The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 3: Ambition and Industry 1800-1880

THE EDINBURGH H I S T O RY of THE BOOK in SCOTLAND Volume 3 AMBITION AND INDUSTRY 1800–1880 Edited by Bill Bell THE...

Author: Bill Bell

59 downloads 1219 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

THE EDINBURGH

H I S T O RY of

THE BOOK in SCOTLAND

Volume 3 AMBITION AND INDUSTRY 1800–1880 Edited by Bill Bell

THE EDINBURGH HISTORY OF THE BOOK IN SCOTLAND General Editor: Bill Bell University of Edinburgh WHETHER in the creation of early manuscripts, in the formation of libraries, through ﬁne printing, or the development of mass media, Scotland’s contributions to the history of the book, both within the nation and beyond its boundaries, have been remarkable. Published in four volumes, The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland brings together the work of leading scholars in the ﬁeld in order to investigate the history of the Scottish book from earliest times to the present. Volume 1: From the Earliest Times to 1707 Editors: Alastair Mann and Sally Mapstone Volume 2: Enlightenment and Expansion 1707–1800 Editors: Stephen Brown and Warren McDougall Volume 3: Ambition and Industry 1800–80 Editor: Bill Bell Volume 4: Professionalism and Diversity 1880–2000 Editors: David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery

ADVISORY BOARD

John Barnard, University of Leeds Jonquil Beavan, University of Edinburgh Iain Gordon Brown, National Library of Scotland Patricia Fleming, University of Toronto Douglas Gi≠ord, University of Glasgow Christopher Harvie, University of Tübingen Lotte Hellinga, British Library John Hench, American Antiquarian Society Brian Hillyard, National Library of Scotland Wallace Kirsop, Monash University Alasdair MacDonald, University of Groningen Bertrum MacDonald, Dalhousie University Keith Maslen, University of Otago Jane Millgate, University of Toronto Michael Moss, Glasgow University Library John Sutherland, University College, London I. R. Willison, University of London

T HE E DINBURGH H ISTORY OF THE B OOK IN S COTLAND Volume 3 Ambition and Industry 1800–80

EDITED BY BILL BELL

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

© in this edition, Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Copyright in the individual contributions is retained by the authors. Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 11/13 Miller Text by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 1779 1 (hardback)

The right of the contributors to be identiﬁed as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

CONTENTS

Figures Tables Abbreviations Acknowledgements Chronology

viii xi xiii xvi xix

Introduction

1 I. PRODUCTION

Chapter One

The Organisation of the Trade

Papermaking Typefounding Printing Illustration Binding

John Morris John Morris Trevor Howard-Hill John Scally John Morris

17 26 32 49 64

II. PUBLISHING, DISTRIBUTION AND READING Chapter Two

Publishing

Publishing 1800–30 1825–6: Years of Crisis? Publishing 1830–80 Gaelic Printing and Publishing

Peter Garside Simon Eliot David Finkelstein Donald E. Meek

79 91 96 107

Chapter Three Distribution and Reading Bookselling The Railways

Iain Beavan Stephen Colclough

123 141

vi

edinburgh history of the book in scotland Gaelic Communities and the Use of Texts Reading Libraries

Donald E. Meek Jonathan Rose John Crawford

153 173 189

III. MARKETS AND GENRES Chapter Four

Literature in the Marketplace

The Rise of the Scottish Literary Market Authorship: Six Case Studies Walter Scott and the Management of Copyright Waverley and the National Fiction Revolution John MacLean, the Gaelic Bard Thomas Carlyle and the Lure of London Margaret Oliphant and the Profession of Writing Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pursuit of Fame The Making of a Scottish Literary Canon Chapter Five

203

Jane Millgate

212

Peter Garside Donald E. Meek and Rob Dunbar

222 232

Ian Campbell

240

Zsuzsanna Varga

247

Jenni Calder

256

Cairns Craig

266

The Diversity of Print

Antiquarianism Religion Science Reference Maps Education Printing for Everyday Life Chapter Six

Peter Garside

Padmini Ray Murray Padmini Ray Murray Aileen Fyfe Padmini Ray Murray Diana Webster Padmini Ray Murray Gen Harrison

278 287 296 304 313 324 333

Periodicals and Newspapers

The Age of the Periodical Reviews and Monthlies The Popular ‘Weeklies’ Newspapers

Bill Bell Joanne Shattock Laurel Brake Padmini Ray Murray

340 343 358 370

contents

vii

IV. BEYOND SCOTLAND Chapter Seven Greater Britain and Ireland Agencies and Joint Ventures The London Scots Wales Ireland

Ross Alloway Robin Myers Philip Henry Jones Charles Benson

385 396 408 418

Chapter Eight Bookseller to the World Continental Europe North America India The Paciﬁc Appendix A: Personnel in the Print and Allied Trades Appendix B: Statistical Evidence for the 1825–6 Crisis Contributors Bibliography Index

Sharon Brown and Barbara Scha≠ Fiona Black Graham Shaw Wallace Kirsop

430 442 455 465

Ross Alloway

476

Simon Eliot

486 494 499 525

FIGURES

Chapter 1 1.1 Fourdrinier Papermaking Machine, NMS 1.2 Type Specimen, NLS 1.3 Common Wooden Press, 1800s 1.4 Columbian Press, 1820s 1.5 Nelson Rotary Press, 1850 1.6 Walter Press, 1870s 1.7 Composing Room, NLS 1.8 Wood Engraving, 1800 1.9 Copper-plate Engraving, 1815 1.10 Steel Engraving, 1840, NLS 1.11 Photomechanical Printing, 1845, NLS 1.12 Forging Tools, Bank of Scotland 1.13 Wheel Binding, 1802, NLS 1.14 Mauchline Binding, 1857, EUL Chapter 2 2.1 Archibald Constable 2.2 Premises of Blackwood & Sons, Royal Commission on Historical and Ancient Monuments of Scotland 2.3 Parkside Works, SAPPHIRE 2.4 Adam Black, NLS 2.5 William Chambers, NLS 2.6 Thomas Boyd, Pearson Education 2.7 Thomas Clark, NLS 2.8 An t-Oranaiche, 1879

21 28 38 38 39 39 47 52 54 56 60 62 68 72 81 89 98 100 100 101 101 119

figures Chapter 3 3.1 Penicuik Bookshop, Midlothian County Library Service 3.2 Travellers’ Log Book, NLS 3.3 William ‘Hawkie’ Cameron, NLS 3.4 Newspaper Boy, NLS 3.5 Sàr-Obair nam Bàrd Gaëlach, D. Meek 3.6 Gaelic Notebook, D. Meek 3.7 Edinburgh Interior, NLS 3.8 11th Duke of Hamilton, Lennoxlove House 3.9 Hugh Miller, Getty Images 3.10 Lady Hawarden’s daughter, Victoria and Albert Museum 3.11 Diary of Robert Hamilton, Aberdeen University Historic Collections 3.12 Leadhills Book Plate, Leadhills Mining Museum 3.13 Leadhills Reading Room, Leadhills Mining Museum 3.14 Itinerating Library, East Lothian Museums Service Ladies’ Edinburgh Debating Society, Edinburgh Central 3.15 Library Chapter 4 4.1 The Lady of the Lake, 1810, NLS 4.2 Letter from Constable to Scott, EUL 4.3 Waverley Frontispiece, NLS 4.4 Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach, D. Meek 4.5 Proofs of Carlyle’s Frederick the Great 4.6 Margaret Oliphant, NLS 4.7 Young Folks, NLS 4.8 William McGonagall, Dundee Public Library Chapter 5 5.1 Aberdeen Breviary, Bannatyne Edition, EUL 5.2 Aberdeen Breviary, Advertisement, EUL 5.3 Broadside, Heather Jock, NLS 5.4 Broadside, Hieroglyphic Love Letter, NLS 5.5 Anatomical Male Figure, Royal College of Surgeons 5.6 Maver’s Genuine Scottish Melodies, 1866, EUL 5.7 Thomson’s Atlas of Scotland, 1823, NLS Bartholomew’s Reduced Ordnance Maps of Scotland, 5.8 1883, NLS 5.9 Embossed Printing for the Blind, 1834, NLS

ix 125 131 134 149 157 169 182 183 184 185 186 191 191 195 198 207 221 228 233 245 253 262 264 283 283 286 286 303 311 314 320 322

x

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13

Hornbook, Lilly Library, Indiana University Nineteenth-century Schoolroom, NLS Scotch Whisky Label Playbill, Theatre Royal, 1819, NLS

325 325 331 339

Chapter 6 6.1 Edinburgh Review, 1802, W. Zachs 6.2 Chambers’s Journal, 1854, NLS 6.3 The Scotsman, 1817, NLS

345 361 374

Chapter 7 7.1 The Philosophy of Human Nature, 1815, NLS 7.2 Four o’clock Friends, NLS 7.3 Poems of Ossian, 1807, NLS 7.4 Cenion llenyddiaeth Gymreig, NLS 7.5 The Great Unknown, 1825, Trinity College, Dublin

387 397 400 413 425

Chapter 8 8.1 Gri∞n’s Bookshop, Glasgow University Library 8.2 Gaelic Bible Binding, Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Archives 8.3 Gaelic Bible Inscription, Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Archives 8.4 Mohawk Gospel of John, 1805, GUL 8.5 George Russell’s Bookcase, State Library of Victoria 8.6 Janet Lawrie, State Library of South Australia

432 451 451 454 467 474

TABLES

Chapter 2 2.1 Edinburgh titles, 1821–31 2.2 Edinburgh titles by Dewey classiﬁcation 2.3 Turnover at John Menzies, Edinburgh, 1840–56 2.4 John Menzies, total turnover and turnover at the stalls, 1858–62 2.5 John Menzies & Co., total turnover 1867–78

150 151

Chapter 6 6.1 Newspaper returns 1851–53

379

Chapter 7 7.1 Unbound books imported from Scotland to Belfast, Cork and Dublin 7.2 Value of bound books imported from Scotland to Belfast, Cork and Dublin Appendix A 9.1 Employee numbers in the print and allied trades in Scotland, 1841–1901 9.2 Growth of the print and allied trades in Scotland, 1841–1901 9.3 Per cent of British workforce in the print and allied trades 9.4 Comparison of trade labour in London and Scottish counties, 1851–1901 9.5 Per cent increase of males and females in the Scottish trades, 1841–1901

94 94 145

423 423

479 479 480 480 481

xii

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

9.6

Comparative presence of males and females in the Scottish trades, 1841–1901 481 Number of employees in the trades, Edinburgh, Lanark, and Aberdeen, 1861 482 Average employment in the trades by county, 1841–1901 484 Weekly wages for compositors 485 Weekly working hours for compositors 485

9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10

Appendix B 10.1 Title production, 1824–31 10.2 Share of overall title production 10.3 Edinburgh imprints, 1824–8 10.4 COPAC Edinburgh titles, 1821–31 10.5 Edinburgh and London titles by Dewey classiﬁcation

487 488 489 491 492

ABBREVIATIONS

ACB ACP ADB B&Ba B&Bb BCP BCUC BFBS BL BOSLIT BP CBTLI CEJ CROB DAB DCB DLB DTPS EBS ECL ECS EGSS EIS EJB EJC

A. & C. Black Papers, National Library of Scotland Archibald Constable Papers, National Library of Scotland Australian Dictionary of Biography Bell & Bradfute Papers, Edinburgh City Archives Bell & Bradfute Papers, National Library of Scotland Bannatyne Club Papers, Edinburgh University Library Bookbinders’ Consolidated Union Typographic Circular British and Foreign Bible Society British Library Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation Blackwood Papers, National Library of Scotland Canadian Book Trade and Library Index Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal Caernarfonshire Record Office Bulletin Dictionary of American Biography Dictionary of Canadian Biography Dictionary of Literary Biography Dublin Typographical Provident Society Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society, National Library of Scotland Edinburgh Central Library Edinburgh Compositors’ Society, Edinburgh Central Library Edinburgh Gaelic School Society Educational Institute of Scotland Edinburgh Union Society of Journeymen Bookbinders, National Library of Scotland Edinburgh Journeymen Compositors

xiv

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

EPD ETS EUL GBA GBPA GPBS GTS GUL IOR JMeA JMuA KFA KFP KPS LA MCP NA NAS NBR NLS NLW NMS NP NSA NSARM NSTC O&B ODNB OSA PML PO PP RCP RCS RUL SBTI SCR

Edinburgh, Perth and Dundee Railway Edinburgh Typographical Society, National Library of Scotland Edinburgh University Library Glasgow Business Archives Glasgow Booksellers’ Protection Association, Mitchell Library, Glasgow Glasgow Printers’ and Bookbinders’ Society, Mitchell Library, Glasgow Glasgow Typographical Society, Strathclyde University Glasgow University Library India O∞ce Records, London John Menzies Archive, Edinburgh John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland Kirkcaldy Free Church Archives Kidston Family Papers, Nova Scotia Archives Kildare Place Society, Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin Longman Archive, Reading University Library Maitland Club Papers, National Library of Scotland National Archives, Kew National Archives of Scotland North British Railway National Library of Scotland National Library of Wales National Museums of Scotland Neilson Papers, Libraries and Archives Canada New Statistical Account Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management, Halifax Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue Oliver & Boyd Papers, National Library of Scotland Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Old Statistical Account Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York Post Office Directory Parliamentary Papers Robert Cadell Papers, National Library of Scotland Records of the Commissioners of Supply, Kirkcudbright, Ewart Library, Dumfries Reading University Library Scottish Book Trade Index Scottish Central Railway

abbreviations SDUK SGUC SIGS SN SNER SPCK SPRAT SRB SSBA SSGC SSPCK STA STC TCEC TS-G USC VSL WD WHS WIVP WRM

xv

Society for the Di≠usion of Useful Knowledge Scottish Gaelic Union Catalogue Society for the Introduction of Gaelic Schools Saunders’s Newsletter Scottish North Eastern Railway Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge Scottish Printing Archival Trust South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography Scottish School Book Association Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools Scottish Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge Scottish Typographical Association Scottish Typographical Circular Thomas Charles Edwards Collection, National Library of Wales Typographia Scoto-Gadelica United States Census State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals W. H. Smith Archive, Swindon Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals W. R. McDonald Papers, Aberdeen University Library

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume would not have been possible without the generosity of a number of people and organisations. We are particularly grateful to the members of the project’s Advisory Board who provided helpful advice in the early stages of the book’s planning. The sta≠ of Edinburgh University Library and the National Library of Scotland have dealt with our many requests over the years with courtesy and e∞ciency. Without the sponsorship of both institutions, many of the illustrations in this volume would not have been possible. We are additionally indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, both of which provided major research grants. Additional funding was provided by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh Development Trust. For granting permission for the use of illustrations we are pleased to acknowledge Aberdeen University Historic Collections, the Collections of the Duke of Hamilton at Lennoxlove House, Dundee Central Library, East Lothian Museums Service, Edinburgh Central Library, Edinburgh University Library, Getty Image Archive, Glasgow University Library, Leadhills Mining Museum, Midlothian County Library Service, National Museums of Scotland, Nova Scotia Archives, Pearson Educational, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Commission of Historic and Ancient Monuments of Scotland, Scottish Archive of Printing and Publishing History Records, State Library of South Australia, State Library of Victoria, Trinity College Dublin, the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Individuals who have given their support in a variety of ways include Hugh Amory, Lynda Ardern, Norbert Bachleitner, Iain Bain, John Barnard, Iain Beavan, Alan Bell, Robert Bringhurst, Bill Brock, Iain

acknowledgements

xvii

Gordon Brown, Jay Brown, Stephen Brown, Ian Campbell, Sarah Carpenter, Roger Chartier, Tristram Clark, Des Cowley, Robert Darnton, John Davidson, Tom Devine, Iain Donaldson, Ian Donaldson, William Donaldson, Donald Ferguson, David Finkelstein, Diarmid Finnegan, Chris Fleet, Mirjam Foot, Peter Freshwater, John Frow, William Gillies, Latte Goldstein, Robert Gross, Chris Harvie, Brian Hillyard, Tom Hubbard, David Kett, Trevor Lawrie, Elisabeth Leedham-Green, Alistair McCleery, Warren McDougall, Barry McKay, D. F. McKenzie, David McKitterick, Patricia Macwhirter, Susan Manning, Ben Marsden, Joseph Marshall, Anne Mason, Jane Millgate, Michael Moss, Alex Murdoch, Padmini Ray Murray, Robin Myers, Sheila Noble, Helen Redmond-Cooper, Roger Savage, Eduardo Seraﬁn, Owen Shalloo, Murray Simpson, Helen Smailes, David Stam, Randall Stevenson, Deirdre Sweeney, Anthea Taylor, Katrina Thompson, Jon Topham, David Vander Meulen, I. R. Willison, Charles Withers, William Zachs. There are a few individuals to whom an enormous debt of gratitude is owed, and without whom this volume could not have come to light: Jonquil Bevan, with whom it was originally conceived and discussed; Peter Garside for his help at various stages; Ross Alloway for his work over the past two years; and Nicola Wood for her concentrated e≠orts in the ﬁnal months. The support and patience of Edinburgh University Press throughout the process has been remarkable, in particular Jackie Jones, Tim Rix, Jonathan Price, Ian Davidson, Ann Vinnicombe and James Dale. For their unfailing support and forbearance, a special debt of gratitude is reserved for Suzanne and Andrew Bell.

Copyright Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce illustrations. Aberdeen University Historic Collections (Fig. 3.11) Bank of Scotland (Fig. 1.12) Collections of the Duke of Hamilton at Lennoxlove House (Fig. 3.8) Dundee Public Library (Fig. 4.8) East Lothian Museums Service (Fig. 3.14) Edinburgh Central Library (Fig. 3.13) Edinburgh University Collections (Figs 1.15, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 5.60) Getty Images (Fig. 3.9) Glasgow University Library (Fig. 8.1)

xviii

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Leadhills Mining Museum (Figs 3.12, 3.13) Lilly Library, Indiana University (Fig. 5.10) Midlothian Country Library Service (Fig. 3.1) National Museums of Scotland (Fig. 1.1) Nova Scotia Archives and Record Management (Figs 8.2, 8.3) Pearson Education (Fig. 2.6) Royal College of Surgeons (Fig. 5.5) Royal Commission on Historical and Ancient Monuments of Scotland (Fig. 2.2) Scottish Archive of Printing and Publishing History Records (Fig. 2.3) State Library of South Australia (Fig. 8.6) State Library of Victoria, Australia (Fig. 8.5) Trinity College, Dublin (Fig. 7.5) Trustees of the National Library of Scotland (Figs 1.2, 1.11, 1.13, 1.14, 2.4, 2.5, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.7, 4.1, 4.3, 4.6, 4.7, 5.3, 5.4, 5.7, 5.8, 5.9, 5.11, 5.13, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1, 7.2, 7.4, 8.4) Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 3.10)

CHRONOLOGY

1800 Act of Union unites Britain and Ireland Combination Acts make trade societies illegal; repealed in 1825 Hugh Blair (author and critic) dies (b. 1718) 1801 First Scottish Census: population of Scotland 1,608,000 Copyright Act incorporating Ireland Thomas Telford reports on roads in the Highlands Archibald Constable acquires the Scots Magazine First full text Gaelic language version of the Bible 1802 Constable becomes Scottish agent for the London ﬁrm of Longman Edinburgh Review founded George Thomson publishes A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice, including Haydn’s settings of Burns Alexander Christison, The General Diffusion of Knowledge, One Great Cause of Prosperity of North Britain Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 1803 Constable becomes Scottish agent for John Murray II Burnett’s Gazetteer of Scotland

xx

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

1805 John Murray II accepts London agency of the Edinburgh Review John Norton’s translation of the Gospel of John into the Mohawk language Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel Earl of Selkirk, On Emigration and the State of the Highlands 1806 Joseph Robertson, Traveller’s Guide through Scotland and its Islands 1807 Oliver & Boyd established Adam Black established as bookseller First Fourdrinier papermaking machine licensed in Scotland Sutherland Clearances begin Poems of Ossian published in Gaelic by the Highland Society of London Robert Tannahill, The Soldier’s Return 1808 First part of David Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia published; republished in eighteen volumes in 1830 Elizabeth Hamilton, The Cottagers of Glenburnie John Jamieson, Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language Walter Scott, Marmion 1809 John Ballantyne & Co. established Quarterly Review founded by John Murray II Perthshire Courier founded Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 1810 Commercial Bank of Scotland established Glasgow Chronicle founded Joanna Baillie, Family Legend Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake Dugald Stewart, Philosophical Essays

chronology 1811 Census: population of Scotland 1,806,000 John Murray II transfers his Scottish agency to Blackwood; terminates his agency with Constable in 1813 Mary Brunton, Self-Control 1812 Cost of post between London and Edinburgh: 1s 11⁄2d Constable acquires the copyright of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in India 1813 Daniel Macmillan born on the Isle of Arran. With his brother, Alexander (b. 1818), he will establish the London ﬁrm of Macmillan & Co. in 1843 James Hogg, The Queen’s Wake 1814 Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since 1815 Battle of Waterloo Union Bank of Scotland established Whittaker & Co. become principal London agent for Oliver & Boyd Waverley published in Boston and New York 1816 George Smith of Elgin sets up as a stationer in London with Alexander Elder First supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica published Guy Mannering becomes the ﬁrst Scott novel to appear in French Robert Owen, A New View of Society 1817 Chalmers & Collins begin publishing Glasgow Typographical Society established

xxi

xxii

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Samuel Brown introduces itinerating libraries in East Lothian Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine founded Scotsman newspaper founded Thomas Chalmers, A Series of Discourses on the Christian Revelation George Stephenson, A Description of the Safety Lamp 1818 Union Canal begun Thomas Neilson begins trading as Thomas Nelson (ﬁrm becomes Thomas Nelson & Sons in 1839) The Scottish School Book Association established Susan Ferrier, Marriage James Hogg, The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Other Tales John MacLean, Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach 1819 Peterloo Massacres Passage of the Six Acts leads to tighter political regulation of the book trade Princess Victoria born William and Robert Chambers set up their ﬁrst bookstall German printer Edward Kuhl goes into partnership with John Blackie Andrew Duncan of Glasgow introduces the ﬁrst iron press in Scotland, and stereotyping around the same time Thomas Chalmers, The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns J. G. Lockhart, Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk 1820 Radical Rising escalates in west central Scotland John Robertson of Edinburgh becomes the ﬁrst Scot to be listed as a lithographic printer Robert Mudie, Glenfergus William Scoresby, An Account of the Arctic Regions James Strachan, A Visit to the Province of Upper Canada

chronology

xxiii

1821 Census: population of Scotland 2,092,000 First mechanics’ institute, the Edinburgh School of Arts, founded John Galt, Annals of the Parish William Hooker, Flora Scotica 1822 Visit of George IV to Scotland Caledonian Canal opened The ﬁrst ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ appears in Blackwood’s Magazine John Campbell, Travels in South Africa 1823 A. & C. Black established Bannatyne Club established; their ﬁrst publication, The Buke of the Howlat, edited by David Laing Thomas Dick, The Christian Philosopher 1824 Edinburgh Compositors’ Society established Glasgow Printers’ and Bookbinders’ Society established John Galt becomes Secretary of the Canada Company Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister George Combe, Elements of Phrenology James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Robert Stevenson, An Account of the Bell Rock Light-House 1825 A series of bank failures begins an economic crisis John Wilson’s ‘Cockney School of Poetry’ appears in Blackwood’s Magazine Scots Times founded James Montgomery, The Christian Psalmist 1826 Scotland’s ﬁrst commercial railway opens between Edinburgh and Dalkeith

xxiv

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Archibald Constable and James Ballantyne bankrupted William Collins, formerly Chalmers & Collins, established W. & A. K. Johnston established Longman & Co. takes over the Edinburgh Review 1827 Scottish Missionary Society establishes its ﬁrst press in India Encyclopaedia Britannica purchased by A. & C. Black Robert Chambers, The Picture of Scotland James Gall, A First Book for Teaching the Art of Reading to the Blind James Myllar, Encyclopedia Edinensis 1829 Perthshire Advertiser founded Publication of magnum opus edition of the Waverley novels begins Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’ appears in the Edinburgh Review 1830 Whigs take power; Francis Je≠rey appointed Lord Advocate Steam beginning to be used in the Scottish newspaper printing Bartholomew & Son established John Thomson, mapmaker, declared bankrupt; again in 1835 Oliver & Boyd’s Edinburgh Cabinet Library launched Felicia Hemans, Songs of the Affections published by Blackwood 1831 Census: population of Scotland 2,364,000 Cholera outbreak Scotland’s ﬁrst passenger railway in Scotland opens between Glasgow and Garnkirk Blackie & Son established John Galt, Bogle Corbet; or, The Emigrants 1832 Reform Bill extends the male franchise Death of Scott W. & R. Chambers established Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal founded

chronology Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus 1833 First John Menzies shop opens in Princes Street, Edinburgh Glasgow Argus founded Blackie & Son’s Popular Encyclopaedia Archibald Alison, History of Europe during the French Revolution 1834 Thomas Carlyle moves to London Publication of the New Statistical Account of Scotland begins; completed in 1845 George Lewis, Scotland a Half-Educated Nation Michael Scott, Tom Cringle’s Log 1835 Edinburgh’s New Town completed Andrew Carnegie born in Dunfermline Continuous electric light invented by James Bowman Lindsay 1836 General Typographical Association of Scotland established Stirling Observer founded Henrietta Bowdler, Essay on the Proper Employment of Time Thomas M’Crie, Sermons 1837 Accession of Queen Victoria (d. 1901) First telegraph patented Blackie & Sons open a London o∞ce Publishers’ Circular founded Posthumous publication in monthly parts of John Kay’s Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings begins Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution John Dunmore Lang, Transportation and Colonization J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Walter Scott

xxv

xxvi

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

1838 Typefounders William Miller & Co. become Miller & Richard Thomas Dibdin, Bibliographical . . . Tour in the Northern Counties of England and in Scotland William Fleming, Gazetteer of the Old and New Testament Simon Macgregor, Report of the Great Meeting of the Trades and Working Classes W. H. Lizars, Blackwood’s Atlas of Scotland 1839 Abolition of bible printing privileges in Scotland Spalding Club established Charles Timperley, A Dictionary of Printers and Printing 1840 Penny post reduces the cost of 1⁄2oz letter to 1d Foundation stone laid for the Scott Monument Miller & Richard experiment with typecasting machines William Blackwood & Sons establish London o∞ce Friedrich Schenck, Munich lithographer, arrives in Edinburgh The Witness established by Hugh Millar David Octavius Hill, The Land of Burns 1841 Census: population of Scotland 2,620,000 1842 People’s Charter presented to the House of Commons Queen Victoria’s ﬁrst visit to Scotland Copyright Act establishes protection for a period of forty-two years from the date of ﬁrst publication or seven years after the author’s death, whichever is longer Daily Record founded Elizabeth Leckie, The Hebrew Boy 1843 Disruption of the Church of Scotland; Free Church of Scotland established

chronology

xxvii

Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present George Carruthers, The Highland Note-Book Marion Reid, A Plea for Woman 1844 Repeal of the Corn Laws Potato famine in Ireland; spreads to the Scottish Highlands in 1846 and continues until 1847 Nelson establishes London o∞ce Blackie & Son establish Dublin branch Andrew Lang born, Selkirk (d. 1912) Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation Robert Southey, Life of Andrew Bell 1845 Scottish print trade joins the National Typographical Association Thomas Nelson & Sons occupy premises at Hope Park Thomas Chalmers transfers his works to Oliver & Boyd William Henry Fox Talbot’s Sun Pictures in Scotland, the ﬁrst book sold with photographic illustrations Christian Johnstone, Edinburgh Tales 1846 Corn Laws repealed North British Railway established Scott Monument inaugurated First volume of David Laing’s edition of the Works of John Knox printed for the Bannatyne Club; volume 6 completed in 1864 Marion Aird, The Home of the Heart Rev. James Macbeth, No Fellowship with Slaveholders 1847 Final run of the Edinburgh to London mail coach Educational Institute of Scotland established Sir Walter Scott’s debts ﬁnally cleared, ﬁfteen years after his death William Alison, Observations on the Famine James Bridges, Sunday Railway System Practically Discussed

xxviii

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Thomas Guthrie, A Plea for Ragged Schools Hugh Millar, First Impressions of England and its People 1848 Revolution throughout Europe Queen Victoria acquires Balmoral as her Scottish residence Scotland adopts Greenwich Mean Time First Scottish settlers arrive in Dunedin, New Zealand John MacLean (Gaelic poet) dies in Nova Scotia (b. Tiree 1787) 1850 Thomas Nelson produces prototype rotary press Francis Je≠rey dies (b. Edinburgh 1773) Robert Louis Stevenson born in Edinburgh (d. Samoa 1894) Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets Hugh Millar, Footprints of the Creator Dinah Mulock (Mrs Craik), Olive 1851 Census: population of Scotland 2,889,000 Gold discovered in New South Wales and Victoria William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), On the Dynamic Theory of Heat 1852 William Henry Fox Talbot patents photographic engraving 1853 Crimean War begins Duty on advertisements abolished Robert Mackay of Sydney becomes agent for Blackie & Co.; moves to Melbourne in the 1860s to set up the ‘Glasgow Book Warehouse’ William Chambers visits North America John Hill Burton, History of Scotland from the Revolution to the Extinction of the Last Jacobite Insurrection Helen Mackenzie, Life in the Mission Margaret Oliphant, Katie Stewart 1854 Public Libraries (Scotland) Act

chronology

xxix

Thomas Nelson becomes the ﬁrst British publisher to establish a branch in the US United Brotherhood of Papermakers established Aberdeen Breviary printed for the Bannatyne Club Robert Burn, Colonist’s and Emigrant’s Handbook of the Mechanical Arts 1855 Repeal of Stamp Duty Scotsman becomes a daily Alloa Advertiser founded Glasgow Argus founded Orcadian founded William Campbell, The Crown Lands of Australia 1856 Crimean War ends John Anderson, History of Edinburgh Henry Cockburn, Memorials of his Time William Rankine, Introductory Lecture on the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics 1857 Indian Mutiny Obscene Publications Act R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island 1858 Universities (Scotland) Act Victoria proclaims permanent British rule of India Strahan & Co. established Master of Sinclair’s Memoirs of the Insurrection in Scotland in 1715 published by the Abbotsford Club People’s Journals founded George Macdonald, Phantastes

xxx

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

1859 Arthur Conan Doyle born Edinburgh (d. 1930) Kenneth Grahame born Edinburgh (d. 1932) Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species Samuel Smiles, Self-Help 1860 Bleach and Dye Works Act Miller & Richard produce Old Style type J. M. Barrie born Kirriemuir (d. 1937) John Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss published by Blackwood James Clerk Maxwell, Illustration of the Dynamical Theory of Gases Alexander Smart, Songs of Labour 1861 Census: population of Scotland 3,062,000 First colour photograph taken under the supervision of James Clerk Maxwell Scottish National Institute for Promoting the Employment of Women in Printing established A. K. Johnston produces ﬁrst Royal Atlas 1862 Collins appointed Queen’s Printer for Scotland Shetland Advertiser founded 1863 Imported esparto grass becomes principal raw material for papermaking United Presbyterian Church of Scotland Mission sets up a lithographic press at Beawar Bank of England rate adopted as guide to Scottish charges William Collier, History of the British Empire John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile

chronology

xxxi

1864 Introduction of typecasting machines in Scotland; labour strike follows John Hill Burton, The Scot Abroad Ellen Guthrie, Tales of the Jacobites 1866 Transatlantic telegraph completed Robert Maver, Collection of Genuine Scottish Melodies 1867 Scottish Reform Act gives the vote to all male householders Second Public Libraries (Scotland) Act Scottish Women’s Su≠rage Society established Confederation of Canada John Menzies & Co. established John Stuart Blackie, On Democracy Joseph Lister, Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery 1868 Liberals win General Election; Gladstone begins his ﬁrst term as Prime Minister Queen Victoria, Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands 1869 Cutty Sark launched on the Clyde Modern Society of Papermakers founded (split from United Brotherhood) W. & A. K. Johnston open a London o∞ce 1871 Census: population of Scotland 3,360,000 Gaelic Society of Inverness established Henry Stanley meets David Livingstone An Gaidheal ﬁrst published in Toronto George Chesney, Battle of Dorking George Eliot’s Middlemarch published in parts by Blackwood

xxxii

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

1872 Education (Scotland) Act; schooling for all children between 5 and 13 Print Workers’ Strike Newspaper trains ﬁrst commissioned by The Scotsman William Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers 1873 American evangelists Moody and Sankey conduct meetings in Scotland Thomas Constable, Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents Alexander Hislop, The Book of Scottish Anecdote James Clerk Maxwell, Treatise on Electricity and Megnetism 1874 Repeal of patronage for the Church of Scotland Mitchell Library, Glasgow, established John Small, Works of Gavin Douglas 1875 John Buchan born in Perth Publication of the celebrated ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica begins; completed in 1898 1876 Victoria declared Empress of India Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone William Collins establishes branches in Australia London newspaper trains introduced John Stuart Blackie, The Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands David Kennedy, Kennedy’s Colonial Travel 1877 Opening of the Mitchell Library, Glasgow Scottish Typographical Association abolishes the tramping system

chronology

xxxiii

Jackson Gaskill, The Printing-Machine Manager’s Complete Practical Handbook Andrew Lang, Aristotle’s Politics George Stewart, Shetland Fireside Tales 1878 Fire destroys Thomas Nelson’s works in Hope Park John Ross, Book of Scottish Poems Ancient and Modern R. L. Stevenson, An Inland Voyage 1879 R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey 1880 Liberal Party returns to power. Gladstone becomes Prime Minister for the second time, and MP for Midlothian Thomas Nelson re-established at Parkside Works Robert Mackenzie, The Nineteenth Century: A History

INTRODUCTION

n 1800 Scotland was an agrarian nation composed of a handful of major towns and a large number of smaller scattered communities. Although the Industrial Revolution had already transformed some manufacturing districts, particularly those engaged in textiles and tobacco, the nation’s printers and booksellers were still largely operating within a pre-industrial economy. But urbanisation and industrialisation were on the horizon, heralding large-scale changes that within a few decades would transform the Scottish book trade. Although the cultural transformations that Scotland faced were not unique, there are clear distinctions about the way in which the nation experienced the period. Of immense importance were the various technological developments that were to appear in the ﬁrst quarter of the century. Faster and cheaper transport networks soon followed, so that, within a generation or two, the ways in which goods were manufactured and distributed were completely revolutionised. This was also a period that was to witness unprecedented political and demographic change. Despite high levels of mass migration, in the eighty years covered by this volume the population of Scotland almost tripled. The aim of this introduction is to explore that changing cultural landscape in order to provide a context for thinking about the world in which the book in Scotland found itself between 1800 and 1880.

I

A technological revolution Along with other major industries, the print and allied trades were to undergo a series of developments as new technical discoveries and changing patterns of consumption transformed the way in which books were made, distributed and even read. In 1800 the fundamentals of 1

2

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

printing had remained largely unaltered since the days of Gutenberg; by the 1880s, the traditional forms of papermaking, printing and binding were barely recognisable. In the process the Scottish book trade had moved from a cottage industry, based on hand methods in relatively small-scale workshops, to a large-scale manufacturing process. Among the ﬁrst and most important technical innovations that were to make this expansion possible was the introduction of the industrial papermaking machine, a necessary precursor of the coming faster and more e∞cient printing technologies. Labour-saving iron presses had begun to replace the traditional wooden press by the 1820s and steam printing started to appear at around the same time. Among the most important advances soon to follow was lithography, a method of production in which Scottish printers would eventually come to excel. Although it was invented much earlier, stereotyping, a method of creating multiple impressions simultaneously, ﬁnally came into its own with the availability of high-speed rotary presses in the 1830s. So dramatic were the changes wrought by these and other innovations that by 1845 the ﬁrm of W. & R. Chambers was reputed to be printing as many sheets in a week as the whole of the Scottish press had produced in a month only a decade earlier. By the 1870s, The Scotsman newspaper had installed machines capable of producing 12,000 complete copies an hour, a far cry from the labour-intensive hand presses on which two operatives had produced 240 impressions in the same amount of time. The resulting economies of scale were to have a considerable e≠ect on the organisation of the trade, and particularly on the nature of the workforce. The second census of 1851 records a dramatic growth in the number of employees in the print and allied trades in comparison with the previous decade, with the number almost doubling in the space of a few years (see Appendix A). While the increase would be far less dramatic in subsequent years, there remained a steady growth until the end of the century, with most activity concentrated in and around Edinburgh and Glasgow. The relative importance of the book trade to Scotland at this time, while it has long been recognised, may even have been underestimated: between 1841 and 1901, an average of 26 per cent more of the nation’s workforce was employed in the print and allied trades than in England and Wales, with Edinburgh showing a rate, on average, 68 per cent higher than London. In due course, the demand for cheap labour opened up jobs to less skilled men and also to women, whose presence became increasingly conspicuous in the composing room as the century progressed. Between 1841 and 1851, the number of female employees in the trade almost tripled, at a time when the number of male workers increased

introduction

3

only by about half. While in the 1840s the majority of women were initially to be found in relatively unskilled jobs, they had come to make up almost a third of those listed as printers in Edinburgh by the beginning of the twentieth century. Such changes were also to have a dramatic impact on the structure of the trade. In the early nineteenth century printing house books were made and sold under one roof. The ambitious schemes of entrepreneurs like Archibald Constable and the ﬁrst William Blackwood saw the advent of a new kind of publishing. In due course a number of large-scale ﬁrms would emerge, mass producing for a modern industrial economy. In 1797 the Encyclopaedia Britannica could still refer to ‘publishers’ as ‘petty dealers, or venders of small ware’. It was in such a context that early nineteenth-century publishers, like their predecessors, began by selling their own books. If their titles sold well, the undertaking was proﬁtable; if they misjudged the demand, they bore a direct loss for their investment on paper, illustration, composition, printing, binding and transport, not to mention advanced author payments. As their businesses grew and they became ever more reliant on larger markets, so publishers found themselves subject to economic forces beyond their immediate control. In the transition, there were bound to be casualties. During the economic ‘crash’ of 1825 and 1826, the insolvency of the London publisher Hurst, Robinson & Co. famously brought about the ﬁnancial downfall of Archibald Constable, someone who, before the disaster, was considered one of the major players. Nevertheless, the Edinburgh and Glasgow trades generally went on to weather such volatile conditions, in due course increasing their impact on markets elsewhere (see Appendix B). As time passed, the term ‘publisher’ came increasingly to refer to a specialised class of investor who commissioned and oversaw the distribution of books and other printed materials, relying on the labour and expertise of others for printing and bookselling. By the 1880s, the book trade in Scotland had become a mass manufacturing industry, relying on high investment and technologically advanced methods of production. Printing, publishing, and bookselling – almost indistinguishable at the beginning of the century – became highly specialised as new divisions of labour emerged. The continued use of designations such as ‘printer and bookseller’ or ‘printer and publisher’ indicates something of the complex permutations that continued to exist in spite of increased specialisation within and between the trades. While some ﬁrms like Thomas Nelson’s combined printing, publishing and binding under one roof, others, like the printer R. & R. Clark, would continue to provide one element in the production process, but on a scale that would have been unimaginable a few years before.

4

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

The reach of print Another important factor was the emergence of new communication networks on which publishers would come increasingly to rely for distribution. From the use of coach and sea routes, to the development of more e∞cient inter-provincial roads and canals, to the rise of the railways accompanied by a cheaper and more e≠ective postal system, and ﬁnally the coming of the telegraph, these changes were to play a decisive role in the modernising of the book trade throughout the century. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, transport methods remained much as they had for generations. Where possible, printed material in bulk was taken by coastal shipping, although in exceptional circumstances canals were used. Inland carriage was routinely carried out by local courier, except for the most urgent items which were carried by mail coach. The arrival of long-awaited printed materials could cause a stir, even in larger cities. James Bertram witnessed the excitement in London as the Leith smack bearing ‘the precious bales’ of one of Walter Scott’s novels hove into view: ‘The London agents had men waiting . . . to get out the books, which were always shipped in unbound sheets’ (and quickly taken o≠ to the binders). And as the same writer censoriously noted, there was a reciprocal enthusiasm for reading matter arriving by return: ‘Up from London came such penny trash as the Calendar of Horrors, the Penny Police Gazette and Lives of the Highwaymen all of which had a certain circulation’ (104–5). Regional variations make assertions about the general state of communication in Scotland in the ﬁrst half of the century di∞cult to sustain, the distribution of print to outlying areas often bringing its own problems. In the 1830s, the coastal settlement of Crail in Fife received only one mail per day, and that by way of St Andrews. The border town of Coldstream, on the other hand, situated on the Great North Road, beneﬁted from the daily arrival of the London-Edinburgh mail coach, three coaches between Edinburgh and Newcastle and two from Kelso and Berwick. In 1841, Glasgow newspapers were available at Port Appin in Argyll on the same day as they were printed. Just beyond the main lines, however, life moved at a more familiar pace: it took a further day for the same newspapers to reach the island of Lismore, only a few hundred yards across Loch Linnhe (NSA). Outlying districts were soon opening up to tra∞c, and the advent of the steamers which began to traverse Scotland’s waterways from the 1820s brought merchandise and information with some regularity to the most remote coastal stations. ‘There never was a bookseller, bookbinder, or stationer in this town that deserves to be mentioned,’ complained the

introduction

5

minister of Peterhead at the end of the eighteenth century, though there were rumours that ‘there is one going to settle very soon’ (OSA). Several booksellers took up residence in the parish in the 1820s, and one inhabitant, Peter Buchan, even began printing and publishing his own books (SBTI). By the 1830s even small and relatively isolated towns were beginning to enjoy regular access to printed materials. One commentator observed the changes that had taken place at Yarrow by 1833: A solitary newspaper formerly made its passage up the water by slow stages and through many hands, contrasting forcibly with the regular and rapid circulation of periodicals at present. Withal, there has been a striking change in the habits of the peasantry. Local attachments have given way to general knowledge. (NSA) Similar changes had taken place at Kirriemuir in Forfarshire, where in the same year it was reported that whereas ‘about ﬁfty years ago there was but one newspaper, which served the whole parish [now] about 200 copies of various newspapers come weekly through the post-o∞ce’ (NSA). The introduction of the penny post in 1840 was to have almost immediate repercussions. In 1847 Rowland Hill argued successfully for the introduction of a book post – intially 6d per pound but later reduced – on the grounds of helping to promote education. And so it proved: a high level of healthy competition between railway companies over parcel rates led to the conveyance of an estimated 3 million book packets in 1855, rising to 14 million in 1862 (Smith 1917: 186≠.; Robinson: 328). But it was the abolition of the Stamp Tax in 1855 which removed one of the main obstacles to the availability of print. Thereafter a local press ﬂourished throughout Scotland, bringing international news to provincial readers and encouraging greater levels of commerce through their advertising pages. In the meantime, evidence before the Parliamentary Committee on the so-called ‘tax on knowledge’ in 1851 had conﬁrmed the impact that the new postal system and the railways were having on the print culture of Britain. W. H. Smith testiﬁed that many of the readers who bought the newspapers distributed by his London-based company subsequently used the post to distribute them on to other readers. Smith chose to defend the tax that allowed newspapers to be posted on at no further cost, but his evidence also suggests that the delivery of the London dailies to the industrial North – where they arrived in the early afternoon – was fundamentally altering the perception of what constituted ‘news’. Thanks to the new railway network, noted the same Select Committee, a copy of The Times arriving by post was fast becoming ‘old news’.

6

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

While in its early years the railway was largely conﬁned to the Central Belt, the Lowlands and the Borders, by 1850 there were three AngloScottish routes connecting Scotland to the ever-expanding network. As John Chapman observed, the new integrated system of post, rail and telegraph was having a revolutionary e≠ect on the way in which business was being transacted in the book trade (52). By the 1870s a pervasive rail network made it possible for the nation to imagine itself through the pages of Bradshaw’s railway timetables, reputed to be the most frequently consulted text at the time apart from the Bible. Thus the book was coming to take on new geographical relationships, reﬂected through the development of emerging markets for print such as the ‘railway novel’, ‘the emigrant’s guide’, and ‘the guide book’. In other words, books no longer represented mere repositories for information but became, in a profound sense, the material manifestation of a new communication order. In this process, Scots were among the chief innovators. Alexander Bain, a clockmaker from Wick, was responsible for patenting the ﬁrst ‘printing telegraph’ – a longtime precursor of the fax machine – and in 1846 oversaw the introduction of a telegraph for the railway line between Glasgow and Edinburgh, the ﬁrst of its kind in Scotland. But it was the work of Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, which was to have the most far-reaching consequences, through his pioneering achievements in telegraphy in the 1850s which earned him the popular designation ‘Lord Cable’, and whose inventions led to the ﬁrst successful transatlantic line in 1865. In the end Scotland had to settle for international news delivered over the telegraph from London. By the time Gladstone became Prime Minister in 1880 it was possible for his own constituents in Midlothian to read of his electoral victory at the same time that word was being circulated in London. Through the pages of its own press, Scotland found itself within the orbit of British political life in a way that could not have been imagined a generation before. By the time the process was complete, Westminster had been brought as close to the Scottish capital in information-gathering terms as Glasgow, and London had become for Scottish newspaper readers ‘the centre for obtaining imperial, foreign, and particularly parliamentary news’ and the telegraph was the means by which it was conveyed (Magnusson: 42–5).

A half-educated nation? Scotland has long prided itself on the superiority of its educational system. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith maintained the

introduction

7

existence in every Scottish parish of ‘a little school, where children may be taught for a reward so moderate, that even a common labourer may a≠ord it’. The signiﬁcant consequence, according to Smith, was that almost all common people could read by the 1770s. But Smith’s optimism was not universally shared. The Statistical Accounts are scattered with remarks about the paucity of the nation’s educational provision, often turning Smith’s comment on its head and remarking on the meagre wages commanded by school masters. In his 1834 jeremiad on the parlous state of Scottish schools, Scotland a Half-Educated Nation, George Lewis claimed that only one in twelve Scottish children was enrolled in a day school, a claim that was borne out in government returns for the same year. Still there persists a belief that there existed in early nineteenth-century Scotland a universally meritocratic system of local education in which the ‘lad o’pairts’, no matter how humble his origins, could make his unimpeded way from the parish school to the university. While Scotland has more than its fair of celebrated examples, statistics show that even as late as 1860 the children of unskilled labourers made up only 3 per cent of the student body at the University of Glasgow (Anderson 1989: 311). In recent years, historians have posed a serious challenge to ‘the myth of Scottish literacy’, suggesting that the nation’s educational provision was not so universal as has often been supposed (Houston). The Inverness Society for the Education of the Poor in the Highlands maintained that in their jurisdiction in 1836 a half of the entire population over the age of 8 was unable to read and a third of all families in the region lived more than two miles from the nearest school. Just twothirds of families owned Scriptures: in Western Inverness and Ross, there was only one bible for every eight persons over the age of 8 (Moral Statistics: 25–8). Literacy ﬁgures are notoriously di∞cult to establish but it is generally conceded that by mid-century approximately 75 per cent of Scottish people were literate to some degree, well ahead of the European average for the same period. While it is sometimes assumed that the importance of the Education Act (1872) – introduced into Scotland one year after England and Wales – has been overestimated, its implication for the poorest citizenry in some districts must nevertheless have been considerable. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the audience for print was far from homogeneous. Francis Je≠rey identiﬁed a potential readership for the Edinburgh Review in ‘some twenty thousand among “fashionable or public life” . . . all earning more than eight hundred pounds a year’. In 1812 Je≠rey estimated a further 200,000 persons reading for amusement and instruction among the ‘middling classes’ of society, by

8

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

which he meant ‘almost all those who are below the sphere of what is called fashionable or public life, and who do not aim at distinctions or notoriety beyond the circle of their equals in fortune and situation’ (Klancher: 50; Clive: 143–4). The majority of Scottish readers fared less well of course. At the popular end of the market, the so called ‘common reader’ was catered for in towns and cities through a vigorous supply of chapbooks and broadsides. In the 1830s newspapers were circulated among the poor in the parish of Ban≠ ‘as long as the texture of the paper holds together, or its colour can be distinguished from the printer’s ink’ (NSA). Such readers would most certainly not have been in a position to own the latest literary works. At the cost of a guinea, Waverley represented several weeks’ wages for a labourer in 1810, for whom secondhand copies and cheap reprints were the standard literary fare until the middle of the century. Governments have long recognised the importance of the printed word to the deﬁnition of civil society, and in the wake of the French Revolution various attempts were made to regulate the British press. Despite the introduction of measures intended to keep a tight rein on the circulation of seditious print, the practice continued in Scotland well into the period. While some educationists argued that literacy was the precondition for a good citizenry, others were more sceptical about the ameliorating inﬂuence of the printed word. An ability to read might lead to a devout study of the Bible, but it could also lead to The Rights of Man. In 1793, Thomas Muir had been sentenced to transportation for fourteen years for circulating Paine’s pamphlet. Two decades later the memory of such political martyrs was still strong and there is little evidence, despite government restrictions, that the circulation of seditious literature had slowed down by the time of the radical uprisings of the 1820s. One publication at the forefront in the ‘War of the Unstamped’ was The Chartist Circular, begun in Glasgow in September 1839 and reputed to have sold 22,000 copies a week at its height. At the cost of a halfpenny, the Circular was one of several illegal publications that operated outside the Newspaper Tax. The failure of the Whigs to deliver the promised reforms in the 1830s led, if anything, to an intensiﬁcation of radicalism in Scotland and Chartism found a strong organisational base among Scotland’s skilled working classes, fuelled in part by the coming of industrial practices that threatened to displace long established forms of skilled labour. Central to the political argument was the call for a free press. As the minister of Ban≠ observed, recent political controversies ‘whatever may be their good or evil tendencies otherwise, have doubtless tended to increase or create an appetite for knowledge’ (NSA).

introduction

9

The change in mentality brought about by the coming of print to the remotest areas and the poorest communities was not always so explicitly political. According to one witness, greater access to the printed word meant that the people of Cromarty were becoming: better acquainted with the principles of agriculture and of trade; and they have learned to identify their interests as a body with those of the people everywhere. Their intelligence, too, is of a di≠erent cast from that of their fathers . . . Formerly, when there were comparatively few books and no periodicals in this part of the country, there was but one way in which a man could learn to think . . . He applied earnestly to the Bible and the standards of the church . . . But a thorough, though noiseless revolution has taken place – new sources of intelligence have been opened up. Going on to deploy the language of the printing shop, the same writer observed with some regret that ‘it is the newspaper and the magazine, not the Catechism and the Confession of Faith, that are now stereotyped on the public mind; and the older and better source . . . seems to have lost much of its e∞cacy’ (NSA). Scotland was becoming increasingly mercantile and secular, and the availability of the printed word was fundamental to this process. By the 1830s a number of Scottish publishers were coming to cater to readers of modest means through cheap reprints of the popular classics. One of the most explicit manifestations of the ethos of self-help was to be found in the publications of the brothers Robert and William Chambers who were to dominate the popular literary market for several decades. In 1832, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal was launched for the ‘elite of the labouring community; those . . . who are anxious to improve their circumstances by judicious means’. In the 1840s, at a time when the celebrated Blackwood’s Magazine was achieving sales of around 10,000, Chambers’s enjoyed a circulation of over 87,000. A miscellany of informative articles on everything from geography and history, to science and contemporary morals, it represented to the aspirant working classes what the Edinburgh and Blackwood’s had previously for a more ‘respectable’ middle-class readership. It was of course not only in terms of class that the reading public was divided in the nineteenth century. The spoken language among much of the population of the Highlands and Western Isles was Gaelic, and many were outside of any form of reading. The SSPCK had been established in 1709 with the principal aim of bringing anglophone literacy, and throughout the eighteenth century the provision of books in Gaelic was sparse. However, the publication of the ﬁrst full text Gaelic bible in

10

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

1801 represented an important breakthrough and gave greater impetus to reading in the language. Within a few years a number of presses dedicated to Gaelic publishing had arisen, leading to the production of 114 titles in Glasgow alone in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, over double of the total number of Gaelic books produced before 1800. Another factor in the democratisation of print in this period was the increased buying power of the common reader. With a weekly wage a little over 2s 10d in 1770, the income of the Scottish working man in the country had been as low as that in Ireland; but a dramatic increase in the average wage of the Scottish agricultural labourer is detectable from 1845. Wages in England and Wales had previously remained considerably higher but, by 1850, Scottish income among unskilled labourers had risen to 11s 5d, and remained above the British average for the rest of the century. By the 1890s, wages in the Central Belt were among the highest in the British Isles (Langton: 64, 68). In the meantime, improvements in communication and more e∞cient production techniques all contributed to the increasing availability of print, so that between 1828 and 1835 the average cost of a book fell by half. From the early 1830s 5s reprints of novels were commonly available. Three decades later, a cheap paperback edition could cost as little as 6d (Altick: 280–312). While new modes of communication were bringing outlying areas into the world of mainstream print, they also encouraged mass migration to the cities. Thus there was an increasing concentration of the population in and around the Central Belt as the century progressed. Central Scotland was home to 56 per cent of the population in 1801 and it had risen to 71 per cent by 1881 (Osborne: 3). The concentration of the population was to have a corresponding e≠ect on the public sphere. While pockets of local print culture survived, largely in the form of newspapers and jobbing printing, urbanisation served in turn to concentrate an increasing proportion of the means of cultural production, giving even greater priority to Glasgow and Edinburgh, and eventually to London, as sources of news and information.

Spoils of empire Throughout the nineteenth century the fate of the Scotland’s book trade was tied, like many of its other manufacturing interests, to the nation’s rising fortunes as an international trading power. In much the same way that textiles, tobacco and shipbuilding were transformed throughout this period, so printing and publishing were to become important elements in Scotland’s outward expansion.

introduction

11

Scots had become a conspicuous presence in the London book trade by the late eighteenth century, a trend which was to intensify in the following decades. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become increasingly di∞cult to speak in terms of a separate Scottish book trade, not only because of the permeation of the London trade by Scots, but because printers and publishers throughout Britain were coming to compete for the same expanding market. Scottish ﬁrms would soon dominate large-scale printing in particular, providing vast quantities of sheets for Britain’s publishers until the middle of the twentieth century. The competitive rates charged by companies such as R. & R. Clark of Edinburgh and James MacLehose of Glasgow meant that metropolitan publishers often turned north of the Border for the production of what were to become classics of ‘English Literature’. It is a mark of the important place of Scottish printing that by the mid-nineteenth century the ‘Edinburgh scale’ had become the standard by which British printers estimated their costs. Like other entrepreneurs, Scottish publishers were capable of playing the British card when it was ﬁnancially astute to do so and the more successful learned, early on, to capitalise on a dual commercial identity. The Encyclopaedia Britannica – so often thought to reﬂect the best elements of post-Enlightenment Scottish intellectual life – was, as its name suggests, an explicitly post-Union phenomenon. Pragmatic attitudes towards the business of literature meant that the most successful were not always respecters of the idea of an indigenous Scottish culture and the lists of major companies underwent increased anglicisation as they gained a share in an expanding and eclectic market. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (founded in 1832) became after 1853 simply Chambers’s Journal, reﬂecting the metropolitan ambitions of its founders, who were to open a London agency for the company in the same year. In the early decades of the century Blackwood’s had been associated almost exclusively with Scottish writing, reﬂected in the local ﬂavour of Blackwood’s Magazine. As the years passed, the organ that had promoted the names of John Galt, J. G. Lockhart and John Wilson, turned to a broader fare, demonstrating the company’s ambitions within the larger British, American and imperial spheres. There is a common assumption that the ‘Golden Age’ of Scottish culture ended some time around 1830. It is a story that has been told many times over since Lord Cockburn’s memoirs gave voice to the nostalgia for a period before the best examples of Scottish cultural life had been ‘absorbed in the ocean of London’. The sudden decline of Scottish intellectual life, within a year or two of the death of Scott and the departure of Je≠rey and Carlyle, is an idea that has been remarkably persistent.

12

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

In 1969, T.C. Smout could still characterise it as a ‘crescendo of achievement’ that breaks o≠ suddenly into ‘a silence broken only by staccato outburst’ (1986: 460). The continued publication of articles and books with titles like Edinburgh: The Golden Age would seem to suggest that Cockburn’s nostalgic longing for the Georgian world of Edinburgh still has appeal today. Yet, in its concern for a handful of authors and personalities, the preoccupation with the decline of Scottish literature in the second quarter of the nineteenth century often serves to mask the important role that the Scottish book trade would come to play across Britain and beyond over the following decades. Scott lived just long enough to witness the arrival of a new reading public, one that would sweep away Cockburn’s charmed intellectual world. It might even be argued that in cultural terms the ‘Age of Scott’ only really began in the 1840s, with the appearance of cheap editions which were by then starting to sell in their tens of thousands. And if the distinctiveness of Scottish writing was in danger of becoming lost to an expanding British market, it might also be argued that this was a period in which English authors just as often found themselves at the behest of Scottish publishers. From the 1860s, Blackwood’s were to publish from their o∞ces in Edinburgh many of the leading non-Scottish writers of the day, including George Eliot and Anthony Trollope. Well into the twentieth century, the ﬁrm would remain a major player in the world of literary publishing, eventually bringing the works of Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and of others to the English-speaking world. While they were often astute in their engagement with the British market, Scottish publishers were perhaps even more so at capitalising on the overseas trade. Scottish ﬁrms were among the ﬁrst to establish overseas agencies, Nelson’s becoming in 1854 the earliest British publisher to open a United States o∞ce. Many of the dominant ﬁgures in the colonial trade would continue to be part of powerful networks of booksellers, printers and publishers who had learned their skills in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Down to 1900, as one historian has observed, ‘[T]he Canadian village . . . typically had its leading Kirk and minister, its Scottish schoolmaster, and its Scottish-derived editor and printer’ (Checkland 1984: 158). The great migrations, ﬁrst to North America, and later to Australasia, were encouraged by a proliferation of printed propaganda. In 1850, John Hill Burton remarked that in the most destitute parts of Britain ‘one may read, stuck to the walls as decorations, the announcements of the Emigration Board’ (13–14). So concerted were the campaigns on the part of improvers, church organisations and government agencies to promote overseas settlement that by mid-century tracts, pamphlets

introduction

13

and newspaper articles were pouring from the presses. Scottish literature appears to have travelled particularly well, allowing settlers to participate wherever they were in an imagined community of print. The ‘tyranny of distance’ experienced by many emigrants often caused them to turn with greater engagement to the print culture of home. The market for a nostalgic Scotland would eventually be felt in the popularity of vernacular literature and the intensive, and sometime highly ritualistic, reading of the poetry of Burns remained an important marker of social a∞liation and kinship within Scottish communities. The church, through missionary and bible societies, also served to consolidate a sense of cultural di≠erence through the circulation of sectarian reading matter in much the same way that Caledonian Societies and other secular organisations later helped to reinforce cultural identity in the face of emergent forms of nationalism. Thus, from Melbourne to Cape Town, Nova Scotia to Delhi, would Scottish settlers continue to celebrate their national origins through a number of cultural practices, of which reading and writing were among the most important. Yet the way in which Scotland imagined itself through the Empire remains a fraught question for the cultural historian. Some continue to accept the view that the spoils of empire more than justiﬁed the Union; others that it was an unholy alliance entirely responsible for Scotland’s political acquiescence in the age of industry. It might be argued that the Britishing of Scottish popular culture in this period was part of an earlier transformation that had long been taking place in the public sphere, going back at least as far as the Act of Union in 1707. As local mentalities were being brought into the orbit of a supranational culture through the double ethos of improvement and industrialisation it was perhaps inevitable that popular expression would come increasingly to resonate with a more cosmopolitan outlook, a process in which print culture was central. There is no doubt that Scottish printers and publishers, many of whom operated at the centre of imperial commerce, played a signiﬁcant role in the sustenance of this commercial and cultural relationship. But the participation of the nation’s literary manufacturers in an international market also put Scotland in an unprecedented position to represent itself to the world at large. While that representation was not always sympathetic to the aims of progressive politics, it is signiﬁcant that the kailyard novel of the late nineteenth century, with its addiction to a nostalgic Scotland untouched by the e≠ects of industrialisation and modern politics, was produced primarily by the London press. When the response eventually came, in the form of George Douglas Brown’s acerbic satire The House with the Green Shutters (1901), it was brought

14

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

to the reading public by a London Scot, John McQueen, and to the American public by another expatriate setting the record straight, McClure Phillips of New York. By the end of the nineteenth century, the story that the Scottish book trade told of itself was one of ambition and achievement. The major ﬁrms typically memorialised themselves in trade histories full of brilliant careers and philanthropic gestures. Even the notorious collapse of Constable in the 1820s was transformed in the hands of Lockhart into a story about the heroic perseverance of Scott. Although there has been a tendency to overstate the inventiveness of the entrepreneurial spirit, the Scottish achievements of the nineteenth century were indeed remarkable. Throughout the period, Scotland had transformed itself from a small agricultural nation on the periphery of Europe to a major industrial force with international signiﬁcance. In doing so, it had made a reputation in the world of books out of all proportion to its size and population. By the 1880s the names of Chambers, Nelson, Collins, Blackie, Bartholomew and others were ﬁrmly established in the constellation of international publishing. And there they would remain for most of the twentieth century. Bill Bell

I. PRODUCTION

Chapter One

THE ORGANISATION OF THE TRADE Papermaking John Morris he first Scottish paper mill was established at Dalry, near Edinburgh, around 1590. Thereafter growth was slow, with only a dozen mills to be found in Scotland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, most book paper continuing to be imported from France and the Netherlands. A century later, however, there were thirty-two mills in Scotland, the highest concentrations to be found around Edinburgh, Perth, Berwick, Glasgow and Aberdeen, so that, by 1800, papermaking had become a well-established manufacturing industry. An increasing demand for paper products of all kinds would lead to a dramatic expansion in the industry over the following decades, necessitating the establishment of more and larger mills. By the 1840s, the mill at Prestonholm, near Edinburgh, is reported to have been employing over 200 labourers; another mill in Berwickshire to have employed eighty; while another, in Stirlingshire, over seventy. By far the largest concentration of labour was on the Water of Leith in Edinburgh, where could be found no fewer than sixteen of some sixty Scottish mills in the 1830s. As well as paper for its own consumption, Scotland was at this time coming increasingly to produce for export. Three-quarters of the paper produced at the St Leonard’s Works in Edinburgh was destined for London, while the Balbirnie Mill in Fife was producing almost exclusively for the London market (NSA).

T

Papermaking in the hand period At the beginning of our period, papermaking was based on the watermill, the collection of rags, and the hand dipping of moulds by skilled craftsmen. Rags were the basic raw material of paper throughout the handmade period though hemp rope was used for coarser paper. In the 17

18

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

early 1840s, the papermill at Carron Grove in Berwickshire was using ‘almost exclusively old tarred rope’ at a rate of a ton a day (NSA Eyemouth). Even when it was manufactured at home, virtually all rags used in Scottish paper until the middle of the eighteenth century were imported from the Continent. In 1755, the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture had expressed concern about the expense of importation, and had o≠ered a premium for rag collection in Scotland (Thomson: 33). Thus began an increasingly organised trade in rags, so that by 1811 there were three warehouses for the purpose in Edinburgh alone. A severe shortage during the Napoleonic Wars gave additional impetus to the search for alternative sources, although an extensive amount continued to be imported well into the century. After they were collected, rags had to be sorted, and when they reached the papermill sorted again. Buttons were detached, and coloured items and other missorts removed because bleaching was only in its infancy (though in the last decade of the eighteenth century a small quantity of blue rags was added to the white to produce a whiter looking product). The sorting process was carried out on a table covered in wire mesh of about three meshes to an inch, at the front of which was ﬁxed part of a scythe blade about a foot long. The unsorted rags were on the left of the sorter and a box divided into compartments on the right. The wire top of the table allowed dust to fall through and the rags were cut into roughly four-inch squares on the scythe blade. In the early days, the colour of paper had been largely determined by the colour of the rags from which it was made, though some bleaching was achieved through the use of lye and exposure to the sun. Chlorine bleaching was discovered in Sweden in 1774, and in 1790 the new method was introduced to the English-speaking world in the form of Robert Kerr’s Elements of Chemistry, a translation from an essay in French by Claude Louis Berthollet. When William Cunningham applied for a Scottish patent for chlorine bleaching in 1794, he was opposed by eight Scottish papermakers, who were already using the process, its ﬁrst introduction apparently by William Simpson who had chlorine in his papermill at Polton as early as 1791 (OSA Lasswade). Simpson also appears to have generously communicated the method to his fellow Scottish mill owners, and even to Joshua Gilpin, the ﬁrst American manufacturer to use chlorine. After the rags had been sorted and cut, the next stage was a wet process in which the individual ﬁbres were separated out from the rags. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the hollander or beater had long established itself as an ‘engine’ for breaking up rags. Consisting of

the organisation of the trade

19

an oblong vessel about ten feet long, four and a half feet broad and two and a half feet deep, it was usually made of lead-lined wood and subsequently of iron. Across the wider side was ﬁtted horizontally a heavy roller usually of elm and about twenty-two inches in diameter. Round the surface of the roller were ﬁtted steel plates projecting about two inches. Below the roller was a plate with corresponding bars over which there was a cover. After rags and water were introduced, the roller was set in motion at about 160 revolutions per minute, and the rags were forced between the roller and the plate and then round the narrow part of the engine and back through the roller again. The ﬁnished ‘stu≠ ’ (the suspension of ﬁbres in water) was fed through a pipe to the stu≠ chest (a tank with a mechanical paddle which kept the ﬁbres moving and so in suspension) and then on to the vat. The vat where the paper was formed was about ﬁve feet across and four feet deep. The forming of the sheets of paper was carried out by a vatman using a mould. Moulds came in pairs and were made of hardwood with a detachable deckle (a rim of hard wood into which the mould ﬁtted), turning the whole into a shallow tray. The mould itself was of mahogany consisting of a frame with a series of cross bars underneath and onto which wire was attached. Moulds varied in size, depending on the dimensions of paper required, but the overall length was limited by the reach of the vatman’s hands. The shape was a rectangle and the proportion of the shorter dimension to the longer varied somewhat but was generally in the ratio in the order of 4:5. The wire with which the mould was covered was of one of two kinds. In the older ‘laid’ type small wires ran the length of the mould and were individually attached to the ‘chain wires’ which were wires attached to each cross bar. A laid mould made a characteristic pattern in the paper with the chain lines about an inch or a little more apart running along the shorter side and the wire lines horizontally on the long axis of the paper. The other type was a ‘wove’ mould in which a woven wire cloth took the place of the wire and chain lines. It was useful for making ﬁne writing paper and also for use by artists and engravers, for whom the pattern of laid paper could create di∞culties in printing. The invention of wove paper was a vital step towards the development of the papermaking machine, as laid wire was unsuited to the making of a continuous web. The watermark in both kinds was stitched onto the surface of the mould. Throughout the process, the vatman worked with another skilled labourer called a ‘coucher’. After the vatman dipped his ﬁrst mould into the vat, picking up enough stu≠ to make a full sheet, he gave it a shake which crossed the ﬁbres of the stu≠, and rested it on the corner of the vat for a second to allow the weight of the water to run o≠. Then, when

20

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

the paper was formed, he released it from the deckle and passed the mould to his coucher, who turned it out onto a pile of felts, then applied another felt on top. Meanwhile the vatman had put the deckle onto the second mould and formed another sheet, which he then passed to the coucher, taking the ﬁrst mould from him again, and so on. The term ‘felts’ is slightly misleading as they were in fact made from coarse woven cloth, really a ‘hair cloth’. When there was a su∞cient pile of paper and felts, which was called a ‘post’, it was pressed in a standing press, and then air dried in the loft, the sides of which were louvred and could be opened and shut. Finally, it was sized in a clear animal glue diluted with water in order to make it stronger and less absorbent. This last process, done by hand in warm size, involved treating the paper to avoid air pockets.

Nineteenth-century developments The increase in the demand for paper by many trades, including the cloth trade, which used large quantities of paper in manufacturing processes; the grocery and other retail trades, which used it for wrapping; and particularly in the publication of books, magazines and ephemera, encouraged a number of technical developments. The most important of these was the Fourdrinier papermaking machine, invented by Nicholas-Louis Robert in 1799, and based on the use of a continuous web. In the years following the Fourdrinier’s introduction, a number of other machines were invented, not least that of the Scottish manufacturer Robert Cameron. Cameron’s machine made use of ordinary paper moulds which were driven round an oblong horizontal track by means of a chain. Ordinary papermaking stu≠ was delivered individually to each mould as it passed, any surplus returning to the stu≠ chest by means of an Archimedes screw. On the next stage of their journey the moulds were given a shake by means of a pin activated by a wheel cut with a wavy groove; continuing, they reached a tilting point where they couched the paper onto a revolving belt of felt where it was dried by steam-heated rollers. Finally, the moulds were machine washed before returning to be ﬁlled with more stu≠. The machine, which Cameron called his ‘wooden man’ (a term previously used for his own papermaking machine by Charles Kinsey of Princeton, New Jersey) was presumably used at his Springﬁeld Papermill in 1816. It seems to have been used in only two other Scottish mills; and its single original feature, the steam-heated rollers, seems not to have been particularly noticed at the time, though would become a feature of later Fourdrinier machines (Thomson: 162–63).

the organisation of the trade

21

Figure 1.1 Fourdrinier paper machine, Falkirk.

While the Fourdrinier involved no principle new to science, its combination of already existing technologies revolutionised papermaking. In its ﬁrst manifestation, it employed an endless loop of wire woven cloth onto which the stu≠ was continuously fed, initially making lengths of continuous wet paper two feet wide. After the wire was given a lateral shake the paper had to be dried and was then ﬁnished by hand. In 1801, John Gamble took out an English patent, with John Hall of Dartford being involved in its development and the engineer Bryan Donkin ultimately making a production model. Development proved highly expensive, and the Fourdrinier brothers, who ﬁnanced it and by whose name the machine is known in Great Britain, soon went bankrupt. Nevertheless, by 1804 a machine was installed and working at the Frogmore Mill in Hertfordshire. The main development was the transition from an exclusively wet machine, to a wet and dry machine, by the inclusion of a continuous felt onto which the paper was couched and passed over heated cylinders, so that ﬁnished paper could be delivered at the end ready for cutting and dispatch. Tub sizing was used at ﬁrst but ceased to be necessary after 1805 when rosin size could be introduced into the stu≠ chest. Once the machine was capable of producing ﬁnished paper there was naturally an increase in width and speed.

22

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

The ﬁrst licence for a Fourdrinier paper machine in Scotland was signed soon afterwards, in 1807, and was certainly producing paper by 1811, after which time it gradually took over the market. In 1836 it was reported that the vats at the Auchtermuchty Mill ‘are now all thrown aside, the paper being made by a Fourdrinier machine, such as is generally used’. Two years before, the new proprietor at the neighbouring Balbirnie Mill, which had been set up in 1816 with two vats and one engine, extended capacity by introducing a machine driven by four engines (NSA Markinch). One of the great advantages of the new Fourdrinier was that paper came o≠ the machine in rolls, and could be used in this form to feed the recently introduced rotary presses. The minority of mills that were producing printing papers were among the ﬁrst to install them: by 1832, of the ﬁfty-seven mills in Scotland, only sixteen made printing paper; of these fourteen already had Fourdrinier machines. Two Scots, George and William Bertram, sons of George Bertram of the Springﬁeld Mill at Polton on the Esk were apprenticed to John Hall of Dartford, who had been involved in the Fourdrinier’s development, and on their return to Edinburgh in 1821 established the St Catherine’s Works at Sciennes which was dedicated to manufacturing papermaking machinery. In 1845, their younger brother James opened a second wire-working factory in Leith Walk. By the 1860s, the Bertrams were selling machines not only throughout Scotland but to at least a dozen mills in England as well as overseas in the United States and Russia. The most vulnerable part of the papermaking machine was the web of woven wire, the worst problem being that the seam where the two ends of the web were joined was clearly visible. The other major problem in the manufacturing process was that the wire was kept in a constant state of ﬂex and so quickly wore out, a problem that was exacerbated by the increasing speeds at which the machines were working. The life of a machine wire was normally about three weeks, and it was therefore very important to have a reliable source of supply. To meet the demand, a number of Scottish wire-workers began to specialise in its manufacture. One such was the United Wire Works Ltd of Granton, established about 1837 by William McMurray, whose family owned the papermill near Currie from 1835, and who had set up as a wire-worker in Glasgow in 1825, later moving to Edinburgh (SBTI). The availability of raw material was a perennial problem. At ﬁrst all that could be done was to increase e∞ciency in rag collection. Although more e∞cient warehousing arrangements were introduced, the price of rags continued to rise, large quantities continuing to be imported from the Continent. From about 1850, wood pulp from sawdust became

the organisation of the trade

23

available, but the paper made from it soon discoloured and became very brittle. I was used for newspapers but was generally unsatisfactory for books. The di∞culty was not overcome until about 1863, when imported esparto grass became the principal raw material for paper in Great Britain. Steam superseded water power in Scotland somewhat slowly since water mills were already well established and worked su∞ciently well. In 1843, of six mills with steam power, all were still generating more than half their power from water. Papermaking had always been industrial, dependent on the supply of water in rivers and fast streams for power to drive the machines, and for water for its own processes. The mills in Scotland were for the most part fortunate, having an abundant supply of water for both purposes, though a few, like that at Ayton in Berwickshire, were susceptible to the drying up of the mill race in summer (NSA Ayton). In other instances, mills further up stream could reduce water-ﬂow. Pollution was an additional problem and often adversely a≠ected the communities in which the mills were situated. At its head, the Water of Leith was said to ‘abound with small trout’ but, as a consequence of the chemical waste, by the 1840s ﬁshing downstream was almost entirely fruitless. By 1880, steam was being used in all the larger mills. It was more e∞cient, but it was expensive to install and run. The early machines required a separate engine house and were bulky, and all required a large and dependable supply of coal, although in most parts of Scotland this was not a great di∞culty (Thomson: 159–60).

Labour relations Owing to the unskilled nature of much of the work involved, particularly in the sorting of rags, cheap female and child labour was routinely employed in the industry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At one mill in Berwickshire workers were taken in as young as 8 years old (OSA Ayton) and in the 1840s one Edinburgh minister was still complaining that the papermills there were continuing to employ children as young as 10 years old ‘a period when they can do nothing very laborious, and when their morals, from idleness and neglect, are very apt to be corrupted’ (NSA Currie). It was not until the passage of the Bleach and Dye Works Act (1860) that earlier legislation in textile manufacturing relating to hours and conditions of work was ﬁnally applied to the paper industry. As in other manufacturing industries, the introduction of new forms of labour-saving machinery was destined to meet resistance among the

24

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

workforce. Indeed, the reason given by Nicholas-Louis Robert for the introduction of his continuous web paper machine was the constant di∞culty he had with the skilled workers of the handmade papermakers guild. Price inﬂation in France in time of war had led workers to agitate for an increase in wages, and it was the skilled workers, the handful of vatmen and couchers who had been apprenticed and knew that they were indispensable, at whom Robert’s new technology was particularly aimed. In their prospectus, the Fourdrinier brothers also pointed out that with the new machine ‘the manufacturer is relieved from the di∞culties and loss consequent upon perpetual combinations for the increase of wages’. Although there is no evidence of the existence of papermaking unions in Scotland at this time, there are occasional references in private papers to strike action – for instance at Springﬁeld Papermill in the year 1821 ‘a continual source of annoyance and interruption was the stopping work or striking of Vat men’. In 1841, the Rev. John Dempster, describing the Herbertshire Mill in Stirlingshire and its new machinery, wrote: Combinations among operative paper-makers were [in the days before the introduction of the Fourdrinier machine] a frequent cause of great annoyance to masters and of misery to many innocent families. The improvements mentioned have put an end to combinations of paper workers. (NSA Denny) The vatmen and couchers, the only skilled workers in the hand-made papermill, were no longer needed when their jobs were replaced by machines. Losing their power over unskilled labourers, they found they could not now disrupt the production line to the disadvantage of the masters. Though there were no local unions for them to join, Scottish papermakers, like other skilled workers, joined ‘box societies’, mutual beneﬁt societies having cash boxes with three locks, the keys of which were held by di≠erent o∞cials of the society. They provided a form of insurance against accident, illness and the death of the wage-earner. Typical was the Bridge of Allan Union Box Society of 1806, which was founded by David Allan, a papermaker at Airthrey Mill (Jardine: 83). The trade society at his time was known as the Original Society of Papermakers, its full title being English, Irish & Scotch Papermakers. It was open only to apprenticed papermakers who had served seven years under a single master, and issued a ‘Card of Freedom’. During his apprenticeship, the vatman would have been paid his keep and pocket money only, so the card, which cost £10, a year’s wage at the time, was a considerable investment. Only the lawful bearer of a card was allowed to wear the

the organisation of the trade

25

apron and cap of the initiated. The card was indispensable for journeymen who were out of work, and moving from place to place, or ‘tramping’ as it was called. In addition to the card and beneﬁts, emigrating hand-made papermakers were assisted in their passage money by the box society (Voorn). From 1854 the workers in the mechanised mills preferred a new society – the United Brotherhood of Papermakers. The Modern Society of Papermakers split o≠ from that in 1869. In 1894 they reunited to become the Amalgamated Society of Papermakers.

Typefounding John Morris By 1800, the hand production of type had become a fairly standardised practice. The ﬁrst step in the process was to make a set of tools called ‘punches’, one for each desired letter form. The type punch was then used to make an impression of the required depth in a copper bar. The result, which was called the ‘matrix’, was then placed into a mould from which the type was to be cast. A molten alloy of lead, tin and antimony was now poured from an iron ladle and briskly shaken in order to ensure that all parts of the matrix were ﬁlled. When the metal had cooled, the mould was opened and the type knocked out. Type ﬁnishing involved the removal of any waste, and type which required an overhang, such as the letter ‘f ’, was trimmed, or ‘kerned’, with a knife. Finally, the sides were ground smooth and the type made a uniform height (‘type high’). Although hand production in small workshops was eventually superseded by large scale machine manufacturing, the basic threestep process of punching, casting and ﬁnishing remained fundamental to type production.

Apart from John Findlay, a ‘steel type cutter’ in Aberdeen (1825–7) and Daniel Campbell, who combined typefounding with the manufacture of printers’ furniture in Paisley in 1851, typefounding in Scotland was restricted to Glasgow and Edinburgh. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the principal manufacturer of type in Scotland was the Wilson typefoundry in Glasgow. The designs of Alexander Wilson, originally for use at the Foulis Press where they had won the admiration of the scholarly world, had been superseded by modern faces in the new taste. The new type, introduced by Richard Austin of London, had

the organisation of the trade

27

thicker ascenders and descenders and ﬁner horizontal line and unbracketed serifs. When the ﬁrm of John Baine & Grandson, which had been settled in Edinburgh for more than thirty years, departed for the United States in 1786, a gap was left in the printing world of Edinburgh. This was to some extent ﬁlled in 1790 by John Mathewson who manufactured type there, in various partnerships until 1831. The Mathewson specimen shows a selection of conservative body types; useful, no doubt, but not inspiring. With almost a monopoly in Scotland and Ireland, the Wilson foundry turned its attention to the London market, eventually transferring the Glasgow Foundry there in 1834. The balance shifted with the opening in Edinburgh of the typefoundry of William Miller & Co. William Miller had trained at Wilsons, and was perhaps manager there for a time (Glasgow Directory, 1799–1807). In 1807 he moved to Edinburgh, and opened a typefounding ﬁrm in a back court of Nicholson Street. At ﬁrst, the types he sold so much resembled those of the Wilson foundry they were said to be virtually indistinguishable, having also been cut by Richard Austin. Due in large part to the excellence of their types, both in their design and in their metal and casting, Miller & Co. achieved an ever-increasing share of the market. One particular coup was the contract to supply the type for Bradshaw’s railway timetables: a very small type, pearl, which needed to be concise and legible, cast in hard metal to allow it to take large impressions. The ﬁrm also supplied type to many newspapers, including The Times in London. In 1832, William Miller took his son-in-law, Walter Richard, into partnership, and the ﬁrm became ﬁrst William Miller & Co. again and, in 1838, Miller & Richard. William Miller died in 1843, and the ﬁrm remained in the hands of Walter Richard and his son until 1868 when Richard senior retired, and the ﬁrm was taken over by his sons, J. M. and W. M. Richard. His descendants, the Miller Richard family, ran it until its closure in 1952. In 1844, Charles Whittingham of the Chiswick Press printed Lady Willoughby’s Diary for Longman’s. The book aimed for an archaic appearance to suit the period of the text, and to that end used an original Caslon type complemented by wood-engraved head and tailpieces. It was an immediate success, and led to a revival in the use of Caslon’s original type designs. In 1860, Miller & Richard produced their Old Style which built on the strengths of an eighteenth-century type, but improved it, strengthening its look and giving it better printing and wearing properties than the original. The design has the bracketed and inclined serifs of an eighteenth-century type, but the stress is vertical.

28

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 1.2 Type specimen, Wilson & Co., Glasgow, 1815.

the organisation of the trade

29

The counters of the letters are enlarged and rationalised, particularly those of a, e, g and w. This made the letters more legible, the page more attractive, and improved the wearing qualities of the type. A specially designed set of head and tailpieces was made to go with Miller’s Old Style, the page layout displaying a new and original look. The resulting style was a great success, set a new fashion and was copied almost exactly by many typefounders. Before 1866, Blake & Stephenson and Reed & Fox had produced their own versions. They were followed, in 1868, by the American Patent Typefounding Company, and in due course by George Bruce & Co. of New York, the Dickinson Type Company of Boston, and eventually by the Monotype Corporation with their Scotch Roman. Throughout the nineteenth century, type punches were commissioned by typefounders and were cut by ﬁrms of engravers and punch cutters. One of the latter was Alexander Phemister who was apprenticed to William Grandison, one of two Edinburgh ﬁrms that specialised in the ﬁeld. Born in 1829, Phemister emigrated to the United States in 1861, where he cut the American copies of Old Style used by George Bruce & Co. and the Dickinson Type Company. While in Edinburgh, he had, so he claimed, been employed to cut Miller & Richard’s Old Style, the exact date of which cannot be known for certain. There was a trade war at the time and a number of typefoundries had sprung up in Edinburgh following the invention of stereotyping. In consequence, many ﬁrms, including Miller & Richard, were economising by cutting down on the type specimens they o≠ered to their customers, the single Figure 1.2 (continued) Good typography is fundamental to good printing. Ballantyne, whose books set a new standard for Scots printing at the beginning of the nineteenth century began with Old Style types obtained from the Glasgow ﬁrm of Alexander Wilson & Sons (est. 1743), but by the time he printed Scott’s The Eve of St John (1800) and The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3) he was employing more up-to-date designs. Although the Wilson foundry acquired modern-face types in 1812, until then it had nothing like the bold Great Primer used by Ballantyne to print Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, whose source was the London ﬁrm of Caslon & Catherwood. Pictured here is a specimen of the famous design that came to be known as ‘Scotch Roman’, the work of the English type-designer Richard Austin who cut modern faces both for the Wilsons and for the Edinburgh ﬁrm of Miller & Richard. With a mid-century revival of interest in antique design, its Old Style face of the 1840s was the most inﬂuential type of its day, and was copied by typefounders throughout the world.

30

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

one in existence for the critical period 1847–60 being a lone copy from 1857 in the American Typefounders Library. The ﬁrst we hear of the type is in the publication of Specimens of Old Style Types (Edinburgh: Miller & Richard, 1860), the only known copy of which is in the St Bride’s Printing Library in London. This shows the whole series of the Old Style type and forty-three headpieces and tailpieces. It may have been the ﬁrst showing of the type, though it had possibly been in preparation before that. The ﬁrm of Miller & Richard continued to thrive. It saw o≠ all its competitors except for the Edinburgh branch of Wilson’s, which was bought by James Marr and continued under that style into the twentieth century, and the printing ﬁrm of Neill & Co., who started doing small-scale typefounding in 1840 and continued into the next century. Miller & Richard were able to pick up many types at the sales of closing foundries. They acquired an excellent music type in three sizes from the sale of Duncan Sinclair & Sons in about 1863, and some placard type, large sizes for posters, which was auctioned after the death of the two Sharwood brothers in 1856. They added ‘the greater number of the punches, matrices and moulds of the late foundry of Messrs J. Milne & Co’ mentioned in a specimen of 1865, and about the same time obtained all the Long Primer matrices and moulds of the Ferguson foundry (1848–56). Miller & Richard had experimented with typecasting machines from the outset and had one operating as early as 1849. This was a modiﬁed version of the machine of the American David Bruce. The introduction of casting machines throughout the works provoked a strike in the workforce at the beginning of 1864. Presumably the workforce was defeated by management as The Scottish Typographical Circular reported that there seemed: ‘little probability of the strike terminating in favour of the men, whose places are being ﬁlled, not so much by typefounders from other places, as by unskilled workmen, who are said to be capable, after a few weeks practice, of executing much of the work usually performed by the regular hands’. The Miller & Richard foundry in Reikie’s Court continued to ﬂourish until the First World War, spreading all over the block and incorporating a chapel, a school and a lying-in hospital. Like all the big typefounders, the ﬁrm su≠ered from the introduction of Linotype and Monotype machines at the end of the nineteenth century but continued until 1951, when, on the death of the last male partner, the company was wound up.

Ink Manufacturing

The use of high quality ink in printing was of utmost importance, as poorly produced ink that leeched through, turned brown or blurred, could ruin a printer’s reputation. The process for ink production changed throughout the nineteenth century and was often considered a trade secret. The chief component of ink was varnish, which was produced by heating linseed oil until it thickened, an often dangerous process: one recipe called for heating the oil in a pot over a ﬁre until it boiled and ﬂamed. If, after stirring and cooling, the varnish could be drawn into half inch strings it was considered su∞ciently reduced for printing. The oil was heated again and rosin and brown soap were added, after which the mixture was poured into earthenware pots containing Prussian blue, mineral lamp-black (literally soot from a lamp), and vegetable black (charcoal from organic materials). Once pigments and oil were stirred until free from lumps and then ground together in a mill the resulting ink was ready for printing. In nineteenthcentury Scotland, as in the rest of Europe, ink-making gradually changed from a task performed by printers themselves into a specialised and industrialised process.

Printing Trevor Howard-Hill At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Scottish print trade was far from ubiquitous. Of the ﬁfty most populous towns listed in the ﬁrst Statistical Account only nineteen had printing before 1800 but as the century progressed printers could be found in most of the smaller towns in Scotland (SBTI et passim). Castle Douglas, for example, with about 700 inhabitants in 1800, acquired Anthony Davidson’s press around 1820, on which was printed the Castle Douglas Miscellany over the next three decades. The majority of provincial enterprises were undertaken on a similarly small scale, consisting of a master printer and his son perhaps and very few if any journeymen or apprentices. Printing in the provinces provided only intermittent employment and it was common for printers to hold more than one occupation. The printer Robert Wood of Lanark is identiﬁed between 1837 and 1852 as a bookseller, an administrator of a circulating library, and the agent for the Atlas Insurance O∞ce. His business rival, D. C. Budge, distributed stamps and collected county rates. Similar examples abound. At Duns, James Brown is listed as a bookseller, stationer, printer and bookbinder in 1797. William Renwick, who served as bookseller, stationer, druggist and postmaster at Jedburgh from 1820, added a press in 1825. And, besides the usual activities, John Nicholson in Kirkcudbright (ﬂ. 1820–67), also dealt in musical instruments and tea. Anecdotal evidence indicates that in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century an unprecedented number of country booksellers added printing to their business, and that some printers who were to diversify into other activities outnumbered those who were to survive exclusively through printing. At the beginning of the century this was even true of the major towns. In Glasgow, John Buchanan is recorded as a black borderer, paper marbler and spirit dealer. In Aberdeen the Edwards family acted as book agents and tea dealers in 1820, adding printing in 1828.

the organisation of the trade

33

In provincial towns it was on the local newspaper that printers relied for regular employment. The famous Edinburgh printer, James Ballantyne, began his printing career as proprietor of the Kelso Mail in 1795. In 1809, Robert Morison & Son established the Perth Courier. The Inverness Courier was founded by the printer John Johnstone in 1817 and edited with his wife Christian. The Edinburgh ﬁrm of James John Gray printed the Edinburgh and Leith Advertiser and the North British Advertiser from 1825. In Alloa, the one-time printer James Lothian established the Alloa Advertiser as a monthly newspaper that was so successful that in 1850 it was issued fortnightly, and from 1855, weekly. For many small provincial printers, the conduct of a newspaper made the di≠erence between success and failure.

From cottage industry to family dynasties While rural printing was relatively slow to transform itself, concentrated populations enabled the printers of Glasgow and Edinburgh to consolidate their operations in establishments that not only survived the increasing demands of the new century, but prospered. The Edinburgh ﬁrm of Neill & Company, founded by Patrick Neill in 1749, entered the nineteenth century as Adam Neill & Company, added typefounding in 1830, stereotyping and printers’ joinery in 1843, and survived to celebrate its 200th anniversary, ﬁnally closing in 1973 (McLaren 1949). Also surviving the turn of the century was the printing ﬁrm of Pillans & Sons, founded by James Pillans in Edinburgh in 1788, becoming H. & J. Pillans in 1827, and continuing as Pillans & Wilson through the 1950s. The ﬁrm lost all of its bookstock in a disastrous ﬁre in James’s Court, ‘that immense pile of buildings’, in 1857, and was eventually forced to move from the Old Town to the New alongside a number of other printing ﬁrms. Perhaps the most famous Edinburgh printer in the nineteenth century was James Ballantyne of Kelso, Walter Scott’s schoolmate. Having attracted attention in 1802 with the typography for Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border he moved to Edinburgh with his old friend’s assistance and continued to act as Scott’s principal printer. In 1822, when the company was still employing labour-intensive hand presses, it printed no fewer than 145,000 volumes of Scott’s works. Despite the ﬁrm’s implication in the notorious crash later in the decade, Ballantyne & Company, renowned for its production values, survived and thrived. From forty-four compositors and ﬁve pressmen in 1843, it reported ninety-four men at case and thirty-two press or machine men in 1875, a signiﬁcant increase given the capacity of its more modern

34

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

presses.1 After the Universities (Scotland) Act of 1858 altered the balance of control and patronage between universities and town councils, the ﬁrm of Constable was appointed Printer to the University of Edinburgh. The ﬁrm of Oliver & Boyd, a partnership of two printers dating from 1801, was the earliest of the great Edinburgh ﬁrms to combine printing and publishing and the ﬁrst to maintain large-scale printing, bookbinding and publishing in a single building (SPRAT 1990: 16). More famous still were Thomas Nelson & Sons, founded in 1811 by a bookseller who added printing and publishing to the business in 1825. Also entering the trade as booksellers, in 1819, the learned Chambers brothers, William and Robert, began printing in 1824, eight years later attaining greater prominence as the publishers W. & R. Chambers & Company. The publishers William Blackwood & Sons employed Oliver & Boyd to print Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine when it was established in 1817, then Ballantyne’s from 1821, but the issue for January 1847 was composed and printed in the ﬁrm’s new printing establishment in George Street and continued to be printed there exclusively through the middle of the next century (Oliphant 1897: 388–9; Porter: 388–9). Besides the major companies, there were many small establishments in the larger cities.2 In Edinburgh, Pillans had nine compositors and pressmen in 1843 and only seven in 1875. Armour’s, a ﬁrm founded in 1836 and surviving into the twentieth century, recorded a single employee in 1843, an apprentice compositor, and in 1875 was still employing only three compositors and no pressmen. Paton’s, who also recorded a single compositor in 1843, was doing su∞ciently well to declare nine compositors and four pressmen in 1875. The greatest improvement amongst the minor Edinburgh ﬁrms was Turnbull’s who began like Armour’s, in 1847, but ended up with thirty-four compositors – two of them women – and eight machine men in 1875. Edinburgh would come increasingly to dominate the Scottish printing trade. Although in the early part of this period many Glasgow printers founded in the eighteenth century remained in business, comparatively few survived to see the second half of the nineteenth century. Robert Chapman, printer of the Glasgow Mercury from 1788, continued as a partner in the ﬁrm of Chapman & Lang from 1799 to 1822, and died in 1838. James Haldane, whose ﬁrm was founded in 1789 and continued as Haldane & Company, engravers and copperplate printers, 1 2

NLS MS 4068. Ibid.

the organisation of the trade

35

was successful enough to leave money to found the Haldane Academy of the Fine Arts on his death in 1843, the precursor of the Glasgow School of Art. Another survivor from the eighteenth century was the German Edward Khull who in 1819 became partner to John Blackie, becoming virtually ‘the printing department of Blackies’ (SBTI). In 1826 he left the partnership but continued to share the premises for another four years until moving to Virginia Street where he became Printer to the University from 1833 to around 1848. Glasgow University was distinguished from other Scottish universities by never having owned a press building of its own; from its establishment in 1638 it commissioned a sequence of ﬁrms as Printers to the University. Of these the most notable in the early part of the nineteenth century was Andrew Duncan who, with his father and son, was University Printer from 1811 to 1827. Andrew expanded his ﬁrm in 1818 by building the Villaﬁeld Press in the heart of Glasgow, while his son John introduced Clymer’s iron Columbian press around 1819, the ﬁrst in Scotland (MacLehose: 222), and stereotyping around the same time. While Villaﬁeld enjoyed a good reputation for ﬁne printing, especially of the works of classical authors, business losses sustained in the crash of 1825 forced the family to retire from printing in 1827, the ﬁrm having been advertised for sale in 1826: part of it was sold to John Blackie snr in 1829, the rest to Robert Hutchison who later sold it to Blackie in 1846. Khull succeeded Duncan as University Printer in 1833. John Blackie himself had been apprenticed and was employed as a weaver before becoming a canvasser for the publishers A. & W. D. Brownlie whose business he bought in partnership with two other members of the ﬁrm around 1808. The ﬁrm was divided in 1819 and Blackie went into partnership with Khull until 1826, becoming Blackie & Son, printers and publishers, in 1831 with the addition of eldest son John. Blackie’s second son, Walter Graham Blackie, was trained as a printer and in 1837 took over the Villaﬁeld Printing Works under the name W. G. Blackie & Company, which remained as a separate company in name until the second half of the century. When John Blackie snr died in 1874 the ﬁrm turned from principally religious to educational printing and publishing. By 1881 two other third-generation Blackies had become partners of one of Glasgow’s two great printing and publishing enterprises to survive through the twentieth century. The founder of that other Glasgow dynasty, William Collins & Company, was like Blackie originally a weaver. Coincidentally, he too went into business in 1819 with a bookseller, Charles, the younger brother of Thomas Chalmers the theologian, who had fallen out with his publisher. The ﬁrm of Chalmers & Collins was given all of the Reverend

36

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Chalmers’ new works to print and publish. The ﬁrm went on to trade as William Collins Sons & Company from 1840. Two years later the ﬁrm was licensed to print and publish bibles, though personal di∞culties with Chalmers resulted in the latter transferring his literary interests to Oliver & Boyd in 1846. The ﬁrm continued to prosper and when, in 1856, lithography was introduced ‘with ten single-cylinder printing machines, ﬁve old-style presses and several litho presses’, the company produced its ﬁrst illustrated bible (Keir: 80, 167). In the 1860s Collins became Printers to the Queen for Scotland and at the end of the decade ‘the plant included sixteen letterpress and seven lithographic printing machines, and by 1875 employed more than 1,200 persons’ (Schenck: 37). By 1882 it had twenty double-cylinder machines and fourteen lithographic presses (Keir: 198). Collins became a limited company in 1879 and ﬂourished until the 1980s.

The spread of new technologies The basic mechanics of printing in Europe remained in 1800 very much as they had been in the days of Gutenberg. Worked by hand, the wooden ‘common’ platen press reigned at the beginning of the century but became increasingly replaced – ﬁrst in the major towns – by iron presses capable of greater output. The earliest British iron presses, those built around 1803 by Robert Walker to the Earl Stanhope’s design, were able to print about 250 impressions an hour. In 1823 William Hope, an ironfounder in Jedburgh, applied for a patent to e≠ect improvements to the by then widely used Stanhope press. Perhaps the most successful Scots manufacturer of printing machines was David Napier who, based in London, made considerably improved machines for international export. One such was a selfinking Albion press in 1825; another, the improved double-feeder bed and platen originally conceived in 1830, introduced that same year at Ballantyne’s and eventually becoming ‘the most popular press of the kind in the trade’ (Moran: 116; Gray: 13). Numerous patents were taken out for machines in the second third of the century but only a few were economically successful. Robert Gunn of Edinburgh, whose machines were made by Claud Girdwood & Company in Glasgow, found considerable success with a doublecylinder, steam-driven machine that was ‘claimed to print about 2,300 impressions an hour’ and in 1835 another of his machines which was used to print Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, the Historical Newspaper, and Information for the People ran at ‘750 impressions an hour and cost £300, without the steam-engine’. It was the cylinder and later the sheetor web-based rotary printing machines that made possible the speedy

the organisation of the trade

37

and large print runs on which the prosperity of the great Scots newspapers and reviews were founded. When steam was ﬁrst employed to drive a printing machine in Scotland is hard to determine. The obituary of the machinist William Tofts claimed that he was ‘the ﬁrst man who superintended a steam printing-machine in Scotland’ on its introduction to Ballantyne’s (Ballantyne: 107). However, McLaren wrote that William Fraser (d. 1846), the manager of Neill’s, ‘introduced into Edinburgh steam presses for printing’ (McLaren: 16), though neither provided dates. Nevertheless, the capacities of steam presses were so well known in Edinburgh that by 1830 John Gray proposed the construction of a ‘Printers’ Hall’ in which the best and the biggest of the machines could be gathered. By the end of the century, however, the unremitting march of technology had made steam all but obsolete. As Andrew Aird wrote in 1882, ‘[S]team in many quarters is now disappearing as a consort to the engine, and gas as a motive power is now taking its place. It, too, is getting its quietus, and electricity is its competitor’ (Aird: 10). Another important technology which entered Scottish printing early in the nineteenth century was the use of stereotyping which, contrary to popular opinion, was probably not discovered by the Edinburgh goldsmith, William Ged, whose experiment with the form was only one of several in the eighteenth century. According to the STC, it was introduced into Edinburgh printing o∞ces in 1825 by Duncan Stevenson of the University Printing O∞ce and almost simultaneously by James Gall (Oct. 1865: 215). Ballantyne’s took up Kronheim’s process in their printing of McPhun’s Working Man’s Bible, ‘a folio volume of more than 1000 pages’. Stereotype achieved its greatest commercial viability with James Dellagana’s invention in 1861 of a curved casting box for plates to ﬁt the cylinder of a rotary printing machine, thus enabling unprecedentedly large daily newspaper runs. By 1865 stereotype was being used in Edinburgh by ‘no less than twelve parties’ while the related procedure of electrotype was at the same time being practised in four o∞ces, most successfully at Blackwood’s (Oct. 1865: 215). Glasgow, on the other hand, was particularly noted for the number and importance of its lithographic printing establishments. In 1832 there were seventeen compositors in Glasgow, and forty-six press or machine men; in 1882, there were 547 compositors and 203 pressmen, a four-fold increase (Aird: 7). The technique ﬁrst came to the attention of Scots in an article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1817 (L. L. 1817) and in 1820 John Robertson of Edinburgh became the ﬁrst Scot to be listed as a lithographic printer, followed closely by John Watson (ﬂ. 1821–7), the ﬁrst to be listed as a lithographic printer in Glasgow.

38

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 1.3 Common wooden press, 1800s. In 1800, printing technology remained remarkably similar to the way it had been in the days of Gutenberg. The wooden press was labour-intensive, allowing two pressmen to produce 240 simple impressions an hour. Pictured here is a common wooden press, similar to the one on which Ballantyne printed his early editions of Scott.

Figure 1.4 Columbian press, 1820s. Throughout the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the introduction of iron presses, with their heavier mechanisms, allowed for larger and better deﬁned impressions. The Columbian press pictured here is typical of the many iron presses introduced into Scotland in this period.

the organisation of the trade

39

Figure 1.5 Nelson rotary press, 1850. In 1850 Thomas Nelson Jnr. constructed a prototype steam-driven rotary machine for book work, capable of producing 10,000 sheets an hour, printed on both sides, fed by a continuous web of paper. Nelson went no further with his machine, judging it inadequate for the purpose and overlooking its potential for newspaper printing.

Figure 1.6 Walter press, 1870s. The Scotsman newspaper, which had been printing by steam since 1831, was using a ten-cylinder Hoe ‘lightning’ press by 1860, yielding 10,000 complete and folded copies of the newspaper an hour. In 1871, three Walter presses were acquired, each of which was capable of producing 12,000 copies an hour.

40

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Hugh Wilson, also of Glasgow, was not far behind though he was not listed as a lithographic printer until 1829. In 1877 his ﬁrm ran 300 hand presses and 120 steam presses. Other population centres were soon to follow: John Neilson jnr was the ﬁrst to introduce lithography to Paisley in 1821, and stereotyping three years later. The process of ‘printing from a stone slab’ was particularly valuable for the printing of illustrations, and accounts for the great popularity of illustrated books and periodicals in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While the majority of lithographic printers were probably engaged in jobbing work – such as circulars, business forms and funeral notices (Schenck: 9) – the introduction of lithography was to have a dramatic e≠ect on the division of labour within the trade at large, diminishing the necessity for composition and conveying greater responsibility for the printed product to the pressmen – or the machinemen as they quickly came to be called. David Schenck has shown that Edinburgh and Glasgow increased the number of their lithographic printing ﬁrms between 1820 and 1830 at a similar rate, due to the burgeoning industrialisation of Glasgow as well as the development of railways there, ‘the comparative ﬁgures for Glasgow had virtually doubled by 1850’. Schenck’s analysis of the ‘Numbers, Durations and General Distribution of Lithographic Businesses established in Scotland 1820–1870’ gives rise to a surmise that the proportions of the durations of the businesses and their general distributions in Scotland may apply equally well to the whole number of printing establishments in Scotland to 1870, not merely to the lithographic printers (15, 16). Although they were not a disturbing force until after 1880, the new composing and distribution machines were on the horizon. The Hattersley composing machine was demonstrated to employers in the Chambers’ o∞ce in December 1859, the Young machine at the Edinburgh Exhibition in 1862, and Mackie’s machine and perforator in 1872 (Gillespie: 110–11).

The organisation of labour Until the Factory Acts of 1866–70, the conditions under which printers worked were oppressive. Even after the Acts restricted their hours, as the tables below illustrate, children and females were still employed in signiﬁcant numbers though not in the more skilled categories. In 1804, the Edinburgh compositors observed that: the profession of a journeyman compositor can be compared with no trade; conﬁned in an unwholesome house, without the beneﬁt

the organisation of the trade

41

of free air or proper exercise, employed in arranging and composing poisonous materials, their minds at the same time, in a perpetual state of agitation. (EJC 1804a: 12) For the most part they worked in under-heated and ill-lit tenements, and, if on piece work rates (rather than establishment rates), for as many hours as they could. When courts were in session, work was plentiful and there were opportunities for relatively high pay, but the level of pay during the legal terms was not continued throughout the year. Furthermore, such work often required printers to work through the nights under considerable pressure (EJC 1804b: 4). The situation was not very di≠erent in the newspaper houses. The Glasgow Society’s newspaper scale of 1877 awarded compositors on morning newspapers – who worked largely by candlelight – as much as 10d per 1,000 ens of Pearl type for six hours of work (GTS 1877: 5). Other newspaper compositors worked longer for less. And the three months from August to October were invariably slack for the printing trade. Typesetting was widely recognised as unhealthy and the mortality rate, particularly from tuberculosis, was particularly high during this period. While the expansion of print had made the trade more proﬁtable, wages in Scotland, always less than those in England, had not increased from the depressed levels of the eighteenth century. In 1804 a group of Edinburgh compositors had appealed to the Court of Session for a quarter increase, asserting that ‘their wages have continued the same, for time immemorial, while the price of living has increased one half ’ (EJC 1804b: 6). The court’s interlocutor agreed and in 1805 established the scale of prices that would come to govern composition throughout Scotland for the next ﬁve decades (EJC 1805; ETS 1844, 1851). This was the ﬁrst increase in wages to result from collective action by workers in the printing trade, the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 having made journeymen’s trade societies illegal, until their repeal in 1825. Consequently, the earliest nineteenth-century printers’ societies were e≠ectively friendly societies which nevertheless a≠orded ample opportunities for the consideration of ‘industrial action’. The Glasgow Typographical Society was founded in 1817, the Glasgow Printers’ and Bookbinders’ Society in 1824, and the Edinburgh Compositors’ Society in 1824 (Gillespie: 29; ECS 1824; GPBS 1824) principally for the relief of unemployment and the provision of provident beneﬁts. The enduring unit of print labour organisation was the chapel, which traced its origins to the beginning of printing in Europe. It consisted of the journeymen (compositors and pressmen) of individual printing establishments, was presided over by the Father of the Chapel, and

42

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

provided both discipline and entertainment in the printing-house while representing the workers’ concerns to the master. Chapels also provided information and support to the local typographical societies to whose meetings they sent representatives. It was from this network of chapels and friendly societies that local typographical societies (or unions) emerged. The ﬁrst national organisation of Scottish typographical societies was founded in 1836 as the General Typographical Association of Scotland (Gillespie et passim). By 1843 it had ﬁfteen branches (including Aberdeen, Dumfries, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kelso, Kilmarnock, Montrose, Perth and Stirling) and over 700 members, whose major concerns were to limit the number of low-paid apprentices, to address working conditions, and to secure uniform rates of pay. By the 1840s substantial unemployment – believed to be caused by an inordinate number of apprentices – became the main concern and led to a number of strikes which strained the ﬁnances of the association. Forced into amalgamation with the Northern, Irish and London typographical societies Scotland became one of ﬁve districts in the National Typographical Association (1845–7). Deliberations on the apprenticeship question came to a head when the newly-formed Master Printers’ Association of Edinburgh resolved not to employ any journeyman who threatened to strike and that no journeyman should be employed without providing a certiﬁcate from his previous master. Early in January 1847 the District Board agreed to support a dispute against the thirty-eight employers who had signed the resolutions and directed that branch members who lost their employment should receive ten shillings a week strike pay. As a consequence, over 150 men received notice of discharge. Most of them left Edinburgh to ﬁnd employment elsewhere; by October only thirty remained on the books of the Edinburgh branch, which found itself saddled with considerable debt. Many smaller societies went out of existence around this time, leaving only Glasgow in an active though ﬁnancially-precarious situation. Nevertheless, the latter took the initiative to re-form the Scottish Association, proposing re-amalgamation in 1851–2. At a delegate meeting in November 1852, Dumfries, Edinburgh, Kilmarnock and Paisley agreed to join Glasgow in the Scottish Typographical Association. It was decided that the Central Board would be located in Glasgow and elected by the Glasgow branch. True to the conditions of its establishment the STA ‘emphasized the virtues of caution and ﬁnancial prudence’ and by 1860 claimed twenty-three branches and over 1,000 members (Child: 116). Ten years later the membership had grown to 1,540. By 1877 the STA had ‘emerged as a full-scale provident society,

the organisation of the trade

43

providing sick and funeral beneﬁts, unemployment allowance, and superannuation’ (Gillespie: 58). Amongst printers the ten-and-a-half hour working day and six-day week was standard through the early years of the century (Child: 73). Edinburgh printers secured a scaling-down of hours to ﬁfty-seven a week in 1865 and in 1871 attempted to make that ﬁfty-one, but accepted ﬁfty-four temporarily. Reduction of hours, even with reduction of scale rates was important because the number of hours worked established what was to be paid as overtime at higher rates. The News section had night work reduced to forty-eight and day work to ﬁfty-one hours. In 1872 the Edinburgh Society attempted to extend the ﬁfty-one-hour week to other sections of the trade, together with increased piece-work and overtime rates. This was too much for the masters to swallow and the compositors went on a strike that was broken by the non-union labour readily available from England, apprentices, and, in signiﬁcant numbers for the ﬁrst time, females. Indeed, the strike can be seen as a catalyst for female labour in the printing trade. As one commentator observed: An enterprising employer . . . trained some girls from the Merchant Company’s Schools – a better class of girls. . . – to compose. The results were satisfactory, and the example was speedily followed. The strike failed and the displacement of the men continued. (Macdonald 1904: 45) Eventually a compromise was negotiated. The compositors accepted the employers’ o≠er to increase the establishment or weekly wage, and the overtime rate and returned to work, the society’s and STA’s funds being much depleted. The upshot was that the GTS remained in a superior situation for wages and hours, as it managed to avoid the actions that so debilitated the Edinburgh Society. Its ﬁrst scale was agreed to in 1815; its second in 1837; its third in 1870, its fourth in 1879. In 1877 the Glasgow weekly wage was the same as Edinburgh’s but the piece rate was 3/4d greater, for the same number of hours.

Apprentices and the ‘female question’ From the earliest days of printing in Britain there were complaints about the use of cheap apprentice labour for journeyman work. Scottish apprentices were not bound to their masters for a standard period. The length of apprenticeship could vary from the ‘standard’ seven years – for instance, the King’s and Queen’s Printers bound apprentices for ﬁve years and the Caledonian Press for four – and apprentices were paid

44

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

wages, the amount of which was not regulated by the various printers’ scales. Consequently, it was always cheaper to employ apprentices than journeymen. From its inception, the STA sought to restrict the number of apprentices masters could employ, setting ratios of apprentices to journeymen. In 1837, the Glasgow Society allowed an o∞ce headed by a master who had served an apprenticeship to start with three apprentices (GTS 1837: 2). With 409 journeymen at case and 352 apprentices, and at press 137 journeymen and ﬁfty apprentices, there was a ratio of one apprentice to every 1.8 journeymen. Concerns among Edinburgh printers in 1843 about this ‘superabundance of apprentices’ led to the general implementation of new limits which required no more than two apprentices per master or company and thereafter one apprentice for every three journeymen (EJC 1843). By the 1880s calls for the abolition or at least a restriction on the length of apprenticeships had been commonly expressed in the STC. What is more, it was felt that the masters’ desire to get the most economic beneﬁt from their compositors was leading them to a neglect of professional education. An 1875 return of compositors, pressmen and so on complained that in the Daily Review newspaper o∞ce ‘swarms of young men [were] learning nothing’.3 As printing establishments became larger, however, compositors began to specialise and a long apprenticeship was seen as unnecessary. Another issue which was to exercise the printing trade greatly throughout the nineteenth century was the status of women. As the census report of 1881 demonstrates, a considerable number of females were employed in Scotland: 1,107 to 8,393 males, or one female to just over seven male workers. Female compositors, even in Edinburgh, made up only a few of that number, one estimate being ‘approximately 150 in 1879; 200 in 1885’ (Reynolds: 48–9). A disproportionately larger number of females younger than 20 years of age, however, suggests that females were routinely employed in the less-skilled operations of printing-o∞ces, as machine feeders or paper-folders for instance, the modesty of their wages giving them relative work security. The Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women ﬁrst proposed the training of women as compositors in 1859 and a year later Emily Faithfull set up the Victoria Press in London with ﬁve women apprentices bound to four-year terms and paid equivalent male rates. In 1861, the Scottish National Institute for Promoting the 3

NLS MS Acc. 4068.

the organisation of the trade

45

Employment of Women in Printing was launched with a proposal to establish printing o∞ces in several Scottish towns for the employment of women as compositors; however, only the Edinburgh o∞ce was established, under the name of the Caledonian Press, a name which had been associated over four decades earlier with Oliver & Boyd and David Macarter & Company of Ayr. The leading light of the venture, which began at 4 South David Street in 1861 with eight girl apprentices and three male journeymen, was a Miss Mary Anne Thomson of Lasswade. By 1863, the press was employing fourteen women (Reynolds: 33). The press established an initially feminist magazine, The Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle, which ran from May 1862 to March 1865, and provided the main employment. Ultimately it did not succeed as a commercial venture, and its stock of materials was advertised for sale in 1865. The fate of Miss Thomson and her compositors is unknown. Three years before the Print Workers’ Strike of 1872, the STC professed ‘a vague belief ’ that there was one female compositor in Edinburgh. Three years after the strike the report on compositors in Edinburgh revealed that Ballantyne & Co. now employed twenty-eight female compositors, W. & R. Chambers four, R. & R. Clark eighteen, Muir & Paterson seven, Murray & Gibb eighteen, Neill & Company thirty-ﬁve, and Turnbull & Spears, two. Two others appear to have been employed as reading-girls. All in all, in 1875 there were 114 female compositors in Edinburgh, as against 1,054 male compositors: one out of ten Edinburgh compositors was a female, a ratio which was unequalled anywhere else at this time and which would increase in the coming years.

Conclusion The transformation of the printing trade and the new technologies on which it relied were to force dramatic changes on the labour force throughout the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that the ‘Edinburgh scale’ would eventually set the standard for the production of print throughout the British Isles, through the period 1800–80 Scottish wages were on average always lower than London and some other English scales. The unpredictable conditions of trade – particularly in the ﬁrst half of the century – put a growing number of printers out of work, leading to local and then national schemes for the relief of unemployment. Although local societies had attempted to o≠er aid their resources were meagre. A later solution was to ‘license’ society members to ‘tramp’ to

46

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

the jurisdiction of societies which were more prosperous, in the hope of employment or ﬁnancial aid. On the national level the tramping relief system was elaborate and ultimately unsuccessful. Societies located on the main routes were overwhelmed by such obligations (STA: 8). In 1877 the STA abolished the tramping system in Scotland and was shortly followed in this by the London Society of Compositors and other societies (Gillespie: 82). Originally, compositors had belonged to the labour aristocracy, in comparison to whom pressmen were regarded as mere brute labourers. The complex new printing machines not only increased output but also represented a large investment of capital so that employers were reluctant to entrust the task to old-style pressmen: in e≠ect they became engineers on whose abilities the fortunes of printing ﬁrms greatly depended. ‘Twicing’, that is, compositors working as pressmen and vice versa, was no longer feasible in o∞ces with large printing machines. There was also a consequent shift of power within the trade societies where pressmen believed that their new skills and responsibilities were not being adequately acknowledged. ‘Within little more than a quarter of a century’, the STC proclaimed in October 1866, ‘the Edinburgh pressman has advanced from the grade of an able-bodied labourer to the rank of an artist’ (406). In Glasgow in 1866 a large number of machinemen attempted to secede from the Typographical Society; they were reconciled when the STA refused to recognise them and the Glasgow Society made organisational arrangements to accommodate them (Gillespie: 122). In 1874 a similar event occurred in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Press and Machinemens’ Society was established as a breakaway from the Edinburgh Society but was not recognised by the STA. Despite many attempts to secure unity the Edinburgh Machinemen maintained their separate existence until 1907 (Child: 117; Gillespie: 123). Reviewing the situation of the trade on 9 April 1882, the editor of the STC concluded: Add to these the probabilities of still greater changes being made in the mode of carrying on the business, dependent on the successful adaptation of machinery to the work of type composition and distribution, the further extension of mechanical appliances to the press-room, the vaunted superiority of which is their capability of being worked by boys, and the gradually increasing substitution of apprentice boys and unapprenticed females for journey-men in the case-room, and reasonable grounds for anxiety are not far to seek. (38)

the organisation of the trade

47

Figure 1.7 Composing room, Neill & Co., Edinburgh.

Although printing technologies changed over the ﬁrst eighty years of the nineteenth century, a≠ording a greater e∞ciency in the speed of the presses, there was no serious challenge in this period to the fundamentals of setting and imposing type. The introduction of stereotyping had the e≠ect of increasing production and freeing up large quantities of standing type but still had to be originated by hand. The compositor worked in the composing room, standing at a frame, on top of which would sit the upper and lower cases of type. Before any setting could begin the ﬁnished size of the page had to be decided upon. This was determined by how many times and which way the original sheet of paper was to be folded. One fold becomes folio (delivering four printed pages), twice becomes quarto (eight), three times octavo (sixteen) and so on. Crown octavo (ﬁve inches by seven and an eighth inches) became an increasingly popular size during this period. Type was placed (set) on a setting stick. The size of the page, less the margins, dictated the width of the measure to which this would be set and also the number of lines in the block. The stick was held in the left hand, whilst individual letters were selected and assembled by the right. The type was cast in mirror image and set left to right, but upside

48

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

down. Each metal type had a nick, which enabled the compositor to check by touch that the type was accurately aligned. Every line then had to be fully justiﬁed and spaced to ensure readability was not seriously impeded. The good arrangement of space between words was integral to the aesthetic of the overall ﬁnished page. Set type was stored on a galley and once the main body was ﬁnished attention could be turned to other matter (headlines, page numbers, signatures and so on) and added to the completed pages. These were tied with cord and transferred to the stone for imposition. Pages were placed in sequence to allow the sheet, when printed, folded and trimmed, to form a ﬁnished section of the book. Odd page numbers were always to the left, even to the right, so correct imposition would reverse this. Numbers and signatures were checked and the pages initially positioned by eye. A book chase was then placed around the pages and, using a folded sheet of the exact stock, the margins and gutters set. Then the appropriate furniture, sidesticks and footsticks were introduced, quoins positioned, pages untied, and the forme planed to ensure a good impression. Once locked and lifting successfully, it was sent to the machine room for the ﬁrst proof, which was read, and corrected if necessary. When passed for printing the completed forme would be returned to the press or dispatched to the stereotypers for the creation of the ﬂong (a compressed mass of paper sheets, forming a matrix) and subsequent plate for printing. After printing, the type would either be stored for future editions or distributed back into the case in preparation for the next job. Pictured here is the composing room of the Edinburgh ﬁrm of Neill & Company. The compositor applies the furniture at the stone while, just visible to the left, are two female compositors at case. Gen Harrison

Illustration John Scally In 1800 there were a few tried and tested methods of producing printed illustrations which had been in use for decades and in some cases since before the introduction of moveable type to Europe in the 1450s. These methods were principally the woodcut, the wood engraving, the copper engraving and the etching. The advantage of these processes was that they could be executed manually, either in small workshops or by one craftsman or artist working alone. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, printing was still in the hand-press period, but the introduction of industrial processes was on the horizon, with which would come the ability to produce quality illustrations in vast numbers. Improved reprographic techniques were introduced alongside other epochal technological advances in the period, not least the introduction of mechanised papermaking, the introduction of the steam-powered press, and the invention of multiple-cylinder stereotype printing, all of which would contribute to the mass production of print and image (P. Anderson 1991: 1–3). Nevertheless, if there was one feature that stood out more than any other it was the advances made in the creation of illustrations, both in monochrome and colour, in response to the inexhaustible public appetite for a combination of visual and textual material. Between 1800 and 1880 a range of new methods of illustration was introduced to Scotland, including wood engraving using boxwood which had been perfected in the ﬁrst quarter of the century by the Northumberland printer Thomas Bewick. Producing works for the Scottish market, Bewick made extended visits north of the border and was responsible in 1808 for an illustrated edition of The Poetical Works of Robert Burns. More sophisticated methods of steel and copper

50

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

engraving were to follow, accompanied by improved etching techniques, and eventually the entirely new processes of lithography (literally printing on stone) and photography (calotype, collotype and albumen print). The invention of photography in 1839 made new forms of illustration possible, not least photolithography in which Scottish pioneers led the way. And by 1880 more sophisticated photomechanical processes, such as the transfer of images onto relief blocks, were on the horizon. Wood engraving rode the tidal wave of industrialisation remarkably well. Because it was so hard-wearing and, more importantly, could be printed simultaneously with the text, this method continued to dominate until the mid-1880s. As David M. Sander has observed, almost any printing before this time in which an illustration appears on the same page as type was produced by this method: ‘Even if they look like etchings, pen drawings, or lithographs (wood engravers often imitated these techniques on wood), only wood engravings could be printed with the type’ (Sander: 19). Yet by 1890 the wood engraving was dead, made obsolete by the introduction of the photomechanically produced relief block (Gri∞ths: 25). The introduction of lithography into Scotland greatly increased the ability to produce images and text cheaply and e∞ciently. The technique of lithography initially came to the attention of Scots in an article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in May 1817 and in 1820 John Robertson of Edinburgh became the ﬁrst Scot to be listed as a lithographic printer, followed closely by John Watson (ﬂ. 1821–7), the ﬁrst to be listed as a lithographic printer in Glasgow. Other population centres were soon to follow: John Neilson jnr was the ﬁrst to introduce the technique to Paisley in 1821 (SBTI). The decades from 1800 to 1880 were therefore to witness an unprecedented number of new illustrative processes. What follows is an examination of the key techniques in Scottish use in this period, from woodcuts to photography. All illustration, from wood engraving to chromolithography, falls into one of three families of technique – relief, intaglio and planographic – each of which involves a di≠erent method of delivering ink to the printing surface, usually paper. The relief technique delivers ink above the surface, intaglio below the surface, and planographic on the surface (Gri∞ths: 1a). Although there are other important di≠erences within the three families, this fundamental distinction remains.

Relief In the relief process, the surface holding the ink load stands above the surface of the block, or other medium, as this has been cut away.

the organisation of the trade

51

E≠ectively, the image comprises the original parts of the block which have not been removed. In the nineteenth century a roller was used to apply the ink to the printing surface, where previously a slower dabbing technique was employed. The ink is transferred to the paper by adding pressure, while the ink must be of a consistency to allow it to sit on the relief surface only and not bleed into the hollows. The main relief processes are woodcut and wood engraving and these have a distinct advantage in that they can be printed alongside type in the printer’s forme. The woodcut predates most other processes and can be traced back to China in the ninth century, although it was not until the introduction of printing using moveable metal type in the mid-ﬁfteenth century that the humble woodcut was brought into the new printing process (Chatto: 7–9). Treated softwood, such as sycamore or beech, is used and the image is drawn onto the block – sometimes paper with the image on it is glued to the block – which allows the superﬂuous wood to be cut away with a penknife-like instrument, leaving in relief the lines and wider surfaces (which are often hatched) to be inked and printed (Gri∞ths: 13–22). Conversely, wood engraving uses hardwood, usually boxwood, cut across the close ‘end-grain’, with the relief image being revealed using a graver (much like the burin used in copper engraving) which cuts a v-shape into the surface. With a harder boxwood surface and the precise graver a much more detailed, high-quality image can be created, yet the non-printing areas are still cut away, as in the old-fashioned woodcut. Wood engraving was pioneered in Britain by Thomas Bewick in Newcastle in the late eighteenth century, but it was not until the 1830s that the technique quickly spread throughout Scotland with the steam-printing revolution. Armies of facsimile wood engravers excelled at reproducing black ink illustrations on relief blocks. Gradually, the method of transferring the image to the block was rendered more e∞cient, ﬁrst using stereotypes and electrotypes, then imposing the image on the sensitised block (initial attempts used bichromated gelatine) by a photomechanical process. The latter process, in particular, enjoyed limited success before 1880. In e≠ect the wood-engraved block was the only way to produce inexpensive, but accurate and detailed images for a print run of many thousands. Copper engraving and etching were well established, but they were intaglio processes, which made it impossible to execute at the same time as relief printing with metal type. Hence the proliferation of separate prints using these intaglio methods, which were either sold separately or had to be bound into the book after the

52

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 1.8 Wood Engraving, 1800. Robert Bloomﬁeld’s The Farmer’s Boy was ﬁrst published in 1800 with wood engravings by John Anderson of Aberdeen. Anderson was apprenticed to Thomas Bewick in 1792 but was so unruly that the ﬁrm attempted to sue him three years later. After ﬂeeing from Bewick he found employment in London with the booksellers Vernor & Hood, for whom these illustrations were produced. His ﬁrst known work appeared in 1799, followed by the ﬁrst edition of Bloomﬁeld’s The Farmer’s Boy (illustrated here), often misattributed to Bewick. In 1805 Bewick received notiﬁcation that ‘Mr John Anderson is certainly gone to Botany Bay’ (ODNB).

letterpress had been printed. By contrast, the wood engraving was a relief method similar to text printing and so could be executed at the same time. As a consequence, the wood-engraved block and metal type sat side-by-side in the steam-powered pressroom for most of the nineteenth century.

the organisation of the trade

53

Intaglio In the intaglio process the printing surface is wiped clean of ink so that the engraved marks below the surface can hold the ink load. The printing surface is a thin metal plate, generally made of copper, although steel was introduced in the 1820s. Acting in exactly the opposite way from relief printing, the image in the intaglio process is contained below the surface and therefore requires considerable pressure to transfer the ink from below the surface of the plate to the paper. The application of the extra pressure needed to transfer the image results in the characteristic ‘plate mark’ around an intaglio image. In copper engraving, the engraver makes the lines using a burin which cuts a v-shape in the metal while the sheer di∞culty of the technique naturally engenders the use of parallel lines. The skilled craftsman can alter the width of the line to convey three dimensions, while cross-hatching, dots and little scoops lifted from the surface of the metal create tonal areas. Before printing, the plate is warmed and the ink applied with great care and dexterity, the printer ensuring that the ink is completely worked into the furrows and the surface is entirely clean. A sheet of dampened paper is laid on top of the inked and warmed plate and they are together passed at high pressure through a roller. It is this process that produces the distinctive plate-mark which is often used to identify an engraving. (The action of a printing press on a wood block leaves little or no impression on the paper.) A copper plate engraving is harder than wood and therefore capable of producing between 2,000 and 3,000 impressions before completely wearing out. Etching is a more complex, though less labour-intensive process. To the hard-pressed engraver spending long hours gouging lines in copperplate, its introduction in the early ﬁfteenth century had brought something of a respite. Unlike engraving, etching is a process using acid to bite out the lines on a metal plate. The action is fairly simple, in that the copper plate is heated, then coated with a ground (usually a mixture of wax, gum or resin) that is resistant to acid when cooled, and the obverse of the plate is coated in varnish to make it resistant to acid. The etcher reveals the lines with an etching needle and, once the drawing has been completed, the plate is submerged in a bath of acid which eats into the exposed lines. If lines of varying depth are required, then the plate is removed from the acid, washed and dried, and the lines that have been adequately bitten are painted over with varnish to protect them from further acid biting. The plate is then returned to the acid, with the lightest lines protected, allowing the remaining lines to be bitten into more deeply. This ‘stopping-out’ process may be repeated on a single plate

54

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 1.9 Copper-plate engraving, 1815. The son of a mason from Dalkeith, John Kay (1742–1826) was a self-taught artist who made his early living as a surgeon-barber. After the receipt of an annuity in 1784, Kay was able to set up in modest premises as a seller of prints at 10 Parliament Close, Edinburgh. Although he is known for his idiosyncratic subject matter and his distinctive portraits of Scots worthies rendered in a naïve style, this portrait of the apothecary William Wilson (1815) shows a comparatively high level of accomplishment. At the time of his death, Kay was making arrangements for an edition of his works with

the organisation of the trade

55

several times. Alternatively, it is also possible to draw further lines onto the plate during the etching process. This procedure – practised to great e≠ect by Rembrandt – allowed the artist more freedom as an intermediary between the printing process and the ﬁnal product. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw something of a vogue for ‘artist’s etchings’ making possible new kinds of tonal quality using experimental techniques such as retroussage, which involves the removal of the ink from the recessed areas before printing (Gascoigne: 10). Scottish artists, Sir D. Y. Cameron and Sir Muirhead Bone were key ﬁgures in the use of this technique. The technique of drypoint is by far the most undemanding of the intaglio processes. Using a needle-sharp point made of steel, it is possible to score a copper plate and this convenient method not only allows plates to be worked in certain areas after engraving or etching, but if the waste metal (the burr) is not rubbed away, the resultant e≠ect after the application of ink raises new tonal possibilities. With the waste metal along the ridges of the line covered in ink, the e≠ect when printed is akin to blurring, a softening of the sharp detail of the impression. The sole use of a drypoint needle on a copper plate (without the need for acid, stopping out, or an engraver’s burin) attracted artists to it during the etching revival of the nineteenth century. In the early decades of the century Scottish artists such as David Wilkie and Andrew Geddes used the technique, often in combination with other intaglio methods, while Bone and Cameron used drypoint as part of their repertoire in the closing decades of the century. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution the simple scoring technique on metal and the knowledge that only a few impressions could be printed o≠ered for some practitioners an antidote to the mass production that had come to dominate printing. The two most common techniques of intaglio printing – engraving and etching (often called line engraving) – were regularly combined on a single metal plate. This was the dominant method in use throughout the nineteenth century. An engraver would use the burin to work on some parts of the plate after other areas, such as foliage and Figure 1.9 (continued) letterpress to be provided by James Thomson Callender. In 1835, Kay’s widow sold the plates to Hugh Paton who issued a quarto edition entitled A series of original portraits and caricature etchings by the late John Kay, miniature painter, Edinburgh in monthly parts in 1837–8 (2nd edn, 1842). The plates, which were eventually acquired by A. & C. Black for a 3rd edition in 1877, were thereafter destroyed.

56

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

buildings, had been bitten using acid, thus allowing him to concentrate his energies on the ﬁgures in the image or other areas of intricate detail. The need for mass production led to the use of steel engraving in the 1820s. Since steel was such a hard metal, the wearing of the plate during successive printing was almost impossible, meaning that limitless impressions could be made. A comparatively harder surface also permitted shallower lines arranged closer together, thus producing a more subtle and highly detailed image. However, such was the nature of the obdurate steel that most plates were almost fully etched rather than engraved, the acid being much more e≠ective against steel than the engraver’s burin. The invention of steel facing in the 1850s, where a very thin layer of iron was laid over a copper engraving by means of electro-plating, meant that after the engraver had worked the yielding copper his work could be strengthened before it was printed.

Figure 1.10 Steel Engraving, 1840. A native of Perth, David Octavius Hill (1802–70) was one of the ﬁrst Scots to experiment with lithographic printing, in his Thirty Sketches of Scenery in Perthshire, Drawn from Nature and on Stone, issued in six parts between 1821 and 1823. ‘The Old Brig of Doon’ is one of several steel engravings which he executed for The Land of Burns (1840), the most expensive Scottish publication to that date. With William Henry Fox Talbot (see below), Hill would become a key ﬁgure in the pioneering art of photography.

the organisation of the trade

57

The mezzotint process is like no other in the intaglio family in that the basic principle is to work from complete black to light. A mezzotint rocker ‘grounds’ the copper plate until it is covered in marks and the consequent burr that is thrown up. If inked in this state the plate would leave a deep, rich print. Mezzotint, therefore, serves to reveal the image by smoothing parts of the plate (‘scraping’) to varying degrees so that an image results. The technique is laborious and complicated from start to ﬁnish and so was not practised extensively, but the results, when done properly, were superb. In practice the mezzotint worked best on reproductions of portrait paintings. As its name suggests, the aquatint was able to mimic the watercolour wash and it was particularly in the reproduction of landscapes that the technique enjoyed popularity between 1800 and 1830. This coincided with the proliferation of colour plate books depicting topographical scenes, a trend that was assiduously recorded by J. R. Abbey in Scenery of Great Britain and Ireland in Aquatint and Lithography 1770–1860 and Travel in Aquatint and Lithography 1770–1860. Essentially the technique involves covering the plate with an etching ground, normally a resin, which resists the action of acid but creates little pools around each particle that have been bitten by the acid. These depressions play host to the ink and produce the characteristic aquatint tone. As with other intaglio processes the action of the acid can be controlled through stopping out with varnish or by using grounds of di≠erent size on di≠erent parts of the plate.

Planography While the relief processes print above the surface and intaglio below, the planographic processes print on the surface. The action of transferring an image to the printing surface therefore relies on chemical di≠erences rather than any action which removes material from a plate or other printing surface. Invented in Germany in 1798, lithography (literally drawing on stone) is based on the simple principle that grease and water repel each other, much like magnets with the same charges. Thus a highly polished limestone can receive an image produced with greasy ink; the surface is then dampened with water which will be selectively repelled; a roller containing greasy ink is passed over the stone only adhering to the drawn areas, with the dampened areas repelling the ink. The inked parts are then transferred from the stone to paper via a scraper press (Manual: i–xi). The production of the image on the stone could be done in di≠erent ways, for example using a pen with greasy ink, chalk (chalk

58

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

lithography), or covering the stone with litho ink and revealing the image by using a needle. Eventually the cumbersome lithographic stone was replaced with zinc in the 1830s and in the 1890s by aluminium. The greatest breakthrough in lithography in the nineteenth century was transfer lithography, whereby the image could be created on a specially prepared paper and then transferred to the stone, inked and printed. It was transfer lithography that was used when steam-power met lithographic printing in the 1850s. Lithography enjoyed many advantages over what had come before. Gone was the need to gouge and scrape a plate, or burn it with acid. Creating an image on stone was as easy as creating an image on paper, though the hand had to be raised above the surface using a wooden cradle to avoid smudging. Transfer lithography also meant that the initial art work could be accomplished from a distance, since the image could be created elsewhere and transferred to the stone by the printer. Its versatility allowed for the cheap production of handbills, facsimiles of handwriting, and other small jobs to be done quickly and e∞ciently and explains why local printers used the technique through to the middle of the twentieth century. Commercial printing especially was transformed by the lithographic process, so that the production of playbills, funeral notices, bills of lading, circulars, labels and advertisements proliferated as never before. In 1825 there were six lithographic printing businesses in Edinburgh and ﬁve in Glasgow, but by 1870 there were no fewer than sixty in Edinburgh and 122 in Glasgow. Hugh Wilson began as a lithographic printer in Glasgow in 1829, and ﬁfty years later his ﬁrm was running 300 hand presses and 120 steam presses.

Colour printing Adding colour to the three main families of illustration (relief, intaglio and planographic) o≠ered a myriad methods that were often combined in one print, and which ranged from simple hand-colouring to commercial colour lithography, otherwise referred to as chromolithography (Gasgoigne: 21–31; Gri∞ths: 113–120). Many printers went down blind alleys in their pursuit of a cheap method of adding colour to monochrome prints and some techniques emerged brieﬂy only to be rejected because they were too laborious. At its most basic a simple tint could enliven a monochrome image, as in the case of tinted wood engravings and even more commonly in tinted lithographs. The colour woodcut, or chromoxylograph (literally colour from wood) and the chromolithograph (colour from stone) were the most frequently used methods of

the organisation of the trade

59

adding colour. These were all methods in which, by 1880, Scottish printers had come to excel.

