Henry Curwen

“ Never before had the enterprise of young and almost unknown men started so ambitious a scheme, and never since have pluck and learning, talent and genius been so amply rewarded. They found the world of English society, English literature, and English politics warped and dwarfed—scared by the French Revolution and the American Republic into a dormant state of Toryism—they found matters thus, and in an incredibly short time they almost changed the current of the national thought. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To the sauntering Roman of the Augustan age literature was an essential; never, probably, till quite modern times was education—the education, at all events, that supplies a capability to read and write—so widely spread. The taste thus created was gratified in many ways. If the Romans had no Mudie, they possessed public libraries, thrown freely open to all. They had public recitations, at which unpublished and ambitious writers could find an audience; over which, too, sometimes great emperors presided, while poets, with a world-wide reputation, read aloud their favourite verses. ”

“ Of which duties I perceive finance alone, and free trade alone will by no means be found to be the sum.... What alone concerns us here is to remark that the present system of book-publishing discharges none of these duties—less and less makes even the appearance of discharging them—and, indeed, as I believe, is, by the nature of the case, incapable of ever, in any perceptible degree, discharging any of them in the times that now are. A century ago, there was in the bookselling guild if never any royalty of spirit, as how could such a thing be looked for there? ”

“ The old-book trade was at that time in its most flourishing condition, Dibdin was firing the minds of curiosity-seekers with a love for rare quartos and folios; Heber, and many more after his kind, were spending the main portion of their time, and the vast bulk of their fortunes, in the acquisition of immense libraries; and the old-booksellers of the day were making large incomes. Blackwood’s success by no means satisfied his ambition, but enabled him to enter the field of publishing as a rival to Constable, who was now at the height of his glory. ”

“ We have already, in our account of Archibald Constable, shown how deeply the brilliant writers—who for a while gave a bold literary supremacy to the northern capital—were indebted to the daring spirit and the generous purse of one Scottish publisher; we have here to follow the narrative of a rival’s life—a life at outset very similar, but soon diverging widely, and which, actuated by very different principles, and aiming at very different results, was destined to open the arena of literary struggle to those whom honest political feeling had for a moment rendered dumb and inactive. ”

“ From the commencement of his career, Tegg made commercial success his one aim in life; and with much patience, much endurance, and much labour, he achieved it thoroughly, and, in the achieving of it honestly, he conferred a great and lasting benefit upon the world; for the book merchant holds in his hands the power to do good, or to do evil, far beyond any other merchant whatsoever. Rising from a humble position in life, he never forgot his early friends, never left unrewarded, when possible, his early encouragers and assistants. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thomas Kelly was one of those men of whom the London citizens are so proud—men who come to the mighty centre of commerce utterly friendless, and worse still, penniless, and whom industry, labour, and good fortune exalt to the very pinnacle of a good citizen’s fondest dreams. ”

“ I may be influenced by a father’s feelings, but I believe I can honestly state that, by education, earnest purpose in the fulfilment of duty, a high sense of integrity guiding and regulating their transactions, they will be found worthy of your confidence, and thus maintain the character of the house whose reputation and business transactions have extended to all parts of the world.” To this honest expression of well-earned business contentment, we can only add our wishes that Mr. Churchill’s years of retirement may be as happy as his years of toil have been useful and beneficial. ”

“ George Virtue was another of those men of whom, in this history, we have had not a few examples, who, beginning life without any fictitious advantages, have made success their goal, and, in attaining it, have not only amassed princely fortunes for themselves and their families, but have opened up new branches of industry, and have afforded employment to hundreds whose bread depends upon their daily labours. ”

“ And for this bantling he received the handsome first-earnings of fifty pounds. Living, at a time when other boys were at school, in the gayest of all society in London, a welcome guest behind the curtain at every theatre, and hailed as a good fellow in every literary coterie, young Hook led a rollicking, devil-may-care life, giving the world back with interest the rich amusement he gathered from it. Now, making a random bet that a corner house in Berners Street should, within a week, be the most famous house in London ”

“ Seldom, if ever, have two members of a publishing firm been so admirably fitted for their business.
From the very outset the brothers were thrown entirely on their own resources; they had no literary jealousy, and eagerly enlisted on their staff most of the young aspirants in Scotland, who have since achieved a world-wide reputation. It was, however, to Mr. Robert Chambers’ contributions that the Journal was primarily indebted for success, his delightful essays, æsthetic and humorous, permanently fixing the work in public esteem. ”

