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The House of Blackwood

Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era

By David Finkelstein

1 Setting the Scene

On a warm, sunny day on 8 November 1879, the body of publisher and editor John Blackwood was interred in Old Calton Hill Cemetery in Edinburgh, overlooking the city in which he had spent much of his working life. Passing by the tomb of David Hume on one side, the pallbearers brought the casket to the family vault, where it was placed next to that of his father, William Blackwood, founder of the Blackwood publishing firm and the famous monthly Blackwood’s Magazine. Among those who helped carry the remains to its final resting place were some of John’s most trusted friends and literary contributors: General Edward Bruce Hamley; historian John Hill Burton; John Skelton, author and critic; and Colonel James Grant, African explorer and J. H. Speke’s overshadowed companion in his famous search for the source of the Nile River. Weeks later, men with lists swarmed through the firm’s premises on 45 George Street and 32 Thistle Street in Edinburgh. They measured rooms; they counted shelves; they counted chairs, desks, tables, light fixtures. They counted stock on the 275 shelves in the front shop, investigated the firm’s ledgers, noted copyright values.

Equipment in the printing office was fingered, valued, and listed in a twenty-eight-page report; among the notable items in its eighteen rooms were boxes filled with varying types and fonts, including:1 Wood Type Metal Type Book Type

76 pieces 20-line pica 94 12-line pica Roman 10,395 English 68 pieces 17-line pica 100 8-line pica Clarendon 6,490 pica no. 28 94 pieces 16-line pica 43 7-line pica Grotesque 1,669 pica no. 4 76 pieces 18-line pica 77 4-line pica Roman 5,740 small pica no. 28

Also listed were thirty-eight double crown letter boards, sixty-seven brass galleys, thirty-six composing sticks for use on Blackwood’s Magazine, and one Double Deny Albion proof press with inking table and three rollers, along with other printing presses and heavy machinery. The final estimated value of all this printing office stock and equipment was £5,870.

The numbers men counted, they added, and then they summarized, in the end producing a financial report that detailed to the last brass molding and brass farthing the total worth of the Blackwood publishing firm. The resulting remarkable document is one of the most complete commercial and financial statements one is likely to encounter of any British publishing firm operating in the nineteenth century. It was used to settle family interests and establish John’s nephew, William Blackwood III, as the new head of the firm. Its value, however, extends beyond that of the personal, allowing us a snapshot view of the Blackwood firm at the peak of its success.

When Alexander Blackwood (head of the firm following his father William Blackwood’s death in 1834) died in March 1845, a similar accounting exercise placed the firm’s value at £41,633. Of this sum Alexander’s share as a company director came to £12,004, which, combined with income withdrawn by both his brothers, Robert and John Blackwood (both also partners in the firm), accounted for almost half the total value of the family business. The final sum also included £14,814 in copyright values (that is, the value of the firm’s intellectual property rights in its publications) and £7,361 in capital free for further investment.2 The spread of income looked like this:

Total balance at 21st March 1845 £41,633.14.10

Thirty four years later the value of the firm had almost doubled to £80,509, and the balance sheet now read more complicatedly like this:

What is significant about this welter of statistics is that while copyright valuation had not increased greatly since Alexander Blackwood’s death, stock, printing office assets, and general property since accumulated now accounted for more than half the firm’s value. More important, the capital available to the firm—the clear profit—had increased more than fivefold in thirty-four years, from £7,361 to £39,479. Even allowing for inflationary factors, the result is a clear statement of the role John Blackwood played in energizing and expanding the firm’s lists and profitability during his tenure as director, validated in the manner in which this capital sum was subsequently divided between the two main partners of the firm: John Blackwood’s estate received four-fifths (£34,043), while William Blackwood III held on to the remaining 20 percent stake (£5,436).

William Blackwood III had much to live up to when he dutifully took over management of the firm in 1879, and his path was not made smoother over the next three years by the retirement of key personnel and the death of various family members who might have contributed to its development. His solution to this loss of support, a solution that has remained hidden until now, is revealed in documents from 1913, when, following his demise, the counting men were once more dispatched to assess the value of the firm. This time, however, there was a hidden agenda to satisfy. In this case, sums were calculated and worth assigned in order to establish how much to pay off the silent member of a secret partnership that had run the firm between 1903 and 1910. Cataloged in the legal document subsequently produced is a detailed breakdown of the firm’s assets and liabilities, with columns of profit and loss neatly recorded and balanced in order to arrive at the amount necessary to remove David Storrar Meldrum from the firm’s directorship (Meldrum was the first non–Blackwood family member ever to be allowed such a role) and to return full control of the firm to family hands, in this case William’s nephews George William and James Hugh Blackwood.3 How Meldrum became such a privileged insider is a story that will be detailed later in this book. Why he was accorded privileges denied to earlier and equally valuable Blackwood employees, such as Joseph M. Langford (London office manager from 1845 to 1882) and George Simpson (Edinburgh office manager from 1842 to 1878), will also be discussed more fully in later chapters.