Photomechanical printing Before the application of photomechanical processes to the production of illustrations every image had to be worked on by hand. The craftsman or the printer or the artist had to intervene in the process before the printing of the image. This distinction remained a crucial one through most of the nineteenth century, and although the invention of photography by William Henry Fox Talbot was announced in 1839, whereby multiple positive images could be produced from a negative, the commercial impact of photography on book production belongs to the period after 1880. Wide-ranging and occasional crackpot attempts were made in relief, intaglio and planographic techniques to harness the medium of photography to the multiple production of images for publication. The more sensible ideas originated outside Britain, most notably in the pioneering work of the French engineer Alphonese Poitevin, who established the use of the carbon print process, collotypes and photolithography. Continuous trial and error in the 1870s of the relief line-block, using zinc plates coated with light-sensitive solutions (such as bichromated albumen), resulted in a viable alternative in the 1880s. Before this time there was more success in the area of planographic or surface printing. The collotype was produced by coating light-sensitive gelatin on a plate which reticulated after exposure to light, thus creating a surface to ink. Though not heavily used before 1880, it was commercially viable and was employed in a number of books, to great e≠ect in the works of the Scottish photographer John Thompson, who is best known for his documentary work, Street Life in London (1877). Another planographic process that would come to the fore in the 1880s was photolithography, which also exploited the light-sensitive qualities of bichromate gelatin, this time to transfer an inked image to a lithograph stone or zinc plate. Without doubt, the establishment of a visual culture, where the image in the book or periodical, the postcard or guide book, the birthday book or gift book, was as important as the text, can be traced to this period. Robert Louis Stevenson recalled how in his early childhood he had stood outside a newsagent’s shop at the top of Leith Walk in Edinburgh staring in wonder at the colourful publications (Stevenson 1909). Stevenson’s memories capture the magnetic allure of visual material in

60

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 1.11 Photomechanical printing, 1845. This picture of a ‘Highland Hut at Loch Katrine’ is from William Henry Fox Talbot’s Sun Pictures in Scotland (1845), a homage to Sir Walter Scott, the ﬁrst book o≠ered for sale with photographic illustrations. Originally from Dorsetshire, Fox Talbot (1800–77) had moved to Edinburgh to work closely with Scottish printers in the development of new photomechanical printing techniques. However, his collotype or Talbotype was slow and expensive to produce and so did not lend itself to multiple reproductions. The twenty-three salted-paper print photographs had to be produced separately and individually inserted into the volume, and thus only nineteen copies were produced. In 1852 he took out a patent for his ‘photographic engraving’ process and later developed the ‘photoglyphic engraving’ for which he was granted a patent in 1858. Although commercial success continued to elude him, Fox Talbot was awarded a medal in 1862 for his contribution to photomechanical printing, which was to have a profound and lasting inﬂuence on twentiethcentury printing techniques.

the middle of the period covered here. The introduction of cheaper methods for producing images in colour towards the end of the nineteenth century produced a range of possibilities for the publishing industry to sell their books and periodicals to an ever-increasing and more comprehensively educated population. In Scotland, as was the

the organisation of the trade

61

case elsewhere in the United Kingdom, wood engraving, lithography and photography brought the picture to all members of society. Not surprisingly, authors took a close interest in the choice of illustration to accompany their work. Walter Scott was intimately involved in the production of illustrations for the forty-eight-volume magnum opus edition of his novels (1829–33), with illustrated title pages and a full steel-plate engraving for each work, while Stevenson, a half-century later in 1885, was keenly interested in the ﬁrst suite of illustrations being produced for Treasure Island (Scally: 26). Indeed, well chosen and expertly executed images allowed the publisher to bring familiar texts to the market in new ways. Robert Cadell did precisely this with Scott’s magnum opus edition, by seeing the potential of illustrations to attract a burgeoning middle-class readership, albeit with limited funds, to a new, and fairly cheap edition of the great author’s novels. As we have seen, throughout the period Scottish printers were in the forefront in their use of the latest printing techniques. Good illustration was essential to many of the niche markets in which the Scottish book trade excelled at this time, most notably in cartography, text books and medical publications. Consequently, the successful implementation and occasional improvement of the best and latest methods would play a key role in the growth of the print trade in nineteenth-century Scotland. In many respects, the acceleration of reprographic technology after the 1820s mirrored the developments in other parts of the industry so that within half a century the well illustrated book was no longer the exception, but the rule.

62

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 1.12 Forging tools.

The forgery of banknotes in Scotland has a history almost as long as banknote production itself. Within four years of the printing of the ﬁrst Scottish notes in 1696, counterfeits or vitiat notes appeared. Bank of Scotland responded by changing its designs, thereby initiating a cycle which continues to this day. Early notes were fairly crude a≠airs, with little or no ornamentation. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, increasingly complex emblems and vignettes were employed. But the uniface notes were still printed from hand-engraved copper plates, and the serial numbers, signatures and often dates too, were ﬁlled in manually. A truly skilled artist or engraver, with access to the right equipment and good quality paper, could replicate the process and print their own ‘money’. One such was Thomas Watling, art master from Dumfries. He turned his hand to counterfeiting Bank of Scotland guinea notes and, despite attempts to implicate a local engraver, was convicted in 1789. Sentenced to transportation, Watling became the ﬁrst European artist to arrive in Australia. His drawings of the ﬂora, fauna and native people around Sydney Cove survive today in the Natural History Museum in London.

the organisation of the trade

63

Watling received a pardon and returned to Dumfries in 1803. Within two years he was again charged with banknote forgery. Despite compelling evidence and witness statements, the jury found the charge not proven. The use of watermarked paper lent additional security to banknotes, but was no guarantee of authenticity. French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars took up forgery on a grand scale, and counterfeit notes proliferated in the localities where they were held. Some were simple pen and ink a≠airs, but others were printed, and incorporated fake ‘watermarks’, created by impressing bone dies onto the paper. A set of dies discovered at the Valleyﬁeld camp near Penicuik in 1812 (pictured here) clearly shows how impressions of bank seals were applied to the fake notes. It was only the adoption of steel printing plates in the early nineteenth century that resolved the problem of counterfeiting, albeit temporarily. Steel allowed much ﬁner detail than copper, and machine tooling could produce extremely complex geometric patterns and designs. The resulting notes were miniature works of art, and the period 1825–60 is regarded by many as the zenith of Scottish banknote design. With the advent of photography came the threat of a new type of forgery. To counter this, banks started to print notes in two or more colours, and to extend their designs to the reverse. A scramble began to identify the perfect combination of colour and design which would be proof against photographic forgery. Bank of Scotland employed Professor Crum Brown, an eminent chemist at Edinburgh University, to conduct exhaustive experiments during the 1880s. The resulting 1885 series of notes was deemed to be ‘proof against photographic forgery’ and trumpeted as such in the press. However, ﬁrst-class forgeries began to appear within just a few years. The culprit, when he was eventually apprehended some eight months later, was 74-year-old John Hamilton Mitchell, an artist and engraver by profession. He had used his considerable skills to counterfeit the notes in the traditional way, using copper plates, and hand colouring the prints. In the rush to combat photographic forgery, the bank had neglected the very real threat still posed by talented engravers. Helen Redmond-Cooper

Binding John Morris In the early nineteenth century bookbinding was carried out in smalland medium-sized binding workshops, each owned by a master bookbinder and employing apprentices serving a seven-year term, and journeymen who had served their apprenticeships and were paid a weekly wage. It was possible for an individual customer to commission a binding from a bookbinder, but most members of the public would apply ﬁrst to a bookseller who would deal with a bookbinder on their behalf. Booksellers also sent books to the bindery to be prepared for display in their own shops. The bookbinding ledgers of one Edinburgh ﬁrm reveal that between 1794 and 1800 they regularly used fourteen di≠erent bookbinders (B&Bb). The principal centres of bookbinding in Scotland were Edinburgh and Glasgow, with Aberdeen third, though many provincial booksellers undertook or ordered bindings for customers. During the whole period the number of binding shops in Edinburgh was remarkably stable. In 1811 there were twenty-six; thirty-nine in 1835; thirty in 1845 and 1850; and thirty-one in 1870, and many of the ﬁrms existed for twenty years or more (EJB; PO). Many publishers found it worthwhile to have their own printing o∞ces, and three at least also had their own binderies: Oliver & Boyd by 1830 or earlier; Mackenzie, the part publisher, had one in Glasgow; and Thomas George Stevenson of Edinburgh from 1849 to 1870. With the wider spread of booksellers, it became possible to have any sort of bookbinding work done locally. Many provincial booksellers, like Isaac Forsyth, had actually been apprenticed to bookbinders. It may be that others kept a set of tools which were used by bookbinders as they travelled around from bookseller to bookseller to carry out orders for binding that had been awaiting their arrival. As well as Isaac Forsyth in

the organisation of the trade

65

Elgin (1780–1837), Inverness had a series of ﬁne binders: J. Young (1804–14?), William Ettles (1817–20), William Young (1818–26), Robert Baillie Lusk (1819–26), Forsyth & Young (1788–1837), Kenneth Douglas (1826–66) and David Urquhart (1837); and in Perth there were James Dewar (1820–37) and David Morrison & Co. (1812–22). Some of them are listed in the directories exclusively as booksellers, yet bindings signed by all of them are to be found in the National Library of Scotland. The reason for the preponderance of binders in Inverness and Perth can be explained by the fact that both places had ﬂourishing literary and debating societies and were the intellectual focus for a large hinterland encompassing the Highlands and including a fair number of the aristocracy.

The end of the hand binding period At the beginning of the nineteenth century, books were delivered in sheets to booksellers, who arranged for the binding of their stock. The country bookseller would either carry out binding himself, or arrange for it to be done. Apart from subscription editions, books were no longer sold to the public in sheets. Rather, the purchaser would receive his books sewn in paper-covered boards, or in cheap leather bindings at a slightly higher price. If he wanted a grander binding, something with gilt on the back to look good in his library, or the works of a favourite poet prettily bound for presentation to his spouse, he would have to commission his own. Though paper boards are durable, often more so than cloth or leather, they were not seen by most as the permanent dress of the book. Some books left the publisher ready bound. School books, for example, were normally put up in canvas for durability, and the children’s books of the day were in decorative boards, either covered in Dutch gilt paper or printed with amusing pictures, to appeal to the juvenile market. Books were commonly given as New Year’s gifts to adults and children alike – Christmas not being celebrated in Scotland at this time – and their bindings were designed to delight their recipients. Edition binding was generally uneconomical as each book had to be bound by hand. Even when cloth casing became customary, it was usual for the publisher to bind up only those copies for which there was an immediate demand. The procedures of hand binding can be divided into four distinctive stages: preparing the sheets, sewing, forwarding and ﬁnishing. When copies of a newly printed book arrived in the binding shop, it would be in sheets gathered into quires, with any illustrations or tabular matter

66

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

separate and, in the case of the latter, accompanied by a note to the binder. The ﬁrst task would be to collate and fold the sections, interleave plates, note any imperfections and report them to the publisher to be made good. In the case of a rebind, the book had to be taken down, the sewing cut, the glue removed from the spine, and the book collated. The sewing itself was almost invariably done by women, on a sewing frame consisting of a ﬂat base with a bar about a foot above. The cords were attached at the foot to the base and at the top ended with a loop which was fastened round the wooden bar. The folded sheets were sewn by hand onto cords or, later, tapes. The cords could be ‘sawn in’ to give a ﬂat back, saw cuts being made in the back of the sections before sewing, or left proud resulting in raised bands down the spine of the book. It was (and indeed still is) customary to sew a series of books of the same size, volumes of the one work, or several copies of the same book, on the sewing frame one after the other separating the volumes with boards to leave enough cord between for lacing in. In bound books, including those in leather, the thread was passed round the cord after each sheet so that all were separately attached to it. For books in boards or wrappers the thread was passed directly into the next folded sheet and then a further one and only then passed round the cord. This is known as sewing ‘three on’ and of course was faster. In ﬁne work, the end papers might be sewn on, strengthening the joint with the boards. Small pamphlets were usually sewn without cords or with three holes stabbed through the side of the pages near and parallel to the fold and a piece of thread passed through in a ﬁgure of eight and tied with a reef knot. The book, having been cut from the sewing frame, then went to the forwarder and was rounded and backed in a lying press with a ﬂat headed hammer. The backing made shoulders to allow the boards to lie ﬂush. The three outer edges of the book block were then cut with the plough, a special plane that ran along the top of a lying press on grooves made for the purpose. The cut edges could then be sprinkled with colour by knocking the handle of a brush full of pigment on the side of the lying press in which the edges were fastened, or they could be marbled or gilded; though these last two techniques were often done by specialists, for which purpose the books might have to be sent out to a separate craftsman. The headbands were then sewn on or stuck on, and the boards cut to size and attached. In ﬁne work, the cords or tapes were laced into the boards, which were of varying materials, through holes made for the purpose with a bodkin. The forwarder’s last task was to cover the boards. The back was sometimes strengthened with a strong open-weave cloth, mull, and then the leather was stuck down, having

the organisation of the trade

67

been damped down slightly and stretched over the boards, and cut to shape to ﬁt neatly at the inner corners, and usually carefully mitred. The outer side of the end papers then was pasted down on the inner board. Except for children’s books, Dutch gilt paper was no longer used, and the Old Dutch combed marblings were no longer in fashion, having been superseded by shell and the elegant reﬁnement of Stormont with its grey shell and salmon pink veins. Modern paper technology had introduced paper coloured and glazed on one side; yellow and purple were common for the period, and on occasion a thick matt brown was also used. After pressing in a standing press, the forwarder then passed the binding over to the ﬁnisher, who added the title in gold, and any required decoration. The ﬁnisher worked with brass tools either set in wooden handles or with brass blocks, the latter impressed into the leather using an arming press. Both sorts of tools were heated on a special small charcoalburning stove, which had a metal circle round it with rests for the handles of the hand tools. The tools were impressed into the leather. In the case of gold tooling, the tools were impressed through gold leaf which had been attached with glair made of egg whites. The surplus gold was then removed with a sponge, later a special soft rubber, which when saturated was sent to the goldbeater to have the gold recovered. Both the heat of the tools and the action of the ﬁnisher were critical to the e≠ect of the tooling. It became fashionable to combine blind and gold tooling on the sides of the same binding. Commonly the binding would be blocked in the centre with one of the ﬁne arabesque tools copied from sixteenth-century bookbinding, and a single broad decorated gold roll on the edge of the board would be complemented with a blind-tooled roll within it. The e≠ect was highly attractive.

Some distinctive Scottish bindings Until around 1780, and in some rare instances later, Scottish bibles and books intended for presentation were bound in unique Scottish styles: the wheel binding with a circular ornament made with special spoke tools, and special tools placed on the circumference of the wheel to give a scalloped e≠ect; and herringbone bindings with paired tools on either side of a central line. There were also modiﬁcations of the herringbone design where the lengths of the paired tools varied, and central diamond designs and cabriole bindings where the outer lines of a central panel were drawn to make a serpentine frame. These were the common designs from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, all of which were constructed on a blind ruled grid, which allowed the

68

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 1.13 Wheel binding, 1802. Lang, W., Disputatio juridica de rei vindicatione. Edinburgh, 1802. [NLS. Bdg. s.34].

accurate placing of the tools (Morris 1987). From the 1770s these existed in parallel with the baroque bindings, most notably those of James Scott, and the fashion for what might be called ‘Adam’ bindings that reﬂect the design of the Adam brothers’ interior decoration styles (Loudon: JS 16, 17) These new designs were tooled without a grid ruled in blind, probably through a paper pattern.

the organisation of the trade

69

In contrast, the bindings of the nineteenth century relied largely on the beauty of the leather. As well as marbled calf, russia and straight-grained morocco were used without decoration or with only a little tooling to set o≠ the quality of the material. The second of these, as its name suggests, was tanned by a process that came originally from Russia and involved the use of birch bark. It was a very heavily grained leather, which gave o≠ a pleasant scent when handled and became popular for ﬁne bindings. In a revolution of taste, the bibles carried to the kirk which had previously been elaborately decorated in gold gave way to the elegance of plain red straight-grained morocco. Marbled calf bindings were ﬁrst made in the 1760s, and in his later career James Scott made bindings using the process, often forming panels of di≠erent marbles on the same binding. At the same time, more colours of morocco were available to supplement the original red and black. Green had appeared in the 1770s; by the nineteenth century blue, mulberry and purple were widely used. The early years of the century saw a gradual adoption of international binding styles and working practices throughout Scotland. The tools, more accurately placed than before, were probably applied with the aid of a paper pattern. Of earlier practices all that remained were great technical expertise, robustness in construction, and a willingness to innovate. The ‘Adam’ binding style survived into the ﬁrst decade of the century for advocates’ theses, the 1802 bound thesis of advocate William Laing showing an interpretation of the wheel binding, made without spoke tools, or a scalloped design, but nevertheless very attractive. This was the last manifestation of the Scottish Wheel design. In 1820 the Edinburgh bookbinder Robert Hamilton skilfully bound a thesis in purple morocco with Egyptian tools, based on the engravings that emerged from Napoleon’s invasion of the country. Although he used the tools again, it was mostly in blind on bindings in russia leather, and started no new fashion. The English fashion for ﬂat backs and thinly-pared joints seems not to have taken o≠ in Scotland. Whereas such English bindings have often become detached from their boards, the more solid joints of Scottish bindings have usually survived better. Glasgow ﬁne bindings had, as in the previous century, a classical simplicity, typically a ﬁnely gilt back, and the sides plain or decorated with a single roll in gold, and excellent materials, possibly under the classicising inﬂuence of the Foulis Press bindery, many of which are on school and university prizes. The ﬁnest of the Glasgow binders was John Carss & Co. (1809–77). The ﬁrm not only bound most of the city’s university and school prize books, but also worked happily in almost any medium: vellum, or faux antique with padded brown covers and blind tooling and a blind ornament in the centre, but particularly in ﬁne marbled and

70

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Spanish printed leather. A magniﬁcent collection of bindings in the last two styles is to be found in the Euing Collection in Glasgow University Library. The common fashion in ﬁne binding in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s was to impress a large block in blind in the centre of the covers. A large decorative roll was then run along the outside of the covers in gold and another placed inside it in blind. The back (spine) of the binding was tooled in gold. Towards the end of the period, and especially on foreign books, the centre blocks were sometimes copies of the arabesque centrepieces found on many bindings at the end of the sixteenth century, though contemporary designs in a highly stylised formal ﬂoral design, a little like Celtic La Tène art, also appear. Fine binding had never been the bread and butter of a binding business. The binding ledgers of Bell & Bradfute of Edinburgh show a number of binders undertaking large quantities of work, but there is not a recognisable ﬁne binding mentioned. The binding ﬁrms included the one headed by James Scott’s son William, from whom a handful of bindings have come down in his father’s style, using his father’s tools. Some ﬁrms must have employed a large number of journeyman binders, though almost all are known to us only from union records and parish registers. Two ﬁrms of Edinburgh binders carried out ﬁne bindings with some regularity: Robert Hamilton, already mentioned, and Abraham Thomson, both active in the 1820s. An Edinburgh stationer and binder, Douglas Campbell, exploited a niche market in providing tastefully bound books of poetry (for example, the works of Scott and Thomson), duodecimo volumes for presents, goods which were appropriate for a stationer. The ﬁrm eventually became a bible warehouse.

The rise of new techniques As printing technologies improved and steam presses speeded up production, there was growing pressure to increase the speed of bookbinding. In the 1830s and 1840s, cases were made in quantity for publishers’ editions, since these were now issued to booksellers in their ﬁnal form, and only occasionally re-bound at the request and expense of the customer. Such cases were now made quite separately from the book block. Consequently, the production of ﬁne binding declined rapidly, so that by 1870 it was only in request in exceptional circumstances: for example, bibles for presentation to retiring ministers, or covers for illuminated addresses. With the introduction of book cloth (a form of dyed and glazed calico, prepared with a ﬁller to make it glue-proof ) in the early 1820s,

the organisation of the trade

71

paper-covered boards began to be superseded. At ﬁrst printed paper labels were used but, after the invention of gold tooling on cloth, lettering was either done with hand-held lettering tools or with letters ﬁxed into a typeholder, or increasingly by a specially cut block. Book cloth enabled the case to be made all in one piece. The ﬁrst cloth was dingy in appearance, but elaborate embossed and watered ﬁnishes were introduced and even eventually cloth with colour patterns, most commonly dull red, dark green and purple. This style was used, for instance, for The Poems and Songs of Alexander Rodger (1838), published by David Robertson of Glasgow, which features a green ribbed cloth binding with a small, specially cut, gold title block. With the introduction of machines to emboss cases the results became more elaborate. Songs for the Nursery (1844), also from Robertson of Glasgow, perhaps a special issue of the ﬁrst illustrated version of this work, is cased in red cloth embossed with a blind border, a central pictorial title block in gold on the sides and another title block in gold on the spine. The Poetical Works of Hector Macneill Esq. (1856), printed in Edinburgh by William Forester, has green patterned cloth with the sides blind embossed and the whole of the back blocked in gold with an overall pattern and an oval reserve for the title. An edition of The Poetical Works of Robert Tannahill (c.1855) by Fullarton & Co., London and Edinburgh, has an embossed border on the sides with the centre ornament, a lyre, impressed in gold, the same ornament upon the verso being in blind. The lettering on the back is in a very simple style in gold, and is probably not from a block. Anna Ross; the Orphan of Waterloo (12th edn., 1856), published in Edinburgh by Oliphant & Sons, is in terracotta patterned cloth, the sides embossed with a border of ﬂowers and the upper board having a title block in gold, which appears on the lower board in blind. The overall ﬂoral design on the back with the title in a reserve is in gold. By the 1880s publishers’ casings were blocked with designs incorporating black ink as well as gold and blind. A Pedlar’s Pack of Ballads and Songs (1869), published in Edinburgh by William Paterson, is in green patterned cloth with the upper board blocked with the title and formal ornament in black and gold, the lower board embossed in blind, and the back with the title in black and gold. In this sample the end papers are mostly of paper coloured yellow and glazed, but only on the one side. Economies of e≠ort and more e∞cient divisions of labour were gradually introduced throughout the bindery. Books were sewn several at a time on the same tape or cord and cut apart afterwards. Machines for rounding backs and cutting the edges saved much time. The plough had needed great skill to manage well while the guillotine produced

72

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 1.14 Mauchline binding, 1857. In the early nineteenth century, the town of Mauchline in Ayrshire had developed the manufacture of decorated snu≠ boxes with concealed hinges. Made of birch wood and originally decorated with paintings and later with prints either with the wood plain or covered in a tartan pattern, the resulting box was then carefully coated in varnish and polished. Such was its commercial success that more novelty items were soon being produced using the method, such as egg cups, letter openers and, as shown here, book covers. In this example the original trade boards from an 1857 edition of Lady of the Lake published by A. & C. Black have been replaced with typically decorative covers. These items were particularly popular with the increasing number of tourists who came to Scotland by railway in the late nineteenth century.

the organisation of the trade

73

excellent results very quickly. As the century progressed, it became less and less common for one person to forward a whole book, each individual process being undertaken by a di≠erent person, thereby building up speed and saving time, such e∞ciencies eventually paving the way for the mechanisation of processes. The introduction of ﬂy-embossing presses sometime in the late 1820s allowed for the introduction of embossed cases which enjoyed a short popularity for keepsakes, albums and autographs. The hydraulic presses used were massive and took two men to operate. While these were certainly used in Scotland, signed blocks indicate that they came from London, usually from Remnant & Edmonds who are credited with introducing them to England. About 1830, a method of applying gold tooling by setting up specially cut brass ornaments, letters and brass rules in a forme, similar to printing type, was introduced. Fine bindings could be made in a single impression, through gold, onto the side of a book, thus producing, in a minute or two, a decorative binding which would have taken an hour or more to create by hand. As the demand for faster processes increased, and the attractiveness of the cases with it, there was less call for ﬁne bindings, and the quality of those that were made deteriorated as the ﬁnishers, many of whom were masters or foremen, died or were too busy to undertake time-consuming work. Ordinary books were now being put into increasingly elaborate cases, and the part publishers Mackenzie & Co. of Glasgow, were taking in the parts after they had been collected and o≠ering, as an extra, ﬁne though industrially manufactured coverings for the family bibles which were one of their best-selling lines. Only when a call came for a binding for presentation was handwork in demand, and ﬁrms like Carss of Glasgow and Henderson & Bisset and Seton & McKenzie in Edinburgh continued to carry out some work for special customers, though the quality was no longer as good as it had been in the ﬁrst half of the century.

The organisation of the binding trade The ﬁrst societies of journeymen bookbinders were friendly societies intended to provide for sick members, their widows and children. The earliest set of articles known to survive is Articles of agreement by the Society of Bookbinders in Edinburgh for raising a fund for the support of their distressed members, indigent widows and children (Edinburgh, 1775). This was a box society, so named for its treasury which was a wooden box with three locks, the keys of which were held by the society’s three o∞cers. Further sets of articles were again published in 1814 and

74

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

1826 but the lists of the members have not survived, though they seem to have included both masters and journeymen. There was, however, a stipulation that members should be under 35 and in good health, and that they should not be able to draw on the funds for three years. It is not known precisely how many hours Scottish bookbinders worked at the beginning of the century, though a ﬁgure of sixteen hours per day for several successive weeks was not unusual. London bookbinders are said to have worked twelve hours a day in the early 1800s, from 6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. (Howe: 70). An anonymous pamphlet, A statement of the causes which led to the present di≠erence between the Master & Journeymen Bookbinders of Edinburgh; with proposals to Journeymen Mechanics drawn up by Authority of the Journeymen Bookbinders’ Society (1825), provides a helpful account of trade relations at this time. According to the pamphlet, the Edinburgh Journeymen Bookbinders had laid a case concerning their hours of work before the Court of Session in 1811 who, after a careful enquiry, limited their hours to ten a day: The avarice of Masters received a severe shock from this decision, and measures were immediately taken to reduce the already miserable wages of Journeymen . . . Had this reduction been the consequence of a reduction of prices, it must have been submitted to. But as prices had su≠ered no reduction . . . this uncalled for reduction could only be attributed to an avaricious and vindictive spirit. Articles of the Edinburgh Union Society of Journeymen Bookbinders (1822), indicate the establishment of a regular union in Scotland in March 1822, the direct result of a trade dispute: ‘Instituted for the purpose of promoting a good understanding, harmony, and unanimity amongst the Journeymen Book-binders of Edinburgh; and to prevent any of their rights and privileges being encroached upon’, the union was similar to the previous societies in having a wooden box with three locks. The rules show that they were concerned to exclude from employment at the same rates, all bookbinders who had not completed a regular apprenticeship of seven years. To which end, two members of the union were to be at their House of Call twice a week to examine the apprenticeship certiﬁcates of newly arrived journeymen. The union also hoped to be able to ﬁnd new places for unemployed members. The articles are signed by ninety-one members and represents the ﬁrst list of journeymen bookbinders in Edinburgh to be published in the nineteenth century. There was also concern about the employment at the same wages of young men from the country who had served apprenticeships of only

the organisation of the trade

75

three or four years, some with relatively a±uent parents who could a≠ord to supplement their wages. A passing reference is also made to the employment of female apprentices. Three years later, the Masters having agreed the point about country apprentices, the union then tried to persuade the Masters to pay 16s per week to their journeymen. Men with dependants could not a≠ord to insist on a rise in wages, which made it di∞cult for the rest to prevail, and the situation was made even more di∞cult when Masters demanded that individual journeymen should work unpaid overtime. On 21 May 1825, the Masters served a circular stating that employees would be dismissed if they did not leave the union, and when the men refused, circulated a rumour that they had gone on strike. The union’s response was the anonymous pamphlet, already mentioned, which went on to provide a revealing table of the earnings of the society’s journeymen: twenty received 16s per week; sixteen received 18s; one received 12s. The highest wage, earned by only one employee was £1 14s. Because of their special skills, ﬁnishers received more than forwarders: ﬁfty-three earned less than £1 a week and thirty-ﬁve more. As the result of one Master’s refusal to allow his journeymen to join the union, it was resolved in December 1825 that ‘we henceforth treat Mr A. Thomson’s as a Dung Shop – allowing no member of our Society to apply there for work’. Despite the fact that, in February 1864, a group of Masters had endeavoured to impose a new set of rules on their workmen, the society survived until the end of August 1872, at which time the majority of the members became part of the Bookbinders Consolidated Union.

II. PUBLISHING, DISTRIBUTION AND READING

Chapter Two

PUBLISHING Publishing 1800–30 Peter Garside he early decades of the nineteenth century saw a number of remarkable developments in the Scottish book trade, an important aspect of which was the rise of several prominent publishing houses, some of which were to survive into modern times. In particular, Edinburgh became a major producer of books, issuing a variety of highproﬁle titles, and an Edinburgh imprint for a while enjoyed higher status than its London equivalent. One symptom of this was the growing use of the term ‘publisher’ itself, as opposed to ‘bookseller’, to describe the activities of larger concerns and their increasingly promotional emphasis. Characteristic of its usage in this respect is J. G. Lockhart’s statement in 1819 that ‘Till within these twenty years, I suppose there was no such thing in Edinburgh as the great trade of Publishing’ (II: 157). In spite of the tendency to describe such changes as the product of individual enterprise, clearly a number of general factors underlay this transformation. One was the relative strength of the print industry, with Scotland being a major producer of cheap reprints in the later eighteenth century, an activity freshly energised by the landmark decision of the English courts in 1774 formally rejecting the notion of perpetual copyright (which itself had never been upheld by Scottish law). While it was still common for authors of new works to publish in London, booksellers such as Charles Elliot managed in their careers to adumbrate the potential for acquiring literary property and promoting original works from Scotland on a national British scale. Among other positive factors in place (if not fully activated) by the turn of the century can be counted the growth of the Edinburgh New Town, with the commensurate expansion of an indigenous polite readership. Additionally, one can point to the existence of a new breed of Scottish writers, centred as in the previous

T

79

80

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

generation on the legal and educational systems, yet with expanded national ambitions; one which, too, owing to relative ﬂuidities in educational and social structures, was capable of considerable expansion. At the same time, notwithstanding such potentialities, provincial Scottish book production in 1800 was geared largely to reprint, devotional and local interest material, while the book trade in Edinburgh appears to have been caught in something of a hiatus. Such, certainly, is the impression given in a number of (not disinterested) retrospective accounts, provided by commentators belonging to the succeeding generations, including the publisher Adam Black. Recalling the situation during his apprenticeship, when one of his tasks would have been to deliver books and collect orders, Black describes some twenty concerns in Edinburgh, this number including several that were predominantly retail outlets, and two which functioned chieﬂy as circulating libraries. The large majority were clustered near the centre of the Old Town, prominent amongst these being Peter Hill in the High Street, at the Cross, and the law book specialists Bell & Bradfute in Parliament Square, ‘the best-managed bookselling business in Edinburgh at the time’. On the south side of the square was Manners & Miller’s shop, ‘the most fashionable in town’, and down Parliament Stairs the wholesale warehouse of Mundell & Co.; while at the east end of the Luckenbooths, facing St Giles Kirk, stood the premises of William Creech. The only bookseller noted in the New Town was William Whyte, in St Andrew Street, whom Black recalled as trading in music and musical instruments, though in the new century Whyte became one of the more prominent sellers of religious books (Black 1885: 21–8). Even more dismissive accounts can be found in Henry Cockburn’s Memorials of His Time (1856) and Archibald Constable’s 1821 account of Edinburgh booksellers at the end of the century, published as an appendix in Archibald Constable and His Literary Correspondents (1873). From the vantage point of Edinburgh having become ‘a literary mart, famous with strangers, and the pride of its own citizens’, Cockburn looks back to a time when ‘our publishing trade was at nearly the lowest ebb’. The list of ‘principal booksellers’ in his case is reduced to just six concerns, one of whom was an antiquarian specialist, all the rest being ‘unimportant’ (167–9). Constable’s own account highlights among other things the relatively abject position assumed by such ‘principal’ concerns in relation to the London trade. Creech in particular is identiﬁed as having had little interest in promoting Edinburgh as a place of literary importance: ‘So little, indeed, did Mr. Creech feel an interest in this, that I believe it was his fashion to write in his title-pages the names of the London booksellers before his own’ (I: 535).

publishing

81

Figure 2.1 Archibald Constable, by Henry Raeburn, c. 1808, reproduced as a frontispiece to Thomas Constable, Archibald Constable and His Literary Correspondents (1873).

Constable also notes the slipshod manner of conducting business endemic in the trade, with such sale catalogues as were produced being for the most part ‘slovenly and ill edited’. An exception, however, is made (as by Adam Black) in the case of Bell & Bradfute, a house which in Constable’s view ‘has always conducted its trade on the most exemplary principle of correctness and honour’ (I: 13, 536). The survival of

82

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

large sections of the records of the ﬁrm allows a valuable insight into the workings of a relatively successful wholesale and retail concern, whose functions included the supply of private customers, the drawing up of sale catalogues and distribution of books to the trade in Scotland, negotiation with other booksellers in Edinburgh over sharing the risk of more expensive publications, and the marketing of books purchased on trade terms from London publishers, sometimes as exclusive agents (see ‘Bookselling’). Bell & Bradfute stocked a variety of books printed in Scotland, much of it reprint material, while its own publications in addition to law books included medical and theological works, titles of local and topical interest, and some belles-lettres. Traditional accounts have attributed much of the transformation that followed to the enterprise shown by two publishers of the new generation, Constable and William Blackwood, whose pioneering activities are featured in two leading ‘house’ histories of the later nineteenth century. Though they stood on di≠erent sides in the Whig–Tory divide of Regency Edinburgh, their early careers show a number of similarities. Both served as apprentices in the Edinburgh trade, each set up independently with a modicum of capital, and each gained a foothold in business as sellers of old books. Over the succeeding years, the two concerns can be seen to have built up lists consisting of a combination of regular-earning periodicals, prestigious non-ﬁctional works, and fashionable literary titles o≠ering the prospect of fast returns. While his earliest title was an antiquarian edition, and his ﬁrst copyright purchase a religious work (John Erskine’s Discourses co-published with Creech), Constable’s capabilities as a managing publisher were soon made evident through journal publication, the foundation of the Farmer’s Magazine and acquisition of the long-running Scots Magazine in 1801 being followed by the setting-up of the ground-breaking Edinburgh Review in the following year. An early association with Walter Scott also led to an appearance alongside leading London publishers on the imprint of the ﬁrst two of Scott’s long narrative poems, the most fashionable literary product of the day, with Constable acting as the copyright purchaser and managing publisher in the case of Marmion (1808), this allowing him to demonstrate directly to Scott his abilities as a promotional publisher. The paths of Constable and Scott separated for a time, while Scott orchestrated the launch of the rival Tory Quarterly Review and set up John Ballantyne & Co. as publishers in the New Town. However, with the near collapse of the latter Scott fell back on Constable for assistance, and in the immediate wake of its winding-up turned to him as the lead publisher of Waverley (1814). Though Scott occasionally used alternative houses, his letters of the period show him increasingly impressed by Constable’s ability to shift

publishing

83

‘stirring’ literary articles, where large ﬁrst impressions followed by rapid new editions were essential to maximise proﬁts. With his purchase of the copyrights of the Waverley Novels to date in 1819, Constable went on to become the unchallenged main publisher of Scott’s literary output. Robert Cadell, Constable’s partner from 1811, worried incessantly about an over-commitment to Scott, ﬁnding solace in the relative steadiness of other projects, prominent among which was the production of an extensive Supplement from 1816 to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Constable from an early stage had enjoyed ﬁrm relations with the London trade, operating as if on equal terms with long-standing concerns as such Longman & Co., and eventually, after a ﬁnal falling out with Longman, supplying exclusively Hurst, Robinson & Co., whose main remit was to clear large numbers of new Waverley Novels and collected sets of Scott. In this instance, the subservience of the earlier Scottish book trade as perceived by Constable in his 1821 memorandum had been reversed, with a Scottish publisher the dominant partner in a British context. Somewhat unusually, Constable occupied the same premises in the High Street until the 1820s, Lockhart likening his situation there to that of ‘a great wholesale merchant’ (II: 176). After a spell in London and a brief partnership with the Edinburgh bookseller, Robert Ross, William Blackwood set up his own shop in 1804 at 64 South Bridge, close to the university. Conventional accounts of Blackwood’s early occupancy indicate a primary interest in antiquarian books – a catalogue of his issued in 1812 is traditionally cited as having served as a hallmark for prices in that department – but in actuality he was engaged in a fairly steady stream of new books from the start. At the onset of the new decade, he was conﬁdent enough to enter into more substantial projects, such as Robert Kerr’s eighteen-volume General History . . . of Voyages and Travels, beginning in 1811, and David Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia from 1813 on. Undoubtedly the most signiﬁcant trigger for advance on a British scale came, however, through Blackwood’s appointment in 1811 as John Murray’s agent in Scotland. Advertisements in the Edinburgh newspapers of 1811, incorporating Murray’s titles, are boldly headed as ‘Published by William Blackwood’, with the true imprint showing Blackwood as the secondary publisher appearing only at the foot. While this reﬂected an established procedure in Scotland, its application by Blackwood (especially in the case of Byron’s work) was to incense Murray, and served as a contributory factor in the breakdown of relations between the two publishers in 1819, though their di≠erent personalities and agendas had made this virtually inevitable from the start.

84

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

In 1816 Blackwood enjoyed the experience of a truly fast-moving literary article as the Edinburgh publisher of Scott’s Tales of My Landlord (1816). Scott’s main target in this venture was John Murray, whom he wished to test as an alternative to Constable, but the need for a negotiator close at hand, and Scott’s customary insistence on the work being printed by James Ballantyne in Edinburgh, meant that Blackwood e≠ectively became the managing publisher. In the same year Blackwood moved to 17 Princes Street, foreshadowing a larger exodus to the New Town by the trade in the 1820s. The success of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, after a slow start in 1817, provided a racy counter to Constable’s journals, and helped promote his new headquarters as a fashionable literary centre. An idea of the range and freshness of Blackwood’s operation can be gathered from his trade catalogue for October 1818, which noticeably begins with a section headed ‘Periodical Works’, and then o≠ers an alphabetical list of books, with trade and retail price, including James Hogg’s recently-published Brownie of Bodsbeck, the catalogue ending with a list of ‘Byron’s Works’. Compared with the contemporary trade catalogues issued by booksellers such as Peter Hill, Blackwood’s includes a high proportion of independent publications and little dross. In the 1820s, while sustaining his core output of scientiﬁc, geographical and historical works, Blackwood also became a major producer of original novels. For the majority of these ﬁction titles, the London marketing was handled by his new associate, Thomas Cadell jnr, who with Blackwood’s own products acted more the part of an agent than co-publisher. Another leading publishing concern within the period under view was Oliver & Boyd. Unlike Blackwood and Constable, the two constituent partners emerged from the more artisan side of the trade; Thomas Oliver had worked as a printer and George Boyd as a bookbinder. Founded in 1807–8, the ﬁrm occupied various premises in the High Street, before settling there in Tweeddale Court, bringing together a combination of printing, binding, publishing and wholesaling operations. Earlier publications were primarily reprint editions, including poetry, plays and song collections. In 1812 the ﬁrm secured a share in the revamped Edinburgh Almanack, eventually becoming the proprietors. They were also engaged as the ﬁrst printers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, while in 1819 Murray turned to them as his agents in Scotland (to the surprise of the rest of the trade, in view of their having no strong retail outlet). At the heart of the concern’s activities from the 1810s was its wholesale operation, as evident in a succession of trade catalogues o≠ering discounts for cash and extended credit for bulk purchases. Characteristic of these is the Whole Sale Catalogue

publishing

85

of Modern Publications, Standard Works, School Books, Stationery, &c. issued in August 1817, which in addition to the categories evident in the title also listed Road Books, Atlases, Travelling Maps, Music and Juvenile Books. In the 1820s Oliver & Boyd were primary publishers of a number of ‘Scotch novels’, including Hogg’s Winter Evening Tales and titles by John Galt, Whittaker & Co. in London normally handling sales there. James Thin, from a vantage point of 1836 (his ﬁrst year as an apprentice), describes them as ‘far and away the largest wholesale booksellers in Scotland’, and main agents for a variety of London publishers (14). Having survived the di∞cult economic conditions of the mid-1810s, the three main publishing concerns described above were well positioned to exploit a period of relatively unimpeded economic expansion to 1825. The survival of the extensive archives belonging to these ﬁrms – themselves symptomatic of the increased professionalism of publishing in Scotland – provides an exceptionally detailed view of day-to-day operations at that time. Four salient aspects of the role of the publisher, as gathered from these sources, are outlined below.

Commissioning The ability to pay handsomely for literary property was one distinguishing mark of the new age of Scottish publishing. It is evident in Constable’s general rate of payment to the reviewers for the Edinburgh Review, as later with Blackwood’s payment of £1,000 for Susan Ferrier’s The Inheritance (1824), matching the sums awarded to ‘celebrity’ novelists by the London publisher Henry Colburn. For larger projects salaries were involved: an initial fee of £1,575 was o≠ered to Macvey Napier for editing the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In making decisions over accepting material, the larger houses made use of semi-professional in-house editors, whose ‘Remarks’ become increasingly evident in publishing records. Methods of payment to authors varied. The simplest of these was the outright purchase of copyright, though a variation could be to stagger payment according to the demand for new editions. More astute or needy authors sometimes gained advances, while others deliberately limited copyright to editions. Another common method was the system of half proﬁts, where the author shared proceeds with the publisher, after the deduction of the cost of printing, paper and advertising, the value of the impression usually being calculated at ‘sale price’ (two-thirds of retail). This system was commonly employed in the case of authors where success was uncertain, allowing the publisher to defer payment, and those

86

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

of a grasping nature to inﬂate expenses and incorporate factors such as deductions for discounts allowed against the sale price. A notable exception to the rule was Scott, who engaged on half proﬁt terms for all his novels, using his control over the printing operation to maximise returns. Hogg, exasperated at his apparently unfair treatment at the hands of Murray and Blackwood, attempted to enter into agreement with Oliver & Boyd for a return of one-sixth of retail price (a foreshadowing of the present royalty system), but this was resisted. Other methods (though decreasingly in evidence) included publication by subscription, where the author provided a list of purchasers; or at the author’s expense, where the cost of production and advertising was borne by the author, with the publisher taking a commission on copies sold, a system which generally held out little prospect of gain. Formal contracts were evidently not usual, though professionally experienced authors like Scott and Galt drew up quasi-legal documents, and Oliver & Boyd retained a special ﬁle of agreements.

Production and ﬁnancing At the onset of the production process the publisher would secure estimates for the cost of printing and paper, and on completion of printing would be presented with a bill, which was normally accepted on postdated terms. Payment by credit was central to ﬁnancial operations at this time, this involving payments to authors and invoices to other booksellers, with the acceptor of the bill promising to pay cash after a nominated period of time (at six months, twelve months, and so on). Ready money could still be gained through such bills, through discounting at a bank, the banker holding the acceptance until due. In a simple situation, the publisher on receiving the printed sheets would operate singly, o≠ering copies to other booksellers on trade terms, and hoping to make retail sales of his own. In practice, however, Scottish booksellers had traditionally o≠set the risk by o≠ering fellow concerns a part in the venture. With the large-scale publications of the new century, leading Edinburgh publishers entered into direct share agreements with London associates, with costs and proceeds being divided proportionately. Since sales in the populous south-east of England often exceeded those in Scotland, a London publisher owning (say) half of an edition might then receive additional copies from Edinburgh at a special discount from sale price. In other cases, the London associate, though not a direct share-holder, would agree to take a large tranche of an edition, on the understanding that this came with exclusive distribution rights in the south. The system worked similarly in an opposite

publishing

87

direction, though it was more common in these cases for the Scottish publisher to act as the agent for a book rather than as an equal partner.

Distribution With the production of large impressions and the more diverse nature of Anglo-Scottish arrangements, distribution became an increasingly important part of the publisher’s business. Within Edinburgh subscriptions by the trade were often taken and delivered by hand, though trade sales also provided a way of promoting new works in addition to remaindering old stock. Correspondence and catalogues served as a means of alerting country booksellers in Scotland to works on o≠er, with sizeable orders being supplied at sale price and small consignments on narrower ‘subscription’ terms (normally about 70 per cent of the retail price). Publishers such as Constable & Co. supplied large parts of the north of England, as well as Ireland (though the Dublin market was challenged from London later in the period). Mail coaches were used for small deliveries, including advance copies; wagons for larger quantities; while the Irish consignments were shipped, usually from Liverpool. Delivery of works such as the Waverley Novels, the ﬁrst editions of which were running in the region of 10,000–12,000 copies by the 1820s, involved a major operation. While copies for promotional purposes went o≠ in coaches, the bulk of consignments was shipped from Leith in quires packed in bales. Co-ordinating publication in the two metropolises at ﬁrst proved di∞cult, owing to the unpredictable time of passage, and the sometimes irresistible temptation to release early copies in Scotland. The improved e∞ciency of steamships (bar some notorious mishaps) and the insistences of London publishers, however, meant that sameday publication had become normal by the mid-1820s.

Advertising One consequence of advertising in newspapers and periodicals would have been to alert booksellers to new arrivals, this being especially true with the placement of notices in William Bent’s regular list of new publications. Increasingly, however, advertising became vital for attracting the attention of retail purchasers. This contributed as much as any other single factor in making the publisher’s role essentially promotional in nature. While the placement of a succession of notices announcing works as ‘in the press’ and ‘this day published’ was an already established process, the density of coverage accelerated dynamically during the period, and was especially a feature of the 1820s. One

88

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

symptom of this was the increasing use of agents to place advertisements, whereas previously an Edinburgh publisher might have dealt with newspaper proprietors in Scotland directly, and left his London associate to handle matters in the South. Another was the greater proportion of outgoings spent on advertising, as evidenced in ledger accounts, approaching in some cases as much as one-third of outlay, a factor accentuated by the decreasing cost of paper in the 1820s. Other forms of promotion employed included the use of slips placed in periodicals, or on the covers of the same, circulars distributed to fashionable areas of town, and the deliberate placing of plugs in newspapers and reviews, not least those owned by the publisher in question. Encouraged by cheaper materials, new technologies, and emerging new readerships, the Edinburgh publishing industry was generally in a state of expansion in the 1820s. As opposed to the ten or so ill-assorted concerns clustered in the Old Town in 1800, more than thirty ﬁrms were issuing works with Edinburgh imprints in this later decade, the majority situated in the North Bridge area, Princes Street and the New Town squares. The great ﬁre of 1824 in Parliament Square e≠ectively completed this evacuation, with Manners & Miller moving to Princes Street, and Bell & Bradfute to Bank Street, where reportedly the latest novels published by Colburn & Bentley (whose agency they enjoyed) joined long-displayed law books in their window (Thin: 36). Bankruptcies removed several concerns, including Peter Hill, in the years leading up to the 1825–6 crisis (an event discussed more fully elsewhere). Others with stronger roots were there to ﬁll the space, notably Adam Black, who moved from South Bridge to the old Post O∞ce premises at 27 North Bridge in 1823, and was in a sound enough position to acquire the copyright of the Encyclopaedia Britannica after the collapse of Archibald Constable & Co. in 1826. William Blackwood’s capacity to survive the adverse trading conditions of the later 1820s, as well as a continuing commitment to the New Town project, are evident in the ﬁrm’s move to new purpose-built headquarters at 45 George Street in 1830 (Oliphant 1897, II: 97–8), illustrated overleaf. Another kind of resilience can be found in the spread of booksellers appealing to niche markets, among them John Anderson jnr (phrenology, drama); Thomas Clark (law books); MacLachlan & Stewart (medicine, anatomy); and John Thomson (travel guides, atlases). Additionally, the evangelical revival helped sustain and magnify the output of theological and devotional literature, with particular growth in the juvenile market, as evident in the output of William Oliphant. At the lower end

publishing

89

Figure 2.2 Premises of Blackwood & Sons, 45 George Street, Edinburgh. Blackwood’s shop occupied the ground ﬂoor of the building in 1830. Customers could inspect the latest publications in the comfort of an elegant domed salon.

of the trade, too, were a number of ﬁgures poised to take advantage of the new technologies and an information-hungry artisan class: notably Thomas Nelson, then in the West Bow, and William and Robert Chambers, originally stall-keepers in Leith Walk, whose careers were to illustrate once more the capacity for advancement in the Scottish book trade from small beginnings to the occupation of central positions in the British publishing industry. While provincial presses in Scotland continued to issue independent titles, with Aberdeen, Ayr, Dumfries, Dundee, Elgin, Greenock, Inverness, Lanark and Paisley, among others, in evidence, output was largely limited to works of local interest, sermons, reprints of ‘classic’ authors and so forth. In Perth the family ﬁrm of Morison, which in its heyday in the 1790s had been a volume producer of reprint material, issued a steady if reduced succession of titles throughout the period, the main focus of attention turning to regional matters and works by local authors. All in all, the pull of Edinburgh as an increasingly wellorganised centre appears to have had a diminishing e≠ect in these areas. The case of Glasgow requires separate consideration, and represents something of an anomaly at this time. Output of Glasgow

90

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

imprints increases signiﬁcantly, with a high concentration of devotional works and practical instructional materials (for example, weavers’ manuals), but it is not, within the period, possible to point to any dominant concerns comparable to the main Edinburgh houses, and there is relatively little evidence of direct links with London. The emergent Glasgow ﬁrm of Blackie & Son, however, is worth noting on the grounds that the key components underlying its ultimate success were already in place. By 1830 John Blackie, who worked as a delivery boy at the start of his career, had developed the system of number publication (whereby extensive works were sold in parts) to a new industrial level, bringing attendant advantages compared with conventional production. The use of stereotype plates, for example, allowed the printing of instalments according to indications of current sales rather than having to risk the printing of a large impression that might have to be expensively warehoused before it was exhausted. The Blackie business, which at this time primarily served an artisan and religious readership in the west of Scotland, also developed a network of men employed as ‘canvassers’ to show samples to potential customers and take their orders, and as ‘deliverers’ to supply customers with numbers as they were issued. A clear record of such activities, already established in the 1820s, is evident in the extensive records of Blackie & Son, now held by the University of Glasgow. While the Blackie output at this stage consisted mainly of older works (many theological), the vital trinity of low costs, mass production and intensive distribution, so important in the next era of publishing, was by then well apparent in this ﬁrm’s operations.

1825–6: Years of Crisis? Simon Eliot By the early 1820s the British economy, after an initial depression following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, was booming. By the mid-1820s interest rates had dropped and, in the wake of the repeal of the Bubble Act of 1720, many new companies had been formed. The British were investing heavily both in the reconstruction of Europe after Waterloo and in the countries of South America newly liberated from Spain. The overall result was a huge drain on bullion in the Bank of England which fell from £12,799,000 in 1824 to £4,607,000 by 1826 (Mitchell: 657). The situation was made more di∞cult by the fact that after 1819 banknotes could be converted on demand into the equivalent value in gold (Davies 2002: 304). Many of these banknotes were for small sums of £1 or £2 and had been issued independently by a host of small, local or ‘country’ banks, not necessarily always backed up by an equivalent quantity of gold in their vaults. All this came to a head in late 1825 after a spate of failures of South American companies put pressure on small investors and the country banks with which they tended to deal. A series of bank failures was followed by the collapse of the major London bank Pole, Thornton & Co., on which a further forty-three country banks were dependent (ibid.: 307). In all some sixty banks failed in England over the 1825–6 period. The Scottish banking system was di≠erent from its English counterpart in that it was more used to dealing with banknotes than with gold, and had developed a form of overdraft for clients which cushioned users against sudden cash ﬂow crises (Sinclair 2000: 240). This meant that no Scottish bank actually failed during the 1825–6 period, though a number were weakened and some were later wound up or taken over (Checkland: 409). A more robust banking system, however, did not

92

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

shelter Scotland from the broader economic results of the crisis. Over Britain as a whole gross public income, which had stood at £59.7 million in 1825, had dropped to £54.7 million by 1828 and only began its slow recovery in 1829. Bankruptcies – calculated at 1,469 for 1825 – rose to 3,301 in 1826 (Mitchell: 581, 695).

Scott, Ballantyne, Constable – and Cadell Publishing and printing, like most other industries, were depressed by this ﬁnancial crisis. Overall the British publishing system’s output probably contracted by about 10 per cent over the period 1826–7 (Eliot: 16–18). As publishing tended to be a rather under-capitalised activity requiring long lines of credit, it was particularly vulnerable to cash ﬂow problems. This was commonly dealt with by accommodation bills, a form of credit note issued by an individual or company to allow another individual or company to borrow money (usually from a bank). Sometimes the bill-issuing company would require the borrower to make out a counter-bill for the same amount. Usually these bills were withdrawn by both sides before the due date and thus no problems arose. However, it was also possible to use these bills as a form of currency, although their face value was often heavily discounted in the process. This practice worked well if there were enough cash behind the bills to honour them. If not, and particularly if both bill and counter-bill had been used as currency, then a catastrophic collapse of credit could occur when the various bills were presented for payment on their due dates. Publishers were not always immune to the temptations of other, more lucrative investments than books, and in the bubble of 1824–5 some had made rash speculations. For instance, J. O. Robinson of Hurst, Robinson & Co. had speculated disastrously in hops and by late 1825 the London ﬁrm owed £30,000. Constable, Sir Walter Scott’s publisher, had used the ﬁrm as his London agents and had backed some of the company’s bills. In turn, Constable and James Ballantyne & Co., the printing ﬁrm that produced Scott’s books and which was partowned by Scott (unbeknown to Constable), had backed each other’s bills and thus were mutually dependent – and vulnerable. During the crash of 1825–6 Hurst, Robinson failed and, dominolike, Constable and Ballantyne followed. The ﬁrm of James Ballantyne alone had debts of some £120,000 (Millgate 1987: 3) for which, without limited liability, Scott was partly responsible. Having transferred the ownership of Abbotsford to his son the year before, Scott could simply have declared himself bankrupt or come to some form of convenient accommodation with his creditors. Instead, in a deal which

publishing

93

reﬂected well on all parties, a trust was set up into which all of Scott’s future income from writing would be paid. By relentless application, sustained literary talent and, ﬁnally, the sale of copyrights Scott’s debts were completely cleared by 1847, some ﬁfteen years after his death. Scott’s reaction to the crisis of 1825–6 was, however, not merely defensive. As part of the reforms in the wake of the crisis, the British Parliament attempted to suppress small denomination banknotes as the excessive issue of these was regarded as one of the causes of the crisis. The Scottish banking system had made a speciality of small note issue and, as we have seen, proved more resilient than the English banks. Scott adopted the pseudonym ‘Malachi Malagrowther’ and wrote a series of three open letters published in the Edinburgh Weekly Journal in defence of the Scottish banks (the ﬁrst letter was reprinted three times; the second and third, twice). His campaign was successful and the banknote reform was never applied to Scotland. On a more personal basis and as a way of increasing income to his trust fund, Scott entered into an agreement with his new publisher, Cadell & Co., to produce a cheap edition of the Waverley Novels with new introductions and notes by the author, and newly-commissioned illustrations by distinguished artists, to sell at 5s a volume issued at monthly intervals over the period 1829–33 (Millgate 1987: 42, 44). This magnum opus edition was based on the repurchase of Scott’s existing copyrights (ibid.: 8). In one way the edition looked back to the 1770s in that it established a new copyright by reissuing old texts with new material. In another, the Cadell edition anticipated the later nineteenth-century practice of issuing cheaper copyright editions in monthly instalments, and marketing a contemporary author’s collected works as a separate and distinct cultural phenomenon. In the light of events mostly associated with Scott, many literary and book historians have characterised 1825–6 as a traumatic period for the book industry involving the collapse of many publishers and heroic authorial endurance. But how accurate and how comprehensive an account is this?

The statistical evidence A survey of the bibliographical record suggests a decline in the overall number of titles produced in 1826 compared with 1825, the latter appearing to have been a proliﬁc year (but see comments in Appendix B). The years 1827–8 seem to have witnessed a further decline in title production, followed by a marked increase in 1829. In London the

94

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

decline seems to have taken e≠ect by 1826, and to have continued into 1827. By 1828, however, the recovery was well under way, and by 1831 it was complete. The major period of decline in Scottish title production appears to have been 1827–8; it revived brieﬂy in 1829, but had not fully recovered by 1831. However, although the Scottish capital seems to have shouldered proportionally more of the crisis than the rest of Scotland, we should be careful not to overestimate the e≠ect of depression on the Edinburgh trade as a whole. Table 2.1 Edinburgh titles, 1821–31. 1200

Number of titles in COPAC

1000 800 600 400 200 0 1821

1825

1826

1827

1829

1831

Table 2.2 Edinburgh titles by Dewey classiﬁcation. 35

Percentage share in NSTC

30 1–99 100–99 200–99 300–99 400–99 500–99 600–99 700–99 800–99 900–99

25 20 15 10 5 0 1824

1826

1828

1831

publishing

95

What is evident from the ﬁgures is that the 1825–6 crisis precipitated more than a modest quantitative contraction. The subject proﬁle of the Edinburgh publishing system changed under the impact, and that proﬁle was not immediately restored as the economy recovered. The subject that increased most between 1824 and 1828 was religion; the subject that su≠ered the steepest decline over the same period was literature. What resulted was partly a retreat into a more conservative publishing pattern in which the subject that had been the staple of the book trade since before printing had been invented increased its share, and one of the subjects that was to characterise nineteenth-century publishing went into temporary decline. This may be a partial explanation of why 1825–6 was, perhaps not altogether justiﬁably, always regarded as such a traumatic time. It was because those essayists, novelists and journalists whose subject was most damaged were precisely the ones who would be most likely to write about it. Its victims, most notably Sir Walter Scott, were distinguished enough and media-dominant enough to create a great drama out of this moderate crisis.

Publishing 1830–80 David Finkelstein The ﬁfty-year period between 1830 and 1880 was one of consolidation and steady development for Scottish publishers. Most of the powerful Scottish ﬁrms were based in Edinburgh or Glasgow, and tended to be dynastic in nature, run by close-knit families who passed on responsibilities and expectations to succeeding generations. With one or two exceptions, family ﬁrms whose reputations were made on hand presses survived the crash of 1826, and in some instances prospered well into the industrial period, positioning themselves ﬁrmly in the mainstream of British publishing activity while cultivating new niche markets. Thus Ballantyne survived and eventually became Ballantyne & Hanson, equally renowned for the quality of their printing, only acquiring a London o∞ce in 1880. Archibald Constable’s youngest son began as a printer in 1834, engaged in publishing between 1854 and 1860, when he sold his publishing stock, and continued in partnership with his son from 1865 as T. & A. Constable, printers, with lasting success (Brief Notes). Among the best known of these survivors was William Blackwood & Sons, who, after the death of the founder William Blackwood I in 1834, was run by a succession of sons and nephews. Under the leadership of William’s son John Blackwood (1818–79) between 1852 and 1879, the ﬁrm became successful in both ﬁction and non-ﬁction, its mid-century list dominated by best-selling authors such as George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and R. D. Blackmore, as well as providing competition for their former London collaborator John Murray in the ﬁelds of history and travel, with writers like A. W. Kinglake, John Hanning Speke and Laurence Oliphant. The ﬁrm also successfully bid for lucrative contracts to publish Scottish legal titles and religious hymnals and other sacred texts.

publishing

97

Another stalwart of Scottish publishing was Oliver & Boyd, begun in 1807–8 by Thomas Oliver and George Boyd at Tweeddale Court, one of the few ‘auld’ ﬁrms to remain in Edinburgh’s High Street after the crash of 1825–6. On the retirement of Thomas and the death of George in 1843, the ﬁrm came under the control of George’s brother Thomas Boyd, later joined by his sons Thomas, John and Thomson. Under their direction the ﬁrm forged a reputation in medical publishing and educational text-book publishing, particularly dominating overseas colonial markets. They would remain independent publishers until being taken over in 1896 by George and James Thin and John Grant, wellestablished Edinburgh booksellers. In 1823, Adam Black joined forces with his nephew Charles Black in Edinburgh to form the house of A. & C. Black. They would move to prominence after 1827 when they took on the copyright of the Encyclopaedia Britannica after the collapse of Archibald Constable’s business, going on to publish several distinguished editions (see ‘Reference’). This enterprise alone would become a touchstone in nineteenth-century British cultural life, spawning inexpensive imitators such as Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, issued in parts between 1859 and 1866. The concept of gathering, categorising and re-presenting humanity and human activity in an accessible and organised form would also directly inﬂuence prominent national reference works that came later, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of National Biography. Another publishing innovator at mid-century was Thomas Nelson. Bolstered by the entrance of William and Thomas II in 1835 and 1839 respectively (thus becoming Thomas Nelson & Sons), the ﬁrm relocated to custom built premises in Edinburgh’s Hope Park in 1845, and implemented a series of technological innovations – including one famous rotary press invented by Thomas in 1850 – which was to increase dramatically its production of religious, educational and children’s texts. Nelson’s developed a line of ‘moral books’ for young people, which were marketed as suitable for use as educational and church prizes and proved extremely popular. Among their most popular authors was R. M. Ballantyne, whose children’s tales The Young Fur-Traders (1856) and the better-known Coral Island (1857) were part of a series of extremely proﬁtable titles by that author published under the Nelson imprint. Throughout the 1870s Nelson capitalised on the demand for school books occasioned by the various Education Acts of 1870–1 in England, Wales and Scotland, issuing its ‘Royal Readers’ and ‘Royal Schools’ series of text books, proﬁtable editions of school atlases and other educational works (see ‘Education’). Between 1878 and 1881 it has

98

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 2.3 Thomas Nelson’s Parkside Works, Edinburgh.

been estimated that educational titles represented 25 per cent of the total output of Nelson, yet generated 88 per cent of its total proﬁt. This was quite an achievement given the fact that the Hope Park establishment, described as the ‘most extensive house in Scotland’, burned down in 1878, causing damage estimated at between £100,000 and £200,000 (Bremner: 502; McCleery: xviii). Within two months the ﬁrm had begun production in temporary accommodation. Two years later it had rebuilt and relocated to new, larger and more e∞cient premises on the Southside, in the shadow of the Edinburgh landmark, Arthur’s Seat, where it would continue to operate well into the twentieth century.

Publishing and public life A key factor in the success of a number of Scottish publishers was their ability to cultivate and maintain links in a variety of civic and cultural spheres. William Collins (1789–1853), who established his ﬁrm in Glasgow in 1826, was able to take advantage of his close friendship with the famous Glasgow churchman and theologian, the Rev. Thomas Chalmers: Collins’ early bestsellers were almost exclusively works by or commissioned through Chalmers (see ‘Religion’). From 1836 on, Collins’ involvement in civic campaigns and social reform led him to diversify into educational and scientiﬁc publishing as well as reference

publishing

99

works and local government publications such as the Post O∞ce annual directories and, in 1842, an extremely lucrative licence to publish the Bible. These initiatives proved so successful that by 1875 the ﬁrm boasted a workforce of over 1,200, producing more than 1.3 million books printed and bound per year (Schenck: 37). Collins’ public standing eventually led to his appointment as the Queen’s Printer for Scotland in 1862. John Blackwood’s friendship with John T. Delane (editor of The Times) began when they lodged together in London early in their careers, a relationship which led Blackwood to important journalistic contacts, allowing him to solicit copy on political and social topics for his monthly magazine as well as the ﬁrm’s other publications. These contacts included military o∞cers (Edward Bruce Hamley and William George Hamley), journalists (Frederick Hardman, French correspondent for The Times; George Finlay, Greek correspondent for The Times; Laurence Oliphant, novelist and war correspondent) and explorers (John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant). The ﬁrm’s output similarly beneﬁted from its cultivation of key ﬁgures in public life, such as Lord John Manners and John Cecil Russell, yielding important material for its book lists as well as for Blackwood’s Magazine. Given the importance of the industry to Scottish public life it was hardly surprising to ﬁnd members of the book trade themselves playing key roles in local governance. This is most obviously evident in the engagement of a number of publishers in what is today called civic nationalism and a belief in the importance of the printed word to bring about individual and social improvement. Many of the prominent ﬁgures in Scottish printing and publishing were to be involved in philanthropic enterprises. The Nelsons’ ﬁnancial contribution to the public life of Edinburgh included the restoration and development of hospitals and public libraries. William and Robert Chambers considered the provision of improving works for the masses as an important social responsibility, with William leaving a permanent legacy in his home town of Peebles in the endowment of a public reading room and library. William Chambers also served as Lord Provost of Edinburgh between 1865 and 1871. Thomas Boyd followed Chambers a few years later, acting as Lord Provost between 1877 and 1882. William Collins was a leading light of the Glasgow temperance movement, as well as a passionate crusader for social reform. William Johnston held civil o∞ces of burgess, high constable, city councillor, and from 1848 to 1851 Lord Provost of Edinburgh, actively organising relief programmes and public works initiatives.

100

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 2.4 Adam Black (1784–1874) began his civic career as a governor of the Merchant Maiden Hospital and chairman of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce. By virtue of his responsibilities as agent for the Edinburgh Review, he became closely associated with the Whig party. Black acted as liaison between the party and its Edinburgh constituency and eventually stood for election in 1856 and won a seat in parliament for Edinburgh for the next nine years. Black was also active in local government and was elected to the Edinburgh Town Council in 1833 and from 1843 to 1848 served as Lord Provost.

Figure 2.5 William Chambers (1800–83) was elected Lord Provost from 1865 to 1869 and spent much of his term addressing Edinburgh’s poor sanitary conditions. Chambers was instrumental in demolishing nearly 3,000 deteriorating buildings and constructing a number of new streets, which included Chambers Street, named in his honour. During his term, he recommended that Edinburgh’s Advocates Library should form the basis of a new national library open to the public, a scheme that eventually came to pass. During the 1870s he set about restoring St Giles Cathedral and, when some of the promised funds were withdrawn, Chambers spent over £20,000 of his own money in order to ensure the project’s completion.

publishing

Figure 2.6 Thomas Boyd (1818–1902) of the ﬁrm Oliver & Boyd, which was well known for its educational works, was also a prominent member of the Merchant Company of Edinburgh and was responsible for reforming the company’s charitable educational insitutions. Boyd played a leading role in the establishment of the new Royal Inﬁrmary at Lauriston, widely considered at the time to be one of the best hospitals in Europe. Boyd became a town councillor in 1875 and two years later held the post of Lord Provost until 1882, during which time he was knighted by Queen Victoria for his accomplishments.

101

Figure 2.7 Thomas Clark (1823–1900) entered the Edinburgh publishing house T. & T. Clark, founded by his uncle, at a young age and eventually became a partner in the business. He became a town councillor in 1877 and, in 1881, Convener of the Public Health Committee. He was Lord Provost from 1885 to 1888 and played a role in the foundation of the Edinburgh Central Library which was funded in part by Andrew Carnegie. Other signiﬁcant projects carried through during his term as Provost included the building of the Belford Bridge and the construction of an extensive drainage scheme to minimise the pollution of the Water of Leith, a centre of papermaking activity.

Other Lord Provosts from the nineteenth-century book trade included William Creech (1745–1815), William Johnston (1802–88), and William Collins (1817–95) who was Lord Provost for Glasgow. Chambers, Boyd, Collins and Nelson were also honoured with public statues.

102

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Civic life in Scottish communities was promoted and to a certain extent deﬁned by the publication and circulation of print in various forms, from hand bills to hymn books and religious texts, and most particularly through newspapers. Printers and publishers in smaller towns like Arbroath, Kelso and Inverness often survived through the publication of a local newspaper with a loyal local readership (see ‘Printing for Everyday Life’). The Aberdeen printer and publisher David Chalmers found his fortunes ﬂourishing after 1810 when he took over responsibility for the Aberdeen Chronicle, originally begun in 1748. Under his management its circulation by the 1830s was said to exceed big city rivals such as the Edinburgh based Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald. Similar stories can be told elsewhere. Arbroath had the Arbroath Guide, which from 1853 was run by the Buncles; Inverness, the Inverness Courier, run by the Carruthers family between 1828 and 1885; in Orkney, James Anderson established the Kirkwall Press in 1820, which prospered after he and his son launched The Orcadian weekly in 1855.

Outward expansion From the 1820s Scottish ﬁrms realised that to compete with English and particularly London-based counterparts they would have to do so by extending their operations beyond their limited domain. Among the many strategies that they deployed was the use of commercial travellers and agents in order to stimulate regional sales. ‘Commercials’, as they were called, covered great distances in search of orders from shopkeepers, dealers and booksellers, and were relied on with greater frequency as regional markets became more competitive. The Scottish use of ‘commercials’ in the book trade can be traced back to the early years of the century (see ‘Bookselling’). From 1811 onwards, Oliver & Boyd sent out a number of these itinerant salesmen ‘to promote their interests’ (Bell 1998a: 121). William Collins I began his publishing career by travelling to London in 1821 with a ‘valise crammed with his early publications and samples of stationery in the coach’s boot’ (Keir: 56). Travellers became integrated more fully into Scottish publishing trade networks as the century progressed. Nelson and Blackie had travellers working by the 1820s, and by the 1860s many Scottish publishers were using their travellers as important generators of sales. These transient ﬁgures also acted as invaluable sources of trade information. The Blackwood family, for example, used their regional sales representatives to keep close watch on competing monthly sales, registering approval when it was reported in 1862 that, along with higher than expected Blackwood’s Magazine orders, there was news of poor sales for the Cornhill

publishing

103

Magazine, then beginning its serialisation of George Eliot’s Romola, poached from Blackwood by Smith & Elder (Finkelstein 2002: 46). Scottish publishers also contracted with London agents and opened o∞ces in the metropolis to ensure their interests were well represented in the capital city (see ‘The London Scots’). They were cautious with whom they engaged. Robert Cadell, Edinburgh-based publisher of Walter Scott from the late 1820s, for example, chose Whittaker & Co. over John Murray as his wholesale London agent in 1832 based on his view that Murray did not have adequate facilities to service Cadell’s expected high sales. W. & R. Chambers had separate editions of their weekly Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal produced by the London publisher W. S. Orr from 1837 until 1853. Blackie & Sons chose to be independent and opened a London o∞ce in 1837; William Blackwood & Sons opened theirs in 1840; Nelsons followed suit in 1844. Nelsons also became the ﬁrst British publisher to establish a branch in the United States when it opened its New York o∞ce at 42 Bleecker Street in 1854. Lithographic and letterpress printing pioneers W. & A. K. Johnston were late in joining their Scottish counterparts, opening a London o∞ce in 1869. Regional expansion was in turn followed by moves into overseas markets, which prompted the cultivation of overseas agents and o∞ces. William Collins & Sons were among the ﬁrst British publishing interests to enter the Australian scene, initially using the Sydney-based Bright Brothers in the 1850s as agents for their text books, reference works and bibles, then appointing McGreadie, Thomas & Niven as sole agents for Australia and New Zealand, and a separate agent to handle India and Ceylon. A desire for further control of large text-book and stationery contracts awarded in the early 1870s led the ﬁrm to establish permanent warehouses, showrooms and o∞ces in Australia in 1876, followed by o∞ces in South Africa and India, and a permanent base in New Zealand in 1888 (Keir: 179–82; Bell 2000; Finkelstein 2003). Throughout the nineteenth century, Scottish publishers used a combination of marketing strategies to publicise the lists, including the development of permanent o∞ces in British colonial territories. By the 1900s it was common to ﬁnd most overseas libraries stocked with texts published by Scottish ﬁrms, distributed and marketed through branches located in the relevant regions.

Niche markets While many of Scotland’s mainstream publishers had extensive lists covering a vast range of subject matter, by the mid-nineteenth century

104

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

larger specialist markets had begun to emerge, leading a number of ﬁrms to consolidate their activities. The text-book market was one of the key areas in which Scottish publishers would make their mark on the international book trade. Whether justiﬁed or not, Scotland’s educational system was respected throughout the English-speaking world and so it was perhaps only natural that teachers throughout Britain and the colonial world should turn to the nation’s authors, editors and publishers to provide exemplary school texts. This was true particularly after the Education Acts of 1870 and 1871, when demand rose for text books to accommodate the new arrangements. The major players in the educational market in Edinburgh, as already noted, were Nelsons and Oliver & Boyd, whose successful series were not only used throughout Britain but were also exported to colonial possessions such as India, New Zealand and Australia, where educational systems based on British models had been established. Glasgow-based Blackie & Sons (established in 1809 but amalgamated as a family concern in 1831) would dominate colonial as well as local markets with its readers in grammar, arithmetic, history and geography. Originated by the hard working John Blackie (1782–1874), and developed after his death by his grandson John Alexander Blackie (1850–1918), the ﬁrm was the premier publisher in the west of Scotland with a fearsome reputation by the 1880s for high quality, morally sound children’s books by authors such as G. A. Henty, G. Manville Fenn, S. Baring Gould, Annie S. Swan and Bessie Marchant. Other markets in which they enjoyed success were school books and juvenile literature such as children’s annuals and cloth-bound prize books, the latter bought in bulk by Scottish schools, churches and other institutions to be given as awards at special events (see ‘Education’). Children’s literature was a feature of another Glasgow-based ﬁrm, James Lumsden & Son, founded by Lumsden in 1790 and carried on after his death by his son James jnr until around 1850. During its existence the ﬁrm published over 140 juvenile works, including educational and religious texts, as well as bestselling halfpenny and penny chapbooks. Its work was characterised by excellent printing and production standards, whose illustrations, well designed and carefully engraved, contributed greatly to Glasgow’s reputation as a centre for ﬁne printing. Such well known nursery titles as Ali Baba, Robinson Crusoe and The Merry Cobbler were marketed and sold primarily to Scottish readers (Roscoe and Brimmell). Another area on which Scottish publishers capitalised was the religious market. In a period of heated religious dispute, there was a

publishing

105

ready market for ‘controversial’ theological literature (see ‘Religion’). One of the leading religious publishers, as already noted, was the Glasgow-based William Collins, who prospered early on from his publication of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers, leader of the 1843 Disruption which led to the subsequent establishment of the breakaway Free Church of Scotland. The movement created a ﬂurry of publishing activity as the nation’s theologians engaged in protracted arguments about doctrine and the governance of the Church, and Chalmers’ religious texts, published by Collins, had a profound inﬂuence on Scottish Church history and cultural life. Another important publisher of theological works was the Edinburghbased ﬁrm of T. & T. Clark, which was able to extend operations on the back of specialised series such as the Foreign Theological Library (begun in 1846 as an enlarged version of the earlier Biblical Cabinet); the AnteNicene Library, started in 1865; its Bible Class Handbooks, begun in 1879; and through general works by major Scottish ecclesiastical ﬁgures. Blackwood’s maintained a lucrative link with the Church of Scotland, publishing its o∞cial hymnals throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century. Scottish success in religious publishing was not conﬁned to books, as the Ayrshire-born Alexander Strahan, who established Strahan & Co. in Edinburgh in 1858, found when in January 1860 he launched the religiously inﬂected, illustrated monthly Good Words, edited by his mentor and Church of Scotland leader Norman Macleod. Its launch coincided with that of the Cornhill Magazine, and the ﬁrst issue sold a respectable number in face of sti≠ competition – 30,000 copies. Sales would rise to 150,000 by 1864, but interest and sales began fading away after this high point, and it ceased publication in 1906. Edinburgh also became a centre for map publishing in this period (see ‘Maps’). The chief exponents in what would later come to be called cartography were the ﬁrms founded by the Johnston brothers and the Bartholomew family. William (1802–88) and Alexander Keith Johnston (1804–71) joined forces in 1826 to found W. & A. K. Johnston, initially specialising in steel and copperplate engraving. The company expanded its operations in the 1850s and 1860s to encompass lithography and letterpress printing. Renowned for his high quality atlases and maps, William Johnston was appointed Engraver and Copperplate Printer to the Queen in 1837, in part due to the ﬁrm’s outstanding work on o∞cial government maps and banknotes. The Johnstons’ main competitor was the equally celebrated ﬁrm of Bartholomew & Son, founded in Edinburgh by John Bartholomew (1805–61) in 1830. Bartholomew worked closely with A. & C. Black, with whom he initially shared a printing works, and for whom he

106

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

produced maps for the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Following John’s retirement in 1859, the ﬁrm gained momentum under the direction of his son, also John Bartholomew (1831–93), who expanded the ﬁrm’s commercial range. Capitalising on the need for new maps and atlases to meet the mid-century boom in exploration and colonial expansion, Bartholomew & Son became pioneers in cartography, devising new techniques for the production of contoured and layered colour topographical maps. The ﬁrm also undertook commissions for medical and botanical illustrations and Bartholomew’s even worked with novelists on creating maps for the literary classics, most notably designing the famous frontispiece map for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (published in 1883). By the 1880s, many major geographical, medical and botanical works included a map, engraving or lithographic illustration produced in Edinburgh either by Bartholomew or by W. & A. K. Johnston. What is notable about the role of Scottish publishers between 1830 and 1880 is their range and scale of achievement and inﬂuence on the national and international stages. This was a period marked by consolidation as well as innovation, with well-led family ﬁrms capitalising on the opportunities a≠orded by industrialisation and colonial expansion. In this enterprise, the names of Scottish publishing houses would become ﬁrmly embedded in the cultural and social fabric of Britain and its colonies, providing printed material that informed and entertained, pioneering new techniques in graphics, illustration and production, and employing substantial numbers of skilled workers. The success of Scottish ﬁrms in this period is also attributable to the fact that they were able to take advantage of new opportunities a≠orded by changing markets, proﬁting from an increased demand for reading material of all kinds from customers in Britain and in the colonies. Their energy and ingenuity ensured that, for a period at least, Scottish imprints were amongst the most recognisable across the English speaking world.

Gaelic Printing and Publishing Donald E. Meek Printing ﬁnally caught up with the Gaels, and they with it, in the nineteenth century. The two and a half centuries between the printing of the ﬁrst Gaelic book in 1567 and the arrival of print in all its Gaelic power from 1800 onwards had witnessed a game of cultural hide-and-seek between the operators of the letter-press and the practitioners and custodians of Gaelic literary and oral skills. In 1567, John Carswell, in the prefatory remarks to his epoch-making translation of John Knox’s Book of Common Order, had exhorted traditional scribes to abandon their slow quill-scratching, and to embrace the new printing technologies (Meek 1998a: 47–51). Apart from his colleagues in the Reformed Church, who were well aware of the spiritual and political power of the printed word, few were listening. Few had the means to make the transition to print, and even fewer had access to a printing press. This changed when Highlanders began to settle in towns and cities in the Scottish Lowlands and overseas.

Urban printing The nineteenth-century rapprochement between Scottish Gaels and the ‘iron print-blocks’ was splendidly foreshadowed in 1791, when a substantial volume, Searmoin chuaidh a liobhairt aig an Raft-Swamp, consisting of two Gaelic sermons and their accompanying prayers, was printed by Sibley, Howard & Roulstone in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Preached at the Raft Swamps, close to Cape Fear, by the Rev. Dougal Crauford, a native of Shiskine in Arran, these are the earliest Gaelic sermons to survive in print. North Carolina was home to a considerable colony of expatriate Gaels, and it is quite possible that literacy was more common among émigré Gaels than among those who remained at

108

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

home. Within two or three decades other emigrants had set up presses. In 1832, James D. Hazsard, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, printed an edition of Dyer’s Christ’s Famous Titles, and John Boyd was active as a printer in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, by 1847 (Nilsen). In Scotland, the centres of Gaelic printing and publishing before 1850 were pre-eminently Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness, the last having a particularly vigorous group of printers, among them Alexander Fraser, one of a ‘clan’ of Frasers who printed Gaelic titles, especially in the 1830s. Glasgow, while having no lack of printers, was evidently less productive in Gaelic imprints at the outset than Edinburgh and Inverness. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Glasgow was beginning to outstrip Edinburgh – and all other Scottish towns and cities – as the principal locus of Gaelic printers and publishers, so that, by the end of the century, Edinburgh’s foundational contribution had been thoroughly eclipsed by its rival. This had to do with the fact that Glasgow was home to a much larger Gaelic population than Edinburgh. Heavy industry had attracted many to the west of Scotland, rather than the east. Perth produced several titles, and though only occasionally were Gaelic books printed in such small towns as Kilmarnock, Campbeltown, Elgin, Aberfeldy and Forres, the existence of printers beyond the Central Belt is worth noting. In uprooting Scottish Gaels from their native heaths and depositing them in the Lowland cities and in foreign parts, migration and emigration helped to weaken their attachment to orality, and to push them towards other means of cultural preservation. Print was of considerable importance as an aide-mémoire. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘urban cèilidh-house’ was ﬂourishing in city halls and single-ends, and being sustained by books of ‘readings’, specially concocted for the occasion. These books were also ﬁnding readers in the Highlands and Islands. Gaels had come to realise that print was valuable in a wide variety of contexts, and a particularly powerful agent in preserving the culture which they were in danger of losing in the alien environment of the cities. It was therefore natural that, in due time, Gaels themselves should assume control of this important medium. Initially, Gaelic material was set in type (clò-bhuailte, dealbh-bhuailte) by printers who handled material mainly in English. Authors would sometimes crave the reader’s indulgence on behalf of printers who had no familiarity with Gaelic, and were therefore liable to make typographical errors. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, Gaels were creating printing businesses which catered largely for Gaelic material, though it is not clear when this ﬁrst occurred. In Glasgow in the early nineteenth century, a printer called

publishing

109

John Gillies, who hailed from Skye, had a business at 303 Argyle Street, Glasgow, and he may have been related to an earlier, eighteenthcentury John Gillies, based in Perth. The Glasgow Gillies was undoubtedly a Gaelic speaker. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1857, and, while resident in the Otago area, he showed his talents as a composer of Gaelic elegiac verse, which he sent to Glasgow for publication by Archibald Sinclair ten years later (TS-G: 138). The steady output of Gaelic texts from Edinburgh after 1800, and particularly after 1840, indicates that compositors with a knowledge of Gaelic were active in the capital, where they had a foundational role. The names of several Edinburgh companies suggest that their owners had Highland roots, and that they were quite possibly Gaelic speakers. This may have been the case with [John] MacLachlan & [Duncan] Stewart (MacLachlainn agus an Stiùbhartach), 62 (later 64) South Bridge, who set up business in 1819 and published Gaelic titles from the 1830s (SBTI). Edinburgh, where printing presses were readily available, was the spiritual nerve-centre of Presbyterian Scotland. Consequently, Gaelic printing in the seventeenth century, and in much of the eighteenth, was dominated by religious texts produced pre-eminently in Edinburgh, though Glasgow could also claim some credit. After 1800, these were complemented by volumes of Ossianic poetry which were printed principally in Edinburgh, notably by Charles Stewart, who published a signiﬁcant amount of Gaelic material in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. Alongside Ossianica and volumes of sermons, like those of the Rev. Ewen MacDiarmid (1804), Stewart produced major anthologies of Gaelic verse, including those of the collectors, A[lexander] and D[onald] Stewart (1804), and Patrick Turner (1813, airson an ughdair, ‘for the author’ [i.e. the compiler], with a most interesting subscription list). Peter MacFarlane’s immensely popular translation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was printed in Edinburgh in 1812, also by Charles Stewart. Some degree of Gaelic specialisation by printers such as Charles Stewart and Robert Menzies had emerged in Edinburgh by 1820, and the city’s growing Gaelic commitment was reinforced powerfully by MacLachlan & Stewart after 1830. In Glasgow, the roots of Gaelic publishing went back to the seventeenth century, with eleven separate printers and publishers producing one or two Gaelic volumes each by the end of the eighteenth century. Kenneth MacDonald has aptly summarised the position in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century: In the years 1801–1850, one hundred and fourteen Gaelic titles were published in Glasgow by thirty-ﬁve di≠erent publishers. The

110

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

broad picture is still one of a large number of printers turning their hand to occasional Gaelic production, though there is some tendency towards specialisation on the part of D. MacVean, who produced thirteen titles, John Reid who produced nine, and J. and P. Campbell who produced seven. (397–98)

The Bible, Ossian and religious books The century opened with two landmark publications which set the tone for Gaelic literary development throughout the rest of the period. The ﬁrst was the appearance, in 1801, of the last volume of the Gaelic Old Testament, printed by Balfour, Auld & Smellie for the SSPCK. The company, Printers to the University of Edinburgh, had published the Gaelic New Testament in 1767, and remained loyal to the project while the translation of the Old Testament dragged on famously for the next forty years. The second landmark event was the publication in London, in 1807, of the supposed Gaelic ‘originals’ of James Macpherson’s epic translations of the poems of Ossian. Macpherson’s translations had ﬁrst seen the light of day in 1760–3, and had generated no small amount of controversy in the intervening years. The struggle by the publishers, the Highland Society of London, to wrest the ‘original’ material from Macpherson, and then to present it in printed form, was an epic in itself, matched only by the doggedness of the SSPCK in ﬁnally securing the publication of a complete Scottish Gaelic Bible, available in a single volume from 1807. The religious and romantically secular ethos of Gaelic publishing was sustained well into the nineteenth century. The Gaelic Bible provided the impetus to make the Gaelic people literate in their own language. For this reason, it had the upper hand over Ossian, and its inﬂuence was potent. In fact, some 75 per cent of Gaelic books published between 1800 and 1880 were religious in nature. MacLachlan & Stewart, who were ‘Booksellers to the University’, were also the leading Gaelic publishers in Edinburgh. In addition to their strong academic interest, shown in their editions of the principal eighteenth-century Gaelic poets, they sustained a phenomenal output of religious books – well over half of all their 110 or so Gaelic books (including reprints). The national picture was similar, with religious texts leading the ﬁeld in terms of regular reprints. Alongside the Gaelic Bible, the most popular titles of the pre-1850 period included the hymns of Dugald Buchanan (1716–68) and the Shorter Catechism, the latter printed in profusion and in various editions. The various nineteenth-century editions of Buchanan were printed in Elgin (1), Greenock (1), Inverness (4), Glasgow (7),

publishing

111

Edinburgh (17) and Montreal (1). The 1812 Edinburgh edition was ‘printed and sold by R. Menzies, Lawnmarket; sold also by D. Thomson, Bookseller, Greenock’, while the 1844 Edinburgh edition was produced by MacLachlan & Stewart, who published ten subsequent editions, several with print runs of 2,000 copies each. Still another best-seller was the collection of hymns by the Rev. Peter Grant, minister of the Baptist Church at Grantown on Spey. The pattern of publication of this volume is likewise instructive. The ﬁrst two editions were published by Alexander MacIntosh in Inverness in 1827. Publication of the next three editions (1827, 1837, 1842) transferred to Elgin, where they were published by Peter MacDonald, Bookseller, who employed a local printer, Robert Johnston, for the job. Between 1857 and 1889, however, a further twelve editions appeared, all published in Edinburgh (one by Whyte, six by D. R. Collie, three by MacLachlan & Stewart and two by John Grant). Gaelic translations of English religious prose texts, notably the works of Richard Baxter (translated from 1750) and John Bunyan, also went through numerous reprintings. As the publication pattern of Peter Grant’s hymns demonstrates, editions of the popular religious classics were undertaken by a variety of printers – such was the interest in, and enthusiasm for Protestant spiritual material in Gaelic. Roman Catholic publications, on the other hand, were comparatively few, and showed a rather di≠erent pattern of printing and publication. Rev. Fr Ewen MacEachen’s important translation of the New Testament was printed in Aberdeen by A. King & Co. in 1875. Various formulations of Christian doctrine from a Catholic perspective were printed and published in Inverness (1815) and Aberdeen (1835); in Toronto (1871); and in Nova Scotia, at Antigonish (1852, 1854, 1898), Pictou (1862) and Halifax (1874). The principal Catholic doctrinal text, Iùl a’ Chrìosdaidh (‘The Christian’s Guide’), was published variously in London (1844), Inverness (1851, 1872), Pictou (1863) and Aberdeen (1885). The role of Nova Scotian printers and publishers in producing several editions of these texts is noteworthy. Alongside substantial doctrinal works, an unstoppable tidal wave of spiritual ephemera swept through the Highlands and Islands, consisting largely of evangelical tracts, published by a variety of religious tract societies, based in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling and London, and distributed throughout the region by itinerant evangelists, ministers and catechists. These societies employed di≠erent printers in much the same way as the SSPCK had with the Gaelic Bible. Such tracts were usually translated from English originals, and included ﬁrm favourites like the Life of Covey the Seaman (Edinburgh Religious Tract Society, 1823), whose hero had been wounded at Camperdown in 1797. The tide of

112

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

tracts increased at times of ecclesiastical tension, such as the Five Years’ Conﬂict preceding the Disruption of 1843. Polemical Gaelic tracts, usually inveighing against the Established Church of Scotland, were generated in profusion, and stimulated some short-lived Gaelic printing in such places as Aberfeldy. The popularity of tracts and pamphlets demonstrated that an eager and enthusiastic Gaelic readership of a certain kind had emerged in signiﬁcant numbers by 1820. In the second half of the century, however, the tract societies produced some substantial and well-ﬁnished books, which were far from ephemeral, like the Rev. Allan Sinclair’s 365-page Gaelic translation of Andrew Bonar’s The Life and Ministry of the Reverend R. M. McCheyne, published in Edinburgh in 1870, and again in 1891, by the Religious Tract and Book Society of Scotland. The power of print was no less evident in the domain of education. Here, too, there was a close connection with the Christian faith. Various Gaelic school societies, such as the Edinburgh Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools, founded in 1810 by the Rev. Christopher Anderson, made the Gaelic Bible the foundation stone of their e≠orts to teach the Gaels to read. Christopher Anderson, with the assistance of Alexander MacLaren, produced a number of readers and text books for Gaels who wished to read Gaelic. For churches and church-related bodies, print was a major disseminating force, but its application was potentially limitless, and no domain was beyond its reach. It is not therefore surprising that the nineteenth century witnessed the gradual appearance of a rich variety of Gaelic texts created by non-ecclesiastical writers, and that such writers, in due time, were able to challenge the powerful pens of the clergy, and became leaders in the creation of a broader range of Gaelic printed texts – most notably journals – for those who had become literate through the rather constricted curriculum of the Gaelic school societies.

Periodicals and newspapers The Gaelic Bible laid the foundation of the drive to make the people literate in their own language, while the Gaelic version of ‘Ossian’ o≠ered inspiration for new forms of prose writing produced by ministers such as the Rev. Dr Norman MacLeod in an attempt to increase the reading material available to newly literate Gaels, by means of the ﬁrst Gaelic printed journals. The very ﬁrst nineteenth-century Gaelic periodical, An Rosroine [recte An Ròs Raoine] (‘The Field Rose’), was published in Glasgow in

publishing

113

1803, by Thomas Duncan in the Saltmarket. Only four numbers appeared. Nothing further followed until 1829, when An Teachdaire Gaelach (‘The Highland Messenger’) was published, also in Glasgow, which lasted one year. It was edited by the Rev. Norman MacLeod of Campsie, and later of St Columba’s, Glasgow. Initially published in Glasgow by D. McClure & Co., the journal, from the fourth issue onwards, was produced by W. R. MacPhun, Glasgow, who claimed to have ‘entered into the most extensive arrangements with the various Proprietors of the London, Provincial, English, Irish, Scotch and Foreign Newspapers’. Publication of An Teachdaire Gaelach was shared with Blackwoods and MacLachlan & Stewart, both of Edinburgh. Similarly, the publication of its successor, Cuairtear nan Gleann (‘Traveller of the Glens’), which lasted from 1840 to 1843, was shared between J. & P. Campbell, Glasgow, and MacLachlan & Stewart. The next journal to have a life-span of more than a year (1848–50), Feartathaich nam Beann (‘The Visitor of the Bens’) was a Glasgow-based enterprise, printed and published by William Gilchrist (MacDonald 1993: 402; Kidd 2003: 10–11). MacLachlan & Stewart had a particular interest in serials, and latterly held the rights to the important publication, An Gaidheal, which had begun life in Toronto in 1871, under the editorship of Angus Nicholson. The close connection between this journal and emigration is apparent in early issues. Shortly after its foundation, the editor was appointed Emigration Agent for the North of Scotland, and moved to Glasgow. An Gaidheal, which survived until 1877, brought an academic and analytical edge to Gaelic writing, principally in the essays of Donald MacKinnon, who was appointed to the Chair of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh in 1882. It can be debated whether MacKinnon’s essays really constitute ‘literary criticism’ as we know it today. More fairly, perhaps, they can be categorised as a Herderian form of ‘cultural reinforcement’, which taught Gaels to be proud of their language and heritage. This was in tune with the overarching concerns of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which was a period of political activism and cultural lobbying for Gaelic interests. The pulse of the Gaelic world after 1870 can be seen clearly in the newspapers of the time, particularly those published in Inverness and Oban. Newspapers such as The Highlander (1873–81), the Northern Chronicle (1881–1969) and the Oban Times (1861–) had a strong Gaelic interest, and carried English articles on Gaelic matters, as well as specimens of Gaelic prose and verse. Indeed, newspapers from this period are an important repository of Gaelic song texts (Meek 1995),

114

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

as well as of information relating to contemporary Gaelic life. Complementing the secular newspapers were the ‘Gaelic supplements’ of church magazines, most notably the Gaelic supplement of the Church of Scotland’s Life and Work, established in 1880, in e≠ect ‘a magazine within a magazine’, which proved to be highly inﬂuential in determining the shape of Gaelic writing well into the twentieth century, under a succession of gifted clerical editors. The Free Church of Scotland also had its Gaelic magazine, An Fhianais (‘The Witness’) from 1845 to 1850. Free-standing Gaelic religious journals, however, like their secular counterparts, tended to be short-lived, but had better success when they were allied speciﬁcally to the dominant evangelical cause and were denominationally focused. More ‘general’ and less committed religious magazines were not patronised to the same extent. Bratach na Fìrinn (‘The Banner of Truth’), for example, lasted only one year, from 1873 to 1874. It was edited by the Rev. Nigel MacNeill, a Congregationalist, and published jointly by W. R. McPhun & Son and MacLachlan & Stewart, as earlier journals had been. Its fortunes were not helped by its criticism of the social practices of the Glasgow Gaelic community. Clearly, Scottish proprietors had great di∞culty in creating a sustainable Gaelic journal in the nineteenth century, and this pattern was reﬂected elsewhere. In countries where emigrant Gaels had settled, journals appeared which were imitations of, and heavily indebted to, their Scottish counterparts – An Teachdaire Gaidhealach in Australia, from 1857 with about ten issues, and Cuairtear na Coillte (‘The Traveller of the Woods’) in Kingston, Ontario, from 1840 to 1841. These journals had relatively short lives, but their existence among emigrants underlines – once again – the value of print in aiding cultural cohesion among displaced Gaels. The ﬁrst long-lived Gaelic journal, with a signiﬁcant lifespan of twelve years (1892–1904), was Mac-Talla (‘Echo’), edited by Jonathan MacKinnon, and published in Sydney, Nova Scotia – perhaps another indicator that literacy was indeed higher among Gaelic-speaking emigrants than among those who remained at home (MacLeod 1977: 204–5, 227). In Scotland, bilingual newspapers (in which Gaelic was a matter of ‘columns’ rather than pages), and the inclusion of ‘Gaelic supplements’ within English magazines, o≠ered ways out of the dilemma posed by small readerships and non-commercial print runs. As a consequence of their broader base, newspapers were able to reshape the world of Gaelic publishing to a certain extent, particularly by providing more viable printing arrangements, as they were sustained by mixed English– Gaelic provision, with the emphasis on English. In Inverness, the large

publishing

115

number of individual book publishers active in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century had declined appreciably by the 1880s, and had come to be replaced by the newspaper o∞ces with their increasingly e∞cient high-speed presses. For example, Dàin agus Orain Ghàidhlig (‘Gaelic Poems and Songs’), a well produced, illustrated volume consisting of the collected works of the Skye poetess, Mary MacPherson (1821–98), was ‘printed at the “Scottish Highlander” O∞ce’, Inverness, in 1891. This was particularly appropriate, as MacPherson’s songs, which articulated the radical voice of the land agitation of the late nineteenth century, had a close relationship with newspapers from the outset of her poetic career. Although MacPherson was barely literate, specimens of her verse appeared in The Highlander in the 1870s, in the Oban Times in the 1880s, and in The Scottish Highlander in the 1880s and 1890s. A couple of her songs were produced as independent broadsides, in a format which suggests that they may well have originated in newspaper o∞ces (Meek 1995, 1998b). Printing of books by newspaper o∞ces became the pattern in the northern and western localities, but in Glasgow the concentration – in both senses – of literate Gaels was strong enough to sustain important Gaelic printing and publishing houses, which made a smooth transition to the production of secular and ‘popular’ material for the long-term good of Gaelic.

Secular reading-matter The production of secular texts was subsidised at the outset by the demand for religious works. Printers who had previously produced only religious books began to try their hand at secular volumes, and anthologies of secular verse began to appear from Edinburgh presses before 1820. John MacLean’s Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach (‘New Highland Songs’), with a print run of 400 copies, was produced by R. Meinnearach (anglicé Robert Menzies, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh), who was also a printer of religious texts. Others are the collections of the brothers, A. Stewart and D. Stewart (1804), and Patrick Turner (1813), likewise published in Edinburgh. The growing secular stream, with a strongly educational rationale, was represented in the many volumes of poetry, grammars and dictionaries published by MacLachlan & Stewart. Gaelic tales and songs, in printed book, magazine and newspaper, soon became an independent literary stratum. Following the excitement of the Disruption in the 1840s, the pre-eminence of the Presbyterian Church and of religious material began to decline. The

116

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

‘popular’ and the ‘secular’ gradually assumed a more prominent place after 1850, clearly in response to more a±uent urban readerships with the means to buy such material. While the brave new world of secular supply and demand was eroding traditional boundaries, the printing and publishing of religious texts continued strongly in Edinburgh, as the publication patterns of Buchanan’s and Grant’s hymns indicate, and may even have increased slightly in the 1880s, to judge by MacLachlan & Stewart’s output. The ﬁrm remained the city’s – and indeed Scotland’s – principal Gaelic religious publisher until it ceased operations in 1889, after a remarkable seventy years of service. Thereafter John Grant, on George IV Bridge, assumed the role with considerable enthusiasm, and with a substantial list of Puritan translations, reprinted in the 1890s and the early 1900s. The Edinburgh Bible Society, later the National Bible Society of Scotland, had taken responsibility for the publication of the Gaelic Bible by the 1820s, and employed Anderson & Bryce as printers. Latterly the city tended to specialise in periodicals and academic and ‘high-brow’ books, a trend that was apparent by the mid-century. John Francis Campbell’s prestigious four-volume series, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, was published by Edmonston & Douglas, Edinburgh, in 1860–2. The same publishers undertook Thomas McLauchlan’s edition of The Dean of Lismore’s Book in 1862, printed by Thomas Constable. Constable was associated with Gaelic printing as early as 1815, when the company published Peter MacFarlane’s Gaelic dictionary. Oliver & Boyd, in a small way, supplemented Edinburgh’s tradition of Gaelic academic publishing, producing James Munro’s book of verse, Filidh (‘Minstrel’), in 1840, John Forbes’ Principles of Gaelic Grammar in 1848, and Duncan Connell’s volume on astronomy, ReulEòlas (‘Star-Knowledge’), in 1857. William Blackwood made similar contributions. Glasgow was by no means devoid of academic and religious interest, as was amply demonstrated by the publication in 1831, by W. R. McPhun, of the important Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, compiled by the Rev. Norman MacLeod and the Rev. Daniel Dewar. However, the Glasgow trade negotiated the strategically important change to secular printing and publishing, with a ‘popular’ dimension and a speciﬁcally Gaelic focus, much more successfully than Edinburgh. No fewer than 138 titles appeared from twenty-one Glasgow publishers between 1851 and 1900, a period which witnessed ‘the emergence of the “dedicated” Gaelic publisher’ (MacDonald 1993: 398). The Gaels’ involvement in industry and their acquisition of business skills encouraged them to create their own printing enterprises.

publishing

117

Printing and bookselling businesses established by Gaels for Gaels were prominent in Glasgow by the 1840s. In this period, Glasgow attracted three particularly enterprising young men – William Gilchrist from Kintyre, and Neil Campbell and Archibald Sinclair from Islay – all three establishing presses, though Campbell was principally a bookseller, latterly active in Ireland. Archibald Sinclair was in business as a printer by 1848. By 1862, Gilchrist was advertising himself as a ‘Steam-power Printer’ (TS-G: 52). The three men interacted with one another. Gilchrist helped to train Archibald Sinclair, and Sinclair produced books for Campbell to sell in his bookshop. All three also had a conspicuous loyalty to their native areas, and to Argyll generally. Knowing how to exploit business networks, they operated assiduously through territorially-based groups of expatriate Gaels, such as the Glasgow Islay Association, for which Sinclair printed the programmes for its Annual Gatherings. Loyalty to a family concern and to a family name, as well as to Gaelic culture, helped to ensure that Archibald Sinclair’s enterprise, established in 1848, continued until 1951 – more than a century – under the control of three successive Archibald Sinclairs, operating at di≠erent addresses (Argyle Street, Waterloo Street, Bothwell Street, Cadogan Street and McKeith Street, Bridgeton), latterly under the banner of the Celtic Press. The prominence and commercial success of all three Sinclairs guaranteed that Glasgow remained the principal locus of Gaelic publishing throughout the twentieth century, and that it attracted other signiﬁcant Gaelic publishers, such as Alexander MacLaren (who took over the Sinclairs’ business in 1951) and Gairm Publications (who absorbed MacLaren in 1970). The ‘secularising’ of Gaelic speakers in the cities had consequences for the kinds of Gaelic literature that appeared in print. Although they did produce religious texts, the Sinclairs were much more concerned with the publication of secular literature than previous publishers had been. Of seventy-four titles printed by the Sinclairs between 1853 and 1890, forty-ﬁve (approximately two-thirds) were secular – quite the opposite of the wider pre-1850 pattern (Coventry: 140–50). They understood, as few did, the changing dynamics of the Gaelic world in the later nineteenth century, and trimmed their sails accordingly, producing a broad range of titles. Their list was ‘eclectic’ and ‘general’, and breathed an air of healthy, vigorous participation in contemporary Gaelic life, in contrast to the puritanism and pedagogy of MacLachlan & Stewart. The ﬁrm embraced booklets for lodges of Freemasons patronised by Glasgow Gaels, leaﬂets making the case for the Church of Scotland, political squibs and religious pamphlets. The Sinclairs, who had an

118

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

earlier background in abolitionism, were not afraid to ally themelves with the movement for crofters’ rights in the 1870s and 1880s, and to use their press to further its aims. They performed a singular service for the crofting community when they published the important Gaelic translation of the Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886. Gaelic poets and storytellers were likewise well served by the Sinclairs. Loyal as ever to their homeland, they printed the Islay Association’s 1882 anthology of the verse of William Livingston, who had previously enjoyed the patronage of MacLachlan & Stewart (1858) and William Gilchrist (1865). In 1893 they also printed the songs of the expatriate Skye bard, Neil MacLeod, whose verse had ﬁrst been published in 1883 by MacLachlan & Stewart. This is a signiﬁcant example of the Glasgow printers’ absorption of earlier Edinburgh ventures, following the demise of the long-established MacLachlan & Stewart. The Sinclairs likewise published the key texts for the ‘urban cèilidh-house’, among them in 1881 Henry Whyte’s Celtic Garland, perhaps the most popular of all such works, and his Gaelic Readings in 1898. They were no less concerned to develop a good-looking product, and introduced new standards for the design of Gaelic books. Prior to 1850, Gaelic books tended to be plain in appearance, usually bound in boards, doubtless reﬂecting the earlier predominance of religious publishing. Volumes ﬁnished in leather and enlivened with gold tooling appeared fairly regularly in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, and irregularly thereafter; examples include Norman MacLeod’s Leabhar nan Cnoc in 1834 (Neill & Fraser, Greenock), and MacLeod’s collected prose works in 1861, edited by Archibald Clerk (William Mackenzie, Glasgow). The Sinclairs represented the high-water mark of popular Gaelic printing and publishing in the Victorian era, taking pains to give their books a consistently well-tooled ﬁnish, and to dignify their most signiﬁcant volumes with good presentation, as their splendid anthology of Gaelic songs, An t-Oranaiche, published as a single volume in 1879, bears eloquent witness. Produced with covers of di≠erent single colours (red, blue or green) depending on batch, it was decorated with gold tooling and edging. Functional binding continued for many years in Gaelic publishing, but the Sinclairs unquestionably improved the image of the Gaelic book industry, and may well have inﬂuenced others. MacLachlan & Stewart, for instance, were following similar designs by the 1880s. A ‘Sinclair product’ from this period can be easily identiﬁed by its superior appearance. An t-Oranaiche stands as a particularly eloquent monument to their unrivalled excellence in their day – an excellence which was not matched in the twentieth century, despite subsequent advances in standards of book production.

publishing

Figure 2.8 An t-Oranaiche (Glasgow: Archibald Sinclair, 1879).

119

120

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Publishing arrangements and distribution As in the book trade at large, printers of Gaelic books in the Scottish towns and cities were often publishers and booksellers. In the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, however, and occasionally thereafter, some books carried a note that they had been ‘published for the author’ (that is, the compiler). Anthologies of Gaelic verse were commonly funded either by the ‘author’ or by subscription. In such cases, the author as publisher was fulﬁlling a major service to the wider Gaelic community, as happened when John MacLean published his Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach in 1818. Distribution of Gaelic books was never an easy matter, and much depended on their size and portability. Itinerant evangelists sometimes carried packs of religious tracts, which they distributed in the localities they visited. Secular songs could also be distributed by designated chapmen (see ‘Bookselling’). The early nineteenth-century printer, Thomas Duncan, located in Glasgow’s Saltmarket, produced a number of Gaelic chapbooks with an Inveraray imprint. All contained Gaelic songs, many of them reprinted from Ronald MacDonald’s ‘Eigg Collection’ of 1776. These chapbooks were sold all over the Highlands by Patrick Turner, who was based at Inveraray, and whose collection of Gaelic songs was published in 1813 (SBTI). Larger Gaelic books presented greater challenges, and required good advertising, co-operation and discounts to move stock. As with anglophone publications, front matter reveals that arrangements were frequently made with publishers and agents who acted as outlets for such books. In this context, Edinburgh’s principal Gaelic publishers, MacLachlan & Stewart, seem to have acted as something of a wholesaler. Bound into their 1846 edition of Uisge na Beatha, a translation of John Bunyan’s Water of Life, is a list of just over 100 ‘Gaelic Books and Works on the Highlands’ which they stocked, in addition to bibles and psalm books. Of the books listed, only about a quarter (twenty-three) were non-religious, and the company held ﬁfty-eight di≠erent titles of Gaelic tracts (incorporated under one heading in the list). Armstrong’s Gaelic dictionary sold for 35s, a quarto edition (calf ) of the 1826 Gaelic Bible for 25s, and the Highland Society’s Gaelic dictionary for 70s (apparently ‘knocked down’ from £12 12s), while Puritan classics ranged from 1s to 3s, with an average price of 2s. Non-religious books were noticeably more expensive. MacLachlan & Stewart o≠ered ‘a liberal discount . . . on orders for exportation or for private circulation’. A separate list (in Gaelic) in the same book was devoted to some twenty-three volumes ‘sold by the Sunday School Union and by every bookseller’. These were pre-eminently translations of the Puritan

publishing

121

classics – including ﬁve by Bunyan, and one each by Dyer, Gray, Guthrie and Baxter – accompanied by two school primers, two dictionaries and (signiﬁcantly) the principal nineteenth-century Gaelic anthology of songs, Sàr-Obair nam Bàrd Gàëlach (McGregor, Polson & Co., Glasgow, 1841). This second list may well have been regarded as a ‘good and wholesome library’ for the average Gael of the time. Although there was an inevitable element of rivalry in the trade, and discounted rates for special customers, Gaelic printers, publishers and booksellers all worked with one another to maintain a broad market share, as happened in other industries. By the 1880s, book production and distribution were allocated more evenly among di≠erent companies. Firms who had previously printed their own work were more inclined to ‘out-source’ their printing, and to become, more strictly, publishers. Predominantly Gaelic printers and publishers, notably Archibald Sinclair and MacLachlan & Stewart, also supplemented their business by publishing Gaelic-related works in English. In western and northern localities, stationers such as Hugh MacDonald of Oban frequently acted as distributors for Gaelic books, and sometimes printed and published a few titles of their own. In 1891, ‘H. MacDonald, Esplanade, Oban’, co-published (with Archibald Sinclair of Glasgow, and John Grant of Edinburgh) the ﬁrst volume of the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Glasgow. Various aspects of the publishing process, as it had developed by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, can be seen clearly in Donald Masson’s Vestigia Celtica: Celtic Footprints in Philology, Ethics and Religion, which was published by MacLachlan & Stewart in Edinburgh in 1882 – the year in which Professor Donald MacKinnon was inducted to Scotland’s ﬁrst chair of Celtic at Edinburgh University. Written in English, the book was printed in Edinburgh by Neill & Co., ‘Government Book and Law Printers for Scotland’. Listed below the name of MacLachlan & Stewart as principal publishers are those of Trübner & Co., London, and M. H. Gill & Son, Dublin. The book has paper wrappers, and on its back cover it carries recommendations from newspaper reviewers, as well as contemporary scholars, such as Professor Blackie of Edinburgh and Professor Rhys of Oxford, implying that it is probably not a ﬁrst edition. Gaelic and Gaelic-related printing and publishing had come a long way in eighty years. The a≠ordable academic text now took its place alongside the formal anthology of Gaelic songs and the bulky religious classic, which had been the hallmarks of early nineteenth-century publishing. The nineteenth century was a time of immense change – and very considerable achievement – for Scottish Gaels. It was an age of

122

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

transition in every respect, as Gaels migrated and emigrated from their homes in the Highlands and Islands to the Scottish Lowlands and much further aﬁeld. Gaelic culture, and pre-eminently the language, were rerooted in contexts di≠erent from those prevailing in the homeland in earlier times. In negotiating cultural change, and in preserving the vitality of Gaelic in new and challenging environments, print proved to be an invaluable medium. Though it arrived comparatively late, the alliance between print and the Scottish Gaels was a major factor in determining not only the state of Gaelic literature, but also its survival down to the present.

Chapter Three

DISTRIBUTION AND READING Bookselling Iain Beavan n the major population centres of Scotland, bookselling has existed at least since the sixteenth century, the ancient university towns having long supported retail activity. By the end of the eighteenth century the retail book trade had spread beyond the major cities and towns in Scotland, and into smaller localities, northern and north-east Scotland showing evidence of signiﬁcant, if uneven growth. Whereas an established retail trade in Aberdeen – the administrative, legal and educational centre of the North-East – can be securely traced from the seventeenth century, bookshops did not appear in the small county towns of Ban≠ until 1770 – where the trade undoubtedly beneﬁted from the proximity of Du≠ House, the main property of the Earls of Fife – and Elgin until 1788. The book trade arrived in the busy ﬁshing and whaling port of Peterhead (also fashionable for a time as a spa resort) in north-east Aberdeenshire in the 1790s. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, circulating libraries, an integral part of the book trade, had also been established with varying degrees of success in these and other localities. Signs of growth in the retail trade are evident elsewhere along the Moray Firth and north of Inverness by the 1820s. In addition to established bookshops, general merchants in, for example, Fochabers, Forres and Macdu≠, are known either to have acted as collection points for subscriptions, or as stockists for the occasional title. North of Inverness, however, bookshops seem not to have appeared until the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century: Thurso around 1810; Tain 1820; and Wick 1829 (SBTI et passim; Mowat: 85). Aberdeen, with its population of 27,000, was able to support around ten retail bookshops in 1801. A signiﬁcant level of business in Aberdeen was undoubtedly due to the presence of King’s and Marischal Colleges, with their students and teaching sta≠. Glasgow,

I

123

124

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

with its university and population of 77,000 (Mitchell: 26) had around twenty-four booksellers in the ﬁrst years of the nineteenth century. By the mid-1830s, Edinburgh had ninety-three booksellers, over thirty more than in Glasgow (Thin: 4). Such statistics mask important di≠erences. Some booksellers o≠ered highly specialised stock, whilst others dealt in second-hand material or discarded titles. Some ﬁrms in the largest cities concentrated, though not often exclusively, on foreign-language material: Charles Smith’s shop in Edinburgh ‘was the only shop where French books could be obtained’ (ibid.: 34) and John Reid & Co. of Glasgow imported foreign books. In 1842 John Mitchell of Aberdeen o≠ered a range of ‘liberal’ newspapers for discerning readers, including the Edinburgh True Scotsman, a leading publication of ‘moral force’ Chartism. At about the same time his neighbour James Vessie was selling a large variety of ‘bloods’ and other cheap reading matter, including Paul the Poacher, Dick Turpin and Robin Hood (Beavan 1996: 109–10). In the early years of the nineteenth century, Inverness was able to support only one bookselling establishment, the pattern and growth of Young & Imray’s business typical of many in the Scottish provinces (Simpson: 4–6). Starting as retail booksellers, stationers and bookbinders in 1798, the ﬁrm was successor to Alexander Davidson, who had been trading since at least 1774.1 Like many other provincial booksellers, the ﬁrm could probably not have survived without the additional income generated from its involvement in the allied trades of binding and stationery (see ‘Printing for Everyday Life’). Since at least 1802, John Young had been a jobbing printer undertaking work for a number of local institutions, such as the Female Friendly Society of Elgin and the Morayshire Farmers’ Club, and had occasionally attempted some larger works like the Poems of Ossian in 1804. One of Young & Imray’s earliest publications (probably 1798) was their Supplement to the British Almanack covering the Northern Counties, Moray and Nairn. Young also became proprietor and editor of the Inverness Journal, launched in 1807, a major advertising medium for the booksellers of the region. Donald Morrison & Co. announced their new circulating library in Inverness in its pages in November 1826, and at the same time remarked that ‘DM & Co. sell books in every department of literature at 5 per cent below the retail price, and at 71⁄2 per cent for cash.’ The advertisement of Kenneth Douglas, then in Tain, in January of that year was a typical mixture of the seasonal – almanacs and gift annuals – and 1

WRM MS 3167/11

distribution and reading

125

Figure 3.1 Penicuik bookshop. In smaller towns, nineteenth-century bookshops dealt in a variety of goods. James Black was a confectioner in Penicuik who also sold printed matter and operated a subscription library from his shop.

practical works relating to land use and farming. The list was also leavened with ﬁction, including Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, published by Colburn in 1826. But such newspaper advertisements reveal details of only a fraction of the bookselling activity in Inverness at this time. Orders from Young & Imray to their Edinburgh supplier indicate

126

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

a steady and signiﬁcant demand for educational material and school books, including, in 1799, ‘12 copies Scotts Lessons’, twelve ‘Watts latin Grammar’, and eight copies of ‘Waddels Buchanan’. A year later there were requests for twelve ‘Mairs Introduction’, ten ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and fourteen ‘Livy’. Subsequent orders from Inverness included one for no fewer than sixty-six copies of ‘Ruddimans Rudiments’ and six ‘Playfairs Euclid’.2 Over the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, some more ambitious provincial booksellers shifted from being local agents for individual titles towards becoming stockists for works by several publishers. This trend is evident in the fact that, from the mid-1840s, advertisements placed by local booksellers appeared less frequently throughout the Scottish provincial press, replaced by those of publishers and regional wholesalers. Hitherto, Scottish provincial booksellers had turned to their contacts in Edinburgh and Glasgow, or London for supplies. Bell & Bradfute, founded in Edinburgh in late 1788, was able by the 1840s to call upon over thirty years’ experience and contacts in the Britishwide book trade. The ﬁrm, which had established a lasting reputation as a publisher of law books, and of the writings of some of the leading ﬁgures of the Scottish Enlightenment, also acted as a clearing house and agent for orders from Scottish and northern English retail booksellers, occasionally ﬁlling small orders from retail booksellers in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Berwick-upon-Tweed and York. The wholesaling activities of Lewis Smith in Aberdeen expanded rapidly from mid-century, undoubtedly helped by the arrival of the railways from the South in 1850. The ﬁrm was soon in a position to o≠er to the trade portions of Cassell’s and Routledge’s publications wholesale. Three years later, Lewis & James Smith were able conﬁdently to reel o≠ a list of ten publishers for whom they acted as agent, and a further four for whom they held extensive stock. However, the position of the retail bookseller in smaller towns was slow to change. To be sure, the volume and variety of printed material increased over the ﬁrst half of the century; and the process of acquiring it had become easier and speedier, with the need to order copies from Edinburgh or London partially obviated by the appearance of regional wholesalers. However, an 1863 advertisement placed in the Buchan Observer by William Taylor, the Peterhead bookseller, would have been immediately recognisable to provincial customers at least half a century before, with its list of books, fancy goods and sets of playing cards alongside a ‘public library’. 2

B&Ba SL138/4/4 Sheet book, 1798–1802.

distribution and reading

127

Advertising Reluctant for their money to be locked up in unsold stock, the more astute publishers sought a quick return on their investments. Finding the best market in the quickest time was imperative. By the early decades of the nineteenth century the use of advertising, especially in newspapers and magazines, became more organised and intensive. Archibald Constable once commented to his London agents, Hurst, Robinson, that ‘advertisements in the ordinary way, in newspapers . . . always pay . . . advertise judiciously and you will never fail to reap the beneﬁt’ (III: 34). Advertising frequently constituted a signiﬁcant proportion of overall publication costs, and was often higher than the purchase of copyright. While the rights to publish the titles in Oliver & Boyd’s Edinburgh Cabinet Library were mostly between £50 and £100, the investment in advertising was not infrequently £100 per volume. To extend their coverage, Oliver & Boyd turned to Edinburgh agents, Robertson & Scott, and in London Richard Barker, ‘Agent to the Proprietors of Country Newspapers’. The practical beneﬁts of using such intermediaries is obvious, increasing e∞ciency and extending coverage, for a mere 5 per cent commission, a modest amount at the time compared to other charges in the book trade (Beavan 2000). Oliver & Boyd’s agents appear to have operated e∞ciently in the changing economic climate, Barker’s six-monthly advertising account with the ﬁrm suggesting that they were responsive to new developments in the trade: for some years, notices had been regularly placed in the essential vehicle for trade information, Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser and its antecedents, but by the end of 1837 advertisements were also being sent to the newly established Publishers’ Circular.3 Initially free to the trade, the Circular rapidly established itself as a ‘central clearing house of information, aimed primarily at ‘the retail trade and bulk buyers (rather than manufacturers) of books’ (Eliot and Sutherland: 5–6). Members of the Scottish book trade knew only too well which newspapers and magazines north of the border o≠ered the best advertising prospects. Such was at least apparent to English publishers who recognised – though not without occasional transgression – the wholesale trading territory of the major Scottish ﬁrms. In 1800, George Kearsley of London, promoting his British Magazine, wrote to Bell & Bradfute asking them to advertise it in ‘the four best Edinburgh newspapers’.4 Some thirty years later, the London publisher John Murray II wrote to 3 4

O&B Acc 5000/53(4). Advertising account, Richard Barker, Dec. 1837. B&Bb Acc. 10662/17. Letter, 10 Jan. 1800.

128

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

George Boyd that he did not understand ‘the most e∞cient means of advertising in the Scottish newspapers – I shall in future with great satisfaction, conﬁde this department . . . to your better intelligence & discression’.5 In 1819 Oliver & Boyd received a letter of acceptance from the wholesalers, George Whittaker of London, to the e≠ect that ‘we agree to your proposal to take one half Share of the entire copyright of ‘Glenfergus’ a novel in three vols’, which continues: ‘As regards the advertising . . . the expence is to be borne equally between you and ourselves, sincerely wishing a rapid sale.’6 Oliver & Boyd placed advertisements in newspapers and magazines published in Scotland and northern England while Whittaker did likewise in London and the west of England. Between November 1818 and April 1819, Whittaker placed notices in at least sixteen London newspapers and periodicals, frequently having the advertisement inserted several times. Notices also went to the provincial press, as far south as the Taunton Courier in Somerset.7 In Scotland, nineteen local newpapers carried advertisements for the novel from Inverness to Kelso. The advertising history of Glenfergus also demonstrates the rapid rise of advertising agents, whose presence was coming to be quickly seized upon by ambitious publishers. Boyd’s accounts show that J. K. Johnston & Co., General Advertising & Newspaper Agency O∞ce in Dublin, placed advertisements on behalf of the Edinburgh ﬁrm for the novel in four Dublin papers, and two from Cork. The advertising columns of the Edinburgh newspapers therefore carried announcements from the major English and Scottish publishers alike. Henry Colburn’s extensive advertising campaigns led him to place advertisements regularly in The Scotsman, the Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Weekly Journal, frequently noticing the titles that were wholesaled in Edinburgh by Bell & Bradfute. The last, for instance, was instrumental in bringing Dickens to Scotland, as is evident from John Macrone’s notice in the Edinburgh Weekly Journal of July 1837 of a new edition of Sketches by Boz, supplied wholesale by the ﬁrm. Thereby were readers and booksellers in the major cities kept well informed of the latest publications and, just as importantly, where to ﬁnd them (Feather 1985: 112). One important pre-condition of e≠ective advertising was the clear identiﬁcation of niche markets. Essential to the promotion of works, 5 6 7

O&B Acc 5000/196. Letter, J. Murray to G. Boyd, 7 Dec. 1831. O&B Acc 5000/189. Letter, G. Whittaker to G. Boyd, 14 Oct. 1819. O&B Acc 5000/51. Advertising accounts, 1817–20.

distribution and reading

129

new as well as old, was the publisher’s catalogue, sometimes circulated separately but often bound in with other works. Charles Knight’s letter of January 1833 informed George Boyd that it would cost him £25 for the insertion of a four-page catalogue in a monthly part of the popular Penny Magazine, in return for which a publisher could be guaranteed an audience of at least 80,000 consumers.8 John Boyd jnr was in London in 1840 and took time to survey the capital’s periodical literature in order to determine how the ﬁrm’s advertising budget might best be spent. He noted the Monthly Chronicle (1,250 copies per issue) had ‘Whig principles – good for miscellaneous’; the Monthly Review (700 copies) as ‘respectable, but rather indi≠erent medium’; Fraser’s Magazine (2,600 copies) was blessed as having ‘Tory principles & very respectable – good for miscell. & school books’; while the Quarterly Review (supposedly 9,500 copies) had ‘ﬁrst respectability’ and was therefore ‘excellent for miscellaneous and school books’.9 Advertising was also brought to the shop window, as is evident from the following description of the premises of one prominent Edinburgh publisher and bookseller: They were . . . agents for Rivington [and] Colburn & Bentley whose issue of three-volume novels with paper-back titles were permanently exhibited in Bell & Bradfute’s windows by means of imitation book-backs gummed to a wooden frame which ﬁtted into the windows. This was a rather common method of displaying books in the windows at that time, saving the apprentices and assistants much trouble in dressing the windows as they stood there from year’s end to year’s end. (Thin: 35) Such shop displays were something in which publishers appear to have taken an active interest. In 1836, Samuel Sutherland wrote reassuringly from London to George Boyd that he had ‘nearly distributed the whole of the show boards of the Edinburgh Cabinet and upon going round a second time to most of the trade, ﬁnd them displayed conspicuously in their windows and elsewhere’.10 Surviving accounts of the Edinburgh ﬁrm of Oliver & Boyd demonstrate the extent to which, by the 1820s, publishers were targeting speciﬁc customers. Whereas the company advertised its three-volume ﬁction, intended primarily for libraries, far beyond Scotland, announcements for local interest publications like the Bagpipe Preceptor appear 8 9 10

O&B Acc 5000/197. Letter, 26 Jan. 1833. O&B Acc 5000/200. Letter, 18 July 1840. O&B Acc 5000/53(2). Letter, 14 May 1836.

130

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

to have been limited to the Inverness Journal, the Edinburgh Advertiser and the Glasgow Courier.11 Yet, while urban readers were alerted to a wide variety of the latest books in retail bookshops and in the press, few Scottish provincial newspapers carried extensive book advertisements. Despite Greenock’s position as an important seaport, there is little evidence of a thriving local retail market. The Greenock Advertiser rarely included more than one or two announcements for Scottish almanacs, although December issues often included notices of gift annuals such as Waugh & Innes’s Infant Annual; or A Mother’s O≠ering. Provincial Scottish readers were not, however, completely bereft of such information: many agencies supplied newspapers from England and other parts of Scotland to private addresses and it was the business of local reading rooms and libraries to make sure that they were well stocked with newspapers and journals from the larger cities.

Commercial travellers Given the dispersed nature of the Scottish population, one important means by which retail networks were created in the early nineteenth century was through the use of commercial travellers. Carrying advance copies and advertising literature, the publisher’s traveller would come increasingly to represent the human face of the book trade in the more remote parts of Britain and Ireland. A method already extensively deployed by the textile industry, the idea of using commercial travellers for the sale of books was probably ﬁrst put into practice by the London wholesalers, Crosby, Lockwood, in around 1800. Within a decade travellers were being deployed to extend the reach of the Scottish trade so that their presence was well established by the 1820s (Pollard 1978: 40). In 1821, William Collins of Glasgow travelled to London on behalf of his ﬁrm, and in the following year took in the industrial cities of the west of England, as far south as Bristol (Kier: 56, 62). In 1817, the traveller for J. & A. Duncan, Glasgow booksellers, made his way north to Montrose, to visit the local printer and bookseller, John Watts, to whom he o≠ered some attractive deals in the exchange of books and pamphlets.12 Letters exchanged between commercial travellers and their employers sometimes make for dispiriting reading. George Thornton, the nephew of the publisher George Boyd wrote from Belfast in 1832 that business was very depressed as a consequence of the recent cholera 11 12

O&B Acc 5000/51. Advertising accounts, 1817–20. O&B Acc 5000/189. Letter, 1 Nov. 1817.

distribution and reading

131

Figure 3.2 Travellers’ log book. By the 1820s, the circuits of Oliver & Boyd’s commercial travellers extended to Ireland and the northern counties of England. As this log book shows, regular reports regarding their rural customers were kept, in which an individual’s creditworthiness and character was meticulously recorded. The low regard in which these small businessmen were held by their metropolitan suppliers is evident throughout. Telfor of Kelso, although a good prospect, is a ‘hypochondriac’ while his neighbour Walter Grieve is simply ‘a dunce’. The trade seems to have prospered in some towns more than others. While the trade in Kendal was thought to be fairly reliable, the booksellers of Keswick, where John Greenip ‘drinks hard of late’ and the binder Crampton is ‘worth nothing’, was considered to be a generally bad risk.

outbreak ‘and the Booksellers will order nothing. I believe I shall leave Belfast without obtaining a single order’.13 In the economic crisis of the 1840s Thomas Boyd wrote that business in Rochdale was in such a bad state that he had ‘never experienced harder and more spiritless work’.14 One of the principal functions of the commercial traveller was as a source of information about the ﬁnancial state of individual ﬁrms, a factor which became more important after the spectacular failures of 1826 (Bell 1998a: 123). In spite of the fact that volumes from the Edinburgh Cabinet Library appeared to be selling well, George 13 14

O&B Acc 5000/196. Letter, 20 March 1832. O&B Acc 5000/201. Letter, 31 March 1841.

132

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Thornton, writing from Dublin in 1831, recommended that Oliver & Boyd should recall some titles from bookseller William Curry, whom he suspected of double-dealing: ‘[I]n 23 instances the stock now on hand is more than the previous stock six months ago, which makes me suspect we are not fairly dealt with.’ Another task for which travellers were responsible was to assess the creditworthiness of their retail customers, a particularly important factor at a time when advance bills were viewed cautiously. ‘I have taken an order from Yates,’ wrote Thornton in the same letter, ‘on the presumption of his being quite safe.’15 By 1811, Oliver & Boyd had a traveller on the road, who quickly established contacts in London, including booksellers Benjamin Crosby and Thomas Tegg, and appears to have met with great success. From Robert Harrild in Great East Cheap he took orders for 1,200 copies each of the ﬁrst three volumes of the Warbler, and persuaded John Pitts, himself one of the main producers and sellers of chapbooks in London, to buy into their stock, with ‘2 doz each Plays [thus totalling] 20 doz [at] 4/6d [per dozen]’.16 Closer to home, Mrs Mackay of Glasgow also bought from the same traveller large numbers of children’s books including 5,000 copies of illustrated sheets, for the children’s game of lottery (McKay 2001). Travellers also provided vital lines of communication between individuals and ﬁrms as they followed their circuits round the trade. The career of George Smith of London began as apprentice to Isaac Forsyth, Elgin bookseller; thence he went to the metropolis to work at Rivington’s; then John Murray; ﬁnally setting up business with Alexander Elder as Smith & Elder in 1816. Notwithstanding Forsyth’s claim to have ‘helped on’ the career of his able and aspiring apprentice, the notebook of Oliver & Boyd’s traveller shows that it was he who took Smith’s name down to London, and undoubtedly relayed it to the Rivingtons (Bell 1998a: 132). Financial cautiousness or lack of creditworthiness led some booksellers to exchange printed material between themselves, rather than entering directly into money transactions. Thus we ﬁnd one Scottish traveller (working for Oliver & Boyd) agreeing to take from the Minerva Press in London 100 Castle of Otranto, thirty Children of the Abbey, 200 English Hermit and 100 Fashionable Letter Writer, all to be shipped up to Edinburgh to be sold on, the entire transaction consisting of merchandise worth over £300 on each side. That same traveller was in London again in 1815, evidently with the authority to enter into further wholesale arrangements. An agreement was struck with Gale & Fenner of London who as a result became ‘the only holders of stock in England’ 15 16

O&B Acc 5000/196. Letter, 26 Sept. 1831. O&B Acc 5000/1109. Traveller’s notebook, London 1811.

distribution and reading

133

of Butterworth’s text books. An even more substantial agreement between Law & Whittaker and the Edinburgh ﬁrm was recorded by the traveller, who also passed on to George Whittaker a request to purchase shares in Guthrie’s Grammar, Brookes’ Gazetteer, Hutton’s Mathematics, Walker’s Dictionary and Moore’s Navigation.17 Steady proﬁts were to be made in steady sellers, the commitment on the part of wholesalers to particular titles helping to protect them in future editions. After acquiring the copyright of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, the London bookseller Joseph Mawman wrote to George Boyd in 1821, o≠ering the Edinburgh ﬁrm a share in the copyright and commenting tantalisingly: I have admitted [the following] partners on the same terms [that] I became possessor of the book, Messrs Baldwin etc etc, under the conviction that they could essentially promote its sale . . . I now o≠er you one sixteenth share of that book . . . yours is the only house in the North to whom any share has been or will be o≠ered.18 As well as providing an insight into the protective practice that had come to govern mutual arrangements in the trade, Mawman’s remarks provide clear evidence of the extent to which the British trade had, by the 1820s, become highly organised and connected.

Chapmen, Hawkers, and the number trade Despite such arrangements in the mainstream book trade, much printed material in the nineteenth century circulated by means other than wholesale agents and retail booksellers. Travelling to fairs and country markets, or ﬁnding a pitch on the busy street, hawkers, chapmen and ballad sellers sold chapbooks, broadsheets and slip-songs directly to the customer. The main centres of chapbook production developed in the Central Belt of Scotland, because of the relative density of population and the region’s lines of communication further north, south through Carlisle and Penrith, and south-east to Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Morris 1997: 108–9). Chapbooks printed in England were sold in Scotland; and the reverse was also true. Joseph Hodgson of Whitehaven, latterly a glazier, but for many years a chapman, carried with him a variety of small wares, including needles, pins, matches, little school books and ‘4d to 9d worth of ballads’ which were exchanged for small money or bartered for food. 17 18

O&B Acc 5000/1110. Traveller’s notebook, London 1815. O&B Acc 5000/189. Letter, 19 Nov. 1821.

134

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 3.3 William ‘Hawkie’ Cameron. Street sellers and chapmen were to be found in all cities and towns of appreciable size, where an ear for the topical, a sharp sense of humour and a quick imagination were needed for success. The itinerant trader’s stock was obtained directly from printers’ shops. Pictured here is William ‘Hawkie’ Cameron, chapman and street seller, who left a record of his travels in the late 1820s through the Scottish Borders and on into Northumberland.

distribution and reading

135

Most of his journeys took him south, but he undertook at least one lengthy trip in Scotland, from Whitehaven to Glasgow, then east to Dundee, subsequently proceeding south via St Andrews to Edinburgh, and ﬁnally west through the Borders and back into Cumberland (23–4, 40). It is clear that Hodgson’s travels were driven by poverty and the pressing need to supplement irregular employment, a situation which ﬁnds a parallel in the career of John Magee. Born in Ireland, trained as a ﬂax-dresser, Magee crossed to central Scotland in the search for better employment, but soon found his hopes dashed. Desperate at the sight of his wife and ﬁve children, ‘almost naked, and in the depths of winter, crying for food and raiment, which . . . [he] could not procure’ he took to travelling the country and ‘dealing in such articles as answered the market best’ (3–4). His most detailed description is reserved for a journey to the Western Highlands in 1808. Having started in Greenock, he arrived at Inveraray ﬁve days later where he sold about £1 5s of small books. His itinerary took him thence to Ballachulish, Fort William and Fort Augustus, and on to Inverness (32). Another method of itinerant distribution was to be found in the Scottish number trade, the practice of selling works from house to house in parts and numbers, especially in country areas and among the rural poor. It was a mode of publication in which Blackie & Son, established in Glasgow in 1809 – a ﬁrm ‘identiﬁed with propriety and selfimprovement’ – specialised. Competition in the Scottish number trade came from rival ﬁrms such as Archibald Fullarton, with whom Blackie had once been in partnership, as well as publishers from England, although Blackie was able to extend his system of regional warehouses throughout Britain and into Ireland (Hancher: 54–6). Others did likewise: newspaper advertisements and trades directories show that the established London-based number publishers, George Virtue and Thomas Kelly also set up long-term agencies in Scotland. Some were less successful: the Dunbar bookseller and publisher George Miller was Figure 3.3 (continued) Cameron called at Wooler, where there were already a man and a woman selling ‘abominable songs’ and who sold seventeen quires of ballads that day with an estimated proﬁt of about £3 7s. He made it as far south as Houghton le Spring, before returning north through Alnwick. Although he was to spend most of his life in the growing conurbations around Glasgow, Hawkie appears to have been able to eke out a living in a rural as well as an urban market. Airdrie he found a ‘good town for selling a book’, o≠ering better prospects than Kilmarnock further south-west in which ‘above ﬁfty beggars, ballad singers, and speech criers loitered daily’ (39–40).

136

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

driven by the depression after 1815 to sell books in instalments. Miller eyed the ‘country round Inverness’ and noted that ‘the long stretch that lay to the north of it was practically virgin soil for books of all sorts, and especially for those likely to be carried by canvassers’. While Miller’s agents worked the east coast up into Caithness and on into Orkney, the prospects were not so favourable as he had originally supposed, as the Berwick bookseller William Gracie and the number publishers, the Bungay Press, had already beaten him to it (Couper: 154–5).

Co-operation, competition and controversy Any discussion of the distribution of print in nineteenth-century Scotland raises questions beyond those relating to the availability of material actually printed and published within the nation’s boundaries. Print from England and further aﬁeld routinely passed into Scotland in large quantities and, although many books and pamphlets were produced in Scotland for internal sale, other Scottish publishers costed, planned and set up their distributional arrangements with an eye on the extensive market across the British Isles, and sometimes beyond. The single largest market for sales was southern England, and many recognised that they were working within a print distribution system that had largely developed in London. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most Scottish publishers, and particularly those aiming for large-scale commercial success, sought joint agreements with either agents or other publishers in London (see ‘Agencies and Joint Ventures’). Partly as a consequence of the celebrated ﬁnancial failures of the 1820s, and partly because of the increased involvement of the courts in the regulation of the marketplace, agency agreements between English and Scottish publishers and wholesalers became more tightly drawn as the century advanced. A typical agreement between a Scottish and English publisher would require each ﬁrm to sell the other’s titles to the trade at around a third o≠ the retail price, as well as grant a further reduction for the books they sold from their own shops. Sometimes there was also an arrangement to postpone the sale to the general trade in order to create a short-term monopoly on titles. Such inducements ensured a healthy turnover between English and Scottish ﬁrms. Indeed, as southern England comprised the largest single market for Scottish titles it was commonplace to send at least half of the total print run south. Wholesalers in both locations stood to make sizeable incomes from such quantities. In the ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth century, Murray told the Ballantynes that ‘the sole agency for my publications in Edinburgh is worth, to any man who understands

distribution and reading

137

his business, £300’ (Smiles I: 174–5). Ten years later, that income had considerably increased. The cost of the books that the London ﬁrm sent annually to Edinburgh during the 1820s was about £5,000 or, in current prices, around £350,000 using the most conservative estimate (Isaac: 140–1). Given the large amount of capital involved, publishers had to be certain that they could trust their agents and the reciprocal nature of many agreements meant that trust had to be mutual. Occasionally, though, agreements could go badly wrong and the courts were consulted as a last resort. When William Blackwood found himself being taken advantage of by the Dublin bookseller Richard Milliken, he instructed Johnson & Deas to instigate legal action, to seize any remaining stock, and to ‘endeavour to get me an active agent on whom I could depend’.19 Even after a reputable wholesaler was found, a number of dangers threatened the bottom line. Agents often followed the ﬁner points of agreements only when it suited: Scottish publishers frequently complained that the English titles for which they held sole agency appeared in a competitor’s bookshop before they had received their copies. Furthermore, publishers regularly misjudged the public appetite for a particular book and the number of copies supplied to the wholesaler could be either inadequate to ﬁll the demand, or in excess of the required number, a problem exacerbated by the uncertainty of delivery times between the two regions. Many agreements did not stipulate the length of time the agency was to be undertaken, and consequently poaching was a regular feature of the trade. For example, in 1839, during Simpkin & Marshall’s agency for Oliver & Boyd, Messrs Hayward & Moore wrote to the Edinburgh ﬁrm asking if they might be provided with copies of Scottish titles at wholesale prices, taking care to note that they travelled ‘to Evry Town in England where Books can be sold, and having a good Connexion, we think it could make it answer your purposes’.20 Oliver & Boyd were too astute to succumb to such blandishments, which was just as well, as it was rumoured in 1841 that Haywood & Moore were facing a ﬁnancial crisis.21 Another controversial issue to a≠ect the trade in the nineteenth century was the setting and regulation of retail prices. A determined minority of the new generation in Scotland posed a distinct commercial threat to the then prevailing view as to what constituted fair 19 20 21

BP MS 30301/135–6. Blackwood to Rankin, 5 Aug. 1820. O&B Acc 5000/200. Letter, Haywood & Moore, 12 July 1839. O&B Acc 5000/201. Letter, John Dickinson, 23 Mar. 1841.

