The backstage story of literature, told in a publisher’s letters
d us learned and ingenious men enough to buy it.” He wanted a work “such as Pilgrim’s Progress or Robinson Crusoe that will please the million”, but never found it.
John Murray II (1778-1843) enjoyed better luck, and gentrified the firm by moving it to Albemarle Street in Mayfair, where the mortgage was in part secured by Maria Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery, which ran to 65 editions. Lord Byron was another good earner. “Don Juan must sell,” Francis Palgrave wrote to Murray in 1819, when he published the first two cantos of Byron’s poem: “grave good people, pious people, regular people, all like to read about naughty people.”
On Byron’s death in 1824, his memoirs, which he had intended Murray’s to publish, were burned in the fireplace at Albermarle Street, at the direction of his family and literary executors. This has since been viewed as shocking vandalism, but at the time Murray was praised for the gentlemanly sacrifice of his interests.
The Byron association continued to be profitable, yielding many books, but the cult has had its dissenters. In 1977 Rebecca West wrote to John “Jock” Murray VI that she thought Byron “one of the worst bores in the world”. Jock replied that he had “a confession, to be kept to yourself – I also get stuck in the poetry”.
Some were unconvinced by Murray II’s gentlemanliness: Jane Austen, whose Emma he published, reckoned him “a a ro rogue”. Others thought it overdo overdone, among them William Wo Wordsworth, who complaine complained in 1825 that “I receive n no answer from the gra grand Murray… I am persu persuaded that he is too gre great a personage for an anyone but a court, an ari aristocratic or most fas fashionable author to dea deal with.”
In 1809 Murray exp expanded his influe influence by founding the Quarterly Qua Review, as a Tory counterblast to the Whiggish Edinburgh Review. Sir Walter Scott, whose Waverley novels were published by Murray’s, was a regular contributor, and wrote sympathetic reviews of works by Austen and
Byron. So as not to compromise his social position as a judge, Scott published his novels anonymously, but they were rumoured to be his. In 1816, to throw readers off the scent, he wrote a harsh review of his own
Tales of My Landlord series: “the narrative is unusually artificial; neither hero nor heroine excites interest of any sort…”
Quarterly Review lasted until 1967. It paid well, and was highly regarded, so people wanted to write for it. In 1947 Thomas J Timoney offered his services as a critic: “I am particularly liable to be struck by the minutest errors in any literary work, and am particularly slow at comprehending the author’s meaning or the beauty of his work.”
John Murray III (1808-92) was chiefly interested in travel, and published guidebooks that were imitated by Baedeker, among others. A “keen Alpinist”, in 1855 he fell off a narrow path over a 1,200ft precipice on the St Gotthard Pass, landing on a ledge 12ft down.
In 1857 he published Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa by David Livingstone, who proved difficult, demanding that his editor be sacked (“Excuse me, but you must give this man leave to quit”), and objecting to the illustrations, particularly one showing his nearfatal encounter with a lion: “It really must hurt the book to make a lion look larger than a hippopotamus.”
Two years later the Rev Whitwell Elwin, employed as a literary adviser, urged Murray not to publish Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, recommending instead “the publication of Mr Darwin’s observations upon pigeons”, since “Everybody is interested in pigeons.” Murray went ahead anyway, and the book went through six editions in Darwin’s lifetime.
John Murray III’s greatest success was Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, which created a genre, and its successors Character, Thrift, Duty and Life and Labour, all of which were translated into dozens of languages, and went through more editions in Italy than in England. A century later Rebecca West wrote to “Jock” Murray that on a trip to Spain, she and her mother met a man who said “he had only been able to build up a large business as a smuggler owing to the inspiration given him by Mr Smiles”.
John Murray IV (1851-1928) began the publication of The Letters of Queen Victoria (“a task of no ordinary difficulty”), for which he was knighted, and John Murray V completed their publication, for which he too was knighted.
“Jock” Murray (1909-93) was the sparkiest member of the dynasty since John Murray II, and much loved by friends such as “Paddy” Leigh Fermor and John Betjeman, who described him as “Very shy & saintly & high minded & unshockable & shrewd & kind & conscientious & clever”.
Jock was the recipient of quite the oddest letter in this collection, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Adrian, who wrote to him from Tangier in Morocco in 1949 about a review by Harold Nicolson in The Daily Telegraph of a biography of his father by John Dickson Carr (published by Murray’s), which so offended him that he wanted Jock to arrange a duel in France. Nicolson defused the situation by offering “a manly apology”.