The 1913 legal document charting the end of this relationship reveals a story about the firm that is different from the story in the 1879 documents. Reading through the balance sheets, one sees distinct signs of financial slowdown and decline, evinced by the final evaluation of the firm’s worth, which now stood at £67,783. As the balance sheet below shows, the firm’s fortunes had peaked and, while not down to the provincial levels of publishing solvency seen in its accounts in 1845, the firm was decidedly in a spiral of decline that would be temporarily halted only through the intervention of the First World War.

Copyright values had remained static over the period of William Blackwood III’s direction, and a substantial proportion of the excess capital/profit recorded in 1913 came from reserves built up from past years. The capital and profits sum divided among the firm’s beneficiaries (who now totaled four) was £17,249, half the equivalent sum dispensed in 1879. Once again, the division of the spoils reflected the shifting balance of power within the firm: William Blackwood’s estate was accorded 40 percent of the capital (£6,899), while David Storrar Meldrum, George William, and James Hugh Blackwood each received 20 percent of the total (£3,449). Once the debt to Meldrum had been discharged, partnership in the firm was devolved equally upon James Hugh and George William, an arrangement that continued until the 1940s.

The information to be gleaned from such legal documents forms a small part of the new material uncovered for this work. This book is concerned with the firm’s history before, during, and after the snapshot moments represented by the 1879 and 1913 inventories. More specifically, it focuses on the activities of the firm and its directors between 1860 and 1910, using unpublished archival material as well as information gained from a variety of published sources. It charts the firm’s history from a point of preeminence in mid-nineteenth-century British publishing and cultural history through to a marginalized position as publisher of popular works for colonial and special service interests audiences at the start of the twentieth century.

Reasons for focusing on this period have as much to do with what past studies have included as with what they have left out. Work on Blackwood’s has invariably focused either on its early history or on specific authors whose lives intersected with the Edinburgh firm. The literary history of the firm, and more particularly the careers of William Blackwood I, John Blackwood, and William Blackwood III, have provided background information for exploring the lives of such illustrious literary figures as John Wilson, Thomas DeQuincey, John Galt, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Joseph Conrad. Of less interest has been an analysis of the firm, its staff, and their publishing careers in unliterary contexts: of viewing them less as “handmaidens to literature” (a position adopted even in the firm’s “house” histories) and more as individuals working within volatile and competitive business arenas, whose energies were directed as much at publishing financially remunerative prose and nonfiction texts—biographies, memoirs, catechisms, atlases, school primers, dictionaries, and so on—as it was in fostering the careers of literary geniuses. Similarly, scholarly interest in the firm’s operations dissipates once it moves into the twilight years of the nineteenth century and away from the dominant literary culture of the period. Its retreat into niche marketing of popular novelists and a diet of colonialist-centered publications, and its complacency and seeming failure to adjust to changing tastes and markets, leaves little for those accustomed to the excitement of its earlier days. I hope to suggest otherwise in the chapters that follow.

The foundations of the firm were laid down by William Blackwood I at the turn of the nineteenth century, during a period of great change and development in the Scottish publishing and book trade. Blackwood and his contemporaries benefited from Edinburgh’s long-standing reputation and tradition as a center for publishing and printing. Such eighteenth-century pioneeers as Allan Ramsay (initiator of the circulating library concept), Gavin Hamilton, William Creech (publisher of Robert Burns, Henry Mackenzie, Adam Ferguson, and the philosopher Dugald Stewart), and William Smellie (creator and publisher of the Encyclopedia Britannica), had in their time established Edinburgh as a potential rival to London as a source of important, well-printed books. The general diffusion of ideas in the late eighteenth century during what has been characterized as the Scottish Enlightenment, was in great part due to the access Scottish authors had to this efficient and localized print network that could generate and disseminate their texts on a wide scale.

The landmark decision in the English courts in 1774 of the trial of Donaldson v. Becket, which “established the statutory basis of copyright,” as one study notes, and broke the stranglehold of London publishers on copyright and reprint privileges in Britain, led to a surge in Scottish publishing activity that built upon the successes of such Scots pioneers.4 During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, new figures emerged whose publishing innovations transformed Edinburgh into the second literary city in Britain, a role diminished only by the fallout and subsequent reorganization and consolidation that followed the English stock market crash of 1826. Firms were founded in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, and Cambridge by Scots whose lists were to dominate the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Such figures as Archibald Constable (publisher of Walter Scott), Daniel Macmillan, Robert and William Chambers, and Thomas Nelson followed similar career paths and were motivated by similar desires (if one is to believe later house histories) rising from modest circumstances to become major players in British publishing.