138

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

business practice. The retail price problem had already become a di∞cult issue by the end of the eighteenth century and was seen to be threatening the stability of the relationship between publishers, wholesalers and retailers throughout Britain. Late in 1796, George Mudie was summoned to a meeting of the Edinburgh Booksellers Society to face accusations that he had been underselling a number of medical books (Sher: 68–79; Beavan 2001: 76–7). Mudie’s actions – he had apparently o≠ered titles at up to 30 per cent below the retail price – were considered by the society to be ‘highly detrimental to the interest of the fair trader’. Mudie backed down, though not without a compromise that allowed retailers the option of selling at a 5 per cent discount new books for ready money. In October 1819 we ﬁnd the society was again exercised by the ‘system of underselling [that] has prevailed for some time in the Book Trade of Edinburgh’. On that occasion it was decided to increase the threshold for retail discount to 10 per cent on titles still in copyright, with any bookseller found in breach to be deprived of all future trade discount. In order to make the new arrangements generally applicable, the ‘principal Houses in London’ were to be ‘informed of these regulations, & the names of any Individuals refusing to act on these principles be communicated to them, with a request that they will co-operate with the Trade in Edin’. The minutes of a meeting held in April 1820 and attended by Constable, Cadell, Bradfute, Fairbairn, Black, Tait and Blackwood reveal that ‘those Resolutions had not been generally acted upon in such a manner as to render them e∞cient, and that it would be better to give them up altogether . . . Members should now be absolved from their engagements on this subject’.22 The problem resurfaced in 1835, when an anonymous correspondent to the Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society criticised underselling for ‘destroying the respectability as well as ruining the temporal interests of the Bookselling business’, levelling particular criticism at schoolmasters for passing on their conventional 2d in 1s discount as inducements to parents. Other miscreants included printers for ‘interfering between the Bookseller and the public’, as well as binders and their apprentices, who had exploited the ‘privileges of the trade’.23 A year earlier, in 1834, the Glasgow Booksellers’ Protection Association had been established to provide mutual support against the widespread belief that the ordinary customer was entitled to a discount on all publications, to resist unfair competition within the 22 23

EBS Dep 303/3. Minute book, 1792–1830: 352–5: 357–8. EBS Dep 303/25. Letter, 19 Mar. 1835.

distribution and reading

139

retail trade, and to prevent the sale of copyright books at more than 2d in 1s discount, though this was soon narrowed to 10 per cent. The Association’s 1834 circular was signed by over forty Glasgow ﬁrms, including George Gallie, William M’Phun, James Duncan, John Ogle and James Lumsden & Son, all well established companies. Among the examples given for ‘the ruinous extent to which this system of underselling is at present carried on’ were discounts on the Waverley Novels, then being sold at 3s 10d or 4s per volume and Byron’s works at 4s per volume.24 There was justiﬁable concern that if this practice were to persist the number of retail outlets would decrease, and, if proﬁt and discount margins were to shrink, the trade as a whole would have to retrench.25 Realising that pressure from within the retail trade alone was unlikely to succeed, the Glasgow Association determined to restrict the sources of supply. Identifying the names of retail undersellers in the west of Scotland, the Glasgow Association informed London wholesalers that future orders would be placed elsewhere by the members of the association should they continue business with recalcitrant booksellers. The association’s circular of April 1835 includes a statement from William Collins, Fullerton & Co. and Blackie & Son, three of the leading publishers in Glasgow, that they would not supply ‘any Retail Bookseller in Glasgow . . . who refuses to concur with the declaration of the retail Booksellers’.26 Not all prominent members of the trade were sympathetic with such restrictive practices, not least the bookselling ﬁrm of Gri∞n & Co., who had been a reluctant member of the Glasgow Association: When I was not a member, violent means were taken to force me to become so. I was threatened with loss of custom; my customers were threatened in similar manner; the very publishers in London for whom I was agent, were threatened with diminished sale of their books in Glasgow, if I was retained their agent and not induced to become an associate. (11) Yet, in the face of such opposition, the GBPA continued to enforce its views. Although he was readmitted in 1840, Adam Crawford, bookseller and binder in Glasgow, was declared guilty of underselling and ejected from the association in 1837, in spite of apologies, and in spite of his plea that in doing so the Association was ‘not aware of the 24 25 26

O&B Acc 5000/197. Printed circular, 31 Dec. 1834. GBPA Ref. 891733.Correspondence 1835, 1836. O&B Acc 5000/197. Printed circular, 31 Dec. 1834.

140

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

[irreparable] injury it will do me’.27 In a highly competitive and suspicious commercial environment, bookseller reported on bookseller. Alexander Hadden was reported more than once, and actually lost business in early 1843 when Blackwood returned a substantial order unﬁlled. Hadden’s treatment at the hands of Blackwood, combined with a circular addressed to the Scottish trade by Oliver & Boyd threatening any undersellers with a refusal to transact business, drove Joseph Gri∞n into print. Essentially, he argued that any combination to keep up prices by force or coercion was illegal. Gri∞n’s intervention appears to have unnerved the Association, who took advice, only to learn that Scottish legal opinion was not on the side of protectionism (Beavan 2001: 74–5, 81). Several attempts were later made to re-establish the authority of the Glasgow Association, but it eventually became clear that enforcement of the full retail price had become impossible. In some instances, publications were moving from Edinburgh across the Irish Sea, thence back into the West of Scotland at prices that were threatening to the regular retail trade. In 1851, in an e≠ort to demonstrate how loyal a wholesale agent he was to Oliver & Boyd, David Robertson of Glasgow reported that ‘McCulloch’s school books were selling to the public in our Bazaar at 25 per Cent discount . . . It is obvious that if this is not checked – not one of the trade will keep any stock of these works.’ Knowing that Oliver & Boyd were most unlikely to have had an active account with the transgressors, Doyle & Hopkins, Robertson noted that ‘these books must be got from Mullan Belfast &c &c who is destroying the trade in the North of Ireland in Greenock and here.’28 Institutional attempts within Britain to address the controversy were brought to a halt for forty years by the decision of Lord Campbell’s committee of arbitration that the ‘regulations are unreasonable and inexpedient’ and ‘contrary to the freedom that ought to prevail in commercial transactions’. With this judgement, booksellers’ protection societies throughout Britain quickly disbanded, and attempts at systematic control and regulation of the retail price, abandoned. Free trade had arrived at the booksellers’ doorsteps (Barnes: 182–7). The issue would resurface again in the 1890s, leading to a longerlasting solution to the problem in the form of the Net Book Agreement, which came into force on 1 January 1900, and which was to apply, with varying degrees of success, until its abolition in 1997.

27 28

GBPA. Ref. 891733. Letter, 14 Dec. 1837. O&B Acc 5000/207. Letter, 28 July 1851.

The Railways Stephen Colclough The arrival of the railways in the 1840s was to have a profound e≠ect on the Scottish book trade. As one historian has observed, the railway uniﬁed ‘the Scottish economy in an unprecedented fashion . . . [and] linked that economy with England for the ﬁrst time by land with fast, e∞cient and reliable transport’ (Lenman: 166). Britain’s ﬂat-rate postal service was established at the very moment when the mainline railway system was being completed, and both factors, taken together, were to have a considerable impact on the conduct of the print trade. Although this transformation contributed to a quickening of the pace of print culture throughout the British Isles, it was by no means immediate, booksellers and wholesalers continuing to rely on a variety of means to transact business. Distribution by railway was particularly expensive in the early years, involving a complicated variety of independent companies, each of which demanded its own rate (Story: 36). For a newspaper such as the Dundee, Perth and Forfar People’s Journal to break into new territories in the 1850s ‘every link in the existing communication and distribution network’ needed to be used, from packmen and pedlars, to the mail coach and the railway. However, it was the single set of freight tari≠s produced by the amalgamation of the Scottish North-Eastern Railway with the Dundee and Arbroath in 1862 that allowed the People’s Journal to reach the relatively large Aberdeen market ensuring its eventual success with a national audience (Donaldson: 23–5). In order to increase its circulation in the mid-1860s, The Scotsman took an even more radical approach to the cost of distribution by rail. In 1865 it made a successful agreement with the various railway companies to allow the newspaper to be carried over the whole of the Scottish railway system for a single fee. This meant that agents in

142

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

di≠erent regions received the paper ‘carriage free’ and could sell it to the public at the published price of 1d and still reserve a proﬁt of a farthing (1/4d) per copy (Story: 37–8). It was this innovation that led to what The Graphic described as ‘a complete revolution’ in newspaper distribution in the 1870s, the ‘newspaper trains’, ﬁrst commissioned by the editor of The Scotsman in 1872, allowing the paper to be ‘published almost simultaneously in Edinburgh and Glasgow’ (15 May, 1875). The train left Edinburgh at 4.20 a.m. with ‘a packing carriage’ from which parcels were dispatched while the train was still in motion. It arrived at Glasgow some seventy minutes later with 400 parcels ready to be distributed throughout the West of Scotland (Story: 40). The idea of sorting newspapers for delivery on the train quickly spread to the rest of the nation, and competition for the ﬁrst newspaper on the breakfast table contributed to the search for ever more e∞cient new print technologies as editors fought to get their titles onto the early trains. Speed would become an increasingly important factor in the delivery of news. By the mid-1870s, The Times and other London-based papers were arriving at Glasgow by 6.00 p.m. on the day of publication, but the rail could not keep up with the power of the telegraph. Of the nine private lines rented by newspapers in the 1860s, ﬁve were in Scotland. By 1870 Post O∞ce control of the wires made the system cheaper to use, allowing local papers to access national and international news that had once been the province of the London press. The idea that a speech made in parliament in the early hours could reach Scotland in printed form on the same day was one of the journalistic clichés of the 1860s, but by 1866 The Scotsman was using a ‘special wire’ between London and Edinburgh in order to ensure that full coverage of important parliamentary news was included in the same morning’s edition. In the mid-1870s ‘as much as thirty columns of telegraphed matter’ might appear in a single issue, and by 1881 the additional impact of the telephone was being felt on local newsgathering (Lee: 60; Story: 47–51).

John Menzies and the railway bookstall John Menzies, having been apprenticed to Charles Tilt in London in the 1820s, began business at 61 Princes Street, Edinburgh, in 1833. The ﬁrm that he established acted as both retailer and wholesaler for Tilt from 1835. Another London ﬁrm, Chapman & Hall, was added in 1837, and by 1841 they had become the main Scottish agent for Punch (Menzies: 9–11; Gardiner: 16–17). This combination of both retail and wholesale was not unusual in the larger cities in Scotland by this time. The Aberdeen bookseller, Lewis Smith, acted as the main agent

distribution and reading

143

for north-east Scotland for the Society for the Di≠usion of Useful Knowledge and Charles Knight in the 1830s, gaining a stronger foothold in the Aberdeen trade by adapting to the new periodical market, which aimed at a much broader audience than the traditional newspaper (Beavan 1990: 54, 72). Smith made an exclusive deal with the Glasgow Mechanics Magazine in the 1820s. Similarly, weekly newspapers and magazines published in London, such as Punch, became important to the growth of Menzies’ wholesale enterprise. Many new weekly titles, such as the Illustrated London News and Reynolds’s Newspaper were established in the 1840s, but it was really the abolition of newspaper Stamp Duty in July 1855 that triggered a period of tremendous growth in both the Scottish and English press, bringing the price of a typical daily or weekly paper down to a penny. Aimed at the lower-middle class and upper echelons of the working class, the penny weekly proved particularly popular (see ‘The Popular “Weekly” ’). The success of these new newspapers was, in part, dependent upon the distribution centres provided by large ﬁrms, which allowed retailers to have a single account for goods delivered by train rather than a number of separate accounts with various publishers. During the 1850s and 1860s Edinburgh wholesalers distributed mixed bundles of English and Scottish penny papers to ‘local booksellers’ at the cost of three farthings a copy, allowing for a small proﬁt, but delivery to more distant sellers often included an additional fee for carriage, and could lead to papers being sold at inﬂated prices (Story: 35–6). By the mid-1850s retailers were dealing with a large number of London weekly newspapers and periodicals. Rail delivery was still relatively expensive, even more so in the case of express trains. In June 1858 John Menzies wrote to the publisher of the weekly newspaper the Welcome Guest in order to complain that his order had been sent by express to Edinburgh, rather than the cheaper west coast route. If sent on Saturday via the cheaper route, Menzies argued, the parcels would have arrived in Edinburgh by ‘Monday forenoon’, allowing him just enough time to redistribute them on Monday afternoon. Menzies drove a hard bargain, refusing to pay the ‘heavy additional expense’ incurred by using the faster route and informed the publishers that if they chose to use a ‘much more expensive conveyance’ with ‘no advantage . . . to the sale of the periodical’ it was up to them to cover the cost.29 Menzies was often in dispute with the railway companies over excessive costs or the late arrival of goods from London. In April 1857, it was reported that the Caledonian Railway ‘mis-sent . . . 14 parcels and 29

JMeA, Letters II, 14 June 1858: 421.

144

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

boxes’ containing periodicals and books. They eventually arrived on Tuesday afternoon rather than ‘Monday forenoon’ as intended. Menzies argued that this delay had caused him a ‘serious direct loss’ at the shop because the majority of customers bought their weekly papers on Monday afternoon, and a ‘serious indirect loss’ as his ‘country customers’ threatened to move their business to another wholesaler.30 Similar delays on the Caledonian a year later led to the loss of several customers in Berwick, who chose to move their business to the North British Railway (NBR) controlled east coast line.31 In order to keep costs down Menzies preferred his goods to be sent on the slow train from London, but this often left little time to sort and redistribute the weekly papers to customers as far away as Berwick, and even short delays could result in a loss for both wholesaler and retailer. During the 1850s and 1860s Menzies’ use of the railway allowed his wholesale business to expand rapidly, and a ‘considerable number’ of newspaper parcels were sent to Aberdeen and further north using the NBR line through Fife and on the Tay Ferry to Dundee.32 On the railway company’s insistence open-ended parcels were sent to customers in Inverness each morning by the 6.00 a.m. train, but as complaints about the ‘repeated pilfering’ of Punch suggest, this system was not without its di∞culties.33 Booksellers in Dundee who used Menzies to supply books published in London included one D. Burt, whose business was obviously in trouble in the late 1850s, and William Smith, whose delivery was lost in transit in July 1863. Burt’s request that he be allowed to return unsold texts was rejected by Menzies because ‘they were ordered direct from London expressly for you, and they will not listen to any returns’, but he agreed to try to sell them in his own shop. Smith was less fortunate. As Menzies informed him, the books became Smith’s property ‘as soon as the railway company had taken charge of them’ and it was up to him to take out a small debt summons in order to recover the loss.34 In theory the railway allowed for the rapid daily dispersal of newspapers and books from the major cities but, as this incident suggests, there was no guarantee that they would arrive at their destination on time, or indeed at all. The NBR service north was notoriously slow, leading Menzies frequently to complain that severe delays cost him customers.35 It has been argued that immediacy 30 31 32 33 34 35

JMeA, Letters II, 2 April 1857: 228. JMeA, Letters II, 26 April 1858: 396. JMeA, Letters III, 7 Nov. 1862: 372. JMeA, Letters III, 23 March 1863: 449. JMeA, Letters II, 24 May 1858: 408; III, 1 July 1863: 486. JMeA, Letters III, 7 Nov. 1862: 372.

distribution and reading

145

was central to nineteenth-century print culture, but in this instance Scottish readers were getting their weekly papers a day later than readers in the English capital (Brake 2001: 11–12). Despite such delays, the turnover of Menzies’ business more than doubled during the 1850s. By 1856 it was worth £19,262 of which £18,458 came from the wholesale trade, and less than £500 from sales at the shop in Princes Street. Much of Menzies’ wholesale business was generated by regularly issuing catalogues of new books and when a new wholesale warehouse was opened in Hanover Street in 1859 the shop in Princes Street was closed (Menzies: 14). Table 2.3 Turnover at John Menzies, Edinburgh, 1840–56.36 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856

£3,926 £3,759 £2,934 £3,122 £3,386 £3,682 £5,188 £5,962 £6,368 £6,089 £8,149 £10,255 £11,824 £13,079 £15,770 £16,730 £19,262

As Table 2.3 reveals, the removal of the newspaper stamp in 1855 had an immediate impact on the ﬁrm’s already growing turnover. The company’s success in subsequent years can be attributed to a combination of the continued deregulation of the press and the ability to acquire and distribute texts published in London, Edinburgh and north-east Scotland more e∞ciently. The railway also helped to transform the way in which Menzies operated. Sales at bookstalls or by newspaper boys were characteristic of the period 1857–80. During the late 1840s and early 1850s passenger tra∞c was a key part of the railway business: in 1848 over 1 million journeys 36

JMeA, Memorandum Book of Accounts 1851–7, 1833–62.

146

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

were made on the Edinburgh to Glasgow line alone. Although conditions on board were not always ideally suited to reading, a number of bookstalls quickly sprang up to serve this captive audience as it waited to embark (Thomas: 63–4). The ﬁrst Scottish stall was probably opened at Dunkeld in 1849, which was then the furthest point north on the central route to Inverness. The ‘exclusive privilege of selling newspapers etc at the Edinburgh station’ was put out to tender by the NBR in April 1850, and in the following year the company entered into a sixyear contract with W. H. Smith & Son, paying £60 per annum for the ‘exclusive right of selling books and newspapers at all the stations, with free carriage’. The competition for stalls at major stations would soon intensify and when Thomas Murray took over the Waverley stall six years later he would pay £120 for the privilege.37 Menzies may have failed to win the contract for the NBR stall in Edinburgh in 1857, but for several years the company had been wholesalers to a number of railway bookstalls north of Edinburgh. Among those supplied was James Henderson of Glasgow who was responsible for stalls at Stirling, Bridge of Allan, Perth, Aberdeen and Inverness. In due course, Menzies o≠ered to take over the three stations worked by Henderson on the Scottish Central Railway (SCR). The contract began on 15 May 1857 at an annual rent of £60 after he promised the railway directors that he would ‘keep a larger and superior stock of books at the stations than has hitherto been maintained there’. Menzies also spent an additional £17 on buying the stalls erected by Henderson at Perth, Bridge of Allan and Dundee. In the following year he spent over £50 on new stalls for the Edinburgh, Perth and Dundee line, which included one in the ‘Ladies Waiting Room’ at the Waverley Station in Edinburgh.38 What were these early bookstalls like? Menzies stocked the Stirling stall with 575 books at a total cost of £59 8s in May 1857. The majority of books available were cheap, their order book indicating that most were priced between 1s and 1s 6d, some of them inexpensive books published in series such as Routledge’s ‘Railway Library’, and railway timetables were sold as well. An article in the Saturday Review for January 1857 noted that nine-tenths of the stock at the majority of stalls sold for less than half-a-crown (2s 6d).39 However, a number of more expensive titles published by Thomas Nelson are also recorded, including devotional works such as Robert Candlish’s Scripture Characters 37 38 39

NAS, BR/NBR/1/5, f.34, f.284; WHS, A222/79. JMeA, Letters II, 28 Feb. 1857: 214; Letters III, 7 Apr. 1864: 656. JMeA, ‘Accounts for Stirling, Bridge of Allan and Dundee, 1857–8’; ‘Railroad Bookselling’, Saturday Review, 31 Jan. 1857: 100–2.

distribution and reading

147

(1857), and guides to the New World, such as Robert Ballantyne’s Hudson’s Bay (1848), the latter having been reprinted by Nelson in a 5s edition that same year. Menzies bought it for 4s 6d, leaving 6d proﬁt on sales, but other texts appear not to have been bought at a discount and must have been sold at a higher price than that recommended by the publisher in order to generate a proﬁt. The Stirling stall also o≠ered a diverse selection of weekly papers published in London, including Cassell’s Illustrated, Household Words, the Illustrated London News, the Leisure Hour, the London Journal, Punch and Reynolds’s Newspaper. The only English daily on sale appears to have been The Times, but during the 1850s Menzies handled a signiﬁcant proportion of the total circulation of The Scotsman, and the stalls also stocked papers published in Glasgow such as the Glasgow Daily News, the North British Daily Mail, and The Commonwealth. It is di∞cult to estimate proﬁts on individual titles, but the Illustrated London News was bought for 3d a copy and sold for 5d. Unsold copies of newspapers were often returned to the publisher. In 1860 ‘all the Edinburgh papers without exception, and some of the Glasgow ones’ took back ‘unsold copies from the stations’, but even under these conditions it was di∞cult for the stalls to make a considerable proﬁt so that, by 1862, only the stall at Perth was making more than £100 per year.40 By the early 1860s Menzies held contracts with ﬁve railway companies: the Edinburgh, Perth and Dundee (EPD), Dundee and Arbroath, the Scottish North Eastern (SNER), the NBR and the SCR. The contract with the EPD, which came into operation on 25 May 1858 is typical of those drawn up at this time. For an annual fee of £40 Menzies received the ‘exclusive right and privilege of selling books and newspapers’ at all of the stations on the line, including the ferries across the Firth of Forth and the Tay, but excluding Dundee and Perth (which were covered by the SCR contract). They could erect bookstalls at Kirkcaldy, Thornton, Dunfermline, Ladybank, Leuchars and Scotland Street, Edinburgh. The carriage of newspapers and books to the stalls was included in the annual rent, as were passes which allowed two boys to move freely ‘between station and station . . . for the sale of newspapers’. A clause which allowed goods to be transported ‘carriage free’ to the stalls was obviously crucial to their success, but the EPD contract speciﬁed that any parcels delivered in this way were ‘for the exclusive use of the stalls and not for sale to booksellers’.41 This meant that the 40 41

JMeA, Letters III, 6 Aug. 1860: 115; Memorandum Book of Accounts 1851–7, 1833–62. JMeA, ‘Minute of a Lease Between the Edinburgh Perth and Dundee Railway Company and John Menzies, 25 May 1858 [redrafted 4 Jan. 1860].

148

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

bookstall privileges could not be used to pass merchandise to Menzies’ wholesale customers. This contract was ratiﬁed in January 1860, probably in response to a letter sent to the railway company by the Edinburgh bookseller Henry Robinson in December 1859. Robinson accused Menzies of using the bookstalls to supply dealers at wholesale rates, and of promising to supply goods ‘carriage free . . . to the booksellers on this line’. As Robinson makes clear, the SCR had been forced to stop Henderson from dealing in this way in the 1850s. Although Menzies denied this charge, and demanded that Robinson provide evidence of any wrongdoing, he was still forced to renegotiate several contracts as a result.42 Such setbacks meant that the growth of the bookstall business was slow. By 1862 Menzies had opened only a handful of stalls outside of Edinburgh – at Aberdeen, Bridge of Allan, Callander, Dundee, Leuchars, Perth, Stirling and Thornton. As this list suggests, the early stalls tended to be situated either in a large town, such as Perth, or at a terminus or junction, such as Thornton. Small towns were avoided as unproﬁtable. As Menzies complained in 1858, when he realised that the terminus at Dunkeld was not included in the SNER contract: ‘There are scarcely any stations on the line where it will pay to have a stall except Aberdeen.’43 During Menzies’ early years the proﬁt generated by an individual stall was less important than that generated by newsboys travelling between stations. In 1858 Menzies paid the SNER £30 for the Aberdeen bookstall and the right to sell newspapers and books throughout the line. All goods arrived at the Aberdeen stall ‘carriage free’ and were then redistributed by the newsboys. This allowed newspapers and other texts to be sold throughout the system at very little cost to Menzies. A ‘commission on all sales’ was allowed ‘not only to the stall keepers but to the newsboys who travel on the various lines’, but wages were low and, as he noted in 1863, the SNER ‘allowed a su∞cient number of passes for boys to work the line e∞ciently at an annual payment of 10 shillings each’. Each boy wore a grey jacket and trousers and a blue cap with a red band to make them easily recognisable to customers. The uniform also allowed railway o∞cials to spot rival newsboys who frequently attempted to invade Menzies territory.44 By using the stalls at Aberdeen, Dundee and Perth as distribution centres Menzies newsboys were able to cover most of the larger towns north of the Firth of Tay on the north-east coast, including Arbroath 42 43 44

JMeA, Letters III, 9 Dec. 1859: 46–7. JMeA, Letters II, 12 June 1858: 413. JMeA, Letters III, 24 Feb. 1865: 853; 21 April 1863: 462; 25 July 1862: 322.

distribution and reading

149

Figure 3.4 Newspaper Boy, Dunblane Station, Illustrated London News.

and Montrose. The bookstalls at Edinburgh, Perth and Dundee were used to cover the whole of Fife, with the boys terminating their journeys at Ladybank. The route from Edinburgh to Dundee via the Burntisland and Tayport ferries took over three hours to cover just forty-six miles, but in the early 1860s Menzies used this line to distribute newspapers from London, Glasgow and Edinburgh, as well as those printed in Aberdeen and Dundee.45 Menzies also used the stalls as a centre from which newspapers could be delivered for free to the local community, and from 1857 issued advertisements that encouraged working-class readers to order newspapers and magazines from the bookstalls (Gardiner: 34). By 1862 ‘the stations’ were worth only £3,636 12s out of a total turnover of more than £42,000 (see Table 2.4). Such ﬁgures suggest that it was di∞cult to make a large proﬁt from the stalls, but Menzies had the advantage of controlling both wholesale and retail. Despite this, and the fact that the recently acquired NBR bookstall at Edinburgh Waverley was already showing a healthy return, the total proﬁt at the stalls came to less than £400 in 1862.46 45 46

JMeA, JM22: 19th Century Ledgers, No.1, 1857–62. Ibid.

150

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Table 2.4 John Menzies, total turnover and turnover at the stalls, 1858–62.47 1858 Total turnover Turnover at stalls

£25,397 £2,655

1860 Total turnover Turnover at stalls

£30,989 £3,573

1862 Total turnover Turnover at stalls

£42,053 £3,637

The expansion of the bookstall business was not without its problems. When the EPD and the North British amalgamated in 1862, the latter was determined to renegotiate the contract for what had become the ‘northern section’ of the NBR. Menzies thought it worth no more than the £40 he was already paying, but was prepared to o≠er £60 so long as carriage remained free. The NBR refused and in May 1864 a new agreement was drawn up with the Edinburgh bookseller, David Mather, who had o≠ered £72 for the privilege. The arrangement was to include free carriage to the stalls, which were now to be located at Princes Street, Scotland Street, North Leith and Thornton, but the presence of newsboys was much reduced. Three passes allowed newspapers to be sold on trains between Edinburgh and three destinations: North Leith, Burntisland (via the ferry) and Thornton Junction in Fife, where a fourth allowed a boy to serve passengers on the Tay Ferry.48 Such changes must have severely a≠ected the provision of newspapers in Fife. Other changes introduced in the mid-1860s included the ending of ‘free carriage’ to the stalls and the continued escalation of rents. When Menzies renewed the contract with the SCR in 1863 it included a fee of ‘£50 for the conveyance of parcels’. By the time this contract ran out some four years later, the SCR had amalgamated with the Caledonian and Menzies agreed to pay £300 for the entire line.49 In 1867 John Menzies & Company was formed. In the same year a combined retail and wholesale house was opened in Royal Bank Square, Glasgow. The ‘Glasgow Branch’ allowed much greater control over markets in the west of Scotland. New stalls were opened at 47 48 49

JMeA, Memorandum Book. Accounts 1851–7, 1833–62. NAS, BR/NBR/3/2, ‘Agreement between NBR and David Mather’, 25 May 1864. JMeA, Letters IV, 9 Feb. 1867, 342.

distribution and reading

151

Greenock and Wemyss Bay on the west coast, and the new Caledonian contract also opened up routes to Dumfries and Carlisle in the South. Despite this expansion, the company now owned fewer bookstalls than in 1862 and rural Fife was to remain outside of Menzies’ control for the rest of the period covered by this volume.50 Nevertheless, Glasgow was a rapidly expanding industrial town during this period, and Menzies’ business continued to grow by supplying the hundreds of small retailers and newsagents that ﬂourished in its backstreets (Gardiner: 41). As Table 2.5 records, by 1877 turnover at the Glasgow branch was signiﬁcantly higher than the income generated by the bookstalls. Table 2.5 John Menzies & Co., total turnover 1867–78.51 1867–8 Accounts and sales Bookstalls (10) Sales at Hanover Street Total turnover

£49,700 £7,586 £416 £57,702

1876–7 Accounts and sales Bookstalls (17) Glasgow branch Total turnover

£79,052 £19,866 £23,823 £122,741

1877–8 Accounts and sales Bookstalls (21) Glasgow branch Total turnover

£83,640 £21,828 £24,961 £130,429

By the late 1870s Menzies owned twenty-one stalls in all, stretching from Aberdeen in the North, to Dumfries in the South, but the majority of stalls that were set up during this period were within easy reach of Glasgow. The major towns and junctions of Strathclyde were particularly well covered with stalls at Ayr, Kilmarnock, Kilwinning, Wemyss Bay and Greenock (on both the Caledonian and the Glasgow and South Western lines). The ﬁrm controlled three stalls in Glasgow proper, and Hamilton and Lanark south-east of the city on the Caledonian line were added in 1877. It continued to hold the stalls at Bridge of Allan, Callander, Perth, Stirling and Dundee, which it had acquired in the late 1850s.52 50 51 52

JMeA, JM24: Cash Book, July 1867–June 1872. JMeA, JM24: Cash Book; JM22: Ledgers, Jan. 1877–Oct. 1881 JMeA, JM22, Ledgers, Jan. 1877–Oct. 1881.

152

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

By the end of the century John Menzies & Co. had become synonymous with the railway bookstall in Scotland, in much the same way that W. H. Smith & Son had become associated with the stalls in England and Wales. Even so, in the late 1870s such stalls were relatively rare and Menzies’ retail business was largely limited to areas within easy reach of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Gaelic Communities and the Use of Texts Donald E. Meek Manuscript books circulated in Gaelic Scotland long before the advent of print, in much the same way as they did in other parts of Europe before the Renaissance. While the majority of ecclesiastical texts were in Latin, the liber compiled in the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth century owned by James MacGregor, titular Dean of Lismore, forms perhaps the most important source of medieval Gaelic verse to have survived in either Scotland or Ireland (Meek 2002a). Although the coming of print was to redeﬁne the nature of the libri, as well as the means of their production, long after the appearance in 1567 of John Carswell’s translation of John Knox’s Book of Common Order – the ﬁrst printed book in the Gaelic world – scribal activity continued with vigour. In the seventeenth century, the historical compendia known collectively as the Books of Clanranald were compiled. The scribes of these volumes would have expected their works to be read by others within the learned circle of knowledgeable patrons and likeminded compilers. Family history of the kind represented by the various forms of record within the Books of Clanranald was popular in Western Europe at that time, and occupied the boundary between manuscript and print (MacGregor). In due course, the printing press would come to supplement the scribal hand, and replaced it in the longer term, but that hand continued to exert a profound inﬂuence on the nature and content of Gaelic books until at least the end of the nineteenth century. In the secular domain, the boundary between orality and print was crossed initially in the eighteenth century, but it was pre-eminently in the nineteenth century that Gaelic printing, in all the major domains, came into its own. Yet a productive manuscript tradition remained. Even in the context of putting their own works into print, major poets,

154

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

such as Alexander MacDonald and Dugald Buchanan before 1800, and John MacLean and William Livingston in the nineteenth century, were close to, and harnessed essential aspects of, the manuscript tradition. It is unlikely that they would have recognised the distinction between the supposedly ‘old’ world of manuscripts and the ‘new’ world of printed books. For them there was a natural continuum, with numerous points of contact, whatever the changes of form and production which the new medium demanded. At the same time, there was a judicious recognition that print was valuable in ways that manuscript was not, and such poets moved to embrace the printed book as their needs required. It is obvious that printed books, produced in large numbers, could reach a potentially wider readership and a greater audience than manuscripts. But how large was that readership, and what was its composition? It seems likely that at the beginning of the nineteenth century only the professional and mercantile classes in Gaelic society would have been literate: teachers, notably those of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge and the Gaelic school societies, clergy, landlords and their agents, poets and people of letters whose families had maintained a literate tradition, and merchants and perhaps a certain kind of mariner who traded beyond the Highlands. Popular literacy, targeted at the populace, came to the Highlands after 1810, with the creation of school societies, which aimed to make people su∞ciently literate to read the Gaelic Bible. This was evidently e≠ective to the extent that it created a readership with a distinct taste for religious works. Before 1820 the print run for secular anthologies was usually around 400, to judge by John MacLean’s Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach of 1818, but by the mid-century it was common for printers to produce 2,000 copies of each of the many editions of hymns by popular composers such as Dugald Buchanan and Peter Grant. The vitality of Gaelic printing and publishing in the nineteenth century, particularly before 1872, demonstrates that a signiﬁcant readership had been created. After 1872, with the passage of the Education Act and the nationalisation of education, Gaelic literacy went into decline, as the Act failed to acknowledge Gaelic, far less to give the language a place of importance in the wider scheme of Scottish education. The previous work of the churches and religious bodies was to some degree undermined, and the di∞culty of maintaining an engaged Gaelic readership was exacerbated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The challenge remained well into the twentieth century, with accompanying dependence on oral transmission.

distribution and reading

155

From orality to print Transmission of Gaelic texts from the medieval period had an important oral dimension which was inevitably subject to human frailty and loss. Print, which was more likely to remain intact across the generations, was particularly valuable in preserving, and giving a new lease of life to, songs, tales and historical material which functioned within the immensely rich orality of Gaelic culture. Collectors of songs from the second half of the eighteenth century recognised the importance of print in this respect, as in the case of the Eigg Collection (1776) and the Gillies Collection (1786). The work of post-1800 collectors such as John MacLean of Tiree and Nova Scotia followed in their footsteps, ﬁrst by recording oral material in manuscript and then by putting selections of that material into print. So too did the collectors of folktales. In his introduction to Popular Tales of the West Highlands, published in 1860–2, John Francis Campbell of Islay envisaged that the printing of such stories would not only act as a preservative, but that it would rid the tales of the stigma attached to them by the clergy and enlighten the minds of those who read them, for the beneﬁt of the nation as a whole: It is perhaps beyond the province of a mere collector of old tales to be serious; but surely Gaelic books containing sound information would be a vast boon to such a people. The young would read them, and the old would understand them. All would take a warmer interest in Canada and Australia, where strong arms and bold spirits are wanted, if they knew what these countries really are. If they heard more of European battles, and knew what a ship of war is now, there would be more soldiers and sailors from the Isles in the service of their country. At all events, the old spirit of popular romance is surely not an evil spirit to be exorcised, but rather a good genius to be controlled and directed. (Campbell 1860: xxvii) Such sentiments were very much of a piece with those of the clergy who produced the ﬁrst Gaelic periodicals, and who occasionally used the folktale as a means of instruction. Less easily convinced were the tradition-bearers themselves, who were sometimes unable to reconcile the static nature of the printed tale with the live oral performance which was its natural domain. Campbell of Islay had his dragons to slay, even among his own friends, as he tells us wryly: ‘And what are you going to do with them stories, Mr. Camal?’ said a friend of mine, as he stood amongst the brown sea-weed, at the end of a pier, on a ﬁne summer’s evening, and watched my departure in a tiny boat.

156

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

‘Print them, man, to be sure.’ My friend is famous for his good stories, though they are of another kind, and he uses tobacco; he eyed me steadily for a moment, and then he disposed of the whole matter monosyllabically, but forcibly, ‘Huch!!’ It seemed to come from his heart. (ibid.: iii) Print, manuscript and oral tradition were, however, able to live together and to reinforce one another in di≠erent ways. An excellent nineteenth-century example of the ongoing interaction of manuscript, printed book and oral tradition is furnished by an interleaved edition of a major anthology of Gaelic songs, Sàr-Obair nam Bàrd Gaëlach, compiled by John MacKenzie and published in Glasgow by MacGregor, Polson & Co. in 1841. This edition appears to have been produced with the intention of accommodating notes and commentary on, as well as further versions of, songs included – surely a remarkable illustration of the publisher’s awareness of the dynamic and ‘open-ended’ context in which the book was expected to function. The volume was owned by another collector of Gaelic folklore, the Rev. Duncan MacGregor Campbell (1854–1938), formerly minister of the parish of Cumlodden, Lochfyneside, but is now in the writer’s possession (Meek 1978). Campbell supplemented the original printed text with newspaper cuttings, which were pasted onto the interleaved pages, but by far the most valuable contribution lies in his hand-written versions of particular songs, and his preservation of their tunes. Also revealing are the jottings to be found throughout the books which sometimes enlarge the printed record copiously, as in the case of Campbell’s ﬁne notes on James Shaw, the Lochnell bard. It is beyond question that Campbell obtained his ‘new’ versions of songs from oral tradition, and their importance has been recognised by twentieth-century academic authorities, most notably the Rev. William Matheson. In recognising the value of the printed book in nineteenth-century Gaelic culture and its range of uses, it is important to acknowledge the interactive context which Duncan Campbell’s interleaved copy of Sàr-Obair so eloquently expresses. The highly literate and scholarly Campbell was undoubtedly a reader of the book, but he was also a contributor to the text, even after its publication. He was writing, in e≠ect, the next chapter in an unﬁnished story, of which the printed text was only a stage along the way, so that any future edition of Sàr-Obair would be shaped to some extent by Campbell’s contribution.

distribution and reading

157

Figure 3.5 Duncan MacGregor Campbell’s interleaved copy of Sàr-Obair nam Bàrd Gaëlach (1841) contains numerous variant readings and additional verses for Gaelic songs, including Duncan Bàn MacIntyre’s ‘Moladh Beinn-Dòrain’ (‘In Praise of Ben Doran’).

From author to reader Duncan Campbell’s interaction with Sàr-Obair is one illustration of how a reader could respond to a Gaelic book. The publisher was prepared to accommodate not only a reader, but even a new ‘editor’, in the provision of generous interleaves and margins, itself an active acknowledgement of the ﬂuidity of texts, oral and literary. In the case of singleauthor works, however, how did the author himself envisage the reading of his book, and how did he assess its impact? Was there a sense of a hypothetical reader looking over his shoulder as he wrote? It is evident that such a prescience a≠ected some of the principal Gaelic writers whose works were to enjoy popularity in the nineteenth century. Although Dugald Buchanan (1716–68), the celebrated composer of Gaelic hymns, lived in the eighteenth century, his compositions, ﬁrst published alongside the Gaelic New Testament in 1767, helped to shape nineteenth-century Gaelic religious literature – the largest literary sector of the period (see ‘Gaelic Printing and Publishing’). He himself knew the English tradition well, not least through the writings of John Bunyan and Isaac Watts, and was sensitive to the way that

158

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

inﬂuences passed from one writer to another, and even from one culture to another. Indeed, Buchanan’s verse is a prime example of the intertextuality that could exist between English and Gaelic, and shows an awareness, for instance, of the English literary convention of addressing the reader. This convention appears – suddenly and unexpectedly – in the closing section of Buchanan’s long epic poem, Là a’ Bhreitheanais (‘The Day of Judgement’), in which Buchanan envisages the ﬁnal conﬂagration which will engulf the world with the dawning of the dies irae. Just as the reader is intensively engaged in the story of the great apocalypse and the cries of the damned in the ﬂames of Hell, ‘Buchanan’ suddenly walks into the text, and, like a stage director, calls down the curtain abruptly. The cosmic ‘show’ is at an end. The stage itself is thrown away and it is time to think hard, and for the spectator to become the victim: A leughadair, a bheil e fìor Na chuir mi cheana sìos am dhàn? Mas e ’s gu bheil, thig ’s lùb do ghlùn Le ùrnaigh ’s aithreachas gun dàil. (Reader, is it true what I have already set down in my song? If it should be, come and bend your knee in prayer and contrition without delay.) Here we can see that he was aware not only of the future reader, but of his own role simultaneously as composer and scribe. It is also apparent that some at least of Buchanan’s hymns circulated in small manuscript editions, apparently prior to the publication of the printed text. Who, then, is the inscribed reader? It is clear from internal evidence that Buchanan has the unregenerate sinner clearly in mind, but he also appears to have the clergy in his sights, as the reader, at one stage, is exhorted to consider: cionnas bheir thu seòl Don dream tha beò nach tèid iad sìos. (how you will give guidance to those who are alive, that they many not go down [to Hell].) (MacLean: 31) It is probable that Buchanan would have regarded certain clergymen in the Highlands in his own day as dyed-in-the-wool ‘sinners’, because they lacked ‘grace’, and were latitudinarian in their beliefs. Evidence survives of the responses of well-disposed clerical readers in the nineteenth century. Rev. Peter Grant, minister of the Baptist

distribution and reading

159

Church at Grantown on Spey, recorded in 1844 how he encountered Buchanan’s book, heard the hymns being sung, and began to compose verse of a similar kind under its inﬂuence: When I was about 12 years a friend of mine died, and a stranger came from a distance to the funeral, who had a small volume of Gaelic spiritual songs, which to the astonishment of all he sung to the old Highland airs we had to our vain songs. This was Dugald Buchanan’s poems, a name to be remembered as long as the Gaelic language is spoken . . . and in his day was a burning and a shining light. One of the poems was on the day of judgement, the ﬁrst thing that showed me in some measure the value of my soul, and the awfulness of death judgement and eternity. I thought I would give all the world for that little book. When the stranger saw that I was so fond of it he not only granted the book, but also taught me to read some of the simplest words. In less than a year I could read and sing the poems ﬂuently, and taught several others to do the same. (Meek 2002b: 133–4) This extract demonstrates the importance of hymnology as a vehicle for conveying the Christian message and that the desire to learn to sing Gaelic hymns could encourage individuals to become proﬁcient in reading the language, orality and print once again in close alliance. Buchanan’s hymn on the Day of Judgement was sung and transmitted orally in the Hebrides until the 1950s. Later, when he professed faith, Peter Grant joined the Baptist Church at Grantown, of which he was destined to become the second pastor. He struck up a close friendship with his predecessor, Rev. Lachlan Mackintosh, and they began to read Gaelic poetry and compose Gaelic hymns together, an occupation which exempliﬁes the strength of Gaelic culture in that area in the early nineteenth century: About the year 1812 the Pastor and myself were reading some Poetry and he proposed that we should try which of us would make the best poem in Gaelic, and to take Dugald Buchanan’s poem[s] for our model. We took a week to compose the poems. When they appeared mine was the best. Thus encouraged I continued till I had a manuscript that would make a little volume. Many desired to have them published and since that time 6 Editions of them have been published always enlarged. (ibid.: 133–4) Like his eighteenth-century mentor, Peter Grant became highly literate and many editions of his hymns were produced, suggesting a large

160

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

audience for such texts (see ‘Gaelic Printing and Publishing’). Early exposure to printed texts, in the case of both poets, as well as an ability to operate e≠ectively within oral culture, was crucial in laying the foundations of their future literary craft – and of their success.

Authors and editors Authors of printed works were keenly aware that print represented another level of engagement for themselves and for their readers. It therefore encouraged new departures in stylistic and editorial method. Buchanan’s printed book of 1767 raises questions about the manner in which print encouraged the alteration of pre-existing texts, after these had been written down in manuscript. Close comparison of manuscript versions of Buchanan’s hymns with their printed equivalents shows that adjustments were made prior to the publication of the 1767 edition. The case of an author who has control over his own output and a desire to produce the best text is relatively unproblematic, such variants providing an insight into the composer’s methods and aims. Such discrepancies are evident between the earlier manuscript and printed 1882 versions of the poems of the Islay bard, William Livingston, perhaps owing to the use of later, and less reliable, manuscripts by the editor, the Rev. Robert Blair (Meek 2003: 348–51, 458–62). While we may suspect intervention, there is no clear evidence to support such a view. Certain types of nineteenth-century editing, however, raise serious issues of textual authority. Collectors of oral material and editors of printed texts – in some cases one and the – same had to make choices about which version was publishable and what kind of literary conventions such material should deploy. Editorial manipulation of texts, sometimes on an extensive scale and to their detriment, is evident in the handling of the verse of John MacLean, Poet to the Laird of Coll (see ‘John MacLean, the Gaelic Bard’). This was a widespread practice, by no means peculiar to the Gaelic world, where it had its roots in the ongoing inﬂuence of James Macpherson’s Ossian, and it owed something to the way in which writers of national stature such as Sir Walter Scott manipulated the Gaelic tradition. Editorial and authorial adjustment had a subtle but potent e≠ect on the reader, and on the community consciousness, leading to the creation and circulation of texts which did not always agree with one another, and to the undue dominance of particular versions. The status of the printed book tended to resolve issues in a manner favourable to the visible, printed word, and, as literacy spread within communities,

distribution and reading

161

oral tradition became its ‘poor relation’. In short, printed books were liable to create communities within communities, linked by literacy at di≠erent levels.

Communities of readers Religious Communities of readers developed most explicitly in a religious context, their existence depending on a deep desire to read edifying books and pamphlets, and on loyalty to particular institutions and individuals with similar aspirations. A church and its minister provided an important focal point, evident in the survival of the earliest Gaelic sermons in print. Published at Fayetteville, North Carolina, by Sibley, Howard & Rowlstone in 1791, these were declaimed at the Raft Swamp, near Cape Fear, in the preceding autumn by the Rev. Dougal Crauford, a native of Arran, who served in both North Carolina (Barbeque Presbyterian Church) and in Arran itself (Kilmory Parish Church). Each of the two sermons carries a dedicatory preface, the ﬁrst to Crauford’s home congregation at Kilmory in Arran, and the second to the congregations at the Raft Swamp and in Robeson County, NC. Crauford’s sermons are long, polished and sophisticated, and assume a listener – and a reader – who was familiar with the modes of late eighteenth-century rhetoric and homiletics. They also assume – most evidently – communities of Gaelic readers, in Kilmory and at the Raft Swamp respectively, though there are also implications for a larger transatlantic community. The book appears to have attracted individual readers, proud to claim and own a copy, with evidence from the title page of a surviving volume showing that its ﬁrst owner, Duncan Henderson, could sign his name in Gaelic. This, however, was essentially a ‘service book’ which would have provided ready-made Gaelic sermons for scattered congregations. The ‘collective’ and ‘individual’ aspects of Crauford’s book may have met in its use, if the reader also declaimed its contents to a group of people meeting for worship. The Gaelic verb leugh (‘read’) carries the sense of ‘proclaim, declaim’, particularly in an ecclesiastical context (Gillies). The principal factor in the drive towards Gaelic literacy and the creation of communities of Gaelic readers in the early nineteenth century was the Bible, whose full Gaelic text became available in 1801, with revision and publication as a single volume in 1807. Various Gaelic school societies were established to teach people to read the Gaelic Bible. Primers, which could be used in introducing people to literacy, were

162

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

written for the Edinburgh Gaelic School Society (EGSS) by Alexander McLaren and the Rev. Christopher Anderson. The itinerant Baptist preacher, the Rev. Dugald Sinclair, visited the island of Coll in 1814, and observed closely the use of the society’s primers by Ebenezer Davidson, the EGSS master in the island: Mr D[avidson] has been at very considerable trouble to inform me how much pains he has been at in the improving of his School; and indeed it gave me more real satisfaction than any other that I have seen in the Highlands. He teaches on the Lancasterian plan, and makes a few books serve a pretty numerous school. It gratiﬁed me much to see the pains he has taken in teaching, among others far advanced in life, a pupil of seventy-three years of age to read his native tongue. This aged scholar, with furrowed cheeks and grey locks, was called to repeat his task, holding in his hand the Gaelic Society’s First Book; and this, in the place which his lesson lay, bore all the marks of close and diligent perusal: he had a feather that served as a pointer to the letters, with a pair of glasses which were called in to aid his decaying sight. (12) The extent to which Gaelic religious texts gained in popularity as basic literacy spread is indicated by Sinclair’s account of how tracts were snatched out of his hand as he walked to Tobermory in the same year: After a very pleasant passage to Mull, on the shores of which we landed by 1 o’clock; we walked on for T[obermory] without delay, in order to embrace any opportunity that might present itself for proceeding to any part of the Long Island. On our way, we came to a spot where a number of people were employed in cutting and peeling wood by the road-side. I presented one of them with a tract, and requested him to read a sentence, that I might be able to judge whether it might be of service to the receiver. This was distinctly done. In a few minutes almost all the people surrounded me, some crying earnestly, ‘Give me one,’ and others, ‘do be so good as give me one.’ Some who could not read, being sharply reproved by their companions for asking so earnestly what they could not use, replied, ‘and what for that? We shall get some one to read it to us.’ So earnest were they, on every hand soliciting, that at length the rules of decency were broken through, and they would pull them out of my hand. On this occasion, as often before, I was convinced of the propriety, and even necessity, of having a large proportion of tracts in Gaelic, if good is to be expected by distributing tracts in the

distribution and reading

163

Highlands. Often have I also desired to have a little leisure for the work of translation. Sinclair goes on to record how, in an e≠ort to meet the growing demand, libraries of tracts were created in Coll: Mr D[avidson] being in possession of a few tracts; by means of these, and the addition of a few more which I gave him, he has formed, on a very small scale, a sort of Circulating Library. Thus he makes a few serve many people. The tracts are preserved, and as an additional advantage, he can impress the importance of the subject on the mind of the reader, when he returns the Tract. (ibid.: 16) The work of schoolmasters like Ebenezer Davidson was basic, in every sense, but not much had changed even by the middle of the nineteenth century, as Professor Donald MacKinnon makes clear in his warm-hearted appreciation of the ‘old school’ in Colonsay, where he received the ‘rudiments’ of the education that took him, eventually, to the chair of Celtic at Edinburgh University in 1882. MacKinnon notes particularly the reading material that he encountered: Agus ma bha àirneis an tighe-sgoil gann, cha robh àsaig an sgoileir duilich a ghiùlain. Leac-sglèat ghlas le ruith oibreachadh oirre, paipear-sgrìobhaidh cho saor is a gheibheadh cailleach nan uighean an Grianaig, dubh de shùghadh an daraich, peann de ite an t-sùlanaich, Gray, Leabhar Aithghearr nan Ceist, Bìobull Gàidhlig air a chòmhdach le craiceann caorach, agus deagh chaman. (And if the furniture of the schoolhouse was sparse, the equipment of the scholar was not hard to carry. A grey slate with a smattering of work on it, writing paper as cheap as the old wiﬁe of the eggs would have acquired in Greenock, ink of oak sap, a pen of the solan goose’s feather, [Thomas] Gray, the Shorter Catechism, a Gaelic Bible covered with the skin of a sheep, and a good shinty-stick.) (267) Yet the work of such schools and schoolmasters was of immense signiﬁcance for the future of Gaelic, as it laid the foundation of Gaelic literature as well as of Gaelic literacy. It led to the establishment of the Rev. Norman MacLeod’s Gaelic journals, An Teachdaire Gaelach and Cuairtear nan Gleann, and to the compilation of the reader, Leabhar nan Cnoc, ﬁrst published in 1834, and reprinted several times thereafter. In meeting the needs of literate Gaels, and in spanning the worlds of orality, penmanship and, ultimately, print, clergymen like Norman

164

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

MacLeod, and later Alexander MacGregor, were no less important than the schoolmasters (Meek 2002a; Kidd). The worldview of the ﬁrst Gaelic journals has been discussed elsewhere, but it may be summarised here. Journals reinforced people’s desire to become literate, their broad range of material extending Gaelic perspectives signiﬁcantly. In the midst of a period of social change in the Highlands and Islands, periodicals provided helpful advice on pressing contemporary topics, and explained ahead of time such experiences as sailing on a steamship, travelling on a steam train, and the dangers awaiting a newcomer to a city like Glasgow. Journal editors, such as the Rev. Norman MacLeod, were highly aware of the mobile nature of society, and were usually sympathetic to emigration as a solution to the ills of the Highland people. Some journals carried articles which were fashioned to entice Gaels overseas, and to prepare them for life in the New World. This remained so up to the end of our period, as can be seen in the pages of the secular journal, An Gaidheal, ﬁrst published in Toronto in 1871. There is evidence that these journals were, indeed, very attractive to emigrants, who took copies overseas, while maintaining their subscriptions. A bound volume of An Teachdaire Gaelach was taken to Canada – by ‘Mr Archd. Brown, Kilmoluaig, Tyree, Sept. 1[1] [18]64’ according to the inscription – and it was read until it fell apart. It was given to the present writer in Ottawa in 1986. Literate Gaels were thus an easy target for the emigrant agents and their propaganda, and a direct link between literacy and emigration lies in the contents of Gaelic journals (ibid. both). By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, tracts and journals were far from being the only religious reading matter available to Gaels, which had grown to include some very substantial books, including numerous bulky translations of the principal English Puritan writers (Baxter, Bunyan, Dyer and others), very much in keeping with literary tastes of contemporary readers of evangelical literature far beyond the Highlands (Bebbington: 95–6). There were also some noteworthy original titles, including for instance the Rev. Duncan MacCallum’s important volume, Eachdraidh na h-Eaglaise (‘History of the Church’) (Thornton & Collie, Edinburgh, 1845), doubtless stimulated by the controversy surrounding the emergence of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843. In 1851, ten years after the publication of MacKenzie’s Sàr-Obair nam Bàrd, the religious community of readers was given its own distinctive anthology of sacred verse, namely John Rose’s Metrical Reliques of ‘The Men’ in the Highlands, printed by Mackintosh of Inverness. This had been foreshadowed in 1815 by Rose’s Co-chruinneachadh de Dhàin Spioradail

distribution and reading

165

(‘Collection of Spiritual Songs’), printed for the compiler by Alexander Fraser of Inverness. Signiﬁcantly, Rose was already a well-known translator of the works of Bunyan, Boston, Watson and others. Gaelic religious publications of the period thus borrowed extensively from English doctrinal prose-writers of the seventeenth century, but for verse beyond the Metrical Psalter drew largely on more recent Gaelic poets. Secular While distinctive communities of readers, centred on Gaelic religious books and journals, had thus emerged in the Highlands and Islands by the middle of the nineteenth century, it is also possible to discern the creation of another community of readers, focused on secular books. The two communities were not, of course, mutually exclusive. Boundaries were naturally blurred, and indeed it could be argued that the journals produced by the Rev. Norman MacLeod met the needs of both sectors, sacred and secular. A window on potential readers, as well as on the wider circle of more detached supporters, can be found in subscription lists to anthologies of songs and other signiﬁcant Gaelic volumes. One such is the splendid list of subscribers which is found at the back of Pàruig Mac-anTuairnear’s major verse anthology, Comhchruinneacha do dh’orain taghta, Ghaidhealach nach robh riamh roimhe clo-bhuailte gus a nis, air an tional o mheodhair, air feadh Gaidhealtachd a’s Eileine na hAlba (‘Collection of choice Highland songs that were never before printed until now, gathered from memory, throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’), printed for the ‘author’ (that is, the editor) by C. Stewart, Edinburgh, in 1813. It consists of no fewer than eighteen pages of tightly packed print in double columns, recording the names of several hundred subscribers, whose geographical distribution embraces the western mainland – from Argyllshire to Ross-shire, with a strong representation in Perthshire – as well as several of the Inner Hebrides, including Coll, Tiree, Mull, Islay and Lismore. Of the towns and cities, Edinburgh is prominent, but not Glasgow, while Perth and Inverness feature frequently. Social and professional classes extend from clan chiefs to merchants, millers, dyers, shoemakers and teachers. Turner himself was a chapman who travelled extensively from Inveraray, and the subscription list further demonstrates the geographical reach of a well-connected and highly literate Gaelic packman (see ‘Bookselling’). Clearly, Turner’s compilation stimulated immense general interest. To judge by this alone, and even allowing for those who might make

166

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

only ornamental use of the book, the extent of Gaelic literacy was far from insigniﬁcant in 1813. As the lists of MacLachlan & Stewart and Archibald Sinclair amply demonstrate, Gaelic poetry and song were extremely popular in the nineteenth century, and the works of the secular poets were among the bestsellers of the time, despite the overall dominance of religious material (see ‘Gaelic Printing and Publishing’). One of the subscribers to Turner’s volume was none other than ‘Eben. Davidson, teacher, Coll’, the schoolmaster whose work had so impressed Dugald Sinclair when he visited the island a year later in 1814. Although Dugald Sinclair was not himself a subscriber, subscribers by the name of Sinclair from mainland Argyllshire, and speciﬁcally from Sinclair’s home area of Mid-Argyll and its environs, are prominent. ‘Don. Sinclair, Annat, Lochowside’ may have been a close relative of Dugald’s, as he is known to have had near kin in that area. We have already noted Dugald Sinclair’s literary skills in English, which he put at the disposal of the itinerant missionary society he served, by writing journals describing his preaching tours in the Highlands and Islands. The evidence suggests that kin groups, in certain key locations, were likewise emerging as ‘communities of readers’ – and also potential writers – of Gaelic and English material. In the case of the Sinclairs of Mid-Argyll, we can discern a further link between literacy and emigration, as numerous Sinclairs from that area had made their way to Ontario by 1831, among them Dugald Sinclair himself, who arrived in Lobo in 1831 (Meek 1991). Scholarly Alongside the users of religious, or partially religious texts, secular anthologies and their circles of subscribers, another distinct and important group of readers, writers and users emerged in the course of the nineteenth century. These were the scholars who, having made themselves familiar with foundational volumes such as the Gaelic Bible and the Gaelic text of Ossian, set about the creation of a range of tools for those who aspired beyond basic literacy to a deeper knowledge of the language itself (Meek 2004). Pre-eminent among these were the lexicographers, who provided access to some of the most important items in the Gaelic language. Their indebtedness to, and intention to elucidate, the Gaelic texts of the Bible and Ossian are sometimes evident in their prefaces, and also in the acknowledged sources of their material. Peter MacFarlane, a skilful translator of religious texts such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1812), produced ‘A New and Copious English and Gaelic Vocabulary’ (1815), in which he stated that he was frequently

distribution and reading

167

asked to provide a vocabulary for the language of Ossian’. The Rev. Norman MacLeod and the Rev. Daniel Dewar likewise compiled a useful two-volume Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, which was published in 1831. There they make it clear that the admirable translation of the Scriptures and the publication of the poems of Ossian furnish a rich treasure of genuine Gaelic (v). Their job was to render that ‘treasure’ accessible to the average Gaelic reader, and in this they enjoyed no small success. ‘MacLeod and Dewar’ was well used by literate Gaels for the remainder of the century, and helped to lay the foundation of further lexicographical developments. By the time this dictionary was undertaken, the output of Gaelic books had increased so signiﬁcantly that the Glasgow publisher and bookseller, John Reid, was on the point of producing the ﬁrst bibliography of printed works in the language. While studying Gaelic, a friend asked him to catalogue his Gaelic books for him. This led to the compilation of Bibliotheca Scoto-Celtica, which Reid published in 1832. It was the precursor of Donald MacLean’s similarly Latin-titled Typographia Scoto-Gadelica, which was published in 1915, and which provides a useful overview of nineteenth-century Gaelic publications. A new era of linguistic enquiry was signalled when the Rev. Alexander Stewart, himself closely involved with the Highland Society of London’s edition of the Gaelic Ossian, and also with the revision of the Gaelic Bible, produced his Elements of Gaelic Grammar, ﬁrst published in 1801 by C. Stewart, Edinburgh, and subsequently maintained in print by MacLachlan & Stewart. One senses a ‘second enlightenment’, or steps towards such, in the spirit of Stewart’s introduction, which includes sentiments like: ‘The more the human mind is enlightened, the more desirous it becomes of farther acquisitions in knowledge.’ In gaining such knowledge, iron sharpened iron, and Stewart found himself dissenting on occasion from ‘those gentlemen whose superior abilities are so conspicuous in the masterly translation of the sacred Scriptures with which the Highlands of Scotland are now blessed’ (Stewart: viii). In grammatical enquiry, as in lexicography, the Gaelic Bible stimulated the creation of expositional tools. Equipped with the new dictionaries and grammars, ministers such as the Rev. Thomas McLauchlan, who edited The Dean of Lismore’s Book (Edmonston & Douglas, Edinburgh, 1862), were among the ﬁrst editors of Gaelic academic texts. McLauchlan’s edition appeared just as the fourth volume of John Francis Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands rolled o≠ the presses. Until about 1870, Gaelic scholarship, such as it was, was restricted to clerical circles. After 1870, however, it was gradually secularised and

168

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

placed on a stronger footing, with the arrival of non-clerical scholars like Donald MacKinnon and Alexander MacBain, whose methods were in tune with the contemporary linguistic and literary enquiry of Europe (Evans; Meek 2001). Elucidation also began to move more obviously into the public arena, as is reﬂected in the contents of particular journals. Academic writing in Gaelic – presuming a fairly learned readership – is evident in An Gaidheal, for example, which was published in Toronto in 1871, the journal in which Donald MacKinnon presented the essays with which he made his name as Scotland’s ﬁrst Gaelic ethnographer and proto-literary critic. MacKinnon’s writings carry the distinct scent of their own day, one redolent of post-Ossianic identiﬁcation of the hallmarks of ‘the Gaelic race’. Despite this, his essays marked an enormous advance in the technical assurance with which Gaelic speakers and readers, and now writers, could explore their own origins, literature and cultural context – through the medium of Gaelic itself. Strengthened and diversiﬁed by means of books and journals, Gaelic literature had come of age, and enlisted pioneers of the calibre of MacKinnon, who was clearly not writing from, or into, a cultural vacuum. With the basic tools for understanding ‘Gaelic and the Gaels’ locking into place and becoming available more generally, a sense of the collective worth of Gaelic literature became apparent at di≠erent levels, stimulating further enquiry. Conﬁdence to tackle even scientiﬁc and technical subjects from scratch through Gaelic (as Norman MacLeod had attempted to do in his journals) was underlined in 1856, with the publication by Oliver & Boyd of the Rev. Duncan Connell’s assured and ﬁnely idiomatic exposition of the stars, Reul-Eòlas (‘Star-Knowledge’). A similar work, this time based on medical knowledge, was published by Archibald Sinclair of Glasgow in 1877, namely Dr Donald Black’s Eòlas agus Seòladh mu Luchd-easlainte (‘Information and Advice regarding Invalids’). Black was the general practitioner in Polewe, Wester Ross. From 1870, such landmark volumes were accompanied by a growing interest in Gaelic literary scholarship, which ﬂourished within the cocoon of the alleged ‘Gaelic race’, whose outlines Donald MacKinnon was anxious to establish in his ground-breaking articles. Learned societies began to appear, following the model of earlier societies in London, and soon their publications were adding to the sum of knowledge. The Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness (established in 1871), for example, reﬂect the swelling tide of scholarly awareness, but also the burgeoning of a more popular, highly intelligent spirit of cultural exploration. These carry membership lists by which learned circles can be identiﬁed.

distribution and reading

169

Reading and the Cèilidh-House The Gaelic literary organs of the nineteenth century – books, journals and pre-eminently newspapers carrying Gaelic material – found their way into the hands of all manner of consumers. No corner of the Gaelic world was immune to the inﬂuence of print, which soon began to displace the oral medium in the very centre of Gaelic cultural life itself – the traditional cèilidh-house. By the second half of the nineteenth century, cèilidh-houses were accommodating weekly readings of local newspapers, like the Oban Times, written predominantly in English, but carrying Gaelic features, such as songs, tales and proverbs. In Caolas, Tiree, for example, the writer’s family attended newspaper readings in a cottage called Taigh Iain (‘John’s House’), which stood in the next croft. The Iain/John in question was Iain mac Nèill, or John MacFadyen, who was regarded as the most ‘scholarly’ crofter in the area. When the Napier Commission visited Tiree in 1883 while enquiring

Figure 3.6 Pages from a notebook, held by the author’s family in Caolas, Tiree, at the end of the nineteenth century, show how a ‘Song Book’ was created by ‘cutting and pasting’ texts printed in the local newspaper, the Oban Times.

170

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

into crofters’ grievances throughout the Highlands and Islands, it was John MacFadyen who represented the crofters of the east end of the island. MacFadyen was a very close relative of the poet, John MacLean, Bàrd Thighearna Cholla, whose family (shoemakers to trade) were likewise highly literate, and held a treasured and well-worn copy of the bard’s Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach of 1818. MacFadyen was thus part of another impressive kin-based ‘community of readers’, and also the intermediary of a local group who were ready and willing to embrace the newspaper as an integral part of Gaelic culture. The inﬂuence of the newspaper operated in many di≠erent ways. One of these was that, by carrying texts of Gaelic songs and accounts of various activities in the area served by the paper, it stimulated the creation of scrap-books of Gaelic songs and the collecting of further songs. A notebook of this kind, entitled ‘Song Book, Collection of Songs’, was retained by the writer’s Tiree family. It is primarily a compilation of clippings from the Oban Times, chieﬂy Gaelic songs, but also accounts of Highland kindred and clans, and reports of the Land Agitation in Tiree in 1886. Interleaved in the notebook, and tucked into its pages, in the manner of Duncan Campbell’s copy of Sàr-Obair nam Bàrd, are handwritten texts of Gaelic songs, ostensibly transcribed from singers and reciters in Tiree. The earliest of these handwritten texts dates to 1863, and was ‘taken down’ from Anna MacLean, daughter of Donald (‘The Cooper’) MacLean, brother of John MacLean, the poet. ‘The Cooper’, we are told in an English introduction to the song, ‘was one evening at the brewery, but was not asked in; shortly after he had left, some of the kegs were found to be in a leaky condition, and he was immediately sent for to tighten them’. The ﬁrst verse of the Cooper’s Luinneag (‘Little Song’) is then written as follows: ’S am feasgar cha do chuireadh mi; Bha ’n cùbair dubh gun fhuran ris; Ach ’nis gur h-e ’n t-aon duin’ agaibh Bho’n dh’fhàs na buideil ao-dion. (And on that evening when I was not invited, there was no warm welcome for the black cooper; but now he is the chief man among you, since the kegs have sprung a leak.) The source of this song, however, can be traced directly to Clàrsach na Coille, an 1881 edition of the poems of John MacLean. The notebook therefore bears witness to a highly literate group of readers and writers, interacting closely with contemporary books and newspapers.

distribution and reading

171

In the cities of the Scottish Lowlands and, presumably also, in the colonies in which Gaels had settled, a similar interaction with print was evident. In Glasgow, by the 1880s, the ‘urban cèilidh-house’ was enjoying the admission of books of songs and readings specially compiled to meet its needs. The principal compilers of such volumes were members of the Whyte family, originally from Easdale, Argyll. The genre is best represented by Henry Whyte’s trim little volume, The Celtic Garland, published by Archibald Sinclair in 1881. Its link with newspapers is made clear in Henry Whyte’s preface: Most of the translations to be found in the following pages are the result of leisure moments, and appeared in the columns of Highland Newspapers and Magazines. I might have been content with their having been deemed worthy of a place even among the ephemeral literature of the day, but having been urged by several friends to preserve those compositions in a collected form, I reluctantly consented and I leave the reader to judge the wisdom of the step now taken. By the end of the nineteenth century, Whyte’s Celtic Garland was all the rage. In a radio talk given in 1950, Duncan MacCallum commented on its importance to Gaelic culture in Glasgow as the twentieth century dawned: ‘Anns gach ceilidh b’ e an Garland an cuspair. Cha robh leithid ann bho linn an Teachdaire Ghaelaich.’ (‘In every ceilidh the Garland was central. There was nothing like it since the time of the Teachdaire Gaelach’) (MacLeod 1977: 209). The power of the ‘iron print-blocks’, in refurbishing even the traditional meeting-house of Gaels and the principal citadel of Gaelic culture, could not have been expressed more eloquently. The Gaelic printed book, and its relatives, the journal and the newspaper, entered a context in which other forms of transmission and of the book itself were already well attested. Interaction between the manuscript and the printed book, and between both of these media and the world of orality, is clearly displayed throughout the nineteenth century. The book, whether printed, written by hand, or read and memorised, was but another means of enriching the broader repository of Gaelic cultural knowledge. Nevertheless, the printed book was recognised as having particular attributes which were lacking in older forms, and for this reason it gained unusual power and prestige. From 1800, a drive towards mass literacy was initiated on the basis of key texts such as the Gaelic Bible. Thereafter the printing press quickly furnished a range of di≠erent volumes, ephemeral and enduring, popular and scholarly, which added foundationally and massively

172

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

to the sum of Gaelic literature. Printed texts catered for the spiritual, the practical, the recreational and the educational dimensions of Gaelic life, as in any other modern society. They were used by communities collectively, and by readers individually, and not infrequently by both at once. The printed book and its acceptance were the signs of an emerging new, global community of knowledge, in which Scottish Gaels took their place alongside others in their day. Once the concept of the book had been internalised, Gaelic printed texts after 1800 became a vital means of stabilising the Gaelic language and its culture in an age of considerable change. Gaelic, in all its oral, literary and linguistic richness, could not have been displayed to full advantage without the immense contribution of the ‘iron print-blocks’.

Reading Jonathan Rose Some time ago the historian Rolf Engelsing argued that a ‘reading revolution’ transformed the North Atlantic world around 1800. This revolution involved a threefold shift: from reading aloud to private reading; from predominantly religious reading to more secular reading; and from ‘intensive reading’ (close and repeated reading of a few canonical texts, mainly the Bible) to ‘extensive reading’ (rapid reading of a large body of ephemeral texts, mainly newspapers, magazines and novels). Given its rich documentary sources, in particular The Statistical Account of Scotland (OSA) and The New Statistical Account of Scotland (NSA), Scotland provides an obvious case for testing this hypothesis. The ﬁrst provides a benchmark, illuminating reading habits in the 1790s, at the beginning of the so-called reading revolution; the second revisits the same parishes around 1840, when that transformation was ostensibly complete. Both works consist of reports ﬁled by Presbyterian ministers, and one could argue that, when discussing the literary tastes of their parishioners, these men were inclined to overstatement (out of local pride) or understatement (out of class snobbery). But in most cases, they knew their parishes well. There is evidence to suggest that, by the end of the eighteenth century, substantial changes in reading habits were under way in many parts of Scotland. In 1754, we are told, Swinton and Simprin (OSA Berwick) had been populated by ‘plain unpolished farmers, scarcely distinguishable from their hynds, either in dress, information, or mode of living’. But by 1790 they were cultivating a ‘laudable literary curiosity and taste for belles lettres’, and their cottars were striving ‘to imitate them, giving their children as much reading, writing, and ﬁgures, as they can spare time for’ (et passim). The inhabitants of Carsefairn were reportedly ‘careful to cultivate their minds . . . The writer of this has

174

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

been surprised to ﬁnd oftentimes in their little libraries, some of the best authors in the English language’ (OSA Kirkcudbright). Many other parishes submitted similar reports: The people are not illiterate. In common with the rest of Scotland, the vulgar are, for their station, literate, perhaps, beyond all other nations. Puritanic and abstruse divinity come in for a su∞cient share in their little stock of books; and it is perhaps peculiar to them, as a people, that they endeavour to form opinions, by reading, as well as by frequent conversation, on some very metaphysical points connected with religion, and on the deeper doctrines of Christianity. They likewise read, occasionally, a variety of other books unconnected with such subjects. (OSA Auchterderran) Their reading is extensive; and being furnished with an excellent subscription library of the best modern books, they have access to all the improvements in literature and politics. (OSA Kirkcudbright) By a much better education, and a more enlarged intercourse, than our ancestors enjoyed, the human mind has been considerably opened; and they of this generation, in a variety of respects, excel those of the last . . . Servility of mind, the natural consequence of poverty and oppression, has lost much of its hold here; and a spirit of independence, in the progress of opulence, has arisen, especially among the more substantial part of the people. An attention to publick a≠airs, a thing formerly unknown among the lower ranks, pretty generally prevails now. Not only the farmers, but many of the tradesmen, read the newspapers, and take an interest in the measures of government. (OSA Wigtown) [N]ot only tradesmen, but even day-labourers, give their children a good education. Scarce a boy who is not taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, a little church music, &c. And should any of them be neglected in their youth, when they come to the years of discretion, they go to school, at their own expence, in order to acquire these branches. (OSA Renfrew) From Montquhitter in Aberdeenshire, the Rev. Alexander Johnston observed that an older oral culture was giving way to a culture of print and reading: Now, a company of country men, despising the proverb, may be ranked among the disciples of the ﬁnical Chesterﬁeld. The allegory, no longer necessary to illustrate the laws of economy, is reserved for the amusement of the nursery . . . Books, trade, manufacture,

distribution and reading

175

foreign and domestic news, now engross the conversation; and the topic of the day is always warmly, if not ingeniously discussed. From believing too much, many, particularly in the higher walks of life, have rushed to the opposite extreme of believing too little; so that, even in this remote corner, scepticism may justly boast of her votaries. (OSA Montquhitter) No doubt the wave of political radicalism following the American and French revolutions provided much of the impetus behind the appetite for reading matter. By 1795 Paineite literature was attracting a keen readership in Perth and Ban≠. Some of the subscribers who founded the Bothwell parish library in 1798 had Paineite sympathies, as reﬂected in its collection. Though the common people of Fossoway remained solidly loyalist, Paine’s works had moved them to discuss politics, something they had rarely done earlier. Meanwhile, the availability of books was growing apace, as library services expanded downwards to ever broader sectors of the community. There were no public libraries at all in Fife until around 1750, when Walter Bowman, laird of the rural parish of Logie, willed his personal collection for the use of local gentlemen (women were excluded). Owing to its remoteness it was little used, so additional subscription libraries for the gentry and professional classes were founded at Dunfermline (1789), Cupar (1797), and Kirkcaldy (1800). In 1808 a Tradesmen’s Library was organised in Dunfermline, followed by a Mechanics’ Library in 1820, soon merging to become the United Tradesmen’s and Mechanics’ Library. By 1845 it had a collection of 1,500 titles, an entry fee of 2s 6d, and a subscription of 1s per quarter. The library never had its own building, was sta≠ed by volunteers, and was open only two or three evenings a week, but it was well used and continued to grow until it was absorbed into the new Dunfermline Public Library in 1883 (Anderson 1953: 3, 10–11). Yet progress was uneven. In the 1790s even a substantial town like Dundee su≠ered from an acute lack of schools and public libraries. Many parishes were unable to hire and keep good schoolmasters, owing to the low rates of pay, which had failed to keep up with inﬂation. In Glenholm the teacher’s remuneration did ‘not amount to the value of a labouring servant’s wages and board; and hence the present schoolmaster . . . has had recourse to shopkeeping’. Naturally many parents were reluctant to entrust their children to a man who had only half his mind on the job (OSA Peebles). In Scots-speaking St Andrews Lhanbryd teachers were so ill-paid that the ‘o∞ce has fallen altogether into the hands of mere school-boys, which they abandon

176

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

as soon as their own education is supposed to be completed, or into that of bankrupt tenants, still less qualiﬁed for the duties of it’ (OSA Elgin). The situation was particularly di∞cult in the more remote and impoverished districts. The schoolmaster in the Highlands parish of Lochbroom accomplished little, according to the minister, owing to ‘a stupid indi≠erence in the generality of the people, with regard to every branch of literature’ (OSA Ross). In the county of Sutherland, the parish of Farr had a population of 2,600, but only two schools, with no more than ﬁfty-nine pupils, and even fewer in harvest time. In predominantly Gaelic Kingussie there was just one parochial school, which the children of tenants attended only in the winter: in the summer they had to tend cattle: ‘They are naturally fond of learning, shrewd, and of quick apprehension,’ we read, but their parents often could not a≠ord even this basic schooling, with the result that the majority of children remained illiterate. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge provided a schoolmaster and a £10 salary for Edderachylis but withdrew him when he could attract only seventeen pupils out of a population of 1,024 (OSA Sutterland). What is striking, however, are the e≠orts made in some poor parishes to overcome these obstacles. In Kirkpatrick-Juxta the schoolmaster’s annual salary was only £11: ‘Had not the present teacher been disabled for working as a common mason, he must have spurned at such a livelihood as this.’ Yet there had sprung up an intellectually lively local reading public – perhaps too lively for the minister: The common people were certainly more ignorant 50 years ago than at present. Several at that time had not learned either to write or read; now they can all read pretty well, and all the men at least can write. Several of the farmers read history, magazines and newspapers. The vulgar read almost nothing but books on religious subjects. Many of them are too fond of controversial divinity; a taste which the Dissenters are very diligent in promoting, and which the few books they are acquainted with, are rather calculated to conﬁrm. (OSA Dumfries) At Pettie the school was well-attended, ‘as even the poorest of the people are becoming sensible of the importance of giving some education to their children’ (OSA Inverness). Cabrach lost its charity school in 1779, ‘a want which the people there feel much’. In this instance the makeshift solution was to ‘hire a country man to teach their children to read and write in winter; the only time they can dispense with them from herding their cattle’ (OSA Ban≠ ). Teachers were so poorly paid in

distribution and reading

177

Fearn that the post was sometimes vacant, so ‘[s]ome boys or girls, in their parents’ houses, begin to teach for a triﬂe of quarter payment’ (OSA Ross). Each winter in Dunoon adolescents aged 12 to 15 went ‘from house to house, for about 20s. and their maintenance, to teach children younger than themselves; and it is surprising with what success they go through that business’ (OSA Argyll). In many instances, the remoteness of the community was the major impediment to the provision of education. The school in New Galloway could only serve a three-mile radius: Such as are farther distant, hire young lads into their families, that have been bred at the public school, to teach their children arithmetic, which they can do for £3 or £4 a year. When 4 or 5 families lie contiguous to one another, they hire a teacher among them, for which they pay from £5 to £6, with victuals. (OSA Kirkudbright) Because the parochial school was too far away, the colliers of Dalgety supported their own teacher by subscription (OSA Fife). Each winter in Kirkmichael volunteers took over teaching in remote parts of the parish (OSA Perth). Exceptional were Mid and South Yell in the Shetlands and North Ronaldsay in the Orkneys, where there were no schools but where reading literacy was close to universal: because farms on these islands were small, parents had time to teach their children. In North Yell and on Fetlar the common people were ‘in general very quick in comprehending any branch of literature . . . which they apply to’ (OSA Shetland). In Lochgoilhead and Kilmorich ‘tenants and cottagers, who live at a distance from the established schools, usually join in hiring a teacher at their own expense, at least during the winter season.’ This was a Highlands Gaelic district, where the majority also spoke English, and the demand for education may have been spurred by a traditional but disappearing Gaelic oral culture. Just ﬁfteen years earlier ‘the present minister heard very old people in the parish repeat Gaelic poems, which they ascribed to Ossian, Orran, and other Caledonian bards’ (OSA Argyll). Moulin was a Gaelic parish where the total annual earnings of a labouring man’s family might amount to only £15 10s, something less than a subsistence wage, but reading and education were still high priorities. The availability of a Gaelic bible had arrested and even reversed the decline in Gaelic literacy. Out of a population of 1,749, there were 230 pupils in school, seven learning Latin, and one attending a university (OSA Perth). By 1839 there was an increasingly vital reading culture in Moulin although the area still lacked convenient libraries, di∞culties being overcome by an ethic of literary collectivity:

178

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

‘[I]n as far as books are concerned, “mine and thine” are synonymous.’ Many of the inhabitants were ‘in possession not only of the ephemeral and evanescent productions of the day, but of many of our standard works, historical, moral, and religious’ (NSA Perth). By far the highest levels of illiteracy were in the Gaelic-speaking regions of the Highlands and Islands. In the early nineteenth century education in Gaelic was being provided for by the Society for the Introduction of Gaelic Schools, but already it was realised that these well-intentioned e≠orts might prove counterproductive. Once pupils became literate in Gaelic they would quickly run up against the lack of printed Gaelic books. They could only satisfy the newly-whetted appetite for reading by mastering English, and that in turn would accelerate the eventual decline of Gaelic (Withers: 146–8). In 1839 the Rev. Thomas Munro of Kiltearn concluded that: The Gaelic School Society, by establishing schools throughout the country, have done much to eradicate the language. This may appear paradoxical; but it is actually the case. Those children that had learned to read Gaelic found no di∞culty in mastering the English; and they had a strong inducement to do so, because they found in that language more information suited to their capacity and taste, than could be found in their own. English being the language universally spoken by the higher classes, the mass of the people attach a notion of superior reﬁnement to the possession of it, which makes them strain every nerve to acquire it; and it is no uncommon thing for those who have lived a short time in the south, to a≠ect on their return, a total forgetfulness of the language which they had so long been in the habit of using. (NSA Ross and Cromarty) One consequence of the reading revolution was a shift from religious to secular reading, though this transformation was more rapid among the a±uent than the labouring classes. Around 1786 the bookstock of James Sibbald’s circulating library in Edinburgh’s Parliament Square held 8 per cent religion and 20 per cent ﬁction. In four other middleclass libraries in Greenock, Hawick, Forfar and Duns (according to catalogues published between 1789 and 1795) the collections averaged 3.1 per cent religion and 14.1 per cent ﬁction. But at two libraries for lead miners the proportions were quite di≠erent: 23.6 per cent religion and 14.2 per cent ﬁction at the Wanlockhead library (1790) and 24.6 per cent and 8.5 per cent at the Leadhills library (1800) (Crawford 1981). It was the success of Sir Walter Scott that ﬁnally turned the working classes to novel-reading: the Greenock Mechanics’ Institute prohibited

distribution and reading

179

‘inﬁdel literature’ in 1833, but the following year reversed its ban on the Waverley Novels. In 1831–2 the Perth Mechanics’ Library (founded 1823) spent 6s on Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather and 10s on Boccaccio’s Decameron. By 1859 its collection of 1749 volumes was 45.2 per cent ﬁction. In 1858 novels accounted for 28.9 per cent of the 15,163 volumes at the Edinburgh Mechanics’ Library (founded 1823) and 39.4 per cent of all loans (Thompson: 23–6). Religious reading, however, by no means disappeared. In much of Scotland, particularly in the rural areas, parish libraries o≠ered the only public library service. The parochial library movement began in the 1790s and, at its peak around 1850, there were no fewer than 438 such libraries. While most were a∞liated with the Church of Scotland, at least ninety-two were established by other denominations, including ﬁfty-eight by Presbyterian dissenters, twenty-four by Episcopalians, and nine by Roman Catholics. Parish libraries were generally open to all, usually charged no subscription fee, and were well used by women in particular. Average membership was somewhere around 150, and the average collection in the 1840s was about 300 volumes. The movement declined later in the century, but in the 1880s Greenock still had eight church libraries with a total bookstock of 5,400. Yet even parish libraries were not immune to secularising trends. An analysis of six parish library catalogues reveals that their stock was 47.1 per cent religion, 11.3 per cent biography, 9.7 per cent history, and 4.1 per cent ﬁction (Crawford 1985: 33–44). Linton Parish Library (about 500 volumes) speciﬁcally excluded theological controversy, limiting itself to history, travels and essays (NSA Peebles). The loans register for the Tweedsmuir Parish Library for 1846 to 1854 shows that readers were demanding secular as well as sacred books. In 1839, at the Slateford Chapel Library ‘the volumes most frequently asked for are those that minister to amusement rather than to ediﬁcation’ (NSA Colinton, Edinburgh). In 1862 the 1,000-volume collection of the Congregational Church Library in Greenock consisted of 35 per cent history and biography, 27 per cent natural philosophy, 11 per cent novels and romances, 8 per cent travels, 4 per cent poetry and just 2 per cent theology. One distinctive manifestation of Scotland’s reading revolution was an early ﬂowering of proletarian libraries. John Crawford has identiﬁed ﬁfty-one working-class subscription libraries in Scotland founded by 1822. All were located in the Lowlands, mainly the South-West, in towns with fewer than 10,000 people. They tended to ﬂourish in stable communities with a traditional artisan base. In 1794 the weavers of Old Monkland founded the Langloan Subscription Library, which included books on biography, travel, religion and two novels, The Vicar of

180

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Wakeﬁeld and The Man of Feeling. But this institution of local culture was to change with the inﬂux of industrial labourers, many of them Irish and uneducated, who, as witnesses told the Children’s Employment Commission, read either Chartist papers or nothing at all (Thompson: 27–8). In 1845 the NSA reported that the colliers of Newton, near Edinburgh, once maintained their own circulating library: but such was the e≠ect of the enlargement of the works near the commencement of this century, whereby some hundreds were added to that class in a few years, consisting chieﬂy of the most reckless characters, that the whole body became deteriorated; and . . . some twelve years ago, the library was shut up, there being not a single subscriber remaining. (NSA Newton, Edinburgh) Yet, even when they could not support formal libraries, working people found ingenious ways of acquiring and sharing reading matter. In 1796–7 there were, according to the Scots Chronicle, thirty-ﬁve reading societies in the Glasgow-Paisley region. Typically they had thirty to forty members, often weavers, who were charged a monthly fee of 6d or 9d, and chose books by democratic vote. Some of their bookstocks approached 1,000 volumes, mainly history, travels and periodicals. Early in the nineteenth century, shepherds in the Cheviots would leave books in designated nooks in boundary walls. When the next shepherd came along he would borrow it and replace it with another: eventually each volume would travel a circuit of thirty to forty miles. (Both OSA and NSA reported that shepherds were exceptionally avid readers, largely because they spent so much time alone in the ﬁelds.) The Lochend poet Alexander Bethune recalled that he and his brother John were too poor to buy many books, but ‘after it became known that we were readers, the whole of our acquaintances, far and near, and even some people whom we could hardly number as such, appeared eager to lend us books’ (Bethune: 231–2). This was also a period in which Scottish working men formed ‘mutual improvement societies’, where they met to discuss books and ideas. During the Napoleonic Wars, cotton-spinner Charles Campbell joined a small club that met each week to explore literature and philosophy, reading Newton, Locke and Reid. Early in the century this kind of intellectual debate could be regarded as dangerously subversive, and Campbell complained that his neighbours ‘branded us with the designation of atheists, poets, and play-actors . . . No poor devil was ever more tortured, or persecuted, for his attachment to books than I was’ (Campbell 1828: 36, 19). But by the Victorian years mutual improve-

distribution and reading

181

ment societies had become ubiquitous, a thoroughly respectable form of literary self-help. Was Scotland’s reading revolution complete when the New Statistical Account was compiled? Clearly there were still serious gaps in the Highlands and Islands. Only six of the thirty-one parishes in the county of Inverness were served by libraries, and most of them, outside of the city of Inverness, were little used. Few parishes in Argyll had libraries, and none at all was reported on the Isle of Skye. Gaelic-speaking Pettie had created a parish library only in 1840, ‘not so much in order to meet the demand, as to create a taste for reading’ (NSA Pettie). Yet even in Ross and Cromarty, where the illiteracy rate in many parishes was 50 per cent or more, there were signs of relative progress. In Kintail, ‘About ﬁfty years ago, few, comparatively speaking, of the inhabitants, could read; and their knowledge hardly extended beyond the ordinary routine of their everyday occupations.’ Now, in 1836, there was still widespread ignorance, according to the minister, but at least ‘A considerable majority of the younger portion of the population can read the Bible; and indeed the whole body of the people may be said to pay more regard to the cultivation of their mind’ (NSA Kintail). By 1840 a Gaelic bible and prayer book were owned by every family in Kincardine, which supported a parochial library of religious literature and a more secular reading club with sixteen members. In Rosemarkie: The taste for reading in various departments has pervaded all classes of society; so much so, that among tradesmen and the labouring classes, many valuable works are now [1840] to be met with, particularly of a religious character, where in former times such publications were seldom looked for, and but rarely found. (NSA Rosemarkie) The NSA shows that around 1840 most Scots, particularly in the Central Belt, had access to some kind of library; if not a free public library, then at least a subscription, circulating, parish, chapel or Sunday school library. Even if there was no library in one’s own community, there might be one in the next parish. Kirkmahoe founded a parish library in 1800, but allowed it to ﬂicker out because ‘[b]ooks were so numerous in private houses, and so easily gotten from the public libraries of [nearby] Dumfries’ – which included three society libraries, four booksellers’ libraries, a presbytery library, a circulating library, a mechanics’ institute and four reading rooms (NSA Kirkmahoe). In 1835 Alves was served by a parish library of nearly 200 volumes and a juvenile library of eighty volumes. An itinerating library of ﬁfty books, lent for a penny a volume, was in great demand among

182

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 3.7 Edinburgh interior, 1806. The representation of books and reading was extremely common in nineteenth-century portraiture. Sometimes books appeared simply as props, indicating the erudition or religious piety of their subjects. At other times the act of reading is itself the subject of the picture. Like many portraits, these images are highly coded acts of interpretation in their own right, inviting speculation about the character and the cultural values of both the artist and the subject. While most portraits of nineteenth-century readers tended to celebrate the relationship between the individual and the book, a number are suggestive of reading as a more sociable act. This is one of a series of sketches of domestic scenes executed by John Harden in 1806. Demonstrating something of the leisured world of the professional classes in Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town, it shows a group of polite readers, each distinct in their presentation. The participation in the public sphere of the prominent banker Robert Allan is communicated through his conﬁdent engagement with the daily news. His daughter, Helen, might be seen as an exemplary female reader, poring intensively over a small volume of ﬁction or poetry. Nevertheless, the genteel posture of the second male ﬁgure challenges the idea of clearly identiﬁable gendered representation.

distribution and reading

183

Figure 3.8 11th Duke of Hamilton as a child, 1814. William Alexander Anthony Archibald, 11th Duke of Hamilton and 8th Duke of Brandon, was born in 1811. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford and served as Knight Marischal of Scotland from 1846 and Lord Lieutenant of Lanarkshire. In 1843 he married Marie, daughter of Charles, Grand Duke of Baden, after which he lived chieﬂy in Paris and Baden succeeding to the Dukedom in 1852. In this image, painted by Sir Henry Raeburn around 1814, the young Duke is shown drawing attention to a small volume, presumably open to a family portrait. This is therefore not a book to be read in the conventional sense but rather to be taken as a symbol of heredity as well as an emblem of the subject’s precocity.

184

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 3.9 Hugh Miller, 1854. Born in Cromarty in 1802, geologist and man of letters Hugh Miller began his working life as a stonemason. An autodidact, he later developed an interest in geology. He was most famous for his geological justiﬁcations for the biblical account of creation, The Old Red Sandstone (1841) and the posthumously published Testimony of the Rocks (1857). Troubled by the conﬂict between his own scientiﬁc and religious beliefs, he took his own life in 1856. This photograph, taken around 1854, appears to have been an attempt to capture something of the complex relationship between Miller’s humble origins and his devotion to scholarship. While books were often used as symbolic props in male portraits of this period, this one is unusual in the way that it shows the sitter engrossed in a book, communicating something of the intellectual rigour as well as the self-reliance of its subject.

distribution and reading

185

Figure 3.10 Lady Hawarden’s daughter, 1862. Clementina Maude was born in 1822 into a polite Lanarkshire family, her father having been Commander-in-Chief of Gibraltar and later MP for Stirlingshire. She spent most of her adult life in Kensington, where she conducted experiments in the new art of photography and promoted the role of women in the arts. Inﬂuenced by pre-Raphaelitism, her photographs of domestic life have a profoundly romantic quality. This image of her daughter, executed around 1862, portrays the subject in a typically romantic setting. On closer examination, the sitter appears to be identifying a speciﬁc passage in her book, suggesting that, while it might portray a passive attitude, this is a portrait of an engaged and active mind.

186

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 3.11 Diary of Robert Hamilton. The eighth son of Edinburgh bookseller and publisher Gavin Hamilton, Robert Hamilton (1743–1829) was well connected in Scottish public life, having been a founder member of the Speculative Society. In 1779 he was elected to the chair of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen University and later became the author of several works, including the inﬂuential Inquiry concerning the rise and progress, the reduction and present state, and the management of the national debt of Great Britain and Ireland (1813). From 1790 until his death Hamilton kept a meticulous record of his reading habits, listing all of the books he encountered with information about how he had acquired them. Hamilton had a lively interest in political and philosophical writing, and we ﬁnd him reading important contemporary works by the likes of Malthus, Owen and Mill. He also had a taste for the latest in popular literature. In 1815 alone, he read fresh from the press Byron’s Childe Harold and Hebrew Melodies, Scott’s Waverley and Guy Mannering, and Edgeworth’s Patronage. He also kept up with current a≠airs and was a regular reader of the Edinburgh Review and the Scots Magazine. The diary provides a rare window on the reading habits of the professional élite in nineteenth-century Scotland. Hamilton appears as someone with a great deal of personal resourcefulness, for whom books and reading were an essential part of sociability. In his early years, Hamilton purchased few books

distribution and reading

187

farmworkers and labourers in the winter: they had no time to read in other seasons. ‘Not a few of the farmers themselves . . . receive the newspapers regularly, sometimes three or four taking a share of an Edinburgh or London paper . . . Books of history, biography, and travels, are for the most part preferred,’ though some readers were still partial to religious subjects (NSA Elgin). Melrose, with a population of 4,339, reported several libraries, universal literacy, and the fact that there was ‘not a cottage that does not possess a small store of books’, the most popular authors being Scott, Lockhart, Hamilton and Brewster (NSA Roxburgh). The Aberdeenshire parish of Clatt, with 524 inhabitants, had no public library provision, yet adult literacy was universal: To the inestimable beneﬁts of education the inhabitants are in general zealously alive. The parent who has felt the disadvantages of ignorance is anxious to remove this obstruction from his children’s future path; and he willingly subjects himself to much labour, and many privations, in furnishing them with the means of reﬁning their taste, forming their intellectual character, and forwarding their advancement in society . . . To great simplicity of manners, which has for ages existed in the parish, there have been superadded habits of reading. (NSA Clatt) In 1839 Penicuik had a subscription library of 1,200 volumes as well as a Secession chapel library. As a result the common people were regarded as: decidedly moral and intellectual, and their standard of civilization high. They read much, and take a pride in the acquisition of knowledge . . . Political reading and discussion preponderates, accompanied with no little degree of disa≠ection to the institutions of the country, particularly the rights and privileges of the Established Church. (NSA Edinburgh) Ban≠, with a population of 3,711, was in 1836 supporting a literary society with a library of more than 2,000 volumes, a small scientiﬁc museum and library, a tradesmen’s library, a reading room and at least Figure 3.11 (continued) himself, borrowing most from the library at Marischal College, local circulating and parish libraries, personal acquaintances, and occasionally from the libraries of great houses. Most books he read in their entirety; a few he only partially read. His spending on books increased towards the end of his life, perhaps as a consequence of a slowing down in his social activities.

188

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

four church and chapel libraries. As Rev. Francis William Grant claimed: An improved state of the practical arts makes every profession more di∞cult of acquisition, furnishes new occupation for ingenuity, new aims for mental activity, new subjects of emulation – the di≠usion of knowledge has created new desires, new ideas, new sources of excitement. From the increased di≠usion of newspapers and cheap popular prints, a taste for reading has sprung up to a considerable extent. Such works as Chambers’s Journal are frequently bought by farm-servants and artisans. Newspapers are circulated as long as the texture of the paper holds together, or its colour distinguished from that of the printer’s ink. The recent political excitements . . . have doubtless tended to increase or create an appetite for knowledge: there being few political questions that do not, at least indirectly, excite a curiosity, and lead to inquiries, touching a variety of extrinsic subjects in history, geography, statistics, arts, commerce, &c. A man who sets up for a politician ﬁnds occasion to learn a great many things besides politics. (NSA Ban≠ ) It is generally assumed that, as literacy increased, reading aloud gave way increasingly to silent reading, and no doubt this happened to some extent. But as the example of Scotland illustrates, reading may have become in some respects less silent as the nineteenth century progressed. The more Scots read, the more they talked about their reading – in parlours and chapels, in mining and weaving communities. And the more they read, the more they wrote. The People’s Journal and many other Scottish newspapers of this period were largely readerwritten, their columns ﬁlled with letters, reports, folklore notes, commissioned articles and entries to ﬁction and poetry contests supplied by their readers. These papers remind us that print is an interactive medium, an endless dialectic of reading and writing – never more so than in the wake of Scotland’s reading revolution.

Libraries John Crawford The Regulations and Catalogue of the Fenwick Library, published in Kilmarnock in 1827, provides a list of titles as well as a detailed list of regulations, extending to no fewer than eighteen clauses, along with a ‘Preamble’ or what would today be called a mission statement. The care taken over stock, members, rules and policy makes it entirely typical of the way in which such organisations were managed and regulated. As the ‘Preamble’ correctly observes, ‘The utility of such institutions has happily been long acknowledged in Scotland.’ Publicly available libraries within Scotland originated in the 1680s mainly under the initiative of Episcopal clergy and local lairds. These libraries were funded by wealthy patrons but in the following century community-based funding models emerged whose inﬂuence was to survive into the twentieth century (Kaufman 1969; Crawford 2002; Manley). The two commonest types of library in the eighteenth century were circulating and subscription libraries. Compared to England, circulating libraries were a rarity in Scotland and, like endowed libraries, were limited in geographical distribution, although in a less erratic fashion. Run largely by booksellers who rented out part of their stock, there were, before 1801, some 369 circulating libraries in Britain as a whole, only thirty-one (8 per cent of the total) being in Scotland. The circulating library was a feature predominantly of the large towns and on the east coast where much of the population was concentrated, as were most of the outlets for retail bookselling (Varma; Kaufman 1963; McDonald).

The emergence of the subscription library The subscription library arose partly out of the deﬁciencies of other types of existing provision. The majority of potential new library users

190

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

were in central and south-western Scotland and were poorly served by endowed and circulating libraries, the latter being prohibitively expensive. Market towns and villages had few or no bookshops and there was a need to develop the supply of print along cheap and easily manageable lines. The eighteenth century was an age of intimate communities and closely knit societal activity. A type of library which combined community control in a local governmental framework was therefore a prime desideratum. Class was a deﬁning factor with more expensive libraries for the well-to-do – entry fees in the eighteenth century were about a guinea, with an annual subscription of around 6s. Cheaper options, where they existed, had correspondingly smaller stocks for poorer readers. Subscriptions for working-class libraries customarily ranged from 2s to 5s per year which might bring in an annual income of £10 or so. Subscription libraries were self-managed institutions, governed by an elected management committee which reported to the membership at regular intervals. The annual subscription was used to buy books and defray the expenses of the library. The ﬁrst example was founded at Leadhills in Lanarkshire in 1741. Libraries were established initially in market towns and larger villages and the small library, locally managed, became the standard organisational model until the mid-twentieth century. Although this model was a decentralised one, all libraries, to a greater or lesser extent, shared an ideology of vigilant, amateur, although not amateurish management by local community leaders, both lay and secular, who were often involved in other prominent community activities, a tradition which also survived into the twentieth century. The philosophical model which underlay the rules of Leadhills Library and its successors was that of mutual improvement. This tendency reﬂected the wider preoccupations of the Movement for Mutual Improvement which may be deﬁned as the spiritual and intellectual improvement of the social individual through corporately organised intellectual activity. It was essentially an eighteenth-century version of what is often these days referred to as lifelong learning and proved to be more inﬂuential among working-class library users than their middle-class equivalents. Its fundamental raison d’être, that of the importance of intellectual independence, was to be a key theme in the period. In 1800 there were about 100 libraries in Scotland, of which fourteen were working-class subscription libraries and forty-three were middleclass subscription libraries. As well as administrative and philosophical underpinnings the social composition of user groups had achieved a class proﬁle of membership being based largely round the middle-class and the upper-working-class male society. Women and children were

distribution and reading

191

Figures 3.12, 3.13 Leadhills Miners’ Library.

The Leadhills Miners’ Library, founded in 1741, was the earliest subscription library in Britain. The library had twenty-three founding members, and by 1821 owned no fewer than 1,500 volumes. Each volume bears the bookplate, reﬂecting both neo-classical values – the column and the dove of peace (the latter being the Hopetoun emblem) – and more practical matters – the treeless landscape in which the miners lived and their working implements: the pick, shovel and ore tub. The motto ‘And leave the rest to heaven’ has been variously ascribed to Southey and Corneille, both indicative of high educational standards. The library is housed in a cottage of about thirty by ﬁfteen feet which was suitable for housing the eventual stock of 3,000–4,000 volumes. The books are stored according to size, indicating a lack of interest in shelf arrangement by subject, with locations being listed in printed catalogues. The room is shelved on three sides, the other wall being left free for fenestration, a common plan. The building probably dates from 1791 and is certainly one of Scotland’s oldest ‘public library’ buildings. The interior suggests an explicitly democratic library society. At the far right hand corner is the table where the secretary sat while taking minutes, and loans may also have been recorded here. The ballot box for electing new members can be seen on the secretary’s table and beside the door is the pulpit-like structure from which the praeses or president chaired meetings. The members sat on the benches during business meetings, or awaiting their turn to select books. The layout reﬂects an idealised model of social organisation, deriving from the Scottish Enlightenment and providing a model for subsequent developments. Reading societies were subsequently established in the neighbouring mining village of Wanlockhead (1756) and at Westerkirk in eastern Dumfriesshire (1792).

192

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

still to emerge as major participants. Compared with England reading societies seem to have been a less important phenomenon although their transitory nature means that evidence is less likely to have survived. They usually functioned for periods of up to ﬁve years, after which the stocks might be sold among the members. They were di≠erentiated by social class like subscription libraries and, in the case of working-class reading societies, at least, the di≠erence between the reading society and the permanent library was more apparent than real, given that the practical reality often consisted of a bookcase containing no more than 200 volumes, stored in a member’s home. Libraries intended to be permanent might fail after a few years while some temporary societies were so successful that they became permanent libraries. Among the middle classes, reading societies seem to have postdated the subscription library. One was founded in Ban≠ in the 1790s where there was no subscription library and only one circulating library (OSA Ban≠ ). The New Statistical Account records book clubs at Kelso where twenty-four members paid a guinea a year (NSA Roxburgh) at Stirling (NSA Stirling) and at Kincardine in Ross-shire where sixteen subscribers bought books every year and sold them among themselves at the end of the year. The annual subscription was less than £1 (NSA Ross-shire). At Jedburgh there was a reading society ‘among the higher classes’ (NSA Roxburgh) and in Sutherland there were reading clubs at Scourie and Golspie (NSA Sutherland). Although little detailed evidence survives for less a±uent readers, the NSA mentions a number of working-class ‘book societies’ in Glasgow which, the surviving evidence suggests, were temporary and small (NSA Lanark), an arrangement well suited to an expanding, ﬂuid population which had yet to develop a sense of communal identity. For communities with more settled populations the permanent model was preferred.

Middle-class intervention New types of publicly available library appeared in the nineteenth century, all of which were characterised by middle-class interventionism. The subscription tradition enjoyed varied fortunes. The last middleclass subscription library was founded in 1826 by which time about seventy-three had been established. Poor administrative standards and falling book prices meant that many were already in decline. Some, such as Greenock and Langholm, survived into the twentieth century by assuming a more popular character, but many disappeared so that

distribution and reading

193

there were only twenty-ﬁve left by the end of the twentieth century. Working-class subscription libraries su≠ered from small incomes, lack of resources, an inability to invest in development, and vulnerability to the trade cycle. They were also unable to cope with the challenge of industrialisation and urbanisation. Nevertheless, the movement survived successfully in the traditional heartland of the community library, the large village and the market town. By the end of the nineteenth century there were eighty-three (Crawford 1993: 76–8). Middle-class intervention originated with the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart who believed that the provision of libraries for the working classes would produce a more industrious and pliable workforce, an idea which led to the development of the mechanics’ institutes (Chitnis: 174–5, 219–20). Complementing this was the rise of Evangelicalism. In Scotland religiously based libraries originated with the moderate clergy, some of whom pondered the growing working-class interest in books and reading and concluded that it should be both encouraged but also controlled. However from the early nineteenth century onwards the initiative shifted to the evangelicals (Crawford 1985). The middle-class promoters of mechanics’ institutes and religious libraries saw little value in imaginative literature, and intellectual development was believed to be inseparable from manners and morals (Smith 1983). Both mechanics’ institutes and religious libraries represented a direct attack on working-class intellectual independence, the former by limiting reading matter to ‘value free’ subjects, mainly science and technology; the latter by providing stocks of religious books. Both were openly hostile to ﬁction and imaginative literature. Mechanics’ institutes began in the 1820s to provide working men with a background of technical education which would allow them to develop the new skills demanded by the Industrial Revolution. The ﬁrst of its kind, the Edinburgh School of Arts, which had a library from the beginning, was founded in 1821 (Aitken: 39–41). By 1851 there were about ﬁfty in Scotland, mostly in the Central Belt. The largest, in Glasgow, had 6,000 volumes (Kelly: 229–30). The major impetus for the movement is generally thought to date from the 1820s and 1830s but, in Scotland at least, their foundation continued until the 1860s, at least ten being initiated between 1850 and 1868 (Crawford 1993: 81). Although the mechanics’ institutes made a considerable addition to the facilities available to the wider reading public they were only moderately successful in their appeal to the working classes and had a substantial middle-class following. Whatever their defects, they were the ﬁrst form of library provision aimed at the working classes to invest heavily in buildings and equipment.

194

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Church and religiously based libraries, on the other hand, were usually small and short-lived. The movement roughly paralleled the rise and fall of Evangelicalism and the founding of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843. As religious controversy declined in the 1850s and 1860s and the Church of Scotland reasserted itself, so religiously based libraries declined and the large number that had come into being rapidly disappeared. Such libraries did attempt to extend their range beyond the traditional male middle- and upper-working-class clientele to include women and children. The Edinburgh Sessional School, for example, which was founded in 1813 to cope with the problems of adolescent violence and deprivation, established a successful library in 1823 (Wood: 29–30). At the Free Church Library in Kirkcaldy, which operated from about 1845 to 1855, women always formed the majority of users (KFA). About forty-six such establishments, all small, still survived in the mid-1890s. Although now largely forgotten, second endowment libraries were the preferred kind of publicly available library in Scotland between about 1850 and 1900. The ﬁrst noteworthy example, the Campbell Library, was founded at Pollokshaws near Glasgow in 1844, the last being established as late as 1929. Funded by wealthy patrons, the administration and standard of service provided represented the norm in public library provision. They combined the old strategy of community organisation with a new interventionist philanthropy which served to deﬁne identiﬁable aims and values. Rarely found in inner city areas, they were successfully established in locales where their philosophy of personal betterment, constructive recreation and community development was likely to take root. Second endowment libraries were often housed in public halls where good accommodation was cheaply or freely available. Representing a halfway house between the old world of voluntary community library provision and a new world of professionalism and regular funding, the best examples compared favourably with rate supported libraries. By the mid-1890s 107 of these establishments existed and they were the largest class of libraries at that time to house major collections. Representative examples were Baillie’s Institution in Glasgow and the Chambers’ Institution in Peebles, both with 17,000 volumes (Crawford 1993: 88, 139–49). In the Highlands the preferred Lowland model of decentralised library provision, united by a common ideology, did not apply. A centralised model, driven by intervention from the Lowlands, and originally proposed by James Kirkwood, a late seventeenth-century Episcopalian clergyman, survived as late as the early twentieth century. Between 1818 and 1824, the Associate Church clergyman, John Brown,

distribution and reading

195

established twenty-four libraries of religious literature in the Highlands, and in 1826 the Education Committee of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland founded ‘itinerating libraries’ in the Highlands on the East Lothian model, an initiative which had run its course by 1840 (Crawford 1984: 94–117).

Figure 3.14 Itinerating library, East Lothian. In 1817 Samuel Brown, a Haddington merchant, launched the East Lothian Itinerating Libraries Scheme, which circulated boxes of 50 books, over half of which were religious in nature, in two-year cycles. Most of Brown’s local librarians were reputed to have been labourers or tradesmen. About ﬁfty such libraries were established by 1830, their members including sailors at Dunbar, and prisoners. The scheme began to decline after the introduction of a charge of a penny a volume in 1832. Nevetheless, successful imitators of the ‘Brown system’ continued to be implemented throughout the empire, wherever dispersed Scottish populations found themselves.

196

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

All the evidence currently available suggests that library activity in the Gaeltacht during the period was most likely to be successful in areas nearest to the Lowlands. The island of Arran is a particularly good example. Kilbride Public Library, which was based at the village of Lamlash, was founded in 1824 and had 300 volumes by 1840, used by eighty subscribers. The stock consisted of books on history, biography, popular science, geography and practical divinity. The earliest recorded imprint is 1796 and the latest 1908, including some Gaelic titles. Arran also received three ‘itinerating libraries’ which were sent to the schools maintained by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. They were among the most heavily used in the whole scheme and were still recording issues in the 1840s (Crawford 1987: 83–94).

Public libraries: 1853 and after When the ﬁrst Public Libraries Act was passed in 1853, therefore, Scotland already had a rich, varied and largely voluntarily-run library culture, based for the most part within local communities. This partly explains the slow progress of the rate supported movement and why the set-up came to resemble what had gone before. The Act of 1850, which covered England and Wales only, was extended to Scotland in 1853 and was amended by the Public Libraries (Scotland) Act of 1854 which raised the rate limitation from the product of a half penny rate to a full penny and allowed the money raised to be spent on books as well as buildings, furnishing, heating, lighting and sta∞ng. Although there was further legislation and a consolidating Act in 1887 the basic principles remained unchanged until 1919 when the rate limitation was raised to three pence (Aitken). Although the penny rate tends to be criticised as inadequate, for the most part it generated higher income than that available to the voluntary sector so provision must have seemed reasonable to contemporaries. However, the penny rate did not produce su∞cient income for initial purchase of plant and equipment, a situation which led to the continuation of traditional philanthropic strategies. The Act applied only to cities and towns which were, for the most part, small and the movement made slow progress up to 1897 when Carnegie grants became widely available. Great strides, however, were made in two main areas: in market towns where the ‘free library’ took on the traditional community character; and in large towns like Dundee, Perth or Paisley where local philanthropists could compensate for a deﬁciency in resources. In the late nineteenth century, the world of library provision was still curiously distant from the twentieth-century rate-supported model.

distribution and reading

197

The community model still predominated, despite middle-class intervention and there was little evidence of professional librarianship, the running of libraries then still largely an amateur activity. The key Act during this period was the Public Libraries (Scotland) Act 1867 which required library committees to contain equal numbers of elected members and householders, an interesting variation on the idea of the community library (Aitken: 240). The main source of funding and the only one which could support the construction and maintenance of substantial buildings, the purchase of books and periodicals, and the provision of sta≠, was philanthropy and would remain so until Carnegie’s work was complete. Although various theories have been put forward to account for philanthropy in Scotland it is clear that community was the main motivation for library support, just as in the seventeenth century individuals patronised their local communities and none other. As many patrons were not particularly wealthy the result was often small local libraries, in other words a continuation of the eighteenth-century tradition (Crawford 1993: 269–71). Although Carnegie transformed the landscape of library provision, he began his scheme in traditional fashion by patronising his home town of Dunfermline at the close of our period, in 1880. Although his largesse was ultimately to extend throughout Scotland, the end result, a network of small, under-funded library services under local government control, did not look all that di≠erent from the models of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In most types of publicly available library the provision of a library service had long been equated with a lending service, but reading rooms, the only source of current information for most people, were becoming increasingly common. Reference libraries, initially quite small, were also emerging. The most important qualitative development during this period was the foundation of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow in 1874, a reference library and initially an endowed rather than rate-supported library. Thanks to the brilliant management of its librarian, Francis Thornton Barrett, it rapidly set standards in complex organisation and quality of service never before seen in Scotland (Crawford 1993: 142–4).

198

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 3.15 Ladies’ Edinburgh Debating Society.

The Attempt was a monthly magazine published by the newly formed Ladies’ Edinburgh Debating Society from January 1865 to December 1874, when its title was changed to the Ladies’ Edinburgh Magazine. The guiding inﬂuence of the society and magazine was Sarah Mair, who remained President of the Society until its dissolution in 1936. Throughout its life, the Society met

distribution and reading

199

in Mair’s New Town drawing room in Edinburgh, a suitable location for the members who were drawn primarily from the upper middle class. Reading and writing were at the centre of the enterprise and society members as well as others were encouraged to contribute to the magazine. It frequently included articles on the topic of reading. Not all reading material was equal, as it reminded its subscribers: ‘[M]uch novel reading has a deleterious e≠ect; it should be read as we eat sugar plums, not as an article of staple food, but as a slight zest when the meal is over; it should constitute our recreation, not the business of our lives.’ Structured reading was seen as an antidote to the monotony of domestic life, and a ‘strong mind’ was to be cultivated by rejecting sensational novels which were to be regarded as ‘poison’. By condemning authors like Wilkie Collins and Miss Braddon, and recommending the likes of Gaskell, Scott, Tennyson and Shakespeare, the society set about formulating its own literary canon. Topics for debate at society meetings ranged from literature to philosophy, politics and history. Women’s education was a perennial topic and, although not all members supported su≠rage, the Society was a catalyst for women’s rights in Edinburgh. One early member, Flora Stevenson, was a founding member of the Edinburgh Women’s Su≠rage Society in 1867 and served on the ﬁrst school board in Edinburgh in 1873.

III. MARKETS AND GENRES

Chapter Four

LITERATURE IN THE MARKETPLACE The Rise of the Scottish Literary Market Peter Garside n his Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819), as part of a sequence of key chapters on Edinburgh booksellers, John Gibson Lockhart celebrated the dawn of a dynamic age of literary production in Scotland, marked by a new species of review and high-proﬁle imaginative literary production. Previously, by Lockhart’s account, the Scottish capital’s book trade had acted as subordinate to its London counterpart, and ‘Even if the name of an Edinburgh bookseller did appear upon a title-page, that was only a compliment allowed him by the courtesy of the great London dealer whose instrument and agent he was.’ The founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802, followed by Walter Scott’s poetry and novels such Waverley (1814) and Old Mortality (1816), had helped energise a ‘new race of booksellers’, as well as stimulating the appetites of ‘the reading public, both in and out of Scotland’. As a result the dependency which characterised earlier polite literary output from Scotland had, in some respects, even been reversed. ‘Instead of Scotch authors sending their works to be published by a London bookseller, there is nothing more common now-a-days, than to hear of English authors sending down their books to Edinburgh.’ ‘No book can be published there,’ Lockhart triumphantly adds, ‘and totally neglected’ (II: 157, 165, 166, 167). It should be added that Lockhart’s account here, culminating as it does with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine as a kind of apex of this new activity, is in several respects both partial and self-interested. On one front, it obscures the energy shown by the Scottish industry in producing reprints of classic English and Scottish literature during the later eighteenth century, often in the face of restrictive practices by the London trade; an activity which continued with some vigour in the new century, developing new forms and ﬁnding fresh outlets. On another, it

I

203

204

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

badly underestimates the more ‘solid’ output of Edinburgh booksellers in ﬁelds such as law, science and theology, which undoubtedly provided the main ballast for trade operations during 1800 to 1836 (the period mainly under survey in this entry), compared with more fashionable literary items which more than once threatened its stability. At the same time, however, several of Lockhart’s assertions have a positive ring of truth. Though there are notable exceptions, original imaginative literature stemming from Scotland in the mid- and later eighteenth century was generally produced in London, the home of the then main reviews, and where undoubtedly the largest number of sales would be expected. One might take the case of Henry Mackenzie, whose three principal works of ﬁction, beginning with The Man of Feeling (1771), were all published by the ﬁrm of Thomas Cadell in London, leaving the author sometimes as a kind of remote spectator of an autonomous commercial operation (Drescher: 87, 89). By contrast, in addition to the foundation of its new reviews, Edinburgh became preeminent in Britain with regard to two of the most fashionable literary products of the early nineteenth century: the longer narrative poem, and the three-decker novel. More especially, Edinburgh was widely regarded as the home of the ‘Scotch novel’, a term which in contemporary usage referred at least as much to source of manufacture as to subject-matter or authorship. Whereas Lockhart’s tendency is to interpret these changes in personal terms, as a product of the extraordinary drive and imagination shown by publishers and authors alike, clearly other more general factors were at work. Four more general determinants are worth noting in this respect. 1. Developments in the Scottish print/publishing industry. Surveying the ﬁeld primarily from the year 1837, James Bertram claimed that there were more booksellers (128) than barbers in Edinburgh, and ‘over eighty letter press printers’ (1893: 86, 90). More broadly, one might point to the generation of a complete infrastructure for the production of polite literature in Scotland, involving paper-making, printers with the capacity to produce sizeable works quickly, compositors skilled in setting such materials, and the house readers employed by publishers and the larger printers. 2. The growth of the indigenous market for literature. A key factor undoubtedly was the development of the Edinburgh New Town, with its concentration of professional and middle-class residents, and expansion later in the suburbs. One indication of the new readership for imaginative literature, particularly novels, is the spread of a new species of circulating library in these areas: compared with

literature in the marketplace

205

the old-style Mackay’s Edinburgh Circulating Library in the High Street, which held approximately 30 per cent ﬁction, Robert Kinnear’s newer establishment in Frederick Street consisted primarily of novels (some 70 per cent of holdings), the majority of these new issues. Subscription lists found in Edinburgh-published works point similarly both to an expanding home readership and a willingness to accept the novel as a respectable genre. Elsewhere, there are signs of a growing market for ﬁction in Glasgow and the West. According to Robert Cadell, who managed the distribution of an unprecedented 10,000 ﬁrst impression of Scott’s Rob Roy (1818), only a third of which was initially shipped to London, the ﬁrst delivery there was so large that it had to be sent by wagon (‘no Coach or Coaches could anything near hold them’), yet even then proved insu∞cient for a region that featured prominently in the novel (‘the great drain is to Glasgow’) (Garside 1983: 109). 3. Improved communications and publisher control. Whereas in the previous century it had taken up to three weeks for vessels to sail between Leith (the Edinburgh port) and the London docks, leaving writers such as Mackenzie uncertain as to when the generally very small proportion of an edition sent northward would arrive, by 1821 Scott was able to inform Samuel Rogers that ‘the steam-boat will bring you to Leith in Sixty hours’ (Letters VI: 469). Bulk consignments as large as 5,000 of the Edinburgh Review and new Waverley Novels, usually as sheets packed in bales, were by that time not uncommon. At the same time, it became increasingly possible to coordinate dates of publication in the two capitals, a facility particularly valuable to publishers in marketing ‘new’ works of literature, where there was likely to be a rush to procure copies. Improved communications no doubt also helped Scottish publishers maintain and extend connections with booksellers in Ireland and the demographically-expanding north of England. Publisher records of the period indicate that books were sent directly to these locations, making Edinburgh in the early decades of the nineteenth century (in print terms at least) a metropolitan centre matching in the geographical extensiveness of its home operations that of London. 4. National representations of Scotland. Here it is possible to point to a number of interconnecting elements: the improved image of Scotland, ﬁgured less as a site of conﬂict and fanaticism, and more as a source of romance; the growing interest within Scotland in antiquities and self-identity; and a burgeoning sense of Scotland as an energising source within the larger British union. The kind of

206

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

‘tartan fever’ which burst out in 1810, when the public were acutely aware of the activities of the Highland troops in the Peninsular War, and then more garishly with the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, though since interpreted in terms of distortion and regressive nostalgia, at the time reﬂected a positive e≠ort at rechannelling old loyalties for the purpose of a greater national cohesion. Both years can also be viewed as highpoints in Scottish literary production. In the genre of poetry the most powerful example of the success achievable from a Scottish base is provided by Walter Scott. At the start of his career it might have seemed that Scott was to follow the old pattern of publishing from London. His ﬁrst main literary success, the ballad collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3), though printed in Kelso by James Ballantyne, was initially managed by the ﬁrm of Cadell & Davies in the Strand on a half proﬁts basis, with the Edinburgh ﬁrms of Manners & Miller and Archibald Constable being apportioned only 100 of the 800 copies printed. In the event, however, the Scottish sale proved the more rapid, and Scott wrote to his main publishers for a further 100 copies to be sent back northward. In the case of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), his ﬁrst long narrative poem, Longmans (who had purchased the copyright of the Minstrelsy) were the primary publishers, though this time Constable & Co. had an active share, appearing as co-publisher on the imprint and e≠ectively managing the Scottish marketing. In the case of Marmion (1808), Constable was the primary publisher, having o≠ered Scott 1,000 guineas for the copyright, with William Miller and John Murray in London taking shares. Sales again exceeded expectations, notwithstanding a pounding from Je≠rey in the April issue of the Edinburgh Review: according to the estimate in Lockhart’s Memoirs of Scott, 31,000 copies were sold before the collected editions, and 50,000 overall by 1836 (II: 158). James Hogg in a letter to Scott of 2 May 1808 o≠ers an interesting snapshot view, noting how ‘[t]here were 240 copies of Marmion sold in Constables shop yesterday forenoon’ (86), this presumably referring to retail sales of the newly-issued octavo second edition, which followed in the path of the more grand quartos in which form Scott’s verse was ﬁrst released. A sense of the potential for Scottish publishing in the literary ﬁeld no doubt helped determine the setting-up in 1809 of John Ballantyne as a publisher in Hanover Street, and it is his ﬁrm (secretly co-owned by Scott) that appears ﬁrst on the imprint of The Lady of the Lake (1810), the Highland poem which in terms of its knock-on e≠ects (such as illustrations and dramatisations) was indisputably the most inﬂuential of Scott’s poems.

literature in the marketplace

207

Figure 4.1 The Lady of the Lake, 1810. The title-page of the ﬁrst (quarto) edition of The Lady of the Lake, published 8 May 1810 in Edinburgh, and issued 16 May in London. Examination shows that ‘Edinburgh’ appears there as a hallmark no fewer than three times, both as the main place of publication, and after the names of the main publisher (John Ballantyne & Co.) and the printer (James Ballantyne & Co.), both concerns in which Scott had a share as a hidden partner.

208

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

John Ballantyne & Co. similarly published in 1810 Joanna Baillie’s Family Legend: A Tragedy, which, with a prologue by Scott and epilogue by Henry Mackenzie, had received rapturous applause in the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, earlier in the same year, Scott in a letter to Lady Abercorn describing it as ‘entirely of Scotch manufacture’ (II: 286). Ballantyne was also co-publisher of John Wilson’s ﬁrst main literary excursion, The Isle of Palms, and Other Poems (1812). The failure of the ﬁrm, which withdrew from active publishing in 1813, no doubt stemmed from a variety of factors, including under-capitalisation, the inability of the over-heavy and often late Edinburgh Annual Register to make headway, hostility within the trade to a newcomer, and the di∞cult economic conditions of 1812–13, in addition to Ballantyne’s own ineptitude. In essence, however, the concept of a ﬁrm mixing in its list high-proﬁle literary works, antiquarian studies, and more workaday stock was not necessarily misguided; and Ballantyne’s failure was followed by a succession of other publishers and booksellers with new literary works in stock gravitating to the New Town main streets and squares. Other examples of Edinburgh-published poetry achieving British reputations for their authors include Thomas Campbell’s The Pleasures of Hope (seven editions 1799–1802, published by Mundell & Son in association with Longmans), and James Hogg’s The Queen’s Wake (1813), which somewhat fortuitously through the bankruptcy of its original publisher, John Goldie, fell into the hands of William Blackwood (and via him those of John Murray, Byron’s publisher, in London), bringing celebrity to its author for a period, if not commensurate proﬁt. Compared to poetry in the ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth century, home-produced ﬁction from Scotland was slow to emerge. Between 1770 and 1799 there were just seven new novels which showed Edinburgh as their primary place of publication, and none at all in the new century to 1807 (Garside 2000). The ﬁrst indication of a shift occurred with Elizabeth Hamilton’s didactic The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), which in bringing together three components – a Scottish setting, a Scottish printer and a Scottish publisher – might be said to foreshadow what was to become for a spell of time an almost commonplace association. More telling still, in adumbrating possibilities, was the success of Mary Brunton’s polite evangelical novel, SelfControl (1811), which was published by Manners & Miller, in association with Longmans, and became the best-seller of its season. The Longman Letter Books contain a succession of requests sent to Edinburgh for new editions to be printed, and spare copies to be sent down in the meantime, but there are also signs of an unprecedented

literature in the marketplace

209

sale for the novel in Scotland too. As the Scots Magazine for March 1811 commented: ‘We do not recollect even among the popular productions of the present day any one, the appearance of which excited a more immediate and general interest throughout this metropolis’ (203). And in context there can be little question as to which metropolis is meant. According to conventional accounts, it was the publication of Walter Scott’s Waverley in July 1814 that marked the arrival of the ‘Scotch novel’ proper, and there can be little question that the succession of anonymously authored (but widely recognised) titles that followed served as a forceful spearhead in the development of a fully-ﬂedged Scottish ﬁction industry. All the Waverley Novels carried the word Edinburgh at the head of the title-page imprint, followed in earlier instances by the legend ‘Printed by James Ballantyne and Co.’, this latter reﬂecting the author’s life-long insistence that his imaginative works should be printed in Edinburgh by Ballantyne’s ﬁrm. The prioritising of Edinburgh as the place of origin occurs even in those cases, such as Guy Mannering (1815), where Longmans were technically the managing publishers, though from The Antiquary (1816), when Constable had full management, its positioning normally reﬂected the joint reality of an Edinburgh printer and publisher. At the same time the rise of a national ﬁction in Scotland was clearly an event waiting to happen. An indication of this can be found in the number of claims made by fellow Scottish novelists to have been close to becoming instigators themselves, including reasonably legitimate ones by Hogg, Lockhart and John Galt, all of whom su≠ered rejections to proposals made to Constable. In fact, rather than acting as a spur to Scottish ﬁction, Constable in some respects can be seen to have acted more as a brake on output. In the years 1814 to his bankruptcy in 1826 his ﬁrm published only twenty-ﬁve new novels, the majority by Scott (or sponsored by him), and the Constable records show a number of proposals from aspiring writers being declined, the most common reasons for rejection being that novels were not normally undertaken by the concern and an all-consuming commitment to ‘the author of Waverley’. William Blackwood’s ﬁrst full taste of handling ﬁction occurred when he became Edinburgh publisher of Scott’s Tales of my Landlord (1816), shortly after having moved his premises to Princes Street in the New Town. Scott’s main purpose in changing publishers on this one occasion was to secure John Murray as the London publisher, and throughout their dealings Murray evidently regarded Blackwood primarily as his Edinburgh agent and only nominally having the book’s management. Blackwood nevertheless took a full half share of the ﬁrst and early subsequent editions, and records indicate Edinburgh sales for the most

210

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

part matched those generated from London. In 1818 Blackwood ventured further into ﬁction with Susan Ferrier’s Marriage and James Hogg’s The Brownie of Bodsbeck, with Murray taking a two-thirds share of each impression of 1,500, only to withdraw from promoting the second title when taking alarm at Hogg’s alleged improprieties. The height of productivity, however, occurs in the years 1821–5, when Blackwood published over twenty new novels from Edinburgh. In the 1820s Blackwood was the ﬁfth largest producer of new ﬁction titles in Britain and Ireland as a whole, the majority of his output being published with Thomas Cadell jnr in London, though the latter on this occasion was the subordinate partner. Additionally, unlike mass producers of ﬁction such as the Minerva Press, Blackwood’s titles were generally high-proﬁle products, issued in relatively large ﬁrst editions of 1,500–2,000, more often than not entering into subsequent editions, and for which Blackwood paid good money (culminating in the £1,000 advanced for Ferrier’s Inheritance (1824)). An important cog in the operation was Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which in addition to providing a source of material through previously serialised ﬁction, also helped shape a core audience, as well as providing employment for key personnel and a ﬂexible means of promoting Blackwood’s wares. Between 1820 and 1825 more than half of Blackwood’s titles were generated by just three authors, all intimately connected with the magazine – John Galt, Lockhart and Wilson; while as a whole the authorship was predominantly male, reﬂecting a masculinisation of the genre that had been initiated by Scott, and beyond that an increasing readiness among male readers to acknowledge (and buy) ﬁction as reading matter. Unquestionably the Blackwoodian phenomenon contributed signiﬁcantly to the heightened awareness of the ‘Scotch novel’ evident throughout Britain by the mid-1820s. In its notice of Lockhart’s Adam Blair, the London-based Monthly Review for May 1822 refers to ‘the vast forge of novels which within the last few years has been established in the Scottish capital’ (110). Symptomatic of the invasiveness of the trend, and perhaps also of an element of jealousy in the London trade, is Sarah Green’s Scotch Novel Reading (1824), published by A. K. Newman at the Minerva Press, which points to an undiscriminating willingness to accept any kind of incomprehensible matter from the northern presses. Encouraged by the vogue a number of other Edinburgh booksellers moved into the ﬁeld, most notably Oliver & Boyd, who published some ﬁfteen titles from Edinburgh in 1819–29, including Hogg’s Winter Evening Tales (1820), this concern normally operating in association with the ﬁrm of Whittaker in London. In all, more than 130 new titles were published from Scotland in the period

literature in the marketplace

211

1800-29, only a handful of these coming from non-Edinburgh locations, with output approaching 15 per cent of total British production in the optimum years in the mid-1820s. In the later 1820s, however, production starts to decline, while only seventeen Edinburgh-managed novels are traceable in the immediate pre-Victorian years of 1830–6, with a further four titles originating from Glasgow. A number of reasons might be adduced for this. The failures of 1825–6, noticeably Constable who was now publicly recognised as being over-committed to Scott, no doubt dissuaded fellow booksellers from taking on uncertain literary commitments, even if Robert Cadell (as Constable’s successor) still encouraged new work from Scott as a means of keeping him in the public eye. Blackwood by the end of the 1820s was concentrating mainly on scientiﬁc and other informative material, his ﬁrm’s few ﬁction titles invariably stemming directly from the Magazine. Frustrated by Blackwood’s failure to back a series of his collected ﬁction, Hogg turned to the London publisher James Cochrane for his Altrive Tales (1832); then, in the wake of Cochrane’s bankruptcy, eventually found a constricting outlet in the Glasgow-based Blackie & Son, whose output prior to the posthumous Tales and Sketches by the Ettrick Shepherd (1836–7) had been mainly evangelical and instructional in nature, much of it in the form of number publication. The removal of key ﬁgures such as Lockhart and Je≠rey to the central political stage in London during the Reform years has been well recorded; less so that of a number of more ‘artisan’ Scottish writers, such as the Paisley-born Andrew Picken, attracted by the increasingly centralised and diverse London book trade. All ﬁve works of ﬁction by Picken in the 1830s, some with strongly Scottish materials, were issued by London publishers alone. Seen from one vantage point, it is hard not to sense something of a vacuum forming in Scotland in the wake of the Reform Bills and the death of Scott in 1832, at least so far as fashionable literary production is concerned. On the other hand, the emergence of alternative vehicles, as with the popular collected sets of Scott, and periodicals combining entertainment and instruction such as the weekly Edinburgh Literary Journal (1828–32), point to the early realisation within Scotland of the opportunities o≠ered by an extended popular market. As the following Case Studies amply illustrate, the Scottish writer also remained at the forefront of English writing, often continuing to associate with Scottish publishing houses even when operating from the more ‘central’ London literary base. Moreover, as the ﬁnal essay in this sequence argues, Scottish literature was to play a major role in determining by the end of the century a new Scoto-British sense of cultural identity.

