Grey changed his name by deed poll in 1930 to succeed him. The last century is dispatched briskly, skidding from tales of William Flower Garden Robinson, Axel San Michele Munthe, and Leigh Time of Gifts Fermor, to Kenneth Civilisation Clarke and John Continual Dew Betjeman. The latter's Collected Poems (1958) sold two million, but Don Mackean's Introduction to Biology sold eight million around the world, as JM6 subsidised general books through his educational list. With dynamism and social skills Jock extended the salon tradition, piloting the exemplary, 12-volume Marchand edition of Byron's Letters and Journals to publication before his death in 1993. Carpenter is candid about the depression that afflicted his over-active latter years. Three formidable ladies conclude the tale, two Murray authors, Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy, and Jock's wife Diana, giving telling glimpses of the inner workings of the Murray household. Carpenter, having drafted his 20th book, died at the untimely age of 58. He can rest easy with this fine memorial to a once-great publishing house, now part of the corporate mainstream.
...
Antony Farrell is a publisher