William Blackwood I was no exception. The founder of the firm and its monthly Blackwood’s Magazine was born in Edinburgh in 1776, the son of a silk merchant. At the age of fourteen he took his first steps into the book trade, beginning a sixyear apprenticeship with the Edinburgh booksellers Bell & Bradfute, located on Parliament Square in the heart of the city. Such a start was standard practice for those with an interest in selling and publishing books for a living. Blackwood’s near contemporary Archibald Constable, for example, began his career in 1788 apprenticed for six years to Edinburgh bookseller Peter Hill, former associate of William Creech and “highly respected,” as Constable recalled, “as possessing gentlemanly manners beyond most others of the trade.”5 Likewise, those who followed afterward did not neglect such early training: William Chambers endured five years as an Edinburgh bookseller’s apprentice before opening his own office near his brother Robert on Leith Walk in 1819, while the Arran-born Daniel Macmillan spent seven years apprenticed to an Irvine bookseller and bookbinder before moving on in 1831 to establish himself across the border in London and finally in Cambridge.

After completing his apprenticeship in 1796, William subsequently worked his way through other areas of the book trade, superintending the Glasgow branch of the Edinburgh publishers Mundell & Company for a year, serving as a partner with the antiquarian bookseller and auctioneer Robert Ross for another year, and completing his years of training in London in the antiquarian department of the booksellers Cuthill. In 1804 William returned to Edinburgh, opening a shop at 64 South Bridge, in front of the Old College quarters of the University of Edinburgh, where he specialized in selling and trading rare and antiquarian books. Its success allowed him the financial security to marry Janet Steuart in 1805, and they were to have nine children, including seven boys, of whom four were to play important roles in the future of the Blackwood firm. By 1810 William had begun branching out into publishing, producing historical and religious works for Scottish markets. Movement beyond the regional became possible in 1811, when he was appointed the Edinburgh agent for the publisher John Murray, becoming an important link in the distribution of the latest works from London. The connection also allowed Blackwood a foothold in the London market, and he was to build on this in subsequent years. A further link was made in 1813, when William became the agent for James and John Bal- lantyne, printers of Walter Scott’s novels. This arrangement paved the way in 1816 for Blackwood and John Murray to co-publish Walter Scott’s Tales of My Landlord, comprising the novels Old Mortality and Black Dwarf. Blackwood’s attempts to suggest improvements to Scott were not met with approval: “Tell him and his coadjutor,” Scott is reported to have written to the printer James Ballantyne, “that I belong to the Black Hussars of Literature, who neither give nor receive criticism.”6 Scott’s connection with the House of Blackwood was terminated soon afterward.

William decided to shift his business locations in 1816, taking the plunge into the New Town, a recent expansion by the city planners based on an architectural model and style designed by Robert Adams. Such a move, while it drew Blackwood away from the historical center of Edinburgh publishing around the High Street, allowed him more space for development. He established himself at 17 Princes Street and began concentrating his business on publishing. In April 1817 Blackwood started what was to become the flagship publication of his firm, having been approached earlier by James Cleghorn and Thomas Pringle to edit and produce a monthly journal under the title the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine. While general consensus has it that Blackwood envisaged creating a Tory alternative to his rival Archibald Constable’s Whig orientated quarterly, the Edinburgh Review, recent scholarship suggests that in fact the magazine was originally directed to challenge the monthly Scots Magazine, also published by Constable. As Maurice Milne notes, the rival to the Edinburgh Review at the time was more clearly John Murray’s Tory Quarterly Review, published in London. Murray’s Scottish counterpart Blackwood saw his opportunity to attack Constable’s dominant position in the periodical market from another angle, in this case moving in on the tottering Scots Magazine, whose sales and literary reputation were weak.7 He contracted Pringle and Cleghorn to become editors of the new journal, paying them £50 a month and agreeing to divide with them any profits accruing from sales.

The first few issues, however, were anything but exciting. Terminating Pringle and Cleghorn’s contracts after six months, Blackwood relaunched the journal in October 1817 as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, with editorial input and contributions from members of his literary coterie, including John Gibson Lockhart, John Wilson (“Christopher North”), and James Hogg. The first few issues, with their attacks on local and national literary figures, their brand of personalized satire, and their blend of anonymously authored literature, politics, fiction, and poetry, established the reputation of the Blackwood firm. Lawsuits brought against the firm by those attacked added welcome publicity, but it also frightened off some of Blackwood’s trade connections: both Baldwin, Cradock & Company (Blackwood’s London agents) and Oliver & Boyd (Blackwood’s printers) severed their connections with the firm based upon the furor caused by the new journal. Bringing home the first number of his relaunched journal, William is said to have presented it to his wife with the words “There’s ma Maga-zine.” In affectionate parody, the journal became known to future generations of contributors and readers as “Maga.” Maga’s rising reputation and sales swiftly eclipsed the Scots Magazine while at the same time attracting competition from London. The London Magazine, for example, was begun in 1820 specifically in response to the journal. Blackwood, however, consolidated his initial success by using the journal to attract a core of well-placed writers to the firm. These included the Irishmen William Maginn and Samuel Ferguson, and the Scots John Galt, Douglas M. Moir (“Delta”), and Thomas DeQuincey. The magazine also featured occasional reviews by Walter Scott, fiction by Samuel Warren and Susan Ferrier, and work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Blackwood also began attracting commissions to publish other journals, such as the Edinburgh Christian Monitor, begun in 1818, and various legal, medical, and theological texts.