AUTHORSHIP: SIX CASE STUDIES Walter Scott and the Management of Copyright Jane Millgate

W

hile the general issue of copyright and intellectual property in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has recently received a great deal of attention, evidence derived from the detailed contractual arrangements entered into by individual authors has been harder to ﬁnd. In Scott’s own case the relevant materials are widely scattered, but it is nonetheless possible both to establish his general views on author–publisher relations and to tease out the speciﬁcs of many of his individual contracts. And since it is often argued that he served as a model or a warning for subsequent authors, it seems useful to establish just what he said and did about the disposition of literary property. The individual volumes of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels have now provided us with considerable detail about the contractual negotiations for his novels up to the ﬁnal magnum opus collected edition of 1829–33, but for the important and more varied initial phase of his career – when he achieved the enormous celebrity as a poet that came to an end only with the emergence of Byron – the evidence has not been assembled. In the 1790s, at the outset of Scott’s publishing career, the Statute of Anne vesting copyright ownership in authors for fourteen, extendable to twenty-eight, years had been in e≠ect for over eighty years, and some of its most signiﬁcant provisions had been fully tested in the courts (Rose 1993). The range of possibilities available was well understood, and four basic methods of publication prevailed. Books could be sold in advance by subscription – in which case, though printing and distribution costs were not incurred until there was an assurance of their being covered, there was in most instances little likelihood of any signiﬁcant proﬁt accruing to the author. Books could, on the other hand, be published for the author. In such situations the publisher kept an account

literature in the marketplace

213

of all the costs associated with production, advertising and sales, added in his own commission for overseeing the work, and then sent the author either what remained as proﬁt or a bill for the amount by which costs had exceeded sales. The disadvantage of this mode of publication was that the cards were all in the publisher’s hand, and there was no incentive for e∞ciencies and economies in production or distribution costs. A third and more widely used method involved the outright sale of the copyright, in which case the publisher paid the author an agreed sum, pocketed the proﬁts (if any), and retained the right to print new editions during the legal term of copyright. This system had considerable attractions for the publisher if the work sold well, while the author had the advantage of receiving cash up front without having to wait months or years until an edition was sold and the publisher’s accounts were complete. The disadvantages were the high up-front costs for publishers and the loss of longer-term income for authors. The fourth method of publication was on a shared proﬁts basis, either for an unlimited number of copies during the term of copyright or for a ﬁxed number of copies in one or more editions. The great attraction of shared proﬁts was that it gave author and publisher a common interest in minimising costs and delays and pursuing maximum sales. The disadvantages for the author were the need to wait for payment until accounts were completed and the possibility that a dishonest publisher could so exaggerate costs as to erode or even eliminate proﬁts. Scott’s long experience of many di≠erent aspects of contemporary publishing made him well aware of the di∞culties facing authors who had neither reputations nor ﬁnancial resources and therefore found themselves at a disadvantage when bargaining with potential publishers. In March 1827, writing to Lord Montagu about the precarious situation of James Hogg, he commented: In Bookselling matters an author must either be the conjuror who commands the devil or the witch who serves him and few are those whose situation is su∞ciently independent to enable them to assume the higher character. And this is injurious to the indigent author in every respect for not only is he obliged to turn his pen to every various kind of composition & so to injure himself with the public by writing hastily and on subjects unﬁtted for his genius but moreover these honest gentlemen the booksellers from a natural association consider the books as of least value which they ﬁnd they can get at least expence of copy-money and therefore are proportionally careless in pushing the sale of the work. Whereas a

214

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

good round sum out of their purse like a moderate rise of rent on a farm raises the work thus acquired in their own eyes and serves as a spur to make them clear away every channel by which they can discharge their quires upon the public. So much for bookselling the most ticklish and unsafe and hazardous of all professions scarcely with the exception of horse-jockeyship. (Letters IV: 461–2) Inevitably, however, Scott’s early and continuing success as an author brought him many ‘how-to-do-it’ enquiries, and in responding to such requests he sought always to be directly helpful rather than vaguely sympathetic. The idea of publication by subscription he rather grandly rejected in a letter to Anna Seward of 22 December 1802: The mode of publishing by subscription is one which in itself can carry nothing degrading & which in many of the more extensive & high priced publications is perhaps essentially necessary. Still however it is asking the public to become bound to pay for what they have not seen, & carries with it if not the reality at least the appearance of personal solicitation & personal obligation. (Letters I: 163) He never advocated publication on behalf of the author, and he was decidedly unenthusiastic about the early outright sale of copyrights. On 1 October 1807 he warned his friend Southey against selling the copyright of Madoc: ‘I hope you have not, and don’t mean to part with the copyright. I do not think Wordsworth and you understand the bookselling animal well enough, and wish you would one day try my friend Constable, who would give any terms for a connexion with you’ (I: 387). His usual response to such queries was, in fact, to advocate shared proﬁts as the best available option. Discussing with Anna Seward later in 1807 the poor sales of Southey’s poem, he insisted upon the superiority of shared-proﬁts arrangements even while acknowledging the deftness with which publishers could work them to their own advantage: ‘It is the tale of the fox that went a hunting with the lion on condition of equal division of the spoil. And yet I do not quite blame the booksellers, when I consider the very singular nature of their mystery . . . They are the only tradesmen in the world who professedly & by choice deal in what is calld a pig in a poke’ (Letters I: 379). In January 1816, Scott was still recommending shared proﬁts to his friend James Skene; and again in March 1817 and December 1819 he advised Joanna Baillie (Letters IV: 163–4; 410–13) and Washington Irving that he thought this much the best arrangement, telling Irving: ‘There is something fair in this, and advantageous for both parties; for

literature in the marketplace

215

the author receives a share of proﬁt exactly in proportion to the popularity of his work and the bookseller is relieved of the risk which always attends a purchase of copyright, and has more rapid returns of his capital’ (Letters VI: 45). In cases where Scott felt that his correspondents might ﬁnd a sharedproﬁts arrangement troublesome, he consistently recommended that they not part with the entire copyright but only with the right to a single edition. In March 1808 he advised Anna Seward to sell Constable an edition of her poems with a speciﬁed number of copies, adding the tip that if she stated her price in guineas she would end up, even after discounting, with ‘the neat sum in pounds’ and thus alleviate the disadvantages of being paid in post-dated bills.1 And in 1817 he urged on Joanna Baillie the advantages both to oneself and to one’s heirs of selling editions rather than copyrights: ‘I sell editions but never of late years copyrights and submit to some temporary loss to keep up my right in these things the value of which may be supposed to be increased after the death of the author’ (Letters IV: 412). Despite the general consistency of his advice to others, Scott’s own early practice was considerably more various. He seems, in fact, to have been primarily concerned to make publishing arrangements that would enhance the monetary value of a work over a fairly immediate time-span. The modern concept of an author’s ‘moral rights’ simply did not exist in Scott’s day, and he seems to have accepted with complete equanimity the appropriation of his work by composers, dramatists, opera librettists, and so on. One needs only to look at the enormous number of ‘derivatives’ listed in the massive Todd and Bowden bibliography to recognise the freedom with which Scott’s poetry and ﬁction was exploited. The only form of supplementary exploitation over which he could exercise any control was the appearance of his own individually published lyrics, articles, reviews, introductions, etc., in collected form, and although it was his practice to sell the copyrights of his short pieces he was careful to reserve the right of collection to himself alone – so that he forbade, for example, any reprinting of the ‘Lives’ he contributed to Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library separately from the novels they introduced.2 In negotiating terms for his books Scott was from the beginning clear-eyed, and tough to the point of arrogance. Even for his very ﬁrst – and very small – volume, the 1796 translations of two ballads by the German poet Gottfried August Bürger, his total lack of a literary 1 2

Scott to Seward, 14 March 1808, Houghton Library, Harvard, Lowell autograph. NLS MS 23230, fol. 95

216

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

reputation did not prevent him from insisting upon some form of payment from the publisher (Lockhart I: 246). The contract does not survive, but since in May 1798 Scott told Matthew Lewis, who wanted to reprint the poems, that he had applied to his publishers for permission ‘which they have granted’,3 it would appear that Manners and Miller had bought the copyright. And when in May 1798 he proposed a much grander translation project to the old established ﬁrm of Cadell & Davies his expressed intention not to be exorbitant in his claims for the reward of his own labour certainly did not extend to a renunciation of all remuneration. Given that the proposal was for a ‘German Theatre in imitation of the well known Theatre Allemand to consist we shall suppose of 12 Vols Octo each Volume comprehending three plays’, it is not altogether surprising that Cadell & Davies turned it down.4 Following the failure of this ambitious scheme Scott found himself having to be grateful when Lewis o≠ered to get just one of his play translations published at the somewhat ignominious rate of £25, with the understanding that a further £10 would be paid in the unlikely event of a second edition’s being called for.5 The failure of these early projects to attract signiﬁcant notice – or even to achieve publication – might have been expected to introduce a certain di∞dence into Scott’s further dealings with publishers. But in the spring of 1800 – his ﬁnancial situation improved by his accession to the position of Sheri≠ of Selkirk and his literary conﬁdence enhanced by his growing friendships with such wealthy and established antiquaries as Lewis, Richard Heber and George Ellis – he again approached Cadell & Davies with a proposal for the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. This time he was successful, the ﬁrm entering into a shared-proﬁts agreement for an 800-copy two-volume edition that appeared – after many delays caused by the discovery of new material and Scott’s insistence on numerous revisions – in February 1802 at the substantial price of 18s for the two volumes. Within two months of publication, however, Scott was inviting Cadell & Davies to o≠er £500 for the entire copyright covering the two volumes already published and a third volume that was as yet only projected.6 When that proposal was declined at the end of April 1802 Scott felt free to open the negotiations with Longman that resulted by October in a formal agreement by which Longman bought the copyright of the three Minstrelsy volumes for 3 4 5 6

PML MA 1432. Univ. of Rochester, Gordon ms. NLS MS 3874, fol. 49. NLS Acc 9971.

literature in the marketplace

217

£500, the price originally sought.7 Two months later, when Cadell & Davies sent Scott their accounting for the ﬁrst edition of the Minstrelsy together with his £78 10s share of the proﬁts, they pointed out, a triﬂe acidly, that ‘The Publication would have been somewhat more proﬁtable both to you and ourselves, but for the premature Advertisement of a new and improved Edition, which, of Course, instantly made the remaining Copies unsalable’ (Millgate 2000).8 Because the Minstrelsy sold slowly it is easy enough to understand Scott’s eagerness to sell the copyright early and so gain access to money for which he might otherwise have had to wait a considerable time. With The Lay of the Last Minstrel, on the other hand, published by Longman on a half-proﬁts basis in January 1805, the 750-copy ﬁrst edition moved o≠ briskly, notwithstanding the quarto format and the high price of £1 5s. Even so, sale of the entire copyright was already under discussion by June 1805, and after a certain amount of haggling Scott ﬁnally agreed to accept £500.9 Since Scott had made a side-deal with Longman by which they paid him an additional £100 for the right to publish a volume consisting mainly of the original ballads from the Minstrelsy – which they had of course already bought – he doubtless felt that he had struck an uncommonly good bargain. But given the poem’s subsequent popularity – Lockhart estimates that nearly 44,000 copies were sold before the appearance of the collected edition of 1830 – it is evident that Longman came o≠ much the better in the end. Indeed, they indirectly acknowledged as much by giving Scott an additional ex gratia payment of £100, bringing his direct earnings as author of the Lay to a total of £769 6s (Memoirs II: 35; Poetical Works VI: 30). As part or, sometimes, full owner of the Ballantyne printing ﬁrm, he of course continued to proﬁt indirectly from the poem’s popularity. Given his experience with the Lay, Scott might have been expected not only to seek shared-proﬁts arrangements for the early editions of his next poem but also to extend the period over which he retained ownership. Yet on 30 January 1807 he sold Constable the entire copyright of the largely unwritten Marmion – not, it would appear, as a matter of deliberate policy but simply because he was in urgent need of cash to repay the debts resulting from his brother Tom’s mishandling of the ﬁnancial a≠airs of the Marquess of Abercorn. Constable paid the full 1,000 guineas in a promissory note post-dated 2 June 1807, and 7 8 9

NLS MS 851, fol. 277; LA 278 Copyright Ledger. NLS MS 3874, fol. 198. NLS MS 3875 fols 118–19.

218

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

payable in full three months later, that is, at the beginning of September 1807.10 Assuming that Scott was correct in telling Anna Seward that discounted guineas were realisable as pounds, it would appear that he had a note worth £1,000 in his hands many months ahead of Marmion’s publication in February 1808. The payment was large enough to attract the satirical attention of the young Lord Byron, whose English Bards and Scotch Reviewers accused Scott of having written ‘for lucre, not for fame’, but since Lockhart puts the pre-1830 sales of Marmion at 31,000 copies, it would appear that the publisher once again had considerably the better of the bargain (Memoirs II: 159). The detailed ﬁnancial arrangements arrived at for Scott’s next two poems are unclear. He reportedly received 2,000 guineas for the copyright of The Lady of the Lake (1810) and £3,000 for that of Rokeby (1812) (Memoirs II: 291; Letters III: 242), but because the primary publisher for both poems was the ﬁrm of John Ballantyne & Co., of which Scott himself was the principal owner, the ostensibly outright sale of the copyrights cannot be taken at face value. If Scott did sell them it must have been, e≠ectively, to himself. Since, however, a share in each poem was sold on to another publisher – William Miller in the case of The Lady of the Lake, Longman in the case of Rokeby – Scott can be said to have parted outright with at least a portion of both poems. The contract for Scott’s last major poem, The Lord of the Isles, was closer to that for the Lay than to the contract for any of the intervening volumes, and on this occasion Scott did choose to retain a ﬁnancial interest in the work over an extended period. He entered with Constable into a complicated shared proﬁts agreement that covered only the editions to be published in 1815 and 1816 and reserved to himself the right to negotiate new terms for subsequent editions or even to sell the entire copyright (Letters III: 474). Constable would have preferred to purchase the copyright at the outset, but Scott declined the o≠er in terms that identiﬁed just those advantages of initial shared-proﬁts agreements that he had spelled out for his friends: I mentioned to you the weighty reasons I have for retaining a moiety of this copyright, and I assure you all good jockeys chuse that their rider should have bets depending upon the issue of the race. Upon this moiety I only wish to have half proﬁts accepted for on publication at such a date as will meet your own returns from 10

EUL La.III. 584 fols 40–41.

literature in the marketplace

219

the booksellers, – you and Longman managing the whole in your own way. (Letters III: 469) It is tempting to read the contract for The Lord of the Isles as evidence of Scott’s having ﬁnally absorbed the lesson taught ten years earlier by the consequences of his parting prematurely with the copyright of the Lay. Throughout his career as a novelist it would be his standard practice never to sell the complete copyright until some years had elapsed. But it could easily have been otherwise. Only weeks before he negotiated the contract for The Lord of the Isles Scott would willingly have parted with the entire copyright of Waverley had Constable’s o≠er been not £700 but £1,000, the price paid for Marmion (Memoirs III: 124–5). The ﬁrst edition of Waverley, appearing on 7 July 1814, consisted of only 1,000 copies, but by the end of the year three additional editions had been called for, and Scott did not part with the copyright until 1819, when he sold it to Constable along with the copyrights of all the novels before Ivanhoe and his own shares of the poetry copyrights for a total of £12,000 (Constable III: 122). He thus established what became his standard practice as a novelist of negotiating payment for a ﬁrst edition of a ﬁxed size and subsequently selling the copyrights in groups to Constable, who then brought out new collected editions in a range of formats. There is, perhaps, a moral to this tale beyond the simple demonstration that those who give advice don’t necessarily follow it precisely themselves. It has become the practice to view Scott’s dealings with his publishers in somewhat cynical terms as a continued battle to wring the maximum out of every situation no matter what the consequences. There is ample evidence, however, both from his words of advice and from the actual details of his own contracts, to show that Scott saw the relationship between author and publisher as essentially mutual and interdependent and that he recognised the ﬁnancial and business pressures under which the booksellers laboured. He always stressed the importance of ﬁnding an appropriate publisher, and clearly had his own principal publisher, Archibald Constable, as the model he had speciﬁcally in mind. Publishers such as Longman, Blackwood and Murray seemed to lack the energy or commitment to push a popular work – what he described to Joanna Baillie as ‘a stirring article’ (Letters IV: 411) – but Constable was passionate, energetic, adventurous and volatile, prepared to take extraordinary risks, ﬁnancial and otherwise, for those books and authors he believed to be at once saleable and worthwhile. On the occasion of Constable’s death in 1827 Scott spoke of him as ‘a Prince of Booksellers’, perhaps ‘too sanguine . . . and not always

220

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

calculating his means to his objects with mercantile accuracy’ but knowing ‘more of the business of a bookseller in planning and executing popular works than any man of his time’ (Journal, 331–2). And at the very end of his career, in a Quarterly article of February 1831, it was clearly Constable to whom Scott primarily referred when praising the kind of publisher ‘who adds to complete acquaintance with the commercial parts of his trade, a liberal and enlightened familiarity with literature’ (Misc. XXI: 201). Scott recognised only too clearly that such a combination of talents was far from universal, and it was Constable’s successor, Robert Cadell, that he evidently had in mind when making Chrystal Croftangry, the narrator of Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), decide against consulting his publisher on a matter of literary merit on the grounds that the latter ‘understands his business too well, and follows it too closely, to desire to enter into literary discussions, wisely considering, that he who has to sell books has seldom leisure to read them’(148). The relationship between Scott and Constable, for all its vagaries and occasional animosities, had been quite di≠erent – not just a convenient business connection but a genuine partnership, so that the terms shared publishing and shared proﬁts acquired a meaning that extended far beyond the realm of accounting.

literature in the marketplace

221

Figure 4.2 Letter from Constable to Scott. Constable conﬁrms the purchase of Marmion. The price o≠ered for the copyright – 1,000 guineas – was unprecedented and derived in part from the Edinburgh publisher’s wish to be associated ‘for the honour & Glory of Scotland’ with a poem on one of the most lamented events in Scottish history. At this early stage in the poem’s planning and composition the title was still ‘Flodden Field’, but on its publication more than a year later this was combined with the name of the remarkable protagonist, Marmion, precursor of those dark romantic ﬁgures subsequently taken up by Byron.11 11

EUL La.III. 584, fol. 40.

Waverley and the National Fiction Revolution Peter Garside Writing to Archibald Constable on 4 February 1814, prior to publication of Walter Scott’s Waverley; or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since the following July, James Ballantyne asked whether he should order paper for an edition of 750 or 1,000 copies:12 a modest amount considering the runaway success achieved by the same author with his long poems, such as Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). However, the printer’s caution was not entirely unjustiﬁed. Scott’s star as a poet had begun to wane, and, moreover, the standing of the novel as a genre was at a low ebb, the average edition extending to only a few hundred copies, a fair proportion of which were destined for the circulating libraries. Nor was there any clear precedent for the successful launch of a novel from Edinburgh, and Scotland stood well behind Ireland and even Wales as a ﬁctional setting. Two further disadvantages were Scott’s insistence on anonymity and the fact that the publication date threatened to fall within the summer months, known to the trade as ‘the dead season’. Nevertheless Constable, who had yet to manage a new ﬁction title, sanguinely opted for the larger number, though taking care to hedge against the risk by o≠ering 700 copies to Longman & Co. in London. Longmans in turn agreed to accept these only on condition that unsold copies could be returned after six months.13 In the event, the novel exceeded all expectations, breaking the mould for the production of ﬁction at that time, and heralding the rise of the phenomenon known by the 1820s as ‘the Scotch novel’. Early in August Longmans reported that only 150 of their share remained, the work being ‘spoken of in the highest terms’, by which time Constable had 12 13

RCP MS 23230, fol. 54. ACP MS 789, fol. 86; LA I, 99, no.5.

literature in the marketplace

223

already commissioned a second edition of 2,000 copies (Scott Letters III: 461).14 According to Scott’s son-in-law and biographer, J. G. Lockhart, in his Memoirs of Scott, this was followed by two further editions of 1,000 each in the autumn, and three more (totalling between them 4,500) in the next three years, with a ﬁnal eighth edition of 2,000 in 1821. In early collected editions, published 1819–25, another 11,000 had been disposed of; while, through its reappearance in the magnum opus collected edition of the Waverley Novels, commencing 1829, Lockhart continues, a further 40,000 sales had been generated by 1837 (III: 296). Emphasising the work’s innovative ‘Scottishness’, Henry Cockburn in Memorials of His Time recalled the ‘instant and universal impression’ created amongst the earliest readers in Edinburgh: ‘The unexpected newness of the thing, the profusion of original characters, the Scotch language, Scotch scenery, Scotch men and women, the simplicity of the writing, and the graphic force of the descriptions, all struck us as with an electric shock of delight (280–1).

The emergence of the text The sudden success achieved by Waverley nevertheless belies a complicated composition history, characterised by protracted experimentation, crises of conﬁdence, and unstable publishing conditions. Most traditional commentaries have described two phases of writing: the ﬁrst occurring in 1805, and represented by the early ‘English’ chapters of the narrative; the second and much larger part dating from 1813–14, and covering the more extensive Scottish sections of the novel, in which Edward Waverley visits the Highlands, is drawn into the 1745 Jacobite Rising, and then ﬁnally becomes integrated into quotidian AngloScottish society. In fact, as investigations have shown (Garside 1986; 1991a), there is no concrete evidence to support an active intervention in 1805 – which, if this were the case, would place the inception of the novel before the innovative ‘Irish’ ﬁctions of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson. Scott’s situating of the opening narrative voice at ‘this present 1st November, 1805’ (4) is more proﬁtably seen as a ﬁctional device, allowing the two-generation distance indicated by the sub-title, while echoing the date on which Charles Edward Stuart commenced his ill-fated campaign into England. By contrast, there are a number of strong circumstantial reasons for believing that the introductory chapters of the novel as they now exist were drafted in 1808, in the wake of Marmion, and parallel with a 14

LA I, 99, no. 10;

224

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

projected 20-volume set of classic ﬁction to be published by John Murray. A whole variety of echoes in the ﬁrst four chapters – including a parodic survey of contemporary ﬁctional modes, as well as a possible riposte to Francis Je≠rey’s critique of Marmion as a pseudo-romance in the Edinburgh Review of April 1808 – point to Scott’s situation at that stage. Especially telling, too, is the a∞nity between the account of Waverley’s ‘education’ and Scott’s own fragmentary ‘Ashestiel’ Memoir, which is dated at the head ‘26th April 1808’, and which is written on similar paper to the earliest surviving parts of Waverley. Granted the starting-point occurred at this point, then Scott can be seen as ﬁnding a kind of security in a ﬁctionally more familiar English country-house setting, even if the introductory chapter seems to anticipate an eventual change of locale by pointing to ‘favourable opportunities of contrast . . . a≠orded . . . by the state of society in the northern part of the island’ (5). The ﬁrst clear surviving record of Waverley’s existence is a letter from James Ballantyne to Scott dated 15 September 1810, responding to a small section sent for evaluation, most probably the ﬁrst four chapters. Ballantyne’s main advice was for Scott to go on, and there are signs in the ﬁfth chapter of Scott responding to Ballantyne’s criticisms, with him then setting up in the following two chapters the situation whereby Waverley can be stationed in Scotland and proceed to his stay with the Jacobite Baron Bradwardine at Tully-Veolan close to the Highland line. The unparalleled success of The Lady of the Lake, to which Scott in one account later attributed his undertaking the novel, had helped turn a partiality for Highlanders – at the time in action in the Peninsular War – into a national craze; and Scott had just returned from a conﬁdence-boosting tour of the Highlands and Western Isles. Another indication of Scott’s engagement at this point is a letter of 29 September 1810 to William Erskine, his closest literary conﬁdant, inviting him to stay at Ashestiel, with a view to consulting ‘about Waverley’.15 How far Scott proceeded at this stage is uncertain, but there are a number of reasons for believing that he carried on up to the central Highland scenes featuring Fergus and Flora Mac-Ivor. Underlying uncertainty about the advisability of a male-authored Scottish novel, and more particularly an unease in handling Gaelic materials, may have played a part in his discontinuing the narrative; though the most likely factor is Scott’s decision to turn to another long poem, in this instance Rokeby (1813), as the surest means of ﬁnancing his new home at Abbotsford. A determination to publish in the winter season of 1811–12 15

NLS 23141, fol. 131.

literature in the marketplace

225

is nevertheless apparent in the listing of ‘Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since, in Three Volumes, 12mo’ as a new publication in the bookseller John Ballantyne’s Catalogue of Books issued in September 1811.16 Notwithstanding the well-known anecdote of Scott’s about the discovery of the ‘missing’ manuscript while searching for ﬁshing-tackle, there can be little doubt that his decision to reactivate Waverley was largely born in exigency. Rokeby had failed to match the success of earlier poems; and, after the ﬁnancial collapse of John Ballantyne & Co., Scott badly needed to re-establish relations with Archibald Constable. While the novel was ﬁrst advertised, as ‘in the press’, in the Edinburgh Evening Courant for 27 January 1814, printing in earnest appears not to have started until March or April, and it is most likely around then that printed passages were circulated amongst the Edinburgh literati, and the completed ﬁrst volume used to secure a deal with Constable. Scott’s immediate post-publication letters to his English friend J. B. S. Morritt, however, indicate that the last two volumes were written in a sudden burst in June 1814, with Scott back in Edinburgh for the legal term, and conveniently close to the other main players in the production process. In this respect, Scott can be considered to have completed the greater part of his novel during a highly exhilarating public moment at the end of the long Napoleonic War. Much of this new conﬁdence can be sensed in the ﬁnal phase of narrative, which works hard to suggest the e∞cacy of a new Anglo-Scottish alliance, as symbolised in the ‘union’ between Waverley and Rose Bradwardine, and the restoration of Tully-Veolan through the good graces of the English o∞cer-gentleman Colonel Talbot.

A literary success On its ﬁrst publication in Edinburgh on 7 July 1814, at the premium price of a guinea a set, Waverley undoubtedly beneﬁted from this new wave of national conﬁdence. According to James Ballantyne, in a letter to Constable early in August, the novel everywhere was ‘the theme of universal eulogy’, and it was likely another 2,000 copies would be needed in addition to the second edition of that size almost completed.17 Lockhart’s account of the succession of three-volume editions that followed, while generally correct in outline, in some respects tends to obscure a number of interesting elements concerning the novel’s production and reception in the early years. Surviving publishing records 16 17

O&B Acc. 5000/1391. RCP MS 23230, fol. 59.

226

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

provide an accurate record of genuine new editions, in other words ones for which the type was reset. 2nd edition 3rd edition 5th edition 6th edition 7th edition 8th edition

2,000 2,000 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,000

August 1814 October 1814 August 1815 June 1816 November 1817 1821

The sum-total (including the ﬁrst edition) of 11,500 copies is witness to Scott’s success in securing actual individual purchasers for his works, and furthermore indicates a new readiness amongst male readers to accept the novel as a respectable genre. Yet sales of the novel were not uniformly impressive, nor was there necessarily a steady division of success between Edinburgh and London. The ‘fourth’ edition in reality represents a remarketing of the third with new title-pages, in the wake of Je≠rey’s generally supportive notice in the Edinburgh Review for November 1814, which was widely quoted in newspaper advertisements for this ‘edition’. Though publishing records are incomplete, there are signs that with the early subsequent editions, sales by Longmans sometimes lagged proportionately behind those of Constable, itself an indication of Scotland’s new capacity to support an indigenous ﬁction industry. In comparison, the eighth edition not only seems to have been targeted primarily at the southern trade, but also appears to have been the work of an as yet unidentiﬁed London printer, this constituting a rare circumvention of Scott’s insistence that his literary works should be printed exclusively by James Ballantyne & Co. in Edinburgh. In the years to 1819, Waverley was followed by a sequence of novels, all set in a Scotland of the recent past, and (notwithstanding the adoption of a new pseudonym and di≠erent publisher for the ﬁrst series of Tales of My Landlord (1816)) increasingly viewed by reviewers and the reading public as a generic body of historical ﬁction, notable for its depictions of national ‘manners’, and identiﬁable if not with absolute certainty as by Walter Scott. With Rob Roy (1818), where Constable had the management and Longmans only a third share, the ﬁrst impression consisted of 10,000 copies, released in two tranches, the publisher’s conﬁdence no doubt boosted by the sales achieved incrementally by predecessors such as Waverley. After a falling out with Longmans, Constable’s ﬁrm appeared alone on the title page of the the second series of Tales of My Landlord (1818; comprising The Heart of Mid-Lothian); then in association with the London ﬁrm of Hurst, Robinson & Co. for

literature in the marketplace

227

the third series of Tales (including The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose) published in the summer of 1819. Owing to the limited geographical scope of copyright, direct sales of the Waverley Novels in Scott’s lifetime (and beyond) were largely conﬁned to Britain and Ireland. Waverley was ﬁrst published in North America in Boston and in New York in 1815, with a French translation (of the fourth edition) following in 1818, and a German translation in 1821. However, some extra proﬁts were made by the publishers through the supply from about 1818 of advance copy of new novels in the form of proof sheets to American booksellers, notably Carey & Lea in Philadelphia (Kaser), as well as to agents of continental publishers for rapid translation into French and German. By the early 1820s copies were being shipped to the British colonies, those for India being sent via London in specially sealed boxes. With Scott’s turning to medieval English material with Ivanhoe (1819), for which the ‘author of Waverley’ nomenclature was nevertheless retained, the main reprintings of earlier titles are found in the form of collected sets. Having purchased the copyright of Scott’s novels to date, Constable brought out ﬁve di≠erent editions of Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley, whose format and prices reﬂect an aim to exploit di≠erent levels of readership. These comprise two octavo sets (1819, 1822) in twelve volumes, at £7 4s; two duodecimo sets (1821, 1825), in sixteen volumes, at £6 in boards; and an 18mo set in twelve volumes at £4 4s in boards in 1823. As far as can be ascertained, the total number of these sets produced was 11,500. One distinctive feature is the use of illustrations, at ﬁrst conﬁned to vignette title-pages in the earlier sets, though the 1823 ‘miniature’ set also includes twelve frontispieces drawn by C. R. Leslie, all carrying the imprint of Hurst, Robinson & Co., whose function by this stage was e≠ectively that of a bulk distributor in London. An exceptionally large impression of 5,000 was ordered of this set, the main part of which went to London, with Constable holding out hopes of a new ‘large class of readers’ as purchasers.18 The ultimate expression of Constable’s sense of an extended middleclass readership, however, is the magnum opus collected set of all Scott’s ﬁction, though as a result of Constable’s bankruptcy in 1826 it was his partner Robert Cadell who saw the project through and became its main beneﬁciary. Published under the mantle title Waverley Novels, and issued in monthly cloth-bound 18mo volumes priced at 5s each, the series was inaugurated by Waverley which appeared in two volumes, 18

ACP MS 677, fol. 60.

228

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 4.3 Waverley frontispiece. An important distinguishing feature of the magnum opus set was the much wider use than hitherto of illustrations, each of the forty-eight volumes featuring a title-page illustration and a separate steel-engraved frontispiece. The two frontispiece plates in Waverley depict set-pieces in the novel, Flora Mac-Ivor with her harp at Glennaquoich (seen here) and Baron Bradwardine reading prayers before the Battle of Prestonpans. According to a letter from Cadell to Scott in 1831, ‘Without plates 5000 less of the Waverley Novels would have sold’ (Scott Letters XI: 493n).

literature in the marketplace

229

swollen by new introductory and annotatory materials, published together on 1 June 1829. While clearly projected at the full British market, production remained ﬁrmly based in Edinburgh, and involved processes such as the use of stereotype plates and, extensively from about the sixteenth volume, steam presses (Millgate 1987). Initially projected at 12,000, sales soared towards 30,000 per volume, and when completed in 1833, the year after Scott’s death, the set formed forty-eight volumes, providing the basis of all subsequent editions in the nineteenth century. By its completion the magnum enterprise had revolutionised British ﬁction in a number of inﬂuential ways. Through the identiﬁcation of a series of works with a celebrated individual, Scott and his publishers had transformed the idea of the author as it was understood in the public mind. By creating a sense of serial homogeneity, not always apparent when the constituent titles were emerging, the Waverley Novels had reinvented the concept of the ‘Collected Works’ as a commercial imperative. And, ﬁnally, through the use of a highly sophisticated paratext – including elaborate illustrations, detailed explanatory notes and historical introductions – Scott’s oeuvre as a prose novelist presented itself as an already canonised body of texts having national importance.

The Waverley phenomenon In other respects, the Waverley Novels had become a truly multi-media phenomenon, with Scott and his publishers having at best only limited control of their o≠spring. In the case of Waverley itself some of the spino≠s were relatively slow to appear, compared with works published at the height of the Scott craze in the 1820s. But it is possible to point to rapidly-produced sheet music based on songs from the novel, as well as to at least three chapbook condensations in the early 1820s, and a number of dramatic productions in the same decade, with Waverley enjoying popular success particularly on the Scottish provincial stage (Todd and Bowden 1998: 323–34; Bolton: 49–55). Among sets of illustrations sold independently can be counted the Edinburgh-based William Allan’s Illustrations of the Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley (1820), which includes two key scenes from Waverley, and whose plates are sometimes found subsequently added to the original editions of the Scottish novels. One of Scott’s own major sources also became more visible through Robert Jamieson’s edition in 1818 of Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, which includes additional materials supplied

230

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

by Scott, but whose Introduction pours unqualiﬁed praise on the Highlanders in a way out of keeping with Scott’s own more antiromantic outlook in the novel. Scott’s inﬂuence also undoubtedly helped stimulate historical work on the Jacobite risings: from exercises in popular historiography such as Robert Chambers’ History of the Rebellion in Scotland in 1745, 1746, ﬁrst published as volumes 15 and 16 of Constable’s Miscellany in 1827, to the large specialist tomes of the antiquarian societies, including the Master of Sinclair’s Memoirs of the Insurrection in Scotland in 1715, ﬁnally published with Scott’s notes by the Abbotsford Club in 1858. After Scott’s death in 1832, production of sets of the Waverley Novels continued as one of the mainstays of the Scottish publishing industry. From his headquarters in St Andrew Square, Robert Cadell (in the words of one witness) ‘conﬁned his business almost entirely to issuing in various shapes the works of Sir Walter Scott’ (Bertram: 82). The magnum opus was followed by comparable editions of the Poetical Works (1833–4) and Miscellaneous Prose Works (1834–6), then in turn by J. G. Lockhart’s Memoirs of Scott, which on its ﬁrst publication in seven volumes (1837–8) appeared in cloth similar to that used in the magnum. The new proprietor also proved inventive in targeting di≠erent readerships. At one end of the marketing spectrum, Cadell brought out a People’s Edition, sold originally in weekly sheets priced 2d, and then on completion in ﬁve volumes at £2 10s. At the other, slightly in its wake, a grandiose Abbotsford Edition in large octavo was issued fortnightly at 2s 6d a number between 1842 and 1847, this in turn being sold on completion in twelve volumes at £16 16s, with a vaunted ‘2000 illustrations on wood and steel’.19 According to information given by Cadell’s trustees, after his death in 1849, in two decades Cadell had printed 78,270 collected sets of the Waverley Novels, a ﬁgure excluding no fewer than 7,115,197 weekly sheets printed of the People’s Edition.20 In 1851 the stock, copyrights and plant associated with Scott’s works were purchased for some £27,000 by the Edinburgh ﬁrm of Adam & Charles Black, who at the same time removed to new premises at 6 North Bridge, partly to accommodate the resulting expansion (Adam: 27–8). (As a consequence of the extension of copyright in 1842 to forty-two years from publication, copyright of the original ﬁrstedition Waverley Novels were due to begin expiring in 1856, with the magnum copyrights in turn lapsing from 1871.) In addition to issuing 19 20

Introductory ‘Notice’ in the ﬁrst number, last page of Part 120, of the Abbotsford Edition. ACB Acc. 9765/2, fols 1–2.

literature in the marketplace

231

new sets of the magnum, with additional illustrations, A. & C. Black produced a number of sets in the range of twenty-ﬁve volumes (whereby individual novels could be contained in a single volume), beginning with the Library Edition (1852–4), which was launched with the ﬁrst four titles, followed by regular monthly volumes. Another signiﬁcant set in this form was the Centenary Edition of 1870–1, which in its prefatory matter strongly asserts the presence of additional materials from the Interleaved Set (acquired as part of the 1851 purchase), which had been used by Scott in preparing the magnum. In an e≠ort to saturate the market right down to the cheapest reprints, A. & C. Black also brought out a ‘sixpenny edition’ in paper covers, issued monthly between 1866 and 1868, all twenty-ﬁve volumes then being available at 12s 6d the set, with total sales evidently exceeding 2 million volumes. The ‘Minute Book’ recording these sales shows the impression of Waverley to have been 131,000 copies, a ﬁgure only exceeded by Rob Roy (137,000 copies).21 One e≠ect of the Blacks’ endeavours was that up to the 1890s, when the ﬁrm moved to London, the o∞cial production of Waverley and its successors remained very much an Edinburgh activity, involving a similar nexus of participants to that in Scott’s own heyday – the printers of the Centenary Edition were R. & R. Clark. By the end of the 1870s, however, alternative non-copyrighted editions had become available, such as The Illustrated Waverley Novels published by Marcus Ward with a London and Belfast imprint in 1877–9. Even the grandiose late Victorian and Edwardian sets at the close of the century, the Dryburgh, Border and Melrose editions, symptoms of the last period of Scott’s supremacy, are essentially products of a London-centred British Imperial book trade, the use of local place names masking a publishing phenomenon that had vastly transcended its Scottish origin.

21

ACB Acc. 9765/1, fols 200–1.

John MacLean, the Gaelic Bard Donald E. Meek and Rob Dunbar Gaelic song and poetry, throughout the millennia, have a≠orded special recognition to panegyric, composed in honour of key ﬁgures in Highland kindreds and communities. Alongside a wealth of other verse forms, panegyric has held its place to the present day, although it has been of greater signiﬁcance in some periods than in others. It ﬂourished particularly strongly in the context of traditional Gaelic society, and was prominent in the early eighteenth century, in an age dominated by clan chiefs until the Heritable Jurisdictions Act (1746), consequent upon the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, abolished many of their powers. John MacLean was a nineteenth-century Gaelic poet who has been categorised by some twentieth-century literary critics as an eighteenthcentury ﬁgure in all but date, largely because of his substantial output of panegyric verse. Born in Caolas, Tiree, in 1787, and known locally as Iain mac Ailein (‘John son of Allan’), MacLean was also acknowledged in Scotland as Bàrd Thighearna Cholla (‘The Laird of Coll’s Poet’), because of his professional relationship to the laird of the neighbouring island, whose praises he sang in a substantial number of songs (Sinclair 1881: xiii–xxvi). MacLean, however, stood on the cusp of change. He derived his power and status from conventions much older than his own day, but he adjusted these conventions, and his own horizons, to accommodate the ‘new’ world of the nineteenth century.

Patronage and change John MacLean’s patron was a representative of the old order. Alexander Ruadh (‘Red-haired’), the 15th Laird of Coll, was evidently a conservative chief, who remained loyal to Highland chieﬂy values, including patronage of the Gaelic arts and kindness to the tenantry. However,

literature in the marketplace

233

MacLean’s unease with Alexander’s heir, and his concern at the changes a≠ecting the Coll MacLeans more generally, as they began to assimilate non-Gaelic practices, are evident in his songs. With the decline of the old chieﬂy order and the rapid commercialisation of estate management, MacLean’s verse changed focus from a pre-eminent concern with the earlier Highland aristocracy to salutation of new heroes and iconic ﬁgures, among them military leaders and clergymen. He was all the more impressed when such leaders were also good poets. This is reﬂected in a song which he composed in honour of the Morar poet, Alexander MacKinnon (1770–1814), a manuscript of whose verse MacLean had seen (Mac Illeain: 87). MacKinnon had served as a British army corporal in foreign ﬁelds. John MacLean’s life and work also reﬂect the expanding horizons of the time. In the early years of the nineteenth century, many Highlanders migrated to the Lowlands in search of employment.

Figure 4.4 John MacLean’s Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach (1818), bearing a dedication in which the poet thanks his patron, the 14th [15th] Laird of Coll, for helping to ﬁnance its publication.

234

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

MacLean himself knew Glasgow and its environs, and indeed was married there in 1810, to Isabella Black, a native of Lismore and a Gaelic speaker. In both his praise poetry and his several satires, he showed a concern with the cultural and linguistic gap between Highlanders and Lowlanders, and warned against the potentially corrupting inﬂuences of Lowland manners and morals.

Collecting the tradition Sometime between 1810 and 1818, John MacLean travelled to mainland districts for the speciﬁc purpose of collecting songs. He compiled a manuscript of over 600 neatly hand-written pages amounting to over 15,000 lines of Gaelic poetry, which included most of the secular songs he composed in Scotland, together with a large number of songs by other Gaelic poets. In 1818, the poet published his own songs, and a selection of others collected by him, in a volume, Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach (‘New Highland Songs’), printed by R. Meinnearach, Edinburgh, air son an Ughdair (‘for the Author’, that is, the compiler). His dedication to his patron, ‘Colonel Alexander MacLean, Laird of Coll, Queenish, Rum and Muck,’ states that MacLean of Coll assisted him in the production of the book by ﬁnancing its printing, because of the poet’s impecunious circumstances: Tha an t-seirbheis so a leanas air a dearcadh gu h-umhail dhasan, air son meud a thlachd do Chlann na ’n Gáedheal, da ’n Cainnt nadurra, mhâthaireil, agus da ’n Dúthaich. Mar dhearbhadh dhuibh gu bheil tlachd aige do gach aon dhiu sin a dh’ ainmich mi, chunnaig onair iomchuidh an t-saothair so fhaotuinn an ordugh, a chum a sgaoileadh na measg, do bhrigh gu’n robh Ughdar an leabhair neo-chomasach air a faotuinn an clo-bualaidh, ge do thug e cho fada sin air adhairt i, le bhith gann do stóras, mar a tha mòran eile ga thuille, agus, mar is bidheanta tha tachairt, ge do bhitheas aon ni aig duine, gu ’m bi nì eile bu’ uaithe.(i) (The service which follows is dedicated obediently to him, in recognition of the extent of his esteem for the Kindred of the Gaels, to their natural, maternal Language, and to their Country. As proof for you that he esteems each one of these that I have named, his honour saw ﬁt to put this labour in such order that it could be distributed among them, because the Author of the book was unable to have it printed, although he took it as far forward as that, as he was short of money, as many others are too, and, as

literature in the marketplace

235

frequently happens, though a person may possess one thing, he lacks another.) The role of lairds, such as MacLean of Coll, in facilitating the printing of anthologies of Gaelic song, suggests that the nature of patronage – traditionally rewarding the poet with bounty in forms other than money – was changing in response to the needs of Gaelic society, and more particularly those of its creative and literary sector. It might even be said that the generosity of MacLean of Coll foreshadowed the creation of the grant-awarding bodies which exist today for the beneﬁt of writers and publishers. Later MacLean explains his motivation in compiling the book: ‘S iomadh uair a bha mi smuainteachadh, ma ’n do thòisich mi air an obair so, gu ’m bu mhòr am bèud gu ’m bitheadh na seann Orain, nach robh mi faicinn anns na leabhraichean chaidh chuir a mach roimh so, air an di-chuimhneachadh . . . (ibid.: i–ii) (Many a time I considered, before I began this work, that it was a great pity that the old Songs, which I did not see in the books which were published before this, should be forgotten . . .) The gradual appearance of important printed anthologies of Gaelic songs – many of which, as he noted, he possessed – had made him aware of gaps in the published record, and he moved expeditiously to ﬁll some of these gaps. The publication of MacLean’s book also gave the poet himself an unexpected form of practical support, providing the surety which helped him to leave his native land and his patron. Succumbing to the lure of the New World, he emigrated to Nova Scotia, where he died in 1848, in a district which was named after him as ‘Glenbard’, near Antigonish. According to Donald MacLean, ‘Almost the entire impression of 400 copies [of Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach] was left with the printer, who supplied the Poet with a small sum of money to pay his passage to Canada, whither he went with his wife and family in 1819’ (TS-G: 260). In this, there is considerable irony, and more than a touch of sadness. Traditional accounts aver that MacLean’s departure was precipitated by a rupture in his relationship with the laird (Sinclair 1928: 283–4). This was caused, it is claimed, by his eulogising of a ﬂamboyant Highland chief, Alasdair Ranaldson MacDonell of Glengarry, which occasioned some jealousy on the part of MacLean of Coll. Glengarry’s inclinations – as an investor in sheep-farming and steamships, while raising the tartan to new heights of romanticism – reﬂected the changing world of the nineteenth century, but MacLean evidently esteemed him highly for his

236

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

support of traditional mores. Gaelic poets through the ages knew the problem only too well, as they usually ‘served’ (and MacLean consistently refers to his own work and that of other poets as seirbhis, ‘service’) more than one chief, though they would have had an especially close association with one particular patron. If the traditional account of strained relations is correct, the poignancy of MacLean’s emigration is all the greater, particularly because of his invaluable book, and the productive relationship between poet and patron which it represents. John MacLean’s arrival in the New World took him to an environment which was completely di≠erent from that in Caolas, Tiree. His ﬁrst encounter with the towering woodlands of Barney’s River, where he settled initially, brought him to the brink of dark despair. There he composed his best known song ‘Oran do dh’Ameireaga’ (‘Song on America’), otherwise entitled ‘A’ Choille Ghruamach’ (‘The Gloomy Forest’) (Meek 2003: 64–73). His song shows several di≠erent aspects of the man and his context – among them his awareness of his writing skills, his pride in being asked as a ‘bard’ to compose songs, and his consciousness, through loss, of the creative exchange between the poet and his community. In due course, however, further emigrants arrived, and the poet himself moved to a new location in which he continued to compose verse. A letter of 1847 shows him being addressed as ‘Mr John McLean, Poet, Addington Forks, Antigonish’ – an indication that his poetic skills were well recognised in his adopted community. In addition to carrying his own work with him to Canada, John MacLean also brought a valuable manuscript, compiled in the eighteenth century by Dr Hector MacLean of Grulin, Mull. This was apparently given to him by the compiler’s daughter, and indicates the respect in which he was held, not only as a poet, but also as a collector and custodian of Gaelic traditions. At the back of this (that is, Dr MacLean’s manuscript), the poet transcribed several of the secular poems he had composed in Canada. A few additional poems attributed to him were transcribed therein by the poet’s son, Charles. Eleven of these New World compositions were printed in 1856 by John Boyd of Antigonish, the founder of the Antigonish newspaper, the Casket (1852–) (Nilsen: 135). Both manuscripts are now archived in Nova Scotia (NSARM).

Transmission and circulation Having ventured overseas, MacLean found it di∞cult to maintain his links with his former community in Tiree, where his brother, Donald, a cooper, lived at Balephuil in the west of the island. Although evidently

literature in the marketplace

237

able to read, Donald was apparently unable to write, employing the local Baptist minister, the Rev. Duncan MacDougall (or MacLucas), as his scribe. In a letter dated 28 March 1838, ‘The Cooper’, as he was known locally, acknowledged receipt of a copy of his brother John’s second book, this time a collection of spiritual songs which the poet had composed, and which had been printed in Glasgow in 1835 by Bell & Bain, for sale by Maurice Ogle & Son. According to Donald MacLean: ‘Of this work 400 copies were printed at 1s. each copy. The printing is very inaccurately done, as proofs for correction were not issued. Very few copies were sold in Scotland; almost the entire stock was shipped to Canada, where it was disposed of ’ (TS-G: 261). For John’s brother, Donald, the book was, ﬁrst and foremost, conﬁrmation that John was still alive, and, second, that he had now turned his hand to the composition of spiritual verse: We were glad that we got a token of your being yet alive, by a little pamphlet of poems under the title of your name. As you [stopped] writing for a long time we were doubtful whether you were living or not. But the above mentioned book rejoiced us to understand that you are yet living. And more so when we heard the tuneful sound of your lyre turned Spiritually. And though in a foreign land that you could sing of the Songs of Jehovah, So near the foreign streams of Babilon (or at the Streams of barney). I expect when you receive this letter, you shall write me soon in return. (MS copy in writer’s possession) The ‘Streams of barney’ was an allusion to Barney’s River, the poet’s ﬁrst holding in Nova Scotia. The biblical reference to the ‘foreign streams of Babilon’ (Psalm 137) was witty and appropriate, given the poet’s earlier plight. In return, Donald provided some news about the Laird of Coll, in all likelihood Hugh, the 16th Laird, and son of John MacLean’s patron, Alexander: The Laird of Coll is failing much in his prosperity, it is reported that he is to leave this kingdom for Australia, he left Drumﬁne Castle and he is in some place in the Low Country dwelling. He rented the castle to an Englandman. We are much afraid of his failure[;] perhaps the honest Gentleman shall make better than what is thought of him; so would be our desire. Halfway through the letter, Donald the Cooper turns from English to Gaelic, and provides more intimate local news. He concludes: P. S. Cuir da rann a m-ionnsuidh anns an litir a bheir mi mar phaidh do ’n sgrìobhadair mar a chi thu fein freagarrach, oir tuigidh e bardachd spioradail gu maith.

238

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

(Send two verses to me in the letter that I will give as payment to the scribe as you see ﬁt, for he understands spiritual poetry well.) Duncan MacDougall was himself an accomplished Gaelic poet who came of a talented family connected with the Ross of Mull, and brother of Mary MacDougall (or MacDonald) who composed the well-known hymn, Leanabh an Aigh (‘Child in the Manger’). Following the postscript, he added verses of his own composition. This transatlantic exchange between two poets with Tiree connections is illuminating in itself, suggesting a sense of companionship and shared purpose in their craft. Three years later, in 1841, Duncan MacDougall published a substantial book of his own verse, which was printed in Glasgow by John Niven & Son. Religious literature of one kind or another was at the core of Gaelic printing in the nineteenth century, and from it radiated di≠erent forms of the printed book, among them periodicals and journals. Emigrant Highlanders, in several instances, left home accompanied by copies of the Gaelic journals of the time, and they appear to have subscribed to them after their arrival in their new abodes. One of these journals was Cuairtear nan Gleann (‘The Traveller of the Glens’) (1840–3), which was evidently received regularly by John MacLean. He was highly appreciative of its contents, and regarded it as a signiﬁcant link with his homeland. In fact, he composed a eulogy in honour of the ‘Traveller’, comparing the journal to a kilted Highlander. In the closing quatrains of his praise poem, he exhorts the ‘Traveller’ to put the song in the ‘iron print-blocks’ and to take it to his native island of Tiree (Meek 2003: 202–5). MacLean realised and employed the power of print in di≠erent contexts, not least as a means of keeping him in touch with Scotland. What he may not have realised was the ability of print to transform what the poet himself had previously written, and also to establish later ‘editorially adjusted’ texts as authoritative. In 1880, a second edition of John MacLean’s volume of spiritual songs was published in Edinburgh by MacLachlan & Stewart (and printed by Lorimer & Gillies). It was edited by the poet’s grandson, the Rev. A. MacLean Sinclair, a notable Gaelic historian and textual editor in Nova Scotia (1840–1924). Deftly summarising the intrusive and creative editing which was MacLean Sinclair’s standard approach, Donald MacLean assessed the work as follows: ‘The Editor made very considerable changes on both the text and orthography of the Glasgow Edition, and not always for the better’ (TS-G: 261). Like other editors of Gaelic material in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, MacLean Sinclair ‘took liberties’ with the poet’s autograph texts, and

literature in the marketplace

239

with those written by the poet’s son, Charles, sometimes omitting or adding whole stanzas, or recasting lines and verses. In 1881, MacLean Sinclair published a second edition of his grandfather’s work, this time dedicated to the secular poetry. Entitled Clàrsach na Coille (‘The Harp of the Wood’), it contained all but one of John MacLean’s secular songs, the omission being of a satirical song composed while MacLean was in Tiree. The racy subject matter did not meet MacLean Sinclair’s exacting standards. These standards extended to stylistic matters. A close comparison of the versions published by MacLean Sinclair and those published by the poet himself in his 1818 edition, or contained in the poet’s manuscripts, shows that MacLean Sinclair took very great liberties indeed with his grandfather’s work. His adjustments are of an entirely di≠erent order from the relatively minor changes that would have arisen in the course of transmitting the songs by oral or scribal means. MacLean Sinclair’s interventions had a profound e≠ect on subsequent versions of John MacLean’s poetry, which relied on the posthumous Clàrsach na Coille rather than the sources for which the poet himself was responsible. Several of John MacLean’s songs entered the oral traditions of both Scottish and Nova Scotian Gaels. From the 1960s, ﬁeldworkers working in both Nova Scotia and Tiree have recorded versions from Gaelic-speaking informants. While the extant samples are too few to allow deﬁnitive conclusions to be drawn, it would appear that printed versions – particularly those in Clàrsach na Coille or in publications which drew on it – had a signiﬁcant impact on the forms of the songs which have been retained in the oral tradition. As a collector and publisher of songs, John MacLean recognised the value of print. But was he also aware, one wonders, of the potentially detrimental e≠ect of the ‘iron print-blocks’? Did he consider the possibility that the growing prestige of the printing press, with its overriding authority, might begin to interfere with the original forms of songs, and even provide a means of altering the words of the poet? Did he, like his own later editors, make any signiﬁcant adjustments to other poets’ texts as he transcribed them into his own manuscript, and then printed them in Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach in 1818? This question also remains to be answered, but it is more than clear that MacLean’s literary output had been adjusted signiﬁcantly by the end of the nineteenth century, due very largely to the power of print.

Thomas Carlyle and the Lure of London Ian Campbell The history of Thomas Carlyle’s itinerant Scottish years is well known: from his childhood in Ecclefechan to his schooldays at Annan, his largely unhappy university career in Edinburgh followed by teaching posts in Annan and Kirkcaldy, further years in Edinburgh, then six long solitary years in Craigenputtoch, punctuated by visits to Edinburgh and, for the winter of 1831–2, to London. When Carlyle arrived in the metropolis, London was in full Reform agitation, and he was much taken with the intellectual energy he encountered there. The subsequent political changes were to take one of his great acquaintances and patrons to London, when Francis Je≠rey – whose patronage as editor of the Edinburgh Review had been invaluable to his early publishing career – became Lord Advocate. Edward Irving, the other great friend of his early years, was already there as one of the capital’s most talked-about preachers. Carlyle’s wife, Jane, was also strongly drawn to the new excitement of London. As he observed: ‘She was very hearty for London, when I spoke of it, though till then her voice on the subject had never been heard. “Burn our ships!” she gaily said, one day – i.e. dismantle our House; carry all our furniture with us’ (Reminiscences: 87). And so they did: from mid-1834 until his death in 1881, Chelsea was to be his home, however frequent were subsequent trips to the country, to friends, and to family in Scotland. Although Carlyle’s early literary training and experience had been temperamentally Scottish he saw his immediate future in London, one of its principal attractions being its publishing industry, and the years were to conﬁrm him in this view. Carlyle had come up the hard way: through an introduction to Rev. Henry Duncan of Ruthwell he had published in the Dumfries and Galloway Courier, and through Duncan had met Sir David Brewster

literature in the marketplace

241

whose Edinburgh Encyclopaedia gave him odd jobs writing and researching individual articles. Publishers in both Edinburgh and London commissioned articles and even book-length work, such as the life of Schiller and translations of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and Carlyle’s early scientiﬁc interests led to such projects as a translation of Legendre’s Elements of Geometry, for which Sir John Leslie took the credit, and a lost but potentially fascinating study of interplanetary gravitation reviewed in Geneva (Campbell: 1974). It was a miscellaneous literary apprenticeship, one which can be followed in the pages of the Collected Letters, and towards the end of it Carlyle speaks increasingly of wanting to write a book of my own, a reference to the highly original and then gestating Sartor Resartus. In the Reminiscences Carlyle surveyed these early years with the aid of a near photographic memory through which he records his years of struggle up to and including the move to London in the spring of 1834. The bibliographical work of Rodger Tarr allows us to trace the slow progress of Carlyle from jobbing hack to author of Sartor; while the recent edition of the latter tells us a great deal about the genesis and publication of the book, including the great lengths Carlyle went to to ﬁnd a publisher at all, let alone one who would do justice to this most extraordinary work. Carlyle’s early exposure to London in 1831 was not a total success: Every mind is engrossed with Political questions, and in a more earnest mood than to put up with such stu≠ as has been called Literature . . . The Manuscript is at present in Je≠rey’s hands, whence I expect to receive it in some two days, with a favourable or at worst unfavourable judgement; in either of which cases I shall ﬁnd out what to do. Little money, I think, will be had for any work: but I will have it printed if there be a man in London that will do it, even without payment to myself: if there be no such man, why then what is to be done, but tie a piece of good Skeenyie [packthread] about my Papers, stick the whole in my pocket, and march home again with it, where at least potatoes and onions are to be had, and I can wait till better times . . . (Letters V: 368) This is indeed what happened: partly because the volatile political situation made publishers too cautious to take something quite so original – even with Je≠rey’s backing – and partly because of the sudden death of Carlyle’s father which, although it produced the splendid ﬁrst chapter of the Reminiscences, unsettled his son who felt he should have been at the funeral in Ecclefechan rather than writing his tribute in faro≠ London.

242

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

The story has already been told of the di∞culties faced by a littleknown author in London in the early 1830s, when not even Je≠rey’s patronage could interest publishers of the calibre of Murray or Fraser to take the risk (Sartor: lxvi–lxvii). Charles Tilt, David Bogue, Charles Dilke in London, and even Tait in Edinburgh were approached, without success in the climate of the times. The ﬁrst British publication was to be in Fraser’s Magazine in serial form while the ﬁrst book version appeared in America, thanks to Emerson’s intervention. There was, however, a small British edition of sheets bound from Fraser’s in more than one format (Tarr: lxxiii–lxxv, 35≠ ). Despite Carlyle’s irritation and a sense of thwartedness at the di∞culties he faced in trying to ﬁnd a publisher, more people understood or responded to Sartor than is commonly supposed. In a letter sent to Carlyle on 17 December 1834 his Annandale friends reported: Mr. Menzies got hold of your Sartor and retained it for a second reading . . . Menzies says that no other man but just your very sel’ could have wrote the Sartor; that it abounds with original, profound ideas, with Attic salt of your own manufacture; that in common times it were enough to transmit your name like a bright Galley, on the stream that it is at last to mingle with, and to be swallowed up of, the shoreless Ocean . . . My Sister got hold of it and read a whole day most vigorously. Hear her criticism: ‘I kent it was Thomas Carlyle’s, for it just gangs on like a “mill shillin” ’! Mr Clow of Land was in raptures with it; but Currie says, ‘What’s ta use on’t? nobody can tell what he would be at.’ My son James, however, understood it so well and admires it so much, that it seems to have new-modelled his style of letter-writing . . . (Letters VII: 348–9) The mill shillin’ referred to here is the stream of corn that comes from a threshing mill: an apt simile. Carlyle’s servant in Chelsea was another admirer of Sartor, indication perhaps that the book had a wider potential audience before the author’s later fame led to its popular reconsideration. The book sold consistently in America, leading Harriet Martineau to go to the trouble of importing copies, thereby helping to create the impetus which eventually convinced British publishers to take a risk on Sartor as well as Carlyle’s half-forgotten earlier works. James Fraser sent for me to propose printing Teufelk and my scattered Review Articles &c in volumes! Not so long ago, all this was far as the North Pole from James’s ideas. He shrieked literally at the very hint of it. And now he is willing, nay eager; there even seemed to lie money in him, if I could bring it out. No Review-pu≠

literature in the marketplace

243

whatsoever can come up to this. Well, I said I would consider it; and so, having considered it, and taken counsel about it with my Goody, with Miss Martineau (a very shrewd creature) and made up my mind, I yesterday wrote Fraser that there were, including Teufelk, some Five su∞cient Volumes of those things; that he should have a 750 Edition of them on paying me down £50 per volume baar; on not paying it, not. . . . Under ﬁfty pounds a volume, I simply will not plague myself with it at present. Miss Martineau is importing Teufk from America by the ﬁfty, by the ﬁve-and-twenty: if my repute will not spread to such extent that I can get a little victual while correcting the press, why then in Heaven’s name it may take its own way, – and I also will take mine. (Letters IX: 365) Carlyle was rarely relaxed in his dealings with the book trade, even in his later and more a±uent years, and he retained a lifelong distrust of booksellers: ‘They charge above 40 per cent., I ﬁnd, for the mere function of selling a book, the mere fash of handing it over the counter’ (Froude I: 153). Even before Sartor Carlyle’s prickly pride made him disinclined to give up control of his work for money: ‘As to the printing of Teufelsdreck, it lies over for better insight; shall not be attempted, at all events, till I have money of my own, to pay the piper’ (Letters VI: 248). But the great fruit of the early London years was to be the triumphant 1837 publication of The French Revolution whose production rendered the struggle over Sartor insigniﬁcant by comparison. Few can visit the house in Chelsea today, and mount to the attic study, without being moved at the sight of the charred fragments which are all that remain of the ﬁrst volume of The French Revolution, lent to John Stuart Mill and by him to Harriet Taylor, and consigned to ﬁrelighting by a maid. Carlyle’s response to the instant loss of a year’s work was, to say the least, remarkable: It is purely the hand of Providence; and, by the blessing of Providence, I must struggle to take it as such, – in which case (as I trust you too understand) it would not be loss but gain. That ﬁrst volume (which pleased me better than anything I had ever done) cannot be written anew, for the spirit that animated it is past: but another ﬁrst volume I will try, and shall make it, if not better or equal, all that I can. (Letters VIII: 67–9) I have ordered a Biographie Universelle this morning; – and a better sort of paper. Thus, far from giving up the game, you see, I am risking another £10 on it. Courage, my friend!

244

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

That I can never write that Volume again is indubitable: singular enough, the whole Earth could not get it back; but only a better or a worse one. There is the strangest dimness over it. A ﬁgure thrown into the melting-pot; but the metal (all that was golden or goldlike of that, – and copper can be gathered) is there; the model also is, in my head. (Letters VIII: 70–1) As you take an interest in Teufelsdröckh, it will be good news to hear that they are printing a second edition of him in America; – of 1000, the ﬁrst having only been 500. I even heard some whisper of an Edition coming out here by and by. But as it unfortunately will never procure me one pipe of tobacco in the way of advantage, but on the contrary will only confuse my already confused head still farther with foolish babblement and clatterment, – it seems to be some other man’s charge than mine. (Letters IX: 130) Yet The French Revolution was rewritten, printed, published – and with the aid of an enthusiastic review by Mill, became a commercial and critical success. However Carlyle was frequently to bemoan the publishing process: [The French Revolution] is actually at Press; – two Printers working at separate Volumes of it, – tho’ still too slo[w.] In not many weeks, my hands will be washed of it! You, I hope, can have litt[le con]ception of the feeling with which I wrote the last word of it, one night in early January, when the clock was striking ten, and our frugal Scotch supper coming in! I did not cry; nor I did not pray: but could have done both. (Letters IX: 140) Carlyle was a fussy and often infuriating author, whose proofs and revisions drove publishers and their printers to despair: one story survives of the compositor who ﬁnally left Edinburgh in disgust to start a new career in London, and unfortunately chose the very moment of Carlyle’s move to do so. Carlyle’s manuscripts are shockingly messy, overwritten, and frequently with corrections wafered on (Fielding). The proofs show much the same tendency, corrections everywhere, revisions demanded, corrections again, often the original version ﬁnding its way back. Small wonder that Carlyle, after each book, took to his heels out of London, often to his native Annandale, out of the sight of printers and the sound of reviewers, to recover his nerves before starting his next task. The strain put upon him by the production of Frederick was to shatter his nerves as well as severely to weaken his wife’s health, not to say their marriage. Even though in the years of his fame good friends volunteered their services in library research,

literature in the marketplace

245

Figure 4.5 Proofs of Frederick the Great. This illustration demonstrates something of Carlyle’s compositional method. The handwritten notes are typical of a layered working technique in which he made notes from a primary source to which he added; the process is further complicated by the use of pen and ink, and subsequent changes in blue and black pencil, as well as his habit of pasting additional paper slips to his original notes and keying addenda to their location in the originals. These highly personal notes show signs of being draft prose with subsequent adjustments according to style and afterthought. The complicated nature of such source material makes it extremely di∞cult for scholars today to reconstruct the creative process.

246

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

annotation, map-drawing, the nuts and bolts of authorship – Henry Larkin is a conspicuous example – Carlyle still found the mechanics of writing di∞cult. The famous soundproof study in Chelsea added to the top storey in 1854 to try to stiﬂe the noises which maddened him from an increasingly built-up London did little to alleviate his irritation. Carlyle’s ﬁnancial accounts indicate that the last few decades of his life were extremely comfortable: ‘burning his boats’ and risking the move to London just at the outset of the Victorian era turned out to have been a very good decision. The story of Carlyle’s literary life as a hardworking professional before and after that move, through the copious records of his correspondence and his Reminiscences, provides an insight into ﬁrst, the battle for recognition, and afterwards the struggle to set his own literary agenda. Describing the completion of Frederick in 1865, he likened it to emerging from the Valley of the Shadow. While biographers have made much of Carlyle’s misery as an author, the majestic list of his published work bears testimony to the single-mindedness with which he pursued his vocation, particularly after the move to London, the di∞cult ﬁrst few years, then the increasing security and even a±uence which allowed him to write on subjects of his own choosing, to deal with publishers of his own choosing, latterly even to dictate the terms under which he would use a publisher or permit reprinting overseas.

Margaret Oliphant and the Profession of Writing Zsuzsanna Varga Margaret Oliphant’s writing career provides a number of insights into the issue of female authorship in the late nineteenth century. For Oliphant, as for most women journalists and novelists, writing was not simply about female self-expression; writing for the marketplace was also a hard economic reality and a means of providing for her household. Oliphant’s career demonstrates how an unassuming lady novelist who conceived of authorship as a familial as well as social act, developed into a self-aware and professional ‘Jill-of-all trades’. Her simultaneous engagement with the world of publishing in Scotland and England also illustrates the ways in which an Anglicised Scottish-born writer negotiated these complex cultural a∞liations.

A very unprofessional arrangement Margaret Oliphant’s career as a writer began early. In her Autobiography, written over several decades and ﬁrst published posthumously in 1899, she claims that writing came as a natural process to her, in the way reading is natural to others – a statement which reveals much about her intention to conform to Victorian expectations about female authorship. Like many women writers in the nineteenth century, her entry into publication was initiated by male family connections. In 1849, when Oliphant was only 21, her brother Willie sold the manuscript of her novel Miss Margaret Maitland to Henry Colburn, a London publisher renowned for his ‘wide range of mediocre titles’ (Cross: 179). Although her subsequent early novels were destined for publication by similar ﬁrms, family connections soon enabled her involvement with one of the most highly regarded publishing ﬁrms of the day. In 1851, her socially and intellectually ambitious mother

248

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

renewed the old family connection with Dr Moir, Blackwood’s ‘Delta’, who introduced Oliphant to the Blackwood family in Edinburgh. She was soon accepted as their author. Oliphant’s novels ﬁrst began to appear in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1852, in serial form. Other book publications of her novels followed, including The Quiet Heart and The Athelings (both 1854), two early works about artists. From 1854 she gained an increasingly important role as an essayist, contributing about eight items annually to the Magazine throughout the rest of the decade. Maga, as it was informally called, suited the female writer as its corporate identity was distinctly that of a respectable family magazine, its wide circulation o≠ering prime publishing opportunities for ﬁction and journalism. Oliphant’s relationship with Blackwood throughout her career was conducted under the banner of ‘friendship’, based on collaboration rather than competition; on personal obligation rather than business-like (Haythornthwaite). One telling anecdote from the Autobiography indicates the intimacy of these quasi-familial arrangements. During her husband’s terminal illness in Italy in 1859, she turned to her publishers in much the way that people might turn to family members when they are in ﬁnancial need. As she later recalled, ‘I had to go on working all the time, and not very successfully, our whole income, which was certain for the time, being £20 a-month, which Mr Blackwood had engaged to send me on the faith of articles’ (52). Although advance payment was not unusual in the case of promising nineteenth-century writers, Oliphant’s presentation of the arrangement implies more of a personal than a professional relationship. Although the connection with the Edinburgh ﬁrm would remain her most lasting, Oliphant also continued to nurture her previous associations with London publishers, most importantly, with Colburn and Hurst & Blackett. In later years she would become closely a∞liated with Macmillan’s, who published some of her novels and the best of her book-length non-ﬁction. Thus we can see Oliphant maintaining a careful balance between her commitments to both of Britain’s literary capitals, continuing to nurture her a∞liations with Edinburgh while at the same time capitalising on the ever-increasing opportunities available in the London trade. Of all her professional connections, the one with her Scottish publisher would prove to be the most lasting and productive. Beginning with the publication in 1861 of the short stories ‘The Executor’ and ‘The Rector’, and the novella The Doctor’s Family, Margaret Oliphant was beginning to make her reputation as a writer of substance. But it was her eventual collaboration with John Blackwood on The Perpetual

literature in the marketplace

249

Curate in 1864 that proved to be the turning point in her career as a novelist (Shattock: 113–23). Acting as a collaborator and mentor, Blackwood consulted her on matters of detail, o≠ering advice and recommending changes. The 1860s and 1870s brought not only critical success – her contemporaries often compared her to George Eliot – but also ﬁnancial gain. During the early 1860s, Oliphant began to receive signiﬁcant remuneration for her work. For The Perpetual Curate, Blackwood o≠ered £1,500, which was £500 more than the original sum she requested. The editor of Good Words o≠ered £1,000 for Madonna Mary (1866), at a time when Oliphant was writing at least two books a year, in addition to numerous essays (Colby: 112, 179). In her autobiographical account, Oliphant consistently underplays the ﬁnancial aspects of her career. Unlike Trollope, whose Autobiography shocked readers with its forthright attitude towards the balance sheet, Oliphant kept relatively silent about her earnings, o≠ering only scant information, yet describing her ﬁnancial plight with a considerable measure of self-pity. Although she does admit to having received ‘about £400’ for a title in the 1850s, conspicuously absent is the payment of £150 for her ﬁrst published novel, Miss Margaret Maitland (21, 44). First novels did not earn exceptionally well: Chapman & Hall had paid Elizabeth Gaskell £100 for Mary Barton (1848) while Charlotte Brontë had received the same amount from Smith & Elder for Jane Eyre (1848) (Sanders: 153). But Oliphant, even initially, was better paid than the two other authors, and also earned a respectable addition by her literary essays, at a time when an annual income of £500 guaranteed a respectable middle-class lifestyle. There were several reasons for self-pity. Oliphant tended to compare herself to the best-paid authors of her generation. In 1886, referring to Trollope’s recently published autobiography, she complained at length about her income, comparing it unfavourably with sums paid to Trollope and Dinah Mulock Craik. But it was the astronomical sums earned by George Eliot that provided the greatest contrast (Jay: 249). Eliot, however, was an unusual case: few, if any women writers had a guardian or literary agent of the order of G. H. Lewes to oversee their literary property. Oliphant, indeed, commented wryly on the ‘mental greenhouse’ that Lewes kept for Eliot, yet the considerable measure of envy in her words suggests that this sort of intellectual and practical guardianship may well assist a female author’s career (Autobiography: 5). Oliphant’s bargaining power was not helped by the fact that her relationship with Blackwood remained informal rather than businesslike.

250

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

During most of her career, Oliphant parted with her copyrights for advances to be worked o≠, as opposed to receiving royalties over the longer term, a strategy which appears initially to have been based on her ignorance of the market. Intimate relations with the Blackwood family early on would make later, more favourable contractual terms di∞cult. While the 1860s saw the most intense of her collaborations with Blackwood, from 1868 onwards the company rejected more of her ﬁction than it accepted. Nevertheless, she routinely continued to o≠er them ﬁrst refusal, partly out of a sense of obligation but also because her a∞liation with Blackwood, she felt, always provided a prestigious platform for her work. Her relationship with Macmillan is less well documented, although their association was similarly longstanding, beginning in 1858 with the publication of Agnes Hopetoun, and continuing until the posthumous publication of Oliphant’s collection of short stories in 1898. Their collaboration became increasingly active from the 1870s onwards, also a connection sustained by friendly relations, especially through Alexander Macmillan and George Lillie Craik. Macmillan was responsible for publishing much of her non-ﬁction, such works as the series which included The Makers of Florence (1876), The Makers of Venice (1887) and The Makers of Modern Rome (1895), as well as the popular title The Literary History of England (1882). The ﬁrm also continued to publish her ﬁction, including the highly successful Kirsteen (1890), which Blackwood had originally rejected. This unbusinesslike relationship meant that in 1863, for instance, she applied to her London publisher for money to support a visit to Italy, a request that was later repeated in support of her research for The Makers of Florence. Like Blackwood, Macmillan published some of her ﬁction in serialised form, a number of her works ﬁrst appearing in Macmillan’s Magazine and thereafter in book form. These novels include The Two Marys, one of her best pieces of short ﬁction (1872–3) and her other short novel The Curate in Charge (1875–6). But the similarities did not stop there. While Oliphant respected and accepted the judgement of the earlier heads of both ﬁrms, after the 1870s she found both relationships increasingly strained. Her relationship with the Edinburgh ﬁrm deteriorated after the takeover by William Blackwood in 1879. She could not respect him in the same way as she had the editors of the previous generation: she found William far too young and inexperienced to take his criticism of her work. In the case of Macmillan’s, she could not accept John Morley’s editorial judgements without complaint. Sometimes, the relationship broke down because of the London pub-

literature in the marketplace

251

lisher’s behaviour. She was most upset when, after Kirsteen had been accepted exclusively for book publication, they ran it in the magazine without seeking her permission (Colby: 175). Oliphant’s relationship with the London ﬁrm of Hurst & Blackett was similarly longstanding, beginning in 1852 with the publication of Adam Graeme of Mossgray and continuing until the 1880s. This relationship followed the familiar pattern. In the early 1860s, she moved to Ealing to be near to the Blackett family, and in 1865 dedicated her novel Agnes to her friend, Mrs Blackett. Hurst & Blackett published some of her best work, including Edward Irving (1862) and Phoebe Junior (1876). Although she held Blackett in lower esteem than Blackwood, their good relations lasted until his death, only deteriorating once his children took over the business. As ever, Oliphant found it harder to relate to the next generation: when an appeal for an advance on her work was not met in 1875, she referred to the new Blackett generation as ‘underbred and uneducated young men’ (Colby: 179). Thereafter the number of her books placed with the ﬁrm declined dramatically, and after 1881 they published only six of her titles.

The search for recognition For Margaret Oliphant, the economic aspect of publishing was a blessing and a curse. From the 1870s on, her correspondence contains an increasing number of demands for prompter and larger payment, and demonstrates a greater sense of need to protect her copyrights, thus indicating a growing self-conﬁdence and awareness of the commercial value of her work. In this period we can also see her attempting to establish a more public persona in the rapidly professionalising world of Victorian letters, a world which was becoming much more accessible to women, who were now heavily involved in the publication process, acting as publishers’ readers, reviewers and sometimes taking up editorial positions. By the 1870s, Oliphant was beginning to feel the tension between her status, on the one hand, as a highly regarded, proliﬁc and commercially successful novelist and, on the other, as a writer with only a limited amount of cultural authority. The history of Oliphant’s career from this period can be characterised by successive failed attempts to secure permanent employment and the prestige enjoyed by male contemporaries with comparable ability and productivity. For Oliphant, only the editorship of a magazine in the league of Blackwood’s would have been suitable, but her close friendship with the members of the Blackwood family could not counterbalance the fact that the company was a

252

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

strictly family business based on male succession. Her long search for public recognition might be said to have started, timidly, as early as 1854 but by the 1880s was all but completely thwarted (Jay: 249). Encouraged by strong ties with her principal London publisher, she approached Macmillan with various editorial schemes. In 1878, they had considered publishing a weekly magazine or paper with Oliphant at the helm. In 1880, she approached them again, proposing something in a more domestic line, asking whether they would consider launching a children’s magazine similar to St Nicholas to which she had earlier contributed. Oliphant drew up plans to publish yet another paper in 1881 (Autobiography: 294). At around the same time, she harboured the vain hope that she might get Longman’s Magazine, and she was so sure of Fraser’s that she even commissioned articles to recast the magazine. In 1883, she was still chasing an editorship, but was coming to realise the disadvantage of her sex. All she wanted, she wrote acerbically to Macmillan, was ‘something like an editorship where there would be steady income without perpetual strain – such as his friends have found more than once for Leslie Stephen – but then he is a man’ (Colby: 175). She also set out her editorial plans to Craik for a society paper, drawing on the cream of the foreign press, yet none of her hopes was realised (Jay: 249–50). In 1882 she had written to Craik to suggest that she might receive a ﬁxed income from her ﬁction and in 1884 was pressing Blackwood for contractually determined work. In 1885, she experienced disappointment yet again because Leslie Stephen, whom she considered a friend, refused to give her work on the Dictionary of National Biography (Williams: 140). She did eventually obtain regular income from her ‘Old Saloon’ series which ran in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1887 to 1892, as well as the ‘Looker-On’ series, a column of social commentary that appeared between 1894 and 1896. Oliphant also managed to secure the editorship of Foreign Classics for English Readers, a series of translations brought out by Blackwood between 1877 and 1890. But it is all too evident from her correspondence that an overwhelming sense of career failure underscored the last two decades of Oliphant’s professional life (Autobiography: 258, 310–11). The image that emerges from the Autobiography is of a miserable, unprotected woman with little self-conﬁdence – in her own words a ‘fat, little, commonplace woman, rather tongue-tied’ (Autobiography: 8). The symbolic power of this image, enhanced by references to her involvement in the ‘trade’ – rather than the ‘art’ – of writing, inspired the dominant view of Oliphant as someone desperately shy of celebrity

literature in the marketplace

253

Figure 4.6 Portrait of Margaret Oliphant.

status. These cunningly styled self-representations are not, however, borne out in contemporary descriptions of the way Oliphant operated in the world of professional authorship. In fact, she appears not to have shied away from public recognition, so long as it was couched in feminine terms suitable to Victorian propriety. Trollope’s thinly veiled representation of her, in the form of Lady Carbury in The Way We Live Now (1873), attests to Oliphant’s intimidating social charisma. There

254

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

are some obvious correlations with the role model provided by the monarch, her ‘very deﬁnitely female and matriarchal’ position, making Oliphant ‘the literary equivalent of Queen Victoria’ (Haythornthwaite: 80). Both spoke from a distance, and both were supported by institutional authority, of the magazine and the monarchy respectively. Oliphant’s conﬁdence in her authorial status is also attested to in her management of the use of her name. Her earliest novel was published anonymously, the fact that Miss Margaret Maitland was a ﬁctitious autobiography allowing her to publish her subsequent novels under the soubriquet of ‘The author of Margaret Maitland’. Although almost all of her journalism was unsigned, this was largely due to the publishing policy of Blackwood’s Magazine which insisted on a strict adherence to anonymity long after other magazines had abandoned the practice. It is perhaps signiﬁcant that some of her most memorable journalism, such as ‘The Grievances of Women’ which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine in 1880, were published under her signature as ‘M.O.W.O.’, which she used elsewhere. It was clear that Oliphant was proud of her authorship and was keen to acknowledge responsibility publicly. Oliphant’s role in the Society of Authors, established in 1883, also shows her acute awareness of the need for authorship to gain the same social and economic dignity as other professions. As her correspondence with the society’s president, Walter Besant, attests, Oliphant o≠ered her unconditional support to an organisation which sought to protect the concept of copyright and to promote fair contractual arrangements between authors and publishers. Her preoccupation with the profession of writing is also evident throughout her work. Although her ﬁction contains few speciﬁc references to artistic labour, and even fewer to its commercial dimensions – in The Three Brothers (1870) and Kirsteen (1890), for example, the emphasis is more on the domestic circumstances of writing – her numerous articles in Blackwood’s in the 1870s and 1880s go some way toward re-evaluating the romantic concept of the artist. Inspiration and originality are rarely given validity and literary ‘genius’ is often shown in fact to be the result of training – often auto-didacticism – and social inﬂuence. Throughout, literary labour is always referred to as a ‘trade’, the outcome of sustained daily industry. In an article of 1879, concerning the work of Anna Jameson, Oliphant compares an earlier system of patronage with the modern environment of professional payment: The author in earlier days, was very well content to be the attendant star of some noble or wealthy house, getting society and

literature in the marketplace

255

privileges upon a footing . . . of ﬂattered elevation and nominal sovereignty – but never upon equal footing. (‘Two Ladies’, 208) Walter Scott, in contrast, is enlisted as the epitome of modern commodiﬁed authorship, which may encourage the production of slipshod work every so often but which in Oliphant’s view grants to the writer the dignity of the man of letters and a greater degree of social independence. In arguing that Scott ‘was the ﬁrst great writer who was determined to be socially independent, – to be the host and not the guest, to give and not to receive’ (ibid.: 209), Oliphant unambiguously embraces the idea of authorship as a thoroughly modern profession. ‘Success as measured by money never came to my share,’ she wrote (Autobiography: 83). For many literary historians, the career of Margaret Oliphant would indeed come to exemplify the false dichotomy between writing well and writing for money. Perhaps it is more helpful to regard Oliphant’s relationship with the Victorian publishing industry as an example of both the opportunities and the limitations faced by the nineteenth-century woman writer, and the way in which the successful negotiation between them was possible.

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pursuit of Fame Jenni Calder By the age of 17, Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters were full of fragments of verse, embryonic essays, sketches for plays, comments on reading and literature, and a clear sense of strengthening ambition: ‘When it is on me, I write, write, write – no matter what, under the vain delusion that my name will live in proportion to the number of foolscap pages covered with sprawling and half-illegible handwriting’ (I: 151). In 1868 he was planning a novel, a play and a series of short stories on the theme of the Scottish Covenanters. Chapter and story headings are recorded in University of Edinburgh notebooks. His ﬁrst published work as an adult was in the Edinburgh University Magazine while his ﬁrst paid publication was his essay ‘Roads’, published in The Portfolio (December 1873, earlier rejected by the Saturday Review), under the name L. S. Stoneven. For this he received £3 8s. By now he had met Sidney Colvin, Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge and later Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. Colvin, who moved in literary circles, would act as agent and facilitator throughout his career and put Stevenson in touch with London literary editors.While Stevenson was full of angst over ‘Roads’ – ‘I fear I am unﬁt as yet to make any money by my pen,’ he wrote in September 1873 (I: 307) – Colvin sent it to the Saturday Review and The Portfolio and encouraged Stevenson to believe in himself as a writer. Whether it was because he was taken under Colvin’s wing at this early stage or whether he aspired to London publication at the start is not clear. There is nothing to suggest that he thought in terms of publishing in Edinburgh and much to indicate that he was attracted to the London literary scene. Although he had one e≠ort rejected by Blackwoods, he seems not seriously to have attempted publication in either Blackwoods

literature in the marketplace

257

or the Edinburgh Review, which he might have considered obvious outlets. Another key ﬁgure in this early phase of Stevenson’s career was the literary critic Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, to whom he was introduced by Colvin. Stephen published, with some enthusiasm, several pieces Stevenson wrote in the 1870s – nine in total between 1874 and 1878, including his second published piece of ﬁction ‘Will o’ the Mill’. Stephen was far from undiscriminating, and indeed rejected some of Stevenson’s o≠erings, including his essay on Raeburn later turned down by the Pall Mall Gazette and Blackwoods. Stephen’s reason was that ‘cockneys’ would not be much interested in Edinburgh people (Letters II: 194n.). This editorial discouragement of an overtly Scottish identity is interesting in the context of Stephen’s conviction that the writer had remarkable potential. He believed that George Eliot marked ‘the termination of the great period of English ﬁction which began with Scott’ and that Stevenson might be the one to rescue novel-writing from its current doldrums (Calder: 87–8). Clearly, he assumed that Stevenson could not reprise Scott’s achievement as a writer of Scottish English ﬁction, but presumed that he might lead the renaissance from a centre of gravity which had shifted south. In a sense Stevenson was being groomed for fame. Without the intervention of Colvin and the encouragement of Stephen, he might never have found the openings he needed. His letters reveal a mix of uncertainty and exuberance as he worked out his apprenticeship. By the later 1870s he had come to regard himself as an all-round ‘man of letters’, poet, essayist, story writer, dramatist. For Stevenson, magazine publication represented the practice slopes, but to make a living as a writer he would have to move beyond earning a few guineas here and there and tackle something more substantial. Throughout the 1870s, through the support of his father, he was able to avoid an impoverished Grub Street existence, although in these years he never had a great deal of money at his disposal. London literary life was a magnet for Stevenson and it was there and in France that he found a cultural environment that Edinburgh seemed not to o≠er. His relationship with the city of his birth was complex. He was deeply imprinted by its history and character, yet at the same time oppressed by the Calvinist environment and middle-class mores of his upbringing. Writing would become a way of both engaging with his background and escaping from it, and clearly publication outwith Scotland was an important factor in this process. Contemporaries such as Andrew Lang, by 1875 based in London, W. E. Henley and Edmund Gosse fostered his creativity and his

258

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

ambitions. They bounced ideas o≠ each other with inspirational vigour, and Stevenson and Henley collaborated as dramatists, though without much success. To move from essays to something of book length Stevenson needed a bigger subject, which in September 1876 he created for himself by undertaking a canoe trip in Belgium and France with his friend Walter Simpson, an adventure that was from the start intended to provide copy. Stevenson’s journal on the trip, which he rewrote the following year and submitted to Kegan Paul, was published in April 1878. Selling only 485 copies in its ﬁrst year, An Inland Voyage failed to achieve the thousand copies which would have triggered a shilling a copy royalty following an initial payment of £20. Stevenson was much relieved when Paul accepted the book for publication: ‘God grant Paul may take the thing,’ he had written from France in January 1878: ‘I want coin so badly, and besides it would be something done – something put outside of me and o≠ my conscience; and I should not feel such a mu≠ as I do, if once I saw the damned thing in boards with a ticket on its behind’ (II: 233). Kegan Paul published three of Stevenson’s ﬁrst four books, but only Travels with a Donkey (1879) sold well and paid its way. Stevenson received £30 and a two shillings a copy royalty after the ﬁrst 700 in a deal negotiated on Stevenson’s behalf by P. G. Hamerton, who had written an enthusiastic review of An Inland Voyage for The Academy in which, like Stephen, he identiﬁed Stevenson as ‘one of the most perfect writers living, one of the very few who may yet do something that will become classical’ (Maixner: 56). Stevenson, short of money as usual, was incensed by the fact that ‘the foul Paul is not to give me my coin till the day of publication’ (II: 303). The third book published by Kegan Paul was Virginibus Puerisque (1881), bought outright by Paul for £20, which, along with a general feeling of poor treatment, provoked more ireful comment from Stevenson (III: 269). Virginibus Puerisque was well reviewed but did not sell particularly well, although Stevenson would have been justiﬁed in expecting more for its sales of 900 copies. Clearly, the aspiring author was not going to achieve celebrity through essay writing, despite the fact that he was being described as original, graceful and engaging. In spite of its Scottish focus, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes was also published in London. It came out ﬁrst in instalments in The Portfolio (June–Dec. 1878) with book publication by Jackson, Seeley & Halliday, who appeared not to share the London bias against Scottish topics, at the end of the year (but dated 1879). Stevenson had high hopes of the earning capacity of Picturesque Notes. He wrote to Henley at the end of 1877: ‘[I]f I and the pictureists can hit it o≠ well enough, we shall sail

literature in the marketplace

259

into book form in due time, with more coins and honour’ (II: 226). ‘Coins’, at this stage, appear to have been as important to him as ‘honour’. By this time Stevenson had published a few pieces of short ﬁction in periodicals but the great novel envisaged by Leslie Stephen had not materialised. Towards the end of 1878 he had at least ‘two novels in the wind’ as well as essays, a half-written play, and his story ‘Providence and the Guitar’ about to appear in London. ‘How’s that for busy?’ he wrote to his mother, ‘It does me good. It was well I wrote my ‘Idlers’ [his essay ‘An Apology for Idlers’ written two years earlier for the Cornhill and included in Virginibus Puerisque] when I did; for I am now the busiest gent in Christendom’ (II: 285–6). Stevenson was turning at this time increasingly to ﬁction, and with his marriage to Fanny Osbourne in 1880 the need to produce commercial work intensiﬁed. He had taken on not only a wife but a stepfamily, and was embarrassed by his continuing ﬁnancial reliance on his father. When the ﬁrst breakthrough came it was relatively modest. Treasure Island was begun in September 1881. That summer had already seen an explosion of creativity in the form of the short stories ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Merry Men’ and ‘The Body Snatcher’, the ﬁrst two of which were published in the Cornhill. He had found his feet as a writer of ﬁction. The publication history of Treasure Island is well known. Its serialisation in Young Folks (Oct. 1881–Jan. 1882) was again achieved through an intermediary, this time Alexander Japp, a Scottish writer and publisher who had criticised Stevenson’s Cornhill essay on Henry David Thoreau. Stevenson had invited Japp to the rented cottage in Braemar where he and his family were staying in the summer of 1881. The Sea Cook, the novel’s original title, was under way. Japp joined the family to hear Stevenson read aloud the result of his day’s work and responded enthusiastically. He departed with the early chapters which he showed to James Henderson, the proprietor of Young Folks. Stevenson was clearly anxious about the enterprise, both in terms of the company he was keeping – ‘what bosh the stories are’ was his comment on Young Folks (II: 228) – and his commitment to keeping up with instalments. His reluctance to sign away copyright, as well as his insistence on receiving proofs, suggests he was more conﬁdent about his professional ambitions. It also suggests a growing awareness of the fact that writing at speed and under pressure was likely to lead to mistakes. Stevenson received £30 for the serialisation of Treasure Island, which made no signiﬁcant impression on readers and unlike The Black Arrow which followed two years later, no impact on circulation. He had planned from the start to republish in book form, and accordingly revised the text

260

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

which was accepted by Cassell and published in 1883. The deal was negotiated by Henley, who was employed by Cassell at the time, resulting in an o≠er of £100 for the book, to which Stevenson reacted with jubilation, dubbing Henley ‘the Prince of Extortioners’ (II: 228). This was an outright sale to Cassell, but in addition to the £100 he was to receive a royalty of £20 per thousand copies sold after the ﬁrst 4,000. Treasure Island sold 12,000 copies in its ﬁrst three years. Although this was a huge step up from the few hundred his earlier books had sold it looks less impressive when compared with, say, the 31,000 copies Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1886) sold in its ﬁrst year. James Henderson was keen for Stevenson to write more for his magazine; the result was The Black Arrow, begun in the summer of 1883, though with little enthusiasm on Stevenson’s part and somewhat carelessly. ‘Nowhere do I send worse copy than to Young Folks,’ he wrote to James Dow at the magazine (IV: 176), who had pointed out that he had failed to account for the last of the four black arrows. The Black Arrow was duly serialised that year (June–Oct.), like Treasure Island under the name of Captain George North. It did not appear in book form until 1888, when it was published by Scribners in the US, following US serialisation by Samuel McClure’s syndicate. McClure claimed that it made more money than any other serialised ﬁction the syndicate handled. Stevenson had interrupted work on another novel, Prince Otto, which was subsequently serialised in Longman’s Magazine (Apr.–Oct. 1885), to write The Black Arrow. Although he asked for and received £250 for the serialisation rights of Prince Otto, Stevenson was worried that he had overplayed his hand. It was published by Chatto & Windus later that year, to whom Stevenson had moved, having become exasperated with Kegan Paul. As publishers of Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882) and The Silverado Squatters (1883) Chatto already had a history with the author. Negotiations were again conducted by Henley. Although at ﬁrst Stevenson was pleased at Chatto’s ‘liberal terms’, the agreed payment of £100 for ﬁve years’ exclusive rights was not to materialise until the following September, and he was soon ﬁnding the situation almost as irritating as his earlier relations with Kegan Paul. The real breakthrough for Stevenson did not come until 1886, when the response of the American public was a crucial factor. The publication of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde early in that year heralded a dramatic change in the novelist’s fortunes and conﬁrmed his status as a professional writer, strengthened by the appearance of Kidnapped in the same year. Jekyll and Hyde was written with the speciﬁc intention of reaching a popular readership and making money. Living in Bournemouth at this time, Stevenson was endeavouring to

literature in the marketplace

261

sustain a comfortable bourgeois existence, to which he refers somewhat ruefully in his letters. Submitted initially for serialisation in Longman’s Magazine, Jekyll and Hyde was published separately at Longman’s suggestion, with Stevenson o≠ered a royalty of one-sixth the retail price. Royalties on the ﬁrst 10,000 copies were to be paid immediately; he was also to receive 50 per cent of returns on foreign sales. Published in a cheap format, price 1s, Jekyll and Hyde was calculated to reach a mass audience. It sold 40,000 copies in the ﬁrst six months. These were sales in a quite di≠erent league from anything to which he had previously aspired, although, with only twopence a copy coming to him, in actual terms he was not initially earning vast amounts. That would come with the American publication, and the market value that fame would bring him. This development in Stevenson’s fortunes came at a time of considerable change in the relationship between authors and publishers and the economics of the book trade in general. Although, as Stevenson’s varying publishing arrangements indicate, there was as yet no standard system for remunerating authors, there was in this period a gradual shift to royalties rather than outright sales. Stevenson throughout his career remained relatively unsophisticated and careless in dealing with literary property and was more than happy to allow others to handle the details on his behalf, which was not an altogether satisfactory state of a≠airs. He relished the prospect and savoured the reality of best-seller status but was not hard-headed enough to maximise his earning potential. Luck and the support of friends and associates played a signiﬁcant part in his early success; without them his ability to sustain a writing career on the other side of the world would have been severely jeopardised. Not only did friends such as Colvin and Henley have more business sense than Stevenson, they seemed prepared, purely in the spirit of friendship, to act as bu≠ers between publishers and the often sick and initially ﬁnancially struggling author. Understandably, Colvin, Henley and Stevenson’s longstanding Edinburgh friend, lawyer Charles Baxter who looked after his ﬁnances, all felt they had a stake in his career. The fact that each relationship was primarily emotional rather than ﬁnancial made them all the more problematic not least with regard to the guardianship of his works and reputation when he was in the Paciﬁc, and no less so after his death. This arms-length relationship between Stevenson and publishers and editors began when he was a novice based 400 miles away from what he and the literary world perceived as Britain’s cultural centre. His intermediaries saw themselves as facilitating the career of a brilliant young provincial with a mercurial mind and magnetic personality.

262

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 4.7 Young Folks, 1 May 1886. Stevenson’s Treasure Island had ﬁrst been serialised in the pages of Young Folks in 1881–2. Four years later the ﬁrst instalment of Kidnapped; or, The Lad with the Silver Button appeared in the same magazine, on whose front page it remained throughout almost its entire run.

literature in the marketplace

263

They, and he, may have envisaged that success would bring him permanently to London, or at least back to Britain. It is perhaps signiﬁcant that there was relatively little direct correspondence between Stevenson and his publishers. In the ﬁrst ﬂush of his new-found popularity as a best-selling author he spent several months in the United States where he was sought out by editors and publishers. In that context there was no trusted friend to act as intermediary and more correspondence with publishers survives. The letters indicate that he did not handle his new situation very well. Stevenson was ambivalent about popularity as a writer, and, although he wanted to be read, he did not necessarily trust the public. His essays on the art of writing, collected in Memories and Portraits (1887) and many of his letters reveal him as profoundly serious about his work and with a highly developed sense of responsibility to his audience, yet he avoids making inﬂated claims about his own artistic worth. Highly disciplined in the pursuit of his profession, he was remarkably cavalier about the nuts and bolts of professional survival. To those who considered that writing for Young Folks was beneath him he responded virulently: To those who ask me . . . to do nothing but reﬁned, high-toned, bejay, bedam masterpieces, I will o≠er the following bargain: I agree to their proposal if they give me £1000 a year, at which I value mon possible, and at the same time e≠ect such a change in my nature that I shall be content to take it from them instead of earning it. If they cannot manage these triﬂing matters, by God, I’ll trouble them to hold their tongues . . . Let them write their damn masterpieces for themselves, and let me alone. (III: 293–4) When fame did come, Stevenson was simultaneously jubilant and embarrassed at the large sums of money he was beginning to attract. The popularity of his work served to mask the critical appreciation of the subtleties, complexities and striking modernity of much of his writing. In 1880, in spite of the high opinions of Leslie Stephen and others, few could have predicted that Stevenson would create books and characters which would occupy so large a space in the world’s cultural landscape.

264

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 4.8 William McGonagall, Poet and Tragedian.

While a number of Scottish writers were to ﬁnd spectacular success in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace, there were many for whom literary labour was both di∞cult and ﬁnancially unrewarding. There are few more evocative characters in the annals of Scottish literature than the working-class poet, William Topaz McGonagall. Born in Edinburgh to Irish parents in 1825, he was one of ﬁve children. The family settled in Dundee early in his life where he was to take up employment as a weaver. He describes in his memoirs how he became an autodidact, ﬁrst learning to read from penny editions of Shakespeare. In the 1840s, he took up amateur acting, began performing at the Theatre Royal in Dundee, and gave public recitals whenever the

literature in the marketplace

265

opportunity arose. He himself relates an episode in 1877 in which a mysterious presence endowed him with ‘the genius of poetry’. His ﬁrst composition ‘while under the divine inspiration’ was a poem in praise of his benefactor, the Reverend George Gilﬁllan, published in the popular Weekly News. Thereafter he wrote verses commemorating everything from the scenery of Scotland to the virtues of Sunlight soap in erratic metre with simple rhyme schemes. A characteristic example can be found in a poetic tribute to Robert Burns which begins: Immortal Robert Burns of Ayr, There’s but few poets can with you compare; Some of your poems and songs are very ﬁne: To ‘Mary in Heaven’ is most sublime; And then again in your ‘Cottar’s Saturday Night,’ Your genius there does shine most bright, As pure as the dewdrops of the night. Your ‘Tam O’Shanter’ is very ﬁne, Both funny, racy, and divine, From John O’Groats to Dumfries All critics consider it to be a masterpiece, And, also, you have said the same, Therefore they are not to blame. And in my own opinion both you and they are right, For your genius there does sparkle bright, Which I most solemnly declare To thee, Immortal Bard of Ayr! McGonagall undertook an ill-fated tour of the United States in 1887, where he failed to secure any engagements, returning to Dundee with the assistance of one of his local patrons. He continued to perform his works wherever the opportunity presented itself, from circuses to penny ga≠s, relying on the support of his more well-to-do acquaintances with whose ﬁnancial assistance he was able to publish his verse in the form of broadsides. McGonagall saw over 200 of his poems through the press during his lifetime and in 1890 arranged for the publication of his collected works in two parts under the title Poetic Gems. He died impoverished in Edinburgh in 1902. While he is best known today for writing some of the worst verse in the history of poetry, Poetic Gems appeared in many editions in the twentieth century and is still in print today. He has been translated into many foreign languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.

The Making of a Scottish Literary Canon Cairns Craig On Saturday, 5 June 1819, at the Freemason’s Tavern in London, a festival of commemoration was held for Robert Burns, with the aim of raising enough money to build a ‘National Monument to his Memory’. That such a national monument was required in addition to those already erected at his places of birth and burial was the argument of the day’s distinguished speakers, each of them insisting on Burns’ special place in the country’s ‘national’ life. The chairman, Sir James Mackintosh, noted that: No Monument, indeed, was wanting to eternize the name of Burns. His immortality rested on a surer basis – it lived in his Poems, and would ﬂourish as long as human beings felt an interest and a sympathy in a true representation of the history, the cares, the joys, and sorrows of their fellow men. (Festival: 7) A monument, however, would serve a di≠erent purpose, reminding people that Burns’ poetic achievement was possible only because he had ‘enjoyed the beneﬁts resulting from a system of national instruction – he had received an excellent English education, and had industriously availed himself of the resources presented by it’; as a consequence, ‘there was no question but that he had read more books than Homer could have read’. The erection of such a memorial would stand as a monument to the Scotland which he represented in his poetry and o≠er it as a beacon to the rest of the world: [It] would suggest to all who might ever see it, that as it was to the general di≠usion of Education in Scotland his inimitable writings owed their origin – so, the same cause, if allowed to operate in other countries, would, in all probability, incalculably augment the

literature in the marketplace

267

common riches of the intellectual world – would open unnumbered mines of mental treasure, which would otherwise lie unrought and unvalued – would unlock and give to society the genius and the talents of ten thousand bosoms, which, but for it, would for ever languish in silence and obscurity. (ibid.: 7) Burns would become the icon of Scotland’s national superiority in the provision of a general education, and a symbol of what a state could do for its people. The national monument would reﬂect not only the achievement of the poet as an isolated genius but also as a son of the people, one whose life reﬂected their virtues, since ‘morality was the best nursery of genius’ and because, despite his detractors, Burns’ poems ‘a≠orded intrinsic evidence, that it was in early life, and by his father’s ﬁre-side, those seeds of virtue, ﬁlial duty, and piety to his Creator, were implanted, which afterwards grew up and matured into the fruits which would supply powerful and never-failing lessons of moral worth, integrity, and independence’ (ibid.: 8). Burns, the Scottish people and the Scottish nation provided a unique example to the world of the beneﬁts of a Presbyterian polity, and the event of the poet’s commemoration was in itself a historic one, since it ‘was the ﬁrst instance in the history of the world, of an assembly of Gentlemen called together, and over which a Prince of the Blood presided, for the purpose of erecting a Monument, in the Capital of his Country, to a Peasant of that country’ (ibid.). The projected monument, however, was not the one which now stands somewhat to the side of Calton Hill in Edinburgh. What was proposed in a paper submitted by Mr Andrew Robertson was something much grander: it was to be an imitation of the Acropolis, because ‘to select and restore some one of those ancient works which have excited the enthusiastic admiration of all ages’ would ‘associate with the memory of our favourite Poet, all that is reﬁned and beautiful in art’ (Festival: 3). The proposed monument to Burns emerged, three years later during the visit of George IV, as a National Monument intended to symbolise the heroic role of Scots in the defeat of Napoleon, and although such conﬁrmation of its ‘Britishness’ might seem ironic, but in fact Burns’ ghostly presence within that ‘National’ structure is highly appropriate. The original scheme for the monument had come from a group of Scottish exiles in Bombay, and James Thomson’s poetic address to Burns during the commemoration stressed his importance in the imperial mission: Along the deadliest ﬁelds of ﬁght Bestrew’d with foemen slain;

268

edinburgh history of the book in scotland Our tartan’d Chiefs have owned the might Of thy resistless strain. And ‘Scots’, whose Sires ‘wi’ Wallace bled!’ In battle thought on Thee; And follow’d where their Poet led, To Scotland’s victory! (ibid.: 12)

Burns thus becomes the poet of Scotland-in-Empire, maintaining Scotland’s distinctive voice in the expanding British realm, and ensuring ‘Scotland’s victory’, despite its apparently minor status within the Union. In an era of newly emerging ‘nation states’, Scotland, a nation which had abandoned its independent statehood, came to insist on the continued signiﬁcance of its distinctive nationality, a nationality deﬁned in large measure by its distinctive writing; and so one of the toasts on 5 June 1819 was to ‘The memory of Ossian, Thomson, Ramsay, Beattie, Skinner, Macneil, Leyden, and other departed Scottish Bards’ (ibid.: 15). Departed, but like Burns continuing presences in the national imagination, and their inﬂuence reinforced by the fact that Burns was succeeded by Sir Walter Scott who, although unable to attend the event, was celebrated by Mackintosh as ‘a poet in his prose as well as in his verse’. The supposed anonymity of the ‘author of Waverley’ did not prevent the assembly toasting a writer ‘who in his delightful Series of Narrative Fictions – if indeed such faithful pictures of men, manners and times, were to be called ﬁctions – had done that for his country, which no other man ever had’ (ibid.: 15). Burns’ commemoration preﬁgures the memorialisation of Scott’s achievement by the Scott Monument on Princes Street, a Gothic structure chosen as: Peculiarly appropriate to this country – beautiful in its outline – capable of the greatest enrichment – of being raised to the most commanding altitude – exclusively and intimately associated with the events, areas, and characters, which occupied the genius of the man whose memory it is desired to honour. (Second Report: 11) Scott, like Burns, had, according to Sir Daniel Sandford, writing in The Scotsman in 1832, ‘raised our country to a proud equality of fame with the most renowned nations of ancient and modern times – and they had done more than history itself to throw light and splendour round her annals’ (Morton: 165). Scotland’s national standing in the world depended upon the reputation of its writers, and in Burns and Scott the nation had found writers who asserted its pre-eminence in both ‘ancient and modern times’.

literature in the marketplace

269

The cultural signiﬁcance of Scottish writing was enormously extended by the impact of Scottish publishing in the ﬁrst twenty years of the nineteenth century. The Edinburgh Review (founded 1802) and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (founded 1817) set new standards in literary criticism and, in their very di≠erent styles, promoted Scottish writing to an Empire-wide audience. It was in Blackwood’s July number of 1819 that the proposal for a memorial to Burns in imitation of a classical temple was modulated into a proposal for a monument which would conﬁrm Edinburgh as the ‘Athens of the North’: [W]hile London must always eclipse [Edinburgh] in all that depends on wealth, power, or fashionable elegance, nature has given to it the means of establishing a superiority of a higher and more permanent kind. The matchless beauty of its situation, the superb cli≠s by which it is surrounded, the magniﬁcent prospects of the bay, which it commands, have given to Edinburgh the means of becoming the most beautiful town that exists in the world . . . And thus while London is the Rome of the empire, to which the young, and the ambitious, and the gay, resort for the pursuit of pleasure, of fortune, or of ambition, Edinburgh might become another Athens, in which the arts and the sciences ﬂourished, under the shade of her ancient ﬂame, and established a dominion over the minds of men more permanent even than that which the Roman arms were able to e≠ect. (379) ‘The Athens of the North’ is no casual slogan of neo-classical imitation: in the era in which British arms would create the world’s most extensive empire, Edinburgh’s role was to provide the ‘permanent’ spiritual ‘dominion’ to justify that imperial power. Scottish arts and sciences would have classical authority over the territory of the pax Britannica. Hugh Blair despaired of Alan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd achieving recognition as the equal of ‘any composition of this kind, in any language’, because it was ‘written in the old rustic dialect of Scotland, which, in a short time, will probably be entirely obsolete, and not intelligible’ (531). A hundred years later, Burns’ language is no impediment to his inclusion as one of the greatest of Carlyle’s ‘Hero Poets’: High Duchesses, the ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns; – a strange feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like this; that on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of uttering it at present, that this rustic, with

270

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

his black brows and ﬂashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is of a dignity beyond all others, incommensurable with all others. (1840: 79) For Carlyle, Burns stands as one of the heroes of history, comparable to Shakespeare or Dante but, just as importantly, he stands for the continuing identity of the Scottish nation. Carlyle quotes Fletcher of Saltoun’s aphorism, ‘Let me make the songs of a people and you shall make its laws’ and declares Burns to ‘have equalled himself with Legislators’, because he is ‘ﬁrst of all our Song-writers; for we know not where to ﬁnd one worthy of being second to him’. Those songs ‘are already part of the mother-tongue, not of Scotland only but of Britain, and of the millions that in all ends of the earth speak a British language’. Far from being obsolete, Burns it is argued had made Scots the second language of the Empire and through it ‘no British man has so deeply a≠ected the thoughts and feelings of so many men, as this solitary and altogether private individual, with means apparently the humblest’ (Carlyle 1888: 368). Through the reputations of Burns and Scott, through the inﬂuence of the Edinburgh reviews, the Scottish writer had not only scope for reaching a world-wide audience, but undeniable status within the modern world’s ‘classical’ culture. The standing of the Scottish writer in the ﬁrst three-quarters of the nineteenth century is evidenced in the work of the young W. B. Yeats, struggling as he was to ﬁnd ways of establishing the status of Irish writing. In the 1890s, the comparison between Ireland and Scotland could not have been more pronounced: When once a country has given perfect expression to itself in literature, has carried to maturity its literary tradition, its writers, no matter what they write of, carry its inﬂuence about with them, just as Carlyle remained a Scotsman when he wrote of German kings or French revolutionists, and Shakespeare an Elizabethan Englishman when he told of Coriolanus or of Cressida. Englishmen and Scotsmen forget how much they owe to mature traditions of all kinds – traditions of feeling, traditions of thought, traditions of expression – for they have never dreamed of a life without these things. They write or paint or think or feel, and believe they do so to please no taste but their own, while in reality they obey rules and instincts which have been accumulating for centuries. (360) If Carlyle takes Burns to be the equal of Shakespeare in his heroic intensity, then Yeats takes Carlyle to be an equivalent expression of a

literature in the marketplace

271

mature literary tradition, thus allowing Scottish writers to stand equal with English writers in terms of the status of the traditions which they represent. Indeed, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, Burns had to be saved by a critic like George Saintsbury (holder of Hugh Blair’s Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the University of Edinburgh) from the pervasive expectation that any form of Scottish speech must be ‘poetry’: I do not know to whom the epigram that ‘everything that is written in Scotch dialect is not necessarily poetry’ is originally due, but there is certainly some justice in it. Scotch, as a language, has grand accommodations; it has richer vowels and a more varied and musical arrangement of consonants than English, while it falls not much short of English in freedom from that mere monotony which besets the richly-vowelled continental languages. It has an almost unrivalled provision of poetical cliches . . . [that] is to say, the stock phrases which Heaven knows who ﬁrst minted and which will pass till they are worn out of all knowledge. It has two great poets – one in the vernacular, one in the literary language – who are rich enough to keep a bank for their inferiors almost to the end of time. For Saintsbury, Scots is too poetically seductive, because ‘its best practitioners are sometimes prone to forget that nothing ready-made will do as poetry, and that you can no more take a short cut to Parnassus by spelling good “guid” and liberally using “ava”, than you can execute the same journey by calling a girl a nymph and a boy a swain.’ Nevertheless, for Saintsbury at least, ‘the reason why Burns is a great poet, and one of the greatest, is that he seldom or never does this in Scots’ (Saintsbury 1923: 38–9, 37–8). As a poet, Burns has to be redeemed from the very success of the Scots language which his work initiated, and, indeed by the beginning of the twentieth century, literary historians such as T. F. Henderson had come to see Burns as not only the climax but as the conclusion of poetry in Scots: ‘[H]is death was really the setting of the sun; the twilight deepened very quickly; and such twinkling lights as from time to time appear only serve to disclose the darkness of the all-encompassing night’ (458). What such views ignored, however, was that it was only in the nineteenth century that the literary tradition of medieval Scottish writing became publicly established: indeed, one might say that Henryson and Dunbar as the great writers of the early Scottish tradition were, in terms of literary impact, actually nineteenth-century writers, for, as late as 1786 when John Pinkerton published his List of Scottish Poets, Henryson was still known only as one of the poets mentioned by

272

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Dunbar in his ‘Lament for the Makars’, and as the possible author of a small number of unattributed poems. The editions of Barbour’s Bruce and Blind Harry’s Wallace by John Jamieson, compiler of the Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808–9), applied serious scholarship for the ﬁrst time to those founding works of the Scottish tradition, and it was not until the 1820s, at the instigation of the Bannatyne Club in Edinburgh – formed in 1823 under the presidency of Sir Walter Scott – and the Maitland Club in Glasgow, formed in 1828, that complete editions of the major medieval poets appeared. The central ﬁgure in this period was David Laing, secretary to the Bannatyne Club, whose editions of Lyndsay (1826), Dunbar (1834) and Henryson (1865), and Works of John Knox, 6 vols (1846–64), provided the ﬁrst complete and scholarly editions of the major writers, setting a standard for later editions such as John Small’s Works of Gavin Douglas (1874), and for the work of the Scottish Text Society, which was formed in 1882 to ‘publish in each year about 400 pages of printed matter’ that would be ‘illustrative of Scottish Language and Literature before the Union’ (Law: 2). John Jamieson’s work in the early part of the century had been in part inspired by his connections with the Icelandic scholar, Grim J. Thorkelin, who was responsible for the ﬁrst publication of Beowulf in 1815. Beowulf came to be recognised, in the following decades, as the foundational work of the English literary tradition, but it also gave added signiﬁcance to the Scots literary tradition since, as Jamieson’s dictionary aimed to prove, the Scottish language was a separate development of the Scandinavian linguistic origins of Beowulf and one that had remained much closer to those origins than had English itself. As well as publishing texts from Scotland’s pre-Union history, the Scottish Text Society was committed to the establishment of a chair of Anglo-Saxon at one of the Scottish universities. Between 1800 and 1880 the canon of poetry in Scots was established not only as foundational to Scottish national identity but as crucial in the development of English literature. John Merry Ross, author of the ﬁrst study of Scotland’s early literature, argued that: The inﬂuence of Chaucer is felt more powerfully and yields richer fruit in Scotland than in England. Towering high above the group of lay and clerical poets whom we have just named, stand out the splendid ﬁgures of King James, Henryson, and Dunbar, whose genius would shed a lustre on any literature, and who are in fact the only great English poets of the ﬁfteenth century. They and their successors in the sixteenth form a real connecting link between the age of Chaucer and that of Spenser, and enable us to measure in

literature in the marketplace

273

some degree the sovereign sway exercised by the great ‘Father of English poetry (129). In other words, the tradition of English literature is sustained and made possible by the achievements of the early Scottish poets, thereby allowing Scottish writing not only to claim a contemporary pre-eminence through the work of Burns and Scott, but an equal share in the history of a national British literature. It was an argument similarly acknowledged by early historians of English literature in England. Henry Morley’s English Writers, for instance, identiﬁed the crucial role of Scotland’s medieval makkars in the creation of the English literary tradition: Our North gained vigour by a war for independence, and had, in the ﬁfteenth century, poets and historians who led the way on to a golden time of Scottish Literature. Our South, at the same time, lost vigour by the blight of foreign and domestic wars that brought men into conﬂict for cause that lifts the mind. The soul stirs nobly in the last man left alive where men fall in the ﬁght for liberty . . . From Chaucer’s time till the beginning of the sixteenth century our Literature of the North sweeps upward. Chief poet of Scotland in the time of Chaucer was John Barbour, of whose chief poem, ‘The Bruce’, the theme was liberty. (1) And Thomas Arnold’s article on ‘English Literature’, in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, connects this earlier tradition to the Scottish culture which had produced and sustained the Britannica itself as one of the major achievements of nineteenth-century British intellectual life: not only did Arnold (younger brother to Matthew) give prominent roles to Dunbar, Henryson and Douglas – ‘all of whom, in respect of their turn of thought and the best features of their style, may be properly a∞liated to Chaucer’ – but a special place was accorded to Burns as ‘a man of genius . . . whose direct and impassioned utterances, straight from the heart’ were ‘to prepare the English-speaking world for that general break-up of formulas which the tempest of the French Revolution was about to initiate’. The article’s culmination is the work of Scott, whose ‘strong memory and inexhaustible imagination, joined with a gift for picturesque description, and the faculty . . . of creating and presenting living types of character’, makes him the representative novelist of the age (415, 428, 433). In e≠ect, what Arnold’s article acknowledges is the power of a Scoto-British conception of English literature in which Scottish writers occupy a central role. Arnold’s broad conception of literature as good writing means that the works of Francis

274

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid are given prominence, and even Dugald Stewart is given a key role in the moulding of modern ‘English’ culture through the wide range of intellectuals who attended his lectures, many of whom became contributors to those inﬂuential organs, the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine. By 1880, Scotland’s greatest writers, whether Henryson and Dunbar or Burns and Scott, stood at the very centre of the ‘English’ literary tradition, an outcome in part attributable to the fact that the discipline of ‘English Literature’ was largely shaped by Scottish examples. Robert Crawford (1992; 1998) has argued that in the eighteenth century the peculiar situation of Scots in the Union required the ‘Scottish Invention of English Literature’, but just as signiﬁcant was the consequence that when English Literature came to be institutionalised in the nineteenth century, it developed largely on the basis of Scottish models. As Chris Baldick has argued, the ‘academic critic, tied professionally to a university’, was a role which ‘originated in the Scottish universities of the late eighteenth century when courses on “Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres” were established’. According to Baldick, the ﬁrst major academic literary critics were ‘Edward Dowden, Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1867 . . . and David Masson, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh from 1865’ (13–14) – though the timing of their installation would suggest that Baldick’s sentence ought to have had a di≠erent order of precedence. Masson, author of a ground-breaking, six-volume study of Milton, and editor of the works of Thomas de Quincey might seem to be one of those who neglected the native nation, and who, according to Crawford, ‘devalue native literary currency, choosing to compliment it only when it accords with Anglocentric rules of propriety’ (1998: 12). But Masson, who, for the range of his criticism and the breadth of his engagement with contemporary thought, must stand as one of the most important of Scotland’s nineteenth-century writers, always took delight in asserting the pre-eminence of Scottish thinkers and writers. Burns, Scott, Chalmers and Carlyle represented, to him, the greatest achievements of modern writers and thinkers, and his eulogy to Carlyle is typical of his commitment to the signiﬁcance of the Scottish writer: ‘[I]t will be many and many a day before those who in the future shall speak the English tongue, in our British Islands and elsewhere, will cease, when they look back on the history of these Islands from 1795 to 1881, to think with veneration of the noble labours and great personality of Thomas Carlyle’ (1885: 115). For Masson, the distinguishing feature of Scottish writers was that: ‘[A]s compared with England at least, that which has come down to the

literature in the marketplace

275

natives of Scotland as something peculiar, generated by the series of transactions of which their country has been the scene, is an intense spirit of nationality’ (1856: 397). And it was this Scottishness which made their contribution to British literature so signiﬁcant. In the year in which he took up the chair of Rhetoric at Edinburgh (1865) Masson had demonstrated what George Davie has argued to be the foundation of Scottish intellectual life – a commitment to philosophy and to generalism – by his publication of a book on Recent British Philosophy. Surveying all of the major contributions to British philosophy in the previous sixty years, Masson insisted that ‘it is to Carlyle, Hamilton and Mill that all would point as having been the most prominent leaders of free or uncovenanted British speculation during the last thirty years’ (7) – in other words, that ‘British’ thought was deﬁned by its Scottish contributors. The continuity of the tradition of Scottish philosophy and its steady signiﬁcance in Victorian culture was, for Masson, both a matter of national pride and an indication of the special role that Scottish culture played in the modern world. He was no less convinced of the role of Scottish literature in nineteenth-century British culture, and in an essay entitled the ‘Scottish Inﬂuence on British Literature’ he insisted that the achievements of the eighteenth century in philosophy were matched by the achievements of the nineteenth century in literature: [T]he specially literary energy which had been awakened in the country descended along another line in the persons of Scott, and Je≠rey, and Chalmers, and Campbell, and Wilson and Carlyle. Considering the amount of inﬂuence exerted by such men upon the whole spirit and substance of British literature, considering how disproportionate a share of the whole literary produce of Great Britain has come from them or from other Scotchmen, and considering what a stamp of peculiarity marks all that portion of this produce which is of Scottish origin, it does not seem too much to say, that the rise and growth of Scottish literature is as notable a phenomenon as the rise and growth of Scottish philosophy. (1856: 407–8) The Scottish writer, according to Masson, thus stood not only at the forefront of English writing but as the expression of a distinctive national culture. What Masson, in his patriarchal concern with genealogy, had overlooked, however, was what was clear to J. H. Millar forty years later when, in 1903, he published the ﬁrst attempt at a complete Literary History of Scotland. To Millar the nineteenth century in Scotland started as the century of women writers: ‘The opening decade of the nineteenth century is remarkable in the literature of

276

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Scotland . . . for the ﬁrst appearance of the female author in prose’ (539). Millar lists Anne McVicar, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton and Susan Ferrier as major ﬁgures in Scottish prose-writing of that decade, but does not include the contribution, for instance, of the Porter sisters (The Scottish Chiefs, 1810) or the inﬂuence of Joanna Baillie’s plays (Walter Scott was responsible for a production of The Family Legend in Edinburgh in 1810) or the later novels of Christian Johnstone (Clan-Albin, 1815). The development of Johnstone’s career – she went on to be the editor of Tait’s Magazine in the 1830s – is symptomatic of the fact that Scotland’s ﬂourishing publishing businesses not only provided means by which literary outsiders such as James Hogg could make careers for themselves, but routes by which women writers too could earn a living. The relationship, for instance, between the Blackwoods and Margaret Oliphant – she wrote a history of the company in 1897 – was one in which she developed from story-writer and novelist to reviewer, translator, biographer and literary critic, and with such a prodigious output that they often acted as her bankers, advancing her money against her future writings. Oliphant complained in her Autobiography that ‘she never did anything like so well as others’, comparing her earnings with Anthony Trollope – ‘who must have made at least three times as much as ever I did’– and Mrs Humphrey Ward, whose ‘fabulous success . . . we poorer writers are all so whimsically and so ruefully unable to explain’ (91) but she did well enough to have her sons educated at Eton and to live comfortably on her income. Signiﬁcantly, Oliphant became a commercial success by writing her Carlingford series about an archetypal English country town – Scottish writers seeking to be at the forefront of British literature had to be able to appeal to more than just an English taste for the romance of Scotland. Such had been the case with Walter Scott when he switched from Scottish to English history with Ivanhoe. Nevertheless, Scotland remained valuable literary property for Scottish writers, and as the literary marketplace expanded the Scottish educational system, to which Sir James Mackintosh had attributed Burns’ achievements, continued to endow the Scottish writer with signiﬁcant beneﬁts. Which is why, perhaps, at the end of the nineteenth century, so many Scottish writers were at the forefront of the development of the genres that would appeal to the new mass-reading public of late Victorian Britain: Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘penny shocker’, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, Arthur Conan Doyle’s ﬁrst Sherlock Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet in 1887, J. M. Barrie’s whimsical collection of ‘kailyard’ Scottish stories published in Auld Licht Idylls in 1888, and the launch, in 1892, of William Robertson Nicoll’s magazine The Woman at Home,

literature in the marketplace

277

which was to be the vehicle for the work of Annie S. Swan, a writer almost as prodigious as Oliphant herself. Scotland’s strong educational traditions and the overproduction of graduates from its universities probably also contributed to the continuing prominence of Scots in British publishing, even when, by mid-century, it began to be increasingly concentrated in London (see ‘The London Scots’). Symbolic of this is the founding of Macmillan & Co., in 1843, by two brothers from the island of Arran, a house which not only published much of Margaret Oliphant’s later work but engaged David Masson as the ﬁrst editor of the new Macmillan’s Magazine in 1859. Their launch of the scientiﬁc journal, Nature, in 1869 can be seen as part of that commitment to bringing scientiﬁc knowledge to the people that had lain behind Scotland’s long tradition of producing encyclopaedias, such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Chambers’s Encyclopaedia. So important were the contributors to these sorts of publications, that individual entries would sometimes be published independently, as in the case of Walter Scott’s material for the third edition of the Britannica; and so signiﬁcant were some of the entries, such as J. G. Frazer’s on ‘Totem’ in the ninth edition of Britannica, that they proved to be the germ of a lifetime’s writing. In Frazer’s case this led to the twelve-volume ﬁnal edition of The Golden Bough in 1915. An inordinate number of the contributors to these encyclopaedias were Scottish, and their e≠ort to command and articulate for a general readership a vast range of contemporary knowledge suggests the conﬁdence they had in their own abilities. The period from the 1830s to the end of the century is often presented as one of the weakest in Scotland’s literary history, but if literature is taken, in its nineteenth- century sense, to include the nation’s scientiﬁc writers, from James Clerk Maxwell in physics to J. G. Frazer in the new science of anthropology; and its philosophical and theological writers, such as Alexander Bain, author of the groundbreaking psychological treatises, The Emotions and the Will (1859) and The Senses and the Intellect (1865) and William Robertson Smith, editor of the ninth edition of Britannica, it might be argued that at the height of the British Empire Scottish culture had indeed fulﬁlled Blackwood’s prophecy of 1819, having established ‘a dominion over the minds of men more permanent even than that which the Roman arms were able to e≠ect’.

Chapter Five

THE DIVERSITY OF PRINT Antiquarianism Padmini Ray Murray he rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of Scotland in the early years of the nineteenth century led to the notion among men of learning that its historic nationhood was under threat and that its identity should be revived in a variety of literary forms. Modern society, it was felt, was in danger of making one culture seem very much like another, and there developed a concerted e≠ort to recover aspects of Scotland that would di≠erentiate it from the rest of Britain. Eighteenth-century scholars had tended to read history through the lens of philological detail and the disputed events of the past. The nineteenth-century antiquarian found that a rich literary heritage was waiting to be discovered that could serve to enhance Scotland’s distinctiveness. This trend gathered further impetus with the publication of James Macpherson’s Ossianic ‘translations’. The result was a craze for historical manuscripts, ballads and folk tales, a tendency institutionalised in the founding of a spate of historical clubs and societies. The ﬁrst association of its kind in Scotland was the Society of Antiquaries, founded in 1780 for ‘the investigation of the antiquities and history of Scotland.’ The Literary and Antiquarian Society of Perth, founded in 1784 for ‘investigating the history and antiquities of that part of Scotland of which the City of Perth may still be considered the capital’, was the ﬁrst such society to concern itself with literary matters (Terry: vii–viii). Papers read by members at meetings were sometimes published, but the clubs of the nineteenth century also concentrated on more substantial publications. Most of the clubs and societies of this era brought out their own titles in limited print runs, varying from around 100 to 300 copies. They were often executed in ‘sumptuous style’, the long-term preservation of their ancient texts thus being

T

278

the diversity of print

279

ensured (Weir: 191) Supported by subscription, these publications were usually exemplary in their editing and commentary, often done by club members. The most prominent of these organisations was the Bannatyne Club, founded by Sir Walter Scott in 1823 for the express purpose of the ‘printing and publication of works illustrative of the history, literature, and antiquities of Scotland’ (Terry: 26). It was named for George Bannatyne, who was responsible for compiling the ﬁfteenthand sixteenth-century anthology of Scottish poetry, the Bannatyne Manuscript (1568). The Bannatyne modelled itself on the Roxburghe Club of London and shared some of its membership with the Maitland Club of Glasgow, which was founded with similar aims in 1828, namely the ‘cultivation of the literary antiquities of Scotland’. The Bannatyne and the Maitland occasionally pooled their resources when a publication was economically di∞cult for one club to publish independently. The most prominent example of this kind of joint venture was the Register of the Bishopric of Glasgow, published in 1843 and costing more than £200 above the original estimate. The Bannatyne had an inﬂuence on the founding of similar clubs, such as the Iona Club in 1833, the Abbotsford Club in 1834, and the Spalding Club in Aberdeen in 1839. Societies dedicated to the preservation of ecclesiastical writings were also instituted: the Wodrow Society was founded in 1841 ‘for the publication of the works of the fathers and early writers of the Reformed Church of Scotland’ and the Spottiswoode Society in 1843 for ‘the revival and publication of the acknowledged works’ of members of the Episcopal Church (ibid.: viii). The objectives of the Bannatyne Club were set out by Scott himself in the club minutes: The express object and design contemplated in this Association, is, by means of an annual sum contributed by the Members, to print in a uniform and handsome manner, a series of Works, illustrative of the History, Topography, Poetry, and Miscellaneous Literature of Scotland in former times. (BCP) Contrary to the practice of the Roxburghe Club, Bannatyne books could be sponsored either from club funds or at the expense of an individual member. The annual membership cost 4 guineas, exclusively by invitation, and six members were elected by ballot annually. From the original number of thirty-one, subscriptions eventually grew to 184, which, as the club’s secretary, David Laing, observed, led to ‘larger sums being placed at the disposal of the Committee, and

280

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

many important works completed, which otherwise could never have been undertaken’ (1861: 6). An elected committee was responsible for selecting the manuscripts to be edited under the Club’s auspices, as well as the order of publication. Under the presidency of Thomas Thomson, Scott’s successor, important editions of Baillie’s Letters & Journals and Knox’s Works were produced. David Laing, the Club’s ﬁrst and only secretary, was a highly distinguished editor whose e≠orts for the Bannatyne as well as other clubs were acclaimed as the best of their kind. Laing’s work on the Buke of the Howlat (1823), one of the ﬁrst Bannatyne productions, was an editorial tour de force, consisting of exemplary notes on historic context as well as textual variants. The Bannatyne Club’s success as a publishing body belied its convivial nature. The print runs of publications were originally limited to eighty-four, and every member received two copies gratis. In the case of works of importance, an extra impression would be printed ‘on a paper di≠ering in size or quality from that which is made use of for the copies intended for the Members’ (Bannatyne: 32). Scott’s original vision of the Bannatyne was one of a ‘bibliomaniacal society . . . for the prosecution of the important task of publishing dilettante editions of our national literary curiosities’ (Murray: 14). That the venture turned out to be more serious is evident from an 1827 entry in his journal: ‘Gad, it is a ﬁne Institution, that, a rare one by Jove and beats the Roxburghe’ (Journal: 311). Scott’s recognition of the club’s scholarly aspirations is further exempliﬁed by the fact that in 1831 he noted that the printing of extra copies of important works for general sale proved that their members were ready ‘in some degree to waive their own claim of individual distinction and lessen the value of their private collections . . . in so doing they serve the cause of historical literature most essentially’ (ibid.: 68). What some of its members lacked in bibliographic knowledge, they made up for in enthusiasm. As Lord Cockburn wrote in his journal in 1832: Very few of us can read our books, and still fewer can understand them; yet type, morocco, and the corporation spirit make us print on, and this quite independently of the temptation arising from the marketable worth of what we get being far beyond what we pay. (Murray: 15) The aesthetics and presentation of the works were the result of careful deliberation, embodied by a spirit that aimed to match the quality of its production with its contents. The fetishistic appeal of Bannatyne

the diversity of print

281

books is evident from the following anecdote by the bibliophile, Thomas Frognall Dibdin: Dining one day with Dr. Lee at the suburban villa of our common friend Mr. David Laing, we were regaled in the evening with a sight – yea a sni≠ – of some of the rare pieces of the Reformer in possession of our host, of which Ane Admonition, &c., 1554, 12mo, is considered to be his ﬁrst publication. Most cruelly did Mr. Laing ﬂicker the gilt tooling upon this morocco-coated tome in the eyes of his reverend guest, Dr Lee. ‘Name your price,’ said the Doctor, unable to sustain the shock of such a battery any longer, ‘and I will give it.’ (ibid.: 22) The Bannatyne served its founders’ purpose well and produced many ﬁrst-rate volumes in its lifetime. However, it was wound up in 1861, its termination occasioned by the ‘di∞culty of keeping up the stated number of Members from the want of candidates’ (Laing 1861: 7). The Maitland Club of Glasgow (1828) was consciously modelled on its distinguished predecessor. One of its founding members, John Kerr, corresponded with David Laing at its inception, requesting a copy of the Bannatyne rules. The club was named ‘in honor of the good old Knight and commendable collector, Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington’, its stated aim being ‘to print works illustrative of the antiquities, history and literature of Scotland’ (MCP: 5,882). The Iona Club, on the other hand, was founded: to investigate and illustrate the history, antiquities and early literature of the Highlands of Scotland . . . as a necessary step towards substituting an authentic history . . . of the literature, manners and character of its inhabitants, for the fables and errors which have so long prevailed on these subjects. (Terry: 98) The Iona was short-lived, producing only one volume, and di≠ered signiﬁcantly from its contemporaries in that it set no limits on numbers, and had fewer restrictions, allowing ‘ordinary’ members who paid an entrance fee and a moderate annual subscription of one guinea, thereby creating a less rareﬁed body. Associate members were admitted from the ‘clergy of every denomination and every rank’ (Ash: 79). As well as perpetuating and disseminating sources originally in manuscript form, clubs also promoted the conservation of the originals. The Spalding Club was established in Aberdeen in 1839 more or less for this purpose. As James McKenzie lamented in 1839: ‘[B]y such an establishment not having been established years ago, much has been lost’ (Withrington: 47).

282

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Members of the legal profession were so prominent in the enterprise that, as one observer remarked, ‘Never, probably, was the oral pleading of the Scottish bar more aptly linked with the art of oratory’ (Millar 1903: 568). This interest manifested itself once again in the fact that all of the founding members of the Spalding Club of Aberdeen abandoned the legal profession in favour of an occupation in editing, historiography and record keeping. One of these young men, Joseph Robertson, had already found modest fame through the publication of his The Book of Bon Accord, or a Guide to the City of Aberdeen (1839), research on which stimulated his interest in manuscript material which he felt merited proper editorial treatment. Robertson’s provincial background as well as his relative lack of proven ability discouraged him from approaching the Bannatyne Club, and he was thus motivated to found a club of his own along the lines of the recently established Camden Society of London, which had an ‘open’ membership and had as its stated aim ‘to make easily accessible to would-be historical researchers ranges of source materials, in public or private hands, which would otherwise be closed to them’ (Withrington: 46). A proposal was framed by Robertson and his associates, John Stuart and Richard Hill Burton and advertised in the Aberdeen Herald: To establish a club, on the model of the Bannatyne, Maitland and Camden Clubs [sic], and the Surtees Society, for the publication of the Historical, Genealogical, Topographical and Literary remains of the north-eastern counties of Scotland. The chief objects of the Society would be the publication of unedited manuscripts, and the reprinting of works of su∞cient rarity and importance to make such reprints desirable. (Ash: 81) The prospectus stated that the initial ﬁeld of enquiry would be that of the ‘shires of Aberdeen, Ban≠ and the Mearns’ as ‘this ﬁeld, abounding with highly interesting and valuable materials, has not hitherto been explored’ (Withrington: 46, 49). The Aberdeen club was also to di≠er from the Bannatyne and its ilk by setting out to produce more accessible volumes, advised as they were by Robert Pitcairn, editor for the Bannatyne Club’s volumes who had not always seen eye to eye with Laing regarding remuneration: ‘[T]he Committees are apt to swamp [their funds] by editing costly and often (with reverence be it spoken) useless books, which more than nine-tenths of the members do not relish, and fully as many cannot read’ (ibid.: 50). The need for a less exclusive undertaking such as the Spalding Club was reiterated in the controversy of the fact that it had taken as its title the name of a Scottish annalist who was considered obscure by most. The Earl of Aberdeen

the diversity of print

283

Figures 5.1, 5.2 Aberdeen Breviary and Advertisement, 1854.

One of the most important publications of the Bannatyne Club, this edition of the Aberdeen Breviary, printed by Johnstone, Ballantyne & Co. of Edinburgh, was based on the early sixteenth-century edition by Scotland’s ﬁrst printers, Walter Chepman and Andrew Myllar. According to its editor, the plan of the 1854 edition was ‘to keep as close to the original edition as possible; to produce, in fact, as complete a facsimile of the 8vo small volumes of 1509 & 1510 as was compatible with the enlargement of size, the magniﬁcence of the type & smallness’ while still amending ‘ﬂagrant & patent errors – such as deformed the original impression’ (BCP). Only four copies of the original were known to exist, as David Laing observed in his Preface to the Breviary, largely owing to the e≠ects of ‘negligence’ and ‘civil tumults’. The importance of such texts, according to Laing, was alone evident in the concerted attempt to have them ‘preserved in an accessible form by a careful and accurate republication. This has at length been accomplished, with no ordinary degree of elegance and minute accuracy, alike creditable to the Editor, the printer, and Publisher’ (xvi). So impressed were they by its production, that the committee, after having inspected the page specimens, resolved that ‘the Copies subscribed for by the Club, be thrown o≠ upon the same paper uniformly with those printed for private Subscribers’. In its appeal to historic preservation, serious scholarship, and bibliophilic connoisseurism, the Breviary epitomises all of the principal tendencies of nineteenth-century antiquarianism.

284

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

who was elected president of the club complained that it had hampered his e≠orts to canvass for members in London: ‘ “Spalding” is too insigniﬁcant even in Scotland, and is unknown here. I have often had to captain it’ (ibid.: 51). Robertson’s erudition was soon acknowledged by distinguished antiquarians such as Laing and Hill Burton, who both complimented his work on The History of Scots A≠airs from 1637 to 1641, the ﬁrst publication to emerge from the Spalding Club. The club eventually produced thirty-eight volumes before its termination in 1866, soon after Robertson’s death.

The book club and the antiquarian book trade The market for antiquarian books was gathering impetus in the early part of the century, booksellers o≠ering catalogues of works ‘on sale, for ready money’. These materials were not restricted to literary works alone; the Blackwood’s Catalogue of 1812 o≠ered: a number of Rare and Curious Articles in the various classes of literature; including a very extensive and uncommon collection of books and tracts, relative to the history, antiquities and poetry of Scotland, from the libraries of the late George Paton, David Herd, and other eminent Scottish collectors. Most booksellers also o≠ered to ‘arrange and catalogue, or value Gentlemen’s Libraries, on moderate terms’, an invaluable service in those heady days of bibliomania and book-hunting. The surge of interest in nationalistic works is evident from William (father of David) Laing’s consecutive catalogues of 1818 and 1819. The 1818 catalogue highlighted ‘several recent importations from the continent’ but the 1819 one went on to emphasise that he stocked ‘an extensive collection of books connected with the History and Literature of Scotland’, a shift that was symptomatic of the growing interest in publications of this nature. In the 1818 catalogue, Scotland had been relegated to a mere footnote in the ‘History and Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland’, despite the fact that there were separate sections for ‘English Miscellanies’ and even ‘Deutsche Bucher’ and ‘Libri Italiani y Spagnoli’. However, the 1819 supplement featured 104 pages of Scottish material including history, general, particular; and ecclesiastical as well as historical illustrations; literature – preceding the Union and ‘since the Union’; early miscellanies; and ‘Celtic Literature’. Although the antiquarian clubs did much to preserve material that may have otherwise been lost, the volumes themselves were treated as

the diversity of print

285

rarities because of their limited impressions, and were valued highly in the rare book market. The aura that surrounded such publications is seen in the tenor of their advertising. The title page of ‘Antiquarian and Historical Bookseller’ Thomas George Stevenson’s 1848 catalogue reads merely: ‘T. G. Stevenson’s Bannatyniana’ and then goes on to provide a hagiographic history of the club and its founding. The explicit importance of the antiquarian clubs to the preservation of Scotland’s national heritage is however evident from Stevenson’s account: These records are gradually extending over Scotland a net-work of local and charter history, which will save us in future from ignorant guessers, and lay a foundation for that which the civilization of the country demands – a history of the early settlement and transmission of land in each district . . . The time must come, when the gentlemen of Scotland will take an interest in the antiquities of their own districts; and scholars will be ashamed to know less of the colonizing and early history of Scotland than they do of Greece or Italy. Another Stevenson catalogue, for 1860, features ‘The Interesting and Valuable Works Printed at Private Expense for their Members by the Abbotsford, Bannatyne, Maitland and Spalding Clubs’, to be acquired from the shop well known to ‘all the true lovers of curious little old smoke-dried volumes’. The exclusivity of the titles included is highlighted by comments before each selection, such as ‘Abbotsford Club: This Club was limited to Fifty Members’ and ‘Bannatyne Club: This Club originally consisted of only Thirty-one members, but was afterwards increased to one hundred.–Of the Early Volumes issued only Forty copies were printed, and all of them are now rare.’ The products of the Spalding Club are also featured, ‘All handsomely printed in Quarto, Boards’. Perhaps one of the most telling examples of the commercial success of club publications is demonstrated by the fact that, when a complete set of Bannatyne publications came up for sale in 1828, they considerably exceeded the estimated price, causing Scott to remark that the Bannatyne Club was ‘the most ﬂourishing joint stock company he had ever been engaged in, and the only one in which the partners got a good return for their advances’ (Ash: 65).

