University of Virginia Library

John Murray's Family Library and the Cheapening of Books in Early Nineteenth Century Britain
by
Scott Bennett

The 1790's was a decade of revolution in both France and England. In France the political structure was being recast, while in England economic change of the profoundest order was under way. Two aspects common to the revolutionary situation in both countries were a widening literacy and a new sense of the common reader's importance. The bibliophile Isaac D'Israeli described this change in his book on the upheaval in France, saying that "within the present century a great Revolution was effected in the human mind. Philosophers ceased to be isolated. It is but of late that the people have been taught to read, and still later, that they have learned to think."[1] Questions that before had been of little consequence outside intellectual and professional circles were now becoming the basis for political agitation. Ideas were not simply being popularized; rather, knowledge was being democratized, so that ideas could become social levers used to defend or upset the established order.

One of the less spectacular but important features of the democratization of knowledge in Britain was the cheapening of books and other printed matter during the first half of the nineteenth century. Not all books were made less expensive, of course, for the period saw both the continuance of expensively produced books in small press runs and the establishment of the three-decker novel selling at a guinea and a half. But alongside these practices, printers and publishers

were experimenting with cheaper forms of publication aimed at a mass reading audience. Richard Altick's survey of the history of British publishing between 1800 and 1850 makes it clear that it was the "discovery" of the common reader that excited publishers most during the period and stimulated their most innovative practices.[2] The discovery might be a fearful or a hopeful one, depending on the publisher's attitude toward the established order, but all were alike eagerly involved in both responding to and creating the conditions for the democratization of the printed word.

One early venture in the cheapening of books was the Family Library, a series of five-shilling volumes published between 1829 and 1834 by John Murray, then London's most distinguished publisher. The Family Library offered readers new works, not reprints, at low prices. Inexpensive editions of England's "standard" writers had for some time been widely available, most notably in the series of John Bell (drama, starting in the 1770's), John Harrison (prose essays, 1780's), and John Cooke (poetry, 1790's). More recently, Charles Whittingham and John Limbird were publishing inexpensive editions of British poets and novelists during the 1820's. Even new titles were sometimes available cheaply—if they had failed commerically in the hands of their original publishers. James Lackington in the 1790's and Thomas Tegg in the 1820's thrived on selling what other publishers could not. These remainders, along with reprints of standard writers and the confections of William Lane's Minerva Press, very largely constituted the books available to readers with shillings rather than guineas to spend during the first quarter of the century. It was not until the end of the 1820's, with the publication of the Family Library and other series like it, that new non-fiction works were widely and inexpensively available to the common reader.

The Family Library was innovative in a second and equally important respect. Limbird and Tegg were responding to commercial opportunities in only the most direct way: they sold what books they could. But there were many printers and publishers who defined their interests and their audience in class terms—men like Richard Carlile who so zealously defended the freedom of the poor man's press. It is only to be expected that the newly felt cleavages between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless should be articulated by publicists firmly allied with the poor. It is much more remarkable, though probably not less to be expected, that those on the other side of social divisions should endeavor to disseminate among the common reader

their own understanding of the new conditions. The Family Library and a handful of other publications like it embody a remarkable effort to publish across class lines at a time when class divisions were newly felt to be threatening the fabric of national life.[3] These books are, most simply put, counter-revolutionary documents. They illustrate not an audience finding its publisher, but publishers trying to create an audience. So when a number of London and Edinburgh publishers, including not least of all John Murray, behaved in the late 1820's "as if they stood on a peak in Darien, beholding for the first time a vast sea of common readers" (Altick, p. 274), what they saw was much more than the opportunity to profit in a new market. The most imaginative and responsible of them saw also the opportunity to speak to the common reader in such a way as to heal the fundamental divisions created by the emerging industrial order.

The present essay deals only with the commercial innovations of the Family Library—the cheapening of printed matter for mass distribution to the common reader.[4] A chronological list of the volumes in the Family Library and its companion Dramatic Series is given at the end of this article. These fifty-three volumes were among the first new non-fiction published for the common reader. Murray's most important predecessors had been the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which began its noisy campaign in 1827, and Archibald Constable. Constable's Miscellany, also begun in 1827, was the only series of inexpensive non-fiction published by a well-established commercial publisher before the Family Library; the Miscellany, like Murray's Family Library, was wholly dependent upon an individual businessman's resources. So when Murray began publication of the Family Library in 1829 he was entering commercial territory only tentatively explored. He did not have the advantage of others' experience that the host of publishers who followed him in the 1830's and 1840's did. The financial history of the Family Library therefore has the interest of any pioneer venture, and is the more worth detailing because of the paucity of any published records on book-production costs during the period. The surviving ledgers document how one publisher endeavored to issue new books of high quality at a low price for the common reader.