Maga was used both as a showcase for new talent and as a method of attracting potential contributors to the firm’s book lists. A technique pioneered by Blackwood was the publication in book form of works first serialized in the magazine, predating Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley’s use of such marketing strategies by several years. Works featured in this way included Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818) and Inheritance (1824), John Galt’s Ayrshire Legatees (1820–21), and Douglas M. Moir’s Autobiography of Mansie Wauch (1824–28). At other times Maga was used to drum up interest in texts not yet realized, as in the sly case of John Gibson Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to His Kinfolk (1819). In February 1819 there appeared in Maga a positive notice of this book, a collection of letters supposedly written by a Welsh doctor and published in Aberystwyth. The following month a Maga review heaped further praise upon it, going on to attack booksellers who had not yet stocked up on this virtuoso text. Needless to say, the work did not exist—not, that is, until it was brought out shortly afterward by Blackwood as a “second” (that is, first) edition due to “popular demand.” Such a jeu d’esprit, while coming close to barefaced self-promotion, was an aspect of early experimentation in marketing by the firm that was refined in future years by other Blackwood directors.

Throughout the 1820s and early 1830s, Blackwood turned his small firm into a thriving concern, becoming one of the leading Scottish publishers of the period. His success allowed him to expand and move premises to 45 George Street in 1830. But his was still a firm yet to make the transition from regional dominance to national preeminence. On his death in 1834, his sons Alexander and Robert Blackwood took control of the business, with the aim of developing the national reach and reputation of their book lists and publications. Alexander concerned himself with the magazine and publishing and editorial matters. Throughout his short tenure, however, he was dogged with ill health, suffering from bouts of asthma and tuberculosis, complications from the latter of which were to kill him in March 1845. Robert concentrated on the firm’s financial arrangements. One of Robert’s legacies was the establishment of a London office in 17 Pall Mall in 1840, which he coordinated and then set the young John Blackwood to managing. John Blackwood’s entrance into the family business heralded a major shift in the fortunes of the firm. John Blackwood, the sixth son of William, was born on 7 December 1818 in Edinburgh. Educated in Edinburgh, on graduation from the University of Edinburgh in 1835, he undertook a three-year tour of continental Europe, spending much time in France and Germany. On his return in 1838, he followed family tradition by beginning an apprenticeship in the trade, in this case spending two years with the London publishers George Whitaker & Company. On the opening of the Blackwood office in London in December 1840, John was made a partner of the firm and London office manager. Over the next five years he established the firm’s presence in the capital, making close personal connections with prominent authors (William Thackeray, Laurence Lockhart, Edward Bulwer-Lytton), politicians (Lord John Manners, Lord John Russell), and editors (John Delane, editor of the Times). Delane, with whom John shared lodgings for several years, was to prove an important contact. Through him Blackwood recruited a core group of contributors to Maga and the firm’s lists, including Generals Edward Bruce and William Hamley, Frederick Hardman (French correspondent for The Times), George Finlay (Greek correspondent for The Times), and Laurence Oliphant, explorer and writer. These contacts in turn led to other sources, forming a vital cultural and information network for the firm.

In October 1845, seven months after Alexander Blackwood’s death, when it was clear that Robert could no longer both edit the magazine and run the Edinburgh office all at once, John Blackwood returned to Edinburgh to take over as editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, leaving Joseph Munt Langford to become London office manager. It was a defining moment for the young Blackwood that October when his older brother Robert, as John was to recall years later, “with a kindness and confidence which often fills me with wonder and always with gratitude, handed over the chief conduct of The Magazine to me.”8 He set about discharging his responsibilities with enthusiasm and vigor.

The firm moved in 1850 to larger London offices in Paternoster Row, the burgeoning center of publishing activity in the city. In 1852, on the death of Robert Blackwood, John assumed full control of the firm, working in partnership with his brother Major William Blackwood II, who had returned from India in 1848 to help manage financial matters. Following William Blackwood II’s death from pneumonia in 1861, the firm was reorganized, and William’s son William Blackwood III, who had entered the family business in 1857, was elevated to co-partner. John also established a four-strong managerial team, with the participation of William, London Office Manager Joseph Munt Langford, and the Edinburgh Office Manager George Simpson. Between them, they strengthened the firm’s lists, scouted for new publishing opportunities, and established Maga at the forefront of mid- Victorian literary production.