286

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figures 5.3, 5.4 Broadsides. A form of street literature, broadsides were single printed sheets which carried public notices, news, speeches and songs, often acquired to be read or sung aloud. Sometimes they decorated private houses and taverns. The most popular topics were crime and punishment, death and tragedy, and the supernatural. The quality of their production varied considerably. Often they were composed and printed in such haste that typographical errors crept in, and the engravings bore little, if any, relevance to the text. Such is the case with Heather Jock, an anonymously printed account of a young man who is sentenced to transportation for thieving. Unusually accomplished, on the other hand, is this Hieroglyphic Love Letter, printed by William Sanderson of Edinburgh. Between 1817 and 1836, Sanderson had several premises in the closes o≠ the High Street and by the 1830s he was specialising in ballads and dying speeches. By the end of the eighteenth century, broadside printers and sellers were to be found in every major conurbation throughout Scotland. They were also sold by chapmen, itinerant hawkers or peddlers, who frequented street corners and country fairs. With the repeal of the Newspaper Tax in 1855 and the resulting availability of cheap news the demand rapidly declined so that, within a few years, they had fallen out of fashion, though several large collections have survived.

Religion Padmini Ray Murray Throughout the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth century, evangelicalism was on the rise in Scotland. By 1834 evangelicals had gained a majority in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, a situation that led to a series of disputes resulting in the Disruption of 1843. It was largely through the printed word that theological disagreements were conducted, and in such a climate it was only natural that religious publishing should prosper. Religious texts were relatively cheap to produce, with ready copy always available, and sale was often guaranteed. Consequently, an endless stream of tracts, sermons and treatises poured from Scotland’s presses in this period, some produced by specialist printers, some by mainstream publishers. Two of the central tenets of evangelicalism were its emphasis on the reading of the Bible and the propagation of the faith amongst nonbelievers. The growth of the printing industry, especially in Edinburgh and Glasgow, along with rising rates of literacy, created a particularly fertile ﬁeld for the movement to root itself. A number of ﬁrms that would later distinguish themselves in the world of secular publishing began as producers of religious material. Companies such as A. & C. Black, Oliphant (later Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier), Blackie, Collins and Nelson were initially driven by an explicitly evangelical vision, a trend only reversed towards the end of the nineteenth century when sales of religious works were beginning to falter. A number of other large-scale houses, such as Blackwood, published religious titles but only insofar as these were part of a varied list that also contained secular works. Apart from bibles, religious lists often included psalters, testaments, commentaries, catechisms and sermons. Religious ﬁction was also becoming popular, a genre that could encompass a wide range of narrative from spiritual biography to converts’ confessions and theological

288

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

romances (Maison: 1). There was also an increasing demand for hymn books, formerly the preserve of churches and their congregations, for use around the parlour piano. A series of revivalist meetings held in Scotland in 1873–4 by the American preacher Dwight Moody and his musical accomplice Ira Sankey created a considerable vogue for gospel music, Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos becoming a bestselling work in Britain. Alongside such commercially available religious material, there was a host of titles in free circulation. The desire to proselytise found expression through the distribution of bibles and religious pamphlets not only at home but throughout the world, in the mission ﬁelds of Africa, China and India, as well as emigrant colonies, where armies of Scottish ministers sought to spread the word and minister to their displaced brethren (Drummond: 181).

Bible publishing in Scotland At the beginning of the nineteenth century the King’s Printers for Scotland, Sir David Hunter Blair and John Bruce, held a monopoly on bible printing in Scotland. In 1823 the company attempted to prevent the import of bibles from England in response to the practice of selling bibles cheaper than their own. The Lord Chancellor’s decision in favour of the King’s Printer caused outrage from Scotland’s bible societies and independent booksellers and the privilege was revoked in 1839, abolishing all restrictions on the import of bibles to Scotland and giving to all Scottish printers the right to produce the Scriptures under bond and caution (Keir: 166). William Collins & Co. of Glasgow were amongst the ﬁrst to apply for a licence from the Bible Board under this new decree, and it soon formed a signiﬁcant part of their output. Initially Collins published the Old and New Testaments separately, printing 30,000 copies of the Pearl Testament in 1841, but produced their ﬁrst complete bible in 1842. By the end of 1843 they were able to o≠er three di≠erent formats: the Diamond 32mo, the Nonpareil 12mo School Bible, and the Pearl 24mo. Soon Collins were o≠ering a wide range of bibles to suit every pocket – their ﬁrst bible catalogue, published in 1860, advertised eighteen separate editions from a majestic imperial quarto in morocco binding, costing £4 10s, to a Pearl 24mo at a shilling. At a time when the trade was coming to rely increasingly on standard cloth binding, the elaborate style of bible decoration came to distinguish religious from general publishing. Collins were now producing luxuriously bound bibles embellished with hand-chased brass rims and clasps, blocked in gold design. Presentation often determined price, making some bibles desirable objects in their own right, suitable as

the diversity of print

289

gifts. Durability was essential; bibles served an important function as genealogical record; before the passing of the General Registration Act of 1854, the family bible was accepted as legal evidence in a court of law. Collins received the Highest Award of Merit at the Crystal Palace International Exhibition for an exhibit of two bibles. In accordance with the growing demand for well-produced illustration, Collins added illustrated bibles to their list in 1858, commissioning David Roberts, RA to design the plates. Another major producer of bibles was the Edinburgh ﬁrm of Oliver & Boyd, whose wholesale catalogue of June 1819 o≠ered no fewer than ninety-seven di≠erent kinds of bindings for bibles and religious texts printed by Blair Bruce, who were the o∞cial printers for Scotland, with the option of binding in apocryphal texts. They were one of several companies who also specialised in biblical commentaries, often multivolumed, of which the most expensive was their eight-volume quarto edition at £8 16s. Collins issued family bibles with Henry & Scott’s commentaries, with an initial print run of 250,000, ranging in price from 28s to £4 10s for the most elaborate. Although for a time they enjoyed something of a vogue, large format bibles began to go out of fashion towards the end of the century. Thomas Nelson’s ambition to provide Christian and classical literature for the ‘common people’ led to his company’s publication of the Bible in thirty-two-page instalments. This was a format to which he had originally been exposed as an apprentice in London where he was responsible for securing subscriptions for the Stratford Edition of Henry’s Bible then enjoying a large circulation in shilling parts. Blackie & Sons provided competition in the ﬁeld of cheap Scriptures with a part-issued Self Interpreting Family Bible (1828), as well as a beautifully printed and lavishly illustrated Imperial Family Bible (1841), and an Imperial Bible Dictionary. In 1866 Blackie were also to make their mark in the Welsh language market by publishing a bible in Welsh: Y Beibl Teuluaidd Cynwysfawr. The expiry of Eyre, Strahan & Spottiswoode’s English privilege in 1860 led Collins to petition the government for permission to sell their Scottish bibles legitimately south of the border. According to Collins: Before the abolition of the [Scottish] patent in 1839, the number of Bibles printed in Scotland was under 80,000. From 1831 to 1836 the largest number printed in one year was 105,600, the average falling short of 80,000. From 1854 to 1858 the average was 225,000, and I estimate this year, 1860, the number may reach 300,000. (Keir: 168)

290

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Bibles circulated in Scotland in the nineteenth century either through individual purchase, often by subscription, or through distribution by religious and missionary societies. The work of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) encountered resistance in Scotland because of its inclusion of the apocryphal writings alongside the canonical texts, something unacceptable to those Presbyterians who did not regard it as part of the Scriptures. Not all were troubled by the practice, however, which many Scots felt was a small price to pay for ecumenical co-operation in the international Bible Society movement. Nevertheless, a campaign in 1826 eventually led most of the Scottish auxiliaries, including the two largest, Edinburgh and Glasgow, to secede from the BFBS. Similar doctrinal disputes arose over the provision of religious texts among Scottish congregations overseas. Walter Johnstone reported to the Scottish Missionary Society in 1848 that he found at the Charlottetown Bible Depository in Prince Edward Island no Psalms bound in with their testaments, ‘a sorry state of a≠airs for the Scottish Christians’ (Bell 1998b: 105n.). Presbyterians overseas were also frequently incensed when Anglican missionaries attempted to implement the Longer Catechism as opposed to the shorter version to which they were accustomed.

Other religious literature In Lessons from the Life of the Late James Nisbet, Publisher, the author exhorts his reader to ‘Take care, 1st, How you pray; 2d, What you hear; 3d, Where you go; and 4th, What you read’ (Wallace: 28). The growth of the belief in the printed word’s ability to make people better Christians is reﬂected in the increase in nineteenth-century religious literature. Sermons were particularly proﬁtable in the early half of the century, sold either separately or bound in, o≠ering little risk to the publisher whose role was more akin to that of a jobbing printer. However, with the coming of religious periodicals, which would routinely include sermons for weekly devotional reading, this was no longer the case. Another way of spreading of the word was through the distribution of religious tracts. Throughout the eighteenth century the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) ensured their success by undercutting commercial publishers, providing their members with tracts at half the cost of production, thereby gaining virtual monopoly of the religious education market until the appearance of Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts and the Religious Tract Society later in the century (Lowther Clarke: 82). The ﬁrst major Scottish tract society, the Religious Tract and Book Society of Scotland, more familiarly known as

the diversity of print

291

the Scottish Colportage Society, had been established in 1793. By 1874 there were employing ‘228 colporteurs, who sold, in that year, 55,000 copies of Scripture, 120,000 copies of “various works of a religious and morally-elevating character,” 840,000 periodicals for adults, 400,000 for the young, and 300,000 cheap hymnbooks’ (Altick: 103). The Stirling Religious Tract Society was to return even more impressive ﬁgures. Founded in 1848 to counteract poor attendance at Sabbath services, the society appointed an army of agents to put a tract ‘into the hand of every passer-by’ (Cormack: 11). An advertisement in the Stirling Journal indicates that in September of that year ‘a second printing of 100,000 was in the press’ and that ‘one fourth of the whole . . . sent out to various quarters of Scotland’. These were a combination of evangelical tracts, either written anonymously or by well-known clergymen, or simply a collection of biblical quotations on a topic such as drunkenness or adultery, ending with a customary caution to the reader: ‘Dear Reader – Were you to die with this paper in your hand, where would your immortal soul be – in heaven or in hell? O be persuaded to pray earnestly to the Lord, just now’ (Drummond: 15). The society had a prodigious output, printing and distributing approximately three million tracts annually. It also published a number of religious periodicals: The British Messenger was ‘a cheap religious paper, for the revival and promotion of vital Godliness’, featuring news of religious revivals; The Gospel Trumpet featured ‘short, stirring articles on religious subjects, printed in large type, and specially adapted for aged readers and others’; Good News was ‘an illustrated religious paper, suitable for circulation amongst sabbath scholars and general distribution . . . each month with an attractive original woodcut’. In spite of the enormous number of tracts printed and circulated by the society, it has been argued that they may in the end have had limited e≠ect. ‘No doubt there was a committed readership but the majority of . . . tracts must have shared the fate of many political leaﬂets today’ (Cormack: 19). The world of religious publishing in the nineteenth century had many ﬂamboyant ﬁgures, but none more charismatic than Thomas Chalmers, the ﬁery and eloquent evangelical preacher and ‘ecclesiastic statesman’ who was responsible for the establishment of the Free Church of Scotland. William Collins and Thomas Chalmers’ brother, Charles Chalmers, together formed the publishing house of Chalmers & Collins, handling the publication of Chalmers’ works until the theologian transferred his business to Oliver & Boyd in 1845. In 1817 Chalmers & Collins published a collection of inﬂuential sermons that Chalmers had delivered in Glasgow. Discourses on the Christian Revelation, viewed in connection with the Modern Astronomy dealt with the connections between science and theology. Mercantilism was

292

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

considered in Chalmers’ second set of discourses, the Commercial Discourses, which were published in 1819. The famous Astronomical Discourses sold 6,000 copies at 12s each in ten weeks and 20,000 in the course of the year. William Hazlitt commented that their popularity was such that they ‘ran like wild-ﬁre through the country, were the darlings of watering-places, were laid in the windows of inns and were to be met with in all places of public resort’ (Keir: 31–3). Though Chalmers already had a reputation as a preacher, the Discourses established him as a writer. An earlier edition of the work had been published by John Smith, but Chalmers quickly fell out with the Glasgow publisher, a tendency that would continue throughout his lifetime. As a consequence of this estrangement, Chalmers insisted that Chalmers & Collins should be the sole publisher of his works, helping to establish the ﬁrm in 1819, and thus providing a professional position for his younger brother which gave him a degree of control over his publications. This was an arrangement that was beneﬁcial to both parties for at least the next twenty-ﬁve years. The ﬁrst major work to emerge from the ﬁrm was Chalmers’ The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns (1819), in whose marketing and distribution Chalmers was himself greatly involved. Chalmers was as shrewd a businessman as a theologian, insisting on the best placement for his works and ensuring su∞cient ﬁnancial return on his e≠orts. He received £1,800 for the Discourses and was to earn approximately £14,000 from the Collins partnership. Collins was quick to capitalise on his star author’s success, and issued a volume of Chalmers’ sermons, Importance of Civil Government to Society (1820), priced at 1s 6d and selling 6,000 copies. Collins also made provision to print editions of his sermons at 9d each, initiating the Collins practice of the cheap edition. Realising that the writings of prominent ministers represented a growth market, Collins launched the Select Library of Christian Authors in 1822, available in a variety of formats and prices from 3s to 10s, each of which featured an introduction by an eminent theologian of the day. Collins was not alone in exploiting the religious reprint market, with Nelson and others issuing popular editions of the religious classics (Dempster 1983: 41). Although Chalmers was possibly Collins’ best selling author, the ﬁrm enjoyed considerable success with Thomas Dick’s The Christian Philosopher (1823), which had run to ten editions by 1846 and was frequently reprinted until the end of the century. Collins also succeeded in obtaining 40,000 subscriptions for the Select Practical Writings of John Knox (1845). Knox’s signiﬁcance in controversial times was also evident from the popularity of Thomas M’Crie’s Life of John Knox, published by the young William Blackwood in 1811. M’Crie’s work

the diversity of print

293

di≠ered signiﬁcantly from previous biographical accounts of the divine as it also o≠ered a perspective on Knox’s politics, causing immediate controversy and thereby ensuring the work’s success. The popularity of the novel in the mainstream literary marketplace created an appetite for works of religious ﬁction that would appeal to adults and children alike. Nelson’s was one of the market leaders in the ﬁeld, their involvement having been initiated early in the century when they pioneered the use of stereotyping to produce monthly instalments of works such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Baxter’s Saints’ Everlasting Rest, their later list including such eminent children’s writers as R. M. Ballantyne, W. H. G. Kingston and Elizabeth Rundle Charles. However their most proliﬁc and ‘consistently popular’ author was Charlotte Maria Tucker who wrote under the pseudonym A.L.O.E or ‘A Lady of England’ (ibid.: 44). Tucker chose not to receive any royalties for her prodigious output, preferring to part with her copyrights. As she expressed it to Nelson in a letter of 1851, ‘[M]y position in life renders me independent of any exertions of my own; I pray but for God’s blessing upon my attempts to instruct His lambs in the things which concern their everlasting welfare’ (Avery: 101). Books written in a similar vein published by the Religious Tract Society, Hesba Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer (1868) and Christie’s Old Organ (1873), sold over a million copies each in boards, even after serialisation (Scott 1973: 215). These moral books, though reasonably priced, were appealingly packaged to cater to the ‘reward book’ market, distributed as Sunday school, church or school prizes ‘as rewards for punctuality, diligence, decorum, and deloused heads’ (Altick: 103). The stories varied from Tucker’s dourly didactic work The Children’s Tabernacle (1871) to narratives whose morality was tempered by thrilling adventures set in foreign lands, such as Ballantyne’s Snowﬂakes and Sunbeams; or, The Young Fur-Traders (1856). Also available for younger readers were instructional books on how to be a good Christian. A Father’s Gift to his Children; being a Short View of the Evidences of the Christian Religion, adapted to the Understandings of Young Persons; by a Layman published by Oliver & Boyd was described in the ﬁrm’s catalogue for 1819 as ‘a most valuable manual for the young, and those who have not leisure for the perusal of larger works’ (19). For those with a more academic interest in religion, the ﬁrm of T. & T. Clark endeavoured to publish erudite works by established biblical scholars. The relatively new ﬁeld of biblical criticism, which was arousing interest in the theological community with its iconoclastic attitude towards previously held orthodoxies, kindled a renewed desire for informed and objective commentary. Clark’s perceived market is

294

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

evident from an advertisement for The Student’s Cabinet Library of Useful Tracts: The publisher proposes to conﬁne them to no particular class of literature, and to exclude nothing that can fairly come within the designation of polite letters or useful knowledge; and hopes thus to present a series of cheap publications, which will interest the Antiquarian, the Theologian, the Philosopher, and the Scholar. (Dempster 1992: 4) Clark’s experienced varying levels of success with their theological ventures. Although the forty-ﬁve volume Biblical Cabinet helped to establish them in the market, the seriousness of their list and its corresponding lack of appeal to a popular audience often led to ﬁnancial loss. The missionary impulse that informed nineteenth-century religion was manifest in the large number of Scottish ministers who went abroad in order to educate and to redeem. Popular Scottish role models, like the eighteenth-century explorer of Africa, Mungo Park, and later the missionary David Livingstone, provided edifying examples for the new religious reading public. Accounts of their experiences were read avidly and were also used to promote the missionary e≠ort overseas. One of Chalmers’ students, Alexander Du≠, spent most of his adult life in India, with the intention of educating the élite in the hope that Christian teaching would thus spread throughout Indian society. Several works by Du≠ were listed in the 1839 catalogue of John Johnstone (of Johnstone & Ballantyne, later Johnstone & Hunter) with long, descriptive titles reminiscent of an earlier time, such as Sermons and Works in Divinity: India and India Missions, Including Sketches of the Gigantic System of Hinduism both in Theory and Practice; also Notices of some of the Principal Agencies Employed in Conducting the Process of Indian Evangelization and Missions, the Chief End of the Christian Church; also, The Qualiﬁcations, Duties, and Trials of an East Indian Missionary. While some books and tracts were produced for export, the printing of bibles and sermons in translation was more often undertaken locally. Nevertheless, missionaries remained reliant on publishers and booksellers at home for the production and circulation of their memoirs and sermons. Within Scotland by the mid-nineteenth century a network of bookshops and tract depots had arisen for the sole purpose of disseminating religious texts, the main distribution points being in the major cities. In 1815, the Glasgow Religious Tract Society was supplying at least three booksellers in the centre of the city, with branches in Greenock, Kilmarnock and Paisley. Around this time, too, a Religious Tract and

the diversity of print

295

Bible Warehouse was also operating in Wilson Street, Glasgow. The Society in Scotland for Promoting Religious Knowledge Among the Poor, dating from the late eighteenth century, continued to be a going concern in Edinburgh until the 1890s. The Religious Tract and Book Society of Scotland became a presence in the capital in 1812, followed by the Edinburgh Religious Tract Depository, which had premises on Queen Street by 1835. Such was the demand for religious reading at the beginning of the century that it had been possible to run religious lending libraries on commercial grounds. In the 1800s the Aberdeen bookseller, George Moir, ran a successful circulating library for books of an exclusively religious nature. As time passed, however, the increasingly free provision of religious reading matter made such schemes less proﬁtable. In 1821, James Johnston, another Aberdeen bookseller, projected a similar undertaking, but was forced to abandon it a year later. In outlying areas, a network of parochial libraries operated in parallel with commercial libraries. In the Stirlingshire village of Kippen there were two establishments, one with secular reading matter available by subscription and another religious library where books were made freely available. As the local minister reported in the 1830s: There is a subscription library of between 500 and 600 volumes. Along with the proportion of trash which is usually found in such libraries, it contains a good deal of the standard literature of the country. It has not, of late, been in a very ﬂourishing condition. There is also a parish library, chieﬂy for the beneﬁt of the poorer classes and of the young. It consists of about 300 volumes, chieﬂy of a religious nature. The books are given out gratis, and the number of readers, both old and young, is very considerable. (NSA) In the minds of Scotland’s spiritual leaders, there was a clear distinction between religious and worldly reading matter, and the strictures of the Sabbatarianism that prevailed in some quarters guaranteed religious publishers a captive audience for at least one day a week. Looking back at his Victorian childhood, William Haddow recalled how on Sundays ‘all newspapers and books of a secular character were put out of sight’ and how in the evenings they would read Pilgrim’s Progress or a religious magazine (Haddow: 10–11). As time passed and spiritual fervour cooled, religious publishing in Scotland ceased to be part of the mainstream and became more of a specialised market. By the end of the century, ﬁrms like Black, Collins and Nelson, all founded on religious principles, had come to focus increasingly on secular publishing in response to social change.

Science Aileen Fyfe Throughout the nineteenth century, the sciences appeared in a wide range of publications, from the articles and monographs announcing original research, to reports in newspapers and review journals, and popular miscellanies; and from introductory books for general readers to text books for school or university students. At the beginning of the century, science publishing was part of the general book trade, but by its end, technical works for experts were issued by specialist publishers. Nonetheless, the sciences continued to be discussed in general-interest periodicals and newspapers, and there was a thriving business in popular and educational science publishing.

Research science Books by Scottish men of science were frequently published by the mainstream publishing houses. Archibald Constable, William Blackwood and A. & C. Black produced many of the works of, among others, Robert Jameson, Thomas Charles Hope and David Brewster. At the start of the century, it was common to see joint imprints on the title page, signifying the sharing of both risk and distribution with a London publisher, but by the 1830s, as with the rest of the trade, scientiﬁc books were increasingly issued by a single publisher, sometimes Scottish, sometimes not. Glasgow-based authors often worked with Glasgow publishers, but authors elsewhere tended to opt for publication in Edinburgh or London. William MacGillivray, the Aberdeen natural history professor, did editorial work and translations for several London and Edinburgh publishers, and published his own ornithological works with Maclachlan & Stewart in Edinburgh, and with Scott, Webster & Geary in London. Some men of

the diversity of print

297

science had long-term relationships with particular publishers, as Glasgow engineering professor W. J. Macquorn Rankine did with Gri∞n, or Edinburgh natural philosophy professor J. D. Forbes did with A. & C. Black – a relationship which continued after Forbes moved to a chair at St Andrews. Geologist and journalist Hugh Miller showed an exceptional loyalty to John Johnstone, the publisher of The Witness newspaper edited by Miller. Some authors chose particular publishers for particular projects. Hence, William Gregory worked with Taylor & Walton of London for almost all his translations of Liebig’s chemical works in the 1840s and 1850s, but he published his own works with three Scottish houses: Tait, Gri∞n and Black. There was a general preference for London publishers: the early works of Andersonian professor Andrew Ure were published in Glasgow, until he acquired a connection with Longman and published in London. Brewster’s early works were predominantly with Constable or Blackwood, but by the 1830s he was increasingly working with John Murray. Later in the century, James Clerk Maxwell’s student years at Cambridge introduced him to publishing houses in that city, and he subsequently published with Oxford and London publishers. Most men of science regularly presented research to learned societies, which usually resulted in an abstract in the society’s Proceedings, a paper in the society’s Transactions or a pamphlet reprint. There were also a growing number of commercial science journals which enabled immediate publication without the need for the oral presentation. One of the hallmarks of a learned society in the nineteenth century was the publication of its activities. The Royal Society of Edinburgh, founded in 1783, began issuing Transactions in 1785 and Proceedings in 1832. The printer for both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Wernerian Natural History Society was the ﬁrm of Neill & Co., whose owner, Patrick Neill, happened to be the secretary of the Wernerian and member of several similar societies. Neill’s connections ensured that he was the pre-eminent publisher of Scottish transactions, as well as reports for the Royal Observatory and other government publications (ODNB; Finnegan: 32–6). The support of a learned society guaranteed a regular supply of copy and a captive audience, and many of the transactions and proceedings were long-lived. But maintaining regular publication could be a strain: the Wernerian ceased to issue its transactions in 1838 (ibid.). Smaller societies might settle for a irregular publication, as in the case of the Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, which ran from 1862 until 1868, resuming again in 1876. These later volumes appeared at two- or three-year intervals.

298

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Even societies which did not aspire to transactions or proceedings often published annual reports, as the Montrose Natural History and Antiquarian Society did from 1858. The annual reports of these local societies may seem a far cry from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but they are nevertheless an important part of scientiﬁc publishing in the nineteenth century. In addition to the journals of learned societies, the number of commercial outlets for scientiﬁc publishing had increased by mid-century (Cantor et al.: 13). It has been estimated that 64 per cent of the 500 or so science journals in Britain in the nineteenth century were not sponsored by a learned organisation (Brock 1980: 95). Most of these journals were short-lived, but a few became serious rivals to the venerable transactions. In the absence of society support, a well-respected and reliable editor was essential, and the Scottish universities provided several such men. The Glasgow chemistry professor Thomas Thomson was the ﬁrst editor of Annals of Philosophy (1813), published by Baldwin in London. It merged in 1826 with the Philosophical Magazine, established by expatriate Scot Alexander Tilloch in 1798 and published by Richard Taylor in London (Brock 1980; 1984b). Edinburgh launched several rivals to these London titles, particularly the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal (1819–26) published by Constable, and continued as the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (1826–64) by Black. It was originally edited by David Brewster and Robert Jameson, but Brewster left and persuaded Blackwood to set up the rival Edinburgh Journal of Science in 1824. In the mid-1820s, each journal had a circulation of around 1,000 copies, rather fewer than the 2,500 for which Constable had optimistically hoped in 1819. Blackwood soon sold the Edinburgh Journal of Science to his London agent, Thomas Cadell, and it was subsequently merged into the Philosophical Magazine. Black’s Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal was rather more successful in the long term, but in 1864, it too merged with a London rival – the Quarterly Journal of Science (Brock 1984a). Similar patterns emerge in natural history. The Magazine of Zoology and Botany (1837), was originally published in Edinburgh by W. H. Lizars, but within a year, it had been transferred to London and retitled Annals of Natural History. It was subsequently taken over by Richard Taylor (of the Philosophical Magazine), and from 1841 was styled the Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Sheets-Pyenson 1981a; 1981b). This pattern of renaming and merger indicates how di∞cult it was to sustain a commercial science journal, and the distinct southward trend is also signiﬁcant. Although some Edinburgh journals attempted to survive by forging links with both Dublin and London by mid-century,

the diversity of print

299

it appears to have been more e∞cient to edit and publish a successful science journal in London than in Edinburgh. With most of the scientiﬁc societies based there, it was easier to acquire news and articles.

Educational and popular science publishing As well as monographs and research papers, some men of science engaged in other, more remunerative forms of writing which reached a wider audience: producing treatises for the many encyclopaedia projects of the nineteenth century, writing text books, and penning articles and books for the general reader. Presenting a paper to a learned society was not done for money, and although the Edinburgh Journal of Science did pay, the quarterly reviews paid more generously. Text books, of course, could be long-term earners if they were regularly revised. David Brewster’s various activities provide an indication of the range of authorial possibilities that existed within the world of science (Brock 1984a). An important source of regular income for Brewster was his editorial work, for journals as well as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1801–30). He also contributed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, wrote for all the main quarterlies, and placed occasional articles in Hugh Miller’s Witness, and the Edinburgh-based Hogg’s Weekly Instructor (1845–55). In addition, he wrote books for Murray and Thomas Constable, and contributed papers to the Edinburgh and London Royal Societies. Although Brewster was almost unique in pursuing so many activities and managing to make a living from the combination, most men of science engaged in more than one of these options. The relatively modest income of university professors made authorship and editorship attractive propositions. Robert Jameson was one of the editors of Oliver & Boyd’s ‘Cabinet Library’ in the 1830s, while Macquorn Rankine contributed to Gri∞n’s re-issue of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (1848–58). Rankine later served on the editorial teams of both the short-lived Imperial Journal of the Arts and Sciences (1858–59) and the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (1857–63), published by William Mackenzie of Glasgow. As university professors, many of these men of science were drawn into the separate world of academic-related publishing. Lectures on special occasions, such as inaugural addresses, were sometimes printed. Rankine’s 1856 Introductory Lecture on the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics was printed by the Glasgow University Printer, Richard Gri∞n, and when J. D. Forbes delivered an address on the history of the British Association for the Advancement

300

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

of Science to his students at St Andrews in 1866, it was published by Frederick Shaw in nearby Dundee. Some professors also had their lecture outlines printed locally, for the assistance of their students. The next step was to write a text book or introductory treatise. At the start of the century, the sciences were usually taught in the Scottish universities only in the context of medical training, and so the market for science text books was small. Many of the early introductory texts were therefore treatises for the self-taught, such as those who attended evening classes at a mechanics’ institute, or those who were learning for pleasure. As the century progressed, the newly-established universities elsewhere in Britain o≠ered strong science curricula, and educational reforms made science a priority in the older universities. By the 1870s and 1880s, science was also starting to appear in secondary school curricula, necessitating the creation of new text books. These changes meant that there was an increased demand for science text books, and a canny author would seek either a London publisher, or at least a publisher with extensive English connections. Many Scottish authors worked with Longman, emerging as an important educational publisher, while Rankine’s series of manuals (on applied mechanics, 1858; the steam engine, 1859; and civil engineering, 1862) were issued by Gri∞n, with both London and Glasgow imprints. An important series of text books written and published in Scotland was the ‘Educational Course’ issued by W. & R. Chambers from 1835. At a time when most school text books focused on traditional subjects, the Chambers series was unusual in granting the sciences a more prominent role. The Chambers course included graded readers, introductory treatises on a variety of subjects, and full-length text books, ranging in price from 6d to 4s. Among the cheap introductory treatises, the Introduction to the Sciences (1836) was one of the most popular, having sold 71,000 copies by 1843, and 120,000 copies by 1849; Plane Geometry (1836) was also in the top ten, selling 63,000 copies by 1849 with annual sales of around 5,000. The more advanced text books had a smaller market, limited by their price and specialist appeal: 3,000 copies of the 4s Zoology (1842) were still on hand in 1849 (Cooney 1970: 207–8). Scientiﬁc articles also featured heavily in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832) and in many of the other ‘instructive and entertaining’ popular magazines which were issued from towns all over Scotland, many short-lived: Edinburgh Cornucopia (1831–2); Aberdeen Gleaner: A Literary and Scientiﬁc Miscellany (1833–4); Gardiner’s Miscellany of Literature, Science, History and Antiquities (Cupar, 1840–2); Perth Saturday Journal (1841–5); Taylor’s Weekly Magazine: Of Literature, Science and Rational Amusement (Dundee, 1843). These miscellaneous

the diversity of print

301

forms are another reminder that the sciences featured in general culture throughout the nineteenth century, and not just in specialised publications. Brewster and Rankine were exceptions, for articles in the general press were not usually written by expert men of science. William and Robert Chambers wrote many of the articles for their journal themselves or drew upon a circle of editors, journalists and literary men, many of whom were Edinburgh-based. In addition to the general miscellanies, there were some periodicals with more specialised subject matter which reached wide audiences. For instance, imitations of the London Mechanics’ Magazine (1823–71) focused on topics presumed to be of interest to mechanics and practical engineers. These were particularly common in Glasgow, thanks to that city’s strong engineering base. Gri∞n’s Scottish Mechanics’ Magazine (1825–6) was short-lived, but the Practical Mechanic and Engineer’s Magazine (1841–73), published in Glasgow and London and edited by William Johnson, managed rather better, achieving at one stage a circulation of around 6,000 monthly. Although periodicals were the cheapest and most popular form of scientiﬁc writing in Scotland, science also sold books. As ever, authors were as likely to publish in London as in Edinburgh. In the case of one of the best-known science books of the mid-nineteenth century, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), the Scottish author Robert Chambers chose the London publisher John Churchill, both to ensure his anonymity and to associate his work with a reputable medical and scientiﬁc publishing ﬁrm (Secord). George Combe’s Constitution of Man (1828) was originally co-published in Edinburgh and London, and the cheap edition produced by Chambers from 1835 sold an amazing 72,000 copies within three years (van Wyhe: 217–19). The major Edinburgh publishers (principally Blackwood, Black, Constable and Tait) provided important outlets for Scottish men of science in the ﬁrst half of the century, but as British science became increasingly focused on London, much specialised science publishing moved south. However, the demand for popular and educational science publications increased through the century, and Scottish publishers continued to be active in these ﬁelds. Edinburgh’s dominance of both the Scottish publishing trade and its learned world helped to ensure that the capital was the primary producer of scientiﬁc publications in Scotland, but there were also active publishers in Glasgow, most notably Gri∞n & Co. Printers in other Scottish cities and towns were rarely involved in the production of scientiﬁc books, but they were just as likely to attempt a miscellaneous periodical which featured the sciences as were their

302

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

metropolitan counterparts. At the start of the century, Scottish publishers had published both original research and scientiﬁc works for general readers, but after 1850, their activities were typically concentrated on popular and educational literature, which they successfully marketed to a British (and imperial) market.

This illustration is taken from the second edition of Fyfe’s System of the Anatomy of the Human Body, published in Edinburgh by Pillans & Sons in 1805. Andrew Fyfe (1754–1824), who was a demonstrator in anatomy, dedicates the work to ‘The Gentlemen attending the Medical Classes of the University of Edinburgh’. The ﬁgure is a copper-plate engraving or etching presented folded across its long dimension, intended for viewing with the book turned horizontally. The fold in the ﬁgure is unusually pasted to a short paper stalk which is bound into the volume. This arrangement allows the ﬁgure to lie ﬂat when unfolded and avoids the usual di∞culty of viewing the area close to the fold as the whole ﬁgure stands away from the spine when the book is open. The attitude of the main ﬁgure recalls that favoured by many Renaissance (and later) anatomists, following the example of the sixteenth-century ‘musclemen’ of Vesalius. Here the natural ‘plinth’ is greatly simpliﬁed and recalls the much simpliﬁed ‘plinths’ of Thomas Geminus in the ﬁrst copper-plate engravings copied from the woodblocks of Vesalius.

the diversity of print

Figure 5.5 Anatomical male ﬁgure, 1805.

303

Reference Padmini Ray Murray ‘There appears in the genius of the Scottish people – fostered no doubt by the abstract metaphysical speculations of their universities – a power of reducing human actions to formulas or principles’ (Harvie 1994: 130). Walter Bagehot’s observation was founded on one of the Enlightenment’s main legacies, the systematic collection and dissemination of knowledge. The impact and intellectual purpose of the Scottish Enlightenment is embodied nowhere more powerfully than in the programme of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ﬁrst published in the late 1760s and edited by William Smellie. Scotland was becoming an increasingly literate nation and had long boasted ancient seats of learning, in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews, institutions which a≠orded a ‘uniquely democratic opportunity for individual social mobility’ (Lynch 2001: 389). The very existence and commercial success of publications like the Encyclopaedia Britannica and its competitors might be seen to demonstrate something of the levelling tendency within Scottish intellectual life as well as the spending power of the growing professional and commercial classes. As such, the Britannica can be considered an exempliﬁcation of the Scottish Enlightenment’s e≠ort to democratise knowledge, serving as a point of contact between learned culture and the mainstream literary market. Initially, much of the material for the Britannica was derived from already existing scholarly works. Its ﬁrst edition was published in parts as well as in three volumes between 1768 and 1771. The second edition, completed in 1784, saw the series increase in size to ten volumes, and the third edition, completed in the 1790s, expanded it to eighteen volumes. Such was its success that sales rose from 3,000 to 13,000 between the ﬁrst and third editions. A fourth edition, published by Andrew Bell, appeared between 1800 and 1810 in twenty volumes. In

the diversity of print

305

1804, Bell had o≠ered Constable and Hunter the copyright and all property related to its production and only following the mismanagement of its publication after Bell’s death in 1809 was it at last acquired in 1812 by Constable for approximately 14,000 guineas. Although Constable considered his acquisition of the Britannica the ‘greatest speculation we ever made’, he was well aware of the need to distinguish his volumes from similar reference works that were ﬂooding the marketplace. In a departure from earlier editions, a vigorous advertising campaign was launched in order to popularise the forthcoming ﬁfth edition, involving advertisements in newspapers ‘small, digniﬁed, and discreet . . . o≠ering the set for £36’ and printing ‘elaborate brochures describing the virtues of the volumes’ (Kogan: 28–9). Objecting to the tendency of similar publications to treat the sciences in a piecemeal way, Constable strove to put the publication on a ﬁrmer footing by providing what he regarded as a more comprehensive account of science and philosophy. To which end, he introduced the idea of the supplement to the Britannica, which consisted of extended dissertations on a number of important subjects by ‘persons of the ﬁrst literary eminence’ (ibid.: 31). Dugald Stewart was commissioned to oversee, and to help write, the supplementary volumes – much in the manner of Jean d’Alembert’s Discours to the French Encyclopédie – for which he was paid a handsome advance of £1,700. Each of the six consultants to the Supplement were paid £100–£200, while authors earned between £500 and £1,000 for their contributions. Macvey Napier was appointed sole editor in 1814, in return for which he received an initial fee of £1,575, with a contractual arrangement for an additional £735 if the Supplement was reprinted or sold beyond 7,000 copies, and a further £300 for expenses (ibid.: 32). Napier, in return, managed to recruit an impressive list of literary luminaries: Frances Je≠rey, Sydney Smith, James Mill, Thomas Malthus and, despite his antipathy towards Constable, Sir Walter Scott who wrote the articles on ‘Chivalry’, ‘Romance’ and ‘The Drama’. There were also for the ﬁrst time a substantial number of foreign contributors, whose work appeared in translation. All in all, the relatively lavish terms that Constable paid his contributors would help to loosen the London monopoly on this kind of literary labour, as well as raise the stakes in the increasingly competitive world of Edinburgh publishing. The advertisement announcing the publication of the ﬁrst volume of the sixth edition of the Britannica on 1 March 1820 stated that the plan of the Supplement was ‘to render it not only a valuable companion to the various editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but of extensive utility as a Separate Work’. It listed the chief contents of the volumes as

306

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

the history of moral and political sciences, followed by those of the mathematical, physical and chemical sciences. In an attempt to counter the increasing competition that Constable faced in the reference market, the advertisement for the twelfth volume boldly claimed that the Britannica: was the ﬁrst Work of the class which aspired to embrace all the departments of human knowledge; and the superiority of its Plan, as well as the general merit of its Articles, has procured for it a larger share of success and approbation, than ever attended any similar undertaking. Its ambitious aims are evident from the way in which it describes itself as ‘at once a Dictionary of Science, a Book of Universal Reference, and a copious Abstract of the Literature and Philosophy of the Age’. A list of the names of the Supplement’s celebrated authors was also provided, as a means of assuring any potential customers that they were receiving value for money. Another way in which Constable gained the edge over his competitors was the regularity of his publishing schedule. Unlike some of his more erratic competitors, Constable promised that ‘a Part or Half-Volume will be regularly published on the ﬁrst day of each month’ (Beavan 2002). The success was immediate, the ﬁrst volume of the Supplement selling 7,000 copies, the second 10,500, at a price of 25s each. Overseas sales were similarly brisk, particularly in Philadelphia, where they were distributed by the bookseller Thomas Wardle. The Supplement eventually ran to six volumes comprising 699 principal articles with 125 illustrated plates and nine maps. A sixth edition, ‘revised, corrected, and improved’, was completed in 1823. Heartened by the Britannica’s considerable success, Constable commissioned Napier as editor for the prospective seventh edition for the grand sum of £7,000 and proposed to launch a campaign of ‘vigorous advertising’ (Kogan: 40) to promote the new venture. However, his ambitions were thwarted by the disastrous events of 1826 referred to by Lord Cockburn as ‘the thunderbolt which then fell on Edinburgh in the utterly unexpected bankruptcy of Scott implying the ruin of Constable the bookseller’ (430). The Britannica was purchased by A. & C. Black in 1827, an unsurprising move for a ﬁrm that already had considerable lists in philosophy, science and theology. Napier continued as editor, but the twenty-two volume seventh edition took another ﬁfteen years to complete. The series initially earned well for Black’s, though the eighth edition (1853–60), under the editorship of T. S. Traill, was less ambitious. Despite the fact that a number of new articles were added, unlike its

the diversity of print

307

predecessor it was not completely reset, many of the previous long chapters being retained entirely unrevised. Perhaps the greatest contribution to nineteenth-century scholarship, however, was the celebrated ninth edition, sometimes referred to as ‘The Scholar’s Encyclopaedia’, published in twenty-four volumes, beginning in 1875. Initially under the editorship of T. S. Bayne, and from 1881 William Robertson Smith, the ninth was uncompromising for its progressive approach to the controversies of the day. With over 1,100 international contributors, it set a new standard for reference works, Black’s selling almost 9,000 sets by the time of its completion in 1898. The Britannica’s New York distributor, Charles Scribner, was said to have sold 45,000 sets, in spite of the fact that the American market was ﬂooded with piracies at this time. Ownership of the Britannica passed permanently to the United States in 1901 when the American publishers, Horace Hooper and Walter Jackson, purchased it outright from Black’s. While the Britannica may have been the most celebrated of Scottish encyclopaedias in the nineteenth century, it was by no means the only one. Other titles which made their reputations in an increasingly competitive market included the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana as well as the deﬁnitive text in matters of science and technological discovery, David Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia. The ﬁrst volume was published in 1808, Brewster envisioning a twelve-volume work that would outdo ‘any similar work published in England, namely, by the Originality and the Selectiveness of its articles’ (Collison: 176). Specialised authorship was rapidly becoming a necessity, in contrast to the practices of the late eighteenth century when editors assembled most of the material themselves. Brewster thus believed that his encyclopaedia could serve a double purpose: as a ‘vehicle for the dissemination of science to the general public . . . also a medium, in addition to that of the publications of scientiﬁc societies, for the presentation of original research’ (Yeo: 46). One of the most innovative and ambitious of all reference works in the nineteenth century was the New Statistical Account of Scotland. Published between 1834 and 1845 in ﬁfty-two quarterly parts, it was reissued in thirty-three county volumes between 1841 and 1845, and issued again in ﬁfteen volumes in 1845. Like its predecessor, sometimes referred to as the Old Statistical Account, it provided detailed reports submitted by parish ministers on all aspects of Scottish life, including everything from topography and communications, to employment patterns and education, as well as descriptions of local ﬂora and fauna. The brainchild of Sir John Sinclair, the ﬁrst Account had been published by William Creech of Edinburgh in twenty volumes between 1791 and

308

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

1799. Its successor was published by the Edinburgh ﬁrm of Blackwood and remains today one of the most important primary sources for the historian of nineteenth-century Scotland. While some Scottish publishers distinguished themselves in the production of standard reference works, others successfully exploited the more popular end of the market. The Glasgow ﬁrm of Collins, which already printed several incarnations of the Illustrated Dictionary as well as the Commercial Ready Reckoner, launched a series of popular travel works and several scientiﬁc reference works. The Science Series comprised works ‘encompassing electricity and many other branches of scientiﬁc inquiry – acoustics, for example, geology, chemistry, naval architecture, steam and animal physiology’ and ran to seventy-two volumes. The entire cost of production was £30,000 of which £10,000 went in authors’ fees and royalties, and it sold more than two and a half million copies. Blackie & Son produced The Popular Encyclopaedia (1833), a translation of the German Konversations-Lexicon, originally translated by an American, but requiring considerable reworking by a British editor. Its ﬁrst issue was in ﬁfty-six parts priced at 2s 6d and fourteen half-volumes at 11s. It sold relatively well and in revised editions until 1893. Blackie also published a variety of technical books such as Peddie’s Cotton Manufacturer and Linen & Woollen Manufacturer; Murphy’s Treatise on the Art of Weaving; The Hotel, Innkeeper, Vintner & Spirit Dealer’s Assistant; The Practical Measurer; and The Mechanic’s Calculator & Dictionary. Another major producer in the ﬁeld of reference works was Oliver & Boyd, who had been involved in the ‘useful knowledge’ phenomenon as wholesalers for both for SDUK and SPCK, as well as agents for Murray’s Family Library. They launched the Edinburgh Cabinet Library (1830) seeking to address ‘those branches of knowledge which most happily combine amusement with instruction’ while also promoting titles that ‘bring before the eye of the British reader regions interesting as the scenes of colonial or missionary enterprise’. The format of the work was to be in small octavo, allowing it, if desired, to be bound ‘as a companion to Dr Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopedia, the Family Library or to the Library of Entertaining Knowledge’ (Beavan 2002: 140, 142). Oliver & Boyd paid their contributors variously, often depending on the proven reputation of the writer. James Fraser, an established author, received £130 for the copyright of his work, as opposed to William MacGillivray who was o≠ered only £75 for his work on Humboldt (ibid.: 144). One of its contributors, Christian Johnstone, the wife of the printer John Johnstone and senior editor of Tait’s Magazine, was also the author of a very di≠erent kind of title, namely The Cook and Housewife’s Manual.

the diversity of print

309

The series was discontinued in 1844 after the company passed into the hands of Boyd’s brother who did not see the viability of such useful knowledge in the current literary marketplace. The tendency of the age towards popular knowledge was most evident in the reference publications of Robert and William Chambers, not least the Chambers Encyclopaedia, subtitled ‘A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People’. Begun in 1859, it was issued in ten volumes until 1868, an undertaking that the ﬁrm felt to be its ‘crowning e≠ort in cheap and instructive literature’. William Chambers stated their ‘object was to give a comprehensive yet handy and cheap Dictionary of Universal Knowledge; no subject being treated at greater length than was absolutely necessary’ (Chambers 1882: 269, 270). The Chambers Encyclopaedia di≠ered greatly from the Encyclopaedia Britannica in that it was intended for the general, rather than a specialist, audience. It was adapted from the Konversations-Lexicon, published by the German publishers Brockhaus, from whom the Chambers brothers bought the rights to translate and republish the work for £400 in 1852. The Encyclopaedia boasted 240 contributors, including 116 who were employed speciﬁcally for the purpose as well as six full-time editorial assistants. In an attempt to keep information as current as possible, the tenth volume contained a supplement of those people, places and topics that had achieved relatively recent fame. The dedication of Chambers to the cause of popular education was evident across the ﬁrm’s list. An 1862 catalogue of educational and miscellaneous publications contains the Chambers Cyclopaedia of English Literature, Chambers Information for the People, Chambers Atlas for the People, Chambers’s Papers for the People and Chambers Instructive and Entertaining Library. It also features reference works such as Cookery and Domestic Economy for Young Housewives, Hints to Improve the Kitchen Comforts and Homes of the Working Classes and several illustrated histories. Chambers’s Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts was a highly successful twenty-volume work for use in school, parish and prison libraries. In an 1863 lecture given before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, William Chambers espoused the social e∞cacy of cheap and informative reference works: Among the various phenomena which invite our attention, none is more remarkable for its novelty, or more intimately associated with moral and intellectual progress – in fact, none more bound up with national well-being – than the extraordinary development of a cheap, wholesome, and popular literature. (3)

310

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

The emergence of such literature, as Chambers rightly observed, was largely attributable to new production technologies, such as the rotary steam press and the Fourdrinier papermaking machine, which together made enormous print runs physically possible and economically viable. But there were other factors at work. The encyclopaedic tendency within Scottish intellectual life, identiﬁed by Bagehot, combined with a widespread commitment to universal education, may suggest why the Scottish reference market ﬂourished so successfully, and for so long.

the diversity of print

311

Figure 5.6 Maver’s Genuine Scottish Melodies.

The publication of Maver’s Collection of Genuine Scottish Melodies (Glasgow: Robert Maver, 1866) can be regarded as pivotal in the history of the music trade in nineteenth-century Scotland. Printed by the Edinburgh music engraver and lithographer Robert Home & Co. for

312

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

one of the expanding music publishers in Glasgow, it epitomises the past and the future. Through the Ossianic poems of James Macpherson, and the romantic ballads of Sir Walter Scott and others, the Celtic harp or clàrsach, in disuse since the early eighteenth century, had come to symbolise the continuing Scottish musical tradition, and frequently appeared on title-pages and book covers of music and poetry. Maver and the same editorial team published a companion collection of Irish melodies ten years later. The ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century saw music and music-making move out of the institutions of the assembly room, concert hall, drawing room and the church, into the parlour. Developments in printing techniques, especially those based on lithographic, stereotype and electrotype processes, enabled music created on engraved copper plates or in laboriously hand-set type to be reproduced mechanically and cheaply in formats that suited all but the poorest pocket. The churches of Scotland needed increasing numbers of hymnbooks, psalters and anthem books with music printed in them. The growing railway networks distributed music to bookshops and village shops throughout the land. The demand for cheap music became insatiable. By 1850 the trade of music publisher was becoming distinct from that of music seller, although the two would always overlap to some extent. With companies like Alexander Robertson & Co. and Paterson & Co., Edinburgh was still the centre of music publishing in Scotland; but the 1860s and 1870s saw the trade begin to move to Glasgow. Here it ﬂowered in the 1880s and 1890s, with ﬁrms like Mozart Allan and Bayley & Ferguson dominating music publishing in Scotland for over ﬁfty years. Most of the music published in Scotland during the nineteenth century consisted of arrangements of traditional Scottish music, especially songs, dances, military airs; and homegrown classical music by eighteenth-century aristocratic amateurs such as the 5th Earl of Kelly and Sir John Clerk of Penicuik. The few Scottish classical composers who aspired to serious composition, including Professor John Thomson and, later, Hamish MacCunn and Sir Alexander Mackenzie, studied, and were published, in Germany or London. Peter Freshwater

Maps Diana Webster Knowledge of Scotland’s geography was far from complete at the start of the nineteenth century. By 1800 most of the counties of the Lowlands and the South had been surveyed at 1 inch to 1 mile, but information about northern Scotland and the islands lagged behind. It was not until John Thomson’s Atlas of Scotland was published that county maps for the Highlands and Islands were readily available. Thomson, an Edinburgh bookseller, had already produced a series of travel guides and several historical and school atlases by the time he launched a subscription for his new atlas in 1818. The Atlas was published in parts, with the volume ﬁnally completed in 1831–2. Many of Thomson’s maps were copied and reduced from existing county maps, brought up to date and certiﬁed as accurate by local landowners and surveyors. Not for the ﬁrst time did an enterprising Scottish mapmaker underestimate the capital needed to complete an ambitious project: the production of the atlas, especially conducting new surveys in unmapped areas, so overstretched his resources that he was twice declared bankrupt, in 1830 and 1835. At around the same time the surveyor John Wood embarked on an atlas of forty-eight Scottish towns, also published in parts. The project was completed in 1828, with an accompanying volume, Descriptive Account of the Principal Towns in Scotland to Accompany Wood’s Town Atlas. Although some items were derived from earlier maps, many Scottish towns were for the ﬁrst time provided with printed plans. These two atlases were the high points of Scottish mapmaking in the nineteenth century until the coming of Ordnance Survey (OS) maps. Founded in 1791, as a response to the threat from the French Revolution, the OS began the triangulation of Scotland in the early 1800s, but for political reasons were diverted to Ireland in the 1820s.

314

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 5.7 Skye Island, &c . . . 1824, in John Thomson’s Atlas of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1832.

Maps were essential for any economic development or transport improvement – geological surveying was especially desirable and had been progressing in tandem with the OS – but in spite of persistent requests by Scots anxious to have detailed maps, the ﬁrst Scottish OS

the diversity of print

315

maps were not published until 1847: to complete the entire country took a further thirty years. By 1880, maps of the whole of Scotland were available at 6 inches to 1 mile (1:10560), with larger (more detailed) scales available for developed areas and towns. Meanwhile the Hydrographic O∞ce, established by the Admiralty in 1795, surveyed the seas. Scotland was at last substantially surveyed (excepting perhaps for its bathymetry) and mapped information was available for commercial map publishers to use, although not without occasional copyright disputes with Ordnance Survey.

Map production and publishing Map production required several skills. Surveyors measured and collected information. Draughtsmen compiled and drew maps, either from new surveying data or by copying existing maps. Engravers transferred the draft onto plates, usually copper, by engraving or, occasionally, by etching. Finally, printers impressed the plates onto paper. For an extra fee, maps could be hand-coloured, often by ‘decayed gentlewomen and spinsters’ (Gardiner 1976: 7). Such maps were luxury items, largely for the educated nobility and gentry. For example John Ainslie’s 1797 map of The Stewartry of Kirkcudbright sold for 6s; the revised third edition of 1821 cost 1 guinea, the hundred copies printed, sponsored by the Commissioners of Supply, having been o≠ered for sale to landed gentry only.1 Publishers would commission, issue and advertise maps to the general public, and to book and map sellers. They might arrange for a sheet map to be presented in the form the customer required, perhaps as a roller map. Or it could be dissected, folded and mounted on linen, then boxed to resemble a book. Maps could be bound in volumes, as atlases, or issued in other publications, such as travel books and guides, gazetteers, periodicals and newspapers. A few Scottish map publishers, such as W. & A. K. Johnston, also made globes, while some also produced ‘dissected maps’, what today we would call jigsaws. Individuals at any point in the map production chain could be involved in publishing, while a number of general book publishers also included maps among their lists. In 1800 an individual mapmaker could perform all the skills required for map publishing. John Ainslie (1745–1828), probably the most respected surveyor of his generation, was also a ﬁne draughtsman and engraver, as well as a publisher and seller of maps. He even ventured 1

RCS K1/1/4 (10 October 1797); K1/1/8 (30 April 1821)

316

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

into globe making, though with little success. As the century progressed, new printing techniques were developed, map production became increasingly industrialised and, with more deﬁned divisions of labour, skills became more specialised. An 1893 calendar produced by Bartholomew lists ﬁve departments: draughting, engraving, lithography, printing and mounting. Some surveyors published their own maps often in association with booksellers or stationers in Scotland or London. But land surveying opportunities diminished around the 1820s as agricultural improvements and enclosures were completed. Land surveyors moved overseas, became factors and estate managers, or civil engineers, especially involved with road, canal and eventually railway construction; consequently, their role in map publishing diminished. After the publication of government-sponsored Ordnance Survey mapping from the late 1840s, the private land surveyor became an endangered species. Other printed maps were produced by general engravers, who might engrave a variety of items – scientiﬁc instruments, clocks, book illustrations or banknotes – as well as maps. By the 1820s specialist map engravers were emerging, as demand increased. Edinburgh was preeminent for map engraving, although Glasgow, Aberdeen and some smaller towns might publish some, mostly local, maps. Many of Edinburgh’s map engravers were historically connected. Richard Cooper (c. 1705–64) had arrived in Edinburgh from England about 1730; his apprentice Andrew Bell (co-founder of Encyclopaedia Britannica) trained Daniel Lizars (1754–1812) who in turn trained his sons, Daniel (1793–1875) and William Home Lizars (1788–1859). Thus were the foundations of many of the great nineteenth-century map producers laid in the Scottish capital: George Bartholomew (1784–1871) was apprenticed to Lizars as a general art engraver in 1797, as was his son John Bartholomew snr (1805–61); William Johnston (1802–88) worked for the ﬁrm after his apprenticeship with James Kirkwood (c. 1745–1827) who was initially a watch and clockmaker in Perth, then began to engrave maps, eventually moving to Edinburgh; his son Robert Kirkwood (1774–1818) and grandson of the same name (d. 1843) continued the family business. William and his brother Alexander Keith Johnston (1804–71) were both apprenticed to Kirkwood & Son. Keith Johnston, son of Alexander, worked in the family ﬁrm as well as with German contemporaries and Stanford in London. Among the leading printing ﬁrms involved in map production were Gall & Inglis. James Gall devised new projections to solve speciﬁc problems. His orthographic equal area projection (1855) displayed continents in accurate proportional size, unlike the well-known Mercator

the diversity of print

317

projection which exaggerates the poles, although in Gall’s projection shape is distorted. With his interest in education, especially for the blind, Gall published many school books and atlases, as well as educational aids, such as map jigsaws. General publishers also produced maps, particularly those with an interest in education and travel books, such as A. & C. Black, Blackwood and Oliver & Boyd. Publishers were involved in collaborations. For example, in the 1830s John Bartholomew shared premises in North Bridge, Edinburgh with A. & C. Black, who had taken over the Enyclopaedia Britannica. Bartholomew’s prepared the maps for the encyclopaedia for almost ninety years and in 1888 went on to form a brief partnership with Thomas Nelson which lasted until 1892, although they continued to occupy part of Nelson’s Park Road works until 1911. Maps were expensive to produce and so they were often re-used in other publications: A. & C. Black provided county maps (engraved by Lizars) for the New Statistical Account (1834–45), which they then published in 1848 as Black’s County Atlas of Scotland; the plates were later used in Francis Groome’s Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1884–5). Or sometimes plates were sold to other publishers and re-issued with the name of the new publisher. Base maps could be overprinted with thematic information, such as geology, or surrounded with di≠erent advertisements, exploiting the ease of additions and alterations that lithography made possible. Lithography was one of the most signiﬁcant technical developments of the nineteenth century, enabling large numbers of maps to be produced quickly and cheaply. The technique, ﬁrst described in Munich in 1796, was soon introduced by the British military for maps of the Peninsular War, but these early lithographed maps were crude, and commercial exploitation took some time to catch on. While the method’s arrival in Britain is often attributed to an English translation, A Complete Course of Lithography, published in 1819, the process had been described in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine as early as May 1817 (see ‘Illustration’). It has been suggested that the ﬁrst map produced by lithography in Scotland was printed by John Robertson in 1821 (Schenck: 98), but this could be the date when the information was gathered or the draughting done, not necessarily the date of print. While lithographic presses spread to Scottish cities over subsequent decades, the quality of British maps produced using this process remained relatively poor until the 1850s. Lithographic engraving, rather than the cruder transfer methods, became the preferred method for high quality maps, only to be superseded by photolithography from

318

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

the 1860s (Wallis: 299–306). Hard litho stones could print several thousand copies, unlike copper plates, which wore out after only about a hundred copies had been run o≠, requiring the expense of recutting the plate. Alterations could be made quickly and easily. This was especially useful when maps required frequent revision with the extension of roads and railways across the country, and as growing travel and tourism enlarged the market for inexpensive, regularly updated maps. Lithography also enabled coloured maps to be produced cheaply for a popular audience. This did not always suit the tastes of the scholarcartographer, who preferred more reﬁned cartography: A. K. Johnston commented in the 1850s that, in response to popular demand, maps were becoming increasingly highly coloured, with more illustrations added to conform to British taste. Forty years later John George Bartholomew was even more blunt: ‘One map to the British is as good as another, possibly better if brightly coloured’ (Gardiner: 45).

W. & A. K. Johnston and John Bartholomew The ﬁrms of W. & A. K. Johnston and John Bartholomew were both established about 1826. It may be signiﬁcant that these young, newly trained engravers launched their independent careers at a time when the publishing industry su≠ered a slump (see ‘1825–6: Years of Crisis?’); more likely the great ﬁre in Edinburgh in November 1824, which started in the premises of Kirkwood, the engravers, was the catalyst, leaving fewer opportunities for employment. The Johnstons published maps from their foundation, while Bartholomew’s did not become a major publishing force in their own right until the 1870s and 1880s. As late as the 1870s Bartholomew’s were still a jobbing printer, producing anything and everything: book illustrations, stationery, advertisements and tickets. Over the next thirty years their involvement in miscellaneous printing diminished, as they moved increasingly into map production. Setting up in business on 25 December 1825, William Johnston was joined in the following year by his brother, A. Keith Johnston, who was the driving force in the ﬁrm’s move into map and atlas production. According to tradition, he ﬁrst decided to publish maps after he discovered the inaccuracy of the map that he was using on a walking expedition. A respected scholar, he was appointed Geographer to the Queen in Scotland following the publication of his National Atlas in 1843 while his brother William prospered in local politics, serving as Edinburgh’s Lord Provost between 1848 and 1851. W. & A. K. Johnston took over Lizars’ stock as well as their banknote printing in 1862 on the death of W. H. Lizars (ODNB).

the diversity of print

319

Although their ﬁrst maps were issued in 1830, A. K. Johnston’s ﬁrst major work was The National Atlas of Historical, Commercial, and Political Geography (1843), which was an early use, perhaps the earliest use, of colour lithography in a general atlas. Mainly comprising topographical maps of all parts of the world, the work also included four plates on physical geography based on the ground-breaking work of Heinrich Berghaus, a distinguished German mapmaker who published the Physikalischer Atlas in parts between 1838 and 1848. A. K. Johnston had travelled to Germany to persuade Berghaus to allow him to produce an English edition, which resulted in two Imperial Editions of The Physical Atlas of Natural Phaenomena in 1845 and 1848, the ﬁrst work on physical geography in English. A number of cheaper and smaller atlases for school and home use soon followed. The ﬁrm also ventured into globe making, and was awarded a medal at the 1851 Great Exhibition for the ﬁrst physical globe. Their next major atlas was the Royal Atlas, produced in many editions from 1861. August Petermann, of the Justus Perthes ﬁrm in Gotha, assisted in the preparation of Johnston’s English edition of Berghaus’ maps. Petermann arrived in Edinburgh in the 1840s, where he met John Bartholomew jnr (1820–90), who later spent two years in the early 1850s training with Petermann, who was by then based in London. Petermann had become an expert in producing maps by lithography, and John jnr returned to Edinburgh ﬁred with enthusiasm for the new technology. The ﬁrm quickly expanded and by 1861 was employing about twenty sta≠ and had changed its name to ‘The Edinburgh Engraving & Lithographic Establishment’. All subsequent generations of Bartholomews received some training in the German tradition of scientiﬁcally accurate mapping. In 1892 John George Bartholomew (1860–1920) negotiated the purchase of the copper plates and copyright of the revised third edition of Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas (many copper plates survive in the Bartholomew Archive in the National Library of Scotland). Aiming to produce a seven-volume English edition of Bartholomew’s Physical Atlas, but publishing only the volumes on Meteorology (1899) and Zoogeography (1911), he remarked, ‘To produce a scientiﬁc atlas in England is to embark on a daring philanthropic enterprise’ (Gardiner: 45). The existence of colour lithography led to ‘contour layer colouring’, which might be regarded as John jnr’s major innovation in map design. In the early nineteenth century, relief on maps was usually shown by hachuring, where hills resembled ‘hairy caterpillars’ or ‘molehills’ (Wallis and Robinson: 150). With detailed accurate surveying by the Ordnance Survey from the 1840s, ﬁne contour lines were introduced.

320

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 5.8 John Bartholomew, Reduced Ordnance Maps of Scotland. [Sheet 15] Ross-shire [Edinburgh: A.&C. Black, 1883]

Although contours had ﬁrst been conceived by the Dutch in the late sixteenth century, principally for depicting depths, later for military use, they were not widely adopted until the second quarter of the nineteenth century (ibid.: 222). In the 1870s John jnr experimented in the use of colour between contours: delicate tints of green, shading through brown to purple and white for mountain tops. The ﬁrst maps of this kind were displayed at the Paris Exhibition of 1878, but they were not initially well received by other cartographers. His son John George reﬁned and developed the concept, using it in the half-inch series in the 1880s, where they were a success with the general public. Within twenty years this technique had been adopted world-wide. Both ﬁrms extended their international connections, employing agents throughout the world. A. K. Johnston’s son, Keith Johnston (1844–79) entered the ﬁrm as a cartographer then moved to London and went on to explore Paraguay in 1873, before his premature death in Africa in 1879. John Bartholomew jnr also travelled extensively before his retirement in 1888, touring America in 1885 and Scandinavia in 1887, while John George travelled to Australia, via South Africa, in 1892.

the diversity of print

321

Geography, widely taught in schools and in some universities in the nineteenth century, was a formal part of the school curriculum after the Education Acts of 1870 (England and Wales) and of 1872 (Scotland). These Acts stimulated demand for maps and other educational materials. An international market also developed during this period, especially in the English-speaking countries of the British Empire. The economics of map production had been well learned and usually the ﬁrst few pages of a school atlas would include detailed maps relating to the particular country for the local audience while the remaining maps of the rest of the world would be re-used from existing plates. Throughout the nineteenth century, map and atlas production in Scotland changed considerably. Mapmaking in Scotland was transformed from an artisanal craft supplying a scholarly or luxury, mostly domestic market to an industrialised system of skilled production geared, often through family ﬁrms, to meeting the demand for maps and atlases for popular and educational audiences at home and abroad.

322

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 5.9 Embossed printing for the blind, 1834.

This fount was created by James Gall (c. 1784–1874), an Edinburgh publisher with a keen concern for education, who in 1826 or 1827 became interested in this method of providing books that the blind could read. The system had been used in Paris since 1786, but Gall sought to improve its e∞ciency by using a more suitable fount that avoided the use of curves.

the diversity of print

323

Using wooden types at ﬁrst (because they were cheaper to experiment with), he printed A First Book for Teaching the Art of Reading to the Blind in 1827, with an ordinary letterpress introduction explaining his thinking. Raising money by subscription, he then used metal types to complete, in 1832, an embossed edition of St John’s Gospel, which was not published until 1834, with a letterpress introduction: The Gospel by St John for the Blind: with an Introduction, containing some historical notices regarding the origin and establishment of a tangible literature for their use. In the same year he published A Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of Literature for the Blind (Edinburgh, 1834), showing his deep appreciation of the needs of the blind. In 1852 a Royal Commission report said that ‘it is to Mr. Gall, perhaps, more than any other man, that the interest in education of the blind was awakened throughout Great Britain and America.’ Thanks to pioneering publishers like Gall, the Scottish book trade catered for the blind as well as the sighted, a tradition continued to the present day by the Scottish Braille Press. Brian Hillyard

Education Padmini Ray Murray In his 1802 pamphlet The General Di≠usion of Knowledge, One Great Cause of Prosperity of North Britain, Alexander Christison praised a programme of education which imparted training ‘for the business of life and the purpose of eternity’, and required there to be schools in every parish and burgh ‘able at least to teach grammar and the latin tongue’. From evangelicals to post-Enlightenment utilitarians, the majority of social reformers in nineteenth-century Scotland shared Christison’s view that learning should be largely motivated by an impulse to the improvement of individuals. Evangelicals required that all individuals were conversant with and could read the Bible, and the movement’s growing popularity ensured that legislation would encourage reading and literacy, while the secularist Robert Owen published, in 1816, the New View of Society in which he espoused the idea that ‘the best governed state will be that which shall possess the best national system of education’ (qtd. Anderson 1995: 33). Scotland’s demography in the early nineteenth century required schools in isolated areas as well as in towns, and several kinds of institution, both religious and secular, were created to meet these needs. The Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), founded in 1709, established parish schools ‘where religion and virtue might be taught to young and old’ through the means of reading, writing, arithmetic and religious instruction. A Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools (SSGS) was founded in 1811 to counteract the SSPCK’s refusal to teach in Gaelic, which it felt had perpetuated illiteracy in the Highlands rather than dispelling it. The larger towns maintained burgh schools which by the mid-1800s placed emphasis on utilitarian and commercial subjects as well as more modern subjects that would prepare students for professional life in an urban environment.

the diversity of print

325

Figures 5.10, 5.11 Hornbook. Largely an eighteenth-century phenomenon, hornbooks were still in use in Scottish schools well into the nineteenth century.

In the early nineteenth century there was little variety of textbook provision. In spite of the diversity of educational institution, the subjects taught showed little variation. Proﬁciency in reading was customarily based on an ability to read the tenth chapter of Nehemiah. The hornbook and the battledore, both legacies of the eighteenth century, and the Shorter Catechism and Bible were standard reading matter. Even as late as the 1840s, the provision of educational texts was woefully inadequate, teachers often having to rely on anything that was to hand. As one witness described the situation at mid-century: For the most part, education began with learning the alphabet which in large and small letters was generally found printed on the back of the Shorter Catechism. When the alphabet was mastered, the pupil began to learn reading by using the Catechism or the Bible as a text-book. The use of the Bible to teach reading, spelling and grammar was very common in parish schools . . . In the poorer of the private schools, however, text-books were not so numerous or satisfactory. Telling of his inspection in 1848, of one such school,

326

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

a clergyman . . . was reported as giving details of an extreme case, but not an infrequent one: ‘He found in use, “The History of a Sailor,” a volume of “The Idler,” “Roderick Random,” “Leaves of a Psalm,” a copy of the Prayer Book of the Church of England, part of a novel, and the “Prospectus of an Insurance Company, with interesting schedules and tables”!’ (Belford: 47). The basic subjects o≠ered by all schools were reading, writing and arithmetic, whereas Latin and modern languages, mathematics, bookkeeping and other subjects were more unusual (PP XLVII, 1834). Gray’s Arithmetic was the standard in its subject, and McCulloch’s readers were the most popular of their kind, published by Oliver & Boyd ‘to instruct . . . pupils in the meaning of what is read as well as in the art of reading’. Later additions to the ﬁrm’s list included titles in ‘natural history, elementary science, religion, and the duties of the young, progressively arranged according to their simplicity’ as well as ‘Physical Science, Chemistry, Natural History, Geography and Topography, Religious and Moral Pieces, Miscellaneous Pieces, and Poetry’. In accordance with Oliver & Boyd’s Catalogue for 1855, the ﬁrm’s explicit aim was ‘to give a series of progressive lessons in useful and entertaining knowledge, rather than a mere compendium of elegant and rhetorical readings’. Subjects such as land surveying, geometry, algebra, geography, Greek and French were more likely to be o≠ered in burgh schools than in those in the parish. Other popular titles of the day were Lennie’s or Rae’s English grammar, Stewart’s or Reid’s or Gray’s geography, Hutton’s or Davidson’s mathematics, Crossley’s arithmetic, Morrison’s book-keeping and Moore’s Greek grammar (Scotland: 203). The reliance on religious texts for reading material was controversial, as there was concern regarding the e≠ect of sectarian education on impressionable minds. Reverend J. Bryce writing in 1854 felt that ‘the great business of the schoolmaster of the elementary school was direct religious instruction; the teaching of the art of reading was subsidiary to the “godly upbringing” ’ (Alwall: 18), whereas others like George Combe, a renowned phrenologist, believed that the state ‘had a right to compel its subjects to receive such secular instruction as was necessary for the discharge of their social duties’ (32). Such controversies merely contributed to a higher demand for both secular and religious writing for children, speciﬁc to goals of the respective institution. The success of the Sunday School movement created a market for biblical and missionary geographies although the more progressive also encouraged the learning of such subjects as anatomy since they wished ‘to recognise the principle that science is a handmaid of religion, and that

the diversity of print

327

godliness is like to be promoted by a knowledge and way of God’ (qtd. Brown 1981: 20). Even though education in the classics was restricted to the burgh, private schools and universities, it featured at least nominally on most publishers’ lists. Blackie & Son’s 1838 catalogue of ‘New and Splendid Works’ featured a number of books recommended for use in schools: Questions on Boyd and Adam’s Roman Antiquities contains 16,000 questions which ‘form a most admirable Analysis of the book to which they refer’ while Hartley’s Oratorical Class Book has passages for elocution ‘intended for Use of Public and Private Seminaries’. Blackwood’s catalogue of 1835 contains several text books by Sir Daniel Sandford, Professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow, including ‘Sandford’s Rules and Exercises in Homeric and Attic Greek. To which is added a Short System of Greek Prosody. For the use of the Second and Senior Greek Classes in the University of Glasgow’. The study of anglophone literature was introduced relatively late in Scottish schools, but by the 1870s Chambers’s were publishing a successful series of ‘English Classics for Use in Schools’, which included volumes on Goldsmith, Gray and Wordsworth. Although Thomas Nelson & Sons had contributed much to the education of children with their moralistic publications, they only entered the school book market in earnest after the Education Acts of 1870 and 1872. The ‘Royal Readers’ and the ‘Royal School’ series were dispatched in vast quantities all through the British Empire. Nelson’s were careful to maintain communication with educationalists and school boards both at home and abroad, as well as keeping an eye on their competitors in order to maintain their high proﬁle in the educational book market. Although text books represented only 25 per cent of the company’s output between 1878 and 1881, they accounted for no less than 88 per cent of their proﬁts (McCleery: 222). The Scottish School Book Association (SSBA), founded in 1818, drew its members from parochial and burgh schoolmasters, one of its prime objectives being to publish ‘a collection or series of reading books, as shall, by simplicity of plan, scientiﬁc arrangement, religious tendency, lowness of price, and successive improvements suggested by teachers themselves, be justly entitled to supersede any other compilation’. To qualify for membership of the association, schoolmasters had to use exclusively at least eight of its commissioned school books, of which four had to be for ‘English reading’ (Belford: 16). This did much to protect the association from its competitors, a position that was further strengthened in 1868 when they o≠ered a ‘discount to all teachers in Scotland’. Initially the books were printed and published ‘by a book-

328

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

seller at his own risk and expense’. From 1850 to 1858 the publisher responsible was Whyte & Co., after which the work was taken on by Collins. By 1873, the Glasgow ﬁrm was producing around 150 educational titles which were used throughout Britain and the colonies. William Collins’s sympathy with evangelicalism and his friendship with Thomas Chalmers led him to an interest in education as a way of inculcating Christian doctrine rather than for the general provision of knowledge. Chalmers & Collins’ ﬁrst venture into children’s books was their involvement in the production of A Chronological List of the Sovereigns of England . . . for Use in Schools (1820). By 1823 the ﬁrm was appearing on the title pages of works such as Henry Fitzroy, the Young Midshipman and Little Bessiana; or, a Father’s Tribute to his First Born Daughter. In 1824 they published an edition of the Covenanting classic, Helen of the Glen as well as The Christian Martyr: A Tale for Youth. By and large, these were didactic books intended to frighten children into goodness. Collins & Chalmers’ lack of early success in the school book market was partly because responsibility for sales lay with Charles Chalmers, their business partner, who ‘did not have his mind fully on the business’ (Keir: 77). After Collins’s break with Chalmers in 1826, he produced a number of more successful titles, his former experience as a teacher standing him in good stead as he began to recognise the need for reliable, reasonably priced school books. Leitch’s Practical and Economical Readers sold one and a half million copies over ﬁfteen years. Also phenomenally successful were Collins’ Ready Reckoners. Throughout the second half of the century, the ﬁrm kept up with the pace of technology, putting itself in a position to satisfy the growing demand for school books from all over the British Isles. As well as supplying the SSBA, Collins was also appointed printers to the Irish National Schools, over a ten-year period providing more than two million copies of thirty-one of their titles. By the 1870s, Collins had become the market leaders in educational publishing, prominent works on their list included Laing’s English Literature which went into thirty-ﬁve editions, Trotter’s English Grammar which sold over half a million, and in the ﬁeld of science Bryce’s works on algebra, geography, astronomy and geology, Schmitz’s Manuals of Ancient Geography, as well as a History of the Middle Ages (Keir 171). William and Robert Chambers were publishers dedicated to the spread of useful knowledge in many forms who attempted to produce reference books and encyclopaedias to suit every pocket. It was only natural that they would also enter the growing educational market with the same enterprising spirit that characterised their other endeavours. In 1835, they launched the Chambers Education Course, ‘constructed

the diversity of print

329

according to the most advanced views of education, both as a science and an art’ (Chambers 1872: 236). The course itself was completed in 306 parts, available in di≠erent formats as late as 1896. Robert himself wrote several of these volumes, including a History of the British Empire and a History of the English Language and Literature. William toured the Netherlands in 1838, visiting schools in order to ascertain how the Dutch had overcome the problem of religious content in text books. He came away vindicated in his belief in texts that could ‘appeal to the three di≠erent natures of the human being: the physical, the moral, and the intellectual’ (Alwall: 36) without falling prey to controversy. Instead of pious didactic works, the Chambers list consisted of the ‘Moral Class-Book’ and ‘Exemplary and Instructive Biography’. In contrast to The Infant Teacher’s Assistant, a popular book of Scripture alphabets which begins with ‘A – is an angel who praises the Lord’, Chambers published Infant Education, which contained ‘Philosophical Songs’, simple rhymes that imparted basic facts: A Song on the Senses The organ curiously design’d By which it is we Hear, Which catches modulated wind, Is simply call’d the ear. The Educational Course distinguished itself by o≠ering an impressive range of text books that explored a variety of scientiﬁc phenomena: mechanics, hydrostatics and pneumatics, acoustics, optics, chemistry, animal physiology and geology; which were e≠ectively the ﬁrst in Britain to explore the physical sciences. The course also included maps for the schoolroom as well as smaller atlases of the modern and the ancient worlds. The series began with ‘a three-halfpenny infant primer, and goes onward through a whole library of grammars, dictionaries, histories, scientiﬁc and all primary class books’ (Curwen: 248). The series included, in addition, a version of one of the most popular of grammars, Ruddiman’s Rudiments of the Latin Tongue. Although not originally intended for the purpose, Elegant Extracts: Or Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Young Persons led to a subsequent edition adapted for candidates of the Civil Service examination. James Lumsden & Son of Glasgow specialised in producing illustrated chapbooks for very young children that were of a high standard in spite of their low price. The list contained abridged popular stories such as Red Riding Hood and Babes in the Wood, priced at a penny. These were drawing books which contained etchings to be copied and

330

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

alphabet primers with woodcuts. Their content can be gathered from the following description on the title page of Reading Made Quite Easy and Diverting: symbolical cuts for the alphabet; tables of words of one, two, three, and four syllables; with easy lessons from the scriptures, at the end of each table, not exceeding the order of syllables in the foregoing tables; instructive fables, and edifying pieces of poetry, with songs, moral and divine . . . methodically digested; and calculated, after the manner prescribed by the great Mr Locke to gain the attention of children; who being cozened, or cheated into a love of learning, by the humour of narration, are almost insensibly led on to read the longest words with ease and pleasure. Whether or not it was intended for classroom use, most reading matter for children was meant to impart moral and sometimes religious values. Publishers and booksellers, well aware of a belief in the improving ethos among parents and teachers, took pains to emphasise this in their catalogues. The 1819 catalogue of Oliver & Boyd, for instance, advertised their juvenile books as having ‘Great Variety and . . . various Prices, containing Moral and Useful Instruction and Amusement for Youth’ (45). While historians tend to downplay the importance of such texts in nineteenth-century culture, it is fair to assume that they were sometimes the only ‘children’s literature’ that the poor encountered in Scotland in this period.

the diversity of print

331

Figure 5.12 Scotch whisky label.

The branding of wine and spirits in Britain can be traced back to the commercial treaty with France in 1860 which, for the ﬁrst time, brought chateau bottled wines within the reach of less wealthy consumers. Wine and spirit merchants and grocers, particularly those who sold blended grain and malt whisky, soon followed suit by selling bottled whisky over their own labels and later adopted distinctive brand names. The ﬁrst brand to conquer the London market was Lorne, blended by Greenlees Brothers of Campbeltown, its success depending not only on its printed labels, but the accompanying advertising that produced revenue for a growing periodical market. Malt distillers reacted to this trend by marketing their ‘self ’ or ‘single’ malt whiskies by the name of their distilleries, Glenlivet, Dalmore, Laphroaig, Macdonalds Highland

332

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Dew of Ben Nevis and so on. At ﬁrst labels were plainly produced, either black and white or over-printed with a single colour. With the destruction of many of the vineyards in France and the Iberian Peninsula as a result ﬁrst of odium and later and more devastatingly phylloxera, blended whisky came to dominate the world alcohol market. There was intense competition between blenders, wine and spirit merchants, grocers and malt distillers, all vying for a share of the market. As early as 1870 George and John Gordon Smith had registered Glenlivet as a trademark at Stationers’ Hall in London. Five years later the Trade Mark Registration Act made it possible to register brands of any product and whisky blenders were quick to take advantage. Much of the early sales promotion was based on a romantic image of Scotland and its national drink. The label on Wright & Greig’s Roderick Dhu featured a magniﬁcently garbed Highlander with plaid and claymore resting on a rock. Robertson Sanderson & Co.’s Mountain Dew showed two kilted Highlanders toasting their success in shooting a stag and Anderson & Shaw’s The Challenge featured a stag ﬂanked by thistles, based on Landseer’s famous painting, The Stag at Bay. Others sought to target speciﬁc audiences, such as sportsmen, with Curler’s Choice (1890), Golfer’s Special (1891), Ramblers (1895) and Anglers (1898), or those who believed in whisky’s medicinal properties with Invalid (1884), Doctor’s Blend (1885) and Comfortable Night-Cap (1895). Some brands focused on fashionable pursuits, The Cyclist’s Friend (1898), X Rays (1897) or The New Motor Car (1897), while others appealed to the professions, Barrister (1897), The Doctor (1881) and Old Vicar (1892). Such brands were short-lived, but those that succeeded had wider appeal, such as Johnny Walker, Dewars, Haig & Haig’s Pinch, Peter Mackie’s White Horse, James Buchanan’s Black & White, and Sanderson’s Vat 69. Their achievement depended on labelling and promotion that took full advantage of advances in print technology, and when it became available the potential of cinematography and electrically illuminated hoardings. For small runs of labels jobbing printers could handle the work, but as sales of leading brands rose and bottling became mechanised more sophisticated colour printing was required. Michael Moss

Printing for Everyday Life Gen Harrison ‘Jobbing’ work has been deﬁned as ‘anything which when printed, does not exceed one sheet’ and covers all material from the wood-block printing of early playing cards through to the scourge of the advertising ﬂyer (Southward: 264). A form of textual production which was going on long before the time of Gutenberg, jobbing work was principally functional and its merit was based on cost and speed of production rather than its aesthetic value. While in many instances the fugacious nature of this part of the trade has left us with only fragmentary evidence, many jobbing printers were required to keep guardbooks of their work for legal purposes. A copy of each job, with the date and number of copies clearly indicated, would have to be retained for six months, after which most were destroyed. Fortunately some have survived and remain as a testament to these otherwise ephemeral activities. Originally jobbing work had been executed by separate departments of established book or newspaper printers in major cities. Jobs usually took the form of invitations and calling cards for existing literate, bookbuying clientele. With the advent of industrialisation, increased specialisation and improved communication this dramatically changed. Nineteenth-century industrial expansion greatly extended the demand for everyday printing work and provided innovative means by which this demand could be met. New businesses required both stationery and advertising, and a general growth in prosperity fuelled greater social activity and public entertainment. Order books ﬁlled with requests for handbills, showbills, invitations and membership cards for a growing middle class and an increasingly literate working-class audience. In response to the demand, a greater number of enterprising individuals with the necessary capital became jobbing printers in their own right.

334

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

A printer required compositors and machine-minders to complete customer orders. Typesetting was time-consuming and labour intensive but new advances in press design made jobbing printing a viable business proposition. The treadle operated ‘jobbing’ platen introduced in the 1850s o≠ered simplicity of design and ease of operation, which meant that even an inexperienced machine-minder could make a good impression. It required virtually no make-ready so good time was made when changing from one job to another. It could accommodate a range of sizes from clothing labels to billheads, print up to 2,000 impressions per hour, and was relatively cheap to purchase and run. A larger press, such as a Columbian or Albion, possibly purchased second-hand, could accommodate the smaller runs of larger sheet sizes needed for showbills and placards. Anyone with an eye for opportunity and the means could start a printing business – Miller & Richard, the Edinburgh typefounders, o≠ered a start-up package which included everything for a printing o∞ce for a little under £160 – but there was a deﬁnite advantage for people with existing connections to the printing trade, such as booksellers or stationers who had an established customer base, their diversity allowing them to o≠set the initial costs of taking on production work in-house. It made commercial sense to become a producer as well as a seller of printed materials, as it added greatly to their range of goods, as well as providing them with a means of publicising them. As industry spread to more rural areas, driven by improvements in transport and postal systems, the demand for print followed. Population growth and increased governance made it feasible for even relatively small communities to support a press. As long as the work was of a satisfactory standard, a printer could garner a consistent supply of standing jobs or repeat orders from the local ﬁnancial, commercial and industrial sectors, and still be able to produce occasional jobs for other customers. These printers often began to print their own newspapers and, in a bid to keep up with an increasing market in tourism, local guide books and postcards. Many examples of this kind of operation were to be found in the Scottish Borders which saw an inﬂux of industry in the wake of the growing woollen trade. While the border towns of Melrose, Kelso, Jedburgh, Peebles, Selkirk, Galashiels and Hawick had only one printer between them in 1782, this number had increased to seventeen by 1853. Printing in Peebles began in 1814 when Alexander Elder expanded his existing bookselling, stationery and circulating library to include general printing. A traveller for Oliver & Boyd called him ‘poor but honest’. It was Elder’s library which was credited with giving William and

the diversity of print

335

Robert Chambers their love of books and it was at his printworks that they were said to have ‘caught the smell of printer’s ink that was to capture their lives and to add a lustre to Scottish Publishing’ (Buchan 2: 148). By 1852 the business had been taken over by Alexander Scott, who purchased a Columbian and started the ﬁrst newspaper in Peebles. There is evidence of keeping like-minded trades in the family, as Elder had a brother, Walter, who set up as a bookbinder in Hawick in 1820. His business did not last very long but two other brothers, Robert and Thomas Smail, in Innerleithen and Jedburgh respectively, had far greater success, the former starting a business that was to last through three generations. Indeed the preservation of the Smails’ records from their beginnings in the 1850s provides a revealing glimpse of the way in which provincial Scottish printers operated in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Robert Smail’s of Innerleithen Innerleithen, six miles to the south of Peebles, was home to a population of 463 in 1841 and by 1880 boasted 1,313 inhabitants. It was called a ‘boom town’ in the press, Innerleithen’s growth owing much to the expansion in the woollen trade, attracted by the proliferation of sheep farming and the availability of a cheap source of power in the fastﬂowing waters of the Leithen and the Tweed. It can also be attributed to other factors, not least the resemblance of Innerleithen to the ﬁctional town of St Ronan’s in Walter Scott’s 1824 novel, St Ronan’s Well. Innerleithen’s mineral wells were well known and reports of their curative powers had led many health tourists to seek them out, including Robert Burns who arrived in 1787 to take the waters. The Earl of Traquair, eager to realise the potential of such associations, built and opened a pavilion in 1827, and the wells were renamed St Ronan’s to reinforce the literary link. Further possibilities came with the opening of the railway line from Edinburgh to Peebles in 1855 and its extension to Innerleithen in October 1864, and then to Galashiels in 1866, where it connected to London. Almost overnight the railway replaced the existing twice daily horse carriage, bringing a revolution in communication, which included four trains to and from Edinburgh daily, and three to and from Galashiels. Carriage costs fell dramatically: a ton of goods from Edinburgh to Peebles was reduced from £1 to 9s 6d while coal dropped by half. Finally, the commercial potential of these industrialised rural districts could be realised. The ‘rapid and frequent communication with Edinburgh’ led to increased tourism. As the 1874 edition of the

336

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Innerleithen guide book states: ‘The train forms an agreeable change to the small coach which once a day in winter, and twice a day in summer, slowly performed the journey to Peebles’ (Willins: iii–iv). It was in this climate of change that Robert Smail started selling boots and books in the town. Opening in 1857, he employed two bootmakers and received regular parcels of books and stationery from his brother, Thomas, who was already established as a printer in Jedburgh. A stockbook from the same year contains a note from Thomas congratulating Robert on his bookselling success but advising him to keep accurate accounts. An advertisement in the Border Advertiser dated 9 April 1858 refers to him as a ‘Bookseller, Bookbinder, Newsagent &c.’ while also advertising ﬁshing tackle, paperhangings and footwear. Even before setting up as a printer, Robert had published a guide book, Innerleithen and Traquair, Past and Present, written by the Rev. Angus Willins and printed in Aberdeen in 1863. Production costs were o≠set by income from advertisements for accommodation and services which appeared on the book’s endpages. He also undertook further editions: the fourth, printed in 1874, shares the title page with John Menzies & Co., probably a consequence of the fact that Robert owed them a debt of £50 at around the same time. Robert continued to prosper, soon moving to larger accommodation and then in 1866 buying the current High Street premises for £500. It was here that he would follow his brother’s model and take advantage of the expansion in trade and tourism by starting his own jobbing business. Accounts indicate that he paid £130 16s 4d in 1866 for his initial printing equipment – which included a Cropper platen, a Columbian hand press and type – as well the installation of gas lighting to the premises. There was also a payment of 2s on 22 February 1867 to The Scotsman for an advertisement for a man, most likely a compositor, for the printworks. Wages of £2 a fortnight are paid from 2 March 1867 to John Miller, presumably the successful applicant. By the end of the 1867 Robert had made £94 17s 6d from a variety of printed jobs. The ﬁrst one was for Mr Young, town clerk and secretary of the gas company, for ﬁfty rose tinted circulars for the annual Pigeon Match at a cost of 2s 1d. Most of the work for 1867 was for the production of bills and circulars, although memoranda and business cards were also popular. Social printing undertaken by the ﬁrm included invitations to suppers, dance tickets, debating society notices, and posters for the Horticultural Society and the St Ronan’s Border Games. The games had already been in existence for forty years but this was the ﬁrst job in a client relationship that spanned the next century.

the diversity of print

337

Robert also took time to promote his own business. Throughout 1867 bills and circulars advertising paperhangings, letterpress printing, the Evening Courant, boots and music were produced and distributed. Similar advertisements were made for his brother, Thomas, a name that appears regularly in the order books. His best customers in that ﬁrst year were Mr Procter, grocer, draper and postmaster and Mr Todd, auctioneer. He also printed jobs for the United Bank, the Parish Council and the local mills. His largest order was for 10,000 piece cards for Ballantyne’s Mill in Walkerburn and smallest for the ‘store boy’, two large cards stating ‘1/- per lb’. Pressed for space owing to the inﬂux of newcomers, the parish church relocated to a larger premises in 1867. In August the order book shows Robert printed gratis 540 sermons and bills to commemorate the last service in the old church, and then in October, 540 sermons to mark the ﬁrst service in the new one. The United Presbyterian Church seems to have been faced with the same predicament a decade later, when a proposal for a new building was put forward. The guardbook for 1877 includes a copy of the initial appeal notice ordered in March, then a subscription form later that month. In May posters were printed promoting a fundraising Grand Bazaar to be held in August. These were distributed to United Presbyterian churches as far aﬁeld as Glasgow, Edinburgh and Ecclefechan. Sarah Smail, Robert’s wife, was listed as a stallholder and as one of the church members accepting gifts of work. The new church was opened in the late 1880s. The end of year printing ﬁgures for 1869 show a cumulative income of £414 13s 7d and expenditure of £447 19s (of which £141 7s 9d was for equipment). This, put together with income from boots, books, stationery and newspapers, gave Robert Smail a healthy end of year proﬁt of £443 8s 9d. From 15 February 1868 work had increased enough for him to employ an apprentice, William Sanderson, who was paid 3s 6d per fortnight. He expanded his print capability by installing new equipment and on 2 April 1868 lithography is mentioned for the ﬁrst time, in the form of 300 small cards for ‘Millar, St. Boswells’. Growth continued and the ﬁrm eventually installed a water-powered double crown wharfedale reliance stop cylinder press. Ever resourceful, they saved running costs by tapping into the newly built lade cut through the town by the local mills. It is clear that printing allowed the Smail brothers to o≠er a broad range of services to the townsfolk. Thomas Smail o≠ered ‘Fancy Wood Articles’, newspapers, paperhangings, books, bookbinding, stationery, ledgers, lithographic portraits, engravings, frames, almanacs, as well as a wide range of letterpress printing and local guide books (written and

338

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

published by Thomas himself ). In addition he ran a select library (est. 1853) and a magazine club (est. 1859). Robert mirrored his brother in these goods and services and even added a few of his own such as ﬁshing tackle, hardware (cutlery, jelly pans, pots, for example) and of course, boots and shoes. Robert also travelled for his business. In Reminiscences of Innerleithen and Traquair, printed by the second generation of Smails in 1896, Thomas Dobson notes that ‘Mr. Smail . . . travelled in most, if not all, of the manufacturing towns in the South of Scotland and soon succeeded in extending his business connection’ (156). By its very nature the local printworks occupied a central role in the community and it made commercial sense for the proprietor to keep good company with the clientele. Both Thomas in Jedburgh and Robert in Innerleithen were active, well-regarded men in their own communities. Thomas received a glowing obituary in the September 1900 edition of The Border Magazine and the sons of Robert sent out 350 funeral notices for their father, indicating the great esteem in which he was held in such a small town. Robert had established a good foundation for his sons to continue and expand the business and the everyday printing needs of Innerleithen continued to be catered for until the business closed in 1986. While the democratisation of the printed word which took place in the ﬁrst three-quarters of the nineteenth century is now taken for granted, historians have tended to neglect the hard-working individuals who provided one of the most important means by which the public sphere was created and maintained across the nation. While most of the work was regarded as ephemeral some ﬁne examples have survived. Produced to serve a speciﬁc, often time limited purpose they hold no great emotional or educational value to the intended audience. Nevertheless, they provide an invaluable insight into the social and economic conditions of the time and the everyday lives of ordinary people.

the diversity of print

339

Figure 5.13 Playbill, Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, 1819.

By the 1820s the Theatre Royal was one of Scotland’s principal dramatic venues, largely in consequence of the commercial success of stage adaptations of the works of Walter Scott, the most popular of which was Rob Roy. The play ran for several years and a special revival of the play was ordered by George IV when he visited Edinburgh in 1822. Up-tothe minute playbills, such as this one, were posted on walls around the city, often on the same date as the performance, and were part of the everyday visual culture of the city.

Chapter Six

PERIODICALS AND NEWSPAPERS The Age of the Periodical Bill Bell Perhaps there is no single feature of the English literary history of the nineteenth century, not even the enormous popularisation and multiplication of the novel, which is so distinctive and characteristic as the development in it of periodical literature. (166)

W

riting as regius professor at the University of Edinburgh in 1896, George Saintsbury’s observation on the importance of the periodical press to nineteenth-century culture was particularly apposite in the case of Scotland. From the emergence of the inﬂuential reviews in the ﬁrst quarter of the century to the explosion of cheap weeklies made possible by the new technological economies of scale, Scottish publishers led the way in the market for serial literature. While scholars have long used magazine and newspaper content as valuable sources of evidence, some have concentrated on them as important forms in their own right. Even so, the phenomenon of the periodical press, so important to Scotland in this period, has not always received due recognition as a cultural and literary phenomenon. Despite its obvious importance as a commodity, a leisure pursuit and a shaper of opinion, the Scottish periodical, with one or two notable exceptions, has remained invisible in many literary and historical accounts of the nineteenth century. Despite dominant assumptions about the ‘ephemeral’ nature of magazines and newspapers, as opposed to the more ‘permanent’ form of the codex, much of the book literature of the century owed its origins to the periodical press. The serialised novel is only one of several examples of the mutual reliance that existed between the periodical and the book in this period. Their commercial fates were also bound together in other ways. While later in the century an increasing number of printers 340

periodicals and newspapers

341

specialised in newspaper work, many newspapers and magazines were composed for and printed on the same machines on which book work was also undertaken. It is sometimes forgotten, for instance, that Walter Scott’s publisher, James Ballantyne, started his career as the editor and printer of the weekly Kelso Mail and that Archibald Constable began the Edinburgh Review with capital derived from his other publishing interests. The launch of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in 1832 was similarly important to the development of its publisher’s reputation as a producer of improving books. A clear distinction between the book and the serial is further challenged by the phenomenon of part publication, at a time when major works of ﬁction, poetry, encyclopaedias and even bibles were issued by instalment. There were obvious ﬁnancial advantages, both to the producer and the consumer, to serialised publication, requiring less capital outlay at a time when books were not a≠ordable to all classes. And, while magazines were often circulated in paper wrappers until they fell apart through wear, many copies were collected and bound together as volumes, either by the publisher or by the individual owner, destined to take their place on the shelf beside other books. While Scottish printers and publishers had entered on a number of successful periodical ventures in the previous century, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Scottish magazines is often considered to have begun with the appearance of the Edinburgh Review in 1802, which took the literary world by storm, soon enjoying notoriety throughout Britain and overseas. By 1817, Edinburgh boasted another highly inﬂuential literary periodical, in the form of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Despite their political di≠erences, such magazines spoke with conﬁdence to and for the increasingly inﬂuential ‘middling classes’, and for a brief time put Scotland at the centre of literary and political debate. Although the weekly newspaper was already well established in Scotland, new markets were to open up in the second quarter of the century, the competition for print becoming increasingly ﬁerce. One observer, reﬂecting on the way in which provision had radically changed within only a generation or two, commented in 1837: A very respectable weekly paper, entitled, ‘The Paisley Advertiser,’ published every Saturday morning, has survived considerable opposition . . . Its circulation is at present greater than at any former period. Another weekly journal, called the Glasgow Saturday Evening Post, and Paisley and Renfrewshire Reformer, is printed at Glasgow, and published there and at Paisley at the same hour . . . Sixty years ago only one newspaper was known as coming to Paisley.

342

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

It belonged to the magistrates, and it lay on the council table for the use of respectable freemen. Its name, the Edinburgh Courant. Now, there are comparatively few individuals above the lowest rank who do not enjoy the luxury of a peep at least, into one or more of these inﬂuential organs of public sentiment. (NSA Paisley) A distinctive feature of the period was the emergence of the cheap weekly. A number of such titles were to come and go, but two dominated, both of which are accounted for in this section. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, established in 1832, was the market leader in Scotland, only to be displaced by the syndicate of People’s Journals which appeared in 1858. However, Chambers’s larger British and foreign market had changed by the mid-1850s; its primary mode of distribution was monthly, and its new rivals now included Blackwood’s. The Scotsman began in 1817 as a radical journal but was destined to become Scotland’s mainstream national newspaper. The changing fate of the newspaper, from weekly to bi-weekly, and ﬁnally to daily in 1855, is typical of a host of publications which moved between formats and frequency, as opportunistic owners sought to negotiate the rapidly changing market. And, while it is sometimes possible to identify a periodical with a speciﬁc audience, whether ‘polite’ or ‘popular’, it should be remembered that many were destined to be read across class, gender and geographical boundaries, and it was not unusual for mechanics’ institutes, subscription libraries and even individual readers to patronise simultaneously the Edinburgh Review and Chambers’s, The Scotsman and The Times. By the end of the century, mass circulation publications with an unambiguously popular appeal had arrived and the modern newspaper press was on the horizon. Some early nineteenth-century periodicals survived beyond the end of the century, many trading on reputations that had been built decades before. The Edinburgh Review, after a long and gradual decline, ceased publication in 1929. Chambers’ Journal, barely recognisable from the original, was wound up in 1956. Blackwood’s Magazine lasted until 1980, having continued at the turn of the century to provide a home for some of the most important new prose and ﬁction. The best-selling newspaper published in Scotland today is the Glasgow tabloid, the Daily Record, founded in 1842 and acquired by the London-based Mirror Group in 1955, while the Glasgow Herald continues under the ownership of American media company Gannet. After several years of outside ownership, The Scotsman, which still styles itself ‘Scotland’s national newspaper’, was purchased by the Scottish-based Johnston Press in 2005.

Reviews and Monthlies Joanne Shattock The e≠ect was electrical . . . It was an entire and instant change of every thing that the public had been accustomed to in that sort of composition. The old periodical opiates were extinguished at once. The learning of the new Journal, its talent, its spirit, its writing, its independence, were all new; and the surprise was increased by a work so full of public life springing up, suddenly, in a remote part of the kingdom. (Cockburn 1852, I: 131) This description of the impact of the ﬁrst number of the Edinburgh Review in October 1802, written by Henry Cockburn, the friend and biographer of its ﬁrst editor, Francis Je≠rey, lost none of its force in having been written some half a century after the event. As an avowed Whig, and also an Edinburgh reviewer, Cockburn was not an impartial observer. But his assessment of the signiﬁcance of the quarterly would have received unqualiﬁed assent in 1802. The establishment of the Edinburgh Review was a deﬁning moment in the history of periodical literature and in the history of criticism. The ‘old periodical opiates’, which included the Monthly and Critical reviews, founded in the mid-eighteenth century (in 1749 and 1756) and late-comers such as the Analytical (1788) and even the Anti-Jacobin (1797), were swept aside by the new periodical, which soon established itself as the model for reviews and for reviewing for nearly half a century. As Walter Bagehot commented in 1855, the Edinburgh Review, ‘began the system’ (I: 6). It was soon to have rivals, one south of the border and another on its doorstep, and in the ensuing decades it produced many imitators, but its authority was established from the outset. It had a number of original features. It was independent of booksellers and Archibald Constable, its ﬁrst publisher, gave the review’s

344

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

founders a free hand by distancing his own publications from its agenda, as did Longman, his successor. From the start the Edinburgh was determined to select publications for review, rather than presenting abstracts in the style of the Monthly and the Critical. The ﬁrst number contained twenty-nine articles of varying lengths. The next, in January 1803, contained twenty-three, after which the pattern settled into an average of eight or nine articles in an issue of 250 or more pages. At an initial price of 6s the publication was to be quarterly rather than monthly. What was not stated in the ‘Advertisement’ to the ﬁrst number, but what was signalled by its bu≠ and blue wrappers, was that the Edinburgh’s politics were unequivocally Whiggish. The initial proposal for the review came from Sydney Smith, an English cleric resident in Edinburgh, who persuaded his friends Francis Je≠rey and Francis Horner, both Edinburgh lawyers with Whig a∞liations, and later a third, Henry Brougham, to join the venture. The ﬁrst number seems to have been edited by a triumvirate, with Smith nominally in charge (Cockburn I: 125). Thereafter the editorship passed by agreement to Je≠rey. The original group involved in the setting up of the Edinburgh quickly fragmented, Horner, Brougham and Smith leaving for London. Those who remained, as Cockburn noted, gravitated naturally towards Je≠rey, who was to remain in post until 1829 when he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates. The crucial period in the history of the review, the period in which its reputation was made and its pre-eminence secured, was the period of Je≠rey’s editorship. It was Sydney Smith who advised Archibald Constable that a payment of £300 per annum to the editor, and of 10 guineas per sheet (of sixteen pages) to the contributors would overcome any scruples about involvement with ‘the press’ and would produce ‘the best review in Europe’. The rate was soon raised to 16 guineas, with two-thirds of the articles receiving between 20 and 25 guineas. Je≠rey’s fee rose to £400 and later to over £700. Even before the increase it compared favourably with his professional earnings of £240 in 1804, after nine years in the legal profession. Constable’s payments set a precedent which other reviews struggled to match (ibid.: 134, 153). Few of those associated with the review at the beginning had considered a career in either literature or politics. But they were ambitious, idealistic and most were politically committed. As the climate in Scotland was unpropitious for those with Whiggish views, most had time to spare. The ﬁnancial incentives made it even more attractive. As Cockburn pointed out, of all forms of public address, writing for a review was the easiest in which to engage. It could be done quickly, it

periodicals and newspapers

Figure 6.1 Edinburgh Review, 1802.

345

346

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

was protected by anonymity (articles in the review remained anonymous until 1912), and it yielded relatively immediate results. In Bagehot’s words, Je≠rey ‘invented the trade of editorship. Before him an editor was a bookseller’s drudge; he is now a distinguished functionary’ (I: 30). Je≠rey wrote a prodigious number of articles himself, an average of three per number in the ﬁrst twenty-six issues, and a total of more than 200 by the end of his career – on subjects ranging from biology, metaphysics, politics, economics, history, law and biography to the literary criticism for which the Edinburgh was famous, if not notorious. His ruthlessness in revising the work of his colleagues became part of the lore of nineteenth-century editing. What Carlyle once called ‘that light Editorial hacking and hewing to right and left’ (Letters V: 195) caused many to smart at the liberties taken with their material. But Je≠rey’s real achievement resided in establishing the cultural authority of the Edinburgh. The review spoke with a collective voice, employing the corporate ‘we’, to which all contributors subscribed. It mattered little that within the inner circles the authorship of many articles was a badly kept secret. The Edinburgh addressed and engaged its readers with a uniﬁed, authoritative voice. It has been argued that the periodical press played an important role in shaping the new and expanding reading audience of the ﬁrst three decades of the nineteenth century, and that unlike eighteenth-century journals which ‘mapped their audiences by targeting speciﬁc ranks’, nineteenth-century periodicals often ‘deliberately smudged social di≠erences’ (Klancher: 50–2). Consequently the Edinburgh Review was a particularly powerful instrument for creating a middle-class reading audience whose determinants, like those for all reviews selling for between 4s and 6s, were essentially economic. Figures for print runs and sales are problematic, as no relevant Edinburgh records exist and London sales were handled separately from the beginning. In a letter prior to the founding of the Quarterly Review in 1809 Walter Scott claimed that the Edinburgh’s circulation was in the region of 9,000 (Letters II: 107). The Edinburgh itself claimed a circulation of 13,500 in its second decade (Oct. 1902: 289). Richard Altick lists ﬁgures of 13,000 in 1814, 12,000 in 1818, and 11,000 in 1824–6, although the sources for some of these were the claims of the review itself (392–3). Factored into these ﬁgures is the number of readers that an individual copy of the review may have secured. Abraham Hayward, an active quarterly reviewer, once advised a politician that there was no direct correlation between a newspaper’s circulation ﬁgures and its inﬂuence

periodicals and newspapers

347

(Koss I: 25). He could have made the same point about quarterly reviews, which were as much read in clubs, libraries and reading rooms as they were by individual subscribers at home. Like newspapers, individual articles in the Edinburgh formed the basis of widespread discussion. It was a standard practice in the 1830s to distribute advance sheets to politically sympathetic newspapers so that a brief article on a forthcoming number could be prepared. It was also standard practice to reprint up to 250 additional copies of a number containing a popular or controversial article for retrospective circulation. All of these factors make the actual size of the Edinburgh’s audience di∞cult to estimate. There were, in addition, the North American ‘editions’. Prior to Talford’s 1842 Copyright Act copies of both the Edinburgh and the Quarterly were routinely pirated by publishers in New York, Boston and Philadelphia (Shattock 1989: 160–1). Following the copyright legislation British publishers shipped advance sheets of numbers for binding and distribution by their North American a∞liates, a method also employed for the publication of ﬁction in this period. Circulation ﬁgures, then, tell only a partial story. One historian estimated that at their peak the Edinburgh and the Quarterly had a readership of over 100,000 – ﬁve times their combined circulation (Gross: 2). Similarly di∞cult to gauge is the composition of the Edinburgh’s readership. Contemporary perceptions conﬁrm Je≠rey’s assessment of his readers as drawn from ‘fashionable or public life’, rather than his more optimistic inclusion of the so-called ‘middling classes’ (Clive: 143–4). Leslie Stephen, commenting in the 1860s, described the early Edinburgh Review as the ‘instrument used by a number of very clever young men to put forward the ideas current in the more liberal section of the upper classes’ (II: 249). Bagehot, too, saw the early Edinburgh’s readers as quite di≠erent from those of the present day: ‘The number of readers grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve,’ he lamented. The modern man ‘must be told what to think – shortly, no doubt – but he must be told it. The essay-like criticism of modern times is about the length which he likes. The Edinburgh Review . . . may be said to be, in this country, the commencement on large topics of suitable views for sensible persons’ (I: 6). Bagehot’s modern reader, too busy to read books, needed well-digested information and prepackaged ideas (‘suitable views’). Je≠rey’s relationship with his readers, on the other hand, was subtly di≠erent: If Je≠rey was not a great critic, he had what very great critics have wanted, the art of writing what most readers would think good

348

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

criticism. He might not know his subject, but he knew his readers. People like to read ideas which they can imagine to have been their own. (I: 30) Je≠rey and his colleagues were not presenting ‘suitable views for sensible persons’, but rather summarising or articulating their readers’ views for them. They knew their readers so well they could speak for them. It was an audience, and a relationship, which was unfamiliar to the next, mid-Victorian generation of reviewers who addressed a much more heterogeneous and ever-expanding readership. And it demonstrates clearly the subtle shift in the attitude towards readers held by the new generation of professional reviewers in the 1850s and 1860s. Je≠rey’s often quoted remark that the review had ‘but two legs to stand on, literature no doubt is one of them, but its Right leg is politics’ (I: xiv–xv) was apposite. The combination of political conviction and critical acumen was the key to the Edinburgh’s success and inﬂuence, particularly in its ﬁrst three decades. The political climate in Scotland in 1802, only recently released from the grip of the party machine of the ultra-Tory Henry Dundas, made the success of a spirited, independent and iconoclastic opposition journal a foregone conclusion. It was obvious, Cockburn wrote, ‘that it was only through the press that this intolerance could be abated, or our policy reformed’ (I: 126). But the Scottish, as opposed to the Whig agenda of the Edinburgh is more di∞cult to determine. The contributors assembled by Je≠rey were an interesting mixture of cosmopolitan ﬁgures and eminent Scotsmen. They included Scott, Wilberforce, Melbourne, Coleridge, Malthus, the historian James Mackintosh, Leigh Hunt, Samuel Romilly, the economist and theologian Thomas Chalmers, John Wilson, the political economist J. R. McCulloch, William Empson, Thomas Arnold, the philosopher Sir William Hamilton, Hazlitt, Thomas Campbell, James Mill, plus the two rising stars at the end of his period of o∞ce, Carlyle and Macaulay, who, together with Brougham, would dominate the review during the editorship of Macvey Napier. Some, like Carlyle, Empson, Brougham and John Allen, were Scots who had moved south for a variety of reasons. Other Scots, including Hamilton, Thomas Brown, Scott, Mackintosh, Chalmers and Wilson, were eminent ﬁgures in the intellectual life of Edinburgh and Glasgow, often with university or Church connections. Women writers were conspicuous by their absence. Female authorship was one of the review’s blindspots, evident in its selection of books for review as well as in its recruitment of contributors (Curran).

periodicals and newspapers

349

Benedict Anderson’s well-known argument that a nation’s novels and its press are the most e≠ective agents in the creation of a sense of national community is relevant to a study of the ﬁrst three decades of the Edinburgh Review. Recently historians have seen the Act of Union of 1801 as playing a central role in its agenda, arguing that the accession of Ireland into the United Kingdom is subtly reﬂected in its emphasis, not just on Irish but on Scottish subjects and Scottish culture. In other words the extension of the Union prompted reﬂection on the tensions between the centre and the periphery, colony and metropole then being played out in both Irish and Scottish culture. It has also been argued that the emphasis on antiquarianism in the early decades of the review was part of a nuanced debate on Scottish nationalism and the importance of the Scottish cultural heritage (Demata). These arguments are persuasive, but the Scottish agenda of the Edinburgh must be seen in the context of an even greater ambition of operating on the national stage. Ironically, its political authority began to diminish shortly after Je≠rey’s resignation of the editorship in the summer of 1829, and when in the following year his own political career took him to London. Robert Vaughan, writing at mid-century, shrewdly identiﬁed the beginning of the Edinburgh’s decline in political inﬂuence with the Whigs’ assumption of power in 1830 and the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832. After nearly three decades as a vigorous organ of the opposition, the Edinburgh became in e≠ect a government review, a relationship that was neither straightforward nor comfortable. It was, as John Morley later reﬂected, ‘the cohesion of a political creed that is gone, and the strength and fervour of a political school. The principles that inspired that group of strong men have been worked out’ (269). Others saw the review’s loss of political authority inherent in its format. The younger generation, Bagehot noted, had always regarded the appearance of the Edinburgh as ‘a grave constitutional event’ and had been told that its composition was ‘intrusted to Privy Councillors only’ (I: 1). That very weightiness in the end was its undoing. The quarterlies’ fondness for ‘dissertations’, as more than one critic described their long articles, became a disadvantage. ‘During the last twenty years at least, the average writing in the Times has been writing of much more power than the average writing in the Edinburgh’ Vaughan wrote in 1852, and most observers would have agreed (178). The short punchy articles in newspapers, together with the variety o≠ered by the new monthly magazines, including serialised ﬁction, meant that the political inﬂuence of the Edinburgh, and of other quarterlies, was never quite the same after the 1830s. The review’s cultural authority, as distinct from its political power, was more enduring.

350

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

It was in response to the Edinburgh’s politics rather than its criticism, however provocative, that its two main rivals, the Quarterly and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine set up in opposition. The trigger for the founders of the Quarterly, who included Walter Scott, once a vigorous supporter of the Edinburgh, was a now famous article by Je≠rey and Brougham in the issue for October 1808. In a review of Don Pedro Cevallos’ Exposition of the Practices and Machinations which led to the Usurpation of the Crown of Spain, they were highly critical of the conduct of the Peninsular War, arguing that the current popular uprisings in Spain could have a beneﬁcial impact on the rest of Europe, Great Britain included. It was the proverbial last straw that galvanised the Tory opposition to the Edinburgh. The result, John Murray’s Londonbased Quarterly Review, became the Edinburgh’s major rival as a serious review for the next three decades, sometimes exceeding its circulation, and reportedly paying its editor and contributors in excess of the Edinburgh’s generous rates. The establishment of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, on the other hand, represented a challenge to the Edinburgh on its home territory. As the publishing rival of Archibald Constable, William Blackwood set out to compete with the review by o≠ering more lively entertainment, in terms of criticism, and a clear Tory agenda. The ﬁrst number of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Monthly, as it was called, appeared in April 1817, edited jointly by James Pringle and Thomas Cleghorn. It was not a success. After six numbers, Blackwood himself took over the running of the magazine, and in October launched Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which quickly acquired the nickname ‘Maga’. The magazine’s circulation began at 3,700, but with the relaunch in the seventh number it shot up to 10,000 (Altick: 392–3). Blackwood was e≠ectively the new magazine’s editor, as well as its publisher. He was assisted by John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, both of whom shared editorial functions but not ultimate responsibility. James Hogg was also a member of the inner circle. To the public Blackwood presented the useful ﬁction of an editor and a publisher, each of whom criticised and claimed to have no control over the other. Anonymity was strictly observed, but pseudonymity was brought to a new peak of subtlety, with many of the pseudonyms turning into characters who wrote for the magazine, with favourite topics or interests: ‘Christopher North’ (Wilson), ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’ (Hogg), ‘Timothy Tickler’ (William Maginn, or Lockhart). ‘Ebony’ (Blackwood). This practice of pseudo-persons and pseudo-worlds, as Peter T. Murphy has observed, was derived from the eighteenth-century Tatler and Spectator but with none of the latter’s decorum (642).

periodicals and newspapers

351

The practice reached its apogee with ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’, literally ‘nights at Ambrose’s’ (tavern), an innovative series of dialogues or conversations, to which the principal members of the Blackwood circle contributed, which ran from 1822 to 1835. One critic has described the ‘Noctes’ as ‘one of the great experiments within the form of the magazine’. In the heterogeneity of the exchanges, their complex resonances, the wide-ranging references to the contents of the magazine and to the contents of other publications, ‘the “Noctes” do not simply blur the boundaries between popular and elite cultures, they locate one culture within the other’ (Parker 2000, I: 113). They also highlight the performative aspects of Blackwood’s, and the emphasis on personalities, which was signalled from the beginning. In this the register was quite unlike any play of personality to be found in the pages of its predecessors. The October 1817 number contained three articles, each of which was designed to provoke a storm of controversy: an intensely critical review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, an article on ‘The Cockney School of Poetry’ and a ‘Translation from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript’, the last a highly allusive satire on the early history of the magazine, and on the Edinburgh literary scene. Annotated copies reportedly circulated throughout the city. The Chaldee Manuscript was instigated by James Hogg and contributed to by most of the Blackwood’s group. It was, as Margaret Oliphant described it in Annals of a Publishing House: a piece of remote local satire, which could only be comprehended by those who knew the people, the scene, and to some degree even the circumstances of the extraordinary jeu d’esprit with which the new series began. But it is clear . . . that the opinion of London and the world – almost convertible places nowadays . . . did not occur at all to these young men. It was for Edinburgh they wrote, and of Edinburgh they thought. (I: 115–16) The determinedly local, indeed provincial emphasis, unthinkable, as Oliphant implies, in the publishing world of the 1890s, and not ever considered either by Je≠rey and his colleagues, was one of Blackwood’s distinctive features. So too were the soubriquets – Archibald Constable was ‘the Crafty’, Lockhart, the ‘Scorpion’. The main characters in this inscrutable satire with biblical overtones were identiﬁed by personal characteristics, and physical defects. The emphasis on the personal and on personalities was to become another, not always attractive feature of the magazine. Oliphant, by no means an impartial observer, insisted that there was no bitterness in the satire, only good fun. The same could not be said of the second controversial article in the number. ‘The Cockney School of Poetry’ was the ﬁrst in a series of

352

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

articles on Leigh Hunt, Keats and Hazlitt, to whom the title clung long after the series ﬁnished. In the October 1817 article Leigh Hunt was subjected to a virulent, personal attack. Signed ‘Z’, the article was widely thought to have been written by Lockhart. Like the attack on Keats by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review the following year, the focus was on Hunt’s humble background, including his lack of formal education, his ‘exquisitely bad taste’, and ‘extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners’ (Oct. 1817, 38–41; Nov. 1817, 192–201). Hunt threatened an action for libel. Blackwood as publisher blamed his editor, who claimed to have rebuked the author. And so, as Margaret Oliphant observed, ‘the circle of virtuous irresponsibility’ was completed (Annals I: 136). Legal action was averted, and the only casualty was a breach with Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, Blackwood’s London partners, and with Oliver & Boyd, the ﬁrm’s printers, both of whom were o≠ended by the satire. The ﬁrst number of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine could be said to have set the pattern for the future. Personal attacks and ensuing scandal dogged the magazine, culminating in February 1821 in a duel between John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, a publication which had modelled itself on Blackwood’s, and James Christie, acting as second for Lockhart. Lockhart had issued a challenge to Scott, following an aggressive article in the London, and John Scott was killed. The Scott–Christie duel and its fatal outcome, ‘The Cockney School of Poetry’, the ‘Noctes’ and the ‘Chaldee Manuscript’ are what most modern readers can recall of the early days of Blackwood’s. In fact this period, though intense, was relatively brief. Lockhart left to edit the Quarterly in 1825, much to the relief of his father-in-law, Sir Walter Scott, who had advised him, following the death of John Scott, not to ‘dally with this mother of mischief any more’ (Letters VI: 363). Wilson continued to write, but divided his time between the magazine and the duties of the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh. William Maginn, who had been part of the inner circle, devoted himself to Fraser’s from 1830 onward. William Blackwood died in 1834, and was succeeded by his son Alexander. The ‘Noctes’ ceased in 1835. Throughout this period the magazine published the kind of serious criticism that made it a rival to the quarterlies. The circulation in 1828 was 6,500, reaching 8,000 in 1831, only 3,000 fewer than the Edinburgh’s (Altick: 393). Thanks to William Blackwood’s astute innovation, Blackwood’s also serialised ﬁction from the ﬁrm’s list – by John Galt, Samuel Warren and Susan Ferrier among others. By the mid-1830s the magazine had made the transition from riotous provincial enfant terrible to a major literary magazine. Its competitors now

periodicals and newspapers

353

were the Fraser’s, the New Monthly, the Metropolitan and the ‘old’ Monthly magazines, all priced between 2s 6d and 3s 6d, and all combining politics and general reviewing with serialised ﬁction, with the aim of attracting a wider audience than the, by now, seemingly staid quarterlies. In 1832 Blackwood’s was challenged on its home territory by a new monthly. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine was the project of William Tait (1793–1864), an Edinburgh bookseller with known radical sympathies, and the distributor of the Westminster Review in Scotland. The prospectus signalled the magazine’s devotion ‘to whatever appears calculated to extend the liberties, to advance the interests, or to improve the condition of mankind’. The appearance of the ﬁrst number on 31 March 1832, a month before the passage of the Reform Bill, was welltimed. Tait’s was to be ‘the fearless and uncompromising advocate’ of Reform, its ‘one grand object’ ‘the good of the PEOPLE’ (WIVP IV: 476). Although the prospectus did not declare it, the monthly was determined to rival Blackwood’s as the Edinburgh magazine. The early numbers ﬁzzed with news of the Reform Bill, and of reform in general, ‘the Revolution’ as its enemies termed it. Articles advocating ‘a direct and honest system of taxation’, the removal of duties on newspapers and foreign books, law reform and the abolition of tithes were interspersed with short ﬁction by Catherine Gore and Harriet Martineau and essays by Leigh Hunt. References to the city left no doubt as to the provenance of the new publication. The challenge to Blackwood’s was laid in the ﬁrst number. A ballad invited readers to ‘Unharness your shoulders from Ebony’s yoke’ and ‘crowd to the banner of Tait’s Magazine’ (April 1832, 118). In the second number Tait’s was declared the ‘True Edinburgh Maga’ (May 1832, 214). William Blackwood was apparently unperturbed, writing to a friend: ‘Tait, the bookseller here, has attempted a Magazine by way of rival to mine, and of course it is as much Radical as we are Tory . . . So far from doing us the least harm, it has done us a great deal of good’ (Oliphant 1897, II: 109). The ﬁrst number contained nineteen articles in a total of 136 pages. It ended with the ‘Monthly Register’, the ﬁrst of what was to become a regular feature, including current events, commercial news and short reviews of new publications. The reviews of poetry, ﬁction and biography were written by Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781–1857), who was soon to assume a key role in the magazine. At this time she was the coproprietor, with her husband, of two successive Edinburgh weeklies, one of them published by William Tait. John Johnstone in turn was Tait’s printer.

354

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

The contributors to the early numbers included J. S. Mill, Thomas Perronet Thompson, John Bowring and J. A. Roebuck, all four known to William Tait through the Westminster Review connection. The poet Ebenezer Elliott contributed to the early numbers, signing his articles ‘the author of Corn Law Rhymes’. Tait wrote many of the political articles himself. Scots contributors included Thomas Dick Lauder, John Pringle Nichol, William Weir and John Galt, the last an important addition and a Blackwood’s contributor. Even more important for the magazine’s reputation, and its sales, was the acquisition of the erratic but proliﬁc Thomas De Quincey in 1833. Blackwood’s Tory politics were more compatible with De Quincey’s own, but ﬁnancial exigency was an even stronger motivator. In February 1834 he inaugurated a series of twenty-ﬁve autobiographical ‘Sketches of Life and Manners; from the Autobiography of an English Opium-eater’, which continued until February 1841. Originally intended as an intellectual autobiography, a sequel to the famous Confessions ﬁrst published in the London Magazine in 1821, the Sketches included anecdotal and often controversial portraits of De Quincey’s contemporaries, among them Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb and Southey, all of which brought welcome publicity for Tait’s (Works IX, X, XI). De Quincey continued to publish in the magazine until 1851, contributing nearly seventy-ﬁve articles in total, as compared to just under a hundred for Blackwood’s over a longer period. Tait’s sales were estimated at 4,000 per month, nearly three-quarters of which were in England (Bertram: 11–12). Tait was fond of boasting that his magazine outsold Blackwood’s in Scotland, for which there is some evidence (Mar. 1836, 190–200). The standard octavo format, with its eight by ﬁve inch pages and austere design, corresponded with that of its competitors, and when bound was scarcely distinguishable from a quarterly. Its price of 2s 6d for 130 pages was also standard for monthly magazines aimed at a middle-class market. Tait, however, was keen to extend his readership beyond its middleclass base. In February 1834, two years after the magazine’s launch, he dropped the price to 1s, making Tait’s the ﬁrst of the shilling monthlies that were to dominate the periodical market from the late 1850s. The size of the page was increased to approximately ten inches by six inches with a double column format. Each issue now contained seventy-ﬁve pages. Three months later Tait instituted an even more momentous change when he merged his magazine with the 8d monthly Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine, the successor to the weekly Schoolmaster and Edinburgh Magazine, under the proprietorship of the Johnstones. Tait

periodicals and newspapers

355

ceded half ownership in the publication to Christian Johnstone, although as was later pointed out, the two publications were not of equal value (June 1834, 289). The title Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine was retained and its price remained 1s. Christian Johnstone became the editor of the merged magazine. As such she was the ﬁrst woman journalist to edit a major periodical, before the novelist-editors of the 1860s. Her political a∞liations matched William Tait’s, and her instincts as a journalist were populist. The merged magazine adopted wholesale the format of Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine, a format for which Johnstone herself took credit, labelling it ‘the Radical form . . . the cheap or People’s size’ (Jan. 1838, 63). It was an indication of the direction in which she and Tait were determined to take the magazine. Her other major contribution was the rebalancing of the literary versus the political content of Tait’s. Leigh Hunt had earlier warned William Tait that a magazine was better served by combining politics with ‘more ﬂowery beds’ (Brewer: 198), and Johnstone took the advice to heart. During her twelve-year editorship the focus of Tait’s moved from politics to that of a more general literary magazine. Writers like R. H. Horne, John Hill Burton, William Howitt and later George Gilﬁllan wrote for it. Theodore Martin and W. E. Aytoun collaborated on a number of articles, often under the signature ‘Bon Gaultier’, as well as writing independently. A focus for new poetry, the ‘Feast of the Poets’, was introduced as a regular feature. Formal reviews were interspersed with short ﬁction and sketches by Catherine Gore, John and Michael Banim, John Galt and others. Johnstone’s reviewing was prodigious. She wrote over 400 articles during her editorship, an estimated 20 per cent of the review. Most of them were on literary topics, but she wrote also on politics and travel, and she published some of her own ﬁction in the magazine. From the beginning she had reviewed the work of women writers. Women now joined the sta≠ in greater numbers, among them Mary Russell Mitford, Amelia Opie, Eliza Meteyard and Hannah Lawrance. Modern readers have detected a more gender-oriented reviewing policy and an increased awareness of social issues relating to women during her tenure (Easley: 61–79). According to one source Tait paid contributors at the rate of £14 per sheet (Bertram: 35). Some of the articles were signed or initialled from the start. Johnstone’s editorship, from 1834 to 1846, was by most accounts the high point of the magazine’s history. She and Tait, who had continued to manage the ﬁnances and the production of the journal, retired together in 1846. The magazine was purchased by George

356

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Troup, one of Tait’s sta≠, with the ﬁnancial backing of Alexander Alison, a Glasgow industrialist. The collapse of Alison’s business in 1849 led to Troup’s outright purchase of the magazine, which moved its headquarters to Glasgow. Although De Quincey and Gilﬁllan continued to write for it, the focus of the magazine under Troup narrowed. A period of English ownership between 1850 and 1855 meant that Tait’s could claim to be neither a Scottish nor an Edinburgh magazine, although in quality it returned to the standards achieved by Johnstone and Tait. In 1855 Troup again became editor, and by 1858 also proprietor, moving production back to Glasgow. In its ﬁnal years Tait’s reﬂected Troup’s religious interests, particularly his a∞liation with the Free Church of Scotland, but its Scottish readership, which earlier editors and proprietors had sought to cultivate, dwindled, and the magazine came to an end in 1861. Je≠rey’s successor at the Edinburgh in 1829 was Macvey Napier, a professor of law at Edinburgh University, and editor of the sixth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, another of Archibald Constable’s major publishing ventures. Napier was a ‘solid Edinburgh Whig’, as one of his contributors described him, non-metropolitan in outlook, and with few connections in government circles. These were supplied by Macaulay and by Brougham, frequently at odds with one another and vying for Napier’s patronage. Je≠rey continued in the background, acting as ‘Editor Emeritus’, as he saw himself. There had been another major change in the review’s operation in 1826, with the ﬁnancial crash of Archibald Constable. Longman, who had purchased a half-share in the review in 1814, now became sole proprietor. With the publisher in London and Je≠rey, Macaulay and Brougham similarly metropolitan-based, Napier’s conduct of the review from Edinburgh had a di≠erent dynamic from the operation run by Je≠rey over the previous twenty-seven years. When in 1847 Napier was succeeded by William Empson, Je≠rey’s son-in-law, the entire enterprise, with Longman’s encouragement, was moved to London. For the ﬁrst time in forty-ﬁve years, the review became ‘Edinburgh’ in name only. The review was to run for a further eighty-two years. It ceased publication, eventually, in 1929. Its longevity is remarkable, bearing in mind that for many the decline had begun in 1829, with Je≠rey’s departure. Quarterly reviews continued to be established into the 1840s and 1850s, many with sectarian a∞liations; among them, in 1844, the Edinburgh-based North British Review, the organ of the Free Church of Scotland. The North British consciously modelled itself on the Edinburgh, and was equally conscious of being an Edinburgh-based publication, in contrast to its illustrious forebear. Its circulation in 1846

periodicals and newspapers

357

was 3,000 as against the Edinburgh’s 5,000, but it outsold its rival in Scotland. The review’s heyday was the period of Alexander Campbell Fraser’s editorship (1850–7) when it recruited a number of prominent, mainly English reviewers, and the standard of its literary reviewing equalled that of any mid-century review, quarterly or monthly. The Free Church a∞liation was burdensome to successive editors, but under W. G. Blaikie and publisher David Douglas in the 1860s it maintained its high standard of reviewing. In its last years (1869–71) it became an organ of a group of liberal Catholics, under the direction of Lord Acton (Shattock 1973). Eleven years later, yet another Scottish review was founded, this time by the Paisley-based publisher, Alexander Gardner, with the Rev. W. M. Metcalfe as editor. The Scottish Review was founded ‘to protest against the idea that London is the centre of Scottish life, and also against the idea that Scotland is not strong enough to have a literary organ of its own’ (WIVP II: 785). They were brave words, but they ﬂew in the face of popular opinion, which had begun to refer to quarterly reviews in the past tense. As Mark Pattison put it: ‘Those venerable old wooden three-deckers, the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, still put out to sea under the command, I believe, of the Ancient Mariner, but the active warfare of opinion is conducted by the three new iron monitors, the Fortnightly, the Contemporary and the Nineteenth Century’ (659). Scotland’s glory days as the home of the most illustrious of the quarterlies, the one which ‘began the system’, were at an end.

The Popular ‘Weeklies’ Laurel Brake If at the beginning of the nineteenth century Scotland had distinguished itself in the production of journals like the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the mainstream periodical press was to undergo a considerable shift in the second quarter of the century. While radical changes in the deﬁnition of the reading public led to the emergence of a new class of periodical, calculated to appeal to the less a±uent consumer, all distinctions between the ‘polite’ and the ‘popular’ press in this period are problematic. Scotland’s periodicals had to adapt and transform themselves in accordance with successive political and economic landscapes. The phenomenal success of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in the 1830s heralded the arrival of a new audience for weeklies. Competitors would soon follow, both within the nation and beyond, and Chambers’s would lose its dominance in Scotland with the emergence of a local market for the popular weekly in the 1850s, with the various regional editions of the People’s Journal. Overall, the story of the periodical press throughout these decades reveals as much about the developing culture of Scotland in the nineteenth century as it does about the transformation of print in this rapidly changing environment.

Negotiating markets: Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal was from the start a hybrid publication. Originally a weekly broadsheet, like a newspaper, in 1844 it adopted a smaller, journal format and, although launched from Edinburgh, by the thirteenth issue it was also printed and circulated by the London-based publisher and distributor W. S. Orr. Eventually, with a large audience in England, Ireland and overseas, it became less ‘Scottish’ in its

periodicals and newspapers

359

concerns. From January 1854, it removed the word ‘Edinburgh’ from its title, and consolidated its position as a monthly as well as a weekly. By 1882, William Chambers could boast of its global reach, announcing that Chambers’s was ‘as well known in the United States and in the colonies as at our own door’ (18). Several questions arise with regard to Chambers’s intended readership. Costing three halfpence per weekly number and inspired by the spirit of the Society for Di≠usion of Useful Knowledge, its target market was ostensibly working class. Yet its anti-populist format – illustrations largely excluded, the moral high ground of its contents, and the political ‘platform’ from which it addressed its readers – all suggest more upmarket a∞liations. This dual class orientation is evident from the appearance, in 1834, of Spirit of Chambers’s Journal. Original Tales, Essays, Sketches. Selecting only ‘original articles’, abandoning the cheap weekly format, and targeting a di≠erent, middle-class audience, the Chambers brothers argued that the appeal of the Journal ’s content to a respectable audience was entirely in keeping with the ‘spirit’ of Chambers’s ; they sought ‘to delineate the maxims and manners of the middle ranks of society’ in a book which might attract ‘the attention of those by whom it might be overlooked in its original form and progressive mode of publication’ (v). The second series of the Journal conﬁrmed this dual orientation when, in 1844, it abandoned the newspaper format for the appearance of a journal, and entered a monthly market dominated by Blackwood’s and Fraser’s. In its monthly edition, it supplemented the weekly format preferred by working-class readers, in an attempt to widen its market by adopting a mode better suited to long-distance monthly distribution – overseas as well as nationally. In 1847, nearly two-thirds of Chambers’s sales were monthly, and ‘purchased by the higher-class families’ (6 Feb., 88). While workers continued to spend three halfpence a week on the Journal, by 1855 most readers bought their monthly edition for 7d, which was still considerably cheaper than Blackwood’s at 2s 6d. By the 1840s, multiple copies of the monthly were ﬁnding their way to a large variety of reading rooms and other public institutions: by April 1836 a subscription library in Ayrshire was regularly taking two copies, along with four each of Chambers’s Historical Newspaper and Chambers’s Information for the People, one Penny Magazine and one Saturday Magazine, all of which were ‘circulated throughout the parish’ (NSA Ballantrae). Nor was this pattern unique to Scotland: the Journal was a common feature in London co≠ee houses in the 1850s (James: 17; Darcy: 95).

360

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

But to what extent can Chambers’s be regarded as a popular magazine? One historian classiﬁes it in a group of three ‘upper-class periodicals’; although gaining temporary ‘popularity among the new mass public’, it was perceived as early as 1841 as a middle-class organ (James: 16). With an initial Scottish print run of 31,000 in 1832 rising quickly to 50,000 once English sales began to tell (2 Feb. 1833, 1), it hit a peak of 80,000 in the 1840s. Library holdings indicate that in these early years there were as many as eight editions of each issue in circulation. With such sales, Chambers’s was undeniably popular in the early 1830s when quarterlies such as the Edinburgh Review were selling 9,000 copies and Blackwood’s was selling only 8,000 a month (WD). While Chambers’s was initially read across all classes in Scotland, from bothies to drawing rooms, by 1841 its readership, at least by the editors’ admission, reached no lower than ‘the elite of the labouring community’ or the aspirant lower middle classes (qtd. Darcy: 95). Its initial circulation ﬁgures and ability to penetrate a working-class readership, especially in Scotland, would suggest that in its ﬁrst decade it may be counted as a popular Scottish journal. By 1836, for instance, it was still ‘frequently bought by farm-servants and artisans’ (NSA Ban≠ ). But by the late 1840s, while its circulation remained high, its contents seemed to be moving towards a more ‘respectable’ readership, as its adoption of the more expensive monthly format suggests. In January 1854 ‘popular’ in the new title, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, enshrined the periodical’s success rather than the social status of its readers. In a nation with religious and political tensions, the appeal of the new Scottish weekly was advanced through the exclusion of such controversy. The absence of ‘news’ also meant that Chambers’s was free of Stamp Duty, a rate of 4d per issue in 1832. One possible model for this news-less Chambers’s was the Athenaeum, an English, London-based weekly, launched four years before Chambers’s was founded. The new 1854 title of Chambers’s closely resembles that of the Athenaeum in the 1850s, which was subtitled Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts. It may well be that William Chambers envisaged a Scottish-based, working-class parallel to the Athenaeum’s mix of good taste, fair and unbiased reviewing, instruction and entertainment. Chambers himself, however, o≠ered an alternative, Scottish pedigree for his serial enterprises, citing among his ﬁrst inﬂuences The Scotsman and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, both dating from 1817. Looking back in 1882, William cited other contributing factors: the movement for political reform 1822–32, the appearance of cholera in Britain, and

periodicals and newspapers

Figure 6.2 Chambers’s Journal, 1854.