The prospects for success in such a venture were not at all bright. Plans for the Family Library were laid in 1828, and in that year

Charles Knight, a publisher for the S.D.U.K., was warning that original publications intended for the poor could not be self-supporting, much less profitable. He deprecated the alternative of "gratuitous, and therefore suspicious distribution" and argued that "no great and satisfactory [moral] improvement can be effected, through the unassisted results of trading competition."[5] Murray had set out to challenge this view, and during the first year or so of publication it appeared that the Family Library might well succeed. The supposed virtues of the market system and trading competition might prevail in the march of intellect as well as in the manufacture of cotton cloth.

The first two volumes of the Family Library were a biography of Napoleon and were addressed to the questions of revolutionary change. They had been written by the series editor, John Gibson Lockhart, who had also been editor of Murray's influential Quarterly Review since 1826. Lockhart's Life of Napoleon was an adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's much longer book, which had originally been planned for Constable's Miscellany but had grown to an unwieldy size. Scott's nine volumes, selling for 94s.6d., had been a success, but Lockhart's adaptation of it, selling at 10s., was even more widely purchased. The two works illustrate perfectly the way traditional book-production methods and experiments in cheaper books existed side by side in the late 1820's.

Lockhart and Murray could hardly have hoped for a better beginning for the Family Library. Both volumes of the Napoleon sold out soon after publication and by 12 September 1829 the Literary Gazette reported, auspiciously, that all the "early volumes [of the Library] are already out of print" (p. 601). This initial success was undoubtedly aided by the early and widespread attention the Library had received. It was reviewed in almost all the London and Edinburgh journals and newspapers that concerned themselves with literary matters, and favorable word of the Library spread rapidly throughout the country as well. The new series was well reviewed in, among other papers, the Falmouth Packet, the Plymouth Herald, the Brighton Gazette, the Colchester Gazette, the Oxford Herald, the Berkshire Chronicle, the Gloucester Journal, the Birmingham Journal, the Sheffield Mercury, the Liverpool Times, the Durham County Chronicle, the Carlisle Patriot, and in both the Glasgow Herald and Free Press. The Library found its way quickly to readers in the colonies too. A friend of Lockhart, for instance, wrote in September 1829 from the Cape of Good

Hope to thank him for a copy of the Napoleon: "I have seen a great many copies of it here, & tis well liked."[6]

Murray achieved this success using only his normal methods of book distribution. Very little information is available on this crucial matter, but what there is suggests he handled the Library in the same way he did his other publications—by direct sales to individual book-sellers throughout England. William Wakeman and John Cumming in Dublin and Oliver and Boyd in Edinburgh acted as Murray's agents in those cities, and they were entitled to return to him any unsold stock of the Family Library. In September 1829, during the first success of the Library, the Glasgow bookseller Thomas Atkinson wrote Murray to say that, though the general agency for the series in Scotland could be in no better hands than those of Oliver and Boyd, "individually however something might be done if not to excite interest—which is already largely done—at least to sustain it. Exertion in this way shall not be wanting on my part." Allan Cunningham, who had written for the Family Library, now wrote to Lockhart to recommend Atkinson, explaining that the Glasgow bookseller had "a ready and a clever pen with the command of two newspapers—I rather think three. . . . He has sold 36 copies of the First vol. of the Painters— and that is something" (NLS MSS 934, ff. 11, 13).

With booksellers rivaling one another to promote the series, the Library's prospects were at the outset certainly good. "Let Mr. Murray proceed as he has begun," wrote one reviewer, "and the Family Library will yield to not one of the numerous publications of the day, whether they be cheap or dear."[7] Murray and Lockhart did keep up their good beginning, and by the summer of 1830, it seemed that financial success would also certainly follow. Murray usually kept impeccable records, and in July 1830 he confidently wrote to Lockhart that "the Family Library continues to prosper as you will I hope be satisfied of when you have the accounts." His optimism survived even the account made up in August, when it became evident what large sales were necessary:

This letter suggests that, while neither Murray nor Lockhart was seriously dissatisfied with the Library's financial performance in 1830, the series was not fully living up to their hopes for it. Another indication of trouble, its significance evident only in retrospect of course, is the fact that in 1831 the Perth Mechanics Library, with £27.13.2½ to spend on books, purchased Bentley's Standard Novels, Blackwood's Magazine, twenty-four parts of the Library of Entertaining Knowledge, the whole of the Library of Useful Knowledge, and one volume of Constable's Miscellany, but nothing from the Family Library.[8] One can only suppose that this was in some measure typical of the common reader's lack of interest in the Family Library.