Under John Blackwood’s energetic guidance, the firm experienced unprecedented growth and success. On the literary side, publishing successes included works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Lever, Charles Reade, Richard D. Blackmore, Margaret Oliphant, George Henry Lewes, and all but one of George Eliot’s novels. Anthony Trollope, seeking a place for experimental work, anonymously serialized Nina Balatka (1867) and Linda Tressel (1868) in Blackwood’s Magazine, then authorized their reprints. Blackwood paid £450 for the copyright of each but failed to realize profit from either. It did not prevent Trollope’s family from returning to Blackwood’s in 1882 to publish Trollope’s autobiography. John Blackwood also strengthened the firm’s identification with accounts of travel and exploration. James Augustus Grant’s and John Hanning Speke’s narratives of searching for the Nile river source in Africa, for example (the latter of which will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter), were best-sellers for the firm in 1864 and 1865. Between 1852 and 1879 the firm published both in Blackwood’s Magazine and as separate publications work by Frederick Hardman on Africa, Richard Burton on India and East Africa, Sir Henry Brackenbury on the Ashanti Wars in South Africa, Sir Garnet Wolseley on expeditions in Canada and Egypt, and Laurence Oliphant on Japan and the Crimea.

On John Blackwood’s death in 1879, the task of running the firm devolved to William Blackwood III. Over the next two decades the firm drifted, maintaining a holding pattern of print production that kept itself focused on areas of known profitability. Colonial memoirs, biographies, popular fiction, and endless reprints of George Eliot works in proven formats proved unchallenging in nature but profitable in execution. The entrance of David Storrar Meldrum as literary advisor in 1894, however, while not necessarily increasing the firm’s profit margins, did go some way toward reviving the firm’s literary lists. His literary judgment influenced William’s decision to publish Stephen Crane, Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin, John Buchan, and Jack London. More significant, it was Meldrum who led Blackwood to encourage and publish Joseph Conrad. Blackwood’s Magazine was to feature some of Conrad’s best-known works, including Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.

In 1903 Meldrum, as noted earlier, was made a partner of the firm, sharing responsibilities with William’s nephews James Hugh and George Blackwood. By 1910William had handed over much of the daily management to his nephews, due to ill health. Internal politics caused Meldrum to leave to become editor of The Morning Post. William died in 1912, leaving a diminished firm in his wake. Ironically, it would take a world war to raise the firm’s fortunes once more to levels commensurate with those enjoyed under John Blackwood.

Given the richness of company documents contained within the archives of the National Library of Scotland, it is surprising how few attempts have been made to discuss the firm’s general history beyond the 1880s, to view its role in early twentieth-century literature and business markets, and to establish its place in Victorian and Edwardian British cultural history. Only two works in the past century have been published regarding the firm’s general publishing endeavours, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Porter’s three-volume study in 1897–98, and Frank Tredrey’s house history in 1954. Both suffer from the problems inherent in commissioned works: as hagiographical commemorations of the firm’s activities, controversial incidents are glossed over, blame is shifted, and, in some cases, business matters and letter contents are censored and suppressed. Ultimately, both fail to present a balanced account of the sometimes rocky relationship between the firm, its published authors, and the publishing industry at large. And while both studies benefited from access to confidential papers and correspondence, they have since been superseded by the amount of information and records on the firm, unknown or lost at the time, that have accumulated and been made available as the Blackwood Papers at the National Library of Scotland.

Working through these papers makes one aware of the vast array of material that has remained overlooked or untouched regarding the firm’s role in late Victorian and Edwardian publishing, political, and cultural history. This is perhaps a natural by-product of the manner in which the archives have been used; much of the work done on the Blackwood firm has centered on investigating individual relationships with authors, either as part of larger life studies or in connection with particular literary circles. Such author-centered focus is inevitable, given the sheer amount of primary material available on the firm. Seldom discussed is the manner in which such relations fit in with the firm’s general underlying aesthetic and economic considerations of the literary marketplace. Likewise, little attention is paid to the history of the firm after its links with Joseph Conrad at the turn of the twentieth century, in part because of the universal understanding that by then the firm had begun its long slide into cultural obscurity.

The decay in the firm’s fortunes after the successful directorship of John Blackwood can be partly ascribed to the firm’s strengthened identification from 1880 onward with entrenched conservative viewpoints on literature, society, the military, and the British Empire. Viewed in such a context, the firm’s rejection of unorthodox, “liberal” authors, such as George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and Thomas Hardy, can be seen as a rejection of writers who did not fit in with the firm’s prevailing ideological and literary stance, a stance that was increasingly at odds with concurrent shifts and changes in British politics and literary and aesthetic concerns.