361

362

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

the growth of mechanics’ institutes and the SDUK; ‘above all’ he notes ‘the proliferation of “low-priced periodicals, mostly worthless and ephemeral”’ (1882: 8–12). Social reform – of disease, sanitation and education – was at the core of the Chambers’ project and was to be achieved by taking ‘advantage of the universal appetite for instruction’ (4 Feb. 1832, 1). From the early 1820s, Robert Chambers had been a professional author as well as a bookseller, and in 1832 he turned over his retail shop in Hanover Street to his younger brother David. Soon after its launch, William prevailed on Robert to write for the Journal, and they came to an agreement that, after issue fourteen, William concentrated on business, while Robert edited and did most of the writing (ODNB). While that distribution of responsibility survived, shared family participation in the conduct of the Journal and the ﬁrm permitted ﬂexibility and relief for the brothers after the 1830s. In the 1840s William remained at the helm while Robert moved to St Andrews; in the 1850s it was Robert’s turn, while William moved to Peeblesshire. In 1860, when William returned to Edinburgh, Robert went to America and then to London to oversee the ﬁrm’s o∞ces there. As the publishing ﬁrm grew, editors were brought in to assist. Thomas Smibert, assistant editor from 1837 was followed by editors and co-editors: W. H. Wills, 1842–4; Leitch Ritchie, a Scot, served as editor 1845–58, and was co-editor with James Payn 1858–9; Payn, a friend of Robert Chambers, edited the Journal as sole editor 1859–73, and from London by 1861 (Darcy: 95–6; WD). As the Journal ﬂourished, outside contributors supplemented the substantial contribution that the brothers had made early on: in the course of the century, Grant Allen, Walter Besant, Conan Doyle, Maria Edgworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, James Hogg, W. W. Jacobs, Harriet Martineau, George Meredith, Hugh Miller, Dinah Maria Mulock, Caroline Norton, Stanley Weyman and Edmund Yates were among its contributors.

Extending the empire of print The Journal was soon supported by a wide range of books and serials, all with similar aims. Readers were informed of the prodigious stream of titles as they appeared. The brothers’ ventures in this period ranged from the organisation of public lectures to the production of their famous illustrated Encyclopaedia, serialised between 1859 and 1868. Other publications included cheap weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies. This wide variety ensured that readers of the Journal with the time and money could ﬁnd a Chambers publication to suit their needs.

periodicals and newspapers

363

Two supplements to the Journal appeared, in the form of a monthly Historical Newspaper (1832–6), ‘a complete and familiar view of the news, or general and local events, of last month’ (WD) crafted to escape the Stamp Duty; and the 104 fortnightly pamphlets Information for the People (1833–49), ‘of which every number is a distinct branch of human knowledge’ (CEJ 4 Feb. 1832, 8). The People’s Editions of standard authors began in 1838, and weekly illustrated numbers of the Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts appeared 1844–69. Papers for the People, issued weekly in 1850–1 were re-issued almost immediately: ninety-six numbers had appeared in twelve volumes by the end of 1851. These were still being reprinted as late as 1872, and selections from the series were issued in 1859 and 1887. Despite all this activity, the Journal remained the backbone of the publishing empire, the changes over the years showing the ﬁrm’s ability to negotiate a constantly changing industry. While its price of three halfpence remained, the weekly underwent alterations in each of its ﬁrst three decades, signalled by the commencement of new series in 1844, 1854 and 1864, all associated with changes in technology. Four months after its launch, stereotyping was introduced to keep up with demand, readers being informed that the stereotyping process would take place in Edinburgh with ‘duplicates of the plates . . . transmitted weekly by mail to London, and there, by means of steam-presses, subjected to an impression of twenty thousand or more copies in a few hours after their arrival’ (16 June 1832, 160). Published in 1832 as an eight-page, three-column, Double Crown quarto broadsheet, Chambers’s changed its appearance radically in 1844, when its dimensions were reduced to sixteen pages of Double Crown octavo, allegedly in response to complaints about the awkwardness of broadsheets for reading and storage. But clearly there were other reasons. The new size corresponded with other publications on the ﬁrm’s list, making them all of a piece on the shelf: ‘By this alteration the Journal will in future range with Chambers’s Information for the People, Cyclopaedia of English Literature, and People’s Edition’ (6 Jan. 1844, 16). The second series, now smaller and with a cover, resembled a weekly magazine rather than a weekly newspaper, its new format more likely to attract women readers. Other signiﬁcant changes occurred in 1844: the introduction of a monthly issue, ‘neatly done up in a printed wrapper’, was discreetly announced (30 Dec. 1843, 400) and in March a stamped edition of the weekly, at 21⁄2 d, was advertised ‘to send the work to quarters from which it has been for the most part excluded, India, Europe, various parts of America and the British colonies’ (16 Mar. 1844, 176).

364

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

The third series of 1854 also marked technological change: the end of the agreement with London publisher, W. S. Orr, with whom the ﬁrm had allegedly quarrelled over paper and printing quality. Acquiring their own London o∞ce, Chambers published the journal from both capitals from 1854 onwards, and in the title the word ‘Edinburgh’ was deleted and ‘Popular’ inserted. That this signalled a strategic redirection was conﬁrmed in an announcement of December 1853 of ‘the termination, with this week’s number, of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, after a reign of twenty-two years, and the commencement, next week of a new publication’ (31 Dec., 432). In the further claim that ‘[t]he name of the successor will be simply Chambers’s Journal; a change from particular to general, from local to universal’, it was clear that the Scottish dimension was to be sublimated as representing the ‘local’ and ‘particular’, with ‘Popular’ and ‘Literature’ now receiving prime billing. This title was retained until December 1897, when it became simply Chambers’s Journal. The gentriﬁcation of a journal which from now on would feature ‘literature’ among its more inclusive contents, is borne out in the announcement that it would be ‘identiﬁed still more closely with the genius of the age . . . to include many elegant subjects that did not before receive special attention . . . to produce a serial which will be in itself a pretty complete repertory of popular literature, art, science and amusement’ (ibid.). With the serial publication of Wearyfoot Common, a novel by the editor, Leitch Ritchie, which appeared on the ﬁrst page of the new series, ﬁction began to feature more frequently (Law 2000: 26). The Science Section, appearing in the same month, developed, and the monthly edition was formally acknowledged in its contents: ‘The Month: Science and [Useful] Arts’ consists of a monthly review of this ‘department of knowledge’. Although it began modestly, with the claim that it was ‘nothing more than a kind of popular gossip’ (Jan. 1854, 42), the section’s expanding contents signalled Chambers’s ongoing commitment to the universal education of working men and scientists alike. The alterations of the Journal in 1854 were considerable, if not the complete new beginning announced. The prospectus for the fourth series of 1864 represented another attempt to adapt to changing taste through more attention to books, serial ﬁction and subjects of ‘passing interest’ – in short, more amusement and less instruction. The London-based editor, James Payn, opened the new series by contributing the serial novel Lost Sir Massingbird, thereby raising sales by 20,000 (Law 2000: 26). The new direction of the Journal was also signalled by modernisation of the typeface and use of leading, in accordance with the cheap press that had proliferated after the repeal of the newspaper taxes 1855–61.

periodicals and newspapers

365

The rise of the competition Just as Chambers’s was reaching its early peak of 30,000 sales per week in the spring of 1832, two London-based titles, the Penny Magazine and the Saturday Magazine appeared on 31 March, published by the SDUK and the SPCK respectively. Cheaper than Chambers’s and illustrated, they were more accessible to working- and middle-class readers. Sales of the Penny Magazine reached 50,000 in the ﬁrst week and 200,000 per week by the end of the year while the Saturday Magazine was selling 80,000 per week by January 1833 (James: 17, 19). The huge capacity of a market that had been identiﬁed by Chambers’s is indicated by the ability of three major weeklies to co-exist until 1846, when the Penny collapsed. In August 1832 a local rival, the Schoolmaster and Edinburgh Weekly Magazine, which mimicked the Journal in price and format, was launched by John Johnstone, the printer of the ﬁrst numbers of Chambers’s. However the Edinburgh Weekly was short-lived, becoming a monthly in June 1833 and disappearing into Tait’s a year later. In April 1834, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal made an attempt to capture the Chambers’s market, but folded eighteen months later (WD). When Hugh Miller launched his Edinburgh newspaper The Witness in January 1840, it too was a weekly, inspired by the Edinburgh Review, but eventually gained a huge readership in 1843 during the Disruption when it appeared almost daily (Shortland: 291). Circulation grew from 600 in 1840, to 1,800 by the end of 1841, to 2,750 in 1854, by which time it was outselling The Scotsman. A broadsheet of four pages, each containing seven densely printed columns, The Witness included content from London and foreign papers, local news and a column-length leader by Miller, much of it hortatory commentary on current a≠airs. Despite their social and political di≠erences, Miller’s publication had a lot in common with its Edinburgh predecessor; it too was campaigning rather than news based and dedicated to social improvement and moral good. In March 1854 news of the Crimean War provoked the appearance of a number of cheap unstamped newspapers, or ‘war telegraphs’, which contributed to the repeal of Newspaper Duty in the following year. Although Chambers’s competitors, the Penny Magazine and the Saturday Magazine had long since disappeared, new weekly competition was to be found in English imitators like Dickens’s Household Words (1850), also unillustrated but selling at 2d, with an average weekly circulation of 40,000. The launch in 1855 of the most famous weekly to rise from the repeal of the tax, the acerbic and élitist Londonbased Saturday Review, priced at 5d, probably had little e≠ect on the

366

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Journal, the niche markets of the two weeklies being distinct; but in the late 1850s, Chambers’s Scottish weekly market and its wider monthly market were penetrated by new titles. Chambers’s remaining readership in Scotland, particularly among the working classes, was seriously threatened by a cheap weekly imitator which appeared north of the border in January 1858. The publisher John Leng’s ﬁrst redaction of his penny weekly People’s Journal, the Dundee, Perth, and Forfar People’s Journal, has been identiﬁed by William Donaldson as a descendant of Chambers’s, ‘the real pioneer’. Arguing that the newspaper press in Scotland ‘did not have to attract an English readership as a basic fact of existence’, Donaldson suggests that evidence of a new popular form developed in the second half of the century, ‘based on a distinctively Scottish newspaper press, owned and produced within the country with the outlook and tastes of a Scottish audience speciﬁcally in mind’; a new form of post-repeal Scottish weeklies emerged which were newspaper and ‘half-miscellany’, of which the People’s Journal is a prime example (14, 11). Leng’s ﬁrst innovation was to add a news service to the formula established by Chambers’s, a move dependent on the allowance that the repeal of the duty had made for the provision of a≠ordable news for working-class readers. A second factor in its distinctiveness from its predecessor was the radical politics of Leng and his associates, William D. Latto, editor of the ﬁrst Dundee-based People’s Journal, and William Lindsay, publisher of the Aberdeen edition and one of the city’s wellknown radicals. Latto and Lindsay came from working-class backgrounds, the ﬁrst formerly a weaver, and the second the son of a shoemaker, who earned his living by reading to workplace groups. Leng himself was already publishing the weekly Dundee Advertiser, a newspaper of ‘advanced Liberal opinions’. Whereas the Chambers’ project a generation earlier arose out of pre-Reform Britain and fear of Jacobitism, the People’s Journal appeared in the wake of the Disruption in Scotland and of Chartism, events through which organised labour found its voice. Leng’s prospectus targeted working-class readers, purporting to replace ‘cheap papers which have grown up since the abolition of the stamp, as being utterly unworthy of the intelligence and character of the respectable portion of the working class’ (qtd. ibid.: 11). Another distinctive quality encouraged by Leng which reﬂected his liberal politics was the open inclusion of letters and reports from readers, in addition to ‘local, district, and general news of the week’. Promising not to ‘write down’ to readers, the People’s Journal di≠ered from Chambers’s before 1864, where the register is instructive, and where correspondence was actively discouraged. Chambers’s position

periodicals and newspapers

367

had been magisterial, at a time when serials for working-class readers included a column dedicated to readers’ correspondence. It was a form that had been developed in the pages of the Weekly Dispatch (1795) and continued in Lloyd’s Weekly (1842), and later in George Newnes’ TitBits (1881). Where Chambers’s treated Scotland as part of a larger market, the People’s Journal expanded by means of local editions, which reﬂect its origins in the newspaper. The ﬁrst edition served Dundee and its environs, then Fife (1859), then Aberdeen (1863?), and then in quick succession separate editions were subsequently launched for Perth, Forfar and further south, arguably resulting in Scotland’s ﬁrst truly national newspaper. Where the Chambers expanded to other countries such as England, Ireland and the colonies, Leng was content to multiply his readership within Scotland, calling on an extensive network of editors, printers and publishers to distribute as well as produce the papers. Lindsay writes: ‘[W]e travelled over many parts of the country, establishing agencies, appointing correspondents, and, generally, promoting the circulation of the People’s Journal in the North of Scotland’ (Lindsay: 252–7; qtd Donaldson: 25). The circulation ﬁgures tell the story of their success. Starting with 7,000 copies per week in Dundee, circulation doubled within a year; by 1862 the combined titles were selling 37,500 weekly, higher than any other weekly outside London. By 1866, weekly circulation had reached 100,000, and by 1875, now with three additional titles, nearly 130,000 (Donaldson: 23–6). The mixture of regional news, miscellaneous items and a regular presence of vernacular Scots kept these titles in touch with Scottish working-class life. One late nineteenth-century penny weekly not native to Scotland but claiming a popular readership within it was the British Weekly, a Journal of Social and Christian Progress (1886–1961) which sought to cross national borders from its inception. Edited in London by a Scot, William Robertson Nicoll, the British Weekly issued a Scottish edition which contributed to a circulation at one stage of 100,000 copies. Through Nicoll’s publication of his own letters under the pseudonym of ‘Claudius Clear’, his early recruitment of J. M. Barrie as a contributor of Scottish character sketches from 1887, and his publication in 1893 of Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush by ‘Ian Maclaren’, another Scots regular, the editor stamped the journal with that Scottish ﬂavour now associated with the kailyard. In the meantime a number of new monthly publications had emerged from London, which would provide ever more intense competition for the Scottish periodical market in the second half of the century. The ﬁllip given to ﬁction and visual design by the Cornhill

368

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Magazine (1860), with its elegant cover and sumptuous illustrations, had an e≠ect on Chambers’s which responded in 1864 by increasing its literary content, modernising the graphics of its masthead, reducing the density of print, and generally brightening up its presentation. It did not, however, add illustration, except in an ‘Extra Double Number’, one of two literary supplements costing 3d issued that year. Recalling the wildly successful Walter Scott Supplement published on the author’s death in 1832, the August 1864 Supplement was heavily illustrated, to commemorate the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, while the Extra Christmas Number consisted of ghost stories, commonly associated with the season and a genre that had been used to great e≠ect by Dickens and other English writers. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine had deﬁned itself in 1817 as a Scottish and Tory monthly alternative to the weighty Whig quarterly Edinburgh Review, which dominated literary publishing in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century (see ‘Reviews and Monthlies’). Adopting the a≠ectionate soubriquet Maga, Blackwood’s was self-consciously a magazine rather than a review. Its witty style and miscellaneous format were imitated by many subsequent publications. Still costing 2s 6d when shilling monthlies such as Macmillan’s Magazine and the Cornhill appeared, Maga was both their model and rival, eventually to be overtaken in price, design and contents. As Blackwood’s fought the new London press, it also had to contend with a transformed Chambers’s, now a successful monthly, similarly Scottish in origin, also selling worldwide, but now incorporating popular ﬁction and even cheaper than the new rival publications. Throughout the century, Blackwood’s retained its characteristic brown cover, looking increasingly archaic with its old-fashioned typeface, its long roman numerals, and its dour cameo of George Buchanan, a Scottish antiquarian (1506–82), all evidence of the ﬁrm’s determination to hold onto a formula that had served it well over the years. Inside were seven to nine pieces printed in unruled columns, usually including the instalment of a novel and a political article at the back. The issue for January 1854 was typical and included seven anonymous items: two on domestic themes (on beverages and the ‘English at Home’), two pieces of ﬁction (a serial part by Oliphant and a short story by Landor), two articles with international themes (China and Persia), and ﬁnally the political leader. While neither the topics nor the register of the magazine seemed calculated to appeal to the ‘popular’ market, advertisements in the September and October 1854 issues tell another story, suggesting a concerted attempt to cater to all pockets. Part-issue book titles in a Blackwood ‘People’s Edition’, costing 1s to 2s 6d, are

periodicals and newspapers

369

advertised in September, as well as more expensive ‘periodicals’, a term which included books issued in parts, representing Blackwood’s desire to perpetuate its reach into the wealthier gentry and Tory upper classes. The October advertisements also suggest an e≠ort to move in on Chambers’s market among artisans and the lower middle classes, with an emphasis on usefulness and low price. By contrast with Blackwood’s, Chambers’s Journal for January 1854 carried forty-one pieces, their shorter length calculated to appeal to the busier reader. Chambers’s classiﬁed index provides a clear sense of the magazine’s scope: Familiar Sketches and Essays, Poetry, Popular Science, Tales and other Narratives, Notices of Books, Miscellaneous Articles of Instruction and Entertainment, Anecdotes and Paragraphs. But by 1864 Chambers’s had halved the number of articles in each issue, thereby reducing its resemblance to a popular weekly journal, in an attempt to adjust to the demands of the new middle-class audience. Although Blackwood’s had included ﬁction from its inception, the magazine gave this more prominence at the beginning of the issue immediately following the appearance of the Cornhill in the early 1860s, while retaining its proﬁle as a politicised miscellany. Contents continued to feature articles on religion, domestic and foreign politics, the military, foreign travel and the history of Scotland. In the 1870s, it had a higher proportion of articles on international topics, as well as articles on the military, Scottish culture and politics, all of which suggest a readership in the Empire, and particularly among Scots abroad. While Chambers’s obfuscated its Scottish a∞liation in the second half of the century, Blackwood’s retained ‘Edinburgh’ in its title until 1905 and, if anything, extended its inclusion of Scottish material. Amid the turmoil of the market-driven and responsive ‘new journalism’ Blackwood’s unexplained and unchanging character provoked W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews, ever alive to the pulse of journalism. Remarking on Maga’s ‘rare consistency’ on its 70th birthday, Stead pointed to its preoccupation with causes ﬁve and even ﬁfty years behind the times (qtd. WIVP I: 9). By contrast Chambers’s was committed throughout the century to keeping up with the changing market. However, despite additional di≠erences of politics and price, by 1870 Chambers’s and Blackwood’s represented the older generation of popular Scottish periodicals.

Newspapers Padmini Ray Murray By the late part of the eighteenth century the newspaper had become a familiar feature of Scottish public life. Titles like the Edinburgh Evening Courant (1718), the Caledonian Mercury (1720) and the Advertiser (1769), all published more than once a week, enjoyed varying degrees of success. Previously, the newspaper was used chieﬂy for advertising, and coverage of news was restricted to items such as parliamentary proceedings, often replicated from the London newspapers. All of this changed in the 1790s when the newspaper market, particularly in Edinburgh, exploded. However, belief in the Scottish newspaper as an instrument of democracy was really an invention of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s a number of changes had profoundly a≠ected its nature: cheaper paper, steam-powered high-speed printing, railway circulation, the telegraph, as well as a growth in levels of literacy, all helped create what, by the end of our period, had become a mass newspaper reading public. Most founders and editors of nineteenth-century newspapers were already involved in some aspect of printing or publishing (see ‘Printing’). The average life–span of newspapers founded at this time was short, titles often folding because of lack of interest and low circulation, or simply because they were unable to withstand the pressures of government taxation. It was also di∞cult for those who relied on an income from advertisers to sustain their newspapers in the face of the increased demand for political news and commentary. Struggling newspapers would frequently be absorbed into other titles or be continued under another name. However, this was also the period that saw the triumph of Scotland’s most durable newspapers: The Scotsman (1817), the Glasgow Herald (1783) and the Aberdeen Journal (1747), the last Scotland’s oldest newspaper and still in circulation today.

periodicals and newspapers

371

The average newspaper in the early years of the nineteenth century would contain a summary of news, both national and international, as well as items of local interest such as details of cattle and grain sales, marriages, births and deaths, and advertisements. Though reportage was not as detailed as it would later become, there was still generous coverage of international events, providing an alternative source of information for provincial Scots, who no longer had to rely on the minister or gentry to learn about foreign a≠airs. The role of the editorial article began to gain greater importance insofar as a newspaper’s politics helped determine its readership. The standard format of the Scottish newspaper was four pages, of which about half a page contained local news (Brims: 10, 9). The frequency of publication was largely dictated by the kind of readership it was intended to reach. The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald, which catered to the urban middle classes, were dailies, whereas many evening newspapers catered to those members of the working classes who had the luxury of reading only in the evenings (Hutchison: 11). The provincial papers were largely weekly or bi-weekly, owing to limited news and the relatively intensive labour involved in producing print for a limited circulation. While the principal newspapers operated from extensive o∞ces, small local publications often ran with limited sta≠. ‘The literary department produced two columns of leaders each week,’ recalled one printer, ‘the selecting and arranging of the general news was all gone through at one of the compositor’s frames in the caseroom. The reporting, for which a brilliant sta≠ of one was retained, was all done in the press room’ (Donaldson: 1). One major factor in determining length, frequency and price was the Stamp Duty, imposed on newspapers since the early eighteenth century, but by 1815 standing at 4d a copy. This was a charge placed on all serials which included news, appearing oftener than every twenty-six days, printed on two sheets or fewer (in other words eight larger or sixteen smaller pages), and costing less than 6d before tax (G. Law: 9). The Act necessitated the purchase and the a∞xing of a special stamp to the publication so that it could be posted and reposted for seven days after publication. The Stamp Duty was abhorrent to most supporters of the free press, who referred to it as the ‘tax on knowledge’ after a pronouncement in the Edinburgh Review for October 1835 that ‘A tax upon paper is a tax upon knowledge’. All manner of printed materials fell under the strictures of the tax: chapbooks, broadsides, almanacs, tracts and newspapers. Another charge, the Advertisement Tax, deprived the newspaper industry of a further major source of revenue and restricted advertising to 35 per cent of

372

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

the newspaper until 1853, when it was revoked. This often led printers to set advertisements in the same type as the rest of the newspaper to escape detection. One method of evading Stamp Duty was to issue a paper monthly, which is exactly what the enterprising brothers William and Robert Chambers set out to do with their Chambers’ Historical Newspaper in 1832. As it fell outside the jurisdiction of the Stamp Tax, it was priced very reasonably although it was carried in a similar format to its more upmarket contemporary, the Edinburgh Journal. In a marked departure from its contemporaries, it featured no advertisements apart from those advertising Chambers’ own works. Its success was almost immediate: ‘The impression of the Historical Newspaper, reckoning the Edinburgh and London editions, already amounts to 28,000 copies, 18,000 of which are circulated in Scotland’ (Norrie: 8). But the brothers discontinued its publication after three years to concentrate their capital and energies elsewhere. While prohibitive prices sometimes put newspapers out of the reach of the individual consumer, their public availability, in newspaper rooms, co≠ee shops, taverns and reading rooms, allowed access in exchange for a membership fee, or the price of a glass of beer or cup of co≠ee (Brims: 9). In addition to which, there was a considerable ‘hearing public’ for news in the nineteenth century: [I]t was not uncommon for the men in a workshop engaged in quiet employment, such as tailoring, to commission one man to read aloud, while the others worked, doing his work as compensation . . . each shop took a local and a London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow paper; each man read his share; and the papers were resold for at least two-thirds of their value, sometimes to workmen to read to their families, sometimes to send on to distant friends. (Webb: 34) In many respects the newspaper provided a viable alternative to the reviews like the Edinburgh, the Quarterly and the Westminster, and the new style magazines like Blackwood’s and Fraser’s that catered to the ‘genteel and politically minded individual’ (McLean: 5). Some of the leading newspapers of the day, however, were run by men of letters with considerable political inﬂuence, and so made an important contribution to the production of mainstream Scottish literary culture – newspapermen such as Thomas Ruddiman (critic and historian, proprietor of the Caledonian Mercury), Walter Scott (owner and contributor to the Edinburgh Weekly Journal edited by Ballantyne), Hugh Miller (editor of the Free Church paper The Witness, having the largest circulation in

periodicals and newspapers

373

Scotland in the decade following the Disruption) and William Alexander (author, and editor of the Aberdeen Free Press). One of the ways in which the newspaper press made lasting contributions to literary culture was through the frequent publication of new poetry and ﬁction. For example, Alexander’s novel, Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk, was serialised in the Aberdeen Free Press, and this practice was later adopted by many other papers, which also printed, for example, memoirs, biography and history for the class of reader for whom buying books was regarded as a luxury (Donaldson: x). James Ballantyne acquired his ﬁrst taste of literary publishing as the editor of the weekly Kelso Mail (1797), the prospectus of which describes the miscellaneous nature of such ventures: [I]t shall be our endeavour to combine amusement with information. Literary speculations, poetical productions of merit, extracts from popular works, and interesting anecdotes, shall occasionally be called in to relieve the more important details, which they shall not, however, in any instance be su≠ered to supersede . . . we hope . . . to be able to furnish the Public a species of entertainment, which will be a source of innocent and agreeable relaxation, while it will a≠ord an opportunity for those of our young countrymen who are partial to the lighter species of literature, to indulge the excursions of their fancy, and ascertain without abusing their time, how far they may be qualiﬁed to succeed in pleasing the Public. (Ballantyne: 4–5) Long after the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Scottish publishing, in which Ballantyne was himself to play such an important role, Scottish authors were still ﬁnding their ﬁrst audiences through the pages of the local newspaper press, leading one historian to remark that ‘Scottish culture was (and is) a popular culture, and . . . its major vehicle during the period was not the London-dominated booktrade, but the Scottish newspaper press, owned, written and circulating within the country’ (Donaldson: xii).

Edinburgh and Glasgow Founded by a solicitor, William Ritchie, and a customs o∞cial, Charles Maclaren, in 1817, The Scotsman was initially regarded by some as a ‘rag’ and a seditious paper – often endangering the professional advancement of those seen with it, so that it sometimes had to be ‘smuggled by clerks and porters to readers’ (A. Morris: 9). It was perceived as an ‘incendiary newspaper’ by the gentry, who considered it unﬁt reading matter for

374

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 6.3 The ﬁrst issue of The Scotsman, 1817.

periodicals and newspapers

375

their tenants. Government spies would harass the paper’s messengers to list its recipients. The Scotsman di≠ered from other large newspapers, and standard Tory practice, in its refusal to reproduce articles from the London papers, instead developing its own exclusive line of journalism. Initially it was an eight-page quarto with three columns to the page, published every Saturday, priced at 10d (including Stamp Duty), with a circulation of around 300. Interestingly, none of the founders of The Scotsman was wealthy, nor did they have any experience in journalism, though a bookseller and a printer were among their number. The newspaper’s dedication to progressive values was evident in its commitment to uncovering corruption, not least in its famous exposé of the ‘secret meetings’ of the self-elected town council whose proceedings began to be published in the paper. Its growing popularity led to its publication bi-weekly in 1823, appearing on Wednesdays as well as Saturdays. After the repeal of the Stamp Act, its circulation rose from 3,400 to 6,000, after which it continued as a daily newspaper. Lord Cockburn commented how at the turn of the century: Scotland did not maintain a single oppositional newspaper, or magazine, or periodical publication . . . The Scotsman, which was our ﬁrst respectable oppositional newspaper, and which for thirtyﬁve years has done so much for the popular cause, not merely by talent, spirit, and consistency, but by independent moderation, only arose in 1817. (76) This comment indicates just how successful it had become by that time in fulﬁlling its aim of providing impartial news coverage while holding the ‘liberal’ line. James Law, who joined The Scotsman at the ripe old age of 18 was to revolutionise the circulation and distribution of the paper by making great use of recent developments in transport and communication. Before his arrival in 1857, The Scotsman’s circulation was mostly in and around Edinburgh, but the railway charges made it prohibitive to transport the newspaper to more remote towns. Under Law’s leadership, a mutually beneﬁcial agreement between the railways and the paper was reached, ensuring that agents in other localities could sell the paper at its published rate and make a proﬁt as the cost of the paper carriage would be free. Not content with this expansion, Law set his sights further aﬁeld to Glasgow and the West. Though there was a demand for the paper in Glasgow, it was impossible for it to arrive as early as its local competitors owing to train schedules which prevented the Edinburgh trains from making a timely connection with the trains going south and west. Law’s solution to this was characteristically bold – suggesting to

376

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

the North British Railway that a ‘special train’ should run early from Edinburgh to Glasgow to enable the paper to be distributed in that city before breakfast. The train started running in March 1872, and was soon followed by a special train to Perth. The e≠ectiveness of this plan was soon noted by other newspapers and became standard practice (Magnusson: 41, 47). The Scotsman’s competitors in the earlier half of the century wore their politics on their sleeves, a trend that was not always observable in urban newspapers before the nineteenth century. However, political associations could frequently shift, as one writer in Fraser’s Magazine complained about the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle in 1838: ‘No paper anywhere has undergone so many changes: Tory, Whig, Radical, and now that villainous compound, Whig-Tory’ (Cowan: 20). The Edinburgh Evening Courant (1718), Edinburgh Weekly Journal (1817), and the relatively long running Edinburgh Advertiser (1764) all wore Tory colours as did the Edinburgh Correspondent (1815), which pledged its allegiance so vehemently that it received ‘more money (£80 in all) than the Courant (£76) and The Advertiser (£58) and more even than the three leading Glasgow papers together (£70) for the publishing of Government notices, advertisements, and proclamations’ (ibid.: 20). The Advertiser was brieﬂy edited by the publisher Robert Chambers but he was soon succeeded by Andrew Crichton, a minister of the Church of Scotland. The controversial Beacon (1821) was founded in reaction to the Whiggism of The Scotsman and by virtue of its Tory sympathies had an initial subscription of 800. Its editor was none other than Duncan Stevenson, the former editor of the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle, no stranger to Tory polemic. The volatile nature of these party alliances manifested itself in skirmishes and duels fought to defend honour in the face of libel and slander, most famously in the fatal ‘newspaper war’ of 1821–2, which arose out of the discovery of Sir Alexander (son of James) Boswell’s ‘truculent enough pasquinades’ published in the Beacon targeting James Stuart, a leading Whig lawyer. However this ‘unfortunate newspaper’, as John Gibson Lockhart, the eminent man of letters (and Walter Scott’s sonin-law) commented, was discontinued in August of the same year (1837 IV: 426). After it changed hands in 1866, the long running Caledonian Mercury (1720) began to market itself exclusively as an evening newspaper. The new proprietor, William Saunders, was the owner of an establishment in London where leading articles would be written, set in type, and then stereotyped and sent to various branches of Saunders’ business, all over the country. Saunders intended to use this method to

periodicals and newspapers

377

provide Edinburgh with an evening newspaper that would, in its own words: continue a four-page Paper, and be improved in arrangement and printed in new type obtained for the purpose from Messrs Millar & Richard, of Edinburgh; and no legitimate expense will be spared to make it the best and cheapest Evening Newspaper in the United Kingdom. The price will be reduced to ONE HALFPENNY. (Norrie: 7) However, parochial a∞liations and interests prevented the success of this scheme and the Mercury was terminated in 1867 after printing its 278th edition. The Glasgow Herald, founded by John Mennon in 1783, was in the hands of his son Thomas Mennon and his senior partner Benjamin Mathie in the early 1800s. They enlisted a third partner, Dr James McNayr, who was the ﬁrst to lend some journalistic expertise to the paper, thus raising its status from an advertising news sheet to a newspaper with a deﬁned editorial policy, a change that was reﬂected in its alteration in name from the Advertiser to the Herald. The newspaper’s ﬁrst editorial set forth its aims as ‘obtaining more early and authentic information, and . . . the insertion of such miscellaneous matter as may occasionally contribute to liven and diversify the too frequently uninteresting, though unavoidable detail of triﬂing occurrences incidental to a provincial paper’. Although it o≠ered editorial comment, such items were appended to articles of foreign interest in order to avoid alienating readers. The Herald ’s next editor, Samuel Hunter, was to have more impact editorially than his predecessor, cannily exploiting the story of Nelson’s death for over three weeks (Phillips: 30). The Herald’s competitors were as politically charged as their counterparts in Edinburgh, but advertising remained an important part of their business. The Scots Times (1825) and later the Glasgow Argus (1833) were bi-weekly papers that supported the Whig cause while The Courier (1791) was a Tory paper that did not gain much fame as a newspaper although it was distinct in that it printed poetry at the top of its ﬁrst column (Aird 1890: 13). The Glasgow Chronicle (1810) was politically unremarkable and basically served its purpose as an e≠ective source of agricultural and horticultural news. At the same time, there was a demand for a more politically progressive press and this need was catered for by papers such as the Glasgow Free Press (1823), Glasgow’s answer to The Scotsman in its espousal of Whig politics and its use of a bold typeface; the Glasgow Sentinel (1821) a tri-weekly paper that aimed to uncover corruption and political scandal; and the Spirit of the

378

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Union (1819), which declaimed that parliament was a ‘house of corruption’, a pronouncement which earned both its editor and publisher transportation to Botany Bay.

Provincial newspapers Although Edinburgh and Glasgow were the major producers of newspapers, this was a period which witnessed a dramatic expansion of the provincial press, so that by mid-century every small town had its own newspaper. By 1856 there were 110 di≠erent local journals and papers in Scotland. Even in smaller towns there was often more than one title, and competition could be intense. The Stirling Observer, founded by printer Ebenezer Johnstone in 1836, undercut the price of the existing paper, the Stirling Journal and Advertiser, by pricing itself at 4d, while the latter was selling for 7d. The very next day the Journal reduced its price to 4d, extended its format, and advertised itself as a superior newspaper (Harvey: 4). As the century progressed, the competition grew ﬁercer. In Perth newspaper prices were slashed from 41⁄2 d after the repeal of Stamp Duty in 1855, and were as low as 1d by the 1890s, while doubling their column space, in order to feature both advertising as well as a wealth of news articles. Perth was a typical provincial town of its size, in that it boasted a range of newspapers with a variety of political a∞liations: the Perthshire Advertiser (1829) which had the largest circulation, appeared three times a week, was broadly liberal in its outlook; the biweekly Perthshire Courier (the oldest, founded 1809) which appeared once a week, was initially ‘moderate Conservative’ but by the 1890s was describing itself as ‘Advanced Liberal’; and the Perthshire Constitutional (1832), which saw itself as the ‘voice of orthodox Conservatism’, catered for ‘the county aristocracy and the best class of farmers and the wealthy and business classes of Perthshire and the North of Scotland generally’ (Hutchison). In Aberdeen there had been criticism of the press early in the century because of its radical political opinions. Alongside the established stamped press, represented by the ostensibly neutral Aberdeen Journal and the radical Aberdeen Chronicle, was the unstamped Aberdeen Star which, in the mid-1820s, being a political and weekly miscellany, was ﬂagrantly anti-Tory, a position exempliﬁed by articles on topics such as the starvation of the working classes. The Star’s radical content drew the attention of the Solicitor of Stamps in Edinburgh, who imposed upon it the obligation to pay duty. Unable to a≠ord the expense, it folded within a month, after having tried to retain its unstamped price

periodicals and newspapers

379

of 6d (Beavan 1999: 139). The duty did not impede everyone’s success; rather it encouraged David Chalmers, the proprietor of the Daily Journal, to enlarge his paper to twelve pages weekly, its success more than evident from its Stamp Duty returns of 2,231 copies a week in 1832, compared to 1,914 copies of The Scotsman and 1,615 of the Glasgow Herald (Harper 1998: 26). While it is di∞cult to obtain accurate ﬁgures, stamp ﬁgures provide a helpful measure for the circulation of provincial titles, as demonstrated in the following return for 1851 to 1853: Table 6.1 Newspaper returns, 1851–3. Falkirk Herald Wigtownshire Free Press Kelso Chronicle Stirling Journal Elgin Courant Fifeshire Advertiser Fifeshire Journal Stirling Observer Dumfries Herald

106,000 101,868 95,940 94,000 92,976 69,705 84,250 84,000 84,000

(Eighty Years: 31)

In some instances, the place of publication for local newspapers did not always correspond with the location of their audiences. For example, The Orkney and Zetland Chronicle (1824–6) and The Shetland Journal (1836–9) were published in Edinburgh and London, respectively (Hulme: 3). Similarly, the Falkirk Herald was printed in Glasgow for the ﬁrst year of its existence. But in due course even the sparsely populated Shetland Islands had a selection of locally printed newspapers to serve them: the Shetland Advertiser (1862), the Zetland Times (1872) and the Orkney and Shetland Telegraph (1878). Following the relatively late arrival of printing in Kilmarnock in 1780, it took another ﬁve decades for its ﬁrst newspaper, the radical Kilmarnock Chronicle, to appear, only to cease publication in the following year. Despite such troubled histories, some Scottish provincial newspapers were to survive into the next century, improving in quality, o≠ering more informative journalism, and becoming more attractive to read. (Gardner: 11, 17). By 1880, however, it is estimated that the number of dailies circulating in Scotland, excluding trade and labour papers, numbered only twenty-one, a surprisingly modest ﬁgure given the abundance of provincial titles published earlier in the century (Smith 1979: 126). It was inevitable that, with the rise of the nationals arriving

380

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

daily by rail from Edinburgh and London, the market for local news would become increasingly di∞cult to sustain.

The age of mass circulation By the second half of the nineteenth century, newspapers were leading the way in the demand for more e∞cient and cheaper means of print production. One of the most important innovations was the implementation of steam, ﬁrst used in 1814 to drive a Walter press by The Times of London. David Chalmers of the Daily Journal is reputed to have ﬁrst introduced steam power to the Scottish newspaper industry in 1830 (Harper 1998: 26).The Scotsman claimed to have been using steam-driven presses at least a year later, when they installed four fourcylinder Cowper machines, each of which was able to print up to 5,000 sheets an hour (2 Feb. 1875). The subsequent invention of the rotary press changed the face of newspaper publishing and worked on the principle of feeding a continuous web of paper under cylinders holding curved stereotype plates, the printed paper then being separated as it passed under a serrated knife. The Glasgow Herald, which had initially been printed on a Columbian press, with two operatives producing only 350 impressions an hour was able to increase its productivity to 750 single-sided sheets an hour with the arrival of their Cowper, which produced around 350 four-paged papers an hour after turning over, pulling and folding. A further two cylinder machines were purchased in 1851, each capable of producing 1,000 papers an hour. As one observer recalled, it resembled ‘the most frantic little steam engine I ever beheld, for, when at work, it tumbled eternally from one side to the other, as if it was making an incessant e≠ort to turn itself upside down, and never could succeed’ (Phillips: 52). So widespread was the new technology by mid-century that by 1852 even the o∞ces of the Ayr Advertiser could report: ‘Having ﬁtted up on our premises one of the largest sized, double-acting printing machines driven by steam-power, we have now the pleasure of . . . enlarging the Ayr Advertiser to the size of The Times’ (Gardner: 48). By 1860, The Scotsman had installed a ten-cylinder Hoe ‘lightning’ press, yielding no fewer than 10,000 complete and folded copies of the newspaper an hour. Eventually, three Walter presses were acquired in 1871, each of which was capable of producing 12,500 copies an hour, a far cry from the labour-intensive days of hand printing only a generation or two before. (2 Feb. 1875). One factor that would have a major e≠ect on the speed of informationgathering was the coming of telegraphy. In 1846 a telegraph was installed

periodicals and newspapers

381

on the railway line between Glasgow and Edinburgh, the ﬁrst of its kind in Scotland. While it is often assumed that the coming of the telegraph had an instant e≠ect on the availability of information between major cities, from the introduction of a wire service in 1864 it took almost a decade for The Scotsman to realise its full potential. In its ﬁrst year, the Edinburgh newspaper had access to only a column or two per day across the wire from London, a situation which led the newspaper’s proprietor to establish the ﬁrst Press Association, resulting in the following year in the provision of a ‘special wire’ for the exclusive use of The Scotsman for an annual fee of £750. In 1870, the telegraph service was taken over by the Post O∞ce on more favourable terms and three years later saw the addition of another dedicated wire which provided the newspaper with the capacity to receive up to 30,000 words per night; so that by 1886 it was common for it to run over twenty columns per day of text received by these means (Magnusson: 42–5). Thanks to such technological developments, by 1880 the Scottish newspaper industry was entering the ﬁrst age of mass media. But such innovations were not universally welcomed. In 1892 Andrew Aird told the Glasgow Branch of the British Typographia of the impact the new industrial technology was now having on the labour force: I can well recollect how sad our pressmen looked, and how they raised the voice of lamentation when the steam press was set going in some of our o∞ces . . . When this revolution took place with the pressmen, the compositors boasted that no composing machines could be invented to deprive them of their case and composing stick. They dreamed not of type-setting machines. (9)

IV. BEYOND SCOTLAND

Chapter Seven

GREATER BRITAIN AND IRELAND Agencies and Joint Ventures Ross Alloway lmost without exception, the most successful Scottish publishing houses of the nineteenth century pursued trade beyond the nation’s borders, as improved communications made it cheaper and less di∞cult than it had previously been. Although Scottish publishers recognised that Ireland, England, and Wales each required distinct business strategies, there was much common ground and, with some variation, the day-to-day business practices in the three markets were remarkably similar. While Scottish innovations had an impact on the wider British book trade, Scottish publishers were deeply inﬂuenced by associations elsewhere and it is no coincidence that many of the large Scottish houses of the nineteenth century sent their young men away from the familiar world of Edinburgh and Glasgow to learn the trade, most often in London.The dominance of the London trade within British publishing made links with the metropolis compulsory for Scottish publishers seeking to succeed in the wider market. Association with London publishers opened up a much larger market and also made it possible to draw on the recognition of their imprint and their economic capital. Though on a lesser scale, Scotland represented a reciprocal opportunity for English publishers, o≠ering important opportunities for marketing, ﬁnance, and as a resource of literary talent. Some publishers and booksellers like John Murray and Alexander Strachan moved their base of operations to London, while others, like the Blackwoods and Blackie & Sons, established branches in the metropolis. For those who remained in Scotland, the interrelated activities of agency and joint publication were the primary means of establishing and maintaining the London connection (see ‘The London Scots’). While a Scottish invasion of the London trade had been going on since the late eighteenth century, English publishers, seizing new opportunities

A

385

386

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

in the North, were soon participating in the two-way tra∞c. Though the particulars varied, the duties of an agent were well established by 1800. The principal role was to act as a book wholesaler and retailer within a distinct territory: Scottish agents covered their native country, northern England, and Ireland while London agents were responsible for southern England and Wales. Agents typically received a discount on the trade price of the books they sold – usually between 10 per cent and 15 per cent – as well as a short-term monopoly. For these privileges, agents were expected to distribute and promote the books in their respective territories, as well as arranging for the advertisement of stock in the local newspapers and their own catalogues. Who paid for advertising and shipping would depend on the prior agreement. It was common for accounts to be balanced every twelve months, with bills of credit due at intervals ranging from three to nine months. Such an arrangement often led to joint publications, as publishers who had come to depend on each other in this way would combine resources to o≠set the ﬁnancial risk. Joint publication was an attractive option for Scottish publishers who often operated with less capital than their London counterparts, while at the same time Scottish literary property was recognised by the London trade as a valuable commodity. Firms wanting to publish books that were too expensive to produce single-handedly would sell a share of copyright as large as two-thirds or as little as one thirty-second part to other interested houses. The ﬁrm with which the idea originated tended to retain the largest share and was responsible for the production and management of the work, though this was negotiable. Rather than apportioning proﬁts, the books were divided and distributed according to shares soon after printing. Another important aspect of joint publication was the negotiation of the title pages. Throughout the nineteenth century, title pages were competitive textual spaces where symbolic capital was put on display: a bookseller’s position on the page reﬂecting his relative status to the trade and the public, not necessarily the proportion of investment involved. Indeed, there are many instances where publishers who did not own an interest appeared as a result of a prior agency agreement, or as a reciprocal arrangement for having previously included the majority shareholder on one of their own title pages. Though agency and joint publication arrangements were common, they nevertheless tended to be short-term and evolving enterprises that existed only as long as they were mutually advantageous. In the early years of the century, when an expensive and gruelling journey by mail coach was the primary means of passenger transport between southern England and Scotland, face-to-face meetings were

greater britain and ireland

387

Figure 7.1 The Philosophy of Human Nature, 1815. The attribution of a title to a number of publishers, printers and booksellers was not unusual in the early nineteenth century. The title page illustrated here is typical of the complex business alliances that were often involved in the publication and promotion of a single work.

388

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

comparatively infrequent and correspondence was the necessary means of communication. In an increasingly competitive market, perspicuity and vigilance were essential. While early nineteenth-century publishers had much to gain through the judicious division of the market, surviving letters and contracts indicate that joint ventures did not always run smoothly, some ﬁrms managing joint relations less adeptly than others.

Salvoes and thunderbolts: Constable, Longman and Murray Archibald Constable is an obvious case in point. From the perspective of the London trade, Constable’s canny ability to recognise talented Scottish writers made him a desirable collaborator, but his trading power was often undermined by the casualness of his business dealings. Recognising the ﬁnancial importance of London early in his career, Constable visited the metropolis for a month in 1795 in order to familiarise himself with the trade’s customs, during which time he met with Thomas Norton Longman, the ﬁrst publisher to act as his London agent. Their business relationship began on a small scale in 1802 when Constable agreed to arrange for the sale of Longman’s books in Edinburgh. So pleased was he with the success of this arrangement, that Longman wrote: I look forward to the pleasure of partaking with you of the fame and proﬁts of many a valuable work, from the literary shores of Edinburgh. The Booksellers here seem to be not a little jealous at my successes, which is natural; but I believe none of them will think it advisable to go amongst you to contend with my interests in your Country.1 While Longman’s tone suggests that, even as late as the ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth century, Scotland was still regarded by the London trade as unfamiliar territory, there is a clear recognition that for a publisher willing to venture north there were obvious rewards. Longman’s imperious posture matched the manner of his business methods and Constable found himself on the unfavourable side of more than one agreement. When Constable was seeking capital for the Edinburgh Review, he sought out Longman as a partner in the enterprise. Longman was an astute choice on several counts: not only would the addition of his name on the title page ensure the Edinburgh’s immediate 1

ACP MS 324, Longman to Constable, 13 Dec. 1802

greater britain and ireland

389

recognition by booksellers in London and beyond, but Longman’s ﬁnancial resources would help to o≠set production costs, while his extensive distribution networks would ensure that the markets in southern England and Wales were well supplied. During the course of their negotiations, Longman managed to acquire a half-share of the journal. Judging by the correspondence, Constable believed that he had given Longman the rights only to co-publish in London – a situation which could be suspended at Constable’s discretion – and not a share of the copyright itself. It was not until June of 1804, nearly two years after the business relationship began, that the speciﬁc terms of the arrangement were set out. Even then, Longman’s ‘regulations’ comprised little more than a gentlemen’s agreement. The ﬁrst regulation – ‘that we shall study and promote each other’s interests in our respective countries to the utmost of our power’ – did not specify what exactly was meant by ‘promotion’, whether advertising or word-of-mouth, and who was to pay the advertising fees. The second regulation was even more ambiguous: That we shall o≠er to each other upon the terms we engage in them (before any other bookseller, we in Edinburgh, you in London) shares in such works as we shall consider it for our interest to divide; but that neither party shall be displeased when a share is not o≠ered, nor even refused when application is made for it.2 The further imprecision of the ﬁfth regulation led to additional complications. Without necessarily possessing a share in a work, it was expected that ‘we shall add each other’s names in preference to any other Bookseller’s names (you in Scotland, and we yours in England) in the Title pages and advertisements of our respective publications.’ Longman wanted to be listed directly after Constable in Edinburgh-published books, but Constable seems to have taken the phrase ‘in preference’ to mean that Longman should not be excluded in order to incorporate another publisher’s name. During the announcement of John Robison’s Elements of Mechanical Philosophy (1804), Longman, who did not hold a share of the work, became deeply o≠ended when his name appeared after Cadell & Davies. Fearful of being put in ‘a rather ridiculous light’ as his was the ‘older ﬁrm’, Longman demanded the advertisement and the title page of the book be withdrawn.3 But Cadell & Davies had recently inserted the Edinburgh publisher’s name in a title page as a ‘compliment’ and Constable wanted to return the favour. His partner Alexander Hunter apologised for the o≠ence, but ﬁrmly replied that ‘we 2 3

Ibid., 23 June 1804. Ibid., 28 Nov. 1804.

390

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

cannot at this advanced stage of the publication, correct or reprint the title page.’4 Such misunderstandings caused strains, but it was Longman’s pursuit of the Edinburgh Review that caused their break-up. In his negotiations with Longman, Constable had retained the right to print and manage the Edinburgh and Longman was keen acquire further control. In November of 1804, Longman suggested ‘printing half of the impression of the future in London’ on the grounds that the delay in transporting the bales from Leith was ‘an obstacle to the success of the work’.5 The request was not unreasonable given Longman’s substantial share, but it was seen as duplicitous by the now suspicious Edinburgh ﬁrm, who, in turn, accused Longman of selﬁshness and inattention: The truth is then, that we have so very high an opinion of what so great a House as yours could do for the Edinburgh Review, that we have not been exactly able to convince ourselves, that you have ever as yet done any thing like the utmost that you might have done for it . . . We do not like to put an unpleasant question, but since ‘candour and openness’ is the order of the day, pray what is it you do for the Edinburgh Review? Have you procured a single writer of Eminence for it? Have you introduced it into any Channel of Importance, or by any means that we have not pointed out? Have you encouraged it by any particular advantage of sale to the trade as we have at all times? Have you not even refused to deliver quantities of it to some of the London Booksellers, upon our orders, ‘until your own sale should be over’?6 Although the questions were justiﬁed, in Longman’s opinion Constable’s tone fundamentally damaged their connection: ‘[W]e are sorry to ﬁnd the hopes we had entertained that you would see your interests, and the incalculable advantages that would result from our houses, being all in all to each other, entirely at an end.’7 Books continued to pass intermittently between the houses, but what characterised the relationship after the exchange was a protracted ﬁght for the control of the Edinburgh. Longman held a major interest and Constable was still required to include Longman in the title page as well as to supply him with half of each impression. But the Edinburgh publisher continued to be concerned about Longman’s commitment to the distribution of the magazine and, in seeking to secure another English agent, he found a good 4 5 6 7

Ibid., Constable to Longman, 2 Dec. 1804. Ibid., Longman to Constable, 28 Nov. 1804. Ibid., Constable to Longman, 2 Dec. 1804. Ibid., Longman to Constable, 10 Dec. 1804.

greater britain and ireland

391

ally in John Murray II, for whom he had acted as an agent since 1803. Furthermore, as Constable o≠ered the Edinburgh at a lower cost, Murray had already been ordering directly from Constable. In late 1805 Murray took over the London agency, but was quick to warn Constable: Should you be determined . . . upon the disunion with Messrs. L., I will just observe that when persons have been intimate, they have discovered each other’s vulnerable points; it therefore shows no great talent to direct at them our shafts of resentment; it is easy both to write and to say ill-natured, harsh, and cutting things of each other; but remember that this power is mutual.8 Murray gave sage advice, but it went unheeded. Upon recalling Longman’s embarrassment at being placed after Cadell & Davies, Constable could not resist listing his new agent before Longman in an announcement for the Edinburgh.9 This ‘salvo’, as Murray called it, was juvenile and it meant that the gloves were o≠. But it was Murray who bore the brunt of Longman’s ire, who was willing to sell below trade price in order to reduce Murray’s distribution to the London booksellers.10 Each number of the Edinburgh was eagerly anticipated and Murray was able to circumvent such ‘villainy’ by selling his copies to other booksellers before Longman, a letter to Constable indicating the exceptional e≠orts that Murray was willing to make in order to accomplish this: ‘The Edinburgh Review has arrived, and Hunter and I, and two of our porters, have been at the wharf all the forenoon until now. I have despatched copies all over the town.’11 On one occasion it seems that Constable went so far as to place Longman’s and Murray’s Edinburgh bales on two di≠erent ships, in order to ensure an early delivery for Murray. Though both ships arrived together, Murray still ‘sold all mine before anyone applied to [Longman]’.12 Longman, unwilling to allow his prime Scottish acquisition constantly to be undermined, approached Francis Je≠rey, the editor of the Edinburgh, with the proposition of taking over the editorship of a new journal, even o≠ering him wine as an enticement. Constable was not to be outdone and Murray sent up ‘a pipe of the best port wine that [he] could procure’.13 After one of their schemes to frustrate Longman was carried out, Murray wrote: ‘I know not yet the e≠ect upon Longman . . . but conceive it will have occasioned 8 9 10 11 12 13

ACP MS 23233, Murray to Constable, 14 Dec. 1805. Ibid., 15 Dec. 1805. Ibid., 13 Feb. 1807. Ibid., 14 May 1807. Ibid., 13 Feb. 1807. Ibid., 2 June 1807.

392

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

that kind of stupid consternation as would appear in so many jackasses if a thunderbolt fell amongst them.’14 By this stage relations had reached a crisis point and Longman considered taking out an interdict (injunction) against the publication of the Edinburgh, but this would also mean that he could not publish either. In the end, Constable bought back the half-share from Longman in 1807 for £1,000. With the threat of Longman gone, the realities of conducting complex business transactions from a distance eventually began to wear on Murray and Constable. While it is commonplace to accuse Constable of being a bad businessman, it was not all one-sided – at least with regard to Murray. Though Constable was late in making payments, so too was Murray; Constable’s accounts were not always reliable, but neither were Murray’s; if Constable regularly used bills of accommodation to delay cash payments, Murray did as well. Murray ended the relationship after moving his Scottish agency to Blackwood in 1811, severing his agency arrangement with Constable in 1813. In the years that followed, the exorbitant costs associated with many of Constable’s grand publishing projects (such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica) began to escalate and he lurched from one ﬁnancial crisis to another, seeking agencies and loans with a variety of London publishers and relying more and more on accommodations. It was sadly ironic that in 1814 he was even forced to sell Longman a half-share in the Edinburgh, which was accepted, and following Constable’s bankruptcy in 1826, Longman acquired the remaining property in the magazine.

Clear and explicit understandings: Oliver & Boyd While Constable’s failure was in large part due to his careless transactions, Oliver & Boyd’s detailed arrangements and skilful negotiations helped to transform the ﬁrm from humble beginnings in 1807–8 into one of the largest Scottish wholesalers of the nineteenth century, with a diverse list that included religious, scientiﬁc, educational and children’s literature. Murray’s switch from Blackwood to Oliver & Boyd in 1819 came as a surprise to some in the trade, but it should not have. In their own words, Oliver & Boyd had made a name for themselves by arranging ‘clear and explicit understanding[s]’. From 1815 Whittaker & Co. had been Oliver & Boyd’s principal agents in London and when the arrangement became reciprocal the general terms included a 10 per cent reduction from the trade sale price and an annual balancing of 14

Ibid., 17 Mar. 1807.

greater britain and ireland

393

accounts ‘on the 30th June, and to accept bills for the balance due at 3, 6, and 9, months from the 1st September following’. Whittaker was well known, and Oliver & Boyd advertised the association with the London ﬁrm to potential clients, even using the agreement as a template in negotiation. For example, when reaching a deal with Lackington & Co. in 1820, the Edinburgh ﬁrm wrote: [Y]ou have most honourably mentioned that you will leave it to us to place you on the same footing as the other London publishers, for whom we act as agents, both in point of price and mode of settlement . . . [we] beg leave to state the nature of our agreement with Messrs. Whittaker, whose agency we have longest held.15 Oliver & Boyd withdrew from Whittaker in 1828 because the metropolitan ﬁrm was seen to be abusing the arrangement. By placing advertisements for Oliver & Boyd publications in English newspapers some time before the general trade was able to subscribe, Whittaker was able to proﬁt from a larger number of advance orders. In Oliver & Boyd’s opinion this practice did not give ‘other houses an equal advantage and evidently [did] injury to the work’.16 An increasing number of advertising agents in the 1820s made it possible for Scottish publishers to remove such temptations by exercising complete control over their publicity. However, throughout the nineteenth century the Scottish press remained an unknown territory for many houses from England to Ireland that was best negotiated by native publishers (see ‘Bookselling’). As late as 1855 Oliver & Boyd were given ‘carte blanche’ to place inserts, while even later, in 1898, Murray’s would suggest the number of notices but not the papers to which they would be sent.17 Oliver & Boyd showed conﬁdence in their dealings. In the same year that the agreement with Whittaker ended, the ﬁrm stipulated to its new London associates, Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., that the promotion of its books in the press would be conducted through an advertising agent.18 For a charge that varied between 5 and 15 per cent of the cost of inserting matter, advertising agents placed notices into periodicals at the publisher’s direction or sought out inserts to be placed in periodicals owned by the publisher, as well as managing the ﬁnancial details. In 1866, one novice, G. Butcher, solicited new advertisers for Oliver & Boyd’s Edinburgh Medical Journal assuming that he would receive a fee each time an announcement was taken out. No sooner had he 15 16 17 18

O&B Acc. 5000/140, O&B to Lackington, Hughes & Co., 4 Dec. 1820. Ibid., O&B to Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 23 Dec. 1828. O&B Acc. 5000/55, Henry Greer (Belfast) to O&B, c. 1848; Murray to O&B, 13 Oct. 1898. O&B Acc. 5000/140, O&B to Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 23 Dec. 1828.

394

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

secured the new clients than Oliver & Boyd began to deal with them directly, cutting Butcher out of the deal entirely. 19 In stark contrast to Constable, who unwittingly gave away a halfshare of the Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd secured legal contracts in which each party was aware of its status and every foreseeable circumstance was taken into account. An 1818 agreement with Blackwood to take a half-share of the Rev. Andrew Milne’s educational works identiﬁed which party was to undertake the printing and at what price, which was to pay for advertising, which was to be given precedence on the title page, which agents were to be engaged, what would happen should one party want to sell its share of the copyright, and the rights of beneﬁciaries in the event of death. When dealing with London ﬁrms, joint publications could become contentious a≠airs. In 1822, George Cowie approached Oliver & Boyd proposing the joint purchase of the stereotype plates for Robert Ainsworth’s Latin Dictionary (1736), which were coming up for auction. Oliver & Boyd committed to a one-third share and the right to hold onethird of the plates as security if they sold for £700, or a half share and half of the plates if they sold for £500 or £600. When Cowie bought them for £650, he quickly looked for other partners in order to ‘relieve us from a position of the height of the other two-thirds’. As a result of Cowie’s dealings, Oliver & Boyd’s share was reduced to a quarter and no fewer than six other London ﬁrms were sold shares without the Edinburgh ﬁrm’s consent. Cowie also gave away Oliver & Boyd’s rights to the plates, maintaining that ‘our London friends are decidedly adverse to this plan’.20 Oliver & Boyd, ‘astonished’, petitioned Cowie to uphold the original bargain. Under pressure, Cowie relinquished to Oliver & Boyd one-third share for £205 but refused to endorse their entitlement to the plates.21 Oliver & Boyd, who owned a printing works, no doubt wanted the plates in order to support their claim to carry out future impressions. Indeed, a clause securing printing rights was often written into their co-publication contracts, to which there was an obvious advantage as most of their counterparts were not printers and readily acquiesced to paying Oliver & Boyd for production costs, thereby indirectly subsidising the Edinburgh ﬁrm’s share. Unable to a≠ord Hugh Murray’s Historical Account of Discoveries and Travel in North America (1829), Oliver & Boyd solicited Longman to pay the advance, taking a twothirds share themselves, and undertaking the printing of each edition.22 19 20 21 22

O&B Acc. 5000/212, G. Butcher to O&B, 3 May 1866; 15 May 1866; 17 May 1866; 6 July 1866. O&B Acc. 5000/140, George Cowie to O&B, 12 Mar. 1822. Ibid., O&B to Cowie, 26 Mar. 1822; Cowie to O&B, 30 Mar. 1822. Ibid., O&B to Longman, 4 Jan. 1828; Longman to O&B, 19 Jan. 1828.

greater britain and ireland

395

In the decades before the International Copyright Treaty, Oliver & Boyd were no less shrewd in their management of foreign rights. In order to counteract piracy, Oliver & Boyd o≠ered stereotype plates for a negligible sum – in one instance, 3s 4d per page – on the understanding that the books would not be sold in Britain.23 In Canada, Oliver & Boyd routinely sold the stereotype plates and the Canadian copyright for educational works to Adam Miller & Co. for a relatively small sum in return for 7 per cent of the trade price on the ﬁrst thousand copies and a commission of 10 per cent thereafter.24 Co-publication was a signiﬁcant aspect of Oliver & Boyd’s business, but not as important to them as wholesaling. There was good reason for this: if the size of the share was su∞ciently large, joint publication was potentially rewarding, but with a greater share came a greater risk on the investment. Furthermore, the negotiation of a single title could be drawn-out and time-consuming. Wholesaling, on the other hand, required only an initial agreement, and ensured they received around 10 per cent on every book. In this sense, wholesaling can be described as a far more pervasive and, therefore, more proﬁtable form of co-publication. Oliver & Boyd realised the advantages early on, and were so e≠ective in their role as agent that they rarely lost a ﬁrm’s business after obtaining it, a unique phenomenon in Scotland. For example, John Murray had only three Scottish agents in the nineteenth century: Constable, from 1803 to 1811; Blackwood, from 1811 to 1819; and Oliver & Boyd, from 1819 to the beginning of the twentieth century. Likewise, Simpkin, Marshall & Co. stayed with the ﬁrm after joining them in 1828 and were still listed in their 1880 trade catalogue. Such long-lived relationships helped swell the list from year to year. It is an indication of their e≠ectiveness in cultivating joint ventures that in 1846 Oliver & Boyd held agency for seventeen ﬁrms, and by the next year this had increased to over twenty. The list continued to grow to such a degree that they had to use smaller type and closer spacing in their trade catalogues in order to incorporate more ﬁrms. In 1861, after making room on the page for forty-one ﬁrms, only the most prestigious could be listed. Perhaps the most obvious indication of Oliver & Boyd’s dominance was their growing agency for Scottish ﬁrms which by 1880 accounted for half of their listed clients. The ﬁrm which had begun its wholesaling business by selling English books to Scottish readers had, by the close of the nineteenth century, succeeded in selling Scottish books to English readers in equal proportion. 23 24

O&B Acc. 5000/80, O&B to Appleton & Co., 30 July 1851. O&B Acc. 5000/141, Agreement between O&B and Adam Miller, 17 Mar. 1876.

The London Scots Robin Myers ‘Mr Johnson,’ (said I) ‘I do indeed come from Scotland but I cannot help it.’ ‘That, Sir, I ﬁnd, is what a great many of your countrymen cannot help.’ It was appropriately in the back parlour of a bookshop that this famous exchange took place. Johnson’s quip on ﬁrst meeting Boswell is evidence of just how conspicuous the Scottish migrant presence in London had become by the second half of the eighteenth century, not least in the book trade. Several generations of Scottish printers and publishers had operated at the heart of the trade and, by the 1800s, Scottish names such as Donaldson, Millar and Strachan had been appearing on the title pages of some of the most important London imprints for almost a century. The number of Scots in London, seeking adventure and opportunity, was to increase over the following decades. The journey south, which was taken by so many ambitious young men in this period, can be seen as part of the larger outward migration of talent from Scotland. Like other emigrants, a number returned, but more stayed in the metropolis, though rarely forsaking cultural and social connections with home. By the 1790s, Scottish co≠ee houses, dining circles and churches were to be found throughout London, many in the western suburbs, around St Martin’s-in-the-Strand; over the following decades the London Scots would come to establish considerable networks of inﬂuence. As well as the natural bonds of kinship and religion, they found society and common interests through the various Caledonian clubs and societies, one of the most important of which was the Masonic Thistle Lodge whose membership was restricted exclusively to Scots (Clark 2000).

greater britain and ireland

397

Figure 7.2 Four o’clock Friends. The famous meeting at 50 Albemarle Street where Walter Scott was introduced by John Murray to Lord Byron over afternoon tea. From left to right: Isaac Disraeli, John Murray II, Sir John Barrow, George Canning, William Gi≠ord, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron.

‘I am as much, nay more, a Scotchman than I was while an inhabitant of Scotland,’ wrote Frances Je≠rey to a friend, during his student days at Oxford. ‘My opinions, ideas, prejudices, and systems are all Scotch. The only part of a Scotchman I mean to abandon, is the language.’ Cockburn, in his Life of Je≠rey, notes that Je≠rey’s acquired English accent was not altogether successful (46, 47). As is so often the case with migrant communities, London Scots took an inordinate pride in the symbols of their culture, celebrating their native land through the promotion of familiar music and literature. The Highland Society of London was responsible for the publication in ‘original Gaelic’ of Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian in 1807. By 1840, the Gaelic Society of London had assembled a considerable library of books, tracts and pamphlets for the use of their members relating to Scottish history with a speciﬁc emphasis on ‘the state of feeling and proceedings during the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745’. Similar gestures of nationalism in print

398

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

were evident throughout the rest of the century. As the 1888 prospectus of the London Scotsman, which addressed its audience as ‘oor ainsels’, recognised, such publications did much ‘to knit our countrymen in the metropolis together’ (Stenhouse: 106–13). Such cultural networks clearly were not innocent of professional and ﬁnancial endeavour. By the nineteenth century, the Caledonian infrastructure worked impressively well, the Scottish presence in the civil service and professions out of all proportion to their actual numbers, a situation which began to change only with the reform of the Civil Service in the 1860s.

The Scottish-London dynasties London had long been regarded as the natural training ground for the sons of the Scottish merchant classes, as well as an important sphere for the consolidation of business dealings. Almost all the London Scots in the book trade came south with experience before launching themselves upon the metropolis; most had served an apprenticeship. The ﬁrst George Smith (1789–1846), a sober and pious youth from Moray who had been apprenticed to Isaac Forsyth, bookseller in Elgin, went south in 1812, ﬁrst to work for Rivingtons, booksellers and theological publishers, and later for John Murray. In 1816 he set up as a stationer in Fenchurch Street with Alexander Elder (1790–1876), a fellow countryman from Ban≠, and within a year they had published their ﬁrst book. In 1819 they became freemen of the Stationers’ Company, a decisive step to acceptance in the London trade and in 1820 Smith brought Elizabeth Murray of Elgin to the capital as his wife. In 1824 they moved to 65 Cornhill, where their business took a forward leap with the purchase in 1827 of the publishing rights of the highly popular annual, Friendship’s O≠ering. Before long the ﬁrm was earning a reputation for its lavishly illustrated works and in 1843, became, with the ﬁrst volume of Modern Painters, publisher to John Ruskin. Other niche markets for which Smith & Elder became well known were in the areas of the colonial book trade and scientiﬁc materials, most famously as the publisher of Darwin’s Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1839–43). George Murray Smith (1824–1901), the son of the original founder, inherited a thriving business in 1846 at the age of 22 and his business went from strength to strength. Over subsequent years, he was responsible for publishing most of the leading Victorian novelists and men of letters. At Thackeray’s suggestion, Smith launched the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, to which Thackeray as editor, Trollope, Browning and other leading writers contributed; illustrators included Du Maurier, Millais and Landseer. The second George Smith left an

greater britain and ireland

399

enduring legacy in The Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901), but his business extended far beyond the book trade, making him one of the most prosperous London Scots of his generation. In 1916 the DNB passed to the Oxford University Press while the rest of the publishing assets went to John Murray, another ﬁrm with Scottish origins. The house of Murray (1768–2002) started in London, and stayed independent longer than any other London publisher, thriving through seven generations of John Murrays. The ﬁrst John McMurray later Murray (1737–93), an Edinburgh Scot, migrated to London and took up bookselling after a career in the Marines. Unlike most of the other London Scots, he was not a sober, God-fearing man but ﬁrst and foremost a businessman who acted on his belief that ‘many blockheads in the trade are making fortunes’.25 After a few years of dealing in general bookselling, stationery and patent medicines in Fleet Street, he turned to publishing medical books. John Murray II (1778–1843) and his father’s former assistant, Samuel Highley, inherited a now wellestablished company. Murray soon branched out on his own, and in 1805 strengthened his Scottish ties by marrying the daughter of the Edinburgh bookseller, Charles Elliot. He corresponded with Archibald Constable in Edinburgh, and around the same time took over Constable’s London agency, and bought a share in Walter Scott’s copyrights. With Scott’s support and advice he launched the Quarterly Review in 1809, as a Tory rival to Constable’s Edinburgh Review. This was not calculated to further the friendship between the two publishers. By now his list was strongly literary, mainly launched through the Quarterly; and came to be identiﬁed with the increasingly famous name of Byron. In 1812 Murray moved to 50 Albemarle Street, located at the heart of London literary life. It was from here that he extended his publishing empire and where the ﬁrm was based until it was taken over in 2002. Murray II managed to weather the ﬁnancial crash of 1826 and later diversiﬁed into travel books to cater for the increasing English vogue for continental travel. John Murray III (1808–92) continued with the Murray Handbooks for Travellers, the tourist’s vade mecum for 150 years; and, after the Copyright Act of 1842, ventured into publishing for the colonies, notably India, with his Colonial and Home Library. He was a strong upholder of retail price maintenance. The Murrays, though fully integrated into English publishing and English life, have maintained their Scottish links through marriage and business to the present day. 25

JMuA, Letter-Book, 16 Oct 1768.

400

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 7.3 Poems of Ossian, 1807. The celebrated Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic was published ‘under the sanction’ of the Highland Society of London.

The London ﬁrm of Macmillan & Co. (1843–2002) survived through six generations of family ownership until 1995 when it was taken over by the German publishing group, Holtzbrinck. Daniel Macmillan (1813–57) was born on the Isle of Arran into a crofting family and brought up in the nearby port of Irvine, the tenth of twelve children. His father having died when he was 9 years old, there was little money for formal education and, at the age of 11, he bound himself (1824–31) to the bookseller Maxwell Dick who, on moving to London, left Macmillan as his Irvine shopman. Macmillan later found work in Glasgow where he made friends with another young Scot, James MacLehose, who soon went to London and, in 1833, persuaded Macmillan to follow suit. MacLehose, working in a humble capacity with Seeley & Sons, his major publishing and printing house in Glasgow way in the future, o≠ered to

greater britain and ireland

401

share his lodging-house bed and tried to put in a good word on behalf of his friend with Seeley. But it was another Scot, Macrone of Cochrane & Macrone, who introduced Macmillan to Johnson, the Cambridge bookseller, where he spent three useful but restless years hankering for London. MacLehose ﬁnally succeeded in getting him into Seeley’s, where, in 1839 he found work for his youngest brother, Alexander (1818–96). But they longed to strike out on their own and in 1843 opened a shop in Aldersgate Street before migrating to premises in Cambridge (now the Cambridge University Press retail shop, having previously been Bowes & Bowes, and from 1953 owned by W. H. Smith). Encouraged by Daniel’s mentor and friend, F. D. Maurice, they joined the Christian Socialist Movement, and ‘an upper room at number one became a common-room where young men and old assembled to discuss books or God or social reform’, thus providing the Macmillan brothers with later authors for their publishing house (Morgan: 34). In 1846 they sent to Scotland for their sister’s son, Robert Bowes, to work for them and in the year of Daniel’s death Alexander separated bookselling from publishing and sent Bowes to manage the publishing venture in Henrietta Street, London. In 1874 Bowes returned to bookselling in Cambridge, initially trading under the name of Macmillan & Bowes, later Bowes & Bowes. Alexander meanwhile moved to run the now large-scale publishing house in London. From the 1850s onwards, Macmillan’s was to build up an impressive stable of authors. As publishers for the likes of Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, the ﬁrm produced some of the most important titles of the period, from children’s books to high cultural criticism. The staples of their list also included best-sellers like Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the Globe Shakespeare. Although it had become one of the most important London houses, the Scottish connection was not forgotten. MacLehose, the alliance cemented by two family marriages, continued to be Macmillan’s printers (ibid.: 39). Alexander Strachan or Strahan (1833–1918), in terms of his upbringing and beliefs, was true to type. Born in rural St Quivox, Ayrshire, and brought up in the Free Church in the years following the Disruption, he was apprenticed to an Edinburgh publisher, Johnstone & Hunter. He then set up in partnership with William Isbister and in 1862 the pair moved to London, where they began publishing devotional works, cheap American reprints and illustrated children’s books. Strahan ran a number of popular and successful evangelical journals – Good Words (1859), the Sunday Magazine (1864), Argosy (1865), the Contemporary Review (1866), Saint Paul’s Magazine (1867), and Good Words for the

402

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Young (1869). The Contemporary Review included Gladstone among contributors; Saint Paul’s Magazine was edited by Trollope. Some of the novelists Strahan ﬁrst published in this form were Charles Kingsley, Dinah Mulock and Jean Ingelow. Illustrators included Holman Hunt and Millais. The Revd Norman MacLeod the younger (1812–72), a charismatic Presbyterian minister who became a close friend, although the relationship had its ups and downs, settled in London, edited Good Words, advised on publication policy, and also became a proliﬁc Strahan author. Strahan’s serials had a large circulation and were highly successful while the fashion lasted, but as he modiﬁed his evangelicalism he began to be distrusted by Anglicans and Calvinists alike. A man of ‘frenetic energy and extreme generosity’, Strahan prospered for a number of years but his ‘haphazard business practices and unbounded egotism’ got out of hand and by 1868 he was deep in debt to his printers and stationers; in 1872 he was forced to resign. In 1882 the ﬁrm was declared bankrupt and his career was e≠ectively at an end. He was a maverick who never quite ﬁtted in, for all his generosity and religious moderation. He had two sons and a daughter, but they took no interest in publishing and he founded no dynasty – a publishing career begun with high hopes ended in catastrophe.

Working the London connection While some sought their fortunes in the capital and stayed, a number of enterprising Scottish ﬁrms negotiated the London market at arm’s length. As Ross Alloway has already shown, by the 1820s the London trade had begun to use ﬁrmly established Edinburgh and Glasgow ﬁrms as their agents; Scottish publishers, in their turn, established agencies with London ﬁrms before venturing to open a branch in the metropolis to deal with increasing London and colonial business. In November 1839, John Blackie (1782–1874) made a business trip from Glasgow to London via Bristol and Plymouth, and wrote to his son Walter who was studying and making useful trade contacts in Leipzig that ‘London is progressing steadily, and if it improves as much next year as it has done this last will prove one of our most valuable agencies.’ First and foremost a printer, Blackie had come to see for himself the potential of the latest technology: While in London I saw after Rich’s Printing Machine . . . I ﬁnd there are several of them at work in London, and he informed me that three of them had been at work for some time in Oxford . . .

greater britain and ireland

403

and Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, have got one. They are much superior in durability to the American machine and in the readiness with which the form is got at . . . I saw the ﬁrst he had made at Clays, Bread Street Hill . . . I also learned there were two or three American machines at work in London . . . these you must try and see, if you return that way. Clay, I may mention, has ordered a second of Rich’s. (Blackie 1932: 72) Blackie’s typiﬁed the Scottish publishing business which eventually became a London house. John Blackie snr, apprenticed to a weaver at the age of 11, moved into the trade in 1799 and was a Free Churchman who later opposed the Disruption. In 1809 he and two others took over his employers’ failing printing and bookselling business of Brownlie Brothers. With the German printer, Edward Khull, they built up the trade in number books, issued in cheap weekly parts which they sold on subscription throughout the countryside. Blackie did most of the travelling, gradually widening his areas of sale. In 1821 he took his eldest son, John Blackie jnr (1805–73) into partnership and while John jnr and the youngest son, Robert (1820–96), controlled the publishing side, the second son, Walter Graham (1816–1906), with a doctorate from Leipzig, managed the expanding printing works. Printing, in custom-built premises in Villaﬁeld to which the ﬁrm moved in 1831, was the bedrock of the business until modern times. Having established an Edinburgh agent in the late 1820s, Blackie’s opened a London branch at 21 Warwick Square in 1837, but it was not until after the First World War that London became Blackie’s publishing centre, well outside the scope of this volume. It remained a family ﬁrm through ﬁve generations. The Education Acts of 1870 and 1871 gave a new impetus to the list which began to include the school and popular juvenile books and award books catering for the school market which became their mainstay. It was a natural progression from the improving and religious works and the technical manuals with which they had begun. The Edinburgh ﬁrm of A. & C. Black, a dynastic succession which lasted through four generations, continued into the second half of the twentieth century. Adam Black (1784–1874) came from a prosperous background, was university educated, and then apprenticed to an Edinburgh bookseller in 1798. In 1804 he broadened his experience by moving to London to work in James Lackington’s enormous emporium, the Temple of the Muses, in Finsbury Square. But the pull of Edinburgh was too great and in 1807 he returned to set up as a bookseller and publisher at 57 South Bridge with a ready-made academic clientele. Black

404

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

catered for the university’s medical school with the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal and later Black’s Medical Dictionary and Black’s Veterinary Dictionary. When Constable crashed in 1827, Black bought the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For the seventy-two years and three editions of Black ownership, it brought prestige and proﬁts, and inﬂuenced continuing publication of reference works and later yearbook publications such as Who’s Who, Who was Who and The Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook. But it absorbed vast resources, and with publication of the great ninth edition in 1888, Francis Black (1830–92), the youngest of Adam Black’s three sons, persuaded his reluctant elder brothers, Charles Bertram (1821–1906) and James Tait (1826–1911), in whose name the Tait Black Memorial Prizes for biography and ﬁction were founded by his widow in 1911, who were immersed in Edinburgh society and civic a≠airs, that a move to London could no longer be delayed. They bought the Soho Bazaar, Soho Square in 1889, but Francis died some two years later, and the brothers, in their sixties, were left to cope without him. The Britannica became an albatross and in 1899 they divested themselves of the copyrights and James Tait, then 73, retired to Ayr, leaving the third generation to run the ﬁrm. Perhaps no one worked his London-Scottish connections more successfully than the ﬁrst William Blackwood (1776–1834), a native of Edinburgh. He was apprenticed to the booksellers, Bell & Bradfute, and then spent two years in London working for Cuthill’s, antiquarian booksellers, before returning to Edinburgh to open his own antiquarian bookshop in 1804. He remained in Edinburgh for the rest of his life and was much involved in Edinburgh civic a≠airs and Tory politics, while building on trade contacts made in London. In 1811 he secured Murray’s Edinburgh agency and published Scott’s Tales of My Landlord jointly with Murray which led him from bookselling to publishing, culminating in his launching into serial publication with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (popularly known as Maga). It was the Edinburgh Tory rival to Murray’s staid Whig Quarterly Review, being livelier, bolder and harder-hitting with satirical attacks on Edinburgh society and aggressive reviews of Keats and the ‘Cockney school’ of English poets. Blackwood’s went from strength to strength with publication of many of the major Victorian and Edwardian novelists, initially in the pages of Maga before the works were issued in volume form. As the century progressed, Blackwood’s became deeply Conservative in the modern sense: the magazine ‘held aloft the twin banners of sound criticism and Tory politics’ appealing to colonial civil servants and military men serving in the Empire, particularly in India where William Blackwood II (1810–61) served as a major in the East India Company, and where William

greater britain and ireland

405

Blackwood III (1836–1912), grandson of the ﬁrm’s founder, was born in Lucknow. Blackwood’s opened a London o∞ce in Pall Mall in 1840 but remained essentially an Edinburgh ﬁrm throughout its 176 years. Thomas Nelson (1780–1861) was apprenticed to a London bookseller (1796–8) at 35 Paternoster Row, premises which he later acquired for his thriving metropolitan branch. He was born Thomas Neilson, in Throsk, Stirlingshire, of strict Covenanter stock, and left the family farm at the age of 16 to begin second-hand bookselling in Edinburgh in 1798. In due course he dropped the ‘i’ in his surname, his only recorded witticism being that ‘like the naval hero of the same name, I have had to sacriﬁce an “i” in a good cause’ (ODNB). He combined a puritanical and proselytising bent with a keen business sense, reducing proﬁt margins, using the innovative process of stereotyping for long runs, and economising on quality. In 1829 he was the ﬁrst to employ a representative, or bagman, to sell round the country. As his business expanded he made further savings by printing and publishing under one roof. He opened premises at Hope Park in Edinburgh in 1845, the year after the London o∞ce opened, and employed a workforce of 400. By producing cheaply, selling in quantity and undercutting, he, like Thomas Tegg (see below) with whom he had much in common, both made money and alienated the rest of the trade, which did not trouble him much. He was the ﬁrst Scot to open a New York o∞ce, in 1854. His sons, William Nelson (1816–87) and Thomas II (1822–92), continued to publish cheap reprints as well as moral tales, adventure stories for the young and award books for an expanding educational market in the wake of the Education Acts. A disastrous ﬁre at Hope Park in 1878 caused only a temporary setback. The ﬁrm moved to Parkside, Dalkeith Road where it remained until 1968. Financial success was partly achieved at the expense of payments to authors – R. M. Ballantyne, whose adventure tales for the young were hugely successful, ﬁnally left William Nelson, a ‘mean old codger’, for a less parsimonious publisher (ODNB). William and Thomas Nelson died millionaires in 1888 and 1892, at a time when this meant something. Nelson’s remained a family ﬁrm of independent publishers through six generations. The Glasgow-born William Collins (1789–1853) was of English extraction and although as strongly Presbyterian and supportive of the Disruption as Thomas Nelson he was more humane. He raised money to build new churches in Glasgow, campaigned for the abolition of slavery and for temperance, was an elder of the Kirk at 24, and one of the ﬁrst Moderators of the Free Church, for which he later printed and published. His road to the book trade was circuitous. After early years spent in the cotton trade, then in teaching, he ﬁnally moved into printing and

406

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

publishing in 1819. Devotional literature sold well on both sides of the border and when the monopoly in bible printing ceased in the early 1840s, Collins began to print the New Testament. From 1821, he made annual trips to London to sell his wares and attend anti-slavery and temperance meetings. He opened a London o∞ce in 1840 but the publishing house remained Glasgow-based until 1917 when it moved to London, while the printing works stayed in Glasgow. Under William Collins II, later Sir William Collins (1819–95), the ﬁrm’s list branched into dictionaries, reference works and standard editions of the classics, lucrative areas in the mid-century. Bible printing was still a staple and by 1860 Collins was issuing seventeen di≠erent editions in 100,000 copies a year. In 1862 Collins was appointed Queen’s Printer for Scotland and in 1892, a new typeface, Collins Clear Type, was cut for the bible printing. It was in use for the next eighty years. William Collins II was, like his father before him, much involved in civic and church a≠airs. As Lord Provost of Glasgow, he was popularly known as ‘Water Willie’ because he prohibited alcohol at all civic functions. The third generation moved into reward book publishing for school prizes and greatly expanded the ﬁction list. As the generations passed, the family moved up the social scale, and became less devout and more English and cosmopolitan, although the Glasgow printing works remained in operation into modern times. As a family ﬁrm it survived for seven generations of William Collinses (Keir). One notable exception to the trend under discussion was Thomas Tegg (1776–1846), a Londoner who found himself in Scotland and came south again with some relief. Orphaned young, he was sent to school in Galashiels which he enjoyed, then bound to a drunken bookseller in Dalkeith, which he hated. He escaped over the border as soon as he could and although he never set foot in Scotland again he kept Scottish connections, employing a number of Scots in London, and continuing to deal with London Scots. He bought up bankrupt stock, publishers’ remainders and cheap reprints of out-of-copyright books and sold them at a proﬁt. He was the self-styled ‘broom which swept the booksellers’ warehouses’. (ODNB). Authors and the regular trade detested him, and his business methods were less than scrupulous, yet his Present for an Apprentice (1838) is full of sanctimonious moral advice. Among Tegg’s apprentices was the eminently upright Richard Thomas Gri∞n (1790–1832) who became Tegg’s journeyman and, ﬁnally, partner. He was the eldest son of Joseph Gri∞n (1752–1838), an Englishman who moved to Glasgow in the 1790s, where he sold books, chemicals and scientiﬁc instruments. Richard returned to Glasgow in 1820 and eventually took over from his father, while his younger

greater britain and ireland

407

brother, John Joseph (1802–77) better known as a chemist and author, went to London where he started publishing in Exeter Street, Strand. In time the ﬁrm became wholly London-based. Richard was followed by a nephew, Charles, who traded as Charles Gri∞n & Co. (1843–1957) and by succeeding generations. They specialised in technical and scientiﬁc text books, manuals of mining and assaying, engineering, analytical chemistry and naval architecture, the most enduring being The Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (1816–45). The ﬁrm continued as a family business until the 1970s. Many who departed for London throughout the nineteenth century did so with a reputation for hard work, a high level of literacy, and a ﬁrm belief in the power of the printed word as an instrument of education and improvement. While an austere piety initially drew some into theological and educational publishing, as time passed and the climate of the times grew milder, those who settled became acclimatised and their ideas and their lists became more liberal. In the 1890s, the second generation Scot, George Murray Smith, recollected with nostalgia a time when his father’s working day began with prayer.26 Companies that had started with religiously devout founders – namely A. & C. Black, Blackie, Collins, Nelson, Macmillan and Strahan – were typical of the way in which once ﬁerce beliefs may moderate over time. Perhaps in the end the London Scots had more in common with their English counterparts than at ﬁrst sight appears. While in the very early nineteenth century, it may be argued that they were harder working, better educated and more religiously devout than their English colleagues, by the end of our period those who had truly become ‘London Scots’, settling in London though maintaining Scottish links, must have been barely distinguishable. In course of time, their sons received an English public-school and Oxford or Cambridge education, and even the characteristic Scottish accents disappeared.

26

George Smith, ‘Recollections of a Long and Busy Life’, NLS MS 23191.

Wales Philip Henry Jones Poor communications and the strength of the Welsh language prevented the development of any substantial links between the Welsh and Scottish book trades until the 1860s. This was in sharp contrast to Ireland, where a short sea crossing and the intermittent presence of Welsh journeymen facilitated the production of some twenty Welshlanguage books in Dublin between 1653 and 1820 (Davies 1937–42). Although the need to know the language limited employment prospects for Scottish compositors in Wales, one exception, James Henderson, employed by Thomas Johnes at the Hafod Press between 1803 and 1810 on the recommendation of Dr Robert Anderson, produced antiquarian works in English (Dearden: 324). In the early nineteenth century the market for English titles in Wales was restricted, since about four-ﬁfths of its 1801 population of some 600,000 were monoglot Welsh speakers. However, those who could read English – mainly the wealthier and more privileged – participated in the contemporary enthusiasm for all things Scottish inspired by Scott’s novels. Thus Thomas Cranston’s circulating library in Aberystwyth o≠ered its subscribers Constable’s 1821 edition of Scott’s Antiquary, and Bryant’s Swansea Library added Tales of a Grandfather and T. D. Lauder’s The Wolfe of Badenoch to its stock in 1828 (Boorman: 64). As the century progressed, the readership for English-language works increased, but since its development had no distinctively Welsh features – apart from the problems posed by a lack of bookshops – it will not be further considered here. Wales was the only Celtic country to develop an extensive printed literature in the vernacular. By the mid-nineteenth century a large, monoglot Welsh reading public provided Welsh printer-publishers with a captive market which made Welsh-language publishing a potentially

greater britain and ireland

409

proﬁtable trade (Jones 1997: 116–18; Rees). Since most customers were relatively poor, Welsh books tended to be cheaply produced. Larger works invariably appeared in parts, and there was heavy reliance on subscription publishing. Well over a tenth of the output of the Welsh press consisted of translations and adaptations of English-language works, the translators being mainly ministers of religion. From the 1740s onwards Welsh translations of Scottish Calvinist divines such as Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine and Thomas Boston enjoyed a lasting popularity. Excerpts from Glasite works published both in English and in Welsh translations from the mid-1760s onwards were, however, widely denounced and appeared only because they were ﬁnanced by John Popkin, a wealthy Sandemanian with antinomian tendencies. From the mid-1790s John Roger Jones, a Baptist preacher who had chanced upon the writings of Archibald McLean, established Scotch Baptist congregations in North Wales. Although no Welsh translation of McLean’s works appeared until 1829, Jones told McLean in 1796 that he had ‘endeavoured soon to read them and translate some parts of them before the church as they cannot understand the English tongue’ (Jones 1883: 123–4). Such oral transmission appears to have been supplemented by the circulation of manuscript copies. The undeveloped condition of the Welsh book trade is highlighted by Jones’ comment that he had to obtain from a Chester bookseller copies of McLean’s works for the few who could read English. During the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century translations of Scottish religious works broadened their range to include books on philosophy and natural theology by Thomas Dick and Thomas Chalmers. Translations of secular Scottish titles also began to appear. One of the ﬁrst (setting aside medical works by William Buchanan, which by the 1820s were probably best considered London titles) was a translation of the chapter on manures from James Jackson of Penicuik’s Treatise on Agriculture and Dairy Husbandry, published as a sixpenny pamphlet in 1841, which sold well enough to require a second edition the following year. A similar demand was met by a translation of J. F. W. Johnston’s Catechism of Agricultural Chemistry published by Gee in 1851 as Elfenau Amaethyddiaeth. The most ambitious venture (possibly the ﬁrst to claim to be authorised by a Scottish publisher) was a translation of Chambers’s Information for the People, the ﬁrst volume of which was published in parts between 1849 and 1851 (Lloyd Hughes). Although it was aimed at a market for useful knowledge publications largely created in reaction to the 1847 ‘Treason of the Blue Books’ (Morgan 1984), it was a commercial failure, partly because its publisher su≠ered from the usual

410

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Welsh problem of a shortage of working capital, and partly because of the limited appeal of a purely secular work. Indeed the second volume, published between 1856 and 1860, was savagely attacked for neglecting the role of the Almighty in the Creation. Its sales were further reduced by the appearance, from 1854 onwards, of Thomas Gee’s Gwyddoniadur Cymreig, a ten-volume encyclopaedia covering both religious and secular topics. Despite its relative failure, the venture may have helped bring the market for Welsh-language books to the attention of Scottish publishers. More concretely, several of the translators, such as R. J. Pryse and Owen Jones, became leading ﬁgures in later attempts by Scottish publishers to exploit the Welsh-language market. There were few translations of Scottish ﬁction and poetry. Ossian had no appeal since eighteenth-century Welsh scholars had unanimously expressed their scepticism and prided themselves that the Welsh – unlike Macpherson – could produce and publish the original texts of ancient poetry (Lewis 1962–3; Percy and Evans). The only attempt to translate Scott’s novels was a forty-page abridgement of Ivanhoe published around 1860 as Ivan Hoe in a series called Amusing Stories for Young People. Scott was, however, a major inﬂuence on Welsh-language historical novels from the 1860s onwards, though Saxons and Normans alike were depicted as foes of the virtuous Welsh, and his paternalism had little appeal to those increasingly engaged in the struggle against landlordism (Millward 1991). A few translations of Scott’s verse appeared as song lyrics, and translations were sometimes set as eisteddfod competitions. For the 1840 Abergavenny eisteddfod, Y Gwladgarwr reported that no fewer than nine competitors submitted translations of ‘The Norman Horse-Shoe’, set presumably because of its references to south-east Wales (8: 346–7). His irregular life and the content of some of his poems made Burns unacceptable to many Nonconformist readers. Perhaps the ﬁrst Welsh translation to appear was that of ‘Highland Mary’, which the Anglican clergyman Daniel Evans ‘Daniel Ddu’ included in his Gwinllan y Bardd (1831). A few years later, John Jones ‘Talhaiarn’, a tavern-born Anglican Tory who delighted in a≠ronting the unco’ guid, published the ﬁrst of his translations, which included a popular recasting of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ in a Welsh context. Talhaiarn was later to be occupied in supplying Welsh words to traditional melodies, though here Thomas Moore may have been as inﬂuential a model as Burns. How Talhaiarn ﬁrst encountered Burns’ poems remains a mystery. The most probable explanation may be found in a letter by the scholar-poet Walter Davies, rector of Manafon, who noted ‘I never saw a collection of them; having seen only some fugitive pieces in the newspapers now and then’ (Davies 1868: 402–3).

greater britain and ireland

411

The most inﬂuential Scottish poet during the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century was Robert Pollok, whose The Course of Time provided aspirants to Welsh epic poetry with a model regarded as second only to Milton. It also served as a quarry for acknowledged translations (as by Samuel Roberts) (Millward 1983: 102) and for imitations that verged on plagiarism, most notoriously in Yr Adgyfodiad, an unsuccessful prize poem on the Resurrection submitted by Ebenezer Thomas ‘Eben Fardd’ to the 1850 Rhuddlan eisteddfod. Scottish periodicals indirectly exercised greater inﬂuence on Welsh cultural life than did any individual author. In 1828, Lewis Edwards, a young candidate for the Calvinistic Methodist ministry temporarily keeping a school in Aberystwyth in rooms below John Cox’s printing o∞ce, chanced upon some copies of Blackwood’s Magazine. Reading these transformed his life: their references to literary ﬁgures such as Shakespeare opened up a new world, and ‘Christopher North’ immediately assumed a semi-oracular status. By 1835 Edwards was a student at Edinburgh, attending John Wilson’s lectures and a frequent visitor to Thomas Chalmers (Lloyd Evans: 31, 52–70). Following his return to Wales he promoted the circulation of Scottish religious periodicals such as the Scottish Christian Herald and the Presbyterian Review as part of his e≠orts to enhance the intellectual life of his denomination and promote a Britain-wide union of Presbyterian churches.27 In 1845 he ﬁnally realised his greatest ambition, a scholarly Welsh-language review comparable to the major Scottish journals, when he founded Y Traethodydd (The Essayist), a quarterly which has survived its models (Jones 1995). From 1854 onwards the periodical regularly carried favourable reviews of T. & T. Clark’s publications, particularly its translations of scholarly but orthodox German theological works. Clark itself was su∞ciently interested in the Welsh market to advertise in several vernacular periodicals, and authorised Welsh translations of a few titles in its Bible Class Handbooks (Dempster 1992: 49). Among those included were James Stalker’s popular Life of Jesus Christ. Between the late 1850s and early 1880s, the proﬁtability of the Welshlanguage market induced several English and Scottish publishers to venture into publishing large illustrated part-works in Welsh. Of the six ﬁrms that dominated the trade, the two pioneers were English: Virtue, and the London Printing and Publishing Company. The four Scottish ﬁrms, all experienced number-publishers, were Blackie, Mackenzie, Fullarton and T. C. Jack. Apart from large-format illustrated family bibles – designed for display rather than use – their publications fell into 27

NLW TCEC 3133, L. Edwards to R. Edwards, 16 Dec. 1842.

412

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

two broad groups. The ﬁrst consisted of translations of established favourites such as Bunyan’s works, Goldsmith’s An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, John Brown of Haddington’s Dictionary of the Bible and John Fleetwood’s Life of Christ. These frequently recycled engravings used in English editions and sometimes drew upon recent editorial work. Blackie’s Welsh-language illustrated Bunyan (1861–4), for instance, was a translation of the third volume of George O≠or’s edition, published by Blackie in 1861–2. The second category, original works in the Welsh language, comprised ﬁve titles: a collection of the prose and poetry of William Williams, the greatest of Welsh hymn writers (Mackenzie, 1866–7); Cymru, an encyclopaedic work covering Welsh geography, history and biography (Blackie, 1871–5); Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, a history of Wales (Mackenzie, 1871–4); Ceinion Llenyddiaeth Gymreig, an anthology of Welsh literature (Blackie, 1875–6); and Enwogion y Ffydd (Mackenzie, 1879–80), a tendentious account of Welsh religious leaders from the Reformation onwards. As well as venturing to commission these works, their publishers also went to the expense of having plates specially prepared for them, the most appealing example being the engraving of Hu Gadarn (the wholly spurious initiator of Welsh culture), serving as title page to Ceinion Llenyddiaeth Gymreig. A number of Welsh compositors were drawn to Scotland to set Welsh books. Four compositors from Caernarfon, for example, spent several years at Ballantyne’s setting a Welsh bible published by Jack in 1874.28 Even after Scottish interest in the Welsh market ceased, Ballantyne still required some expertise in Welsh to set books for Hughes of Wrexham, as noted below. Although encyclopaedic works required contributions from many writers, most of the editorial work was carried out by half a dozen authors, all but one of them Nonconformist ministers who were already experienced in writing for Welsh publishers. The eccentric J. Kilsby Jones, who worked for Mackenzie from the early 1860s to 1870, claimed that he had personally persuaded Mackenzie to publish the works of William Williams. Owen Jones ‘Meudwy Môn’ was responsible for preparing all Blackie’s Welsh titles. The ﬁrm valued his advice su∞ciently for W. G. Blackie to visit him in Llandudno to discuss proposed publications. Robert Edward Williams, recommended to Fullarton by the Independent minister William Rees ‘Gwilym Hiraethog’, prepared both Welsh works published by that ﬁrm. Williams then drew R. J. Pryse ‘Gweirydd ap Rhys’ into the service of Scottish publishers by inviting 28

CROB 3, 1970: 14; Jones 1901.

greater britain and ireland

Figure 7.4 Ceinion llenyddiaeth Gymreig.

413

414

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

him to translate the introductory essay to Fullarton’s Goldsmith. Pryse, an autodidact who had acquired considerable experience of hackwork while employed by the Welsh publisher Thomas Gee, wrote 381 articles for Fullarton’s Credoau y Byd, an adaptation of James Gardner’s Faiths of the World containing much new material for a Welsh readership. Impressed by these contributions, Fullarton’s agent Harrison requested Pryse to compile a history of Wales. Williams, bitterly resenting being passed over, travelled to Edinburgh in order to persuade Fullarton that he was far better qualiﬁed to produce such a work. Although Fullarton decided in 1870 to abandon Welsh-language publishing, Harrison then o≠ered Pryse £360 to prepare Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry for Mackenzie. Mackenzie’s last Welsh title, Enwogion y Ffydd, was commenced under the editorship of John Peter, by far the most scholarly writer employed on these ventures. He was highly regarded by Mackenzie, who visited him in 1876, but following his early death in 1877 the work was completed (much to its detriment) by R. J. Pryse. The main translator for Jack’s Welsh titles was R. T. Howell, a Swansea minister who eventually broke down from overwork and took to drink. It is perhaps surprising that others did not follow Howell’s example given the magnitude of the task (Cymru, for example, ran to well over a million and a half words). Tight production deadlines added to the pressure: in 1867 Owen Jones claimed that he had to work ten to twelve hours a day preparing copy and correcting proofs to ensure that a sixtyfour-page part could appear every month. Haste inevitably led to careless omissions, repetitions and errors. Replying to one reviewer, R. E. Williams attempted to excuse himself by claiming that his eyesight had deteriorated because of overwork. Payment for this drudgery amounted to three or four shillings for a printed page which might contain twelve hundred or more words. Although reliable sales ﬁgures are hard to establish, these publications sold well. In 1867 it was claimed that over 20,000 copies of one title had been bought in north Wales alone, and in 1870 some 1,800 copies of Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry were being sold there.29 According to his biographer, Gri∞th Jones ‘Glan Menai’, Caernarfon agent for Blackie and Mackenzie from about 1870, secured them ‘thousands and thousands’ of orders (Edwards: 36). Despite heavy competition in the family bible sector, Jack’s 1874 bible is known to have returned an extremely healthy proﬁt. Their success is particularly impressive given the extent to which the ﬁrms engaged in direct competition: between 1861 and 1874 Blackie, Mackenzie and Jack all published Welsh translations of Bunyan. 29

Baner ac Amserau Cymru, 26 Sept. 1867; Y Beirniad 12 (1870–1): 364.

greater britain and ireland

415

There were three main reasons why these publications were so successful. Firstly, they were far superior technically to books produced in Wales. Contemporary reviews repeatedly expressed amazement at their large format, quality of paper, typography, presswork, the number of steel engravings (often coloured) and ornate bindings; indeed, some naïvely wondered whether such lavishly produced books could return a proﬁt. Secondly, as reviewers repeatedly stressed, numbers appeared punctually, unlike those of part-works issued by notoriously dilatory Welsh publishers. The third reason was that these works were aggressively marketed, their publishers relying on commission-based canvassers who pursued potential customers to their homes, workplaces, and even Sunday schools. For obvious reasons, commission rates were concealed, but R. J. Pryse suggested that a canvasser might receive half a crown a book.30 Canvassers were supported by a wide range of promotional devices including handbills and prospectuses containing solicited testimonials from Welsh religious leaders and excerpts from favourable reviews. ‘Free’ gifts were also o≠ered to those who stayed the course. These normally took the form of large portraits of religious leaders given in exchange for vouchers supplied with parts of the work. These marketing techniques came to be increasingly criticised in the Welsh-language press, though it is fair to note that some of the gravest accusations were published in Baner ac Amserau Cymru, a newspaper owned by the publisher Thomas Gee. Although advertisements for canvassers stressed the need for respectable Welsh-speaking candidates, many met neither desideratum, and a few – such as the Wilson brothers – apparently used book canvassing as a cover for their criminal activities. Even the Welsh-speakers tended to be men such as Edward Davies ‘Iolo Trefaldwyn’, a mediocre poet who had su≠ered repeated reverses in business before resorting to canvassing. Sales tactics were increasingly criticised, particularly the readiness of canvassers to understate the true cost of books in order to induce customers to sign legally binding agreements.31 Rapacious book canvassers came to occupy an unenviable place in popular opinion, their notoriety being given further life decades later in the ﬁction of Caradoc Evans, notably in his short story ‘Be This Her Memorial’ and the recently published Morgan Bible. The reliance of number publishers on their own distribution networks rather than established retail outlets was also criticised. The reputation of number publishers su≠ered a serious blow in June 1869, when Blackie attempted to sue three subscribers for refusing 30 31

Baner ac Amserau Cymru, 16 Oct. 1867. Yr Herald Cymraeg, 4 Mar. 1870.

416

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

to accept or to pay for parts of its family bible. One defendant claimed that the canvasser had deliberately misled him concerning the cost, telling him that the £4 book would cost no more than £2 5s. The judge found in his favour, observing that since the agreement was ‘drawn up in the English language, which a Welshman could not understand’ it might as well have been in Chinese. In a comment that must have been particularly galling to Blackie he added that ‘much is done for the sake of making money, and not for the purpose of spreading religion’.32 Scottish number publishers abandoned the Welsh market as suddenly as they had entered it. Welsh publishers claimed that the onset of the Great Depression from the mid-1870s onwards reduced the demand for expensive books. The success of number publishers may have saturated the market for large-format illustrated books, and the novelty may have worn o≠. Repeated adverse criticism must also have had some e≠ect. By the later 1860s the expansion of the railway system enabled Welsh printer-publishers to make increasing use of Scottish ﬁrms. In 1869 one of the major concerns, Hughes & Son of Wrexham, bought a printing machine and hydraulic press from Davies & Primrose of Leith and type from Miller & Richard.33 The limited space at its printing o∞ce, and the growing demand for books had compelled Hughes to outsource the production of Welsh-language books from the 1850s onwards to London ﬁrms such as Clay, Son & Taylor. Anticipating the increase in production costs resulting from the 1866 revision of the London compositors’ scale, Hughes began to explore the possibility of producing books in Edinburgh and in April 1868 agreed terms with Ballantyne for the production of two books, thus commencing a relationship that would last until 1916.34 During this period, Ballantyne printed many of the largest works published by Hughes in editions of 3,000 or more copies. Arrangements for producing one of the ﬁrst of these titles, a denominational hymn book for the Welsh Congregationalists, show that by 1869 Wales and Scotland formed part of an integrated British book trade. Ballantyne set, stereotyped and printed 10,000 copies on paper ordered by Hughes from McCorquodale of Liverpool.35 The sheets were cased in London by Straker and Son, on 1 January 1870, before the ﬁnished volumes were delivered to Wrexham for distribution 32 33

34 35

Carnarvon & Denbigh Herald, 12 June 1869. NLW, Hughes & Son Donation 1958, Hughes letter-Book, 1862–73: 90, 26 Jan. 1869; 113(b), 16 Sept. 1869. Ibid.: 78, 4 April 1868; 1912–22: 304, 20 March 1916. Ibid. (108(b)), 29 July 1869; (86), 15 Dec.1868.

greater britain and ireland

417

to the retail trade.36 In its ceaseless e≠orts to drive down production costs Hughes negotiated in the same year with Scottish mills, such as Edward Collins of Kelvindale, for paper for its Ballantyne-produced books, but by the 1880s apparently found it cheaper to use Englishmade paper.37 Although Hughes continued to use London binders, by the later 1880s Ballantyne was casing many of the titles it had set and printed for Hughes, though not always to the latter’s satisfaction – one lot of an octodecimo hymn book ‘very soon came loose out of their cases’ since the tapes were too short.38 Ballantyne-cased books included bestsellers such as the works of the leading Welsh novelist, Daniel Owen.39 Here, as elsewhere, Hughes systematically employed false imprints claiming that these books had been printed in Wrexham. In entering the Welsh-language market Scottish publishers demonstrated their customary readiness to explore new opportunities, and their abrupt departure revealed an ability to respond quickly to changing conditions. Whether they adversely a≠ected Welsh publishing is debatable. Welsh publishers certainly complained that they had been deprived of legitimate proﬁts by these ‘alien interlopers’, a legitimate concern given that Charles Hughes reckoned in 1875 that no more than £100,000 was spent on Welsh publications.40 On the other hand, the impact may have been limited if, as a contemporary claimed, the customers of number publishers were mainly those who did not normally buy books (Curwen: 363). The ability of Hughes to have books produced relatively cheaply by Ballantyne was wholly beneﬁcial – indeed, it may be doubted whether several important works would otherwise have appeared.

36 37 38 39 40

Ibid. (119(b)), 1 Jan. 1870; (127), 26 April 1870. Ibid.: 6, 9 March 1887. Ibid.: 24, 7 April 1887. Ibid.: 22, 31 March 1887. Report 1881 QQ 6275, 6277.

Ireland Charles Benson Compared to the rest of Western Europe, trade in printed books was very slow to develop in Ireland. Although limited quantities of printed books were imported during the sixteenth century, no printing was done in Ireland until 1551. The ﬁrst printer, Humfrey Powell, was brought over to Dublin to serve the English-speaking administration and its promotion of Anglicanism. The constituency was a small one as the majority of the people remained Irish-speaking until into the nineteenth century, and continued to adhere to the Roman Catholic faith. The expansion of the book trade was inhibited, at least in theory, by the wide-ranging powers granted by patent to successive King’s Printers between 1609 and 1693. These limited the exercise of any part of the book trade to the patent holder and those whom he licensed. Prior to 1680 there was never more than one printer at work in Dublin at any one time. The paltry state of the trade is demonstrated by the fact that when the Guild of St Luke was established in Dublin in 1670 to cater for cutlers, painter-stainers and stationers, a mere four of the last were founder members. The stationers grew rapidly in number in the following decade to reach twenty-seven in 1680. The King’s Printer’s monopoly was broken in 1681 and the Dublin printing trade grew rapidly to maturity in the eighteenth century unfettered by any copyright laws and supplying most of the needs of Irish readers through largely unauthorised reprints of British works as well as local original publications. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the slow development of printing began in the provincial towns. The recorded religious and trading links between Scotland and Ireland date back to the early centuries of the Christian era. The

greater britain and ireland

419

ties with the north of Ireland were particularly strengthened by the inﬂux of settlers in the plantations of the seventeenth century. Scottish universities, particularly Glasgow, were later favoured by aspirants to the Presbyterian ministry ‘the long road from Portpatrick to Glasgow . . . familiar . . . to generations of footslogging scholars from Ulster’ (Moody: 192). Urban centres grew slowly and the largest town, Belfast, probably had no more than 2,000 inhabitants at the end of the seventeenth century, by which time the connections with the Scottish book trade were nevertheless coming to be established (Bardon: 20): when the William arrived in Belfast from Glasgow in January 1682, it carried among its cargo bibles, psalm books, testaments and other printed works (Benn: 316). The connections with Scotland were intimate for they included much immigration as well as importation. Although they were not the ﬁrst members of the book trade there, the ﬁrst printers to set up in Belfast, Patrick Neill and James Blow, were both Scottish (McCann). The continued association is aptly illustrated in the printed dedication to ‘John Graham printer in Glasgow . . . as a mark of respect for his professional abilities’ of the anonymous The Text-book; or; Easy Instructions in the Elements of the Art of Printing published in Belfast in 1826. Dublin, too, had its share of Scottish immigration, although its primary connection was with the London trade. Early arrivals included Patrick Campbell in the late seventeenth century, and in the early eighteenth century George Grierson, who became King’s Printer in Ireland and founder of the Grierson dynasty (Pollard 2000: 82–4, 254–6). There were further arrivals in the nineteenth century. Individuals who came with capital included Walter Thom, James McGlashan, John Kirkwood, Robert Gunn and John Cameron. Scottish ﬁrms which established branches included Blackie & Co. and A. Fullarton & Co. Walter Thom, author of The History of Aberdeen (Aberdeen, 1811) and Pedestrianism (Aberdeen, 1813) moved to Dublin around 1813 to become editor of The Correspondent, a newspaper that distinguished itself by support of the government. On 1 July 1817 he became joint owner of The Dublin Journal. His son, Alexander Thom, became a contractor for printing to the Post O∞ce in 1824 and for the Stationery O∞ce in 1832 and ultimately the proprietor of the biggest printing business in Ireland.41 James McGlashan arrived in 1830 to become a partner in William Curry jnr & Co., remaining in the ﬁrm until setting up a separate establishment in 1846 which continued until he became insolvent in 1855 (DLB 1991: 203–4). Gunn and Cameron established 41

PP 1835 XVIII 234–5.

420

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

a free newspaper, sustained by advertising revenue, in January 1837, having imported their initial supplies of type from Edinburgh (SN 14 Jan. 1837). John and Robert Kirkwood, members of the renowned Edinburgh family of engravers, set up in business in Dublin in 1826, continuing as a partnership until 1831, after which John Kirkwood continued independently until 1848. Blackie & Son opened a Dublin o∞ce in 1845 but as late as 1856 still retained William Watson as their agent in Belfast. The Dublin operation remained a distribution depot until the ﬁrm acquired an interest in Vere Foster’s Copy-Books in 1878. A printing works was then opened at 89 Talbot Street to produce the copy-books, and it branched out into general educational publishing in the 1890s. In 1910 the business was reorganised as a separate entity, The Educational Company of Ireland, in which Blackie retained a controlling interest until 1919 (Blackie 1959: 36, 52–3). A. Fullarton & Co. established a business in Dublin in 1844 with agents in Cork and Belfast which continued in operation until 1873. In 1848 they also had a depot in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, from where their agent, John Malcolm, supplied the surrounding countryside (MacLoskie: 160–1). As well as the immigration from Scotland of men with capital, there was also a considerable movement of journeymen, mainly printers but also bookbinders. This becomes evident in the years after 1824 with the legalisation of trades unions. When the Dublin Typographical Provident Society (DTPS) was established in 1827 James Ruglin was among its ﬁrst members, having been given a concessionary entrance fee because of his previous membership in the Glasgow Society.42 From the outset the DTPS made provision for the relief of tramps, unemployed men moving from town to town in search of employment. It allowed them a payment of 7s 6d but reduced this on 17 September 1830, creating di≠erential rates for those from larger and smaller towns. Some men were brought to Dublin because they possessed particular skills.43 Philip Dixon Hardy recruited Pattison Jolly in Edinburgh in 1833 (SN 26 Aug. 1837) to supervise a machine designed by Robert Gunn of Edinburgh (Moran: 133). Although Hardy was paying him £1 10s, the standard rate for a journeyman, in mid-1837 Alexander Thom attempted to headhunt Jolly with the o≠er of two guineas a week, causing Hardy to increase his wages to £2 (SN 26 Oct. 1837). By 1840 Jolly was able to establish his own business which continued for almost half a century. 42 43

DTPS, 27 Jan. 1827. DTPS, 17 Sept. 1830; Constitution, Dublin, 1833, p. 11.

greater britain and ireland

421

There are numerous instances of British labour, principally from London but also from Glasgow and Edinburgh, being sought by strikebreaking employers. Michael Staunton, proprietor of The Morning Register, imported eight Scottish printers during his 1829 dispute with the DTPS.44 A decade later the Compositors’ Chronicle reported the Dublin Society making a successful appeal to their Edinburgh brethren to prevent journeymen taking positions in Alexander Thom’s o∞ce which had been closed to the trade in a dispute over shorter working hours (CC 1 Mar. 1841). Another prominent Dublin printer, John Folds, gave evidence in the Court of Queen’s Bench on 15 April 1841 that, following the withdrawal of his journeymen on 18 July 1840 in a dispute over apprentice numbers, he was ‘obliged to procure journeymen from Scotland and England’ (SN 16 Mar. 1841). Alexander Thom would again have recourse to Scotland during the long strike by Dublin printers over pay in 1878. By then he had become Queen’s Printer and sent part of his o∞cial work, the Index of Births Registered in Ireland in 1868, to be completed by Murray & Gibb in Edinburgh, a contract which the latter, who were producing about seven sheets a week, expected to last six months.45 Early contacts between the Edinburgh Union Society of Journeymen Bookbinders (EJB) and the Dublin Journeymen Bookbinders’ Society reveal similar concerns to those that preoccupied printers, namely potential strikebreaking and excessive taking of apprentices. Having provided them with ﬁnancial support in 1825, as did the men in Belfast, their Dublin counterparts requested a show of solidarity from the Edinburgh men in 1827. As the papers of the EJB reveal, the Dublin secretary, B. Somerville, wrote to Edinburgh on 6 February 1827 reporting that George Mullen was trying to depress wages in Dublin and, having had no success with recruitment in London, was going to Edinburgh to seek recruits. The Dublin Society again appealed for help in 1833. Having resolved to withdraw labour from all businesses with more than two apprentices they requested Edinburgh support to prevent recruitment. They were assured that ‘no Society man in Edinburgh will be base enough to go to Dublin’. The generally cordial relations became soured in the later 1830s when the Dublin Society adopted an alternative (bar-book) system of allotting jobs, the Edinburgh Society taking the view that no tramp could a≠ord to remain in Dublin long enough to acquire work. Nonetheless recruitment to Dublin continued. In 1846 Frederick Pilkington (son-in-law of Alexander Thom) and John Mowat were 44 45

DTPS, 21 Mar. 1829. DTPS, Jan.–Feb. 1878.

422

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

recruiting journeymen to fulﬁl their contract for binding school books, running advertisements in Edinburgh for positions at £1 5s a week conditional upon the applicants not belonging to any trades union.46 By April 1846 they were employing ‘eight Scotchmen’ and twelve boys. The Dublin Society misappropriated £50 of funds belonging to the Consolidated Union of Bookbinders to bribe the Scottish men to return home and was suspended in June 1848. Coincidentally, the task of re-establishing a Dublin branch linked to the consolidated union was given to Peter McIntosh, a Scottish immigrant.47 The movement of capital and labour to Ireland was evidence of growing prosperity in the book trade. During the eighteenth century there was a gradual growth in the importation of books. M. Pollard remarks on the declining ability of the Dublin booksellers to satisfy demand from the 1760s and the consequent rise in imports in the years prior to 1800 (1989: 155). The Irish market suddenly o≠ered greatly enlarged opportunities to Scottish and English publishers at the start of the nineteenth century. Following on from the Act of Union, the introduction of the new Copyright Act on 1 July 1801 was intended to put the book trades of the constituent countries of the new United Kingdom on an equal footing. British standards were imposed on a hitherto unregulated Irish trade, having the e≠ect of almost killing the business of reprinting British publications for local consumption, a market on which the Irish trade had ﬂourished throughout the previous century. Henceforth Britain was to be the main source of books for Irish readers. Given that the British and Irish exchequers continued to be separately maintained until 1824, it is possible to trace patterns of importation for the early decades of the nineteenth century. Only three Irish ports, Belfast, Cork and Dublin, were of serious signiﬁcance in the importation of books. While Dublin had a much larger population than either of the other centres – Dublin grew from an estimated 137,000 in 1804 to 232,726 in 1841 (Thom’s: 1,275) – Belfast was to grow relatively faster during the century, its population rising from about 19,000 in 1801 to 70,447 in 1841 and reaching 174,412 in 1871 (Bardon: 66, 89). The tally for unbound books imported from Scotland to Belfast in the ﬁrst decade of the century was almost 60 per cent that of Dublin, with Cork having negligible direct importance to the Scottish trade in the period. 46 47

BCUC, 26 Mar. 1868: 408–9. BCUC, 26 Jun. 1848: 14; 26 Sept. 1851: 4

423

greater britain and ireland Table 7.1 Unbound books imported from Scotland to Belfast, Cork and Dublin expressed in hundredweight. (NAS Customs 15/105–28) Year ending

Belfast

Cork

Dublin

5 Jan. 1802 5 Jan. 1806 5 Jan. 1810 5 Jan. 1814 5 Jan. 1818

36 82 96 80 88

⁄4 19 ⁄4 – – 11⁄2

301⁄2 92 1001⁄4 464 138

1

3

Table 7.1 should be viewed in the context of imports from England, which in the case of Dublin rose from 5291⁄2 hundredweight in 1801 to a peak of 1,557 hundredweight in 1813 and declined to 1,216 hundredweight in 1817. It is not clear to what extent the Dublin and Cork booksellers were supplied with Scottish books via the English ports. When W. Blackwood was promoting his magazine in 1819 he sent a parcel of goods by coach to Liverpool for shipment to Richard Milliken in Dublin: ‘I hope you will by this channel receive it at less expense, and sooner than by London.’ At this period the amount of importation of bound books varied very greatly from year to year but the great majority of books was imported in sheets and bound at the point of sale, a pattern that was to alter with the development of prefabricated cases in the 1820s and the subsequent move to publisher’s cloth bindings. Table 7.2 Value of bound books imported from Scotland to Belfast, Cork and Dublin. (NAS Customs 15/105–128) Year ending

Belfast

Cork

Dublin

5 Jan. 1802 5 Jan. 1806 5 Jan. 1810 5 Jan. 1814 5 Jan. 1818

10.0.0 213.11.0 135.6.4 51.15.0 28.10.0

– – – – –

5.7.2 – – – 3.4.4

The major Irish towns were visited by commercial travellers from Great Britain. G. B. Whittaker of London employed two travellers in 1838 who visited the leading towns of England and Wales and the ‘great towns in Ireland’ twice a year while Owen Rees, partner of T. Longman, was a regular traveller to Ireland.48 Scottish ﬁrms were 48

LA I, 97: 154; I, 100: 87, 97, 197; I, 102: 478; PP 1837–38 XX: 261.

424

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

also active. Oliver & Boyd had travellers who visited a number of Irish towns regularly between 1825 and 1827. Adam Black toured Ireland in 1830, ﬁnding few shops outside Dublin and Cork worth visiting, and related that in some places printed items other than Roman Catholic prayer books were rarely sold. Black severely disapproved of the high lifestyle of John Cumming, his Dublin wholesaler, who had two carriages, a town and country house, and who frequently gave sumptuous dinners ‘for which his creditors had to su≠er in due time’ (Black 1885: 74–5). Others were not so censorious. A. Blackwood visited Dublin on behalf of the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia Company in July 1831 and enjoyed the pleasure of discussing business with Cumming.49 Cumming was the principal book wholesaler in Ireland from 1812 until 1847 when he became bankrupt. During the 1830s he served as the sole Irish agent for a number of London publishers. Richard Milliken had the agency for William Blackwood’s publications and Magazine in 1819–20, but fell out with him due to a failure to pay promptly as promised for 100 copies of Ivanhoe and for dishonouring a draft for £106 5s. The agency was transferred to Hodges & McArthur.50 In the early 1850s James McGlashan had the agency for the publications of Constable & Co. Following the purchase of his business by M. H. Gill in 1855 the new ﬁrm of McGlashan & Gill began looking for further agencies. In May 1856 W. & R. Chambers wrote declining to change their arrangements with William Robertson. Seven years later the agency was transferred to McGlashan & Gill who wrote complaining about the proposed terms of discount: ‘[W]e now ﬁnd that they are no better than what your traveller had previously given us, and gives on the journey to all retail houses.’ T. & T. Clark gave the agency for the North British Review to William Robertson in 1861 in preference to McGlashan & Gill, as the former appeared more vigorous in his e≠orts to promote it. From the mid-1860s there was agency rivalry between McGlashan & Gill and the Dublin branch of W. H. Smith which had taken over the newspaper distribution business of J. K. Johnston in 1851. By 1872 W. H. Smith had become the major wholesaler in Ireland, but the ﬁrm’s sales of books fell sharply in the country during the 1870s and 1880s. This was due in large measure to private buyers ordering directly from publishers or London booksellers who could supply books within forty-eight hours (Cullen: 83). Advertisements from the period suggest that a wide range of works was promoted in Ireland, from literature to histories, school books to 49 50

NLS Blackwood MS 30303. NLS Blackwood MS 30301: 112, 136, 138, 145.

greater britain and ireland

425

Figure 7.5 The Great Unknown, 1825. In mid-July 1825 Sir Walter Scott visited Ireland to see his son, also Walter, who was stationed in Dublin. He was greeted with enormous public enthusiasm particularly in Dublin, where he received an honorary D.Litt. from the university and was granted the Freedom of the Guild of Merchants.

426

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

guidebooks. Presbyterian theology and sermons which had a considerable market in northern Ireland had less appeal in the south. The decline in Irish publishing after 1801 was to have a considerable e≠ect on the production of ﬁction, in marked contrast to Scotland where novel publishing ﬂourished. Ireland is recorded as the place of publication of only twenty-seven new novels between 1800 and 1829 compared with 133 in Scotland and 2,030 for London in the same years (Garside et al.: 76). However, these ﬁgures obscure the fact that in the ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth century, nine new novels were published in Ireland compared to only four in Scotland. The real impetus in Scotland, of course, began with the success of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley in 1814, although the greatest surge occurred in the 1820s. Scott’s novels, none of which lists an Irish distributor on its title page, were enormously popular in Ireland. Scott was lionised when he visited Dublin in 1825, and awarded the degree of D. Litt. by the university and the freedom of the Guild of Merchants. A more telling tribute was the display by the eminent bookseller, Richard Milliken, with whom the author was acquainted, of a copy of his bust by Francis Chantrey.51 The interest in Scott’s works continued, to the extent that sales of the monthly volumes of the collected edition of the Waverley Novels in 1831 were su∞ciently large to be used as a vehicle to advertise John Murray’s edition of Byron’s Works. John Cumming wrote to John Murray on 23 November 1831: [I] would be of great advantage, if I could have 2500 Prospectus’s without covers sent o≠ by return of coach so as I may have them in time to paste into the December volumes of the Waverly Novels and Standard Novels where they will be sure to meet the view of the very persons who will be most likely to subscribe. (JMuA) Cumming used Volume XX of the collected edition, The Abbot, to circulate his own List of Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English . . . School and College Books of which two pages were devoted to the contents of the sixty-two volumes of Constable’s Miscellany. Also remarkable is that Scott was instrumental in persuading Archibald Constable to undertake the publication of Women; or, Pour et Contre, in 1818 (Letters VI: 362), and Melmoth the Wanderer, in 1820, by the Dublin clergyman C. R. Maturin, neither of which carries an Irish imprint. Edinburgh and Dublin alliances in ﬁction publishing are few, notable exceptions being those between W. Oliphant in Edinburgh and William Curry jnr & Co. in Dublin for the publication of evangelical ﬁction (Garside et al.: 77). Some, like The Pastor’s Tales, by the Irish Selina 51

Freeman’s Journal, 16 July 1825.

greater britain and ireland

427

Bunbury, originated in Edinburgh while others, like the anonymous The Roman Catholic Priest, were produced in Dublin. The market for ﬁction in Ireland was substantial. As early as 1846 one subscription library claimed to have a total stock of over 40,000 volumes, though not all of these qualiﬁed strictly as works of ﬁction.52 The school book market was one of the few areas in which indigenous production remained dominant during the nineteenth century. Three di≠erent bodies, the Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor (the Kildare Place Society (KPS) from 1816, the Commissioners of National Education from 1831 and the Christian Brothers from the early 1840s, produced texts which had a signiﬁcant impact outside Ireland. The success of the ﬁrst two bodies was due to the great care that they took to avoid political or religious controversy. Paradoxically the appeal of the works produced by the Christian Brothers was their exclusively Roman Catholic orientation. The works of each found support in Scotland. As early as 1819 there were reports of books sold in sheets by the KPS being bound and marketed in Scotland.53 The books published by the Commissioners of National Education were an immediate success, and by 1848 accounted for 25 per cent of the school market in England patronised by the English Commissioners (Goldstrom: 11). In 1858 Fraser & Co. of Edinburgh were listed in the imprint of the Commissioners’ Biographical Sketches of Eminent British Poets. Oliver & Boyd and John Menzies & Co. were in the imprints of the Epitome of Geographical Knowledge in 1874 and the third edition of the Agricultural Class-Book in 1881. The Christian Brothers’ Historical Class-Book published in 1859 listed outlets in all the major centres of Irish settlement in Great Britain, namely London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as well as Edinburgh where Dolman, and Marsh & Beattie were the outlets and Glasgow, with Margey as the supplier. But the trade was not all one-way; a number of Scottish suppliers promoted their school texts in Ireland. In 1818 the Dublin booksellers Johnston & Deas ordered 100 copies of Bonnycastle’s Algebra from W. Blackwood; Stirling & Kenney advertised a number of items in the Belfast Newsletter on 11 January 1825 as available from booksellers in Belfast, Coleraine and Newry.54 These included new editions of Scott’s Lessons in Elocution and Barrie’s primer in English language and grammar, Tyro’s Guide to Wisdom and Wealth, as well as a School Atlas. The Dublin wholesaler, John Cumming, appears in the imprint of Stirling & 52 53 54

The Nation, 17 Oct. 1846. KPS Book Sub-Committee 12: 52. BP MS 30301: 60

428

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Kenney’s 1828 reprint of Scott’s Lessons in Elocution. Oliver & Boyd purchased a two-column advertisement in Saunders’s Newsletter on 19 October 1825 to promote general stock items, which included new and improved editions of several school books by Thomas Ewing, among them The English Learner, Principles of Education, Rhetorical Exercises, Systems of Geography and a new General Atlas. At a more advanced level there were advertisements in Belfast and Dublin for successive editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the ﬁfth advertised in the Belfast Newsletter on 18 October 1814 and the seventh in the Ulster Times on 17 December 1842. A number of items of speciﬁcally Irish interest originated in Scotland. Lawson’s Gazetteer of Ireland was published by the Edinburgh Printing & Publishing Co. in 1842 with John Cumming in Dublin and W. McComb in Belfast as local agents, neither of whom appears in the imprint of Lawson’s Gazetteer of Scotland published the previous year. A. & C. Black were slow to exploit the growing tourist trade for Ireland, their Picturesque Tourist of Ireland not appearing until 1854, eleven years after their equivalent publication for England. In accordance with their regular practice, subsections of it were separately issued simultaneously for particular areas such as The Guide to Belfast, the Giant’s Causeway and the North of Ireland. So successful was the format that the Picturesque Tourist reached its sixteenth edition in 1881. In turn, a number of titles advertised in the Irish press were of speciﬁc Scottish interest. The attractions of a northern tour were set out in the Belfast Newsletter on 14 August 1821 when The Steam Boat Companion; and Stranger’s Guide to the Western Islands and Highlands of Scotland and the fourth edition of James Duncan’s Itinerary of Scotland were o≠ered by Lumsden & Son of Glasgow as available from four Belfast booksellers. Khull, Blackie & Co. advertised in the Belfast Newsletter on 4 January 1825 that they were publishing Aikman’s New and Complete History of Scotland by subscription with a specimen available at the newspaper o∞ce. A. & C. Black announced the forthcoming Wilson’s Voyage around the Coasts of Scotland and the Isles in the Ulster Times on 17 December 1842, while W. Tait published Gregory’s History of the Western Highlands by subscription in Edinburgh in 1836 with John Cumming as his Irish agent. Cumming was also linked with Tait in the publication of Murray’s Summer at Port Philip in 1843. Religion was a matter of absorbing interest as well as conﬂict in Ireland, a fact that was reﬂected in publishing trends. The Scottish trade had much to o≠er. The Christian Herald, for December 1830, published by R. M. Tims in Dublin, lists thirty-three of James Gall’s Edinburgh catechisms and other educational works, indicating that Tims had the Irish

greater britain and ireland

429

agency for them all. Gall’s works were available from Hugh Rea who ran the Ulster Religious Tract and Book Society’s repository in Belfast. Two works, the First Initiatory Catechism and its key were available in both English and Gaelic. Tims advertised several other Scottish-published works in the same issue, including W. Anderson’s picturesquely titled Apology for Millennial Doctrine, in the Form in which It was Entertained by the Primitive Church. R. M. Tims and W. McComb of Belfast both appear in the imprint of Begg’s Connected View of Some of the Scriptural Evidence of the Redeemer’s Speedy Personal Return, the second edition of which was published at Paisley by Alex Gardner in 1830. The extent of the mutual interest between W. Curry jnr & Co. and W. Oliphant, Curry’s Scottish agent, is shown in the frequency with which Oliphant’s publications are advertised in Curry’s magazine The Christian Gleaner and Missionary Museum between 1831 and 1835. Later Scottish interest in Irish religious a≠airs was shown in a ﬂurry of pamphlets on the religious revival in Ulster in 1859. These included such works as Bell’s Notes on the Revival at Newton-Ards (Edinburgh, 1859) and Robertson’s Visit to Bedony: a Brief Narrative of Revival Movements in the County Tyrone (Glasgow, 1859). The advertising of books in newspapers in Ireland diminished from the mid-1850s and the few Scottish items that appear are linked to the sensations or political scandals of the moment. The Edinburgh publisher William Kay announced the forthcoming publication of the trial of Dr E. W. Pritchard for the alleged poisoning of his wife, to be issued immediately the trial ended, in Saunders’s Newsletter on 30 June 1865. An advertisement in The Nation of 15 March 1879, well tuned to that paper’s political complexion, was for a pamphlet on ‘British Injustice in Transvaal’, General Cetywayo at Rorke’s Drift, by a South African Boer, co-published in Edinburgh by Johnstone, Hunter & Co. and marketed in Dublin by W. H. Smith & Son. There is substantial evidence of the integration of Ireland into the Scottish and English book trades in the nineteenth century. There was movement of capital and labour; and regular visits of publishers’ representatives together with considerable importation of books are recorded. Although the Scottish output did not o≠er serious competition in the four great areas of expansion in Ireland – of law books for the Irish jurisdiction, nationalist literature, Roman Catholic books and, from the 1820s, school books – the productions in literature, Protestant theology and advanced educational, medical and scientiﬁc works had much appeal in that country.

Chapter Eight

BOOKSELLER TO THE WORLD Continental Europe Sharon Brown and Barbara Scha≠

T

hroughout the late eighteenth century, there had grown up a number of proﬁtable connections between the Scottish book trade and the publishing centres of Europe. Cultural and intellectual exchange between European universities was an important feature of the Enlightenment, and Scotland’s ancient seats of learning were no exception. These factors, along with the frequent presence of the Scottish nobility on the circuit of the Grand Tour, had long brought professional and privileged readers within the orbit of continental intellectual culture. A more general ability to read foreign texts is suggested by the increasing presence of European languages throughout parish schools in the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth century. Although German and Italian were taught to some extent, by far the most dominant foreign language was French which, by 1800, was being taught in no fewer than forty-one parishes, extending to 186 by 1850, all of which suggests a considerable potential demand for language text books and other works in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century (OSA; NSA). Newspaper advertisements for books promising new and better methods of learning foreign languages became increasingly common as the century progressed, while advertisements placed by French émigrés o≠ering French language lessons are nearly as frequent during the ﬁrst third of the century as those for new books, book sales and circulating libraries.

Books from the continent While in the nineteenth century an increasing proportion of foreign language literature was to come to Scottish readers through the London trade with its extensive connections in Paris and Leipzig, 430

bookseller to the world

431

newspaper advertisements, library catalogues and periodical literature all indicate a continuing cultural exchange between the major Scottish cities and their European counterparts. Foreign language works frequently appeared in booksellers’ catalogues alongside English works, and a number of Scottish booksellers specialised in foreign language material, shops o≠ering imported books to be found in all of the major population centres. While a small number appear to have dealt exclusively in foreign books, the majority who advertised themselves as sellers of imported material also stocked domestic titles. And although the designation ‘English and Foreign Bookseller’ was not unusual in nineteenth-century Scotland, foreign titles could also be found in most of the larger bookshops. Archibald Constable regularly received consignments of European books until the ﬁrm’s ﬁnancial collapse in 1826. In 1815 we ﬁnd the Edinburgh bookseller William Laing o≠ering a catalogue ‘including several importations from the continent, chieﬂy from Copenhagen, Paris, Leyden, and Leipzig’, Laing having recently received a consignment of four boxes from Georg Joachim Göschen, the Leipzig publisher of Goethe and Schiller.1 The bookseller Richard Gri∞n appears also to have cultivated connections with his opposite numbers throughout Europe. A cartoon from the 1820s shows several consignments having just arrived at his Glasgow shop from the bookselling capitals of Europe, of which London, Dublin, Berlin, Paris, Rome and St Petersburg are clearly identiﬁable (see Fig. 8.1). By the 1830s, a number of reading rooms where foreign language material could be consulted were also to be found in the major cities, several circulating libraries describing themselves as repositories of ‘foreign’ literature. Almost invariably, foreign language books were held alongside the customary English stock. Two notable exceptions were the ‘Glasgow Foreign Library’ trading at the Trongate in 1820 and John Wylie’s ‘Foreign Library’ in Argyle Street, Glasgow, in 1825, though within a few years the latter had become less specialised, transforming itself into a ‘British and Foreign Library’. Although it had once been customary for Scottish booksellers to travel to the Continent to purchase foreign language books, this practice had become less prevalent by the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Archibald Constable’s son undertook such a journey, as did Adam Black in the early days of the ﬁrm, ‘returning with valuable additions to his stock from the rare and ﬁnely bound books in libraries of the nobility, conﬁscated after the Revolution’ (Adam: 4). 1

EUL MS La.IV.18 fol. 618.

432

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 8.1 Gri∞n’s Bookshop, Glasgow. Richard Gri∞n & Co. was one of the best known bookshops and circulating libraries in Glasgow in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. In this cartoon from the 1820s imported books are clearly visible. The proprietor is represented as the legendary beast of his name.