Monthly publication had begun in March 1829 and continued for five years, though after 1831 the books appeared with increasing irregularity. In the thirty-eighth volume, published in April 1833, the proprietors claimed (in the advertisement published with the book) that sales of many Family Library volumes had exceeded 20,000 and that expenditures on copyrights had totaled more than £10,000. These claims stretched the truth with respect to sales and so point to the financial difficulties of the Library, difficulties that Murray was finally unable to overcome. By April 1833 more than £10,000 had in fact been spent on copyrights, but several hundred pounds of that sum had been paid on books that for one reason and another were never published. None of the volumes had sold 20,000 copies, nor did any of them ever reach that figure. Lockhart's biography of Napoleon came closest—having sold 19,950 copies by November 1834, when Murray remaindered the Library—but no other title even approached this figure. A few other successful books in the Library sold between 10,000 and 15,000 copies, but too many others sold fewer than 5,000. With such uneven sales revenue, the Library was unable to meet its expenditures for almost two-thirds of the period during which Murray published it.

It is possible to reconstruct the waning fortunes of the Family Library with some precision because two ledgers concerned with it have survived. One of these is a retrospective record, made up from other cost books evidently no longer extant; it provides detailed information on the costs incurred for each volume in the Family Library as well as on miscellaneous expenditures for the whole series. It also

reports, not very accurately, the income realized on sales. More reliable income figures may be developed from a second ledger that details the number of books sold along with a date for each entry. It is possible to construct from this second ledger a picture of the course of sales for each volume and to determine roughly the manner of its distribution, for sales to agents in Edinburgh and Dublin and from Murray's shop itself—sales that presumably were confined largely to London booksellers—are distinguished from sales to the "trade" in general. In what follows, the first of these ledgers is called the cost ledger and the second the sales ledger. Together they tell almost everything one needs to know about the finances of the Family Library.[9]

The cost and sales of one of the Library volumes, John Blunt's Sketch of the Reformation in England, published in December 1831, will illustrate the figures that are available for reconstructing the history of the series' finances. Blunt's book is signed [A]4 B-X8 Y4 and has 168 leaves, paginated [i-viii], [1] 2-327 [328]. There are typically 35 lines per page, measuring 113 (119) x 67mm; there is but one illustration, a woodcut of Paul's Cross, Cambridge, on the title page. The following were Murray's direct costs in producing 8,000 copies of the book; his overhead expenses went largely unaccounted for.

                           

copyright purchase	£315. 0. 0
composition	26.15. 6
corrections	21. 4. 0
stereotyping	28.17. 6
paper (168 reams &c.mmat; 25s)	210. 0. 0
coldpressing (2s per ream)	16.16. 0
illustration	3. 0. 0
printing	100.16. 0
binding (8,000 &c.mmat; 17.0.0 per 1,000)	136. 0. 0
wrappers (8,000 &c.mmat; 16s per 1,000)	6. 8. 0
entering copyright	2. 0
advertising	34. 8. 5
	------
Total	£899. 7. 5

Some of these items require comment. Murray's printer for the volume was A. & R. Spottiswoode and it is from their ledgers, rather than from Murray's, that the separate entries for composition, corrections, stereotyping, coldpressing, and the actual printing come.[10] In

Murray's ledgers, these items are lumped together as "printing." This practice makes it impossible to separate the cost of composition from that of correction for most of the books. And given the habit of authors at this time of cheap labor to revise printed proof-sheets rather than their own manuscripts, the cost of corrected type varied greatly from volume to volume, as their authors revised more or less. In those books for which separate figures are available, the cost of correction runs from 80% to 200% of the original composition. Where a volume was simply reprinted with no authorial revision, as with Irving's Sketch-Book, the cost of corrections was of course minimal. Aside from corrections, the most significant additional variable would have been the amount of special setting necessary—notes, verse, and the like. Even recognizing these variables, it is possible to estimate composition costs now probably about as accurately as Murray himself could have: the cost per page of corrected type might run from 2s.1od., the cost of Blunt's book, to as much as twice that. Making stereotype plates from this would cost an additional 1s.9d. per page. These costs were stable throughout the publication of the Family Library, which observed the same format in every volume. The cost of paper was also stable; Murray paid 25s. a ream for Blunt's volume and for volumes 3-4, 13-14, and 21-27, while for the others he paid 26s. The paper was of good quality; the sheets were probably foolscap size, producing trimmed pages of about 6” x 4” in size. Coldpressing was a process by which the paper was prepared for fine printing by pressing it at great pressure between glazed boards.[11] Paper for all the volumes in the Family Library was prepared in this way. Where the illustrations had to be worked separately, as was often the case, that printing cost was itemized separately in the cost ledger. But for Blunt's book it appears that only the cost of procuring the cut is itemized. The binding is a printed calico used throughout the Family Library, which was apparently the first publication to use this method of meeting the need for cheap publisher's bindings.[12] On the back cover appears a list of the volumes of the Library then in print.