Yet these decisions that inform editorial and business policy at 45 George Street in Edinburgh and 37 Paternoster Row in London between 1860 and 1910 make little sense unless read within the context of the tumultuous and radical changes simultaneously occurring in the British literary marketplace. As Simon Eliot points out in his survey of trends in British publishing from 1800 to 1919, major technological advances occurred in the 1880s and 1890s with an expansion in paper production and the development of higher printing capacity utilizing large, web-fed rotaries and newly developed hot-metal typesetting machines.9 Other changes included the rapid development of a wide variety of cheap publishing formats and reprints following the decline and collapse of the three-decker novel in 1894; the rapid growth of public libraries; the development of the new journalism and the mass circulation daily papers of the 1890s; the expansion of overseas syndication markets in the Empire, North America, and Europe, particularly after the passing of international copyright agreements (the Berne Convention of 1887) and less-comprehensive agreements in the United States (the Chace Act of 1891); the creation of controlled and stable book pricing through the Net Book Agreement in 1899; and the rise of new publishing firms, such as Methuen and Chatto & Windus, labeled by N. N. Feltes as “entrepreneurial” publishers, utilizing publishing practices to challenge and compete against older, more traditional “list” publishers, such as Blackwood’s, Bentley, Smith & Elder, and John Murray.10 The establishment of associations to represent the professional interests of various sectors of the trade, such as the Society of Authors in 1884, the Booksellers Association in 1895, and the Publishers Association in 1896, also illustrated how far the business of bookselling, publishing, and literary authorship had come since the eighteenth century, when a bookseller, acting also a publisher, could “buy most Books for a Bottle and a fowl.”11 Literary production was no longer, if ever it had been, the mythologized, casual, aesthetically informed pursuit of dedicated “gentlemen” and “gentlewomen,” but had become part of a highly organized and commercial system.

Thus, at the turn of the century, literary publishing was in flux, caught in the contradiction and conflict between, on the one hand, a perceived reliance on publishing “flair,” aesthetic judgment (“good” literature that would nevertheless sell well), and predictable publishing patterns, prices, and book formats (exemplified by the serialized novel in literary magazines then being issued as a standard threevolume first edition followed by a cheaper 1 volume reprint), and, on the other hand, new market forces, rewarding entrepreneurial skills and emphasizing economic competitiveness, with an accompanying cross-merchandising of literary works in a variety of cheaper book formats and publication outlets (serialization in literary magazines and the popular press, syndication in colonial and overseas markets, sales to newly developing film and radio industries). The bewildering range of new outlets for marketing literary property was often beyond the average capacity of publishers used to negotiating on relatively uncomplicated publishing terms.

Whereas in the 1860s most deals negotiated by John Blackwood were fairly uncomplicated, involving first edition, reprint, and possibly serialized periodical rights, by the turn of the century matters were becoming more complicated for his successor William Blackwood III. The insertion of the literary agent as negotiator of literary property became an added factor within the publishing arena, as did the emergence of foreign markets and foreign rights as major sources of income. Such issues play their part in the evolving story of the Blackwood firm during the fifty years chronicled in this study.

Lest this book seem to be solely about facts and figures, dry-as-dust statistics, and rigid economic notations, it is important to note that one of the main themes of this survey is to place the firm, its books, and its authors within appropriate social and cultural contexts. This is not a work concerned solely with the processes of publishing and print production, but rather an attempt to follow through on the implications of studying book history in the wake of recent, dynamic methods of theoretical analysis. Robert Darnton’s overworked “communication circuit,” first mooted in 1984 and since modified by others, brought into Anglo-American book history circles a theoretical stance borrowed from social science models, and is one example of informed and alternative ways of discussing textual production that reach beyond mere bibliographical categorizations and statistical enumeration. It is an often unobserved point that this recent move toward more complex analyses of the modes of production, dissemination, and reception of texts is not confined to book history alone. Cultural materialism, the study of social transactions represented in the complex and interweaving connections between producers and consumers of commodities in an industrialized society, is now a common theme explored by critics in cultural studies, media studies, history, literary studies, and the social sciences, among others. It can be found in sociology in Pierre Bourdieu’s articulation of literary “fields” as common social, intellectual, and ideological arenas linking producers (publishers, editors, and authors) to products (books, periodical publications, literary works), or in the anthropologist Benedict Anderson’s important articulation of print as an important form through which “imagined communities” construct common national identities. Turn to literary studies and we find an allied articulation by Stanley Fish of the readers of these products, “interpretive communities” joined through common understanding and interpretations of texts, while media studies has leaned heavily on variations of Jürgen Habermas’s articulation of the “public sphere” as the major arena for the construction of public opinion. The consensus is quite clear: the process of producing print for public consumption, whether books or journal, newspaper or periodical publications, can no longer be viewed simply as a linear path from producer (author) to disseminator (editor, publisher, printer, bookseller) to consumer (reader). Rather, as Stuart Hall notes in a now classic study of the popular press, such textual productions are “products of a social transaction between producers and readers,” whereby “successful communication in this field depends to some degree on a process of mutual confirmation between those who produce and those who consume.”