One Scottish ﬁrm which forged an unusually extensive relationship, over generations, with the German book trade was Blackie & Son of Glasgow. Between 1839 and 1843, Walter Graham Blackie, son of the founder, who received his doctorate at Leipzig University, established business connections with other German publishers, and later sent his son John Alexander to be educated in Germany. Blackie & Son introduced a number of inﬂuential works to English readers. Among their publishing ventures were editions of French classics like Merle d’Aubigné’s History of the Reformation (1841), Deschanel’s Natural Philosophy (1870) and Marcoy’s Journal Across South America (1871). The scope of interest in overseas publications is evidenced by the regular notices of new books to be found in the Scottish press. Typical was

bookseller to the world

433

an advertisement in The Scotsman in 1832 for Le Cercle, a Weekly Journal of Foreign Literature and Science in the French Language, which noted that: the object of this undertaking is to lay before the British Public and Foreigners, extracts from the literary press of the continent, and to make known all or as much as possible of that which is amusing and instructive in French literature. (24 Aug.) Forty years later, the continuing market for French books was much in evidence in the press, the same newspaper running an announcement for: The French Companion: a Monthly Journal of French Literature, especially adapted for those who wish to cultivate and improve their knowledge of the language. Contains: Papers on French Literature, French Translations . . . may be had direct from the Editor, Dr. Labone, 16 Newton Street, Glasgow. (18 Sept. 1872) The more serious reviews, including The Scots Magazine, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Edinburgh Review regularly featured items relating to ‘foreign intelligence’ which, although written in English, often included extensive quotations from the works in question, indicating an assumed knowledge of languages on the part of their readers. Falling outside copyright restrictions, foreign literature in translation also provided a cheap source of copy for a number of Scottish publishers, among which Nelson’s ‘Foreign Classics’ and Blackwood’s ‘Foreign Classics for English Readers’ were among the best known. The conspicuous presence of French literary works in the Scottish book trade was by no means mirrored by a comparable demand for literature in other languages. The market for German, the second most visible literary tradition, was comparatively small. There was nevertheless an ongoing interest in German romanticism, the most important Scottish–German literary connection being that between Carlyle and Goethe, culminating in Goethe’s introduction to the German translation of Carlyle’s Life of Schiller, published ﬁrst in 1830 in Frankfurt, and later in English in a Tauchnitz edition in 1869. Carlyle had in turn acquainted Scottish readers with German romantic ﬁction, and above all the works of Goethe, having translated in three volumes Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, published by Oliver & Boyd in 1824. A translation of The Sorrows of Werther was published in 1813 by Dick of Edinburgh, in a joint venture with London and Dublin publishers. In 1827, Tait published Carlyle’s selection of German romantic ﬁction, annotated with biographical and critical notes, in four volumes, which

434

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

included tales by Goethe, Tieck and Richter. Schiller was chieﬂy known through The Robbers, which was printed in 1800 by Morison of Perth for Gray in Edinburgh and, in the same year, by Bell & Bradfute of Edinburgh, who also published Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer in 1831. Blackwood continued to show an interest in German romantic literature, publishing E. T. A. Ho≠mann’s The Devil’s Elixir in 1824; De La Motte Fouqué’s Sintram and his Companions in 1820; German Stories from the works of Ho≠mann, De La Motte Fouqué and others, selected and translated by R. P. Gillies, in 1826; and Short Poems Translated from the German by Charles A. Cameron in 1876. With Friedrich Adolf Strauss’s religious travelogue Sinai and Golgatha: A Journey into the East (1849), Blackwood introduced one of the most popular German books of the century to his customers. Despite the fact that these and other imaginative works made their way across the sea to Scottish readers, the interest in continental cultures appears to have been overwhelmingly utilitarian, historical, scientiﬁc, political and geographical, far outstripping the demand for European ﬁction and poetry. Scottish publishers were also quick to accommodate the increasing demand for language text books, dictionaries, grammars, as well as bilingual school editions. Chambers’s Educational Course, published by W. & R. Chambers in Edinburgh, included a number of grammars and dictionaries among its titles. At least twenty-two German grammars were published by Edinburgh and Glasgow publishers between 1800 and 1880. During the same period, some twenty-seven di≠erent French language-learning books for schools were published in Edinburgh; in Glasgow two; and in Dunfermline one. While the majority of these were grammars, there were also aids to vocabulary (The School of Arts French Vocabulary and Phrase Book, 1848), conversation (Edinburgh High School French Manual of Conversation, 12th edition, 1876), and the all-encompassing help (Black’s The French Student’s Assistant, 1828). Of the twenty-seven titles, a conservative estimate of four appeared in a combined total of twenty-ﬁve revised editions, bringing the count of French schoolbooks published in Scotland during the century to ﬁfty-two. Of signiﬁcance also were Italian grammars designed for schools. Ten Italian grammars were published in Edinburgh between 1844 and 1876, while Black, true to that ﬁrm’s interest in school texts, published a bilingual dictionary for students of Italian in 1854. In some instances, imaginative writing was adapted to the needs of the schoolroom. John Johnstone’s Introduction to the French Language and Louis Chambaud’s Select Fables (Dunfermline, 1816) is in fact two books, the second being the entire ninety-nine fables chosen

bookseller to the world

435

by Chambaud as aids for children learning French. These are in French, with an extensive vocabulary list. Joseph Cauvin’s A Treasury of the English and German Languages, published by Blackwood in 1870, was especially designed for the use of schools, students, travellers and men of business. Likewise targeted at language students were Archibald Constable’s German–English edition of Scott’s St Ronan’s Well (1824); Seton and Mackenzie’s 1865 edition of Johan Thomas Loth’s collection of German poetry for girls (Album der Schönsten Blüthen Deutscher Dichtkunst für Britannias Töchter); Blackwood’s 1876 bilingual edition of Short Poems Translated from the German by Charles A. Cameron; and two editions of German plays ‘arranged for schools’ (Deutsches Theater and Modern German Plays) edited with idiomatic notes and a complete vocabulary by Dr Buchheim and published by Williams & Norgate in 1870 and 1876.

The export of Scottish literature The association of Scotland with romanticism was to create a vogue for Scottish works throughout Europe in the early nineteenth century. A Scottish text which had enjoyed wide success for several decades was Macpherson’s Ossian, fragments of which had almost simultaneously appeared in France in 1761. Only a few years later, the ﬁrst German translation by the Austrian Michael Dennis sparked a number of Ossianic discourses – historical, philological, poetic, philosophical and political – in German-speaking countries. As the fame of the work spread, other translations followed, editions appearing in foreign languages including Danish (1790), Dutch (1793) and Czech (1817). One of the most inﬂuential factors in this process was the translation from Macpherson in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werter (1774). Thereafter, an enormous number of versions, principally in French and German, continued to be published throughout the nineteenth century, interest encouraged by the Romantic movement in Germany through the work of Klopstock, Herder, Schiller, Jean Paul, Hölderlin, Kleist and, last but not least, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s concert overture The Hebrides. In France, Ossian was further disseminated through the work of authors such as Hugo, De Vigny, Lamartine and De Musset. Something of the complicated textual history of the poem is suggested by the existence of a Russian edition of 1792, derived not from Macpherson’s English ‘translation’ but from a later French edition. The reception of Scottish ﬁction across nineteenth-century Europe was dominated by the presence of Walter Scott. Between 1816, when Guy Mannering appeared in translation in France, and 1851, no fewer

436

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

than twenty-two French publishers issued his works, the most proliﬁc by far being Nicolle, Nicolle & Ladvocat, and Gosselin. The latter was enterprising enough to negotiate an agreement in 1822 with Scott’s Edinburgh publishers, permitting him to publish French translations simultaneously with English versions (Lyons: 27). Some of the works produced by Gosselin and Nicolle & Ladvocat were in print runs unusually large for the time: in 1823, Gosselin issued 3,000 copies of L’Antiquaire; in 1824, Redgauntlet was issued in 4,000 copies; 5,000 copies of Woodstock were printed in 1826; and since Scott’s non-ﬁction works were also very popular, Gosselin printed La Vie de Napoléon Bonaparte in 6,000 copies in 1827. The overwhelming evidence from all quarters is that Walter Scott was not only the most popular Scottish writer among French readers but was simply one of the most successful authors in France. Scott titles were to be found in French subscription libraries as early as 1817, the catalogue of one provincial ‘cabinet’ listing in that year ‘Dame (la) du Lac, traduit de l’anglais par madame Elisabeth, 2 vol’ (Falconer: 190). Taking all known records of Parisian ‘cabinets de lecture’ between 1815 and 1830, Scott, with twenty-six citations, is second only to Madame Genlis with twenty-seven, in a list of 172 men and women, ‘tous auteurs de romans’ (Parent-Lardeur: 172). The 1830s saw the appearance of cheap, serialised editions of Scott’s novels; D’Exhauvillez’s abridged versions of the most popular novels, aimed at a juvenile audience, appeared in the 1840s; and in 1848, the publisher Charpentier began an a≠ordable edition in which for the ﬁrst time each novel was complete in one volume. Evidence of Scott’s continued popularity was reported to the Société Franklin, the philanthropic society established in 1862 to promote the setting up of public libraries in France: the library at Trouville submitted ‘that of the seventeen most borrowed volumes from 1865–1871, no fewer than six were Scott novels’ (Lyons: 29). Throughout the period, and especially before 1848, Scott’s novels also served to deﬁne Scottish literature for German readers, and, in the 1820s, even generated a German fashion of novels ‘in the style of Scott’. Willibald Alexis, the translator of The Lady of the Lake (1822) and The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1824), wrote his own parody of Scott in the form of Walladmor (1823). Scott’s ﬁction also appeared in serialised form in German magazines, with more than 200 Scott titles published in Leipzig alone before 1845. The ﬁrst collected edition was initiated by Schumann of Zwickau as early as 1822, while Franckh of Stuttgart launched a cheaper version in 1827. Several other German publishers, among them Herbig, Rein and Gleditsch, were well-known for their

bookseller to the world

437

Scott editions, and there emerged a complete German language edition (‘Neue Kabinets-Ausgabe’) published by Schumann in 1844–5, which rivalled Tauchnitz’s English Scott edition of 1845. Statistical evidence for Scott’s unchallenged status as the most successful foreign-language author among German readers is to be found in the entries for foreign literature in the catalogues of Austrian, German and Swiss circulating libraries and cabinets de lecture between 1815 and 1845. A survey of twenty-two such institutions indicates 1,015 Scott titles, nearly twice as many as those of the second most popular author (Martino: 732). If German readers had equated Scottish ﬁction with Scott, then Scottish poetry was synonymous with Burns. The ﬁrst German translations by Ferdinand Freiligrath and Philipp Kaufmann were published between 1835 and 1839; before 1900, the number of separate Burns’ collections, some of them in several editions, stood at seventeen (Selle: 316–17). Not only was Burns’ verse extremely adaptable to German dialect poetry, his poems being easily vernacularised in northern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but the subject matter also suited the tastes of a German public who were steeped in songs and ballads. Such poetry provided a continuous source of inspiration for German composers, and Haydn, Hummel, Beethoven and later Mendelssohn and Schumann all set adaptations of Burns’ works. However, the ‘German’ Burns was the romantic rural love poet, not the satirical, political writer. While Scott remained throughout the century the most popular and the most published Scottish author in Europe, he was by no means the only one, Scottish ﬁction in nineteenth-century French translations including works by Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, John Galt, James Hogg, Grace Kennedy, Thomas Lauder, George MacDonald, Mrs Oliphant, Jane Porter, George J. Whyte-Melville and John Wilson. Among other popular Scottish writers in both Germany and France in the late nineteenth century was William Black (BOSLIT; Martino: 734). A rather curious reception history is that of James Hogg. Whereas The Confessions of a Justiﬁed Sinner was not available in translation for German readers for some time, the ﬁrst of his works to appear in German was the relatively obscure Shepherd’s Guide, translated by Martin Heinrich Schilling and published in Leipzig in 1821. The reception of Scottish literature in Italy, although not far di≠erent from that in France or Germany, presented its own peculiarities. Scott was also a favourite with Italian readers, not least because they associated many of his themes with the events of the Risorgimento. Likewise, Byron had been such a prominent ﬁgure in Italian public and political life that in Italy his works were read as a tribute to Italian irredentism,

438

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

presenting as it did thematic convergences with the writings of Alfredi, Foscolo and Leopardi. Although there was a strong interest in Italian music within Scotland throughout the nineteenth century, documented through the Scottish publication of Italian songs and libretti, the Italian interest in Scotland as a place for musical inspiration took some time to develop. While the Scottish music publisher George Thomson was commissioning settings of Burns by Haydn in the late eighteenth century, it was not until 1863 that the ﬁrst collection of Burns lyrics was translated into Italian. While Scottish ﬁction and poetry tended to be the dominant genres for translation into the European market, the inﬂuence of the Scottish Enlightenment, epitomised through philosophical and historical works, continued to be felt abroad, particularly among German-speaking scholars. Inﬂuential works included Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters (Donaueschingen, 1820), William Robertson’s History of Scotland (Leipzig, 1826), selections from Hume’s Political Discourses (Leipzig, 1877), and, above all, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations which appeared in several German editions between 1799 and 1879. Two editions of Alexander Adam’s Roman Antiquities (Handbuch der römischen Alterthümer (Erlangen, 1806 and 1818) helped to disseminate Scottish historiography on the Continent and John Millar’s Historical View of the English Government, translated as Historische Entwicklung der englischen Staatsverfassung (Jena, 1819–21), testiﬁes to a longstanding interest in the British parliamentary system. Nevertheless, although Scottish philosophy remained important among European scholars and university students, it all but vanished from the ﬁeld of public reading and conversation (Malherbe: 300–3).

The O≠-Shore production of English language texts Even where there were a number of international agreements in place, the enforcement of rights regarding literary property was di∞cult to maintain across national borders. Given the relative lack of copyright protection, the nation’s authors, printers and publishers were to derive proportionately fewer ﬁnancial beneﬁts than at home from the success of their work on the Continent until the Treaty of Berne in 1884. Additional factors militated against the success of Scottish publishers in other European markets. High export and customs duties rendered British books expensive, if not una≠ordable for the average continental reader (Keiderling: 7). What is more, distribution to the book trade in established centres like Paris and Leipzig was dominated

bookseller to the world

439

by London agencies. It was not uncommon for a group of metropolitan publishers to advertise their joint titles in a catalogue, which an agent would distribute to Leipzig booksellers, who would in turn distribute it to other German booksellers, the latter collecting incoming orders on commission. This made it di∞cult for Scottish publishers and booksellers to break into the continental market, with one or two notable exceptions. On at least two occasions, in 1848 and 1854, the Edinburgh bookseller Robert Seton circulated his catalogues of German books in Leipzig. The dominant name in o≠-shore English language publishing in the early part of the period was Galignani of Paris. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the enterprising spirit of the Parisian publisher came to the fore and, with it, the shift of English-language publishing away from Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and other European locations to Paris. Galignani o≠ered British expatriates, who ﬂocked to the Continent in their thousands once the borders were reopened, not only his famous guidebooks, but a comfortable reading room where, along with the contents of a circulating library, English, German, Italian and Spanish daily newspapers were to be had. Among the works stocked by the library were Galignani’s reprints of English editions of all Byron’s works, and later of best-sellers by Scott. These good quality editions could be purchased much more cheaply and undercut equivalent British editions. The success of Galignani’s venture was not lost on other publishers: Baudry of Paris also soon began reprinting English editions of Scott, Byron and others, his 1827 Paris retail list including a seven-volume and a twelve-volume set of Byron’s works, as well as Scott’s Poetical Works and two of his novels. Baudry’s Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors was very successful. This proﬁtable idea was soon imitated by publishers in Brussels, Leipzig, Frankfurt and other continental cities (St Clair: 294–9). In the second half of the nineteenth century the expansive literary empire of Bernhard Tauchnitz dominated the market for English language literature on the Continent (Todd 1988: 6). From about 1850 onwards, English was more widely taught in German schools, and German publishers, of whom Tauchnitz was the most successful, answered the increasing demand by producing inexpensive books in English. Tauchnitz’s still moderate production of forty-three titles in 1850–1 had nearly quadrupled by 1880 to 166 titles (ibid.). Among the most popular Scottish writers in the Tauchnitz International Editions in English series were William Black with thirtyone titles between 1871 and 1898 and Margaret Oliphant, who was

440

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

introduced to continental readers with The Last of the Mortimers in 1862, with forty-three subsequent titles up to 1897. Other popular Scottish writers on the Tauchnitz list included G. J. Whyte-Melville George with twenty titles between 1860 and 1879 and George MacDonald with eleven titles between 1865 and 1883 (Todd and Bowden 1988).

Technology and labour While the movement of Scottish literary works across borders, whether by legitimate or illegitimate means, represented the most tangible point of contact between Scotland and the continental book trade, the relationship between the nation and its continental neighbours is seen in a number of other ways. Through the continuous movement of raw materials, expertise and equipment, Scotland came increasingly to participate in a range of Europe-wide developments in the book trade in this period. For generations, German and Dutch paper makers dominated the development of its manufacture throughout Europe. France, too, had produced a number of technical and economic pioneers (Thomson 1974: 4–5), and Scottish papermills had relied on imported rags from the Continent well into the nineteenth century. Without doubt the most revolutionary contribution to papermaking in the period was the introduction in 1799 of the Fourdrinier papermaking machine by Frenchman Nicholas-Louis Robert, an invention that was to be widely adopted by Scottish mills within a generation. Lithography was another technological advance that would prove crucial to the development of the European book trade, and in which Scottish ﬁrms would come to invest heavily (see ‘Illustration’). Among the German lithographers who brought their expert knowledge was Friedrich Schenck, who had been apprentice to the inventor, Alois Senefelder, in Munich. Brought to Edinburgh in 1840 by the printseller Samuel Leith, he was soon established as Scotland’s leading lithographer, giving lectures on lithography to the Royal Scottish Society of the Arts and later awarded their gold medal for his contribution to the development of lithography in Scotland. In 1859 Schenck set up his own successful business in Edinburgh. Another notable German printer operating in nineteenthcentury Scotland was Edward Khull, who became a partner of Blackie in 1819, establishing the ﬁrm’s enormous printing department and becoming Printer to the University of Glasgow in 1833 (SBTI). While they may have continued to reap the beneﬁts of imported technology and skills, one of the most complex challenges facing Scotland’s

bookseller to the world

441

printers and publishers in the nineteenth century was the foreign language market. As increasing capital and energy went into the exploitation of new colonial markets, old alliances tended to fall o≠. Scottish publishers would continue to ﬁnd it di∞cult to penetrate the continental book trade, two inhibiting factors being language di∞culties and the protectionist nature of continental publishing. All of this changed with the launch of the ‘Collection Nelson’ French series in 1910 which saw a Scottish publisher make a major impact on the continental market at last.

North America Fiona A. Black In 1853, the Edinburgh publisher William Chambers travelled with di∞culty and trepidation to the eastern shores of North America. In Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal he described how ‘stepping ashore at Halifax’ he found himself ‘among friends’ even though he had never before visited the province (Harvey 1947: 82). The publisher’s reputation preceded him, thanks to the international success of his cheap publications. He was already known to many Nova Scotians through the books which had found their way into school libraries at the hand of John William Dawson, the province’s ﬁrst superintendent of education, himself the son of Scottish immigrant bookseller James Dawson of Pictou (ibid.: 81–2). Thirty years later and shortly before his death, Chambers published Richard Goodridge’s shilling narrative, A Year in Manitoba, in which the author compared the remoteness of prairie homesteads to life in the ‘wild uplands of Scotland’ (80). This is just one of many examples of the way in which Scottish print culture forged a ‘community of practice’ throughout North America in the nineteenth century. In the spring of 1822, when Rollo Campbell was 18 years old, he left his native hills in Perthshire and travelled 4,000 miles to Montreal, the town which was to become, for a few decades, the centre of Canada’s printing and publishing industries. Campbell brought with him printing skills acquired from his work on the Scottish newspaper press. In time, his Canadian business would become one of the largest in the country (CBTLI; DCB). By the early 1880s, censuses in Canada and the United States told a powerful story of the relative importance of Scottish-born members of the press. Their contributions ranged from that of William Adam, a ‘cash boy’ in a book store in Providence, Rhode Island and James Watson, a bookbinder in South Boston, to Graeme

bookseller to the world

443

Mercer Adam, noted book dealer, publisher and literary entrepreneur in Toronto. From the eighteenth century onward, Scots in the North American trade often maintained commercial as well as familial connections in Britain (principally in London or Edinburgh), as well as building networks of Scots within North America (Landsman: 18). Through the vigilance with which they maintained these transatlantic ties Scots played a conspicuous role in the infrastructure of the rapidly expanding print cultures of Canada and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the United States. An analysis of the availability of Scottish works in Canada, from the 1750s to 1820, when multiple copies of a relatively limited range of titles were imported to di≠erent towns, suggests similar trends to those found in America in the colonial period, when ‘the groundwork for Scottish cultural inﬂuence upon America [was] laid’ (Hook 1975: 43). While publishers in Scotland may have been slow to cultivate Canada as a market, there were others in the Old World who had the intellectual and moral welfare of new Canadians at heart and who promoted, within Scotland, the donation of books for emigrants. Robert Lamond sent a letter to the Glasgow Chronicle (14 Jun. 1820) in which he explained that donations of books for emigrants travelling under the auspices of ﬁve di≠erent emigration societies would be received by Chalmers & Collins, the booksellers on Wilson Street in Glasgow. The books provided tended to be of a morally uplifting and educational nature – what Lamond referred to as ‘the science and intelligence of old Scotia’ (13–14).

A predominance of Scots James Hargrave dreamed of Auld Reekie while reading out-of-date Scottish newspapers as a young clerk with the Hudson’s Bay fur trading company in 1828.2 It was a nostalgic tendency that was echoed throughout the nineteenth century by other literate Scots, from Gaels such as John McInnes in Pictou Nova Scotia, to Lowlanders such as Fergus Anzle Easton, stationer and news dealer in Massachusetts (USC 1880). Many homesick adventurers and immigrants longed for textual links with home. In earlier periods of settlement, cultural links were consolidated through imported publications alone. Over time, however, intellectual and emotional ties with Scotland were to become more complex: while trade networks continued to ﬂourish from the eighteenth century and 2

Journal of James Hargrave, 10 Oct. 1828 1828–9: MS McGill CH17.S53.

444

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

booksellers and general merchants continued to import books and periodicals, growing numbers of Scottish-born printers, publishers, editors and others fostered a Scottish intellectual and mercantile element within the North American book trades themselves. Scots who crossed and recrossed the Canadian–United States border included John Dougall who promoted his ‘personal philosophy of Christianity’ through his successful weekly Montreal Witness founded in 1846 and then, by the 1870s, through the New York Daily Witness. Others such as Andrew Armour had more overt business links between the two countries. Armour and his partner Hew Ramsay operated a bookselling business that extended across southern Ontario and into the United States (DCB). Scots often cultivated their political and economic power through the use of print, the critical role they played in the burgeoning cultural, economic and political life in North America being out of all proportion with their numerical strength within the total population (Bumsted). By 1881, Canadian residents who were Scottish-born or of Scottish origin formed 19 per cent of the country’s population. Analysis of the ethni-city of workers identiﬁed in the 1881 census of Canada indicates that Scots were over-represented within many of the book and allied trades; nationally, over 26 per cent of publishers, 40 per cent of stationers and 45 per cent of booksellers were Scottish-born or of Scottish origin. In the United States, Scottish-born residents formed only 0.3 per cent of the population enumerated in the census of 1880 yet, again, these Scots were over-represented within the book trades in many areas. In the United States, 1.3 per cent of booksellers, 1.4 per cent of bookbinders, and 0.9 per cent of compositors and typesetters were Scottish-born (Hewes and Gannett: plate 67). Scots who were successful in promoting print culture in North America were often both patriotically British as well as distinctively Scottish in their views. For example, George Brown, who was to become the leading Canadian newspaper publisher, emigrated as a child to New York and learned much about civil and religious liberty, as well as the economic liberalism of Adam Smith, from his father Peter. George had attended Edinburgh High School with William and Thomas Nelson as his classmates, a fact which was to a≠ect his personal life many years later when, at 43, he married their sister Anne (DCB). In New York, the elder Brown published a work on abolitionism and the value of the British parliamentary system, and then, with George’s encouragement, launched the British Chronicle in 1842 (DCB). The paper became a hotbed for the Browns’ fervent views on the ‘Great Disruption’ in the Church of Scotland in 1843. Free Kirk sympathisers in Canada looked very favourably on the British Chronicle and they told

bookseller to the world

445

George when he was visiting Toronto of their wish for his father to move to Canada. George himself was keen to move. He became enamoured of the Reform movement, and was ultimately asked by the Toronto Reformers if he would found a new paper for the party. Thus was founded the Toronto Globe in March 1844. Thomas Gardner, the Scot in Tombstone, Arizona who moved to California and founded the Los Angeles Times might have had a similarly notable career, had he not been crippled by debt (USC 1880). In the matter of technological innovations, the Globe led the way, while lagging behind in labour relations. In 1844, the Browns introduced the ﬁrst cylinder press in Canada, by importing a Hoe press from New York (Dewalt: 91), and tens of thousands of copies of the paper were produced, the largest circulation by far of any Canadian paper to date. In 1856, using the power of his paper, George Brown promoted the annexation of the North-West Territories. In the 1860s he took up the cause of confederation, whose architect was the Scots-Canadian who would become Canada’s ﬁrst prime minister, John A. Macdonald. Brown, like so many of his Scottish contemporaries, used his education and his capital for what he saw as the betterment of the colonial region, playing a signiﬁcant role in the passage of the British North America Act in 1867. The Browns’ ﬁrm continued to be known for its technological innovations, and in April 1880 the ﬁrst web-fed rotary press in Canada was installed at the Globe plant, enabling the printing, cutting and folding of 28,000 eight-page papers per hour (ibid.: 92). Other Scots, too, helped reinforce the perception of their superior engineering knowledge and native inventiveness. George Barrie, publisher in Philadelphia, produced a variety of steel engravings, some on a large scale requiring several sections, such as ‘The Prodigal Son’ by Louis Edward Dubufe, published in 1880. Another Scot in Philadelphia, William Charles, was one of the earliest in America to publish children’s books with coloured plates (Tebbel: 532). In papermaking techniques Scots also took a leading role, with McDonald & Logan installing the ﬁrst Fourdrinier papermaking machine in Canada at Portneuf, Quebec, in 1843. Two decades later, the Scottish partnership of Angus & Logan ‘opened just the second soda mill’ for chemical wood pulping in North America at their plant in Windsor Mills, Quebec (Dewalt: 100). Another newspaperman who might have rivalled George Brown, had he not died in his early forties, was Scottish-born Hugh Scobie, who was well known as a ‘defender of Scottish interests in Toronto’. He was encouraged to edit and publish a newspaper promoting a moderate alternative to reform and the aptly titled Scotsman ﬁrst came o≠ the

446

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

press in February 1838, though its name changed almost immediately to the more generic British Colonist. Like many of his fellow countrymen, Scobie was an outspoken advocate for increased access to education. By 1851 the paper was appearing twice-weekly, and over the next two years he added further newspapers to his business, including the Daily Colonist. Like Brown, Scobie took advantage of technological developments and in 1843 re-established the use of lithographic illustration (DCB). It was in the area of bookselling that Scots were perhaps to become the most visible agents of print culture in North America in this period. Not all were as eccentric as William Gowans from Lanarkshire, an antiquarian book dealer in New York who jealously guarded his stock from potential buyers. If a customer tried to bargain, he would raise the price – and raise the book itself onto an out-of-reach shelf. Although he issued twenty-eight catalogues between 1842 and 1870, after his death his executors disposed of a quarter of a million bound volumes at auction (DAB). As in other areas of cultural life, Scots in Canada were far from homogeneous in their bookselling activities. In the early decades of the century, their activities varied from those general merchants who actively promoted Scottish titles, such as the Kidstons of Halifax, to the cosmopolitan business of successful printer and bookseller John Neilson of Quebec City. In 1799 James Kidston advertised in the Halifax Journal a book stock rich in Scottish publications (2 May, 1799). The Kidstons numbered among their customers fellow members of the North British Society (MacDonald 1905), ‘a Scottish mercantile brotherhood’ (See Brymer DCB). Through the years, ﬁve of the Kidston men were members of the Halifax branch, and Richard Kidston jnr became president in 1815. Some of the members met regularly ‘to read and discuss papers on learned subjects’ (KFP). The Kidstons are important because they saw themselves as having a cultural as well as an economic role in the growing settlements of the Maritimes, a tendency not always shared by other Scottish-Canadian merchants. Scottish-born John Neilson’s contribution to Lower Canadian print culture was extensive as well as long-lasting (Hare and Wallot). Neilson printed English and French works, the latter being especially di∞cult to import, for mainly a Lower Canadian market; and also imported and sold works in both English and French through his ‘highly proﬁtable’ bookshop (DCB). His 1800 catalogue is regarded as the ﬁrst bookseller’s catalogue published in Canada (Alston) and he is known to have supplied other printers, booksellers and stationers in Lower and Upper Canada with stock which ‘he imported or went in person to get from . . . the United States or Great Britain’ (DCB).

bookseller to the world

447

While Neilson cultivated some Scottish connections, they were only a small component of a cosmopolitan business network which extended throughout Canada, the United States and Britain. He showed su∞cient interest in Scottish civic concerns to become involved in the settlement of Scots and Irish immigrants in Lower Canada and his preference for Scottish or American, rather than Canadian apprentices, has been documented (DCB). As he wrote to his son: ‘[I]n [Scotland] they far surpass us in a thousand things that are advantageous to mankind. It is partly the e≠ect of superior general knowledge.’3 This aside, Neilson’s book trade network was almost wholly centred on London and America and there is little evidence that he exploited to any great degree direct connections with Scottish booksellers. Although he was part of the Scottish diaspora, Neilson’s business practices, unlike those of many other Scottish merchants, were not inordinately informed by his personal origins. Within Canada, Neilson’s business contacts did, however, include many Scots. James Brown, born in Glasgow in 1776, became ﬁrst an agent, then a shareholder, and ﬁnally sole owner of the papermill established in 1804 at St Andrews in Lower Canada (DCB). In September 1806, Neilson secured a discount on paper from Brown’s mill, and Brown secured a 5 per cent commission on paper sold by Neilson.4 The well-educated, bilingual and politically active John Neilson was a good businessman and he saw it as advantageous to hire apprentices and other sta≠ from Scotland, who in turn moved on to other towns in Upper and Lower Canada, establishing their own businesses and so spreading the networks of Scots in the trade. The tendency of Scottish printers and publishers to favour their countrymen as employees contributed to a pattern of chain migration in the trade, in which employees hired by Scots in turn hired other Scots. The business of Graeme Mercer Adam exempliﬁes this, through his hiring of David Boyle and others (DCB). In contrast to Neilson, George Dawson and T. Fairbairn both had book trade connections in Edinburgh in the second decade of the nineteenth century, a fact that is reﬂected in the advertisements they placed in Upper Canadian and Maritime newspapers. Although they had been near contemporaries in Edinburgh, their approaches to the Canadian book trade were considerably di≠erent. Dawson chose to settle and establish a permanent business there while Fairbairn arranged periodical visits, carrying with him a selection of books from Edinburgh suppliers, hoping to forge a transatlantic connection with individual customers. 3 4

NP MG24, vol. 42, John Neilson to Samuel Neilson, 13 Nov. 1816. NP MG24, B1, vol. 2, Memorandum, Quebec, 18 Sept. 1806.

448

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

By the 1840s, some Scottish publishers had established formal agencies in Canadian towns. For example, the Irishman Thomas Maclear, who may have worked in Glasgow before arriving in Toronto where he opened a bookshop in 1848, acted as an agent for Blackie & Son (DCB). In 1854, Maclear and other Toronto publishers bought a major share in Hugh Scobie’s business from Scobie’s widow and the new ﬁrm, Maclear & Co., continued as the Blackie agents. In his later years, one of Maclear’s important contributions to transatlantic culture was the publication of William Jordon Rattray’s The Scot in British North America, published in four volumes between 1880 and 1884, which, like its companion, Nicholas Flood Davin’s The Irishman in Canada (1877), served to celebrate the virtues and achievements of settlers from the ‘Old Country’. A large proportion of colonial merchants operated on a smaller scale, selling books alongside a range of other goods. James Dunlap of Montreal ordered consignments from his bookselling brother in Glasgow for sale in his general store. As early as 1819 we ﬁnd an advertisement in the Acadian Recorder for the Halifax saddlers Sinclare & McLean announcing the recent arrival of ‘a valuable collection of books, which have been purposely selected in Edinburgh . . . a few of the most recent publications which have obtained celebrity amongst the literary circles of that city’ (13 Nov.). Many teachers with Scottish connections ordered books from Scotland. Contacting his brother James, an Aberdeen bookseller and binder, John Strachan arranged book supplies for the provincial schools he worked tirelessly to promote. John wrote from York (later renamed Toronto) early in 1817, requesting six parcels of books for schools in York, Kingston, Cornwall, Long Point and Sandwich (Spragge: 127–8). Copies of six titles were requested for the students and ﬁve for the teachers, the consignment costing over £400. John Strachan’s insistence on the provision of school books from his native country was in part an attempt to avoid the unacceptable political views to be found in American works. Among educationists it was generally felt that Canada required school books reﬂecting her political loyalty rather than American imprints with their ‘horrid republican notions’ (Black 2001: 7). It was a sentiment that was echoed by a number of Scottish settlers. In the second half of the century, the works of Thomas Nelson were well known throughout Canada and the United States. In 1854, Thomas Nelson jnr had established a New York o∞ce at the encouragement of his brother William, the ﬁrst branch of a British publisher in the United States (ODNB). The Education Acts of several Canadian provinces in the 1870s increased the demand for inexpensive,

bookseller to the world

449

high-quality school books. Textbook publishing was the staple of many North American printer-publishers. In Halifax, the Scottish-born Andrew and William MacKinlay began printing the Nova Scotia Series of Readers in 1864, consisting of authorised titles from Thomas Nelson & Sons, as well as works by local authors. Evidence suggests that the concern of Scottish publishers for the Canadian market was relatively limited while wholesale stationers appear to have taken a more active role in the supply of certain classes of books to Canadian towns (Black 1999). Archibald Constable, as one of the major publishers of the early nineteenth century, provides an illuminating example of the attitudes of the Scottish supply side in the early years of the century. While Constable sent books to the American colonies at the request of other booksellers, he did not directly engage himself in the transatlantic trade in the period prior to 1820 (ACP). Although the Canadian bookseller George Dawson did deal directly with Constable, he purchased his stock before leaving Edinburgh to set up business in York in 1818. Constable’s enthusiasm for dispatching book orders to the United States but not to Canada followed a pattern already set by Bell & Bradfute, whose letters reveal links with several booksellers and merchants in American towns, but none in Canada (B&Bb).

Transplanting the Bard and the Wizard of the North The inﬂuence of Scottish authors in North America was two-fold: the inﬂuence of their writings in original and colonial editions; and the migration of Scots who continued or began their writing careers in North America. Local editions of noted Scots authors sometimes competed on book-store shelves with imported editions of the same works. For example, by 1788 there were already New York and Philadelphia editions of Burns’ Poems. In the following year John Neilson speculated in the Quebec Gazette that there might be su∞cient local demand for Burns, by proposing a local edition, although this was never published (13 Aug.). North American editions of Burns continued to appear and complemented the reprinting of individual poems in many small-town newspapers. In addition, imitators of Burns wrote and published in the Scottish vernacular for regional North American markets. Whether locally reprinted or not, the works of Burns and Scott, in particular, were widely known and shared both through silent and oral reading. It has been argued that the reason for the huge appeal of Scott rested heavily on his work being a continuation of a tradition that was already well-established by the transatlantic literary inﬂuences of Scottish

450

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

ballads and songs (Hook 1999). Marmion and The Lady of the Lake were enormously popular with North American readers and in 1808 a review of the former in the Port Folio placed Scott in the context of a long line of ‘distinguished Scottish poets’ including Drummond of Hawthornden, Thomson, Beattie and Burns (6: 302). Waverley and ensuing novels were eagerly sought after in book stores and circulating libraries even before their authorship was conﬁrmed. Scott’s work with its ‘narratives of how conquered colonies or border states reclaim nationhood’ apparently resonated with particular force in the South both before and after the Civil War (Schmidt: 545). James Fenimore Cooper, whose The Spy was published in 1821, was hailed as the ‘American Scott’ by critics and readers, although he wished to be viewed as a rival rather than an imitator in part due to his di≠ering social biases. North of the border, William Kirby was hailed as the ‘Scott of Canada’ and, unlike Cooper, he was an enthusiastic admirer of Scott. Kirby’s The Golden Dog o≠ered a ‘picturesque treatment of the lower classes’. In Quebec, reviews of Scott’s works appeared in several FrenchCanadian periodicals such as La bibliothèque canadienne and translations appeared shortly after ﬁrst publication, such as with The Antiquary in 1816 (Kröller: 33, 39, 41). Collected editions of the Waverley Novels were published in North America in large editions and in a variety of formats to suit most pocketbooks, and many cities hosted 1871 Scott centennial festivities. The stories in Scott’s poems and novels became ‘a body of common knowledge’ (Todd 1999: 500). A number of contemporary Scottish writers took an active interest in North American a≠airs. From the early 1820s the novelist John Galt promoted colonisation in Ontario and his organisation was chartered as the Canada Company in 1826. Galt himself lived in Canada for only three years but his novels and autobiography helped to increase awareness of Canadian life. Other Scots writers in Canada, such as David Boyle, sometime bookseller and noted archaeologist, wrote occasionally in broad Scots for deliberate humorous e≠ect, while forwarding serious arguments concerning Scottish cultural nationalism. Boyle, who wrote under the pseudonym of Andrew McSpurtle, lived in Canada and for thirty years contributed to The Scottish American Journal (DCB). Women’s contributions to Scottish cultural expression in Canada, while not as visible as those of men, included the work of Jessie Wanless Brack who was born in Berwickshire and emigrated to Canada where she wrote a collection of nostalgic poems entitled ‘Dreams of Home’. Mary Maitland of Elgin arrived in Ontario in 1857 and began six decades of contributions to periodicals (Watters: 23, 135). Even more proliﬁc was the teacher Margaret Murray Robertson of Aberdeenshire

bookseller to the world

Figures 8.2 and 8.3 Gaelic Bible, Nova Scotia. Family bibles had particular importance for emigrants, reinforcing ties of kinship as carriers of genealogical records. Bound in native buckskin, this one represented to its owners an important link with the past. The inscription between the testaments reads ‘William McDonald and Family Emigrated to Pictou 3 August 1847’. (NSARM)

451

452

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

whose ‘Essay on Common School Education’ won the Galt Prize in 1865. Although she went on to moralistic novels for the Religious Tract Society and the American Sunday School Union, her greatest legacy to Canadian culture is as the aunt of the novelist Ralph Connor (DCB). Crossing the transatlantic divide, Jessie Kerr Lawson supported her family in Canada with journalism and popular ﬁction. She wrote for Dundee’s the People’s Friend as well as for the Glasgow Herald and, in Canada, the popular Grip and The Week, and was widely known in both countries (Watters).

The Gaelic dimension While anglophone Scots had early gained a foothold in the literary circles of North America, inroads in Gaelic publishing would come much later. The use of Gaelic in di≠erent parts of Canada and the United States varied between bilingualism and unilingualism. For example, in 1829, the Rev. Matthew Miller said that while ‘a surprisingly high proportion’ of the Scottish immigrants to Upper and Lower Canada had Gaelic, many could understand English (Moir: 99–100). On the other hand, parts of Cape Breton and around Pictou in Nova Scotia, and regions of New Brunswick such as Black River, were unilingually Gaelic. Imported bibles and testaments were the most common books in Gaelic, as indeed they were in English (SGUC). In 1841, Nova Scotia included a clause in the Education Act entitling any school ‘wherein the ordinary instructions may be in the French, Gaelic, or German language . . . to the like portion of the public money as any school wherein . . . instruction may be in the English language’ (XLIII: 14). In addition to religious materials, Scottish music often had a Gaelic element and, for example, Hund & Seebold, pianoforte makers in Quebec, in 1820 advertised in the Quebec Mercury ‘Favorite Scottish Airs and Melodies’ with song titles in both Gaelic and English (1 Sept.). In 1832, James D. Haszard published Ainmeanna Cl[i]uiteach Chriosd in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and Donald Matheson’s Laoidhean Spioradail was published in Pictou, Nova Scotia, a town that would become known for its Gaelic publishing. James Dawson regularly sold Gaelic books at his shop in Pictou and included both imported and locally-printed Gaelic titles in the advertising pages of his weekly newspaper the Bee (Nilsen: 128–30). In the meantime, Gaelic writers in Nova Scotia used local printing o∞ces as well as Glasgow publishers for their work (SGUC; Nilsen: 127). By mid-century, Canada had a Gaelic periodical press. In 1851, the Canadian-born John Boyd set up a printing press in Antigonish, Nova

bookseller to the world

453

Scotia and published, for about a year, the monthly An Cuairtear Og Gaelich. This periodical included poetry and prose, some original and some gathered from other sources. Though Antigonish, near Pictou, was in the heartland of Highland Scottish settlements, the audience for the paper was not large enough to sustain it and, in June 1852, Boyd launched the more successful Casket, which initially included four pages in Gaelic and four in English (Nilsen: 134–5). Outside the Maritimes, Toronto and Kingston were among the towns where Gaelic or partially Gaelic periodicals were published, but these were often short-lived and their material was mainly borrowed from Scottish publications. Similarly derivative publications were produced in the southern United States, where patterns of Highland immigration after the American Revolution meant that most Gaels arrived either by way of Canada or had been born there (Newton). The export of Scottish culture to Canada and the United States took many forms. Of particular importance to the cultural development of nineteenth-century Canada and the United States were those Scots in the book trade who brought their faith, their education and their business competencies, and put these to use in wholly unsentimental and e≠ective ways in the forging of new nations. Emigration of book-trade personnel to Canada and the United States increased throughout the century. The demand side, which more frequently imported from London than from Scotland, included an inordinate number of Scottish merchants, stationers, bookbinders, booksellers and circulating librarians who, despite the generally small scale and localised nature of their businesses, contributed to increasingly sophisticated networks of print and formed the vanguard of that ‘army of Scots and Ulstermen’ who were so instrumental in the development of the book trade in many regions of North America (Parker 1985: 25).

454

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 8.4 Mohawk Gospel of John, 1805. John Norton (1770–1831?), grew up in Dunfermline and after moving to Edinburgh joined the Army and was stationed in Canada. After deserting in 1787, he lived in the Great Lakes region where he learned native languages and became a Mohawk chief under the name of Teyoninhokarawen. He was an advocate for the Six Nations of Mohawks whom he attempted to help in their assimilation of European inﬂuences while, at the same time, maintaining their cultural identity. To which end, Norton translated the Gospel of St John into Mohawk, Nen Karighwiyoston tsinihorighhoten ne Saint John, which was published in a parallel version by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1805.

India Graham Shaw In the experience of thirty years’ residence in India . . . no settlement of the Company was ever without a faction of them; they attract each other and stick as close together, as the amber and the straw. No man of any other nation can be served in a province where the Chief is a Scot, whilst a Scotchman is to be found . . . If Lord Macartney (if he is not an Irishman) at Madras, and Mr. Macpherson at Bengal, do not ﬁll all the o∞ces with young bonny lads from the same country, I shall wonder at it. (Sandeman: 665) By the late eighteenth century, as this comment from 1779 suggests, the impression was already forming in India of a considerable and selfdeﬁning Scottish community. Scots fostered their own sense of distinct identity through a number of cultural practices, as elsewhere, including the formation of societies, public celebrations, and through literary expression and the use of print. A Highland Society was ﬁrst convened in Calcutta about 1788 when two editions of its rules were printed in the space of three months, attesting to its popularity. The Madras equivalent was founded in 1814, and no doubt Bombay followed suit about the same time. The report of the 1814 St Andrew’s anniversary dinner in Calcutta is typical: ‘The eyes of all true Scots were delighted by beholding a plenteous supply of haggis, sheep’s head, and oaten cakes . . . heightened by cordial draughts of Highland Whiskey’ (Sandeman: 345–6, 375). At the 1815 dinner, variations on Auld Lang Syne were coined including: What cheers us ’mid the sultry toils O’ India’s scorchin’ clime? It’s nae the Rupees’ watchin’ smiles, It’s thoughts o’ Auld Lang Syne. (ibid.: 406)

456

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

In India, this feeling of ‘Scottishness’ was modulated through an overarching loyalty to the Union and the British Empire. Scots had been active in the East India Company project from its inception, not only in India but further aﬁeld in Asia. ‘Jockey’ and ‘Robin’ were two Scottish crewmen on the East-Indiaman Hosiander’s voyage from Bantam, Indonesia to Hirado, Japan in 1615 (Farrington II: 582). The number of Scots in the Company’s service grew steadily throughout the seventeenth and particularly the eighteenth century. Much has been made of the Scottish domination of East India Company appointments, particularly during Sir Henry Dundas’ ‘reign’ at the Board of Control after the 1784 passing of Pitt’s East India Bill, but recent research suggests this is an over-statement (Bowen: 272–5; Fry 1992: 129–33). Nevertheless Scots did excel at networking into Company patronage, and even decades before Dundas (Mackenzie; Bryant). Sir Walter Scott’s much-discussed 1821 description of India as the ‘cornchest for Scotland where we poor gentry must send our youngest sons’ shows what an opportunity for wealth-creation the Company actually represented. Much of that wealth was subsequently invested in Scotland itself, in property, industries and other enterprises. Scots in India, unlike those in Canada or New Zealand for instance, did not form a gradually expanding and permanent settler community but rather a transient one. Individuals came, served and then, if they survived, returned home to be replaced by fresh fortune-seekers (Harper: 287–97; Fry 2001). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Scots permeated every stratum of expatriate society in India, from private soldier to governorgeneral. They were also making signiﬁcant contributions in almost every sphere of activity. They were prominent in the East India Company’s civil administration, army and marine. They undertook civil engineering and surveying projects, and developed India’s infrastructure. They were important in trade and commerce, from operating houses of agency to cultivating indigo, tea and jute. They excelled in the professions such as law, education and medicine, often combined with missionary activity. Lastly, they were deeply involved in the intellectual life of India as pioneers in scientiﬁc and academic enquiry, from Indian botany and archaeology to the study of regional languages as well as literatures (Cain; Smailes; Rendall). The Bombay Literary Society, which later became the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, was founded by a Scot, Sir James Mackintosh. Outstanding Scottish ﬁgures such as Thomas Munro, John Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone helped develop a theory of British governance in India heavily inﬂuenced by the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment (McLaren 1993; 2001).

bookseller to the world

457

A community in print Newspapers from home played a vital role in maintaining identity. On average the expatriate community managed to keep no more than three or four months behind on news. But that time-lag inevitably ﬂuctuated, as the ﬂow of information depended upon the safe and punctual arrival of ships from Europe – not entirely predictable. For instance, in April 1811 Sir James Mackintosh at Bombay complained of ‘seven months from the date of the last London news – a pause of unexampled length’ (II: 97). As soon as they arrived, fresh ﬁles of British newspapers were shamelessly cannibalised for column inches by their counterparts in the three British Presidency capitals Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, such was the dearth of local news. Taking the 1832 Calcutta Courier as an example, items were reprinted not only from London and English provincial but also from Scottish titles. Apart from The Scotsman, that year the Dumfries Courier, Edinburgh Evening Courant, Edinburgh Observer, Glasgow Courier, New North Britain and Perth Courier all featured as news sources. Scottish periodicals, such as the Edinburgh Review and the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, were also quoted but to a lesser extent. Examining the Bengal Weekly Messenger for 1825, we can add Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Edinburgh Journal of Science and the Glasgow Magazine to this list. The 1832 Calcutta Courier also provides a typical range of news from home – political, economic, social and cultural – that Scots in India were reading: the lucrative ﬂounder ﬁshing o≠ Greenock, the Duke of Buccleuch’s hunting accident, prisoners escaping from Stirling Gaol, destruction of the anatomy theatre in Aberdeen, petition raised against the Great Reform Bill by Perthshire gentry, the Earl of Marr’s trial for a shooting, statistics of Glasgow’s population, stage-coaches and steam engines, and a sudden run on Scottish banks. In Sir Walter Scott’s ﬁnal year, his movements were faithfully followed: departure for Europe for health reasons, return to London, and his last journey to Abbotsford. From the 1780s onwards, the Indian newspapers were full of advertisements for British books, journals and newspapers imported as speculative cargoes by local general merchants; and Scottish titles were certainly regularly o≠ered. Among the biggest markets for imported books were the circulating libraries which opened in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. These were mostly operated by local printers who had to diversify their business to survive. Some circulating libraries also o≠ered reading room facilities such as the Bengal Subscription, Reading and Billiard Rooms where in between frames members could read Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Edinburgh Review (Das

458

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Gupta VI: 608–9). Printers diversiﬁed still further by selling books directly to the public. In March 1794 the Bombay Courier newspaper o∞ce was advertising for sale bound copies of ‘a select collection of original Scots songs . . . with the harmony adapted by the celebrated Haydn’ and ‘Napier’s New Music’ in two folio volumes. Music was always in demand for its power to evoke nostalgia. Books also circulated after the deaths of their owners: copies of Scott’s Quentin Durward, Redgauntlet, Peveril of the Peak and Tales of the Crusaders all featured in the sale of Captain James Grant’s estate at Madras in August 1827.5 Compressed or small-format editions were particularly popular as they reduced the costs of shipping and suited the peripatetic life of Company employees in India. In the 1832 Calcutta Courier, we ﬁnd advertised Patrick Tytler’s Lives of Scottish Worthies and Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft in ‘Murray’s Family Library’, Scott’s History of Scotland in Lardner’s ‘Cabinet Cyclopaedia’, and the Rev. Michael Russell’s Palestine in Oliver & Boyd’s ‘Edinburgh Cabinet Library’. By the 1830s English-language books were being imported from France and the United States of America as well as Britain. The Paris editions of A. & W. Galignani, such as all Scott’s novels in six octavo volumes and his poetry and memoirs in one octavo volume, were o≠ered at a fraction of the price of London editions. From New York came the stereotype editions of J. & J. Harper such as the ‘Family Library’ series including again Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft. Poetry as well as ﬁction was popular. Strangely, Robert Burns was not much in demand. In the 1832 Calcutta Courier he is advertised only as included in Jones’ four-volume Cabinet Edition of Select British Poets. But Robert Cromek’s Select Scottish Songs, Ancient and Modern, with Critical Observations and Biographical Notices by Robert Burns appeared frequently, as did John Lockhart’s Life of Robert Burns. Next to Scott, James Hogg is most often mentioned – his Altrive Tales, A Queer Book and Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd. Thomas Campbell’s poetical works were advertised along with Robert Couper’s Poetry Chieﬂy in the Scottish Language. During this period, the towering British literary ﬁgure in India was undoubtedly Sir Walter Scott, whose popularity spread throughout the expatriate community from the professional élite to the common soldiery. As his friend John Leyden wrote to him from Calcutta in 1810: Your ‘Marmion’ is quite the rage here, and it is very dubious whether that or the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ is most so . . . 5

IOR Madras Inventories 1829 L/AG/34/27/260.

bookseller to the world

459

Brigadier-General Malcolm, whom I formerly mentioned from Eskdale, has you constantly under his pillow, and we rejoice over you like an ancient when a few of us Borderers can get together. (Seshadri: 107–8) In 1821 Miss Georgina Cherry on board ship for Madras was reading The Heart of Midlothian: ‘I do not like it at all, it is about a girl who was not lawfully married. I shall be glad when it is ﬁnished’ (Stanford: 48). In 1834, reporting on military libraries, Lieutenant-Colonel James Auriol at Chunar near Benares remarked: ‘Scott’s novels and poems have been the most sought for and read by the soldiers, more particularly the novels.’ The additional books for soldiers in Bengal sent out in 1833 included, besides Scott’s novels, John Lockhart’s Life of Robert Burns, John Carrick’s Life of Sir William Wallace, Patrick Tytler’s Lives of Scottish Worthies and John Galt’s The Ayrshire Legatees, Annals of the Parish, Lawrie Todd and Bogle Corbet (Baxter: 28, 30). Oddly, no editions of Scott’s novels or poetry appear to have been published in India itself. From the 1832 Calcutta Courier we know that many editions of Scott – sets as well as single titles – were being regularly imported. Presumably these satisﬁed demand, and were sold at a price that would undercut any local edition as printing costs were much higher in India than in Britain. Book imports met all manner of recreational and reference reading needs. Among titles advertised in the 1832 Calcutta Courier were the historical works of William Robertson, Henry Bell’s Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Robert Chambers’ multi-volume History of the Rebellions in Scotland, John McGregor’s British America, John Galt’s autobiography The Member, William Guthrie’s A New Geographical, Historical, and Economical Grammar, Lord Woodhouselee’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, David Craigie’s Elements of General and Pathological Anatomy and Sketches from Nature by John McDiarmid, editor of the Dumfries and Galloway Courier. Titles such as Robert Chambers’ Scottish Jests and Anecdotes and James Baillie Fraser’s The Highland Smugglers were listed alongside ‘The Holy Bible printed at Edinburgh 1828’ and The Edinburgh Gazetteer. Scottish school books included Stories Selected from the History of Scotland for Children, Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, being Stories Taken from the History of France, David Irving’s The Elements of English Composition and Alexander Ingram’s A Concise System of Mathematics. Illustrated works made expensive imports, but titles such as William Daniell’s Illustrations of the Island of Sta≠a were advertised, alongside the cheaper o≠ering of single

460

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

prints of Ben Lomond, Roslin Castle and the Falls of Clyde from The Scottish Tourist and Itinerary. Many of those in the professional élite brought out or developed impressive private libraries. That of Sir James Mackintosh, Recorder of Bombay, was particularly renowned, as Maria Graham observed during her 1809 visit: Sir James possesses the best library that ever doubled the Cape. It is arranged in a large room like the cell of a temple, surrounded with a veranda inclosed by Venetian shutters, which admit and exclude the light and air at pleasure. (6) Mackintosh’s collection was updated twice a year with books sent by his brother-in-law and fellow Scot Daniel Stuart, the well-known London newspaper editor. Mackintosh’s memoirs attest to his voracious appetite for books and periodicals. On 9 June 1808, he was reading numbers 28 and 29 of the Edinburgh Review, and on 4 July began numbers 30 and 31. His memoirs also convey how prominent reading was in the daily routine of life, in his case as a judge ‘to soothe before court, and to refresh after it’ (II: 23, 32, 105). Reading was important to those on the periphery of an English-language book world striving to stay in touch and not succumb to a sense of cultural isolation. On 6 July 1808, he wrote: ‘I have just got, by a most lucky chance, Wordsworth’s new Poems. I owe them some most delightful hours of abstraction from the petty vexations of the little world where I live’ (I: 409–10). Mackintosh was less ﬂattering about Scott’s poetry. After reading The Lady of the Lake, he wrote on 20 January 1811: He is a national, almost a county, poet, which aids his popularity, and may shorten his fame. He selects, in a barbarous period, of a very barbarous country, the two most barbarous bodies of men – for ‘The Lay’ the Borderers, and for ‘The Lady’ the Highlanders . . . If the rank of poets were to be settled by particular passages, I should place Campbell above Scott. Mackintosh also had decided views about journals, as when discussing John Murray’s Quarterly Review on 18 June 1811: ‘In general it as much surpasses the “Edinburgh” in taste and pleasantry, as it yields to it in reason and feelosophy; it is neither so instructive nor so popular.’ On 20 October 1811 he was reading Mary Brunton’s novel Self-Control, which had gone into three editions that year at Edinburgh: ‘religious, but not irrational; not a very well contrived story, but full of excellent sentiment; and, notwithstanding a few Scotticisms, elegantly written’ (II: 81–2, 103, 143).

bookseller to the world

461

The Scottish literary contribution The lack of original creative writing by expatriates was frequently commented upon, as in Colonel Mrs Elwood’s account of her residence in India from 1825 to 1828: I was well amused, one day, with hearing a lady just fresh from Edinburgh and its literary coteries, innocently asking a Bombay belle ‘whether she made poetry?’. Now, as there are but few, even of the lordly sex, guilty of trespassing on Parnassian ground in India . . . the astonishment of the one at the question, and the consternation of the other at her surprise, were perfectly ludicrous. She observed to me afterwards with great naïveté, ‘every body made verses in Scotland, and she thought they might do the same at Bombay’. (II: 100) Looking through the 1825 Bengal Weekly Messenger, there are occasional, somewhat trite verses contributed by Scots: a song signed simply ‘R.’ with the refrain ‘Come ye sons of mirth be cheery/ Sons of Scotia swell the song’; a long nostalgic poem entitled A Scotch Farmer’s Day; and a sonnet by ‘Rob Roy’ reprinted from the Madras Courier. The best-known Scottish literary ﬁgure, albeit relatively minor, to work in India in the early nineteenth century was John Leyden, an assistant surgeon and then judge in the East India Company’s service. Before leaving Scotland for Madras in 1803, he had achieved some literary standing by editing The Complaynt of Scotland for the publisher Archibald Constable and by collecting materials for the earlier volumes of Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Once in India, Leyden eagerly set about investigating the regional languages and literatures, ‘digging away like a Turkish galley-slave in the Oriental mines’ (Seshadri: 108), and in 1810 published his pioneering linguistic work, A Comparative Vocabulary of the Barma, Maláyu and T’hái Languages. A year later he died on Java aged just 36. Having accompanied his fellow border Scot Lord Minto on his expedition against the Dutch and French, he caught a fever after venturing into ‘an unventilated native library’, no doubt in search of yet more manuscripts (ODNB). Several Scots made their mark in early Indian journalism, sometimes achieving notoriety for their brushes with the East India Company over press freedom. In 1815 Dr James Bryce, minister of the Calcutta Scots Presbyterian Kirk, attacked through his weekly Asiatic Mirror the press clamp-down introduced by his fellow Scot, John Adam, chief secretary to the Bengal government (Cain: 87). In 1824 a daily newspaper aimed speciﬁcally at ‘Indo-Scots’ was launched in Calcutta. William Pitt

462

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Muston, a surgeon in Bengal, applied for a licence to continue publishing the Calcutta Journal newspaper soon after the East India Company had suppressed its publication and expelled from India its notoriously outspoken editor, James Silk Buckingham. This request was denied, but Muston was permitted to start a new daily, The Scotsman in the East, having obtained a lease on Buckingham’s Columbian Press for a year. Muston was increasingly in trouble with the company, especially for criticising the lack of press freedom and the treatment of Buckingham – one violation in June 1824 rising to twenty in March 1825. No surviving copies have been traced, and how long it continued has not been ascertained.6 One of the longest-serving Scottish journalists was George Buist, who edited the Bombay Times from 1839 until 1857 when he was sacked for his intemperate language in describing the horrors of the Indian Mutiny. During the 1878 Afghan War one enterprising Scot John Alexander Cameron used the new electric telegraph to scoop the news of the relief of Kandahar (Cain: 88). The works of Walter Scott were amongst the earliest and most pervasive of Western inﬂuences upon the development of the modern regional-language literatures of India. He was also one of the ﬁrst inspirations for the totally new phenomenon of Indian creative writing in English. The ‘acculturation’ of Scott in India can be seen, therefore, as an early piece in the process of widely-scattered literatures becoming ‘more uniform and, at a superﬁcial level, more Westernized’, leading ‘towards world literature’ (Bayly: 385–9). As the nineteenth century wore on, Scott’s poems and novels were increasingly read by the newly emergent Indian middle class. In Indian English literature, it was his poems which were more inﬂuential. The famous Dutt Family Album, a poetry miscellany by Govin Chunder Dutt and other members of that prominent Calcutta family published in London in 1870, included romantic verse tales in imitation of Scott’s historical ballads. One on an Indian hero Samarsi consciously echoed the form and style of Lochinvar (Mehrotra: 59–61). Michael Madhusudan Datta, for a while married to the daughter of a Scottish indigo planter, began his literary career in English before emerging as a major Bengali poet. His long narrative poem The Captive Ladie, published in 1849, was modelled on Scott and Byron (Dharwadker: 228). Although most translations of Scott into the regional languages were published after our period, the inﬂuence of his historical novels was felt early on in Bengali and Marathi literature, sparking the reinterpretation in ﬁction of episodes from medieval Indian history, both Islamic 6

IOR Home Miscellaneous Series 533, 585–661; 536a, 279–323.

bookseller to the world

463

and Hindu. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, regarded as the ﬁrst true Indian novelist, admired Scott while dismissing Austen and Eliot as rather insigniﬁcant novelists (Raychaudhuri: 173). His very ﬁrst Bengali novel, Durgeshnandini (‘The Fortress Commander’s Daughter’), published in 1865 was an instant success. Set during the medieval period of Muslim rule in Bengal, it was modelled closely on Ivanhoe (Zbavitel: 239–40). Scott’s inﬂuence can also be seen in Ramchandra Bhikaji Gunjikar’s Mocangad (‘Freedom Fort’), the ﬁrst Marathi historical novel, published in Bombay in 1871 and featuring the Maratha hero Shivaji (Clark 1970: 95–9). Scott’s poetry also exerted an inﬂuence, if less so than the historical novels. In Marathi, Bajaba Ramchandra Pradhan wrote Daivaseni, an adaptation of The Lady of the Lake (1867). In 1875 Rakhaladasa Sengupta published Seshabandir Gana, a Bengali translation of The Lay of the Last Minstrel.

Scotland and the Indian book trade Scots played a prominent part in the ﬂedgling book-trade in India. The earliest ‘North Britons’ with pertinent skills who can be traced embarking for India did so as newly enlisted men in the East India Company’s army. Presumably they were escaping either an unhappy apprenticeship or a failing business. Alexander Osborn, a bookbinder, sailed for Fort St George, Madras on the East-Indiaman Townshend in 1719 and Richard Batey, copper-plate printer, on the Essex in 1753 (Despatches: 79; Public: 137). SBTI records an ‘Alexander Osborne apprentice bookseller Edinburgh 1702’, but no Richard Batey. George Gordon, nephew of the King’s Printer William Strahan, claimed upon arrival in Calcutta in 1783 to be the ‘ﬁrst professionally trained’ printer working in India (Shaw 1981: 48–50). Several other Scottish names, such as Hay, Mackay, Stuart and White crop up as early Calcutta printers-cum-publishers-cum-booksellers, but only rarely are any details of their ancestry revealed. From William Mackay’s will of 1788, for instance, we learn that he left one quarter of his estate to his brother George Mackay, an Edinburgh printer.7 SBTI does not record a George Mackay at that date. It was from Scotland that lithography was introduced into India. James Nathaniel Rind, an assistant surgeon in the Bengal Medical Service, was taught the new process in 1822 while on convalescent leave in Edinburgh by an old school-friend Alexander Forrester. Rind instantly appreciated lithography’s applicability ‘to the wants of India, 7

IOR Bengal Wills 1787–90 L/AG/34/29/6.

464

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

especially in printing the oriental character, a thing yet only partially e≠ected with type’. Returning to Calcutta in August that year, Rind brought with him the lithographic equipment with which he founded the Government Lithographic Press (Shaw 1998: 93; SBTI). John Ruthven & Co. of Edinburgh became one of the leading suppliers of printing presses to India. Printing by Scottish missionary societies in India was not on a large scale. Their book and tract needs were mostly met by a combination of items printed on other mission presses in the subcontinent or imported from Britain. However, the Scottish Missionary Society did establish its ﬁrst press in India in 1827 at Bankot on the Konkan coast below Bombay, producing Christian tracts in Marathi. In southern Rajasthan the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland Mission set up another lithographic press at Beawar in 1863, printing mainly in the Marwari dialect (Murdoch 1870: 98, 105–6, 267). During the nineteenth century, and particularly in the wake of Charles Wood’s 1854 Education Despatch broadening English as the medium of instruction, an enormous and potentially very lucrative market for English-language educational materials of all kinds, from grammars and primers to individual subject text books, emerged. India would be one of the ﬁrst markets where the ‘imperial book system’ began to operate very much to home publishers’ advantage. It was the London-based Scottish publishers such as Macmillan and Murray (see ‘The London Scots’) who exploited this opportunity to greatest e≠ect. Later in the century various Scottish publishers, like their London counterparts, were keen to tap this Indian educational book market, but the development largely took place after our period. Blackie & Son of Glasgow, for instance, did not consider extending their activities to India until 1891, although some of their titles were reaching India well before then, for example their Comprehensive Readers series launched in 1879 (Blackie 1959: 53).

The Paciﬁc Wallace Kirsop Although Scottish emigration to Australasia was never as massive as to North America, it was an important component of colonial life overall and in some places, for example Gippsland and the Western District of Victoria or Otago and the Southland in New Zealand, close to being the preponderant cultural inﬂuence derived from the British Isles in the course of the nineteenth century. It is true that, compared with the English, fewer Scots were transported convicts, but, especially after 1820 and in the shadow of the Clearances, free settlers, assisted emigrants and participants in the various gold rushes that began in the 1850s came to play a growing part in the societies that received them. Even in the early decades of Australian settlement Scottish naval, military and civil o∞cials, notably Governors Hunter, Macquarie and Brisbane, not to mention Colonial Secretary Alexander McLeay (1767–1848), in New South Wales, did much to shape and foster the institutions that enshrined European civilisation. Due attention has to be paid to the particular political, social and even religious character of the various colonies, but it is striking how much was owed to models for the organisation of free secular education and for course structures for universities inspired by Edinburgh and Glasgow rather than by Oxford and Cambridge. To trace these patterns and trends is at the same time to recognise the contribution of a book trade that had substantial input from Scottish sources. Ultimately one is led to the conclusion that people born north of the Tweed had Australian and New Zealand roles beyond their numerical importance, not least in bookselling, publishing, collecting and the establishment of libraries. It is clear, too, that the impulse to be active in these ﬁelds did not die out after the ﬁrst generation of immigrants. Alongside the Scottish involvement in the mainstream culture, there was – more obviously in the nineteenth century than later – continuing

466

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

provision for separate activities both clerical and secular. Thus the diverse manifestations of Presbyterianism, the existence of overtly Caledonian associations and the survival of Gaelic all need to be treated, however much they have been overshadowed by spectacular achievements of Scots in society at large. Coping with a newly settled country has a personal and individual dimension as well as a public one; therefore a brief presentation, based perforce on incomplete evidence, cannot ignore private strategies for survival that led into the later triumphs of entrepreneurs any more than it can push aside all the ways in which people clung to an old discrete identity. The earliest arrivals in Britain’s colonies in the South Seas had to resort during more than three decades to various expedients in order to obtain reading matter. The local o∞cial presses produced very little, whether in Sydney or in Hobart, and auction sales of the books and other possessions of deceased or departing settlers and o∞cials were not numerous before 1820. As a result professional users and other readers of books had to rely on what they brought with them or had sent later by reliable suppliers in their countries of origin. An outstanding example was the collection of Alexander Berry (1781–1873), who, after studying at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh and becoming a ship’s surgeon, eventually turned merchant and settled in New South Wales (which he ﬁrst visited in 1808) in 1819. His library, which included books from his student years, was dispersed in the second half of the twentieth century along with the paintings and furniture of his Coolangatta Park house on the Shoalhaven River (Cornall: 205). More often than appears to have been the case in the cities, such countryhouse treasures avoided being sent to auctioneers or to booksellers immediately after the owners’ deaths. Later the practice seems to have emerged for successful pastoralists of Scottish origin to take a trip back ‘home’ to ﬁt out libraries for the grand houses that replaced the huts of pioneering days. George Russell (1812–88) of Golf Hill (Dwyer and Cowley) and William Lyall (1821–88) of Harewood were two Victorians who took advantage of visits to Edinburgh booksellers, but the latter and his family were more diligent in studying what they had acquired. More serious collectors, though, were in the habit of receiving catalogues from booksellers, particularly in London. Once one moves away from the libraries of prominent men, bringing data together becomes much more di∞cult. Chance discoveries of annotated copies of relevant books help to identify links with the homeland. When Margaret McKay from Sutherland set up home near Ararat in Victoria in the later nineteenth century she brought with her

bookseller to the world

467

Figure 8.5 Bookcase from the Library of George Russell. George Russell (1812–88) arrived in Australia in the 1830s, like many of his countrymen, to take up a sheep run in rural Victoria. Financial security allowed him to return to Edinburgh in 1853 in order to acquire a library, largely made up of second-hand books of Scottish interest, for his ﬁrst homestead. Increased a±uence in the 1870s led him to commission the building of a considerable mansion. This is one of two bookcases in native wood made for his estate at Golf Hill, Victoria, whose manufacture coincides with a large consignment of books ordered in 1878 from the London bookseller, Sotheran. Whereas the physical state and subject matter of the 1853 books suggest a more practical attitude towards reading, the later consignment, more polite and ‘English’ in its contents, suggests the display library of a landed gentleman. The series are uniformly bound and a large number remain uncut. The transformation of Russell’s library corresponds with his own move from Scottish sheep farmer to prominent member of the largely anglophile Melbourne élite.

468

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

a Gaelic bible and psalter acquired in the 1860s (VSL). Similar family relics, whether intact and recorded or not, demonstrate the transfer of traditions, language and literary or religious culture to the colonies. As the century advanced it became less necessary to have recourse to family and friends in order to obtain books. The initial basis of the industry was provided by the o∞cial presses, sources for the period before 1820 of the only authorised newspapers in Sydney and Hobart and therefore of the sole e≠ective advertising beyond handwritten notices and the work of criers and bellmen. Part of the limited output of these ﬁrst printers was work for the missions in New Zealand and the Paciﬁc, a foretaste of domination from New South Wales and, later, Victoria of a vast zone the London trade grouped together after 1850 as ‘Australia’. The outstanding ﬁgure, the ex-convict printer George Howe (1769–1821), had, as has recently been revealed (Robb 2003: 11–13), as his ﬁrst wife the sister of Alexander McLeay, a circumstance that helps to explain his access to inﬂuential Anglo-Scottish patronage networks. However, there is no evidence that Howe was importing books from Britain for retail sale alongside his own publications. The 1820s saw the development of a consignment trade that was important in both Australia and New Zealand till the 1850s and continued even beyond that time. In essence it consisted in the shipping by various London booksellers of cases of remainders, oddments and generally cheap publications to agents who arranged for auctions in the various colonial ports (Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Launceston, Adelaide, Port Fairy, Wellington) chosen as destinations. It was a rather haphazard system, close to dumping, that allowed some publishers and wholesalers to clear their shelves and occasionally brought colonial readers welcome material they could not obtain locally. Scottish houses rarely seem to have been directly involved, but some of their products undoubtedly reached the Paciﬁc in this way. Much more signiﬁcant in the longer term were the attempts made to establish bookselling businesses, often on the eighteenth-century and provincial model where books and periodicals were sold, and lent through circulating libraries, and sat cheek by jowl with fancy goods and patent medicines. George Howe’s son Robert and then the latter’s widow Ann owned the Australian Stationery Warehouse in the late 1820s and early 1830s, when the concern was e≠ectively managed and controlled by William McGarvie (1810–41), a Glasgow journalist and the younger brother of John McGarvie (1795–1853), a Presbyterian divine imported to Sydney in 1826 to assist that extraordinary ﬁgure John Dunmore Lang (1799–1878), who dominated the tumultuous history of his church in Australia for six decades. William McGarvie was one of the founders

bookseller to the world

469

in 1831 of the Sydney Herald, which, as the Sydney Morning Herald, is still the formidable doyen of Australian newspapers. Given the prominence Scots and descendants of Scots were to have in Australian and New Zealand publishing right down to the twenty-ﬁrst century, there is a more than modest portent in McGarvie’s brief career. In line with the e≠orts made by some London bookselling families in the eighteenth century to set up branches in North America it is hardly astonishing to see similar ventures in the Australian colonies. The best known are those of two sons, James and Samuel Augustus, of Thomas Tegg of Cheapside in New South Wales and Tasmania between 1834 and 1847. The value of such initiatives was not lost on the Scottish trade. When young George Boyd, of the Edinburgh publishing family, died intestate in Melbourne in February 1843 he left not only real estate but a substantial amount of stationery, which was eventually sold at auction on 30 November 1844. Was this a personal adventure or part of a deliberate incursion into the nascent Port Phillip market? We are better informed about John Carfrae, who, after failing as a bookseller in Edinburgh, emigrated to Melbourne in 1841 and then, in late 1843, transferred to Sydney. In the colony Carfrae was an auctioneer and commission agent, dealing among other things in consignments from his former colleagues in Scotland (Hubber). His di∞culties in his new sphere of activity mirrored those of many contemporaries in the depressed colonial economy of the 1840s. It is easy to cite other Scottish names in this troubled time before the gold rushes that began in the 1850s. The pioneer typefounder Alexander Thompson, who arrived in Sydney in 1841, is one candidate (Bryans). Another is the egregious William Kerr (1812–59), whose stormy progress through public life in Victoria as an ally of J. D. Lang was marked by strident anti-Catholic journalism and his foundation of the Argus (1846–1957), which was later to become Melbourne’s great conservative daily. Although networks of compatriots and co-religionists were important to activists like Kerr, the fundamental observation to make is that they were operating in the wider society and not in some Caledonian ghetto. Indeed when one looks at the most obviously Scottish settlements of mid-century, in Otago and in Gippsland, it is striking how quickly they were forced out of isolation and inwardness by broader economic and demographic changes. In this context, as in the British Isles themselves, it is necessary to think of an open rather than closed diaspora, of people aware of their cultural inheritance yet ready to grasp fresh chances and to evolve. The new spirit is certainly to be observed in the period that began coincidentally with the ﬁrst Australian gold rushes and with Lord Campbell’s

470

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

determination of 1852, the signal for two generations of free trade in books. The Australian colonies, including New Zealand, not only experienced a surge in population that brought an inﬂux of well-qualiﬁed professionals, but also set up wholesaling arrangements that were to be of great advantage to retailers and their customers till the end of the century. Foremost among the new leaders of the trade was George Robertson (1825–98), Glasgow-born but Dublin-trained, who started in late 1852 a house that was until the 1890s the largest wholesaler-importer and publisher, and also had substantial retail outlets in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane. By the early 1870s George Robertson & Co. were importing over £100,000-worth of books and stationery, and there were over 50,000 titles held in the Melbourne warehouse. There were other importers, but Robertson’s commanding position in Australia, New Zealand and even Fiji was not really challenged till the late 1880s, when branches and agencies of British publishers began to be established in Melbourne and, to a lesser extent, in Sydney (Nicholson 2000). Robertson’s approach to the business was resolutely catholic. As one of the pioneers of the use by Australian-based ﬁrms of London buying o∞ces he scoured the market for books suitable for the diverse, not to say pluralist needs of the colonies. He recruited sta≠ where he could for his various branches, by no means limiting himself to Scots and descendants of Scots. Nevertheless, by the late 1870s and early 1880s he counted amongst his employees some of the people – David Angus (1855–1901), George Robertson of Halstead, Essex (1860–1933) and William Dymock (1861–1900) – who were to be the principals of major successor ﬁrms and to perpetuate Edinburgh and Glasgow inﬂuences and connections. Robertson’s earliest trade catalogue, directed to retailers on both sides of the Tasman in February 1859, drew not only on a wide range of London publishers, but also on several Scottish imprints. Thus one can note titles from Blackwood, Chambers, Gall & Inglis and Nelson so designated, as well as much else by authors born north of the border. Subscriptions were also being taken ‘at English prices, plus half the cost of overland carriage’ (that is, across the Isthmus of Suez) to such journals as the Edinburgh Review, the North British Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. In other words, no readers at the Antipodes would henceforth be deprived of material emanating from Scotland, and Robertson’s monthly advertising magazine (matched by those of other Australian importers of the time) would keep them informed of new publications. Other colonial booksellers were equally inclusive, and, with Adam Melville (1842–1921) formerly of Gall & Inglis in charge of his ambitious circulating library, Robertson’s rival Samuel Mullen was no less aware of Scottish requirements.

bookseller to the world

471

In addition to the solicitude shown by general shops there were also specialists to whom one could have recourse. Robert Mackay began in Sydney in 1853 as an agent for Blackie & Co., moved to Melbourne in the early 1860s to set up his ‘Glasgow Book Warehouse’ and eventually transferred to New Zealand. His partner Matthew Hutchinson (1830–1913) stayed on as his successor in Melbourne, giving particular attention to the needs of the Presbyterian Church and to the business of W. & R. Chambers. It is a reminder that in an Australian society that remained strongly sectarian until the second half of the twentieth century there continued to be a place for exclusive purveyors to individual religious groups and their schools. Overwhelmingly, however, Australian and New Zealand Scots tended to make their mark as contributors to the life of the community at large. Moving beyond another newspaper proprietor of great power and prestige, David Syme (1827–1908) of the Melbourne Age, one can point to a critical role in establishing libraries and educational institutions. In particular the enormous success in Australia and New Zealand of mechanics’ institutes, schools of arts and athenaeums – all three terms were used in di≠erent places – owes something to the recognition that Glasgow and Edinburgh had a crucial part in the launching of this international movement. Scottish names are certainly present among the promoters and administrators, a fact that may or may not support notions of culturally determined preferences for self-help and practical instruction. What is certain, on the other hand, is that people of Scots background were prominent in setting up the Bothwell Literary Society and the Evandale Subscription Library in Tasmania before the middle of the nineteenth century. As builders and creators, both physically and intellectually, the colonial Gaels had few peers. One area of striking achievement is book-collecting. Why immigrant Scots and their descendants should have ﬁgured so largely in the annals of Australian bibliophilia is hard to explain, especially since, with the notable later exception of Alexander Turnbull, the tendency is less pronounced in New Zealand. One can venture a certain distance only down the path of seeking impulses in successful settlers to ape the behaviour and the attributes of the gentry at home. By and large simple solutions of this kind do not ﬁt the known cases before 1880 any more than they apply to the twentieth-century successors like Dixson, Ferguson, Ramsay and McLaren. In any individual the level of acquisitive drive, respect for scholarship, public-spiritedness and sheer obsession is bound to be di≠erent. Similarly the exposure to ‘Scottishness’ is inevitably di≠erent from person to person. Sir Charles Nicholson (1808–1903), the nearest thing to a classical virtuoso in colonial New

472

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

South Wales, was born in Cumberland and had studied medicine in Edinburgh. Despite his benefactions then and later to the University of Sydney, his ﬁrst library was auctioned in Melbourne in 1861 before his long return residence in England. John Macgregor arrived in Melbourne from the Isle of Skye as a 12-year-old in 1840 and then spent four decades in the law, in politics and in the spectacular collection of then unfashionable ﬁelds such as the history of science and philosophy. His philanthropy, though not inconsiderable, was secondary, whereas David Scott Mitchell (1836–1907), native-born and one of the ﬁrst graduates of the University of Sydney, pursued his cultural agenda exclusively from a colonial base. More than any other Australian before or since he cultivated bibliophilia as a form of higher scholarship, for the ultimate beneﬁt of users of the State Library of New South Wales. There are other names: Nichol Drysdale Stenhouse (1806–73), former Writer to the Signet, then solicitor and literary patron in Sydney; William Rae (1823–87) of ‘Happy Valley’, Bendigo; Archibald Michie (1813–99), Victorian attorney-general then agent-general back in London before dying in retirement in suburban Melbourne. The local antiquarian trade, which by and large was not Scottish, will no doubt have had its own views of these enthusiastic customers, who were also assiduous readers of the catalogues of London dealers like Sotheran and Quaritch. If bibliomania is always with us, trade structures are less stable. The re-alignments of the last two decades of the nineteenth century were preﬁgured in the 1870s. Indeed, in the specialist ﬁeld of law bookselling and publishing, Charles Frederick Maxwell, a grandson of the founder of W. Maxwell & Son, went to Melbourne in 1869 to set up a branch of the family ﬁrm (Then and Now). The most signiﬁcant development happened in Sydney in the second half of the next decade when William Collins established a warehouse in the place of its earlier agency arrangements with two bookselling ﬁrms on the spot. Away from the headquarters of the trade in Melbourne the future for all the Australian colonies was being shaped by a ﬁrm that recognised and used local writing talents while continuing to print in Glasgow – ‘almost four million copies’ ‘of seven primers and readers’ ‘within twenty years’(Keir: 179–80, 182). What distinguished a house that was to end paradoxically as part of the global empire of the ultimate Scottish Australian Rupert Murdoch was its close links with Chalmers and the Free Church of Scotland. It was, therefore, intimately associated with the postDisruption emigration, especially to Otago, and with the tradition of Scottish particularism. In the nineteenth century it was possible – at least for a time – to live cocooned in Gaeldom, and this was the experience of people in some of

bookseller to the world

473

Britain’s settlements in the South Seas. The literature aimed at intending emigrants, both practical manuals and the letters home carried by local newspapers; the fellowship enjoyed on board vessels sailing from Greenock with uniformly Scottish and even Gaelic-speaking passengers; the tightly-knit communities formed around kirks, especially those linked to the Free Church; the ﬂourishing of pipe bands and Caledonian societies – all of these things helped to maintain a separate identity over the ﬁrst generation or so. Oral communication, including from the pulpit, played its part, but print was an essential element in a process that kept the homeland and the colony together. The inventory of evidence is by no means complete. It includes shipboard newspapers preserved at the destinations; correspondence with family and friends back in the Highlands or the Lowlands, if the emigrants were su∞ciently literate; the impressions of travellers and visitors in the century’s ubiquitous voyage writings; and all the substantial and ephemeral publications produced in Scotland or in the colonies. For various reasons not everything in the last category has survived or been recorded, so that one is reduced to sampling. Questions of literacy as well as of dispersal inﬂuenced the relatively weaker position of Scottish Gaelic compared with Welsh in the range of Celtic languages that were not only spoken, but also read and written, not to say printed, in the Australian colonies. It has been estimated that there were 6,000 Gaelic speakers in Victoria in 1861 as against 2,000 in New South Wales (Jupp: 800). Although church services in Gaelic survived into the twentieth century, the story is one of decline. Even in New Zealand, where direct connections with Scotland were reinforced by the Waipu link to Nova Scotia, the fact that a Gaelic Society was launched in Dunedin in 1882, in other words quite late as was the case elsewhere except in Geelong, is symptomatic of an entry into an age when museums are needed to preserve the books and realia of a culture threatened with extinction. English became the preferred medium of communication, even for Highlanders, once the immigrants had emerged from their closed groups. In this, Australian and New Zealand policy and practice were simply replicating what was already happening in the British Isles. Consequently the libraries and the literature available to Scots in Melbourne, Sydney, Dunedin and elsewhere were essentially in the imperial language. Some publications were severely practical, like the Rules of the Caledonian Society of Victoria, printed in Melbourne by Alexander Anderson in 1861. On the other hand the parishioners of the Reverend James Forbes’ Scots’ Church in 1842 had access to a general library from which, as its printed catalogue assured them, ‘Novels,

474

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Figure 8.6 Janet Lawrie. Janet Lawrie, born in Ayrshire in 1812, arrived in South Australia in 1855 where her husband was a Scotch Baptist minister and where she lived until her death in 1902. Reading was among the most signiﬁcant cultural practices through which settlers identiﬁed with their Scottish origins. The poetry of Burns and the novels of Scott were particular favourites. Later in the century, the kailyard with its nostalgic image of a Scottish past, had particular appeal.

bookseller to the world

475

Romances and all publications of a Sceptical or Immoral tendency shall be excluded.’ Those who followed Forbes after the Disruption to the Knox Church opposite the future Melbourne Public Library also enjoyed the use of a dedicated, but perhaps even more austere collection. Outside the Kirk, Scottishness was preserved, or fondly remembered, in more sentimental ways in circles of friends and compatriots. The extensive tours of the ‘Kennedy family of Scottish vocalists’, ‘singing the Songs of Scotland’ and travelling ‘minutely through the Colonies, visiting nearly every town and village in Australia, New Zealand and Canada’, give the measure of these more or less informal networks (Kennedy 1872; 1876). With the works of Walter Scott in all respectable libraries and statues of Robert Burns scattered around the countryside, a certain conventional nostalgia was to live on through the generations. Meanwhile, out in the mainstream, Scots entrepreneurs were already celebrating their triumphs. There is a ﬁtting irony in the fact that the old Sydney Showgrounds, site of Highland Games on New Year’s Day, are now the Australian headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s TwentiethCentury Fox Studios.

Appendix A: Personnel in the Print and Allied Trades Ross Alloway Scotland has long had a reputation for having a disproportionate inﬂuence on the British print and allied trades of the nineteenth century. Statistical evidence from the Scottish decennial census reports allows us to measure the extent to which this is the case. These reports make it possible to construct a detailed picture of the rates of growth and relative importance of the print and allied trades by location throughout the second half of the century. The reports have long been recognised as an important resource for nineteenth-century British population statistics (Reynolds). Despite their unparalleled detail and breadth these ﬁgures are not unproblematic and should be understood as approximate rather than exact. Although censuses in Scotland began in 1801, speciﬁc occupations were not recorded until 1841. During the nineteenth century it was commonplace for an individual to be involved in more than one trade, but the census required the recording of the principal occupation of each individual; the following ﬁgures relate to those whose primary occupation was in the print and allied trades. Instability within the deﬁnition of speciﬁc employment categories throughout this period prevents the comparative analysis of the rise and decline of speciﬁc occupations. One census might include the phrase ‘booksellers and publishers’ while another might list these as separate categories. In all but Tables 9.7, 9.9 and 9.10, the numbers therefore represent an aggregate derived from paper manufacture, printing, typefounding, publishing, bookselling, librarianship and other related occupations. The population of the trades in 1841 was 7,195, a number which increased by around 5,000 individuals in each subsequent census (Table 9.1). A dramatic increase in the demand for labour in the trades occurred early on, between 1841 and 1851, with the trade population 476

appendices

477

growing by 84 per cent (Table 9.2). Such expansion was hard to sustain however, and in the subsequent period between 1851 and 1861 this percentage growth dropped by over half, to 37 per cent, remaining relatively steady from 1861 onwards at a rate of around 22 per cent for each subsequent census. This trend is best put into perspective when compared with the increase in the general population: every ten years between 1841 and 1901 the general population increased on average by 11 per cent; in the same period, the print and allied trades averaged 35 per cent growth. This upsurge means that by the end of the nineteenth century the trades had gone from employing 0.73 per cent of the Scottish workforce in 1851 to employing over 2 per cent in 1901 (Table 9.3). Each census lists occupations by county; it is therefore possible to identify the locations where the trades were most prevalent (Table 9.8; see also Table 9.4). Edinburghshire, with its direct land and shipping routes to the English and European markets, and its central economic and political position in Scotland, comes out far ahead of all other counties with an average of 5.1 per cent of its workforce involved from 1841 to 1901. One might presume that Lanarkshire, which includes Glasgow with its large paper trade and signiﬁcant concentration of publishers, would follow next; in fact, Aberdeenshire registered 1.9 per cent of its workforce in the trades, while Lanarkshire returned only 1.7 per cent. On the other hand, given the preponderance of heavy industries in Lanarkshire this is perhaps not so surprising. With the notable exception of Aberdeenshire, a smaller percentage of the workforce in the northern counties was involved in the trades. As the numbers in Table 9.8 are averages over a sixty-year period, the order shifts somewhat depending upon the year. Moreover, as the percentages are relative to general population sizes, it would be incorrect to conclude that a county like Lanarkshire with a much larger general population than Edinburghshire had a dramatically smaller numerical share of the trades. In fact, Lanarkshire’s share comes just behind Edinburghshire’s when it is averaged over the seven censuses, with a total of 7,106 compared to Edinburghshire’s 8,204. As the nineteenth century wore on, women were increasingly involved. Whereas in 1841 they comprised only 15 per cent of the workforce, by 1901 they comprised 40 per cent (Table 9.6). The extraordinary demand for labour in the period between 1841 and 1851 played an important role in opening up the trades to women: in the same period there was a 191 per cent increase in women, compared to 53 per cent in males. The most likely place of employment for women was Aberdeenshire (or the county of Aberdeen) where, on average, women made up 45 per cent of the population of the trades over the six censuses. Perhaps surprisingly, Edinburghshire comes fourth at 29 per

478

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

cent, after Berwickshire and Dumfries-shire. It is important to note that the jobs that women ﬁlled were relatively unskilled regardless of where they were. In Edinburghshire in 1841, for example, of the 1,181 individuals listed under the category ‘printer’, only four were women. By contrast, 51 per cent of workers in paper manufacture were women. It took some time for women to advance into the more skilled occupations, and it was only in 1881 that women represented a signiﬁcant proportion (18 per cent) of those listed as printers in the county of Edinburgh. However resistant the print and allied trades were to the employment of a skilled female workforce, by the end of the nineteenth century they had become a ﬁxture; indeed by 1901, 31 per cent of printers in Edinburghshire were women. Scotland’s considerable impact on British print production is reﬂected in the relatively high concentration of labour in the print and allied trades. Although England and Wales had a far larger number of individuals involved in the print and allied trades, Scotland had a consistently higher proportion of its workforce employed in the relevant occupations (Table 9.3). From 1841 to 1901, Scotland averaged a 26 per cent higher proportion than England and Wales. Likewise, Edinburghshire had, on average, an astonishing 68 per cent higher proportion than London (Table 9.4). As these ﬁgures show, Scotland’s reputation for punching above its weight was well deserved, one might even say underestimated.

479

appendices Source for all Tables is Census Records Table 9.1 Employee numbers in the print and allied trades in Scotland, 1841–1901.

39,564

40,000 33,752

35,000 30,000

27,746

25,000

22,248

20,000

18,154

15,000 10,000

13,235 7,195

5,000 0 1841

1851

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

Table 9.2 Growth of the print and allied trades in Scotland, 1841–1901. 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1841–51 1851–61 1861–71 1871–81 1881–91 1891–1901

480

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Table 9.3 Per cent of British workforce in the print and allied trades, 1851–1901. 2.5 2.0 1.5 Scotland England and Wales

1.0 0.5 0.0

1851

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

Table 9.4 Comparison of trade labour in London and the counties of Edinburgh, Lanark, and Aberdeen, 1851–1901. 8% 7% London

6%

County of Edinburgh

5% 4%

County of Aberdeen

3%

County of Lanark

2% 1% 0% 1851

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

481

appendices Table 9.5 Per cent increase of males and females in the Scottish trades, 1841–1901. 250%

200%

150%

Female Male

100%

50%

–1 91 18

18

81

90

–9

1

1

1 –8 71 18

18

61

–7

1

1 –6 51 18

18

41

–5

1

0%

Table 9.6 Comparative presence of males and females in the Scottish trades, 1841–1901. 90% 80% 70% 60% 50%

Male Female

40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1841

1851

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

482

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Table 9.7 Number of employees in the trades, Edinburgh, Lanark and Aberdeen, 1861.

County of Edinburgh

County of Lanark

Male

Female

Engraving Map Engraving, Making Book Selling, Publishing Bookbinding Printing Newspaper Agency Book Agency, Canvassing Book Folding Newspaper Proprietorship, Librarianship Music Publishing, Selling Lithography Copper-plate Printing Printselling, Mounting Rag Gathering, Dealing Paper Manufacture Stationery Paper Ruling Map and Print Colouring Bill Sticking Typefounding

243 11 426 511 1,796 57 18 0

15 0 14 22 40 21 0 645

29 47 387 39 57 17 672 240 68 0 18 401

0 0 0 0 0 32 1,097 40 0 76 0 0

Engraving Book Selling, Publishing Bookbinding Printing Newspaper Agency Book Agency, Canvassing Book Folding Librarian Lithography Block and Print Cutting Copper plate Printing Rag Gathering, Dealing Paper Manufacture Stationery Paper Ruling Map and Print Colouring Bill Sticking Typefounding

305 300 422 1,283 81 71 0 19 543 127 63 128 197 324 90 0 62 21

0 29 45 18 4 0 420 0 0 0 0 172 444 65 40 59 0 0

483

appendices Male County of Aberdeen

Engraving Book Selling, Publishing Bookbinding Printing Newspaper Agency Book Agency, Canvassing Book Folding Librarianship Lithography Rag Gathering, Dealing Paper Manufacture Stationery Bill Sticking

8 190 41 187 7 8 0 2 33 9 344 13 7

Female 0 6 10 2 2 0 7 0 0 5 586 1 0

484

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Table 9.8 Average employment in the trades by county, 1841–1901 Percentage of overall workforce in print and allied trades. County

Per cent

Average number

Edinburgh Aberdeen Lanark Stirling Berwick Fife Renfrew Dumfries Linlithgow Perth Haddington Forfar Selkirk Clackmannan Elgin Dunbarton Roxburgh Peebles Kinross Nairn Bute Ayr Caithness Kirkcudbright Inverness Wigtown Ban≠ Kincardine Argyll Orkney Ross and Cromarty Shetland Sutherland

5.12 1.88 1.74 1.46 1.29 0.98 0.91 0.90 0.75 0.70 0.67 0.67 0.58 0.56 0.54 0.53 0.48 0.46 0.42 0.42 0.41 0.40 0.37 0.36 0.34 0.25 0.25 0.22 0.21 0.19 0.11 0.10 0.06

8,229 2,084 7,106 495 204 781 894 289 144 412 109 792 53 67 101 171 110 30 15 17 31 377 57 62 125 40 59 33 66 27 37 14 7

485

33 33 33 36 36 36 36 38

30 30 30 30 35 35 35 35

Manchester 30 30 30 31 34 34 34 35

Liverpool 24 24 24 27 30 30 30 34

Birmingham – – 24 28 32 30 32 33

1845 1850 1860 1870 1880 1886 1890 1900

– 63 63 60 54 54 54 54

London

– – 59 55 55 55 55 50

Manchester – – – 56 51 51 51 51

Liverpool – – – – 51 51 51 52

Birmingham – – – – – – – 53

– – – 58 54 54 54 52.5

Newcastle Leeds

26 26 28 30 32 32 32 34

Newcastle Leeds

Table 9.10 Weekly working hours for compositors, 1845–1900.

1845 1850 1860 1870 1880 1886 1890 1900

London

Table 9.9 Weekly wages for compositors (in shillings), 1845–1900.

66 – – 60 54 54 54 52.5

Glasgow

25 25 25 28 33 33 33 34

Glasgow – – 22 22 26 26 27 30

– 66 60 57 51 51 51 51

– – 60 – 51 51 51 51

Aberdeen Dundee

20 20 20 23 27 27 27 30

Aberdeen Dundee

66 66 – 57 54 54 54 52.5

Edinburgh

25 25 21 28 30 30 30 32

Edinburgh

Appendix B: Statistical Evidence for the 1825–6 Crisis Simon Eliot An analysis of the e≠ect of the 1825–6 ‘crash’ on the book trade is possible through a combined review of the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, COPAC and World Cat in order to estimate ﬁgures for title production in these years. As none of the three sources can produce reliable absolute numbers, they are best understood as suggesting trends in title production. These trends are most easily seen if one establishes a baseline (derived from averaging the annual ﬁgures in the catalogues for 1819 to 1824) and then expresses the yearly title production as a ﬁgure above or below that baseline. However, given that there are a number of statistical sources used in this survey, and that each generates a lot of data, it is probably best to look at the overall trends implied by averaging the results across all three data sets. This is undertaken in Table 10.1. Table 10.1 indicates a decline in Edinburgh title production in 1826 over 1825, which appears to have been a bumper year, although we must bear in mind that numbers may have been swollen by cataloguers’ tendency to attribute works of uncertain date to the ﬁrst or middle year of a decade. The decline, however, is still above baseline, if only just (average of 102). The collapse in title production becomes visible in the average ﬁgures for 1827–8 where production of titles drops to around ﬁve points below baseline. In 1829 the ﬁgures struggle to just above baseline (101.9). Leaving out 1830 which was another year vulnerable to cataloguing inﬂation, 1831 seems to have deepened the pattern of 1827–8 by dropping to an average of 13.5 points below the 1819–24 baseline. We can compare this with the average ﬁgures for London, where the depression seems to have bitten earlier, with title production an average 6 points below baseline in 1826. The depression continues into 1827 although the gloom seems to have been lifting with titles an average of 2.5 points below baseline. By 1828 the depression in title 486

487

appendices Table 10.1 Title Production 1824–31. Edinburgh

Scotland (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Paisley, Stirling)

NSTC COPAC WorldCat Average 1824 115.6 1825 111 1826 89.1 1827 88.2 1828 96.4 1829 102.2 1831 96.8

110.5 119.2 104.7 96.6 103.1 109.7 88.7

114.1 127.4 112.1 100.3 85.5 93.7 74.3

113.4 119.2 102.0 95.0 95.0 101.9 86.6

London

NSTC COPAC WorldCat Average 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1831

112.6 134.9 93.9 96.1 102.2 104.3 116.4

111 145.1 98.0 108.2 114.2 106.0 119.4

112.1 123.5 89.1 88.5 102.0 97.4 108.4

111.9 134.5 93.7 97.6 106.2 102.6 114.7

Dublin

109.3 145 83.6 113.8 108.9 98.5 110.2

1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1831

111.4 134.2 94.0 95.6 103.1 104.2 117.1

110.3 144.2 97.1 107.3 113.7 106.1 120.2

112 122.7 88.4 88.5 101.9 98.4 109.4

111.2 133.7 93.2 97.1 106.2 102.9 115.6

116.9 174.9 94.8 120.4 104.0 101.4 110.0

103.9 133.4 95.7 100.2 88.8 89.2 114.2

110.0 151.1 91.4 111.5 100.6 96.4 111.5

NSTC COPAC WorldCat Average 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1831

106 116.9 146.5 174.9 88.2 94.8 115.1 120.4 111.3 104.0 98.5 101.4 106.8 110.0

99.8 131.9 97.2 101.8 94.1 94.1 118.1

107.6 151.1 93.4 112.4 103.1 98.0 111.6

All records

NSTC COPAC WorldCat Average 98.9 149.7 80.8 89.1 104.5 101.0 112.1

109.6 129.9 104.0 95.7 99.0 103.2 95.8

Ireland (Dublin, Belfast)

Glasgow

1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1831

111.7 135.6 116.8 102.9 93.6 98.6 85.6

NSTC COPAC WorldCat Average

NSTC COPAC WorldCat Average 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1831

106.3 128.1 105.7 97.7 105.3 110.2 99.9

England (London, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Liverpool)

NSTC COPAC WorldCat Average 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1831

110.9 125.9 89.6 86.4 98.1 100.9 101.7

87.7 130.6 76.2 100.8 108.0 109.9 127.9

96.5 160.8 93.1 120.8 133.0 134.1 144.1

94.4 147.0 83.4 103.6 115.2 115.0 128.0

NSTC COPAC WorldCat Average 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1831

112 135.4 101.6 105.9 111.4 110.3 120.4

105.1 132.2 103.3 104.5 108.7 106.7 107.2

108.6 133.8 102.5 105.2 110.1 108.5 113.8

488

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

production seemes to have been over with an average of 6 points over baseline. 1829 displays a dip (only 2.57 above baseline) but, by 1831, London’s title production is 14.7 points above the baseline. The trend visible in the total for the ﬁve major publishing areas in Scotland (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Paisley, Stirling) and for the equivalent ﬁve in England (London, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Liverpool) follows a similar pattern. Scotland goes under baseline only in 1827, revives brieﬂy and marginally in 1828–9 but does not fully emerge by 1831 when it is still an average 4 points below baseline. The average ﬁgures for England closely parallel the patterns seen in the ﬁgures for London. These parallels are explained if we look at Table 10.2 which lists Edinburgh’s and London’s yearly production of titles as a percentage share of the ﬁve-centre total for Scotland and for England. These shares are listed for each source separately and then the average ﬁgure across the three sources is given. Edinburgh’s share is pretty consistent, varying no more than 11 per cent over twenty years from a high of 82 per cent (in 1811) to a low of 71 per cent (in 1831). For most years during this period Table 10.2 Share of overall title production of Edinburgh in Scotland and London in England. Edinburgh

London

NSTC COPAC WorldCat Average NSTC COPAC WorldCat Average 1811 79.3 1812 76.8 1813 78.9 1814 82.5 1815 71.0 1816 73.7 1817 69.6 1818 73.9 1819 73.7 1821 74.8 1822 73.5 1823 69.5 1824 76.7 1825 64.9 1826 73.2 1827 75.2 1828 72.4 1829 74.5 1831 70.0

82.2 81.7 73.9 78.3 77.8 73.7 76.1 76.5 79.6 75.1 80.5 75.1 81.5 73.0 77.7 77.6 76.8 78.1 69.6

85.9 86.1 78.3 83.4 82.8 79.7 82.4 79.6 85.6 85.8 86.9 82.5 87.6 80.5 82.2 83.5 78.2 81.4 74.3

82.5 81.6 77.0 81.4 77.2 75.7 76.0 76.7 79.7 78.6 80.3 75.7 81.9 72.8 77.7 78.8 75.8 78.0 71.3

92.1 94.4 93.6 93.5 93.5 92.9 93.2 92.9 92.0 92.4 92.2 93.4 93.8 93.3 92.7 93.3 92.0 92.9 92.2

95.0 95.6 95.3 95.2 96.2 95.1 95.8 95.9 94.7 95.1 95.4 95.0 95.7 95.8 96.1 95.9 95.7 95.1 94.6

95.0 94.9 95.3 96.1 96.0 95.0 95.7 95.3 95.1 95.2 95.0 95.2 95.3 95.8 95.9 95.2 95.3 94.2 94.3

94.1 95.0 94.7 94.9 95.2 94.3 94.9 94.7 94.0 94.2 94.2 94.5 95.0 95.0 94.9 94.8 94.3 94.1 93.7

489

appendices

Edinburgh production accounted for more than 75 per cent of the total from the ﬁve most productive centres in Scotland. Thus, though we should not lose sight of the fact that in book production – as in other things – Edinburgh is not Scotland, the capital city nevertheless has an overwhelming importance in the book industry of Scotland. This dominance, though impressive, pales when compared with the position of London in relation to the total for the ﬁve most productive centres in England. In the case of London, Table 10.2 shows remarkable consistency: between 1811 and 1831 on average London accounted for between 93 per cent and 95 per cent of the titles produced. If anything, Dublin’s predominance over the only other signiﬁcant publishing centre in Ireland, Belfast, was even more extreme. From the evidence of Table 10.1, Edinburgh’s pattern of title output was distinctive not only Table 10.3 Edinburgh imprints 1824–8 (number of titles). BL CAT 1824 A.Constable Oliver and Boyd William Oliphant John Anderson Bell & Bradfute W.Blackwood

1826 16 16 9 5 5 5

COPAC 1824 A.Constable Oliver and Boyd Waugh & Innes William Oliphant W.Blackwood Bell & Bradfute

10 9 7 7 7 7

1826 49 33 23 22 22 20

WORLD CAT 1824 Oliver and Boyd A.Constable William Oliphant W.Blackwood Waugh & Innes Bell & Bradfute

Oliver and Boyd W.Blackwood Bell & Bradfute William Oliphant W.Tait Waugh & Innes

1828

William Oliphant Waugh & Innes W.Blackwood Oliver and Boyd Bell & Bradfute A.Constable 2

Oliver and Boyd W.Blackwood Bell & Bradfute William Oliphant A.Constable Waugh & Innes

16 8 6 5 5 4

1828 35 30 29 26 23 3

1826 33 32 16 15 14 10

W.Blackwood Waugh & Innes Oliver and Boyd Cadell & Co. William Oliphant J. Robertson

W.Blackwood Oliver and Boyd A.Constable Waugh & Innes William Oliphant Bell & Bradfute

39 28 26 26 22 11

1828 28 17 14 12 10 10

W.Blackwood A.Constable Oliver and Boyd Waugh & Innes William Oliphant Bell & Bradfute

28 16 16 16 10 8

490

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

from London and Dublin, but also from the second most important publishing centre in Scotland, Glasgow, which displayed a pattern much closer to that south of the border, with 1826 being sharply down (on average over 16 points) but with an even quicker return to baseline and above by 1827–8. However, one should not exaggerate the Edinburgh depression. Table 10.3 lists publisher or printer information available for books produced in Edinburgh during the period by the most frequently recorded, major imprints. The numbers derived from the BL Catalogue are the smallest and show somewhat less consistency than the others. Of the six most proliﬁc imprints in 1824, four remained in the top six in 1826 and three of those were still in the top six in 1828. COPAC and World Cat ﬁgures suggest even higher levels of consistency. In both, the six top Edinburgh publishers in terms of quantity of titles in 1824 remained the same in 1826 and 1828. The order changes and in both, as in the BL ﬁgures, the fate of Archibald Constable is clear, as is the consistent and importance presence of Blackwood. Overall, despite the ﬁnancial crisis, there is a considerable amount of continuity here. Many of the sources used above do su≠er from sometimes substantial duplication of entries and, although one is looking for patterns and trends rather than absolute numbers, it would be reassuring to be able to work with some ﬁgures where all the duplications had been ﬁltered out. This is a long and laborious process but it was applied to a series of sample years for Edinburgh imprints (1821, 1825, 1826, 1827, 1829 and 1831) derived from COPAC. The results can be seen in Table 10.4. The number of titles is down substantially but, signiﬁcantly, the trends revealed are very similar to the unﬁltered data: numbers rise substantially between 1821 and 1825, drop down in 1826, drop further in 1827, rise in 1829 and drop dramatically again in 1831. The pattern of major imprints observed in Table 10.3 is also basically conﬁrmed by Table 10.4. What seems to have been more discontinuous over the period is the proportion of books published on given subjects. Table 10.5 displays ﬁgures derived from the NSTC for books produced in Edinburgh and London for one year before the crisis (1824), one year during the crisis (1826), one year just after the crisis (1828) and the ﬁnal year of the survey (1831). The NSTC is a useful but rather narrowly-based catalogue which is skewed towards legal deposit libraries and some major university collections. As a number of titles are classiﬁed in two or more di≠erent ways the absolute numbers in Table 10.5 are likely to be exaggerated. This source is, however, one of the very few for this period that allows searching by Dewey subject classiﬁcation which,

491

%

59 22 18 6 29 13 8

155

Total

100

38.1 14.2 11.6 3.9 18.7 8.4 5.2 234

70 44 28 28 24 14 26

1825

980

738

1821

1825

1821

A. Constable Oliver and Boyd Waugh & Innes William Oliphant W. Blackwood Bell & Bradfute John Anderson

Imprints

Titles

Table 10.4 COPAC: Edinburgh titles 1821-31.

100

29.9 18.8 12.0 12.0 10.3 6.0 11.1

%

165

27 21 24 28 29 21 15

1826

726

1826

100

16.4 12.7 14.5 17.0 17.6 12.7 9.1

%

133

20 26 15 27 25 7 13

1827

702

1827

100

15.0 19.5 11.3 20.3 18.8 5.3 9.8

%

142

18 40 22 11 35 8 8

1829

788

1829

100

12.7 28.2 15.5 7.7 24.6 5.6 5.6

%

133

16 20 24 17 38 7 11

1831

661

1831

100

12.0 15.0 18.0 12.8 28.6 5.3 8.3

%

492

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Table 10.5 Edinburgh and London Titles by Dewey Classiﬁcation. EDINBURGH Dewey 1824 1–99 100–199 200–299 300–399 400–499 500–599 600–699 700–799 800–899 900–999 Total

43 12 116 75 19 29 58 50 201 247 850

% 5.1 1.4 13.6 8.8 2.2 3.4 6.8 5.9 23.6 29.1 100

1826

%

32 9 125 81 26 32 50 27 117 189 688

4.7 1.3 18.2 11.8 3.8 4.7 7.3 3.9 17 27.5 100

1826

%

1828 25 15 133 90 19 34 65 39 123 183 726

% 3.4 2.1 18.3 12.4 2.6 4.7 9.0 5.4 16.9 25.2 100

1831 42 10 116 101 17 38 67 24 112 190 717

% 5.9 1.4 16.2 14.1 2.4 5.3 9.3 3.4 15.6 26.5 100

LONDON Dewey 1824 1–99 238 100–199 101 200–299 856 300–399 730 400–499 127 500–599 199 600–699 286 700–799 432 800–899 1349 900–999 924 Total 5242

% 4.5 1.9 16.3 13.9 2.4 3.8 5.5 8.3 25.7 17.6 100

214 68 839 753 134 208 254 299 913 697 4379

4.9 1.6 19.2 17.2 3.1 4.8 5.8 6.8 20.8 15.9 100

1828 184 80 908 809 150 222 276 345 982 787 4743

% 3.9 1.7 19.1 17.1 3.2 4.7 5.8 7.3 20.7 16.6 100

1831 270 75 979 1157 122 266 365 342 980 799 5355

% 5.1 1.4 18.3 21.6 2.3 5.0 6.8 6.4 18.3 14.9 100

although limited and anachronistic, does provide some insight into the relative popularity of one subject against another over time. It is possible that collecting policy in many of the contributing libraries changed over the eight years covered, but it is more likely that any shift in subjects collected reﬂect changes in what was out there to be collected. In other words, although we should not depend uncritically on the following, it is a way of identifying topics that deserve further investigation.

appendices

493

We have seen that the ﬁnancial crisis of 1825–6 did have an e≠ect on the overall title-publishing rates in Scotland. If the e≠ects of this depression were uniform we would expect to see little or no change in the percentage share claimed by di≠erent subjects in 1824–31. The four most popular subject areas for Edinburgh publishing in 1824 were religion (13.6 per cent), social science (8.8 per cent), literature (23.6 per cent) and history (29.1 per cent); together they accounted for more than three-quarters of all titles recorded. Following these four subject areas into 1826 we ﬁnd that religion’s share went up nearly 5 points (to 18.2 per cent) and social science rose 3 points (to 11.8 per cent). In contrast literature’s share declined more than 6 points (to 17 per cent) and history contracted by just under 2 points (to 27.5 per cent). This trend was not corrected two years later in 1828 as title-production recovered. Social science slightly increased its share (to 12.4 per cent), religion and literature essentially maintained their 1826 shares (18.3 per cent and 16.9 per cent respectively) while history dropped a further 2 points (to 25.2 per cent). Table 10.5 indicates that the production pattern in London, though the percentage shares are di≠erent (history, for instance, featured much less strongly in London titles than in Edinburgh), shows a similar dynamic over the same period. Even as late as 1831 neither literature nor history had returned to their pre-1825 levels in either Edinburgh or London. On the other hand, religion in both publishing capitals was higher, as was social science (up from 8.8 per cent in 1824 to 14.1 per cent in Edinburgh, from 13.9 per cent to 21.6 per cent in London). As the 300s in Dewey include politics, and as the ferment over reform was climaxing in 1830–2, this is hardly surprising.

CONTRIBUTORS

Ross Alloway completed his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh where he also held an AHRC post-doctoral research post. He is presently a British Academy post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of the Book. Iain Beavan works in Historic Collections, University of Aberdeen, and has written extensively on the Scottish book trade of the nineteenth century. He has held a McCaig visiting fellowship at Napier University, and currently serves on the council of the Print Networks series of annual conferences. Bill Bell is Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh. He has written widely on nineteenth-century literature and culture and has been a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, the University of Ottawa, and St John’s College, Oxford. Charles Benson is Keeper of Early Printed Books at Trinity College, Dublin. Fiona Black, Director of the School of Information Management at Dalhousie University, is co-editor of the History of the Book in Canada, Volume 2, and of the online Canadian Book Trade and Library Index, both funded by a major grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Laurel Brake is Professor of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is a senior research fellow. Currently, 494

contributors

495

she is the Director of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, an AHRC project; co-editor of DNCJ, a Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism; and writing a life of Walter and Clara Pater. Sharon Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French and the Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh. She is University Librarian at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. Jenni Calder worked for twenty-three years at the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh, and is now a freelance writer and lecturer. She has published extensively, including RLS: A Life Study (1980). Ian Campbell was educated at the University of Aberdeen then at the University of Edinburgh, where he is Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature. He has held visiting posts in France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, USA and Canada, and is one of the editors of the Duke-Edinburgh edition of the Carlyle Letters. Cairns Craig is Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. His books include Out of History (1996) and The Modern Scottish Novel (1999). He was general editor of the four-volume History of Scottish Literature (1987–9). John Crawford is Library Research O∞cer and University Copyright Adviser at Glasgow Caledonian University. He chairs the Library and Information History Group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and has written extensively on library history, the evaluation of library and information services, and information literacy. Stephen Colclough is a lecturer in the School of English at the University of Wales, Bangor. From 2001 to 2005 he was AHRB Research Fellow in Book History at the University of Reading. He has published widely on the history of reading and print distribution in the nineteenth century. Rob Dunbar is a reader in Celtic and Law at the University of Aberdeen. He has recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh on the secular poetry of John MacLean. Before coming to Aberdeen, he taught at Glasgow. A Gaelic speaker, he is originally from Canada.

496

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Simon Eliot is Professor of the History of the Book at the University of London and is Deputy Director of its Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies. He has published on quantitative book history, publishing history and library history. He is general editor of the forthcoming multivolume History of Oxford University Press. David Finkelstein is Research Professor of Media and Print Culture at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. He is author of The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002), coauthor of An Introduction to Book History (2005), and co-editor of The Book History Reader (2001). Aileen Fyfe lectures in history at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge, at Linacre College, Oxford and at the Bibliographical Society of America. Peter Garside is Professor of Bibliography and Textual Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He was Chair of the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research at Cardi≠ University, and Project Director of British Fiction 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception. Gen Harrison is Property Manager and Compositor for Robert Smail’s Printing Works, a Victorian Print Works now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. She has tutored at both Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art. Trevor Howard-Hill is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina. He holds doctorates from Victoria University of Wellington and Oxford, and a post-graduate diploma in librarianship. His British Books and the Book Trade, 1475–1890 will be published in 2008. He is the editor of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Philip Henry Jones lectured at the University of Wales Aberystwyth until 2001. He was co-editor of A Nation and its Books: A History of the Book in Wales and has contributed to the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain and to the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Wallace Kirsop is Honorary Professor in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies and Director of the Centre for the Book at Monash University.

contributors

497

Donald E. Meek is Professor of Scottish and Gaelic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. From 1993 to 2001, he was Professor of Celtic at the University of Aberdeen. He has published extensively on the Gaelic literature of the nineteenth century. Jane Millgate, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, is the author of Macaulay (1973), Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (1984), Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (1987). Her Union Catalogue of the Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott is available on the National Library of Scotland website. John Morris worked at the National Library of Scotland from 1971 to 1997. He was editor of the Armorial of British Bookbinding from 1964 to 2006 and was also editor of the Scottish Book Trade Index. He wrote on the relationship between chapbooks and ballad sheets and Scottish oral tradition. Padmini Ray Murray is currently completing her Ph.D. on gender, nation and embodiment in the works of Byron at The University of Edinburgh. Robin Myers is Archivist Emeritus of the Stationers’ Company. She and Michael Harris founded the annual book trade history conferences in 1979, and have edited 26 volumes of their proceedings to date. Her class on book collecting ran for twenty years (1972–92) and she has published widely on the Stationers’ Company and other bibliographical topics. Jonathan Rose is a professor of History at Drew University. He was the founding President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and he coedits the journal Book History. His books include The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) and (with Simon Eliot) A Companion to The History of the Book (2007). John Scally is Director of Collections at the University of Edinburgh, including museums and galleries as well as printed and manuscript special collections. He previously worked in the National Library of Scotland. His main research interests are in seventeenth-century British history and aspects of book history and visual culture in Scotland. Barbara Scha≠ presently teaches at the University of Vienna. She has held teaching posts at the Universities of Tübingen and Bochum and

498

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

has published books on authorship, English perceptions of Italy and gender studies. Joanne Shattock is Director of the Victorian Studies Centre and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leicester. She has published widely on the periodical press, women’s writing and bibliography. Graham Shaw heads the Asia, Paciﬁc and Africa Collections at the British Library, London, and has published widely on the history of the book in South Asia from the sixteenth century onwards. Zsuzsanna Varga completed her Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh. She has held research posts at di≠erent universities in the UK and currently is Research Fellow at De Montfort University. Her interests are nineteenth-century writing and the literature of travel. Diana Webster studied geography at Edinburgh University and librarianship at Loughborough. She was Librarian of the Royal Scottish Museum, then Deputy Map Curator in the National Library of Scotland, becoming Head of the Map Library in 1999. Her research includes Scottish sea charts, early surveying methods, and maps relating to Scots abroad.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbey, J. R. (1952) Scenery of Great Britain and Ireland in Aquatint and Lithography, 1770–1860. London: Curwen. ——— (1956–7) Travel in Aquatint and Lithography 1770–1860. London: Curwen. Acts of the General Assembly of the Province of Nova Scotia, Anno Quarto Victoriæ Reginæ (1841). Halifax: Printed at the Royal Gazette O∞ce. Adam & Charles Black 1807–1957: Some Chapters in the History of a Publishing House (1957). London: A. & C. Black. Adams, R. E. (1965) ‘A Factory Library at Blantyre in the Nineteenth Century’, Bibliotheck, 4 (5): 207–8. Aird, Andrew (1882) Letterpress Printing in Glasgow during the Last Fifty Years. Glasgow: Aird & Coghill. ——— (1890) Reminiscences of Editors, Reporters, and Printers, during the Last Sixty Years. Glasgow: Aird & Coghill. ——— (1892) The Present and Future Triumphs of the Press. Glasgow: British Typographia, Glasgow Branch. Aitken, W. R. (1971) A History of the Public Library Movement in Scotland to 1955. Glasgow: Scottish Library Association. Alexander, J. H. (1990) ‘Learning from Europe: Continental Literature in the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, 1820–1825’, Wordsworth Circle 3: 118–23. Alston, Sandra (1992) ‘Canada’s First Bookseller’s Catalogue’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 30 (1): 7–26. Altick, Richard (1957) The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Alwall, Ellen (1970) The Religious Trend in Secular Scottish School-Books, 1850–1861 and 1873–1882. Lund: Gleerup. Ambrosini, Richard and Richard Dury (2006) Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Anderson, Alexander (1953) The Old Libraries of Fife. Kirkcaldy: Fife County Library. Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Patricia (1991) The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

499

500

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Anderson, R. F. (1982) ‘Things Wisely Ordered: John Blackwood, George Eliot and Romola’, Publishing History 11: 5–39. Anderson, Robert D. (1989) Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland: Schools and Universities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ——— (1995) Education and the Scottish People. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Anderson, Freddy (1998) ‘Samizdat Literature in Scotland from Burns Onwards’, in Another Book to Burn: A State of Scotland (ed. J. N. Reilly). Glasgow: Bootleg, 75–84. A Printing House of Old and New Edinburgh, 1775–1925 (1925). Edinburgh: Pillans & Wilson. Ash, Marinell (1980) The Strange Death of Scottish History. Edinburgh: Ramsay Head. Astore, William J. (2001) Observing God: Thomas Dick, Evangelicalism, and Popular Science in Victorian Britain and America. Aldershot: Ashgate. Avery, Gillian (1965) Nineteenth-Century Children: Heroes and Heroines in English Children’s Stories 1780–1900. London: Hodder. Babbage, Charles (1835) On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. London: Charles Knight. Bachleitner, Norbert, (ed.) (1990) Quellen zur Rezeption des englischen und französischen Romans in Deutschland und Österreich im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ——— (2000) Beiträge zur Rezeption der britischen und irischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bagehot, Walter (1884) ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’, in Literary Studies (ed. R. H. Hutton) 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, I: 1–35. Bain, Margaret I. (1931) Les voyageurs français en Ecosse 1770–1830 et leurs curiosités intellectuelles. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion. Baldick, Chris (1996) Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present. London: Longman. Ballantyne, James (1909) The Ballantyne Press and its Founders, 1798–1908. Edinburgh: Ballantyne, Hanson. Bannatyne Club (1867) Lists of Members, Rules and Catalogue, Printed for the Bannatyne Club since its Institution in 1823. Edinburgh: Constable. Baptie, David (1894) Musical Scotland Past and Present. Paisley: Parlane. Bardon, J. (1983) Belfast: An Illustrated History. Dundonald: Blacksta≠. Barker, Nicolas (1964) The Publications of the Roxburghe Club, 1814–1962. Cambridge: Roxburghe Club. Barnes, James J. (1964) Free Trade in Books: A Study of the London Book Trade since 1800. Oxford: Clarendon. Baxter, Ian (1993) ‘The Establishment of the First Libraries for European Soldiers in India’, South Asia Library Group Newsletter 40: 28. Bayly, C. A. (2004) The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell. Beattie, William (1949) The Scottish Tradition in Printed Books, Edinburgh: Nelson Beavan, Iain (1990) ‘The Book Trade in Aberdeen and Area’, in Studies in the Provincial Book Trade of England, Scotland and Wales Before 1900 (ed. David. A. Stoker). Aberystwyth: University College of Wales, 54–75. Beavan, Iain (1996) ‘ “All New Works of Interest Received on Publication”: Aberdeen and its Access to the Printed Word, 1800–1850’, in The City and its Worlds: Aspects of Aberdeen’s History since 1794 (eds T. Brotherstone and D. J. Withrington). Glasgow: Criuthne, 94–114.

bibliography

501

Beavan, Iain (1999) ‘ “Spreading the Hell-Hounds of Jealousy and Discord”: The “Aberdeen Shaver” and its Times’, in The Human Face of the Book Trade: Print Culture and its Creators (ed. P. Isaac & B. Mckay). New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 137–54. ——— (2000) ‘Advertising Judiciously: Scottish Nineteenth-Century Publishers and the British Market’, in The Mighty Engine: The Printing Press and its Impact (eds Peter Isaac and Barry McKay). Winchester: St Paul’s, 69–78. ——— (2001) ‘ “What Constitutes the Crime which it is your Pleasure to Punish so Mercilessly?”: Scottish Booksellers’ Societies in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Moving Market: Continuity and Change in the Book Trade (ed. Peter Isaac and Barry McKay). New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 71–82. ——— (2002) ‘Staying the Course: The Edinburgh Cabinet Library 1830–1844’, in Light on the Book Trade: Essays Presented at the Nineteenth Seminar on the British Book Trade in Honour of Peter Isaac (ed. Barry McKay, Maureen Bell and John Hinks). London: British Library, 141–52. Bebbington, D. W. (2005) The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody. Leicester: Inter-Varsity. Beer, Gillian (1983) Darwin’s Plots: The Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge. Belford, Alfred J. (1946) Centenary Handbook of the Educational Institute of Scotland. Edinburgh: EIS. Bell, Bill (1998a) ‘ “Pioneers of Literature”: The Commercial Traveller in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in The Reach of Print: Making, Selling, and Using Books (eds Peter Isaac and Barry McKay). Winchester: St. Paul’s, 121–34. ——— (1998b) ‘Print Culture in Exile: The Scottish Emigrant Reader in the Nineteenth Century’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 36: 87–106. ——— (2000) ‘Crusoe’s Books: The Scottish Emigrant Reader in the Nineteenth Century’, in Across Boundaries: The Book in Culture and Commerce (eds B. Bell, P. Bennett and J. Bevan). New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 116–29. Benn, G. (1877–8) A History of the Town of Belfast, 2 vols. London: Marcus Ward. Bertram, James (1893) Some Memories of Books, Authors & Events. London: Constable. Besterman, Theodore (1938) The Publishing Firm of Cadell & Davies, Select Correspondence and Accounts, 1793–1836. London: Oxford University Press. Bethune, Alexander (1845) Memoirs of Alexander Bethune. Aberdeen: G. & R. King. Bible in Wales: A Study in the History of the Welsh People with an Introductory Address and a Bibliography (1906). London: Southeran. Black, Adam (1885) Memoirs. Edinburgh: A. & C. Black. Black, Fiona A. (1999) ‘Book Availability in Canada, 1752–1820, and the Scottish Contribution’. Ph.D. dissertation, Loughborough University. ——— (2001) ‘ “Horrid Republican Notions” and Other Matters: School Book Availability in Georgian Canada’, Paradigm: Journal of the Textbook Colloquium 2 (3): 7–18. Blackie, A. A. C. (1959) Blackie and Son 1809–1959. London: Blackie. Blackie, John (1932) A Scottish Student in Leipzig 1839–40. Being Letters of W. G. Blackie, his Father and his Brothers, in the Years 1839–40. Glasgow: Blackie. Blair, Hugh (1783) Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. London: Strahan. Bohlman, Philip (2002) World Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bolton, H. Philip (1992) Scott Dramatized. London: Mansell.

502

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Bonham-Carter, Victor (1978) Authors by Profession, Volume 1. London: Society of Authors. Boorman, David (1986) The Brighton of Wales: Swansea as a Fashionable Seaside Resort, c.1780–c.1830. Swansea: Swansea Little Theatre Company. Borchardt, D. H. and W. Kirsop (eds) (1988) The Book in Australia: Essays towards a Cultural and Social History. Melbourne: Australian Reference Publications. Borley, L. (ed.) (2003) Celebrating the Life and Times of Hugh Miller. Cromarty: Cromarty Arts Trust. Bowen, H. V. (2006) The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyter, Ian (1990) Robert Smail’s Printing Works, Edinburgh: National Trust for Scotland. DLB (1991) British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1880, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 106 (ed. Patricia Anderson and Jonathan Rose) Detroit, MI: Gale Research. ——— (1996) British Literary Publishing Houses, 1700–1820, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 154 (ed. James J. Bracken and Joel Silver) Detroit, MI: Gale Research. Brake, Laurel, (2001) Print in Transition, 1850–1910. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Brake, Laurel, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden (eds) (1990) Investigating Victorian Journalism. London: Macmillan. Brake, Laurel Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (eds) (2000) Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bremner, David (1869) ‘Printing and Publishing’, in The Industries of Scotland; Their Progress, and Present Condition. Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 492–511. Brewer, L. A. (1938) My Hunt Library. Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press. Brief Notes on the Origins of T. & A. Constable Ltd. (1936) Edinburgh: Constable. Brimmell, R. A. and S. Roscoe (1981) James Lumsden & Son of Glasgow: Their Juvenile Books and Chapbooks. Pinner: Private Libraries Association. Brims, John (1993) ‘Sources for Historical Research: Scottish Newspapers of the Late 18th and 19th Centuries’, Scottish Local History 28: 9–10. Brock, W. H. (1980) ‘The Development of Commercial Science Journals in Victorian Britain’, in The Development of Science Publishing in Europe (ed. A.J. Meadows). Amsterdam: Elsevier, 95–122. ——— (1984a) ‘Brewster as Scientiﬁc Journalist’, in ‘Martyr of Science’: Sir David Brewster, 1781–1863 (ed. A. Morison-Low and John R. R. Christie). Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Museum, 37–44. ——— and A. J. Meadows (1984b) The Lamp of Learning: Taylor & Francis and the Development of Science Publishing. London: Taylor & Francis. ——— (1994) ‘Science Periodicals’ in Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society (ed. J. D. Vann and R. T. Van Arsdel) Aldershot: Scolar, 81–96. Brown, Callum G. (1981) ‘The Sunday-school Movement in Scotland, 1780–1914’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 21, 1: 3–26. Brown, Iain Gordon (ed.) (1987) Scott’s Interleaved Waverley Novels, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Brown, John (1858) The Border Advertiser, Galashiels: John Brown. Brown, Samuel (1817?) Cheap Itinerating Libraries for Villages. Haddington. ——— (1834) First Report of the Itinerating Libraries in Edinburgh, Leith and MidLothian. Haddington.

bibliography

503

——— (1856) Some Account of Itinerating Libraries and their Founder. Edinburgh. Brown, T. (1941–2) ‘Samuel Brown and his Libraries’, Library Review 8: 125–9. Bruce, James (1847) Destitution in the Highlands. Letters on the Present Condition of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Edinburgh: A. & C. Black. Bryans, Dennis (1996) ‘The Beginnings of Type Founding in Sydney: Alexander Thompson’s Type, His Foundry, and His Exports to Inter-Colonial Printers’, Journal of Design History 9 (2): 75–86. Bryant, G. J. (1985) ‘Scots in India in the Eighteenth Century’, The Scottish Historical Review 64: 22–41. Buchan, James W. (ed.) (1925–7) The History of Peeblesshire, 3 vols. Glasgow: Jackson, Wylie. Bumsted, J. M. (1999) ‘Scots’, in Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples (ed. P. L. Magocsi). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 115–42. Burton, John Hill (1850) The Emigrant’s Manual. Edinburgh: Chambers. Cadell, Patrick and Ann Matheson (eds) (1989) For the Encouragement of Learning: Scotland’s National Library, 1689–1989. Edinburgh: HMSO. Cahan, D. (ed.) (2003) From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cain, Alex M. (1986) The Cornchest for Scotland: Scots in India. Edinburgh: NLS. Calder, Jenni (1980) RLS: A Life Study. London: Hamish Hamilton. Cameron, William (1888) Hawkie: The Autobiography of a Gangrel. Glasgow: D. Robertson. Campbell, Andrew J. (1992) The Tullis Press, Cupar. Buckhaven: A. J. Campbell. Campbell, Charles (1828) Memoirs of Charles Campbell. Glasgow: James Duncan. Campbell, Ian (1974) ‘Carlyle, Pictet and Je≠rey Again’, Bibliotheck 7 (1): 1–15. Campbell, J. F. (1860) Popular Tales of the West Highlands. Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas. Candy, P. C. and J. Laurent (eds) (1994) Pioneering Culture: Mechanics’ Institutes and Schools of Arts in Australia. Adelaide: Auslib Press. Cantor, G., G. Dawson, G. Gooday, et al. (2004) Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carlyle, Thomas (1888) Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. London: Chapman & Hall. ——— (1840) On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. London: Chapman & Hall. ——— (1997) Reminiscences (ed. K. J. Fielding and Ian Campbell). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2000) Sartor Resartus (ed. R. Tarr and M. Engel). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——— and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1970–2006) The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (34 vols to date). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Carrie, William Lowe and William T. Dobson (1909) The Ballantyne Press and its Founders, 1796–1908. Edinburgh: Ballantyne, Hanson. Carter, Ian (1976) ‘The Mutual Improvement Movement in North-East Scotland in the Nineteenth Century’, Aberdeen University Review 46: 383–92. Chambers, William (1863) Historical Sketch of Popular Literature and its Inﬂuence on Society. Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers. ——— (1872) Memoir of Robert Chambers. Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers. ——— (1882) ‘Reminiscences of a Long and Busy Life’, in Jubilee Year of Chambers’s Journal. Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1–20.

504

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

——— and Robert Chambers (1834) Spirit of Chambers’s Journal, 4 vols. Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers. Chapman, John (1852) Cheap Books and How to Get Them. London: Chapman. Chatto, William A. (1848) The History and Art of Wood-Engraving, with Specimens of the Art. London: Illustrated London News. Checkland, Sydney (1975) Scottish Banking. A History 1695–1973. Glasgow: Collins. Checkland, Sydney and Olive Checkland (1984) Industry and Ethos: Scotland, 1832–1914. London: Edward Arnold. Child, John (1967) Industrial Relations in the British Printing Industry. London: Allen & Unwin. Chiswick, Harvey (2004) ‘The Representation of Adam Smith and David Hume in the Année Littéraire and the Journal Encyclopédique’, in Scotland and France in the Enlightenment (ed. Deirdre Dawson and Pierre Morère). Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 240–63. Chitnis, Anand (1976) The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History. London: Croom Helm. Christie, John R. R. and Sally Shuttleworth (eds) (1989) Nature Transﬁgured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clark, Peter (2000) British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800. Oxford: Clarendon. Clark, T. W. (ed.) (1970) The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development. London: Allen & Unwin. Clive, John (1957) Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review 1802–15. London: Faber. Clyne, M. (1985) ‘Multilingual Melbourne Nineteenth-Century Style’, Journal of Australian Studies 17: 69–81. ——— (1991) Community Languages: The Australian Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cockburn, Henry (1852) Life of Lord Je≠rey with a Selection from his Correspondence, 2 vols. Edinburgh: A. & C. Black. ——— (1856) Memorials of His Time. Edinburgh: A. & C. Black. Colby, Vineta (1966) The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and Victorian Literary Market Place. Hamden, CT: Archon. Collison, Robert Lewis (1966) Encyclopedias: Their History through the Ages. New York: Hafner. Combe, George (1847) Remarks on National Education. Edinburgh: McLachlan Stewart. Constable, Thomas (1873) Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents, 3 vols. Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas. Cooke, Anthony, Ian Donnachie et al. (eds) (1998), Modern Scottish History: 1707 To The Present. London: Open University. Cooney, S. M. (1970) ‘Publishers for the People: W. & R. Chambers 1832–50’. Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University. ——— (1999) ‘A Catalogue of Chambers Encyclopaedia 1868’, Bibliothek 24: 17–110. Cormack, M. J. (1984) The Stirling Tract Enterprise and the Drummonds. Stirling: University of Stirling Bible Society. Cornall, Graham (1990) Memories: A Survey of Early Australian Furniture in the Collection of Lord McAlpine of West Green, Perth: Australian City Properties. Cosh, Mary (2003) Edinburgh: The Golden Age. Edinburgh: John Donald. Couper, W. J. (1914) The Millers of Haddington, Dunbar and Dunfermline: A Record of Scottish Bookselling. London: Fisher Unwin. Coventry, T. (1983) ‘An Clò-Bheairt Ceilteach’, Gairm 122: 137–50.

bibliography

505

Cowan, R. M. W. (1946) The Newspaper in Scotland: A Study of its First Expansion, 1815–1860. Glasgow: George Outram. Craig, David (1961) Scottish Literature and the Scottish People, 1680–1830. London: Chatto & Windus. Crawford, John C. (1981) ‘The Origins and Development of Societal Library Activity in Scotland’, MA thesis, University of Strathclyde. ——— (1984) ‘Policy Formulation for Public Library Provision in the Highlands of Scotland’, Journal of Librarianship 16 (2): 94–117. ——— (1985) ‘Denominational Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Scotland’, Library History 7 (2): 33–44. ——— (1987) ‘Books, Libraries and the Decline of Gaelic on the Island of Arran’, Library Review 36: 83–94. ——— (1993) ‘Historical Models of Library Provision: The Example of Scotland’. Ph D thesis, Glasgow Caledonian University. ——— (2002) ‘The Community Library in Scottish History’, IFLA Journal 28: 245–52. Crawford, Robert (1992) Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon. ——— (1998) The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cross, Nigel (1985) The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cullen, L. M. (1989) Eason & Son: A History. Dublin: Eason. Cumming, Cli≠ (1997) ‘ “In the Language of Ossian”: Gaelic Survival in Australia and New Zealand – A Comparison’, Australian Studies 12 (2): 104–22. Curran, Stuart (2002) ‘Women and the Edinburgh Review’, in British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays (ed. Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu). London: Palgrave, 195–208. Curwen, H. (1873) A History of Booksellers, the Old and the New. London: Chatto & Windus. Darcy, C. P. (1983) ‘Chambers’s Journal’, in British Literary Magazines (ed. Alvin Sullivan). Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2: 93–8. Das Gupta, A. C. (1959) The Days of John Company: Selections from Calcutta Gazettes. Calcutta: Government Printing, West Bengal. Davie, George Elder (1961) The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Davies, Glyn (2002) A History of Money. Cardi≠: University of Wales Press. Davies, Walter (1868) The English Works of the Rev. Walter Davies. (ed. D. Silvan Evans). Carmarthen: William Spurrell. Davies, William Llewelyn (1937–42) ‘[A] argra≠wyd llyfr Cymraeg yn Iwerddon cyn 1700?’, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society 5: 116–19. De Quincey, Thomas (2000–1) Works (ed. Grevel Lindop et al.), 21 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto. Dearden, James A. (1973) ‘Thomas Johnes and the Hafod Press, 1803–10’, Book Collector 22: 315–36. Demata, Massimiliano and Duncan Wu (eds) (2002) British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays. London: Palgrave. Dempster, John A. (1983) ‘Thomas Nelson and Sons in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Publishing History 13: 41–87; 14: 5–63. ——— (1992) The T. & T. Clark Story: A Victorian Publisher and the New Theology. Edinburgh: Pentland.