“ Bag in hand he rushes in hot haste all over London, and with an impudent tongue and a pair of brawny shoulders, thrusts himself to the front place before each publisher’s counter. As we listen for a moment to the reply he receives as to the price of a cheap periodical, we may gain an insight into the middleman’s system of profit. “Sixes are fours and twelves are thirteens!” yells the shop-boy, the which being interpreted means that the wholesale price of the sixpenny periodical in question is fourpence, and that thirteen copies go to the dozen. ”

“ John Wilson, the great Tory champion, was descended, not from a county family, but from a wealthy Paisley manufacturer; and, after taking all possible prizes at Glasgow University, went to conquer fresh worlds at Oxford, where he not only won the Newdigate prize of £50 by one of the best prize poems extant, in fifty lines, but excelled in all sports, to which a magnificent frame, a temper universally good, a wild exuberance of animal spirits, and a thirsty love of adventure could contribute. ”

“ Scott and Byron had in succession entranced the world. They had now withdrawn, and no third king arose to demand recognition. It was in the calm that followed that Wordsworth obtained a hearing. In 1839, the University of Oxford conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws, amid the enthusiastic applause of a crowded theatre. Younger men were coming to the fore, and though his contemporaries were fast dying off, still Longman was as eager for business as ever, and as ready, when it was over, for his chief pleasure—the enjoyments of domestic life ”

“ Arnold afterwards displayed elsewhere—attracted and educated a set of young men, unrivalled, perhaps, in modern times for genius and energy, for wit and learning. Nothing, then, was wanting to their due encouragement but a liberal patron, and this position was speedily occupied by a publisher, who, in his munificence and venturous spirit, soon outstripped his boldest English rival—whose one fault was, in fact, that of always being a Mæcenas, never a tradesman. ”

“ The gift of tools is of very little moment to any one, if there is to be no occasion for their use; and in many instances it will be an absolute cruelty to teach children to read, and then to hurl them back on the atrocious literature of slum shops. At present, the fact that London is still without any pretence to a free circulating library, or indeed to an absolutely free library of any kind, is doubly disgraceful to our pachydermatous local authorities, because several provincial towns have shamed us by a good example. ”

“ After a career, as successful we imagine as his wishes could desire, John Murray died on the 6th November, 1793, leaving behind him a widow, two daughters, and an only son, and bequeathing to the latter a business which was destined to carry the name of John Murray wherever the English language was spoken, and wherever English books were read, as the most venturesome and yet the most successful publisher who has ever, in London at all events, encouraged the struggles of authorship and gratified the tastes of half a world of readers. ”

“ CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL:
“LITERATURE FOR THE PEOPLE.” We have already seen, in our short sketches of the Bells, the Cookes, the Donaldsons, and the Constables, some endeavour—neither faint nor altogether unsuccessful, yet not more than a trial venture, for education was still a monopoly of rank and riches—to render books the property and the birthright of the people. ”

“ Almost every engraver of any reputation in this country has been employed on one or other of Mr. Virtue’s illustrated works. Indeed, had it not been for the field of labour opened by the Art Union, in their yearly distribution of engravings, and for the encouragement held out by Mr. Virtue in the production of his illustrated works and the Art Journal, it is said that the art of line engraving would have quite died out in England; and for his services to the public, and, through them, to the profession, he is certainly entitled to be regarded as the first Art publisher of his time. ”

“ The men paused on their way to the pot-house, and heard how homes now desolate might be made happy, how the weeping wife and the starving children might be rendered contented and cheerful, how their own sodden lives might be again cleansed and brightened;—then independence rose again from the hideous thrall that bound them, and many paused for ever. Even those who knew the proper use of alcohol listened with respectful attention to one who sought so earnestly to provide a safeguard for other men weaker than themselves. ”

“ Johnson had discovered that the subscription system was essentially a rotten one, and that the real reading public, the author’s legitimate patrons, were reached of course through the medium of the booksellers: “He that asks for subscriptions soon finds that he has enemies. All who do not encourage him defame him:” and then again—“Now learning is a trade; a man goes to a bookseller and gets what he can. We have done with patronage. In the infancy of learning we find some great men praised for it. ”

“ I passed through some years of the direst hardship, not the least evil being a state of feeling quite unnatural in youth, a stern and burning defiance of a social world in which we were harshly and coldly treated by former friends, differing only in external respects from ourselves. In your life there is one crisis where I think your experiences must have been somewhat like mine ”

“ Tennyson had been silent for ten years, had been maturing his talents, been mourning for the death of his friend Hallam, and probably during the whole of this time not a thousand copies of his poems had been sold. But he was already acknowledged as one of our greatest living poets by a small and ardent band of admirers, and in 1842 he was induced to break his long silence and publish an edition of his poems in two volumes, of which the second was composed entirely of new pieces, and in the first some were new, and many had been re-written. ”