The entries in the sales ledger indicate the month of publication, the printer, and the number of copies printed along with any overrun that was available for sale. Murray ordered 8,000 copies of Blunt's book and there was no overrun. The sales are itemized as follows:

                                                           

19 December 1831	Shop	840
	Trade	3,158
31 December	Shop	350
22 January 1832	Shop	75
	Oliver & Boyd	500
	Wakeman	300
2 February	Shop	50
14 February	Shop	25
25 February	Shop	75
2 April	Shop	52
1 June	Shop	50
21 June	Shop	50
8 November	Shop	45
12 November	Shop	35
31 December	Shop	25
3 January 1833	Shop	75
21 January	Shop	25
5 February	Shop	30
14 March	Shop	70
	C.H. Sale	277
25 April	Shop	50
February 1834	C.H. Sale	185
17 June	Shop	25
6 July	Shop (Rivington)	50
11 August	Shop	30
2 October	Shop (Rivington)	50
25 October	Shop	44
26 November	Tegg	1,459
		---
Total		8,000

Murray sold Family Library volumes at the standard trade discount of one-third off list price, 25 volumes counted as 24—another convention of the trade; he realized 3s.4d. on each volume sold, or £16.0.0 on every hundred. Blunt's book made a profit for Murray; he needed to sell 5,625 copies to cover his direct costs and had done so within fourteen months of publication, in addition to distributing 136 copies for copyright deposit and review purposes. He finally sold 6,541 copies before remaindering the book to Thomas Tegg. About half of his sales were to the "trade"—this included the initial large sales in the month of publication and the two annual coffee house sales. In addition, Murray sold some 2,121 copies directly from his own shop, presumably to booksellers in and near London, and sent 500 to Oliver and Boyd in Edinburgh, and 300 to William Wakeman and John Cumming, his agents in Dublin. The sales to Rivington were intended for members of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Rivington was publisher to the Society and had written in May 1832 to inquire on what terms the Society might buy Blunt's book. Murray's answer was that he would sell it 25 as 24 at 3s. in quires (i.e., unbound).[13] It is not clear that Murray finally sold the books to Rivington in quires or that he allowed any discounts on the Family Library at his annual coffee house sales. In the cost ledgers, where individual balances were struck for each volume, sales are always figured at 25 as 24 at 3s.6d. If the books were ever sold at any other price there is no indication of it and Murray absorbed the difference in cost himself, silently.

The sales pattern for Blunt's book is typical: upon publication Murray regularly sold to the "trade" between a third and a half of his print order. He could look for large sales thereafter only at his annual sales. Typically he sent a few hundred copies to Edinburgh and to Dublin and could expect modest continuing sales from his own shop. Blunt's book is unlike many of the others in the series because it continued to sell fairly well up to the time Murray remaindered the whole Library to Thomas Tegg. Tegg received nineteen copies more than indicated here because Murray's agents in Edinburgh and Dublin finally returned to him that number of unsold copies of the books.

Offering to sell unbound copies to Rivington was evidently as near Murray ever came to publishing his books in forms other than their normal one. Both Constable and the S.D.U.K. issued books in parts as well as in complete volumes, and Murray's reluctance to follow their example must have limited the sales of the Family Library at a time when the common reader could afford books only as a luxury. The Library could hardly attract the experimental purchases that its rivals, published in parts, might. The decision against part issues marks more clearly than anything else the nature of the audience Murray envisioned—people who were well enough off to be able to venture at least five shillings, hopefully every month, on books. In a period when few unskilled laborers earned as much as 20s. a week, and many had to live on less than 10s., Murray's price meant that the Family Library was probably only rarely purchased by anyone who could not afford the comforts of the lower middle and the more prosperous working classes.