506

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Despatches from England 1717–1721 (Records of Fort St George, 1927). Madras: Government Press. Devine, Thomas M. (1999) The Scottish Nation 1707–2000. London: Allen Lane. ——— (2003) Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815. London: Allen Lane. ——— and Rosalind Mitchison (1988) People and Society in Scotland, Edinburgh: John Donald. Dewalt, B. (2005) ‘Printing Technology’, in History of the Book in Canada, Volume II, 1840–1918 (ed. Y. Lamonde, P. L. Fleming and F. A. Black). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 89–101. Dharwadker, Vinay (2003) ‘The Historical Formation of Indian-English Literature’, in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (ed. Sheldon Pollock). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 199–267. Dibden, Thomas F. (1838) Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in the Northern Counties of England and Scotland, 2 vols. London: Richards. Dickson, William P. (1874) Glasgow University Library: Notes on its History, Arrangements, and Aims. Glasgow: MacLehose. Dobson, Thomas (1896) Reminiscences of Innerleithen and Traquair. Innerleithen: Smail. Donaldson, William (1986) Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland: Language, Literature, and the Press. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Doughty, D. W. (1967) The Tullis Press, Cupar, 1803–1849. Dundee: Abertay Historical Society. Drescher, H. W. (ed.) (1967) Henry Mackenzie Letters to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Drummond, Andrew L. (1973) The Scottish Church, 1688–1843: The Age of the Moderates. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Dwyer, R. and D. Cowley (2002) ‘The Golf Hill Bequest. 1. A Pair of Australian Cedar Bookcases. 2. George Russell’s Library’, La Trobe Journal 69: 39–44. Early Australian Booksellers: The Australian Booksellers Association Memorial Book of Fellowship (1980). Sydney: The Australian Booksellers Association. Easley, Alexis (2004) First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–1870. Aldershot: Ashgate. ECS (1824) Laws of the Edinburgh Compositors’ Society; with Introductory Remarks on the Constitution and Errors of Friendly Societies, by a Member of that Society. Edinburgh. Edwards, T. (1909) ‘Glan Menai’, Y Geninen 27: 35–8. Eighty Years 1845–1925 The Falkirk Herald. Falkirk: Herald Press. EJC (1804a) Memorial for David George, Alexander Cowie for Themselves, and the Other Compositor-Printers of the City of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Mundell. ——— (1804b) Additional Memorial for David George, Alexander Cowie for Themselves, and the Other Compositor-Printers of the City of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Mundell. ——— (1805) Scale of Prices of the Edinburgh Compositors. Edinburgh: Mundell. ——— (1843) Unto the Master Printers of Edinburgh, the Memorial of the Journeymen Printers of that City. Edinburgh: Mundell. Eliot, Simon (1994) Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800–1919. London: Bibliographical Society. Eliot, Simon and John Sutherland (1988) The Publisher’s Circular 1837–1900: Guide to the Microﬁche Edition. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey.

bibliography

507

Elwood, Colonel Mrs (1830) Narrative of a Journey Overland from England . . . to India, 2 vols. London: Colburn & Bentley. Engelsing, Rolf (1974) Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschicte in Deutschland 1500–1800. Stuttgart: Metzler. ETS (1844) Laws and Regulations of the Edinburgh Typographical Society. Also, Copies of the Interlocutors of the Court of Session, and Scale of Press Prices. Edinburgh: ETS. ——— (1851) Rules and Regulations of the Edinburgh Typographical Society; to which are Appended Interlocutors of the Court of Session, Scale of Press Prices. Edinburgh: ETS. Evans, D. E. (2004) ‘The Heroic Age of Celtic Philology’, Zeitschrift f ür celtische Philologie 54: 1–30. Ewing, Alexander McLean (1949) A History of the Glasgow Herald, 1783–1948. Glasgow: Private circulation. Falconer, Graham (2001) Autour d’un cabinet de lecture. Toronto: St Michael’s College. Farrington, A. J. (1991) The English Factory in Japan, 1613–1623, 2 vols. London: British Library. Feather, John (1985) The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2006) A History of British Publishing, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Ferguson, J. A. (1941–69) Bibliography of Australia, 7 vols. Sydney: Angus & Robertson; and Addenda 1784–1850, Vols. I–IV (1986). Canberra: National Library of Australia. Ferguson, Mary and Ann Matheson (eds) (1984) Scottish Gaelic Union Catalogue, A List of Books Printed in Scottish Gaelic from 1567 to 1973. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Ferris, Ina (1991) The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Festival in Commemoration of Robert Burns; and to promote a subscription to erect a National Monument to his Memory at Edinburgh (1819). London: B. McMillan. Fielding, Kenneth and David Sorensen (2006) ‘Thomas Carlyle: “The Feast of Pikes” Corrected Proof ’, Carlyle Studies Annual 22: 7–177. Finkelstein, David (1994) ‘Early Nineteenth-Century Scottish Publishing’, Gaskell Society Journal 8: 77–86. ——— (2002) The House of Blackwood: Author–Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ——— (2003) ‘ “Jack’s as Good as His Master”: Scots and Print Culture in New Zealand, 1860–1900’, Book History 6: 95–107. Finlayson, C. P. and S. M. Simpson (1967 and 1973) ‘The Library of the University of Edinburgh: The Copyright Period, 1710–1837’, Library History 1 (1): 41–58; 3 (2): 41–58. Finnegan, D. A. (2004) ‘Glacial Theory and Scientiﬁc Culture in Early Victorian Edinburgh’, British Journal for the History of Science 37: 29–52. Foulis, D. A. (1958) A Hundred Years of Publishers’ Bookbinding: 1857–1957. Edinburgh: Hunter & Foulis. Fraser, G. M. (1912) Aberdeen Mechanics’ Institute: a Record of Educational Progress. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Fraser, William (1834) Hints on the Unlimited Di≠usion of Useful Knowledge, at No Expense to the Reader, through the Medium of the Mercantile and Trading Classes. Edinburgh: Neill.

508

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Froude, James A. (1884) Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London, 2 vols. London: Longman. Fry, Michael (1992) The Dundas Despotism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ——— (2001) The Scottish Empire. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Furnas, J. C. (1952) Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. London: Faber. Fyfe, Aileen (2004) Science and Salvation: Evangelicals and Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gardiner, Leslie (1976) Bartholomew 150 Years. Edinburgh: Bartholomew. ——— (1983) The Making of John Menzies. Edinburgh: Menzies. Gardner, Carreen S. (1976) Printing in Ayr and Kilmarnock: Newspapers, Periodicals, Books, and Pamphlets Printed from about 1780 until 1920. Ayr: Ayrshire Archaeological and Natural History Society. Garside, Peter (1983) ‘Rob’s Last Raid: Scott and the Publication of the Waverley Novels’, in Author-Publisher Relations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris). Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 88–118. ——— (1986) ‘Dating Waverley’s Early Chapters’, Bibliotheck 13 (3): 61–81. ——— (1991a) ‘Popular Fiction and the National Tale: Hidden Origins of Scott’s Waverley’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 46: 30–53. ——— (1991b) ‘Three Perils of Publishing: Hogg and the Popular Novel’, Studies in Hogg and his World 2: 45–63. ——, James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling (2000) The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gascoigne, Bamber (1995) How to Identify Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Ink Jet. London: Thames & Hudson. Gestin, Daniel (1998) Scènes de lecture: le jeune lecteur en France dans la première moitié du xixe siècle. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Gillespie, Sarah C. (1953) A Hundred Years of Progress; the Record of the Scottish Typographical Association, 1853 to 1952. Glasgow: R. Maclehose. Gillies, William (1997) ‘Forms and Meanings of Scottish Gaelic leugh “read” ’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 49–50: 243–9. Gilson, M. and J. Zubrzycki (1967) The Foreign-Language Press in Australia 1848–1964. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Golden Age of Booksellers: Fifty Years in the Trade (1981). Sydney: Abbey Press. Goldstrom, J. M. (1986) ‘The Correspondence between Lord John Russell and the Publishing Trade’, Publishing History 20: 5–59. Goodridge, R. E. W. (1882) A Year in Manitoba: Being the Experience of a Retired O∞cer in Settling his Sons. London: W. & R. Chambers. GPBS (1824) Articles of the Glasgow Printers’ and Bookbinders’ Society. Glasgow: R. Hutchinson. Graham, Maria (1813) Journal of a Residence in India, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Constable. Gray, John (1830) An Address to the Printers of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Tait. Gri∞n, J. J. (1844) Is the Glasgow Booksellers’ Protection Association a Lawful Association, or is it an Illegal Conspiracy? Glasgow: Bell & Bain. Gri∞th, P., R. Harvey and K. Maslen (eds) (1997) Book and Print in New Zealand: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa. Wellington: Victoria University Press. Gri∞ths, Antony (2004) Prints and Printmaking. London: British Museum.

bibliography

509

Gross, A. G., J. E. Harmon and M. S. Reidy (2002) Communicating Science: The Scientiﬁc Article from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press. Gross, John (1969) The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. London: Weidenfeld. GTS (1837) Journeymen Letter-Press printers’ Prices, etc. Glasgow: J. Graham. ——— (1877) Newspaper Time and Piece Scales of Prices. Glasgow: R. Anderson. Haddow, William M. (1943) My Seventy Years. Glasgow: Robert Gibson. Haldane, A. R. B. (1952) The Drove Roads of Scotland. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. ——— (1971) Three Centuries of Scottish Posts: An Historical Survey to 1836. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hancher, Michael (2004) ‘The Number Trade at Blackie & Son’, Publishing History 55: 37–67. Hansard, T.C. (1825) Typographia. London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy. Hare, J. and J.-P. Wallot (1988) ‘Le livre au Québec et la librairie Neilson au tournant du XIXe siècle’, in Livre et lecture au Québec, 1800–1850 (ed. C. Galarneau and M. Lemire). Québec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 93–112. Harman, Claire (2005) Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: HarperCollins. Harper, Marjory (2003) Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus. London: Proﬁle. Harper, Norman (1998) Press and Journal: The First 250 Years, 1748–1998. Aberdeen: Press and Journal. Hart, Francis Russell (1978) The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey. London: John Murray. Harvey, D. C. (1947) ‘A Friendly Scot Looks at Nova Scotia in 1853’, Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society 27:81–100. Harvey, William (1936) ‘The “Stirling Observer” Press: A Century’s Progress’, in The Stirling Observer Centenary Number 1836–1936: A Century’s Progress. Stirling: Observer Press. Harvie, Christopher (1977) Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics, 1707–1977. London: Allen & Unwin. ——— (1994) ‘Enlightenment to Renaissance: Scottish Cultural Life in the Nineteenth Century’, in Social and Political Identities in Western History (ed. C. Bjorn, A. Grant and K. J. Stringer). Copenhagen: Academic Press, 214–43. Hayden, John (ed.) (1970) Scott: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. Haythornthwaite, J. A. (1990) ‘Friendly Encounters: A Study of the Relationship between the House of Blackwood and Margaret Oliphant in her Role as Literary Critic’, Publishing History 28: 79–88. Henderson, Thomas F. (1898) Scottish Vernacular Literature: A Succinct History. London: David Nutt. Hendry, Joseph D. (1974) A Social History of Branch Library Development with Special Reference to the City of Glasgow. Glasgow: Scottish Library Association. Herbert, Francis (1983) ‘The Royal Geographical Society’s Membership, the Map Trade, and Geographical Publishing in Britain 1830 to ca 1930: An Introductory Essay with Listing of some 250 Fellows in Related Professions’, Imago Mundi 35: 67–95. Hewes, F. W. and H. Gannett (1883) Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States, Showing by Graphic Methods their Present Condition. New York: Scribner. Hodgson, Joseph (1850) Memoir of Joseph Hodgson, Glazier, a Native of Whitehaven, Cumberland, Comprising his Various Itineraries through the United Kingdom. Whitehaven: Wm Wilson.

510

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Hogg, James (2004) Collected Letters of James Hogg, vol. 1 (ed. Gillian Hughes). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Holroyd, John (1968) George Robertson of Melbourne, 1825–1898: Pioneer Bookseller and Publisher. Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens. Hook, Andrew (1975) Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835. Glasgow: Blackie. ——— (1999) From Goosecreek to Gandercleugh: Studies in Scottish-American Literary and Cultural History. East Linton: Tuckwell. Houston, R. A. (1985) Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England 1600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howe, Ellic and John Child (1952) The Society of London Bookbinders 1780–1951. London: Sylvan. Howsam, Leslie (1991) Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hubber, Brian (1999) ‘John Carfrae: Bookseller of Edinburgh, Auctioneer of Melbourne and Sydney’, in The Culture of the Book: Essays from Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop (ed. D. Garrioch et al.). Melbourne: Bib. Soc. of Australia and New Zealand, 374–82. Hulme, Malcolm (ed.) (2003) Local News: Life in Shetland as Reported in the Provincial Newspapers. Lerwick: Shetland Times. Humphries, Charles and William Smith (1970) Music Publishing in the British Isles from the Beginning until the Middle of the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hunter, Andrew (ed.) (2000) Thornton and Tully’s Scientiﬁc Books, Libraries and Collectors: A Study of Bibliography and the Book Trade in Relation to the History of Science, 4th edn. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hutchison, I. G. C. (1993) ‘Reporting the Wider World: National and International A≠airs and the Local Press in Nineteenth-Century Scotland’, Scottish Local History 28: 11–14. Isaac, Frank (1930–2) English and Scottish Printing Types. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society. Isaac, Peter (2005) ‘John Murray II and Oliver & Boyd, his Edinburgh Agents, 1819–1835’, in Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and Distribution since 1500 (ed. John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong). London: British Library, 131–46. Jäger, Georg (ed.) (2001) Geschichte des Deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Das Kaiserreich 1870–1918, Teil 1 und 2. Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler Vereinigung GmbH. James, Louis (1963) Fiction for the Working Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jardine, Ewen (1988) ‘The History of Paper Mills in Central Scotland’, International Paper Historians Yearbook 7: 81–3. Jay, Elisabeth (1995) Mrs Oliphant: A Fiction to Herself. Oxford: Clarendon. Je≠rey, Francis (1844) Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 4 vols. London: Longman. Johnson, A. F. (1944) ‘Type-Designs and Type-Founding in Scotland’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 2 (3): 253–61. Jones, Edward (1901) ‘Argra≠wyr Cymru’, Y Traethodydd 56: 273–83. Jones, John (1883) Adgof uwch anghof. Pen y Groes: G. Lewis. Jones, Philip Henry (1995) ‘Y Traethodydd 1845–1995: Ychydig o hanes masnachol y degawd cyntaf ’, Y Traethodydd 150: 133–47.

bibliography

511

Jones, Philip Henry (1997) ‘A Golden Age Reappraised: Welsh-Language Publishing in the Nineteenth Century’, in Images & Texts: Their Production and Distribution in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (ed. Peter Isaac and Barry McKay). Winchester: St Paul’s, 121–41. ——— (1999) ‘Scotland and the Welsh-Language Book-Trade in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, in The Human Face of the Book-Trade: Print Culture and its Creators (ed. Peter Isaac and Barry McKay). Winchester: St Paul’s, 117–36. ——— (2000a) ‘ “Business is awful bad in these parts”: New Evidence for the Pre-1914 Decline of the Welsh-Language Book Trade’, in The Mighty Engine: The Printing Press and Its Impact (ed. Peter Isaac and Barry McKay). New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 33–42. ——— (2000b) ‘Printing and Publishing in the Welsh Language 1800–1914’, in The Welsh Language and its Social Domains (ed. Geraint H. Jenkins). Cardi≠: University of Wales Press, 316–47. Jones, William B. (ed.) (2003) Robert Louis Stevenson Reconsidered; New Critical Perspectives. London: McFarland. Jupp, J. (ed.) (2001) The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaser, David (1957) Messrs. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia: A Study in the History of the Booktrade. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kaufman, Paul (1963) ‘The Rise of Community Libraries in Scotland’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 59: 233–94. ——— (1969) Libraries and their Users. London: Library Association. Keating, Peter (1989) The Haunted Study. London: Secker & Warburg. Keefe, H. J. (1939) A Century in Print: the Story of Hazell’s, 1839–1939. London: Hazell, Watson & Viney. Keiderling, T. (2000) ‘Leipzig als Vermittlungs und Produktionszentrum englischsprachiger Literatur zwischen 1815 und 1914’, in Beiträge zur Rezeption der britischen und irischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum. (ed. Norbert Bachleitner). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 3–76. Keir, David (1952) The House of Collins: The Story of a Scottish Family of Publishers from 1789 to the Present Day. London: Collins. Keith, Alexander (1963) Aberdeen University Press; an Account of the Press from its Foundation in 1840 until its Occupation of New Premises in 1963. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Kelly, Thomas (1966) Early Public Libraries. London: Library Association. Kennedy, David (1876) Kennedy’s Colonial Travel: A Narrative of a Four Years’ Tour through Australia, New Zealand, Canada, &c. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Publishing Co. Kennedy’s Handbook of Scottish Song (1872) Melbourne: Stillwell & Knight. Kerr, Robert (1790) Elements of Chemistry. Edinburgh: Creech. Kidd, Sheila M. (2002) ‘Caraid nan Gaidheal and “Friend of Emigration”: Gaelic Emigration Literature of the 1840s’, Scottish Historical Review 81 (1): 52–69. ——— (2003) ‘The Writer behind the Pen-Names: The Rev. Alexander MacGregor’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 61: 1–24. Kiddle, Margaret (1962) Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria, 1834–1890. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Kirsop, Wallace (1995) Books for Colonial Readers: The Nineteenth-Century Australian Experience. Melbourne: Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand.

512

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

——— (2002) ‘ “The Finest Private Library in Australia”: John Macgregor’s Collection’, The La Trobe Journal 69: 30–8. Klancher, Jon (1987) The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–1832. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Knight, David M. (1986) The Age of Science: The Scientiﬁc Worldview in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. ——— (1989) Natural Science Books in English 1600–1900. London: Batsford. Knox, William (1999) Industrial Nation: Work, Culture and Society in Scotland, 1800–Present. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kogan, Herman (1958) The Great E. B.: The Story of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Koss, Stephen (1981) The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, 2 vols. London: Hamish Hamilton. Kröller, Eva-Marie (1980) ‘Walter Scott in America, English Canada and Québec: A Comparison’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 7: 32–46. L. L. (1817) ‘Account of the Method of Engraving on Stone’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1 (May): 28–9. Laing, David (1861) Testimonial to the Secretary . . . Bound with the Adversaria. Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club. ——— (1866) Abbotsford Club: A List of the Members, the Rules and a Catalogue of Books Printed for the Club Since its Institution in 1833. Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club. ——— (1867) Adversaria: Notices Illustrative of Some of the Earlier Works Printed for the Bannatyne Club. Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club. Laing, William (1818) A Catalogue of Books, for the Year 1818. Edinburgh: Blackwood. ——— (1819) Supplement to a Catalogue of Books, for the Year 1819. Containing Several Purchases from the Continent. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Lamond, Robert (1821) A Narrative of the Rise and Progress of Emigration from the Counties of Lanark and Renfrew to the New Settlements in Upper Canada. Glasgow: Chalmers & Collins. Landsman, Ned C. (ed.) (2001) Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800. London: Associated University Presses. Langton, John and R.J. Morris (1986) Atlas of Industrializing Britain 1780–1914. London: Methuen. Law, Alexander (1965) Education in Edinburgh in the Eighteenth Century. London: University of London Press. ——— (1983) The Scottish Text Society 1882–1982. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society. Law, Graham (2000) Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Lee, Alan J. (1966) The Origins of the Popular Press in England. London: Croom Helm. Lenman, Bruce (1977) An Economic History of Modern Scotland, 1660–1976. London: Batsford. Lewis, Aneirin (1962–3) ‘Ieuan Fardd a’r llenorion Saesneg’, Llên Cymru 7: 172–92. Lewis, George (1834) Scotland a Half-Educated Nation. Glasgow: Collins. Lewis, John (1969) Printed Ephemera, The Changing Use of Type and Letterforms in English and American Printing. London: Faber. Lindsay, W. (1898) Some Notes Personal and Public. Aberdeen: privately printed. Linkletter, Michael (2006) ‘The Gaelic Collection of the Public Archives of Nova Scotia’, in Litreachas & Eachdraidh: Literature & History (ed. M. Byrne, T. O. Clancy and S. Kidd). Glasgow: Roinn na Ceiltis Oilthigh Ghlaschu, 148–60.

bibliography

513

Livingston, William (1882) Duain agus Orain le Uilleam Mac Dhunlèibhe (ed. R. Blair). Glasgow: Archibald Sinclair. Lloyd Evans, Trebor (1967) Lewis Edwards, ei Fywyd a’i Waith. Abertawe: Gwasg John Penry. Lloyd Hughes, D. G. (1996) ‘Addysg Chambers i’r Bobl’, Y Casglwr 56–7 (Haf ): 14–17. Local News: Life in Shetland as Reported in the Provincial Newspapers; the Emigration Years 1862–1881 (2003). Lerwick: Shetland Times. Lockhart, James Gibson (1819) Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, 3rd [2nd] edn, 3 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood. ——— (1837–8) Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 7 vols. Edinburgh: Cadell. ——— (1906) The Life of Sir Walter Scott. London: Dent. Loudon, J. H. (1980) James Scott and William Scott, Bookbinders. London: Scolar. Lowther Clarke, W. K. (1959) A History of the SPCK. London: SPCK. Lynch, Michael (1992) Scotland: A New History. London: Pimlico. ——— (ed.) (2001) The Oxford Companion to Scottish History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyons, Martyn (1984) ‘The Audience for Romanticism: Walter Scott in France, 1815–51’, European History Quarterly 14: 21–46. Mac Illeain, Iain [John MacLean] (1818) Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach. Edinburgh: Meinnearach. Macandrew, Isaac Forsyth (1889), Memoir of Isaac Forsyth, Bookseller in Elgin 1768–1859. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. MacDonald, J. S. (1905) Annals, North British Society, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1768–1903. Halifax: McAlpine. MacDonald, K. D. (1993) ‘Glasgow and Gaelic Writing’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 57: 395–428. Macdonald, Ramsay (ed.) (1904) Women in the Printing Trades; A Sociological Study. London: P. S. King. MacFarlane, Peter (1815) A New and Copious English and Gaelic Vocabulary. Edinburgh: Constable. MacGregor, M. (2002) ‘The Genealogical Histories of Gaelic Scotland’, in The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1850 (ed. Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf ). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 196–239. Mackenzie, John M. (1993) ‘Essay and Reﬂection: On Scotland and the Empire’, The International History Review 15: 716–24. MacKinnon, Donald (1956) Prose Writings (ed. L. MacKinnon). Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Mackintosh, Robert James (ed.) (1836) Memoirs of the Life of The Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, 2nd edn, 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon. MacLean, Donald (1913) The Spiritual Songs of Dugald Buchanan. Edinburgh: John Grant. MacLehose, James (1931) The Glasgow University Press, 1638–1931. Glasgow: Glasgow University Press. MacLeod, D. J. (1977) ‘Gaelic Prose’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 49: 198–230. MacLeod, Norman and Daniel Dewar (1831) Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, 2 vols. Glasgow: McPhun. Macleod, R. D. (1953) The Scottish Publishing Houses, Glasgow: W. & R. Holmes.

514

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

MacLoskie, C. (1848) The Handbook or Directory for the County of Fermanagh. Armagh: Guardian O∞ce. Macmillan, D. S. (1967) Scotland and Australia 1788–1850: Emigration, Commerce and Investment. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Magee, John (1826) Some Account of the Travels of John Magee, Pedlar and Flying Stationer, in North and South Britain, in the Years 1806 and 1808. Paisley: Caldwell. Magnusson, Magnus, et al. (1967) Glorious Privilege: The History of The Scotsman. Edinburgh: Nelson. Maison, Margaret M. (1961) Search your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age. London: Sheed & Ward. Maixner, Paul (ed.) (1981) Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. Malherbe, Michel (2003) ‘The Impact on Europe’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (ed. A. Broadie). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 298–315. Manley, Keith A. (2003) ‘Scottish Circulating and Subscription Libraries as Community Libraries’, Library History 19 (3): 185–94. Manning, Susan (2002) ‘Walter Scott, Antiquarianism, and the Political Discourse of the Edinburgh Review’, in British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review (ed. Massmiliano Demata and Duncan Wu). Basingstoke: Palgrave, 102–23. Manual of lithography, or Memoir on the lithographical experiments made in Paris at the Royal School of Roads and Bridges (1820) London: Rodwell & Martin. Marsden, B. (1992) ‘Engineering Science in Glasgow: Economy, E∞ciency and Measurement as Prime Movers in the Di≠erentiation of an Academic Discipline’, British Journal for the History of Science 25: 319–46. Martin, G. (1823) The Bookbinder’s Complete Instructor in all the Branches of Binding. Peterhead: P. Buchan. Martino, Alberto (1990) Die Deutsche Leihbibliothek. Geschichte einer literarischen Institution (1756–1914). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Masson, David (1856) Essays Biographical and Critical: Chieﬂy on English Poets. Cambridge: Macmillan. ——— (1865) Recent British Philosophy: A Review, with Criticisms. London: Macmillan. ——— (1885) Carlyle Personally and in his Writings. London: Macmillan. McCall, Lorne (1988) ‘ “Of Making Books There is no End”: Aspects of Edinburgh’s Printing History’, Scottish Book Collector 6: 8–12. McCann, W. J. (1990) ‘Patrick Neill and the Origins of Belfast Printing’, in Six Centuries of the Provincial Booktrade in Britain (ed. Peter Isaac). Winchester: St Paul’s, 125–38. McCleery, Alistair (2001) ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Nelson and Sons (ed. Heather Holmes and David Finkelstein). East Linton: Tuckwell. McDonald, W. R. (1967–9) ‘Circulating Libraries in the North-East of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century’, Bibliotheck 5: 119–37. McKay, Barry (2001) ‘John Atkinson’s “Lottery” Book of 1809: John Locke’s Theory of Education Comes to Workington’, in The Moving Market: Continuity and Change in the Book Trade (eds Peter Isaac and Barry McKay). New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 127–44. McLaren, Martha (1993) ‘From Analysis to Perception: Scottish Concepts of Asian Despotism in Early Nineteenth-Century British India’, The International History Review 15: 469–501.

bibliography

515

——— (2001) British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance. Akron, OH: University of Akron Press. McLaren, Moray D. S. (1949) The House of Neill, 1749–1949. Edinburgh: Neill. McLean, Scott A. (2000) Literature to Instruct, Entertain and Amuse: The Cheap Literature Movement in Scotland, 1768–1845. Ottawa: National Library of Canada. Meadows, A. J. (ed.) (1980) The Development of Science Publishing in Europe. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Meek, D. E. (1978) The Campbell Collection of Gaelic Proverbs and Proverbial Sayings. Inverness: Gaelic Society of Inverness. ——— (1988) Island Harvest: A History of Tiree Baptist Church 1838–1988. Edinburgh: Tiree Books. ——— (1991) ‘Dugald Sinclair: The Life and Work of a Highland Itinerant Missionary’, Scottish Studies 30: 59–91. ——— (1995) Tuath is Tighearna: Tenants and Landlords. Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society. ——— (1998a) ‘The Reformation and Gaelic Culture: Perspectives on Patronage, Language and Literature in John Carswell’s Translation of The Book of Common Order’, in The Church in the Highlands (ed. J. Kirk). Edinburgh: Scottish Church History Society, 37–62. ——— (1998b) Màiri Mhòr nan Oran: Taghadh de a h-Orain. Dùn Eideann: Comann Litreachas Gàidhlig na h-Alba. ——— (2001) ‘ “Beachdan Ura à Inbhir Nis / New Opinions from Inverness:” Alexander MacBain (1855–1907) and the Foundation of Celtic Studies in Scotland’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 131: 23–39. ——— (2002a) ‘The Pulpit and the Pen: Clergy, Orality and Print in the Scottish Gaelic World’, in The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1850 (ed. Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf ). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 84–118. ——— (2002b) ‘The Glory of the Lamb: The Gaelic Hymns of Peter Grant’, in The Gospel in the World (ed. D. W. Bebbington). International Baptist Studies no. I. Carlisle: Paternoster, 129–64. ——— (2003) Caran an t-Saoghail: The Wiles of the World: Anthology of Nineteenth Century Scottish Gaelic Verse. Edinburgh: Birlinn. ——— (2004) ‘The Sublime Gael: The Impact of Macpherson’s Ossian on Literary Creativity and Cultural Perception in Gaelic Scotland’, in The Reception of Ossian in Europe (ed. H. Gaskill). London: Thoemmes Continuum, 40–66. Mehrotra, A. K. (ed.) (2003) An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Delhi: Permanent Black. Menzies Group (1965). Edinburgh: John Menzies. Merry Ross, John (1884) Scottish History and Literature: To the Period of the Reformation. Glasgow: MacLehose. Mersey, Charles Clive Bigham (1928) The Roxburgh Club, its History and its Members, 1812–1927. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Millar, J. H. (1903) Literary History of Scotland. London: Unwin. Miller, Hugh (1854) An Autobiography. My Schools and Schoolmasters; or, the Story of My Education. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. Millgate, Jane (1987) Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

516

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

——— (1996) ‘Archibald Constable and the Problem of London: “Quite the Connection We Have Been Looking For” ’, The Library 18 (2): 110–23. ——— (2000) ‘The Early Publication History of Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94: 551–64. ——— (2002) ‘Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel: The History of a Book’, European Romantic Review 13: 225–38. Millward, E. G. (1983) Ceinion y Gân. Llandysul: Gomer. ——— (1991) Cenedl o Bobl ddewrion: Agweddau ar lenyddiaeth oes Victoria. Llandysul: Gomer. Minto, John (1900) ‘A Notable Publishing House: The Morisons of Perth’, The Library 1 (3): 254–63. Mitchell, B. R. (1988) British Historical Statistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moir, Donald (ed.) (1973–83) The Early Maps of Scotland to 1850, 3rd edn, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Moir, John S. (1992) ‘Through Missionary Eyes: The Glasgow Colonial Society and the Immigrant Experience in British North America’, in The Immigrant Experience (ed. C. Kerrigan). Guelph: University of Guelph, 95–109. Moody, T. W. (1957) ‘Higher Education’, in Ulster since 1800 (ed. T. W. Moody and J. C. Beckett). London: BBC, 192–203. Moore, John N. (1996) The Maps of Glasgow: A History and Cartobibliography to 1865. Glasgow: Glasgow University Library. Moral Statistics of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1826). Inverness: Inverness Society for the Education of the Poor in the Highlands. Moran, James (1973) Printing Presses; History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Morgan, Charles (1943) The House of Macmillan (1843–1943). London: Macmillan. Morgan, Prys (1984) ‘From Long Knives to Blue Books’, in Welsh Society and Nationhood: Historical Essay Presented to Glanmor Williams (ed. R. R. Davies et al.). Cardi≠: University of Wales Press, 199–215. Morley, Henry (1887) English Writers. London: Cassell. Morley, John (1970) ‘Memorials of a Man of Letters’, in Nineteenth-Century Essays (ed. Peter Stansky). London: University of Chicago Press, 261–80. Morrell, J. B. (1969) ‘Thomas Thomson: Professor of Chemistry and University Reformer’, British Journal for the History of Science 4: 245–65. Morris, Albert (1992) Scotland’s Paper: The Scotsman 1817–1992. Edinburgh: Scotsman Publication. Morris, John (1987) ‘Wheels and Herringbones: Some Scottish Bindings 1678–1773’, The Bookbinder 1: 39–50. ——— (1997) ‘Scottish Ballads and Chapbooks’, in Images & Texts: Their Production and Distribution in the 18th and 19th Centuries (ed. Peter Isaac and Barry McKay). Winchester: St Paul’s, 89–111. ——— (1998) ‘A Bothy Ballad and its Chapbook Source’, in The Reach of Print: Making, Selling and Using Books (ed. Peter Isaac and Barry McKay). Winchester: Oak Knoll, 85–102. Mortimer, Thomas (1976) 500 Years of Printing in Shetland, Lerwick: Manson. Morton, Graeme (1999) Unionist Nationalism. East Linton: Tuckwell. Mowat, J. (1920) ‘Books and Printers in Caithness’, Records of the Glasgow Bibliographical Society 6: 84–94.

bibliography

517

Murdoch, John (1870) Catalogue of the Christian Vernacular Literature of India. Madras: Caleb Foster. Murdoch, Thomas (1902) The Early History of Lithography in Glasgow. Glasgow: T. Murdoch. Murphy, Peter T. (1992) ‘Impersonation and Authority in Romantic Britain’, ELH 59 (3): 625–49. Murray, David (1915) David Laing, Antiquarian and Bibliographer. Glasgow: MacLehose. Newton, M. (2003) ‘ “Becoming Cold-Hearted Like the Gentiles Around Them”: Scottish Gaelic in the United States, 1872–1912’, e-Keltoi: Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies 2: 63–131. Nicholson, Joyce and Daniel Thorpe (2000) A Life of Books: The Story of D. W. Thorpe Pty Ltd 1921–1987. Middle Park: Courtyard Press. Nicholson, Tim (1999a) ‘A Scotch Mystery’, IMCoS Journal 79: 37–41. ——— (1999b) ‘Comments on the Article “Cartography of the Bartholomew Firm” ’. IMCoS Journal 77: 62–3. Nilsen, K. E. (2002) ‘Some Notes on Pre-Mac-Talla Gaelic Publishing in Nova Scotia’, in Rannsachadh na Gaidhlig 2000. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 127–140. Norrie, William (1891) Edinburgh Newspapers: Past and Present. Earlston: Waverley Press. Ó Baoill, C. (2001) MacLean Manuscripts in Nova Scotia: A Catalogue of the Gaelic Verse . . . in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. Aberdeen: Department of Celtic. Oliphant, Margaret (1867) ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Sept.): 257–80. ——— (1879) ‘Two Ladies’, Blackwood’s Magazine (Feb.): 206–24. ——— (1880) ‘The Grievances of Women’, Fraser’s Magazine (May): 698–710. ——— (1897) Annals of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and His Sons, their Magazine and Friends, 3 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood. ——— (1974) Autobiography and Letters (ed. Mrs H. Coghill). Leicester: Leicester University Press. ——— (1990) The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant (ed. Elisabeth Jay). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Osborne, R. H. (1958) ‘The Movements of People in Scotland, 1851–1951’, Scottish Studies 2: 3. Parent-Lardeur, Françoise (1981) Lire à Paris au temps de Balzac: Les cabinets de lecture à Paris, 1815–1830. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. Parker, George L. (1985) The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Parker, Mark (2000) Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, W. M. The House of Oliver & Boyd: A Record from 1778 to 1948, unpublished typescript. NLS Acc. 5000/1425. Pattison, Mark (1877) ‘Books and Critics’, Fortnightly Review 28: 659–79. Payn, James (1884) Some Literary Recollections. London: Smith, Elder. Payne, Paul (1999) ‘Local Newspapers in Berwick and the Borders’, History of the Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club, 48 (1): 20–3. Percy, Thomas and Evan Evans (1957) The Correspondence of Thomas Percy & Evan Evans (ed. A. Lewis). Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.

518

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Phillips, Alastair (1982) Glasgow’s Herald, 1783–1983. Glasgow: R. Drew. Pollard, H. G. (1978) ‘The English Market for Printed Books’, Publishing History 4: 7–48. Pollard, M. (1989) Dublin’s Trade in Books 1550–1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——— (2000) A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Booktrade 1550–1800. London: Bibliographical Society. Porter, Mary (1898) Annals of a Publishing House: John Blackwood. The Third Volume. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Prentis, Malcolm D. (1983) The Scots in Australia: A Study of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, 1788–1900. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Price, Lawrence M. (1953) English Literature in German. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Public Despatches from England 1753–1754 (1963). Madras: Government Press. Purser, John (1992) Scotland’s Music: A History of the Traditional and Classical Music of Scotland from Earliest Times to the Present Day. Edinburgh: Mainstream. Raychaudhuri, Tapan (2002) Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal, 2nd edn. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rees, E. (1987) Libri Walliae: A Catalogue of Welsh Books and Books Printed in Wales 1546–1820. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales. Rendall, Jane (1982) ‘Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill’, Historical Journal 25: 43–69. Report of the Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Condition of Intermediate and Higher Education in Wales and Monmouthshire Vol. II, Minutes of Evidence and Appendices. PP 1881: 33, C.3047. Report from the Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps (1969) Shannon: Irish University Press. Reynolds, Siân (1989) Britannica’s Typesetters: Women Compositors in Edwardian Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rickards, Maurice (2000) The Encyclopedia of Ephemera. London: British Library. Robb, Gwenda (2003) George Howe, Australia’s First Publisher. Melbourne: Arcadia. Robertson, A. W. (1894) ‘The Public Libraries of Aberdeen’, The Library 6: 1–12. Robinson, Howard (1948) The British Post O∞ce: A History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roscoe, S. and R. A. Brimmell (1981) James Lumsden & Son of Glasgow. Pinner: Private Libraries Association. Rose, Jonathan (2001) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rose, Mark (1993) Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ross, John Merry (1884) Scottish History and Literature to the Period of the Reformation. Glasgow: MacLehose. Russell, Colin A. (1983) Science and Social Change, 1700–1900. London: Macmillan. Saintsbury, George (1896) History of Nineteenth-Century Literature. London: Macmillan. ——— (1923) The Collected Essays and Papers of George Saintsbury 1875–1920. London: Dent. Sandeman, Hugh David (1869) Selections from Calcutta Gazettes of the Years 1816 to 1823 Inclusive, vol. 5. Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing.

bibliography

519

Sander, David M. (1979) Wood Engraving: An Adventure in Printmaking. London: Peter Owen. Sanders, V. (2001) ‘Women, Fiction and the Marketplace’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1800–1900 (ed. J. Shattock). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 141–61. Scally, John (1994), Pictures of the Mind: The Illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh: Canongate. Schenck, David H.J. (1999) Directory of the Lithographic Printers of Scotland. Edinburgh: Bibliographical Society. Schmidt, Barbara Quinn (1984) ‘Novelists, Publishers, and Fiction in Middle-Class Magazines, 1860–1880,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 17: 142–52. Schmidt, P. (2003) ‘Walter Scott, Postcolonial Theory and New South Literature’, The Mississippi Quarterly 56 (4): 545–54. Scotland, James (1969) The History of Scottish Education. London: University of London Press. Scott, Patrick (1973) ‘The Business of Belief: The Emergence of “Religious” Publishing’, in Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and The World (ed. Derek Barker). Oxford: Blackwell, 213–23. Scott, Walter (1833–4) Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, 12 vols. Edinburgh: Robert Cadell. ——— (1834–6) Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott (ed. John Gibson Lockhart), 28 vols. Edinburgh: Cadell. ——— (1872) Scott Exhibition MDCCCLXXI. Catalogue of the Exhibition Held at Edinburgh, in July and August, 1871. Edinburgh. ——— (1932–7) Letters of Sir Walter Scott (ed. H. J. C. Grierson), 12 vols. London: Constable. ——— (1972) Journal of Sir Walter Scott (ed. W. E. K. Anderson). Oxford: Clarendon. ——— (1981) Waverley; or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (ed. Claire Lamont). Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——— (1987) Scott’s Interleaved Waverley Novels (ed. Iain Gordon Brown). Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. ——— (2000) Chronicles of the Canongate (ed. Claire Lamont). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Second Annual Report of the Sub-Committee for Erecting a Monument to Sir Walter Scott (1835). Edinburgh: Neill. Secord, James A. (2000) Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Selle, R. (1988) ‘Aufnahme und Wirkung: Burns in Deutschland’, in Burns. Liebe und Freiheit. Lieder und Gedichte (ed. R. Camerer). Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 309–28. Senefelder, Alois (1819) A Complete Course of Lithography. London: R. Ackermann. Seshadrii, P. (1912) An Anglo-Indian Poet John Leyden. Madras: Higginbotham. Shattock, Joanne (1973) ‘The North British Review 1844–71: Its History, Policies and Contributors’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London. ——— (1989) Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Shattock, Joanne (1995) ‘The Making of a Novelist: Oliphant and John Blackwood at Work on The Perpetual Curate’, in Margaret Oliphant: Essays on a Gentle Subversive (ed. D. J. Trela). Susquehanna, PA: Associated University Press, 113–23.

520

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Shaw, Graham W. (1981) Printing in Calcutta to 1800. London: Bibliographical Society. ——— (1998) ‘Calcutta: Birthplace of the Indian Lithographed Book’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society 27: 89–111. Sheets-Pyenson, S. (1981a) ‘From the North to Red Lion Court: The Creation and Early Years of the Annals of Natural History’, Archives of Natural History 10: 221–49. ——— (1981b) ‘A Measure of Success: The Publication of Natural History Journals in Early Victorian Britain’, Publishing History 9: 21–36. ——— (1981c) ‘War and Peace in Natural History Publishing: The Naturalist’s Library, 1833–43’, Isis 72: 50–72. Sher, Richard (1998) ‘Corporatism and Consensus in the Late Eighteenth-Century Book Trade: The Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society in Comparative Perspective’, Book History 1: 32–93. Shirley, Rodney (2000) ‘Berghaus and Johnston: Pioneers of the Thematic Atlas’ IMCoS Journal 83: 31–5. Shortland, Michael (1996a) ‘Hugh Miller’s Contribution to the Witness: 1840–56’, in Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science (ed. M. Shortland). Oxford: Clarendon, 287–300. ——— (1996b) Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Simpson, W. (1931) Old Inverness Booksellers: Men and Memories of Bygone Days. Inverness: Carruthers. Sinclair, A. MacLean (1881) Clàrsach na Coille. Glasgow: Archibald Sinclair. ——— (1928) Clàrsach na Coille (ed. Hector MacDougall). Glasgow: Alex. MacLaren. Sinclair, Dugald (1814) Journal of Itinerating Exertions in Some of the More Destitute Parts of Scotland. Edinburgh: Andrew Balfour. Sinclair, David (2000) The Pound: A Biography. London: Century. Smail, Thomas (1872) Smail’s Guide to Jedburgh and Vicinity and Angler’s Guide to the Tweed and its Tributaries, Jedburgh: Smail Smailes, Helen (1981) Scottish Empire: Scots in Pursuit of Hope and Glory. Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Smiles, Samuel (1891) A Publisher and his Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray, 3 vols. London: John Murray. Smith, A. D. (1917) The Development of Rates of Postage: An Historical and Analytical Study. London: Allen & Unwin. Smith, Anthony (1979) The Newspaper, an International History. London: Thames & Hudson. Smith, David (1996) ‘William Blackwood & Sons, Map Publishers of the Nineteenth Century’, Mercator’s World 1(5): 56–61. ——— (1997) ‘A. & C. Black, 1807–c. 1900’, IMCoS Journal 71: 15–21. ——— (1998) ‘The Business of the Bartholomew Family Firm, c. 1826–1919’, IMCoS Journal 74: 23–31. ——— (1999) ‘The Cartography of the Bartholomew Family Firm c.1826–1919’, IMCoS Journal 76: 37–47. Smith, J. V. (1983) ‘Manners, Morals and Mentalities: Reﬂections on the Popular Enlightenment of Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland, in Scottish Culture and Scottish Education 1800–1900 (ed. W. M. Humes and H. M. Paterson). Edinburgh: John Donald, 25–54.

bibliography

521

Smout, T. C. (1986) A Century of the Scottish People 1830–1950. London: Collins. ——— (1987) A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830. London: Fontana. Southward, John (1887) Practical Printing: A Handbook of the Art of Typography. London: J. M. Powell. Spragge, G. W. (ed.) (1946) The John Strachan Letter Book: 1812–1834. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society. SPRAT (1990) A Reputation for Excellence: A History of the Edinburgh Printing Industry. Edinburgh: Scottish Printing Archival Trust. ——— (1994) Reputation for Excellence: A History of the Glasgow Printing Industry. Edinburgh: Scottish Printing Archival Trust. ——— (1996) Reputation for Excellence: A History of the Dundee and Perth Printing Industries. Edinburgh: Scottish Printing Archival Trust. ——— (2000) Reputation for Excellence: A History of the Aberdeen and Northern Counties Printing Industries. Edinburgh: Scottish Printing Archival Trust. SRB (1987) The South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography, I: 1556–1800. (ed. Graham W. Shaw). London: British Library. Srebrnik, Patricia Thomas (1983) ‘Anchor of Hope’: The Career of Alexander Strahan, a Victorian Publisher. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ——— (1986) Alexander Strahan: Victorian Publisher. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. St Clair, John B. and Roger Craik (1989) The Advocates’ Library: 300 Years of a National Institution 1689–1989. Edinburgh: HMSO. St Clair, William (2004) The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. STA (1877) Report of the Proceedings of the Eighth General Delegate Meeting. Glasgow: Macrone. Sta≠ord, Fiona (2002) ‘The Edinburgh Review and the Representation of Scotland’, in British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays (ed. Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu). London: Palgrave, 33–57. Stanford, J. K. (ed.) (1962) Ladies in the Sun: The Memsahibs’ India 1790–1860. London: Galley Press. Steinberg, S. H. (1961) Five Hundred Years of Printing. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stenhouse, David (2004) On the Make: How the Scots Took Over London. Edinburgh: Mainstream. Stephen, Leslie (1920) ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’, in Hours in a Library, 3 vols. London: John Murray, 2: 223–49. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1909) Memories and Portraits. London: Chatto & Windus. ——— (1994–5) The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew), 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stevenson, Sara (2002) The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill, New Haven: Yale University Press. Stevenson, T. G. (1848) Catalogue of the Privately Printed Publications of the Bannatyne Club, from 1823 to 1848: Now on Sale at the Prices A∞xed. Edinburgh: T. G. Stevenson. Stevenson, T. G. (1860) Catalogue of an Extraordinary Collection of the Interesting and Valuable Works Printed at Private Expense for their Members by the Abbotsford, Bannatyne, Maitland and Spalding Clubs. Edinburgh: T. G. Stevenson. Stewart, Alexander (1801) Elements of Gaelic Grammar. Edinburgh: C. Stewart.

522

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Stewart, William (1911), The Glasgow Herald: The Story of a Great Newspaper from 1783 to 1911. Glasgow: privately printed. Story of ‘The Scotsman’: A Chapter in the Annals of British Journalism (1886). Edinburgh: Private circulation. Strout, A. L. (1954) ‘Writers on German Literature in Blackwood’s Magazine. With a Footnote on Thomas Carlyle’, The Library 9: 35–44. Sutherland, John A. (1976) Victorian Novelists and Publishers. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Swearingen, Roger G. (1980) The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. London: Macmillan. Tarr, Rodger (1989) Thomas Carlyle, A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Tebbel, J. (1972) A History of Book Publishing in the United States, Volume 1: The Creation of an Industry, 1630–1865. New York: Bowker. Terry, C. S. (1909) Scottish Historical Clubs, 1780–1908. Glasgow: MacLehose. Then and Now 1799–1974: Commemorating 175 Years of Law Bookselling and Publishing (1974). London: Sweet & Maxwell. Thin, James (1905) Reminiscences of Booksellers and Bookselling in Edinburgh in the Time of William IV. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Thom’s O∞cial Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for 1898 (1898). Dublin: Alex Thom. Thomas, John (1971) A Regional History of the Railways: Scotland – the Lowlands and the Borders. Newton Abbott: David & Charles. Thompson, Alastair R. (1963) ‘The Use of Libraries by the Working Class in Scotland in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Scottish Historical Review 42 (April): 21–9. Thomson, A. G. (1974) The Paper Industry in Scotland 1590–1861. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Thomson, Katrina (1999) Turner and Sir Walter Scott: The Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland. Todd, Emily B. (1999) ‘Walter Scott and the Nineteenth-Century American Literary Marketplace: Antebellum Richmond Readers and the Collected Editions of the Waverley Novels’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 93 (4): 495–517. Todd, William B. and Ann Bowden (1988) Tauchnitz International Editions in English 1841–1955. A Bibliographical History. New York: Bibliographical Society of America. ——— (1998) Sir Walter Scott: A Bibliographical History 1796–1832. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll. Topham, J. R. (1999) ‘Science, Natural Theology, and Evangelicalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Thomas Chalmers and the Evidence Controversy’, in Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (ed. David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart and Mark A. Noll). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 142–74. ——— (2000) ‘Scientiﬁc Publishing and the Reading of Science in Early NineteenthCentury Britain: An Historiographical Survey and Guide to Sources’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 31A: 559–612. ——— (2004) ‘Science, Natural Theology and the Practice of Christian Piety in Early Nineteenth-Century Religious Magazines’, in Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (ed. G. Cantor and S. Shuttleworth). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 37–66.

bibliography

523

Tredrey, F. D. (1954) The House of Blackwood 1804–1954: The History of a Publishing Firm. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Twyman, Michael (1998) Printing 1770–1970: An Illustrated History of its Development and Uses in England. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. van Wyhe, J. (2004) Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientiﬁc Naturalism. Aldershot: Ashgate. Varma, D. P. (1972) The Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge. Washington, DC: Consortium Press. Vaughan, Robert (1852) ‘Lord Je≠rey – Our Periodical Press’, British Quarterly Review 16: 152–96. Vincent, David (2000) The Rise of Mass Literacy. Cambridge: Polity. Voorn, Henrik (1988) ‘John Matthew, Papermaker’, International Paper Historians Yearbook 7: 173–82. Walker, G. (1894) ‘Aberdeen: Its Literature, Bookmaking, and Circulating’, The Library 6: 238–45; 266–73. Wallace, John (1867) Lessons from the Life of the Late James Nisbet, Publisher. Edinburgh: Johnston & Hunter. Wallis, Helen M. and Arthur H. Robinson (eds) (1987) Cartographical Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900. Tring: Map Collector Publications. Watson, Don (1984) Caledonia Australis: Scottish Highlanders on the Frontier of Australia. Sydney: Collins. Watters, R. E. (1972) A Checklist of Canadian Literature and Background Materials, 1628–1960. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Webb, R. K. (1955) The British Working Class Reader, 1790–1848. London: Allen & Unwin. Weedon, Alexis (2003) Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Publishing for a Mass Market, 1836–1916. Aldershot: Ashgate. Weinstein, M. A. (1983) ‘Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine’, in English Literary Magazines, Volume 2 (ed. Alvin Sullivan). Westport, CT: Greenwood, 401–5. Weir, J. L. (1939–40) ‘David Laing, Librarian and Bookman’, Library Review 7: 19–24. ——— (1945–6) ‘The Scottish Book Clubs’, Library Review 10: 189–92. WD (2003) Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, Series 2 (ed. John North). Waterloo: North Waterloo Academic Press. WIVP (1968–89) Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 5 vols. (ed. W. E. Houghton). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wiener, J. H. (1965) The Movement to Repeal the Taxes on Knowledge, 1825–1840: A Study in British Working-Class Radicalism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Williams, Merryn (1986) Margaret Oliphant. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Willins, Rev. A. (1874) Innerleithen and Traquair Past and Present: With an Angler’s Guide to the Tweed and its Tributaries, 4th edn, Innerleithen: Smail. Wilson, Daniel (1889) William Nelson: A Memoir. Edinburgh: Nelson. Withers, Charles (1984) Gaelic in Scotland 1698–1981. Edinburgh: John Donald. ——— and D. A. Finnegan (2003) ‘Natural History Societies, Fieldwork and Local Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Towards a Historical Geography of Civic Science’, Cultural Geographies 10: 335–53. Withrington, D. J. (1971) ‘Aberdeen Antiquaries; the Founding of the Spalding Club, 1839’, Aberdeen University Review 44: 42–55.

524

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Wood, J. (1828) Account of the Edinburgh Sessional School. Edinburgh: Wardlaw. Yeats, W. B. (1975) Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. 1 (ed. John P. Frayne). London: Macmillan. Yeo, Richard (1991) ‘Reading Encyclopedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730–1850’, Isis 82: 24–49. Zbavitel, Dusˇan (1976) Bengali Literature. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

INDEX

Subjects principally associated with Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, the United States and Wales will be found under those main headings. Publishing dynasties are indexed under their most significant corporate title, not individuals. Abbey, J. R., 57 Abbotsford Club, 230, 279, 285 Aberdeen Breviary, 283 Figures 5.1, 5.2 Aberdeen Chronicle, 102 Aberdeen Gleaner, 300 Act of Union (1801), 349 Acton, Lord, 357 Adam, Alexander, German translations, 438 advertising, 87–8, 127–30, 428 in Ireland, 424, 426, 428, 429 in London periodicals, 129 shop displays, 129 advertising agents, 88, 127, 128, 393 agents and agency agreements, 136–7, 386 Ainsworth, Robert, Latin Dictionary, 394 Aird, Andrew, 37 Alexis, Willibald, 436 Allan, David, Airthrey Mill papermaker, 24 Allan, Helen, 182 Allan, Mozart, Glasgow music publisher, 312 Allan, Robert, 182 Allen, John, 348 Alloa Advertiser, 33 Amalgamated Society of Papermakers, 25 Analytical review, 343 Anderson, Christopher, 112, 162 Anderson, James, Kirkwall printer and newspaper proprietor, 102

Anderson, John, Aberdeen and London wood engraver, 52 Figure 1.8 Anderson, John, Edinburgh publisher titles published: (1824–8) 489 Table 10.3; (1821–31) 491 Table 10.4 Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 298 Annals of Natural History, London, 298 Ante-Nicene Library, 105 anthropology, 277 Anti-Jacobin review, 343 antiquarianism, 83, 278–85, 349 apprentices, 43–4, 74–5, 421 Arbroath Guide, 102 Armour’s, Edinburgh printers, 34 Arnold, Thomas, 273, 348 The Attempt, 198–9 Figure 3.15 Austin, Richard, London typefounder, 26, 27, 29 Australia agents: Bright Brothers, 103; McGreadie, Thomas & Niven, 103 Australian Stationery Warehouse, 468 book collectors, 466, 471–2 booksellers, 468–9, 470–1, 472: Angus, David, 470; Augustus, James, 469; Augustus, Samuel, 469; Berry, Alexander, 467; Howe, Ann, 468; Howe, Robert, 468; Melville, Adam, 470; Mullen,

525

Samuel, 470; Robertson, George, 470 consignment trade, 468, 469 and Gaelic culture, 473 libraries: circulating, 468; parish, 473, 475; private, 466–7 Figure 8.5; public, 475; subscription, 471 newspapers: Age, 471; Argus, 469; Sydney Herald, 469 publishers, 472: Collins, William, 472; Maxwell, W., & Son, 472; Robertson, George & Co., 470 Scottish expatriates: Boyd, George, 469; Carfrae, John, 469; Dunmore, John, 468; Dymock, William, 470; Howe, George, 468; Kerr, William, 469; Lawrie, Janet, 474 Figure 8.6; Lyall, William, 466; McGarvie, John, 468; McGarvie, William, 468–9; Macgregor, John, 472; McKay, Margaret, 466, 468; McLeay, Alexander, 466; Michie, Archibald, 472; Mitchell, David Scott, 472; Nicholson, Sir Charles, 471–2; Rae, William, 472; Russell, George, 466; Stenhouse, Nichol Drysdale, 472; Thompson, Alexander, 469 typefounders, 469

526

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

author–publisher relations, 85–6, 212–15, 405 advances, 85 collection rights, 215 contracts, 86 copyright sale, 85, 213, 216–17, 218, 219, 261 edition sale, 85, 215 moral rights, 215 publication for the author/editor, 109, 120, 165, 212–13, 408 publication by subscription, 86, 120, 212, 213 royalties, 250, 261, 293 shared profits, 85–6, 213, 214–15, 216–17, 218–19 Aytoun, W. E., 355 Bagehot, Walter, 304, 343, 346, 347, 349 Baillie, Joanna, 214, 215, 219 Family Legend: A Tragedy, 208, 276 Bain, Alexander, inventor, 6 Bain, Alexander, philosopher, 277 Baine, John, & Grandson, Edinburgh typefounders, 27 Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, London publishers, 352 Ballantyne & Co., printers, Kelso and Edinburgh, 29, 33, 36, 37, 45, 206, 224, 225, 341 failure (1813), 208 failure (1826), 92 and Scott, 206, 207 Figure 4.1, 209, 217, 218, 226 Ballantyne & Hanson, Edinburgh printers, 96 Ballantyne, R. M., 293, 405 Banim, John, 355 banknote forgery, 62–3 Figure 1.12 banknote printers, 318 Bannatyne Club, 272, 283, 285 editor, 282 fine bindings, 280–1 presidents, 280 secretary, 279–80 Bannatyne, George, 279 Barbour, John, 272, 273 Barker, Richard, London advertising agent, 127 Barrie, J. M., Auld Licht Idylls, 276 Bartholemew & Co., Edinburgh map publishers, 105–6, 318, 319–20 Bartholemew’s Physical Atlas, 319 battledores, 325 Baxter, Charles, 261

Baxter, Richard, Saints’ Everlasting Rest, 293 Bayley & Ferguson, Glasgow music publishers, 312 Bell & Bain, Glasgow printers, 237 Bell & Bradfute, Edinburgh booksellers, wholesalers and publishers, 44, 70, 80, 81–2, 88, 126, 127, 128, 129, 404 titles published: (1824–8) 489 Table 10.3; (1821–31) 491 Table 10.4 Bent, William, 87 Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser, 127 Beowulf, 272 Berghaus, Heinrich, German mapmaker, 319 Bertholet, Claude Louis, 18 Bertram, Charles, 404 Bertram, George, 22 Bertram, James, wire-working factory owner, 22 Bertram, William, 22 Besant, Walter, 254 Bewick, Thomas, Northumberland printer and wood engraver, 49, 51, 52 Bible Class Handbooks, 105 Bible publishing, 36, 287, 288–90, 411; see also under Gaelic translations Biblical Cabinet, 105, 294 Bilbiotheca Scoto-Celtica, 167 Black, A. & C., Edinburgh publishers, 80, 88, 97, 100 Figure 2.4, 403–5, 424, 431 and Encyclopaedia Britannica, 88, 97, 306–7, 404 Irish guide books, 428 reference books, 404 religious publishing, 287 science publishing, 296, 297, 298, 301 and Scott, 230–1 Black, Donald, 168 Black, Francis, 404 Black, Isabella, 234 Black, James, Penicuik confectioner and bookseller, 125 Figure 3.1 Black, William, translations, 437, 439 Blackie & Sons, Glasgow printers and publishers, 35, 90, 104, 211, 402–3, 412, 432 Bible publishing, 289 Canadian agent, 448 children’s books, 104 commercial travellers, 102

Dublin branch, 419, 420 educational books, 104, 327, 403, 420 and French translations, 432 and German book trade, 432 and India, 464 London office, 103, 403 number publishing, 135 and price maintenance, 139 The Popular Encyclopaedia, 308 prize books, 104 religious publishing, 287 technical books, 308 Blackwood, Alexander, 352, 424 Blackwood, John, 96, 99, 248–9 Blackwood, William, & Sons, Edinburgh publishers, 3, 37, 82, 83–4, 88–9 Figure 2.2, 96, 208, 250, 284, 404–5 and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 34 commercial travellers, 102 educational books, 327 fiction, 12, 84, 96, 209–10, 211 Foreign Classics for English Readers, 252, 433 Gaelic publishing, 116 German literature in translation, 434 German poetry text book, 435 hymn books, 105 and Ireland, 137, 424 London office, 103 and Murray, 404 non-fiction, 96, 99 and Oliphant, 248–50, 252, 276 payments to authors, 85 religious publishing, 287, 292 science publishing, 296, 297, 298, 301 and Scott, 209 titles published: (1824–8) 489 Table 10.3, 490; (1821–31) 491 Table 10.4 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 9, 11, 34, 84, 99, 102, 203, 210, 211, 269, 341, 350–3, 369, 404, 411 circulation, 352 closure (1980), 342 ‘The Cockney School of Poetry’, 351–2 contributors, 11, 350 editors: Blackwood, William, 350; Lockhart, John Gibson, 350; Wilson, John, 350 and Oliphant, 248, 251, 252, 254

index name changed to Blackwood’s (1905), 369 nicknamed ‘Maga’, 350 ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ dialogues (1822–35), 351, 352 printers: Ballantyne’s, 34; in house, 34; Oliver & Boyd, 34, 352, 394 review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literia, 351 and Scott–Christie duel (1821), 352 serialised fiction, 352 ‘Translation from an early Chaldee Manuscript’, 351, 352 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Monthly, 350 Blaikie, W. G., 357 Blair, Hugh, 269, 438 Blair, Robert, 160 Bleach and Dye Works Act (1860), 23 Blind Harry, Wallace, 272 blind people, printing for, 322–3 Figure 5.9 Bone, Sir Muirhead, 55 book production (1824–31) England and Scotland, 487 Table 10.1, 488; see also under Edinburgh, Glasgow, Ireland, London bookbinding, 64–75 centres: Aberdeen, 64; Edinburgh, 64, 70; Glasgow, 64, 69–70 processes: embossing, 70–1, 73; finishing, 67; forwarding, 66–7; gold tooling, 73; preparation, 65–6; sewing, 66 styles: ‘Adam’, 68, 69; baroque, 68; herringbone, 67; Mauchline, 72 Figure 1.14; wheel, 67, 68 Figure 1.13, 69 trade organisation, 73–5: apprentices, 74–5; Bookbinders Consolidated Union, 75; Edinburgh Union Society of Journeymen Bookbinders, 74–5, 421; Master & Journeymen Bookbinders of Edinburgh, 74–5; Society of Bookbinders in Edinburgh, 73; wages, 75; women workers, 66, 75; working conditions, 74 types: Bibles, 67, 69, 70, 288–9; book cloth, 70–1; children’s books, 65; fine, 69–73, 118–19 Figure 2.8,

280–1; hand, 65–70; leather, 69; machine assisted, 70–1, 73; school books, 65 books, relative cost, 10 bookselling, 3, 88, 123–40 Aberdeen, 123 Edinburgh, 124 foreign-language, 124 Glasgow, 124 Inverness, 124, 126 see also under Australia, Canada, Ireland, United States Bowes, Robert, 401 Bowman, Walter, 175 Bowring, John, 354 box societies, 24, 73–4 Boyd, George, Edinburgh bookbinder, 84, 97, 129 Boyd, John, Edinburgh publisher, 97, 129 Boyd, John, Gaelic printer, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, 108, 236 Boyd, Thomas, 97, 99, 101 Figure 2.6, 132 Boyd, Thomas jnr, 97 Boyd, Thomson, 97 Bradshaw’s Railway Timetable, 6, 27 Brewster, Sir David, 83, 241, 296, 297, 298, 299, 307 Bridge of Allan Union Box Society, 24 British & Foreign Bible Society, 290 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 299 British Magazine, 127 The British Messenger, 291 broadsides, 8, 115, 286 Figures 5.3, 5.4 Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 249 Brougham, Henry, 344, 348, 350, 356 Brown, Crum, 63 Brown, George Douglas, The House with Green Shutters, 13 Brown, James, Duns printer and tradesman, 32 Brown, John, 194 Brown, Samuel, 195 Brownlie, A. & W. D., Glasgow publishers, 35 Bruce, David, typecasting machine inventor, 30 Bruce, Blair, printers, 289 Bruce, John, King’s Printer for Scotland, 288 Brunton, Mary, 276 Self Control, 208–9, 460 Bryce, J., 326

527 Buchan, Peter, Peterhead printer and publisher, 5 Buchanan, Dugald hymns, 110–11, 154, 157, 159, 160 La a’Bhreitheanais, 158 poems, 158, 159 Buchanan, John, Glasgow printer and tradesman, 32 Budge, D. C., Lanark printer and tradesman, 32 Buke of the Howlat, 280 Buncles, Arbroath newspaper proprietors, 102 Bungay Press, number publisher, 136 Bunyan, John, 111, 120, 166, 293, 412, 414 Burns, Robert, 49, 56, 273, 276 and Australia, 474, 475 and India, 458 National Monument, 266–8, 269 North American editions, 449 translations, 410, 437, 438 tributes, 265, 269–71 and Welsh literature, 410 Burt, D., Dundee bookseller, 144 Burton, John Hill, 12, 355 Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, 229–30 Butcher, G., 393–4 Butterworth, Edinburgh publishers, 133 Byron, Lord, 218, 437–8 Cadell & Co., Edinburgh publishers titles published (1824–8), 489 Table 10.3 Cadell & Davies, London publishers, 206, 216, 216–17, 389 Cadell, Robert, Edinburgh publisher, 61, 83, 103, 205, 211, 220, 227, 230 Cadell, Thomas, jnr, London publisher, 84, 204, 210, 298 Caledonian Press, Edinburgh printers, 45 Caledonian societies, 13 Callendar, James Thomson, 55 Camden Society, London, 282 Cameron, Robert, 20 Cameron, Sir D. Y., 55 Cameron, William ‘Hawkie’, chapman, 134 Figure 3.3 Campbell, Daniel, Paisley typefounder and printers’ furniture manufacturer, 26 Campbell, Douglas, Edinburgh stationer and bookbinder, 70

528

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Campbell, Duncan MacGregor, 156–7 Figure 3.5 Campbell, John Francis, 155 Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 116, 167 Campbell, Patrick, 419 Campbell, Thomas, 208, 348 Canada agents: Adam, Graham Mercer, 443, 447; Maclear & Co., 448; Maclear, Thomas, 448 books for Scottish immigrants, 443 booksellers: Armour, Andrew, 444; Dawson, George, 447, 449; Dawson, James, 452; Dunlap, James, 448; Fairbairn, T., 447; Kidston, James, 446; Kidston, Richard jnr, 446; Kidstons of Halifax, 446; Neilson, John, 446–7; Ramsay, Hew, 444 Dawson, John William, Nova Scotia education superintendent, 442 Gaelic publishing, 452–3 journal and newspaper proprietors: Brown, George, 444, 445; Brown, Peter, 444; Dougall, John, 444; Scobie, George, 445–6 journals and newspapers: British Chronicle, 445; Daily Colonist, 446; Montreal Witness, 444; Scotsman later British Colonist, 445–6; Toronto Globe, 445 Lawson, Jessie Kerr, author, 452 Macdonald, John A., prime minister, 445 North British Society, 446 paper makers: Angus & Logan, 445; Brown, James, 447; McDonald & Logan, 445 printers: Boyd, John, 452–3; Campbell, Rollo, 443; Neilson, John, 446–7 publishers: Adam, Graham Mercer, 443, 447; Boyd, John, 452–3; MacKinlay, Andrew, 449; MacKinlay, William, 449; Maclear, Thomas, 448; Miller, Adam, & Co., 395 school books, 448–9 Scots authors: Boyle, David, 447, 450; Brack, Jessie Wanless, 450; Kirby, William, 450; Maitland,

Mary, 450; Robertson, Margaret Murray, 450, 451 Scots in publishing, 442–4 Scottish expatriates: Hargreave, James, 443; McInnes, John, 443 Strachan, John, teacher, 448 women authors, 450–1 Carlyle, Jane, 240 Carlyle, Thomas, 274, 275 as author in London, 240–6 on Burns, 269–70 contributor to Edinburgh Review, 348 on editing, 346 and Goethe, 433 and proof revision, 244–5 Figure 4.5 works: Frederick the Great, 244–6 Figure 4.5; Reminiscences, 241; Sartor Resartus, 241–2; Teufeldsrockh, 242–3, 244; The French Revolution, 243–4 Carnegie, Andrew, 101, 197 Carruthers family, Inverness newspaper proprietors, 102 Carss, John, & Co., Glasgow bookbinders, 69–70, 73 Carswell, John, Gaelic translation of Knox’s Book of Common Order, 107, 153 cash flow problems, 92 Caslon & Catherwood, London typefounders, 29 Cassell, London publisher, 260 Castle Douglas Miscellany, 33 Cauvin, Joseph, 435 Chalmers & Collins, Glasgow publishers, 35–6, 105, 291–2, 328, 443 Chalmers, David, Aberdeen printer and newspaper proprietor, 102 Chalmers, Thomas, 98, 105, 291–2, 348 Chambers, Robert History of the Rebellion in Scotland in 1745, 1746, 230 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 301 Chambers, W. & R., & Co., Edinburgh publishers, 2, 9, 34, 45, 89, 99–100 Figure 2.5, 301, 309, 329, 334, 335, 424, 442 Chambers Educational Course, 300, 328–9, 434 educational books, 309, 327 science publishing, 301

Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 9, 11, 103, 300, 341, 342 Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, 97, 277, 309 Chambers’s Information for the People, Welsh translation, 409–10 Chambers’s Journal, 11, 188, 342, 301 chapbooks, 8, 120, 133, 229, 286, 329–30 Chapman & Hall, London publishers, 142, 249 Chapman & Lang, Glasgow printers, 34 Chapman, John, 6 Chapman, Robert, Glasgow printer, 34 chapmen, 133–5 Figure 3.3, 165 Charles, Elizabeth Rundle, 293 The Chartist Circular, 8 Chatto & Windus, London publishers, 260 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 273–4 cheap editions, 9–10, 12, 292 Cheap Repository Tracts, 290 Chepman, Walter, 283 children’s books, 65, 88, 104, 330 Chiswick Press, 27 Christie, James, 352 Christison, Alexander, The General Diffusion of Knowledge, 324 Church of Scotland Disruption (1843), 105, 115, 164, 287, 444 Gaelic supplement to Life and Work, 114 Gaelic tracts against, 112 Churchill, John, London publisher, 301 Clark, R. & R., Edinburgh printers, 3, 11, 45, 231 Clark, T. & T., Edinburgh publishers, 88, 101 Figure 2.7, 105, 293–4, 411, 424 Cleghorn, Thomas, 350 Clerk, Archibald, 118 Clerk of Penicuick, Sir John, 312 Cochrane, James, London publisher, 211 Cockburn, Lord Henry, 11, 80, 223, 280, 343, 344, 348 Colburn & Bentley, London publishers, 88, 129 Colburn, Henry, London publisher, 85, 128, 247, 248 Coleridge, S. T., 348 collected editions see Waverley Novels under Scott Collie, D. R., 111

index Collins, William, & Sons Glasgow publishers, 35–6, 98–9, 101, 102, 130, 291, 405–6 Bible publishing, 36, 99, 288–9, 406 cheap editions, 292 educational publishing, 98, 328 overseas agents and offices, 103 and price maintenance, 139 printing plant and staff, 36 Queen’s Printer for Scotland, 36, 99, 406 religious publishing, 98, 105, 287 science publishing, 98, 308 travel books, 308 Colvin, Sidney, 256, 257, 261 Combe, George, 301, 326 Combination Acts (1799, 1800), 41 commercial travellers, 102, 130–3 Figure 3.2, 405, 423–4 composing rooms, 47–8 Figure 1.7 compositors, 44–5, 46, 412 working conditions and wages, 40–1, 485 Table 9.10, 485 Table 9.9 Connell, Duncan, Reul-Eolas, 116, 168 Constable & Co., Edinburgh publishers, 3, 34, 80–3 Figure 2.1, 211, 221 Figure 4.2, 351, 426, 461 on advertising, 127 bankruptcy (1826), 3, 14, 88, 92, 97, 227, 356, 392 distribution, 87 and Edinburgh Review, 82, 341, 343, 344–5 European imports, 431, 435 and Farmer’s Magazine, 82 German text books, 435 Ireland agents, 424 and Longman, 388–92 and Murray, 391–2 and North America, 449 payments, 85 science publishing, 296, 297, 298, 301 and Scots Magazine, 82 and Scott, 82–3, 92, 206, 207, 217–19, 222, 225, 226 titles published: (1824–8) 489 Table 10.3, 490; (1821–31) 491 Table 10.4 Constable, T. & A., Edinburgh printers, 96, 116 Contemporary Review, 357, 401, 402 Cooper, James Fenimore, 450 copyright, 79, 347, 433

Copyright Act (1801), 422 Treaty of Berne (1884), 438 copyright control, 212–15, 250, 251, 260 copyright sale, 85, 213, 216–17, 218, 219, 261 Cornhill Magazine, 103, 105, 257, 259, 398 Cowie, George, London publisher, 394 Craik, Dinah Mulock, 249, 252 Crauford, Dougal, 107, 161 Crawford, Adam, Glasgow bookseller and binder, 139–40 Creech, William, Edinburgh bookseller and publisher, 80, 101, 307 Critical review, 343, 344 Croker, John Wilson, 352 Crosby, Benjamin, London bookseller, 132 Crosby, Lockwood, London wholesalers, 130 Cunningham, William, 18 Cuthill’s, London antiquarian booksellers, 404 Cymru, 412, 414 Daily Record, Glasgow, 342 Darwin, Charles, Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle, 398 Davidson, Alexander, Inverness bookseller, 124 Davidson, Anthony, Castle Douglas printer, 32 Davidson, Ebenezer, Coll Gaelic schoolmaster, 162–3, 166 Davies & Primrose, printing machine suppliers, 416 Davies, Edward, 415 Davin, Nicholas Flood, The Irishman in Canada, 448 De Quincy, Thomas De, 354, 356 Delane, John T., 99 Dellagana, James, rotary press inventor, 37 democratisation of print, 10 Dempster, John, 24 Dewar, Daniel, and MacLeod, Norman, Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, 116, 167 Dewar, James, Perth bookbinder, 65 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, 281 Dick, Edinburgh publishers, 433 Dick, Maxwell, Irvine bookseller, 400 Dick, Thomas, The Christian Philosopher, 292 Dickens, Charles, Sketches by Boz, 128

529 The Dictionary of National Biography, 399 distribution, 4–5, 87, 90, 120, 141–5 division of labour, 3 Dobson, Thomas, Reminiscences of Innerleithen and Traquair, 338 Douglas, Kenneth, Inverness bookseller and binder, 65, 124–5 Dow, James, 260 Dowden, Edward, 274 Doyle & Hopkins, Glasgow wholesalers, 140 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, A Study in Scarlet, 276 Duff, Alexander, 294 Dunbar, 271, 272, 273 Duncan, Andrew, Glasgow printer, 35 Duncan, Henry, 240 Duncan, J. & A., Glasgow booksellers, 130 Duncan, John, Glasgow printer, 35 The Philosophy of Human Nature, title page 387 Figure 7.1 Dundas, Henry, 348 Dundee, Perth and Forfar People’s Journal, 141 economies of scale, 2 Edgeworth, Maria, 223 Edinburgh as ‘Athens of the North’, 269 book production: (1811–31) 488 Table 10.2, 489; (1821–31) 94 Tables 2.1, 2.2, 491 Table 10.4; (1824–8) 489 Table 10.3, 490; (1824–31) 486, 487 Table 10.1, 490, 492 Table 10.5, 493 book trade, 80–9 Edinburgh scale, 11, 45 Edinburgh–London shared financing, 86–7 fire of 1824, 88 New Town growth, 79 New Town readers, 182 Figure 3.7, 204 print and allied trades workforce (County of Edinburgh): (1851–1901) 477, 480 Table 9.4; (1861) 482 Table 9.7 printers, 33–4, 37 Edinburgh Almanack, 84 Edinburgh Annual Register, 208 Edinburgh Bible Society (later National Bible Society of Scotland), 116

530

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Edinburgh Booksellers Society, 138 Edinburgh Compositors’ Society, 41, 43 Edinburgh Cornucopia, 300 Edinburgh Courant, 342 Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, 83, 241, 299, 307 Edinburgh Encyclopaedia Company, 424 The Edinburgh Engraving and Lithographic Establishment, 319 Edinburgh Gaelic School Society, 162 Edinburgh Journal of Science, 298, 299 Edinburgh Journeymen Bookbinders, 74 Edinburgh and Leith Advertiser, 33 Edinburgh Literary Journal, 211 Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 298 Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 298 Edinburgh Press and Machinemen’s Society, 46 Edinburgh Printing and Publishing Co., 428 Edinburgh Religious Tract Depository, 295 Edinburgh Religious Tract Society, 111 Edinburgh Review, 9, 100, 203, 205, 269, 341, 343–50, 357, 388–9, 390–2, 460 circulation and influence, 346–7 closure (1929), 342, 356 contributors, 348 cultural authority, 349 editors: Empson, William, 356; Jeffrey, Francis, 343, 344, 346–9; Napier, Macvey, 348, 356 fees, 85, 344 and female authors and contributors, 348 first issue (1802), 343, 345 Figure 6.1 move to London (1847), 356 North American ‘editions’, 347 pirated editions, 347 and politics, 348–50 potential readership, 7–8 publishers: Constable, Archibald, 343; Longman’s, 343, 356 readership, 347–8 Edinburgh School of Arts, 193 Edinburgh Sessional School, 194

Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture, 18 Edinburgh Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools, 112 Edinburgh True Scotsman, 124 Edinburgh Typographical Society, 43, 46 Edinburgh University Magazine, 256 editing process, 346 education, 6–7, 175–7, 321, 324–30, 430 Education Acts (1870, 1872), 7, 321 educational publishing, 35, 97–8, 104, 300, 326, 327, 449 Edwards family, Aberdeen printers and tradesmen, 32 Edwards, Lewis, 411 Elder, Alexander, London stationer and publisher, 132, 398 Elder, Alexander, Peebles bookseller and printer, 334 Elder, Walter, Hawick bookbinder, 335 Eliot, George, 103, 249, 257 Elliot, Charles, bookseller, 79 Elliot, Ebenezer, 354 Ellis, George, 216 Empson, William, 348, 356 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3, 11, 273, 299, 428 contributors, 277 editions, 304–7 editors: Bayne, T. S. (9 edn), 306; Napier, Macvey (6–7 edn), 305–6, 356; Smellie, William (1–3 edn), 304; Smith, William Robertson (9 edn), 277, 306; Stewart, Dugald (Supplement), 305; Trail, T. S. (8 edn), 306 publishers: Bell, Andrew (4 edn), 304; Black, A. & C. (7–9 edn), 88, 97, 306–7, 404; Constable (5–6 edn), 83, 305–6; Smellie, William (1–3 edn), 304 sale to USA (1901), 307 Supplement, 83, 85, 305–6 US distributors, 306, 307 Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 133, 299, 307, 407 encyclopaedias, 277, 307–9; see also Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, Encyclopaedia

Britannica, Encyclopaedia Metropolitana Erskine, John, Discourses, 82 Erskine, William, 224 Ettles, William, Inverness bookbinder, 65 Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, 272 Europe English-language publishing, 438–40: Baudry, Paris, 439; Galgnani, Paris, 439; Tauchnitz, Germany, 439–40 exports and translations, 435–8: Burns, 437, 438; France, 435–6; Germany, 436–7 history and philosophy, 438; Hogg, 437; Italy, 437–8; Ossian, 435; Scott, 436–7 imports, 430–5 off-shore production of English-language texts, 438–40 technology and labour, 440–1 evangelical revival, 88 evangelicalism, 194, 287 Evans ‘Daniel Ddu’, Daniel, Gwinnlan y Bardd, 410 Eyre, Strahan & Spottiswoode, English Bible printers, 289 Factory Acts (1866–70), 40 Faithful, Emily, London printer, 44 The Farmer’s Boy, 52 Figure 1.8 Ferguson typefoundry, 30 Ferrier, Susan, 276, 352 Marriage, 210 The Inheritance, 85, 210 fiction, 12, 84, 95, 96, 178–9, 208–11, 493 evangelical, 426–7 religious, 287–8, 293 serialisation of, 248, 250–1, 352 financial crisis (1825–6) effect on publishing, 3, 92–5 Tables 2.1, 2.2, 486–93 Tables 10.1–10.5 and English banks, 91 and Scott, 14, 92–3 and Scottish banks, 91, 93 Findlay, John, Aberdeen steel type cutter, 27 Fletcher of Saltoun, 270 Forbes, J. D., 297, 299–300 Forbes, John, Principles of Gaelic Grammar, 116 Foreign Theological Library, 105

index Forester, William, Edinburgh printer, 71 Forsyth & Young, Inverness bookbinders, 65 Forsyth, Isaac, Elgin bookseller and bookbinder, 64–5, 132 Fortnightly review, 357 Foulis Press, 26, 69 Fox Talbot, William Henry, inventor of photography, 56, 59, 60 Fraser & Co., Edinburgh publishers, 427 Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 357 Fraser, J. G., 277 Fraser, James, 242–3, 308 Fraser, William, printing manager, 37 Fraser’s Magazine, 129, 242, 252, 254, 352, 353 Free Church of Scotland, 164, 194, 291 Gaelic magazine, 114 and North British Review, 356–7 friendly societies, 73 Fullarton, A., & Co., London and Edinburgh publishers, 71, 139, 411, 412, 414, 419, 420 Fyfe, Andrew, System of the Anatomy of the Human Body, 302–3 Figure 5.5 Gaelic, teaching in, 324 Gaelic literacy, 154, 177–8, 473 Gaelic literature editing, 160 folktales, 155 hymns: Dugald Buchanan, 110–11, 154, 157, 159, 160; Peter Grant, 111, 154, 159 Ossianic poetry, 109 songs, 114, 115, 120, 155, 165, 166, 239: Sar-Obair nam Bard Gaelach, 121, 156–7 Figure 3.5; scrapbook, 169–70 Figure 3.6 verse, 109, 115, 164–5, 166, 170 Gaelic manuscript tradition, 153–4, 170, 171 Gaelic music, 452 Gaelic in newspapers, 113–14, 114–15, 169–70 Figure 3.6 Gaelic periodicals, 112–14, 155, 163–4, 238, 452–3 An Cuairtear Og Gaelich, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, 453 An Gaidheal, 113, 164, 168 An Rosroine, 112–13 An Teachdaire Gaelach, 113, 163, 164

An Teachdaire Gaidhealach, Australia, 114 Casket, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, 453 Cuairtear na Coillte, Kingston, Ontario, 114 Cuairtear nan Gleann, 113, 163 Feartathaich nam Beann, 113 Mac-Talla, Sydney, Nova Scotia, 114 Gaelic printers Edinburgh: Anderson & Bryce, 116; Balfour, Auld & Smellie, 110; MacLachan & Stewart, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120–1; Menzies, Robert (R. Meinnearach), 109, 111, 115; Stewart, C., 165 Glasgow: Duncan, Thomas, 113, 120; Gillies, John, 109 other: Fraser, Alexander, Inverness, 108; Gillies, John, Perth, 109; Hazard, James D., Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 108; Johston, Robert, Elgin, 111; King, A. & Co., Aberdeen, 111 Gaelic publications An Fhianais, 114 An t-Oranaiche, 118–19 Figure 2.8 bibliographies, 167 Bratach na Firinn, 114 grammars and dictionaries, 116, 120, 166–7 Iul a’ Chriosdaidh, 111 Leabhar nan Cnoc, 163 primers, 161–2 readers, 163 religious books, 161–5, 238: Roman Catholic, 111; sermons, 109, 161; tracts, 111–12, 120, 162–3; verse, 164–5 scholarly books, 166–8 scientific and technical books, 168 secular books, 115–19, 165–6 supplements to church magazines, 114 translations: Baxter, 111; Bible, 9–10, 110, 112, 116, 120, 154, 161, 163, 166, 167, 171, 451 Figures 8.2, 8.3, 452; Bonar’s McCheyne, 112; Book of Common Order, 107, 153; Bunyan, 111, 120, 166; Crofter’s Holdings (Scotland) Act, 118; Ossian, 110, 112, 167; Puritan classics, 120–1,

531 164, 165; religious tracts, 111–12; Shorter Catechism, 110, 163 Gaelic publishing, 9–10, 107–22 author–publisher relations, 109, 120, 165 Canada, 452–3 distribution arrangements, 120 Edinburgh, 108, 109, 115–16: Edmonston & Douglas, 116, 167; Grant, John, 116; MacLachan & Stewart, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120–1, 166–7, 296; Oliver & Boyd, 116, 168; Stewart, Charles, 109, 167; Thornton & Collie, 164 Elgin: MacDonald, Peter, 111 Glasgow, 108, 109–10, 116–18: Campbell, J. & P., 110, 113; Campbell, Neil, 117; Gairm Publications, 117; Gilchrist, William, 113, 117, 118; McClure, D., & Co., 113; McGregor, Polson & Co., 121; Mackenzie, 118; MacLaren, Alexander, 117; MacPhun, W. R., & Son, 113, 114, 116; MacVean, D., 110; Neill & Fraser, Greenock, 118; Niven, John, & Son, 238; Reid, John, 110; Sinclair, Archibald, 109, 117–18, 121, 166, 168, 171 Inverness, 108, 115: Fraser, Alexander, 108, 165; MacIntosh, Alexander, 111; Mackintosh, 164 North Carolina, (Sibley), Howard & Roulstone, Fayetteville, 107, 161 Nova Scotia, 452–3 Perth, 108, 109 United States, 453 Gaelic readings, 108, 169 Gaelic school societies, 112, 154 Gaelic Society of Inverness, Transactions, 168 Gaelic Society of London, 397 Gaelic urban ceilidh houses, 108, 118, 169, 171 Gale & Fenner, London wholesalers, 132 Gall, James, Edinburgh printer and publisher, 37, 322–3, 428–9 Galt, John, 85, 86, 210, 450 and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 352 and Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 354, 355

532

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Gamble, John 21 Gardiner’s Miscellany, Cupar, 300 Gardner, Alexander, Paisley publisher, 357, 429 Gaskell, Elizabeth, Mary Barton, 249 Ged, William, 37 Geddes, Andrew, 55 General Typographical Association of Scotland, 42 German romanticism, 433 Gilfillan, George, 265, 355, 356 Gill, M. H., 424 Gilpin, Joshua, 18 Girdwood, Claud & Co., Glasgow steam printing press manufacturer, 26 Glasgow book production (1824–31), 487 Table 10.1 book trade, 89–90 Glasgow scale, 43 newspaper distribution, 4 printers, 34–6, 37 Glasgow Booksellers’ Protection Association (GBPA), 138–40 Glasgow Foreign Library, 431 Glasgow Islay Association, 117, 118 Glasgow Mechanics Magazine, 143 Glasgow Printers’ and Bookbinders’ Society, 41 Glasgow Religious Tract Society, 294 Glasgow Saturday Evening Post, 341 Glasgow Typographical Society, 41, 43, 44, 46 Glasgow University, 35 Glenfergus, 128 globe making, 319 Goethe, in translation, 433 Goldie, John, Edinburgh publisher, 208 Good News, 291 Good Words, 105, 249, 401, 402 Goodridge, Richard, A Year in Manitoba, 442 Gore, Catherine, 353, 355 The Gospel Trumpet, 291 Gosse, Edmund, 257 Grace, William, Berwick bookseller, 136 Graham, John, Glasgow printer, 419 grammars and dictionaries French, 434–5 Gaelic, 116, 120, 166–7 German, 434–5 Italian, 434

Grandison, William, Edinburgh punch cutter, 29 Grant, John, 97, 121 Grant, Peter, 158–9 hymns, 111, 154, 159 Grant, Robert, 111 Gray, Edinburgh publisher, 434 Gray, James John, Edinburgh printer, 33, 37 Green, Sarah, Scotch Novel Reading, 210 Greenock Advertiser, 130 Gregory, William, 297 Griffin & Co., Glasgow and London booksellers, 139, 140, 431–2 Figure 8.1, 406–7 Griffin, Richard, Glasgow University Printer, 297, 299, 300, 301 guide books, 6, 336, 338 Gunn, Robert, Edinburgh printing press manufacturer, 36 Hadden, Alexander, Glasgow bookseller, 140 Haddow, William, 295 Haldane & Co., Glasgow engravers and printers, 34–5 Haldane Academy of the Fine Arts, Glasgow, 35 Haldane, James, Glasgow engraver and printer, 34–5 Hall, John, Dartford papermaker, 21, 22 Hamerton, P. G., 258 Hamilton, 11th Duke, as a child, 183 Figure 3.8 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 275, 276 The Cottagers of Glenburnie, 208 Hamilton, Robert, Edinburgh bookbinder, 69, 70 reading diary, 186–7 Figure 3.11 Hamilton, Sir William, 348 Harden, John, 182 Harrild, Robert, London bookseller, 132 Hayward & Moore, London booksellers, 137 Hayward, Abraham, 346 Hazard, James D., Ainmeanna Cluiteach Chriosd, 452 Hazlitt, William, 292, 348 Heather Jock broadside, 286 Figure 5.3 Heber, Richard, 216 Henderson & Bisset, Edinburgh binders, 73

Henderson, James, Glasgow railway bookstall holder, 146 Henderson, James, proprietor of Young Folks, 259, 260 Henderson, James, Welsh printer, 408 Henderson, T. F., 271 Henley, W. E., 257, 258, 260, 261 Henry & Scott, biblical commentaries, 289 Henryson, 271, 272, 273 Herald, Glasgow, 342 Hieroglyphic Love Letter broadside, 286 Figure 5.4 The Highlander, 113, 115 Highland Society of London, 110, 397, 400 Figure 7.3 Hill, Octavius, Perth lithographic printer and photographer, 56 Figure 1.10 Hill Burton, Richard, 282, 284 Hill, Peter, Edinburgh bookseller, 80, 84, 88 history publishing, 438, 459, 493 Hodgson, Joseph, chapman, 133, 135 Hogg, James, 86, 206, 211, 214, 458 Altrive Tales, 211 The Brownie of Bodsbeck, 84, 210 contributor to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 350, 351 Tales and Sketches by the Ettrick Shepherd, 211 Winter Evening Tales, 85, 210 Hogg’s Weekly Instructor, 299 Hope, Thomas Charles, 296 Hope, William, iron printing press patentee, 36 hornbooks, 325 Figures 5.10, 5.11 Horne, R. H., 355 Horne, Robert & Co., Edinburgh music engraver and lithographer, 311 Horner, Francis, 344 Howell, R. T., 414 Howitt, William, 355 Hugh, 16th Laird of Coll, 237 Hume, David, 274, 438 Hunt, Leigh, 348, 352, 353 Hunter, Alexander, 389 Hunter Blair, Sir David, King’s Printer for Scotland, 288 Hurst, Robinson & Co., London publishers and agents, 3, 83, 92, 127, 227

index Hurst & Blackett, London publishers, 248, 251 Hutcheson, Francis, 274 Hutchison, Robert, 35 Illustrated London News, 143 illustration techniques carbon print process, 59 hand-colouring, 58 intaglio, 51, 53–7: aquatint, 57; copper engraving, 49, 51, 53, 54–5 Figure 1.9, 302–3 Figure 5.5; drypoint, 55; etching (line engraving), 49, 51, 53, 55; mezzotint, 57; retroussage, 55; steel engraving, 49, 56 Figure 1.10, 445 photographic, 50, 60, 61: collotype (Talbotype), 59, 60; photoglyphic engraving, 60; photographic engraving, 60 planography, 57–8, 59: colour lithography (chromolithography), 58–9; lithography, 50, 57–8, 61; photolithography, 50, 59; transfer lithography, 58 relief, 50–2: wood engraving, 49, 50, 51–2 Figure 1.8, 61 woodcuts, 49, 51, 58 Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography, 299 Imperial Journal of the Arts and Sciences, 299 India, 455–64 Bombay Literary Society, 456 book trade, 463–4 and Burns, 458 East India Company, 456, 461 English as medium of instruction, 464 Highland Societies, 455 and Hogg, 458 imports, 457, 458: history, 459; illustrated works, 459–60; novels, 458; poetry, 458, 460; school books, 459, 464 libraries: circulating, 457; military, 459; private, 460 lithography, 464–5 and news from Scotland, 457 newspapers and journals: Asiatic Mirror, 461; Bengal Weekly Messenger, 457, 461; Bombay Courier, 457, 458;

Bombay Times, 462; Calcutta Courier, 457, 458, 459; Calcutta Journal, 462; The Scotsman in the East, 462 press freedom, 461 printers, 463–4: Scottish Missionary Society, 464; United Presbyterian Church of Scotland Mission, 464 printing presses, 464–5 and Scott, 456, 457, 458–9, 460, 462–3 Scottish bookbinders, 463 and Scottish Enlightenment, 456 Scottish expatriates, 456: Adam, John, 461; Batey, Richard, 463; Bryce, James, 461; Buckingham, James Silk, 462; Buist, George, 462; Cameron, John Alexandra, 462; Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 456; Elwood, Colonel Mrs, 461; Gordon, George, 463; Leyden, John, 451, 461; Mackintosh, Sir James, 456, 457, 460; Malcolm, John, 456; Munro, Thomas, 456; Muston, William Pitt, 462; Osborn, Alexander, 463; Rind, James Nathaniel, 463–4 Scottish literary contribution, 461–3 small-format editions, 458 Indian poets and novelists: Chattopadhyah, induBankimchandra, 463; Datta, Michael Madhusudan, 462; Dutt, Govind Chunder, 462; Gunjikar, Ramchandra Bhikaji, 463; Pradhan, Bajaba Ramchandra, 463; Sengupta, Rakhaladasa, 463 Industrial Revolution, 1 ink manufacture, 31 Inverness Courier, 33, 102 Inverness Journal, 124 Inverness Society for the Education of the Poor in the Highlands, 7 Iona Club, 279, 281 Ireland, 413–29 advertising, 424, 426, 428, 429 agents: Hodges & McArthur, 424; Johnston, J. K., & Co., 128; McGlashan & Gill, 424; McGlashan,

533 James, 424; Milliken, Richard, 423, 424, 426; Robertson, William, 424; Tims, R. M., 428, 429 bookbinders, 420 booksellers: Curry, William, 132; Johnston & Deas, 427; Milliken, Richard, 137, 423, 424, 426; Stirling & Kenney, 427 commercial travellers, 423–4 engravers, 419, 420: Kirkwood, John, 419, 420; Kirkwood, Robert, 420 export to, 87 newspaper proprietors: Cameron, John, 419–20; Gunn, Robert, 419–20; Staunton, Michael, 421; Thom, Walter, 419 newspapers: The Correspondent, 419; The Morning Register 421 periodicals: The Christian Gleaner and Missionary Museum, 429; The Christian Herald, 428; The Dublin Journal, 419 printers: Blow, James, 419; Folds, John, 421; Grierson, George, 419; Hardy, Philip Dixon, 420; Jolly, Pattison, 420; King’s Printers, 418, 419; McGlashan, James, 419; Mowat, John, 421–2; Neill, Patrick, 419; Pilkington, Frederick, 421–2; Powell, Humfrey, 419; Thom, Alexander, 419, 420, 421 publications: evangelical fiction, 426–7; imports from England, 423; imports from Scotland, 422–3 Tables 7.1, 7.2; religious books, 428–9; school books, 420, 427–8; Scottish-interest titles, 428; total production (1824–31), 487 Table 10.1 publishers: Christian Brothers, 427; Commissioners of National Education, 427; Curry, William, jnr & Co., 419, 426, 429; The Educational Company of Ireland, 420; McComb, W., 429; Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor (Kildare Place Society), 427; Tims, R. M., 428, 429

534

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Ireland (cont.) publishing centres: Belfast, 418, 419, 422, 423 Tables 7.1, 7.2; Cork, 422, 423 Tables 7.1, 7.2; Dublin, 418, 419–20, 421–3 Tables 7.1, 7.2, 487 Table 10.1 and Scott, 425–6 Figure 7.5 trade organisation: apprentices, 421; Consolidated Union of Bookbinders, 422; Dublin Journeymen Bookbinders’ Society, 421, 422; Dublin Typographical Provident Society, 420, 421; legalisation of trades unions, 420; Scottish capital and labour immigration, 419–22; strike-breaking, 421; tramping relief, 420; wages, 420, 421 wholesalers: Cumming, John, 424, 426, 427, 428; Johnston, J. K., 424; McComb, W., 428; Smith, W. H., 424, 429 Irving, Edward, 240 Irving, Washington, 214 Isbister, William, 401 itinerant evangelists, 120 Jackson, Seeley & Halliday, London publishers, 258 Jameson, Anna, 254 Jameson, Robert, 296, 298, 299 Jamieson, John, 272 Jamieson, Robert, 229 Jeffrey, Francis, 206, 224, 240, 349, 350, 397 and Edinburgh Review, 7–8, 343, 344, 346–9, 356, 391 ‘jobbing’ printing, 333–8 Johnson, James, Aberdeen bookseller, 295 Johnston, Alexander, 174 Johnston, W. & A. K., Edinburgh printers and map publishers, 99, 101, 103, 105, 316, 318–20 Johnstone, Ballantyne & Co., later Johnstone, Hunter & Co., Edinburgh printers, 283, 294, 401, 429 Johnstone, Christian Isobel Clan-Albin, 276 contributor to Edinburgh Cabinet Library, 308 editor of Tait’s Magazine, 276, 308, 353, 355 joint editor of Inverness Courier, 33

Johnstone, John, Inverness and Edinburgh magazine proprietor and printer, 33, 297, 353, 434 Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine successor to Schoolmaster and Edinburgh Magazine, 354–5 joint publication, 386 joint title pages, 386–7 Figure 7.1 Jones, Griffith, publishers’ agent, 414 Jones, J. Kilsby, 12 Jones, John Rogers, 409 Jones, Owen, 410, 412, 414 Jones ‘Talhaiarn’, John, 410 kailyard novels, 13, 276, 474 Kay, John, artist and printseller, 54–5 Figure 1.9 Kearsley, George, 127 Keats, John, 352 Kegan Paul, London publishers, 258 Kelso Mail, 33 Kerr, Robert Elements of Chemistry, 18 General History ... of Voyages and Travels, 83 Khull, Blackie & Co., Glasgow publishers, 428 Khull, Edward, Glasgow printer, 35, 403, 440 Kingston, W. H. G., 293 Kinnear, Robert, Edinburgh circulating library, 205 Kirkwall Press, 102 Kirkwood, Edinburgh engravers, 318 Kirkwood, James, 194 Knight, Charles, Aberdeen periodical wholesaler, 129, 143 Knox, John, 272, 292–3 Book of Common Order, 107, 153 labour organisation, 2, 40–3 Ladies’ Edinburgh Debating Society, 198–9 Ladies’ Edinburgh Magazine, 198 Lady Willoughby’s Diary, 27 Laing, David, secretary of Bannatyne Club, 272, 279–80, 281, 283, 284 Laing, William, Edinburgh bookseller, 284, 431 The Land of Burns, 56 Figure 1.10 Lang, Andrew, 257 Larkin, Henry, 246 Lauder, Thomas Dick, 354

Law & Whittaker, London wholesalers, 133 Lawrance, Hannah, 355 Lee, Dr, 281 Leith, Samuel, Edinburgh printseller, 440 Leslie, C. R., 227 Lewes, G. H., literary agent, 249 Lewis, George, Scotland a Half-Educated Nation, 7 Lewis, Matthew ‘Monk’, 216 Leyden, John, 458, 461 libraries, 189–97, 295 legislation for public provision, 196–7 locations: Alves, 181; Banff, 187–8; Bothwell, 175; Cupar, 175; Dumfries, 181; Dunfermline, 175; Edinburgh: Central, 101; Edinburgh Mechanics’, 179; Fenwick, Kilmarnock, 189; Glasgow: Baillie’s Institution, 194; Glasgow: Mitchell Library, 197; Greenock Mechanics’, 178–9; Kilbride, Lamlash, Arran, 196; Kippen, Stirlingshire, 295; Kirkcaldy, 175, 194; Kirkcudbright, 174; Langholm, 179–80; Leadhills Miners’ Library, 178, 190–1 Figures 3.12, 3.13; Linton, 179; Melrose, 187; Peebles, Chambers’ Institution, 99, 194; Penicuik, 187; Perth Mechanics’, 179; Pollokshaws, Campbell Library, 194; Slateford, 179; Tweedsmuir, 179; Wanlockhead Miners’ Library, 178 and middle-class intervention, 192–6 and The New Statistical Account of Scotland, 179, 181, 187 types: church and religious, 193, 194–5; circulating, 80, 124, 163, 178, 180, 189, 204–5, 295, 338, 408; Continental, 436–7; endowed, 197; foreignlanguage material, 431, 432; gentry and professional, 175; itinerating, 181, 195–6 Figure 3.14; mechanics’ institutes’, 175, 179, 193; middle-class, 178, 190; parish, 175, 179, 181, 295; public, 175, 196–7; second

index endowment, 194; subscription, 125, 174, 175, 179–80, 189–93, 295, 338; tract, 163; working-class, 178, 179–80, 190, 193 see also under Australia, India, New Zealand literacy, 6–7, 9 (1790s), 173–6, 177 (1840s), 173, 178, 180, 187, 188 Gaelic, 154, 177–8, 473 Literary and Antiquarian Society of Perth, 278 Livingston, William, 118, 154, 160 Livingstone, David, 294 Lizar’s, map and banknote printers, 318 Lockhart, John Gibson, 14, 79, 203–4, 217, 230 Adam Blair, 210 and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 350, 351 Memoirs of Scott, 206, 223, 225 and Quarterly Review, 352 London book production: (1811–31) 488 Table 10.2, 489, 490, 492 Table 10.5, 493; (1824–31) 486, 487 Table 10.1, 488 dominance of publishing, 385 London Scots, 396–407 London–Edinburgh shared financing, 86–7 print and allied trades (1851–1901), 480 Table 9.4 London Magazine, 352 London Scotsman, 398 London Society of Compositors, 46 Longman & Co., London publishers, 83, 208, 222, 297, 388, 423 and Constable, 388–92 educational books, 300 proprietors of Edinburgh Review, 343, 356 and Scott, 206, 209, 216, 217, 218, 226 and Stevenson, 261 Longman’s Magazine, 252 Lothian, James, Alloa printer and newspaper proprietor, 33 Lumdsen, James, & Son, Glasgow publishers, 104, 329, 428 Lusk, Robert Baillie, Inverness bookbinder, 65 Lyndsay, 272 Macaulay, Lord, 348, 356 MacBain, Alexander, 168

MacCallum, Duncan, 171 Eachdraidh na h-Eaglaise, 164 McCulloch, J. R., 348 MacCunn, Hamish, 312 MacDiarmid, Ewen, Gaelic sermons, 109 MacDonald, Alexander, 154 MacDonald, George, German translations, 440 MacDonald, Hugh, Oban stationers, 121 MacDonald, Ronald, ‘Eigg Collection’ of Gaelic songs, 120, 155 MacDonell of Glengarry, Alasdair Ranaldson, 235 MacDougall (MacDonald), Mary, 238 MacDougall (MacLucas), Duncan, 237, 238 MacEachen, Ewen, Gaelic New Testament, 111 MacFadyen, John (Ian mac Neill), 169–70 MacFarlane, Peter, 109 Gaelic dictionary, 116, 166–7 MacGillivray, William, 296, 308 McGonagall, William Topaz, 264–5 Figure 4.8 MacGregor, Alexander, 164 MacGregor, James, 153 McIntosh, Peter, 422 Mackay’s Edinburgh Circulating Library, 205 Mackenzie & Co., Glasgow part publishers, 64, 73 Mackenzie, Henry, 204 Mckenzie, James, 281 Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, 312 Mackenzie, William, Glasgow publisher, 29 MacKinnnon, Alexander, 233 MacKinnon, Donald, 113, 163, 168 Mackintosh, James, 348 Mackintosh, Lachlan, 159 Mackintosh, Sir James, 266, 268, 276 MacLachan & Stewart, Edinburgh booksellers and publishers, 88, 296 Gaelic publishing, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120–1, 166–7, 296 Maclachan, John, 109 MacLaren, Alexander, 112 McLaren, Alexander, 162 McLauchlan, Thomas, The Dean of Lismore’s Book, 116, 167 MacLean, Charles, 236 MacLean, Anna, 170 McLean, Archibald, 409 MacLean of Coll, Alexander, 234–5

535 MacLean, Donald, 236–7, 238–9 Typographia ScotoGadelica, 167 MacLean, Dr Hector, 236 MacLean, John, 155, 160, 232–9 Clarsach na Coille, 170, 239 emigration to Canada, 235–6, 237 manuscripts, 236 Orain Nuadh Ghaedhlach, 115, 120, 154, 170, 233–5 Figure 4.4, 239 ‘Oran do dh’Ameireaga’, 236 patronage, 232–3, 234–5 spiritual songs collection, 237, 238–9 MacLean Sinclair, A., 238–9 Maclehose, James, Glasgow printer, 11, 401–2 MacLeod, Neil, 118 MacLeod, Norman, 105, 112, 113, 163, 164 and Dewar, Daniel, Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, 116, 167 Leabhar nan Cnoc, 118 MacLeod, Norman the younger, 402 Macmillan & Co., London publishers, 277, 400–1 and Masson, 277 and Nature journal, 277 and Oliphant, 248, 250–1, 252, 277 Macmillan’s Magazine, 250, 277 McMurray, William, wireworker, 22 MacNeil, Nigel, 114 Macpherson, James, Poems of Ossian, 110, 112, 160, 166, 167, 278, 312, 397, 400 Figure 7.3, 410, 435 Macpherson, Mary broadsides, 115 Dain agus Orain Ghaidhlig, 115 McPhun, Working Man’s Bible, 37 McQueen, John, 14 M’Crie, Thomas, Life of John Knox, 292–3 Macrone, John, Edinburgh advertising agent, 128, 401 McVicar, Anne, 276 magazine clubs, 338 Magazine of Zoology, 298 Magee, John, chapman, 135 Maginn, William, 350, 352 Mair, Sarah, 198 Maitland Club, Glasgow, 272, 279, 281 Maitland of Lethington, Sir Richard, 281

536

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Malcolm, John, 420 Malthus, Thomas, 348 Manners & Miller, Edinburgh booksellers and publishers, 80, 88, 206, 208, 216 map publishing, 99, 101, 105–6, 313–21 Marr, James, 30 Martin, Theodore, 355 Martineau, Harriet, 242, 353 mass production, 90 Masson, David, 274–5, 277 Masson, Donald, Vestiga Celtica, 121 Master Printers’ Association of Edinburgh, 42 Master of Sinclair, Memoirs of the Insurrection in Scotland in 1715, 230 Mather, David, Edinburgh bookseller and railway bookstall holder, 150 Matheson, Donald, Laoidhean Spioradail, 452 Matheson, William, 156 Mathewson, John, Edinburgh typefounder, 27 Maturin, C. R., 426 Maude, Clemintina, photographer, 185 Maurice, F. D., 401 Maver, Robert, Glasgow publisher, 311–12 Maver’s Collection of Genuine Scottish Melodies, 311 Figure 5.6 Mawman, Joseph, London bookseller, 133 Maxwell, James Clerk, 277, 297 Mechanics’ Magazine, London, 301 Melbourne, Lord, 348 Menzies, John, & Co. Edinburgh retailer and wholesaler, 142, 143–4, 150 Glasgow branch, 150–1 and railway bookstalls, 146–50 and railway distribution, 143–5 and railway newsboys, 148–50 Figure 3.4 turnover, 145 Table 2.3, 150 Table 2.4, 151 Table 2.5 Metcalfe, W. M., 357 Meteyard, Eliza, 355 Metropolitan, 353 Michael, John, 355 migration, 1, 6, 12–13, 443 Mill, J. S., 275, 354 Mill, James, 348 Millar, Hugh, 184 Figure 3.9 Millar, J. H., Literary History of Scotland, 275

Millar, John, German translations, 438 Miller & Richard, Edinburgh typefounders, 27, 29–30, 334, 416 Miller, George, Dundee bookseller and publisher, 135–6 Miller, Hugh, 297 Miller, John, compositor, 336 Miller, William, Edinburgh typefounder, 27 Miller, William, London publisher, 206, 218 Milne, Andrew, 394 Milne, J. & Co., typefounders, 30 Minerva Press, London, 132, 210 missions and missionary societies, 288, 464 Mitchell, John, Aberdeen bookseller, 124 Mitchell, John Hamilton, artist, engraver and banknote forger, 63 Mitford, Mary Russel, 355 Modern Society of Papermakers, reunites with United Brotherhood of Papermakers (1894), 25 Moir, George, Aberdeen bookseller, 295 Monthly Chronicle, 129 Monthly Review, 129, 343, 344, 353 Montrose Natural History and Antiquarian Society, 298 Moody, Dwight, 288 More, Hannah, Cheap Repository Tracts, 290 Morley, Henry, English Writers, 273 Morley, John, 250 Morley, Robert, 349 Morrison, & Co., Perth booksellers and printers, 33, 65, 89 Morrison, Donald, & Co., Inverness bookseller, 124 Morritt, J. B. S., 225 Mudie, George, 138 Muir & Paterson, Edinburgh printers, 45 Muir, Thomas, 8 Mullen, George, 421 Mundell & Son, Edinburgh publishers, 80, 208 Munro, James, Filidh, 116 Munro, Thomas, 178 Murray, Elizabeth, 398 Murray & Gibb, Edinburgh printers, 45, 421 Murray, Hugh, Historical Account of Discoveries and Travel in North America, 394

Murray, John, London publishers, 83, 84, 96, 103, 127–8, 208, 210–11, 224, 391, 392, 399 books sent to Edinburgh, 136–7 Colonial and Home Library, 399 Handbooks for Travellers, 399 and Scott, 206, 209, 309, 399 science publishing, 297 Scottish agents: Blackwood, 392, 395; Constable, 392, 395, 399; Oliver & Boyd, 392, 395 music publishing, 80, 229, 288, 311–12 Figure 5.6, 438 mutual improvement societies, 180–1 Myllar, Andrew, 283 Napier, David, iron printing press manufacturer, 36 Napier, Macvey, 85, 305–6, 348, 356 The National Atlas of Historical, Commercial, and Political Geography, 319 National Typographical Association, 42 Neill & Co., Edinburgh printers and typefounders, 30, 33, 37, 45, 121, 297 composing room, 47–8 Figure 1.7 Neill, Adam, & Co., 33 Neill, Patrick, Edinburgh printer and publisher, 33, 297 Neilson, John, jnr, Paisley lithographic printer, 40, 50 Nelson, Thomas, & Sons, Edinburgh publishers, 3, 34, 89, 97–9, 293, 405, 408, 448 Bible publishing, 289 ‘Collection Nelson’ French series, 441 commercial travellers, 102, 405 educational books, 97–8, 104, 327, 449 exports, 104 fire of 1878, 98 ‘Foreign Classics’, 433 London office, 103 New York office, 12, 103, 448 prize books, 97 religious publishing, 287

index Net Book Agreement (1900–97), 140 New Monthly, 353 The New Statistical Account of Scotland, 307–8 and libraries, 179, 181, 187 and literacy, 7, 173, 178, 180, 181, 187, 188 New Zealand, 465, 468, 475 booksellers, 470, 471 consignment trade, 468 and Gaelic culture, 109, 473 libraries, 473 McGreadie, Thomas & Niven, agents, 103 Newman, A. K., London publisher, 210 Newspaper Tax repeal (1855), 5, 143, 145, 286 newspapers, 8 circulation and influence, 346–7 distribution, 4–5; see also railways printing, 33, 102 niche markets, 103–6 Nichol, John Pringle, 354 Nicholl, William Robertson, The Woman at Home magazine, 276 Nicholson, Angus, 113 Nicholson, John, Kirkcudbright printer and tradesman, 32 Nineteenth Century review, 357 Nisbet, James, Edinburgh publisher, 290 North America see Canada, United States North British Advertiser, 33 North British Review, 356–7 editors: Blaikie, W. G., 357; Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 357 and Lord Acton, 357 organ of Free Church of Scotland, 356–7 organ of liberal Catholics, 357 publisher: David Douglas, 357 ‘North, Christopher’, 350 Northern Chronicle, 113 Norton, John (Mohawk chief Teyoninhokarawen), bilingual Gospel of John, 454 Figure 8.4 number (part) publishing, 90, 135–6, 341, 411–12, 415–16 canvassing for, 90, 415, 416 deliverers, 90 Oban Times, 113, 115, 169–70 Figure 3.6

Ogle, Maurice & Son, Gaelic publishers, 237 The Old Statistical Account of Scotland, 173–7, 307–8 Oliphant & Sons, Edinburgh publishers, 71, 287 Oliphant, Margaret, 247–55, 253 Figure 4.6, 351, 352 Autobiography, 247, 252, 276 and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 248, 251, 252, 254 Carlingford series, 276 and copyrights, 250, 251 earnings, 249, 251, 276 editorial work, 252 and Fraser’s Magazine, 252, 254 German translations, 439–40 and Good Words, 249 and Longman’s Magazine, 252 and Macmillan’s Magazine, 250 non-fiction, 250: Edward Irving, 251 novels: Adam Graeme of Mossgray, 251; Agnes, 251; Agnes Hopetoun, 250; The Athelings, 2, 48; The Curate in Charge, 250; The Doctor’s Family, 248; Kirsteen, 250, 251, 254; Madonna Mary, 249; Miss Margaret Maitland, 247, 249, 254; Phoebe Junior, 251; The Perpetual Curate, 249; The Quiet Heart, 248; The Three Brothers, 254; The Two Marys, 250 and professional authorship, 254–5 publishers: Blackwood, 248–50, 252, 276; Colburn, Henry, 247, 248; Hurst & Blackett, 248, 251; Macmillan, 248, 250–1, 252, 277 search for recognition, 251–4 self-pity, 249 serialised fiction, 248, 250–1 short stories, 248, 250 and Society of Authors, 254 Oliphant, William, Edinburgh publisher, 426, 429 children’s books, 88 titles published: (1824–8) 489 Table 10.3; (1821–31) 491 Table 10.4 Oliphant, Willie, 247 Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh publishers, 36, 84–85, 97, 133, 291, 392–5

537 advertising, 127, 128, 129–30, 428 agents: Simkin, Marshall & Co., 393, 395; Whittaker & Co., 128, 392–3 Bible publishing, 289 and Blackwood’s, 352, 394 children’s books, 330 co-publication, 137, 394, 395 commercial travellers, 130–2 Figure 3.2 and Cowie, 394 Edinburgh Cabinet Library, 127, 129, 131, 299, 308–9, 458 educational books, 97, 104, 326 exports, 104 fiction, 210 foreign rights management, 395 Gaelic publishing, 116, 168 and Goethe, 433 and Longman’s, 394 medical publishing, 97 and Murray, 392, 395 printing and binding, 34, 64 taken over (1896), 97 titles published: (1821–31) 489 Table 10.3; (1824–8) 491 Table 10.4 and underselling, 140 and wholesaling, 395 Oliver, Thomas, Edinburgh printer, 84 Opie, Amelia, 355 oral culture, 174 The Orcadian weekly, 102 Ordnance Survey, 319 Original Society of Papermakers (English, Irish & Scotch Papermakers), 24–5 Orr, W. S., London publisher, 103 Osbourne, Fanny, 259 Owen, Robert, New View of Society, 324 Owenson, Sydney, 223 Pacific region see Australia, New Zealand Paine, Tom, The Rights of Man, 8 Paisley Advertiser, 341 Paisley and Renfrewshire Reformer, 341 paperbacks, 10 papermaking, 17–25, 445 by hand, 17–20 labour relations, 23–5 mechanised, 2, 20–3, 49 papermaking machines: Cameron, 20; Foudrinier, 20–2 Figure 1.1, 24, 310, 440, 445

538

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

papermaking (cont.) processes, 18–21, 24 raw materials, 17–18, 22, 23 water power replaced by steam, 23 watermarks, 19, 63 papermills Auchtermuchty Mill, 22 Ayton, Berwickshire, 23 Balbirnie Mill, Fife, 17, 22 Ballantyne’s Mill, Walkerburn, 337 Carron Grove, Berwickshire, 18 Dalry, nr Edinburgh, 17 Edward Collins, Kelvindale, 417 Frogmore Mill, Hertfordshire, 21 Herbertshire Mill, Stirlingshire, 24 Polton, 18, 22 Prestonholm, nr Edinburgh, 17 St Leonard’s Works, Edinburgh, 17 Springfield Papermill, 20, 24 Water of Leith, Edinburgh, 3, 17 Park, Mungo, 294 Paterson & Co., Edinburgh music publishers, 312 Paterson, William, Edinburgh publisher, 71 Paton, Hugh, 55 Paton’s, Edinburgh printers, 34 People’s Journal, 188 People’s Journals syndicate, 342 periodicals and newspapers, 340–81 ‘Golden Age’, 341 Perth Courier, 33 Perth Saturday Journal, 300 Peter, John, 414 Petermann, August, 319 Phemister, Alexander, punch cutter, 29 Phillips, McClure, 14 Philosophical Magazine, London, 298 philosophy, 275, 277 The Physical Atlas of Natural Phaenomena, 319 Physikalischer Atlas, 319 Picken, Andrew, 211 Pillans & Sons, Edinburgh printers and publishers, 33, 302 Pillans & Wilson, Edinburgh printers, 33 Pillans, H. & J., Edinburgh printers, 33, 34 Pinkerton, John, 271

Pitcairn, Robert, 282 Pitts, John, London bookseller, 132 playbills, 339 Figure 5.13 poetry, 208 The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, 49 Poitevin, Alphonese, 59 Pollok, Robert, The Course of Time, 411 Popkin, John, 409 Porter sisters, The Scottish Chiefs, 276 The Portfolio magazine, 256, 258 Practical Mechanic and Engineer’s Magazine, 301 Presbyterian Review, 411 press regulation, 8 price maintenance, 137–40 Pringle, James, 350 print and allied trades workforce (1841/51–1901) 2, 479 Tables 9.1, 9.2, 480 Table 9.3, 484 Table 9.8 County of Aberdeen: (1851–1901) 477, 480 Table 9.4; (1861) 483 Table 9.7 County of Edinburgh: (1851–1901) 477, 480 Table 9.4; (1861) 483 Table 9.7 County of Lanark: (1851–1901) 477, 480 Table 9.4; (1861) 483 Table 9.7 female workers: (1841–1901) 477–8, 481 Tables 9.5, 9.6; (1861) 482–3 Table 9.7 male workers: (1841–1901) 481 Tables 9.5, 9.6; (1861) 482–3 Table 9.7 occupations: (1861) 482–3 Table 9.7 printers apprentices, 43–4, 421 female workers, 44–5 following additional trades, 32 hours and wages, 41, 43 labour organisations, 41–3 and newspapers, 33 societies, 41–3 tramping relief, 46, 420 unemployment relief, 45–6 working conditions, 40–1 printing, 3, 32–48 banknote, 62–3 colour, 18, 58–9, 319, 445 electrotype, 37 embossed printing for blind people, 322–3 Figure 5.9 lithographic, 2, 36, 37, 40, 50, 56, 58, 319, 337, 344, 440, 446, 464–5

and newspapers, 33, 102 photo-mechanical, 59–61 Figure 1.11 stereotyping, 2, 35, 37, 47, 49, 90, 229, 293, 394, 395, 405 technological developments, 1–2, 63, 204, 445 printing presses Albion, 36, 334 Columbian, 35, 38 Figure 1.4, 334, 336 Cropper, 336 double-feeder bed and platen, 36 Hoe ‘lightning’, 39 iron, 2, 36 ‘jobbing’ platen, 334 Nelson, 39 Figure 1.5 Rich’s, 402–3 rotary, 2, 22, 36–7, 39 Figure 1.5, 310, 445 Stanhope, 36 steam-powered, 2, 36–7, 49, 229 Walter, 39 Figure 1.6 water-powered, 337 wooden, 2, 36, 38 Figure 1.3 production and financing, 86–7 provincial publishing, 89 Pryse, R. J., 410, 412 psychology, 277 publishers: civic contribution, 98–101 Publishers’ Circular, 127 Punch, 142, 143, 144 Quarterly Journal of Science, London, 298 Quarterly Review, London, 129, 347, 350, 352, 357, 399, 460 railway bookstalls and Henderson, James, 146 and Mather, David, 150 and Menzies, John, 146–50 and Smith, W. H., & Son, 146, 152 stock, 146–7 railway novels, 6 railways, 4, 5–6, 87, 141–52, 335–6 and book and periodical distribution, 143–5 and Menzies, John, 142–52 and newspaper trains, 142 and railway bookstalls, 145–52 and railway newspaper boys, 148–50 Figure 3.4 and Welsh publishing, 416 Ramsay, Alan, The Gentle Shepherd, 269

index Rankine, W. J. Macquorn, 297, 299, 300 Rattray, William Jordon, The Scot in British North America, 448 reading, 173–8, 199, 346 fiction titles, 178–9 in paintings, 182–3 Figures 3.7, 3.8 in photographs, 184–5 Figures 3.9, 3.10 religious titles, 178, 179 reading rooms, 99, 431; see also libraries reading societies, 180, 181, 191–2 Reduced Ordnance Maps of Scotland, 320 Figure 5.8 Reed & Fox, typefounders, 29 Rees, Owen, 423 Rees, William, 412 reference books, 97, 304–10, 404 Reform Bill (1832), 349, 353 Register of the Bishopric of Glasgow, 279 Reid, John, Glasgow publishers and booksellers, 124, 167 Reid, Thomas, 274 religious publishing, 35, 80, 98, 104–5, 287–95 biblical commentaries, 289, 293–4 biblical criticism and theology, 293–4 Edinburgh (1824–31), 95, 493 fiction, 287–8, 293 hymn books, 105, 288, 312 and libraries, 295 missionary biographies, 294 pamphlets, 288 periodicals, 291 reprints of classics, 292–3 ‘reward books’, 293 sermons, 109, 161, 290, 291, 292 tracts, 290–1, 294–5 see also Bible publishing, Gaelic publications, Welsh translations Religious Tract and Bible Warehouse, Glasgow, 295 Religious Tract and Book Society of Scotland (Scottish Colportage Society), 112, 290–1, 295 Religious Tract Society, 290 Remnant & Edmonds, London hydraulic press manufacturers, 73 Renwick, William, Jedburgh printer and tradesman, 32 reprints, 79 reviews, 343–57

Reynolds’s Newspaper, 143 Richard, J. M., Edinburgh typefounder, 27 Richard, W. M., Edinburgh typefounder, 27 Richard, Walter, Edinburgh typefounder, 27 Rider Haggard, H., King Solomon’s Mines, 260 Rivington’s, London booksellers and publishers, 129, 132, 398 Robert, Nicholas-Louis, 20, 24, 440 Robertson & Scott, Edinburgh advertising agents, 127 Robertson, Alexander, & Co., Edinburgh music publisher, 312 Robertson, Andrew, 267 Robertson, David, Glasgow publisher and wholesaler, 71, 140 Robertson, J., Edinburgh publisher titles published (1824–8), 489 Table 10.3 Robertson, John, Edinburgh lithographic printer, 37, 50 Robertson, Joseph, 282, 284 Robertson, William, German translations, 438 Robinson, Henry, Edinburgh bookseller, 148 Robinson, J. O., 92 Roebuck, J. A., 354 Romilly, Samuel, 348 Rose, John Co-chruinneachadh de Dhain Spioradail, 164–5 Metrical Reliques of ‘The Men’ in the Highlands, 164 The Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle, 45 Ross, John Merry, 272 Ross, Robert, Edinburgh bookseller, 83 Roxburghe Club, London antiquarian society, 279, 280 Royal Society of Edinburgh, 297 Ruadh, Alexander, 15th Laird of Coll, 232 Ruglin, James, 420 Ruthven, John, & Co., Edinburgh printing press suppliers, 464 Sabbatarianism, 295 Sacred Songs and Solos, 288 St Catherine’s Works, Edinburgh papermaking machinery manufacturer, 22

539 Saint Paul’s Magazine, 401, 402 Saintsbury, George, 271, 340 same-day publication: Scotland and London, 87 Sanderson, William, Edinburgh printer, 286, 337 Sandford, Sir Daniel, 268, 327 Sankey, Ira, 288 Schenck, David, 40 Schenck, Friedrich, lithographer, 440 school books, 65, 420, 427–8, 434–5, 448–9, 459, 464 Schoolmaster and Edinburgh Magazine, 354 science publishing, 277, 296–303, 308 educational and popular, 299–302 journals, 297–9 lectures, 299–300 research, 296–9 text books, 300 ‘Scotch novels’, 85, 210, 222 Scotland culture, 1, 11–12, 13, 349 early and medieval literature, 272 growing self-identity, 205–6 literary canon, 266–77 literary market, 203–11 poetry canon, 272–3 politics, 1, 348–9 population increase, 1 The Scotsman, 342 distribution by rail, 141–2 printing presses, 2, 39 use of telegraph, 142 Scott, Webster & Geary, London publishers, 296 Scott, Alexander, Peebles printer and newspaper proprietor, 335 Scott, James, bookbinder, 68, 69 Scott, John, 352 Scott, Sir Walter and Encyclopaedia Britannica, 277 ‘Age of Scott’, 12 ballads, 312 and Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library, 215 and Bannatyne Club, 279–80, 285 collected editions, 227, 230–1 and copyright management, 215–20 death, 11 and Edinburgh Review, 348 and English literature, 273 fame, 268, 425–6 financial crisis (1825–6), 14, 92–3

540

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

Scott, Sir Walter (cont.) and half-profits, 86 and illustrations for complete works, 61 and Murray, 399 meets Lord Byron and others in London, 397 Figure 7.2 and novel-reading, 178–9 novels: The Antiquary, 209; The Bride of Lammermoor, 227; The Eve of St John, 29; Guy Mannering, 209; The Heart of MidLothian, 226, 227; Ivanhoe, 227, 276; A Legend of Montrose, 227; Old Mortality, 203; Rob Roy, 205, 226, 231; Tales of My Landlord, 84, 209, 226–7, 404; Waverley, 8, 82, 203, 209, 219, 222–31 Figure 4.3; Waverley Novels, 46, 83, 87, 93, 139, 179, 230–1, 450 as play producer, 276 poetry, 203, 206, 230: The Lady of the Lake, 206–7 Figure 4.1, 215, 218, 224; The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 29, 206, 217; The Lord of the Isles, 218–19; Marmion, 82, 206, 217–18, 219, 221 Figure 4.2, 224; Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 29, 33, 206, 216–17, 461; Rokeby, 218, 224, 225 printers: Ballantyne & Co., Edinburgh, 29, 33, 82, 84, 92, 207 Figure 4.1, 209, 226; Ballantyne, James, Kelso, 206 as professional author, 255 publishers: (Edinburgh): Ballantyne, John, & Co. 206, 207 Figure 4.1, 217, 218; Black, 230–1; Blackwood, 84, 209; Cadell & Co., 93; Cadell, Robert, 61, 230; Constable, 82–3, 92, 206, 207, 217–19, 222, 225, 226; Manners & Miller, 206, 216; (London): Cadell & Davies, 206, 216–17; Hurst, Robinson & Co., 83; Longman’s, 206, 209, 216, 217, 218, 226; Miller, William, 206, 218; Murray, 206, 209 and Quarterly Review, 82, 350

sales and influence: Australia, 474, 475; France, 435–6; Germany, 436–7; India, 456, 457, 458–9, 460, 462–3; Ireland, 425–6 Figure 7.5; Italy, 437; North America, 449–50; Wales, 408, 410 Scott Monument, 268 translations, 215–16 Scott, William, Edinburgh binder, 70 Scottish Christian Herald, 411 Scottish Colportage Society see Religious Tract and Book Society of Scotland Scottish Enlightenment, 304, 438, 456 The Scottish Highlander, 115 Scottish literature, relation to English literature, 272–5 Scottish Mechanics’ Magazine, 301 Scottish Missionary Society, 290 Scottish National Institute for Promoting the Employment of Women in Printing, 44–5 Scottish presence in London bookselling and publishing, 11, 396–402 Scottish Review, 357 Scottish School Book Association (SSBA), 327–8 Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), 9, 110, 324 Scottish Text Society, 272 Scottish Typographical Association, 42–3, 44, 46 Seeley & Sons, London publishers, 400, 401 Select Library of Christian Authors, 292 self-help ethos, 9 Senefelder, Alois, German inventor, 440 serial publication, 248, 250–1, 258, 259–60, 262, 340, 352, 402 Seton & McKenzie, Edinburgh binders, 73 Seton, Robert, Edinburgh bookseller, 439 Seward, Anna, 214 Sharwood brothers, typefounders, 30 Shaw, Frederick, Dundee publisher, 300 Shaw, James, 156 Shorter Catechism, 325 Sibbald, James, circulating library, 178

Simkin & Marshall’s, 137 Simpson, Walter, 258 Simpson, William, 18 Sinclair, Allan, Gaelic translation of Bonar’s McCheyne, 112 Sinclair, Dugald, 162–3, 166 Sinclair, Duncan & Sons, typefounders, 30 Sinclair, Sir John, 307 Skene, James, 214 Smail, Robert, Innerleithen printer, 335–8 Smail, Thomas, Jedburgh printer, 335, 336, 337–8 Small, John, Works of Gavin Douglas, 272 Smith & Elder, London publishers, 132, 249, 398–9 Smith, Adam, 6–7, 274, 438 Smith, Charles, Edinburgh bookseller, 124 Smith, George, Elgin later London, bookseller and publisher, 132, 398 Smith, George Murray, 398–9, 407 Smith, Lewis, Aberdeen bookseller and wholesaler, 126, 142–3 Smith, Lewis & James, Aberdeen wholesalers, 126 Smith, Sydney, 344 Smith, W. H., wholesaler and railway bookstall proprietor, 5, 146, 152, 424, 429 Smith, William, Dundee bookseller, 144 Smith, William Robertson, 277, 306 Smout, T. C., 12 social science and politics, 493 Society of Antiquaries, 278 Society of Authors, 254 Society for the Introduction of Gaelic Schools, 178 Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women, 44 Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 290 Society in Scotland for Promoting Religious Knowledge Among the Poor, Edinburgh, 295 Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 154 Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools (SSGC), 324 Somerville, B., 421

index Southey, Robert, Madoc, 214 Spalding Club, Aberdeen, 279, 281–2, 284, 285 Specimens of Old Style Types, 30 Spottiswoode Society, 279 Stepenson & Blake, typefounders, 29 Stephen, Leslie, 252, 257, 259, 263 Stevenson, Duncan, 37 Stevenson, Flora, 199 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 59, 256–63 copyright sales, 260 essays: Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, 258, 259; Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 260; Memories and Portraits, 263; ‘Roads’, 256; Virginibus Puerisque, 258; ‘Wil o’ the Mill’, 256 illustrations, 61 magazine publication: Cornhill Magazine, 257, 259; Edinburgh University Magazine, 256; The Portfolio, 256, 258; Young Folks, 259, 262 Figure 4.7, 263 non-fiction: An Inland Voyage, 258; Travels with a Donkey, 258 novels: The Black Arrow, 260; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 260–1, 276; Kidnapped, 260, 262 Figure 4.7; Prince Otto, 260; The Silverado Squatters, 260; Treasure Island, 106, 259–60, 262 publishers: Cassell, 260; Chatto & Windus, 260; Jackson, Seeley & Halliday, 258; Kegan Paul, 258; Longman’s, 261; Scribners, USA, 260 and the pursuit of fame, 256–63 royalties, 258, 260, 261 serialisations, 258, 259–60, 262 short stories, 259 Stevenson, Thomas George, Edinburgh publisher, 64, 285 Stewart, Alexander Elements of Gaelic Grammar, 167 Gaelic verse collection, 109, 115 Stewart, Dugald, 274 Stewart, Duncan, Gaelic verse collection, 109, 115 Stirling Religious Tract Society, 291

Strachan, James, Aberdeen bookseller and binder, 448 Strahan & Co., Edinburgh publishers, 105 Strahan (Strachan), Alexander, Edinburgh and London publisher, 105, 401–2 Straker & Son, London binders, 416 Stretton, Hesba, 293 Stuart, Daniel, 460 Stuart, John, 282 The Student’s Cabinet Library of Useful Tracts, 294 Sun Pictures in Scotland, 60 Sunday School movement, 326 Sutherland, Samuel, 129 Swan, Annie S., 277 Tait, James, 404 Tait, William, Edinburgh bookseller and publisher, 297, 301, 353–4, 355, 428, 434 titles published (1824–8), 489 Table 10.3 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine becomes first shilling monthly (1834), 354 circulation, 354 closure (1861), 356 contents, 353 contributors, 354, 355 editors: Johnstone, Christian Isobel, 276, 308, 353, 355; Troup, George, 356 employs female editor and staff, 355 merger with Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine (1834), 354–5 move to Glasgow, 356 printer: Johnstone, John, 353 proprietors: Tait, William, 353–4, 355; Troup, George, 356 reviews female writers, 355 Taylor & Walton, London publishers, 297 Taylor, Richard, 298 Taylor, William, Peterhead bookseller, 126 Taylor’s Weekly Magazine, Dundee, 300 Tegg, Thomas, London book dealer, 132, 406 text books, 104, 300, 435 Theatre Royal, Edinburgh playbill, 339 Figure 5.13 Thin, George, 97 Thin, James, 85, 97 Thirty Sketches of Scenery in Perthshire, 56

541 Thompson, Abraham, Edinburgh bookbinder, 70 Thompson, John, Scottish photographer, 59 Thompson, Thomas Perronet, 354 Thomson, D., Greenock bookseller, 111 Thomson, George, music publisher, 438 Thomson, James, 267–8 Thomson, John, 88, 312 Thomson, Mary Ann, Edinburgh printer, 45 Thomson, Sir William, Lord Kelvin, 6 Thomson, Thomas, second president of Bannatyne Club, 280 Thorkelin, Grim J., 272 Thornton, George, 130–2 Tilt, Charles, London publisher, 142 The Times, 27, 142 Tofts, William, steam printing press operative, 37 tract depots, 294–5 Trade Mark Registration Act (1875), 332 trade structure, 3 Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History Society, 297 Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Glasgow, 121 transport and communications, 1, 87, 205 postal system, 4–5, 141 shipping, 4, 87 telegraph, 4, 6, 142 see also railways Trollope, Anthony, 12, 249, 253, 276 Troup, George, Edinburgh journal proprietor, 356 Tucker, Charlotte Maria, 293 Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh printers, 34, 45 Turner, Patrick, Gaelic verse collection, 109, 115, 120, 165–6 typefaces, 27–30, 406 typefounding, 26–30 underselling see price maintenance United Brotherhood of Papermakers, 25 United States bookbinders: Watson, James, 443 booksellers: Carey & Lea, 27; Gowans, William, 446; Wardle, Thomas, 306

542

edinburgh history of the book in scotland

United States (cont.) Easton, Fergus Anzle, 443 Gaelic publishing, 453 journal and newspaper proprietors: Brown, Peter, 444; Dougall, John, 444; Gardner, Thomas, 445 journals and newspapers: Daily Witness, 444; Los Angeles Times, 445 paper makers: Kinsey, Charles, 20 publishers: Barrie, George, 445; Charles, William, 445; Scribners, 260, 307 Scots in publishing 443, 444 syndicates: McClure, Samuel, 260 typefounders: American Patent Typefounding Co., 29; Bruce, George & Co., 29; Dickinson Type Co., 29; Monotype Corporation, 29 United Wire Works Ltd, Granton, 22 urbanisation, 1, 10 Ure, Andrew, 297 Urquhart, David, Inverness bookbinder, 65 Vaughan, Robert, 349 Vernor & Hood, London booksellers, 52 Vessie, James, Aberdeen bookseller, 124 Victoria Press, London printers, 44 Villafield Press, Glasgow printers, 35 Virtue, George, London publisher, 135, 411 visual culture, 59–60 Wales compositors, 412 editors and translators, 414 English titles, 408 newspapers, 415 number publishing and part works, 411–12, 415–16; canvassing, 415, 416; Ceinon Llenyddiaeth Gymreig, 412–13 Figure 7.4; William Williams, 412 periodicals, 411 publishers: Hafod Press, 408; Jack, T. C., 411, 414; Mackenzie, 411, 412, 414 publishing: and Scottish periodicals, 411; and

Scottish verse, 411; vernacular titles, 408–9, 412 Walker, Robert, iron printing press manufacturer, 36 Ward, Marcus, London and Belfast publishers, 231 Ward, Mrs Humphry, 276 Warren, Samuel, 352 Watling, Thomas, banknote forger and artist, 62–3 Watson, John, Glasgow lithographic printer, 37, 50 Watts, John, Montrose printer and bookseller, 130 Waugh & Innes, Edinburgh publishers titles published: (1824–8) 489 Table 10.3; (1821–31) 491 Table 10.4 weeklies, cheap, 143, 342 Weekly News, 265 Weir, William, 354 Welsh literature and Burns, 410 and Scott, 410 Welsh printing and publishing Ballantyne, 416, 417 Blackie, 411, 412 Clay, Son & Taylor, 416 Fullarton, 411, 412, 414 Gee, 409, 414, 415 Hughes & Sons, Wrexham, 416–17 London Printing and Publishing Company, 411 Virtue, 411 Welsh translations, 409–11, 412 Bible, 289, 411 Bunyan, 412, 414 Chambers’s Information for the People, 409–10 Scottish religious works, 409, 412 Scottish secular works, 409–11 Wernerian Natural History Society, 297 Westminster Review, 353, 354 whisky labelling, 331–2, Figure 5.12 Whittaker, George, & Co., London agents and wholesalers, 13, 85, 103, 128, 210, 423 Whittingham, Charles, 27 Whyte & Co., publishers, 328 Whyte, Henry, 111 Celtic Garland, 118, 171 Gaelic Readings, 118

Whyte, William, Edinburgh bookseller, 80 Whyte-Melville, George J., 437, 440 Wilberforce, William, 348 Wilkie, David, 55 Williams, Robert Edward, 412, 414 Willins, Angus, Innerleithen and Traquair, Past and Present, 336 Wilson & Co., Glasgow typefounders, 26, 27, 29 Edinburgh branch, 30 type specimens, 28 Figure 1.2 Wilson, Hugh, Glasgow lithographic printer, 40, 58 Wilson, John, 208, 210 and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 350, 352 and Edinburgh Review, 348 Wilson, William, apothecary, 54 Figure 1.9 The Witness newspaper, 297, 299 Wodrow Society, 279 The Woman at Home magazine, 276 women in bookbinding, 66, 75 in papermaking, 23, 478 in printing and allied trades, 2–3, 44–5, 477–8, 481 Tables 9.5, 9.6, 482–3 Table 9.7 on Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine staff, 355 writers, 276: in Canada, 450–1; reviewed in Edinburgh Review, 348; reviewed in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 355; see also Oliphant, Margaret Wood, Robert, Lanark printer and tradesman, 32 Wylie, John, ‘Foreign Library’, Glasgow, 431 Yeats, W. B., 270 Young & Imray, Inverness booksellers and publishers, 124, 125–6 Young Folks magazine, 259, 262 Figure 4.7, 263 Young, J., Inverness bookseller and printer, 65, 124 Young, William, Inverness bookbinder, 65