To the literary scholar publishers seem surprisingly cavalier about
their
records which have passed into the dead-file state. Firms not infrequently
bestir themselves to produce a history, but once this is accomplished their
concern is over and the archives are laid waste by dust, decay, and neglect
— if, that is, they escape the ravages of destruction schedules. Busy
publishing houses are not, of course, libraries, and most of them have
neither
the staff nor the time, and almost never the space, to maintain proper
control
over an ever-burgeoning mass of paper. Yet these very same
neglected publishers' archives are fast becoming, together with the records
of
the periodicals of the period, almost the last major untapped reservoir of
primary materials available to the scholar of nineteenth-century publishing.
During the war, portions of the archives of several English publishers were
dissipated into the smoke over the City. The book trade survived and the
buildings were restored, but the lacunal bombsites of literary and publishing
history can never be filled. That the disaster served, in part at least, to
arouse
a belated interest in publishers' archives is evinced both by the increasing
use
made of them by scholars since the war and by the institutionalizing of
several major collections during this era of academic affluence.
A number of recent studies have served to put the publisher of the
nineteenth-century into perspective by examining the impact of widespread
literacy and the rise of a mass reading public on all phases of the cultural
and
sociological current of the age:[1] But
there
is a notable paucity of systematic studies on the publishing of the period
—
there are even few printed listings of books published by individual
firms[2] — and bibliographical
knowledge in this area is still in its infancy.[3] If, as Simon Nowell-Smith says
in his new
book on Victorian copyright, "the legal, commercial and general aspects of
bibliography deserve as much attention as the enumerative and analytical
because of the assistance they can give to . . . the understanding of writers
and their texts,"[4] the cumulative
value of
the documentary materials to be found in publishers'
archives is not simply historical. In fact, precisely because they contain
such
a wealth of information, especially correspondence, touching on all aspects
of the book-making process — from submission and selection of
manuscripts to marketing the finished product and payment of authors' fees
and protection of mutual
rights, publishers' archives are rich natural lodes for the bibliographical
prospector, whether his interest be historical, enumerative, analytical,
descriptive or critical.
It is not really possible to be more than speculative about the specific
textual significance of a collection of papers such as the British Museum's
Macmillan archive, which has not yet been systematically catalogued.
However, the research potential of the archive can be projected from a
survey of the publishing history of the firm, with such aids as Charles
Morgan's The House of Macmillan (1943), and from
published
studies that have utilized portions of the firm's archive. The Macmillan
archive, though vast, is not quite virgin territory. Several groups of
manuscripts from its reserves have been tapped by various scholars
—
notably those of Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, the Rossettis, Thomas
Hughes, Hugh Walpole, and Henry James.[5] The five volumes relating to the
company all
contain extracts from the archive, but although they provide some idea of
the
immensity of the collection and of its ultimate significance to scholarship,
these
"Macmillan books,"[6] and indeed the
formal research deriving thus far from the papers, have hardly made a dent
in
the available mass. The purpose of this paper is to describe the extent of the
Macmillan archive and to relate the story of its recent dispersal, a
complicated affair that provides its own object lesson for literary scholars
and bibliographers alike.