Full information on costs and sales, similar to that given here for Blunt's volume, is available for each volume in the Family Library and for the six-volume Dramatic Series that accompanied it. It is possible to construct from both ledgers a final balance sheet for the Library

that itemizes general categories of expenditures and reports income more accurately than the figures given in the cost ledger alone.[14] The balance sheet is given in Figure I; two of the accounting procedures used there must be explained. First, the value of complimentary copies and of the volumes returned from Edinburgh and Dublin is counted as an expenditure because these copies are included in the sales ledger as "sold"—though of course they were not. In effect, therefore, the revenue calculated from the sales ledgers and reported here is inflated by the inclusion of these copies in the ledger undiscriminated from the copies on which income was actually realized. Second, the sums for income on sales, for the value of complimentary copies, and for the value of copies returned from Murray's agents are only approximations. These figures were calculated, as Murray did in his ledgers, at the standard 25 volumes counted as 24 and sold at 3s.6d. each, though the books were not always sold in units of 25, as is evident from the sales record of Blunt's volume. Because there is no indication of what Murray charged his customers for lots of other than 25, it is impossible to determine his exact income. Instead, income has been calculated to the nearest 10s. on the basis of the total sales each quarter.

Some of the items in the balance sheet require comment. Volumes 48 and 49 of the Family Library, the last two volumes of Gleig's History of British India, figure separately because of the history of their publication. Murray suspended publication of the work in 1830; the rest of it was published jointly by Thomas Tegg and Murray in 1835, after the Library had been sold to Tegg. Murray's copyright payments to Gleig, his advertising of the volumes, and a few miscellaneous costs represented his principal in the final volumes of the work. Murray also had expenses that could not be assigned to individual books. He three times during the course of publishing the Library totalled these miscellaneous general expenses, which included the purchase and partial printing of several books never published, printing and paper for prospectuses and other sundries, advertising, and occasional other expenses including the costs and financial settlement of a legal dispute. Finally, as mentioned before, Murray was content to let his overhead expenses go largely unaccounted for. Only during the final accounting in December 1834, after the Library had been sold, did Murray determine the cost to him of having carried the

Library at a loss for almost three years and having insured the unsold stock. His worksheets indicate he also thought of charging for warehouse costs, but then abandoned the idea.

Murray determined the overall financial position of the Family Library only three times: once as of June 1830 and then again in December of 1831 and 1834. The first of these balances is dated June 1830 but must have been determined retrospectively in the fourth quarter of 1830 because it was based on final sales, not completed until then, of the first printing of volumes 3 through 11 and the second printing of volumes 1 and 2. This accounting showed a profit of £4,363.2.3 but disregarded both the cost of reprinting six volumes and all expenses and income realized during the last two quarters of the year. The cost ledger indicates that Murray and Lockhart split these profits equally between them, these being the only profits they ever took out of the Library. Afterwards the series was always in the red. The other two accountings were not retrospective, but were current, showing the balance that obtained in December 1831 and December 1834. The first of these current balances showed the Library to be £8,220.3.1 in the red; the second, after the sale to Tegg, showed a final loss of £319.12.3. Figure I, by contrast, shows a final profit of £717.16.8, a difference of £1,037.8.11. This difference is accounted for by two factors. First is a total print-order overrun of 6,654 volumes included in the sales ledger figures but not reported in the retrospectively compiled cost ledgers. In effect, Murray lost account of income amounting to £1,065 by failing to co-ordinate his two sets of books. The second factor is the difference introduced by calculating income from sales to the nearest 10s. only and at more frequent intervals than Murray used, as explained above. This difference is not great; it increases sales income only £27.11.1, or .046% of the total. The figures in the cost and sales ledgers are to be reconciled, then, as follows:

             

£1,065. 0. 0 sales income not included in the cost ledgers

319.12. 3 less final loss shown in cost ledgers

------------

745. 7. 9

27.11. 1 less computational difference

------------

£ 717.16. 8 final profit

The books were closed on the Library in December 1834, though several years later, in 1843, Murray was able to sell for £50 the copyright of one of the books he had planned to publish in the Library but never did.