The implications of such a statement for print-culture analysis has been followed through by such critics as Richard Ohmann and Matthew Schneirov, who have examined the communities of authors, editors, and readers of specific nineteenth-century U.S. journals, with the aim of illustrating how such cultural commodities can be read as “a product of human action or agency within certain structural contexts and as a cultural form or ‘object.’”

It is all part of a healthy interdisciplinarity that seeks a closer understanding of the role of culture and society in the shaping of print. As one media studies critic suggests, urging his colleagues to pay closer attention to the intersections between cultural materialism, literary theory, and media culture, “One should not, however, stop at the borders of intertextuality, but should move from the text to its context, to the culture and society that constitutes the text and in which it should be read and interpreted.”14 Such is the theme of several “micro-chapters” in this study, relating the manner in which social and cultural factors feed into the process of production, dissemination, and reception of individual works. In the case of Charles Reade and his novel A Woman Hater, for example, contemporary battles over the issue of women’s rights to medical education are reflected in similar editorial battles over the novel’s contents. Likewise, John Hill Burton’s crucial role as unacknowledged ghostwriter of the travel diaries of the African explorer John Hanning Speke illustrates the manner in which editorial decisions and cultural assumptions and judgments inserted during the production process can substantially alter textual meanings and textual production. More important, it illustrates how a literarily inarticulate traveler, through the services of an unacknowledged “ghostwriter,” was “reinvented” as an articulate, saleable commodity, with the purpose not only of safeguarding a commercial investment but also of promulgating certain views and conceptions about the role of the European explorer in the African landscape. Both these chapters illustrate the interplay of economic, social, and ideological forces in the production of texts, the process of cultural colonization and the dissemination of its conclusions in Victorian society, and the general and intentional exclusion of women from the power structures involved in these processes and productions.

At the same time, though, I offer a macroscopic view, illustrating how these individual efforts fit within larger cultural and “house” contexts, considering how the firm set about creating a distinctive identity for itself within national and international boundaries, and noting how authors and readers were subsequently invited into this invisible Blackwoodian “community” or “ecumene.” To return to Stuart Hall’s statement on texts as products of a social transaction between producers and readers, one sees this reflected in the firm’s determination to foster unique “communities” of readers and authors at various stages in its history. The House of Blackwood, the title of the 1954 official history of the firm, illustrates several unspoken assumptions about this issue of how the firm saw itself as a creator of unique intellectual, social, and work communities and spaces. The House functioned as a tightly run, male-dominated space, yet also suggested itself to prospective authors, both male and female, as an open, welcoming, and inclusive club of sorts.

It was run on paternalistic lines, with clearly defined roles, structures of command, and subdivisions of tasks and space one might consider typical of any proper nineteenth-century bourgeois household. For example, something not often noted is how the firm’s headquarters in Edinburgh was divided spatially in a manner that reflected hierarchies of value. Following the move in 1830 to premises on 45 George Street, the firm relocated its printing works to a large building on Thistle Street immediately behind its George Street premise. A small lane separated these two sections of the firm, and edited works for printing would be walked across this divide to the printing office, to be wheeled back in barrows as finished products for display and sale in the firm’s imposing shop front framing the George Street entrance.

The firm’s official house histories contain clear expressions of value and worth regarding these spaces: between areas of production and dissemination; between the loud, crowded, and busy spaces where print was cast, sheets printed, and folios bound, and the quiet, bay-windowed room where the finished products were displayed and sold. Although the printing office is not often glimpsed in these formulaic pronouncements of publishing reminiscence, it served as an important if unacknowledged arena where print was treated not as an individualized, aesthetic product but as part of a mechanized production process where individual texts were just one of many print runs to be completed within a workday. It is a decidedly unaesthetic aspect of publishing and literary production that runs against the grain of many declarations of the aesthetic nature and purpose of print production that are so evident in memoirs of former practitioners in the field, and most particularly in the Blackwood house histories.

But if the printing office was viewed as the equivalent of the “tradesman” or back entrance of a venerable publishing house, a needed if less-respectable part of the business, the editorial office was decidedly more esteemed: the glamorous front parlor. Indeed, at times it is the House itself. Admittedly, it was not common for firms to have both the printing and the publishing arms of the business within easy walking distance of each other; in fact, firms often had to subcontract the dirty business of actual print production to other specialist printing firms. Blackwood’s, however, contained within its House all the necessary elements of a solid book-trading firm, including printing works, editorial offices, and sales outlets (that is, shopfronts in which to display and offer the latest wares). Nevertheless, the editorial side of the firm was very much at the forefront of the House of Blackwood self-image. It represented a specific social space as well, an invisible arena that accommodated shifting bands of contributors and authors who were encouraged to meet and mingle, imbibe a common “culture,” and share common, unspoken assumptions about their identities within this large, allembracing Blackwoodian ecumene. And, as one finds when working through the Blackwood archives, the most fascinating details of this ecumene at work are often discovered only when one shifts focus away from the micro-details of letters between the Blackwoods and an individual author toward the range of and ranges across archival material to see how other “Blackwoodian” contributors were drawn into debating about, commenting on, and in many cases (as, for example, in the recasting of John Hanning Speke’s work) actively shaping texts emerging under the firm’s imprint, either as book publications or as part of the firm’s monthly journal, Blackwood’s Magazine.