The fact that within a year Murray's calculations swung from a profit of £4,363 to a loss of £8,220 indicates how rapidly the fortunes of the Family Library could change and that more frequent intervals of accounting would provide a more accurate picture of the Library's financial condition. It has been possible to construct quarterly balances from the two ledgers as follows (see Table I). First, the approximate income for each quarter was calculated from the record in the sales ledger. Then the quarter's actual expenditures on copyright and other direct production costs were determined from the cost ledger, as were the averages of miscellaneous expenses for each quarter. These miscellaneous expenses were averaged as follows:

             

For the period April 1829 to June 1830
miscellaneous expenses entered in the cost ledger	375. 0. 0
2,278 complimentary copies counted as sold in the sales ledger	364.10. 0
copyright deposit costs	1. 4. 0
	-----------
Total	740.14.0
AVERAGE expenses for each of five quarters	£148. 2.10

             

For the period July 1830 to December 1831
miscellaneous expenses entered in the cost ledger	2,394. 7. 8
2,384 complimentary copies of the Family Library and Dramatic Series counted as sold in the sales ledger	381.10.0
copyright deposit costs	1.18. 0
	-----------
Total	2,777.15. 8
AVERAGE expenses for each of six quarters	£ 462.19.3

                         

For the period January 1832 to December 1834
miscellaneous expenses entered in the cost ledger	1,534.11.11
2,090 complimentary copies counted as sold in the sales ledger	334.10. 0
copyright deposit costs	2. 4. 0
copyright purchase for vols. 48-49	612. 2. 6
miscellaneous expenses for Family Library	375. 0. 3
miscellaneous expenses for the Dramatic Series	37.19. 0
2,687 volumes returned from Edinburgh and Dublin	430. 0. 0
interest on deficit, 1832-1834	822. 0. 5
insurance	75. 0. 0
	-----------
Total	4,223. 8. 1
AVERAGE expenses for each of twelve quarters	£ 351.19. 0

These average miscellaneous expenses were then added to the direct expenses, giving a total expenditure and a balance for each quarter. Table I does not include the profits Murray and Lockhart took in 1830 or the income realized from the final sale to Tegg. These sums aside, it is clear that Murray over-estimated his balance as of June 1830 by £1,557.8.10, but that the deficit he determined at the end of 1831 was also over-estimated, by £1,471.16.5 when the profit taking of 1830 is allowed for.

An analysis of the ledgers indicates three sources for the persistent deficits shown by the Family Library. First, the Dramatic Series, begun in April 1830, was a financial failure from the start. None of the six volumes issued covered costs, and the average loss on each was at least £191. Unlike the Dramatic Series, a majority (63%) of the first printings of the Family Library volumes proper not only cleared costs but earned a profit as well. The forty-seven first printings of these volumes showed an overall profit of at least £3441—a profit that was, however, more than offset by the miscellaneous general expenses that were incurred. These general expenses were thus the second source of Murray's losses. To these two factors a third must be added—the fact that eleven of the seventeen reprintings recorded in the cost ledger showed a loss when the Library was remaindered in 1834. And three of the six reprintings that did show a profit contributed together less than £120 to the financial welfare of the enterprise. Again the problem was that none of the volumes, including even those that sold best, was able to sustain sales over a long period. Lockhart's biography of Napoleon, seemingly an exception to this, nonetheless confirms the pattern. Where the second printing of the book showed a handsome profit of some £1500, the third printing showed a loss of almost £322. This third printing of 11,000 copies had been ordered in June 1830, only a year after the book's first publication and with 16,500 copies already sold. When Murray remaindered the Library three years later, he had sold only 3,721 copies of his last printing—about a third of it. Compared to its previous success, the book's sale had leveled off sharply and Murray again showed a loss on this printing of the most popular of the Family Library titles.

The clearest single indicator of the Library's fortunes is a graph that plots the course of actual sales against those needed to break even—to cover both the direct and the miscellaneous expenses incurred each month, plus any deficit from the previous one. Disregarding such recurring costs as advertising and sales overhead, the break-even point for a single printing of a single book would be a single point, not a graph line. The break-even point of the Family Library can be represented here as a line not because of recurring costs (which Murray did not itemize as such in any event) but because new costs were incurred each quarter by the introduction of new titles or of reprinted ones, or in miscellaneous expenses. The break-even point changed each quarter because the makeup of the Library continually changed.

Graph I depicts this changing financial position of the series. Averaging actual sales and the sales needed to break even makes it possible to represent the Library on a single line, instead of a line for each volume, and so to conceive of the Library as a single entity. That its sales should decline, as the graph indicates, is not surprising; that is the fate of all but a few books. It is clearly possible to make profits— considerable profits indeed—even on declining sales so long as the break-even point has been passed.

Unhappily for Murray, the Library exceeded its break-even point in only two quarters—the last in 1829 and the first in 1830. Thereafter sales came very close to reaching the break-even point for about a year, but then the gap between the two opened and was never closed. That the Library was in the black during all of 1830 is to be accounted for by the favorable balances earned in 1829-1830, which proved sufficient to cover three quarters of marginally unprofitable sales. But that favorable balance had been exhausted by the end of 1830 and thereafter the persistent failure of sales to meet the break-even point was fatal to the success of the Library. The gap is usually between 400 and 500 sales per volume, but to close this gap any time after 1831 would have involved doubling the rate of sales, something that Murray clearly could not do.

Measured by average sales, interest in the Family Library was very high during the first year or so of its publication but fell precipitously thereafter. In accounting for this, it is important to remember that the declining fortunes of the Family Library approximately coincided with a series of difficulties in Lockhart's family and with the political crisis occasioned by the reform bill finally passed in 1832. The last two months of 1830 saw the defeat of Wellington's anti-reform ministry and the first of the now famous Swing Riot trials; in the spring of 1831 Lord John Russell introduced a reform bill and a general election was held. In the fall the riots punctuating the reform agitation were at their height and a cholera epidemic was beginning. The turmoil of national life must have touched Lockhart, as he was editor of the influential Quarterly Review as well as the Family Library, and these public difficulties could only have been exacerbated by those within his own family—Scott's health was visibly deteriorating and Lockhart's young son, long in frail health, died at the end of 1831. Lockhart kept at his work all through this period, but the Library fell behind its goal of monthly publication. It is of course impossible to measure in what degree the flagging sales of the Library resulted from the distractions of Lockhart's own life or from the disturbances of public affairs. But it was widely felt at the time that the general preoccupation with

reform severely limited the sale of books. Murray's experience with the Family Library seems to confirm that. It was in this period that income from sales began consistently to fall below expenditures, driving the Library irretrievably into the red. It was this state of affairs that Thomas Frognall Dibdin, the famous bookman, described in relating his visit with Murray during the reform crisis: Murray's position seemed foolishly self-defeating. He had helped to shape the market for cheap books but could not supply it profitably; he could keep on only at the expense of his other publishing business.

That the Library was failing financially was known to Murray and Lockhart at least as early as August 1831; for Lockhart in trying to mediate between G. R. Gleig and Murray over the latter's refusal to continue publication of the History of British India had then to explain that "the real secret of Murray's conduct is, that the speculation has proved less advantageous than he anticipated" (letter of August 1831, NLS MSS 932, f. 86). With the December 1831 accounting Murray knew how seriously in the red the Library was—some £8,220 by his calculation. Lockhart described the state of the booktrade, and of the Library, soon thereafter in a letter to Scott, saying that "the Booksellers continue in a very low state—but your Series, & a similar one of Byron's life & works, are thriving capitally. . . . The Quarterly has risen considerably of late; but all my other concerns are for the present dead."[16] And finally the affairs of the Library came to

such a pass that on 30 March 1832 Lockhart wrote to Milman complaining that Murray "persists in keeping total silence to me" about it.[17]

The silence cannot have lasted much longer, for it is clear that Murray had resolved to cut his expenses wherever possible. After the publication of Coleridge's Six Months in the West Indies in November 1832, there was much irregularity in the appearance of the remaining eleven volumes of the Library; and none of these represented a substantial new investment in copyright on Murray's part, except volume III of Tytler's Lives and volume VI of Cunningham's British Painters, the earlier volumes of which had usually proved successful. Murray already owned Coleridge's book, as he did also the books by Croker and Irving that he added to the Library in 1834; all these he could republish cheaply. He also finally published Tytler's Universal History, the copyright of which he had purchased three years previously, in 1830. Such activities suggest Murray thought of the Library as having failed, a supposition confirmed by Lockhart's letter to John Abraham Heraud of 11 February 1833. Lockhart returned the proofs of a volume of "Lives" Heraud had written for the series and explained:

After the publication of volume VI of Cunningham's British Painters in April 1833, nothing more appeared for eight months, until the republication of Irving's Sketch-Book in January 1834. It was little wonder that Lockhart's Edinburgh friend John Cay wrote in September 1833 to ask, "Is the Family Library gone to pot?" (NLS MSS 924, f. 100*). It pretty clearly had, and we have now only to look briefly at how Murray tried to contain his losses. He had of course already exercised the first of his options, to stop publishing new books. But there were other ways to economize, and it is instructive to see which of them he adopted because his choices indicate how Murray conceived of his undertaking even under the pressure of commercial failure.