How, then, does one reconcile the opposition between the assumed hierarchies of value with respect to the function and activities of a firm, and the realities encountered when analyzing the work space and patterns of such places? A particularly intriguing answer may be found by taking up points developed in Janice Radway’s analysis of the workings of the U.S. Book-of-the-Month Club from the 1920s onward. Noting how the firm created a unique identity and role for itself as a mediator, arbiter, and filter of literary production by creating an internal panel of “expert” judges to read texts for subsequent recommendation and sale to club members, she makes a telling point about their evaluative methods: “The key moves in the evaluative practices of the Book-of-the-Month-Club judges,” Radway notes, “was not judgment at all, but rather the activity of categorization, that of sorting onto different planes.”15 Viewing the world of print in this way, not as an organic, uniform, hierarchically organized space but as “a series of discontinuous, discrete, noncongruent worlds,” or planes, Radway continues, establishes a link between producer (author) and consumer (reader) whereby the disseminator, in this case the U.S.-originated Book-of-the-Month Club, with its built-in filters of judges categorizing titles rather than providing aesthetic judgments of books, becomes less an arbiter of worth and more a literary manager of textual production.16 And in many cases, different arenas or planes of textual production, whether it be how-to manuals, atlases, science textbooks, biographies, or novels, quite openly operate on differing planes of meaning, meeting the needs of different audiences with discrete and technically distinct codes, structures, and formats. The Book-of-the-Month Club, begun as a purely commercial proposition, established an overarching identity for itself as a nonjudgmental yet trusted provider of quality texts in a variety of subject areas, operating simultaneously on different textual planes and in various arenas. This principle has potential for a review of the manner in which publishing houses in general, and the House of Blackwood in particular, can be seen to operate. On the one hand, one sees in perusing the entirety of the firm’s lists—the manuals of zoology as well as the consciously literary novels—that contained within such publication lists are separate layers, levels, and planes of textual production and operations. Rules for engaging with such texts change and shift with each sector under consideration. Yet the fact that most analysis of publishing production has focused on the literary and aesthetic planes of textual production has resulted in obscuring the manner in which such levels coexist simultaneously with less-recognized or less-valued printed material. Thus the print works, ironically, can be seen as democratized spaces where such planes become indistinguishable, coexisting in an unhierarchized fashion.

Similarly, as they are being produced in unhierarchized yet united fashion in the print room (using the same machinery operated by the same groupings of individuals), the products of these differing planes are subsequently categorized (fiction, biography, nonfiction, reference) and then sold and marketed under a unified “house” imprint that attempts to impose an overarching identity on products emanating from this source. Publishers act as filters and managers of literary production in a complex network of activity between production, dissemination, and consumption. Criteria used and judgments made by them shift according to areas evaluated, but what is clear when one views a publishing firm like Blackwood’s holistically is that the goals remain the same: to maintain a continual flow of products that on the average are commercially viable and financially successful.

One might argue that this concept of the plane could just as well mean that there would be different genres, markets, and marketing strategies for selling books. But I suggest that it extends further back, beyond target audiences and recipients of textual production, to encompass the producers and disseminators of such works, for each plane within a publishing house might have its own distinct identity and core personnel whose value is conceived in different form from other planes of operation. Thus assessments and evaluations of reference works and their authors’ abilities might revolve around questions of authority and expertise (Is the author sufficiently knowledgeable to discuss the topic? Is the work authoritative in coverage?), whereas evaluations in the plane of literary fiction might revolve around questions of aesthetics and taste (Is the work “literary enough”? Does this author conform to perceived standards of “taste”?). Contained within this scenario is the editorial prerogative to mold potential material into a form that suits the codes and structures expected in these planes. It is in these points of tension and contact that we can see most clearly the formation of a “house identity” and establish the manner in which such an identity is imposed upon texts in different arenas. Likewise, as the chapters on Reade, Speke, and Oliphant show, such moments of production have much to say about the intersection of aesthetic values and commercial interests, about the battles between authorial intention and editorial intervention. Some of the questions that are dealt with in subsequent chapters have come from looking at the troubled productions of these and other works, questions such as: What is an ideal “Blackwoodian” text within differing genres and planes? How does the firm set about ensuring complicity and acceptance of such standards? And do these individual and differing planes ultimately combine to create a unique and identifiable “house” identity?

The following chapters suggest some answers to these questions.

© 2002 Penn State University