The cost of paper, printing, and binding were largely inflexible if the excellence previously achieved was to be maintained. Murray did not give way here; he kept on as he had begun in these most visible aspects of quality book production. But he could secure some elbowroom by controlling his expenditures on copyrights, illustrations, and advertising. That expenditures for these three things should vary considerably from quarter to quarter is not surprising, given the differences in authorship and the suitability of various titles for illustration. But a determination of the quarterly averages per volume in print of such costs shows that Murray gradually reduced advertising and sharply cut illustration expenses in 1832 and afterwards, but that he never stinted in the purchase of copyrights.

Expenditures for advertising showed considerable variation, but except for the last two quarters of 1830 they ranged roughly between £25 and £75 per quarter per volume in print until the middle of 1832. In the last two quarters of 1830 advertising costs rose to £125-150, at just the time when the overall balance was beginning to slip, but Murray probably did not know this. His profit taking during this period suggests, on the contrary, that he was hopeful of success and may have been trying to secure it with increased advertising. Whatever the reason, advertising expenses fell back to the norm in 1831 and declined to the £0-30 range only after the middle of 1832. Expenditures for illustrations are equally various but show a much more pronounced downward drift. From 1829 to the third quarter of 1831, the average cost per volume in print of illustration ranged from £75 to £200; from the end of 1831 until the third quarter of 1833 the range was from £0 to £115; from the end of 1833 until the Library was remaindered the range was £0-25.

Averaging copyright payments per volume in print for each quarter gives a misleading impression of the actual course of Murray's expenses because doing so associates payments with publication, which was not the case with Tytler's six-volume History, and because payments for the other books issued after November 1832 were essentially honoraria, as Murray already owned their copyrights.[18] This flexibility of republishing works he already owned was the only one Murray allowed himself, for he knew that he could not get good books cheaply. It was possible to turn a profit on the work of hacks, but Murray did not choose to do so. So long as he was publishing newly purchased books in the Family Library the range of average copyright payments per

quarter was from £150 to £320, and he never paid less than £100 for any book published in the Library. In effect, he never fell consistently or significantly below his average copyright payment of £221.4.6. This average is some 23% higher than the "standard" copyright payment of £180 made for S.D.U.K. volumes.[19] Even in the face of failing sales and the prospect of considerable losses, Murray chose to publish the best books he could secure—or not to publish at all.

For the end had to come if the Library could not be made to support itself. Murray had no alternatives but to succeed in his design or to abandon it, and his remaindering the Library to Thomas Tegg is clear testimony of commercial failure. Murray had set out in the Family Library to sell the best books he could as cheaply as possible. His basic tactic was to apply a brand name to a series of books and to rely on the general reputation of that name, as well as the individual books, to sell the series. By 1829 this could hardly have been called an innovation, but its application to mass-produced books intended for the common reader was. Not enough is known about the finances of the S.D.U.K. and Constable's Miscellany, Murray's predecessors, or of their many successors in the 1830's and 1840's, to be able to say generally how well such brand-naming in books worked, but Charles Knight's later disillusionment with the practice clearly resonates with the commercial history of the Family Library:

Like so many others, including many publishers who were to follow him, Murray was unable to translate the publishing practices of the market in which he had first established himself into the market for the common reader. But to focus exclusively on this failure would be to miss what is perhaps the most significant part of Murray's endeavor. It may be true that he failed commercially because he refused to sell his books in part issues, because he was not at home in the market for cheap books, and because he was determined not to skimp his publications. But all that is only to say that he failed because he brought his best conception of his profession—his best self, to adopt

the Arnoldian phrase—to bear on the attempt to shape social attitudes through the use of literacy. The true distinction of the Family Library, in even its commercial history, lies in Murray's attempt to make it a vehicle for reuniting a dangerously divided society, an attempt based on the recognition that if books could serve this purpose at all, then only the best books would do for the common reader. Murray might have won commercial success in other ways, but he had a better idea of his profession and aimed at considerably more than the profits he would more likely have made by publishing truly cheap books. The Edinburgh Literary Gazette had commented that among the various new series of books aimed at the common reader "cheapness is the god of their idolatry"—excepting only the Family Library, which was "undoubtedly entitled to bear away the palm" (20 June 1829, p. 82). Murray understood that he had to offer the common reader something more than a low price. That he did so earned him the praise of his contemporaries and a place of lasting consequence in the history of the democratization of knowledge in Britain.

CONTENTS OF THE FAMILY LIBRARY AND THE DRAMATIC SERIES

The following table lists the volumes of the Family Library as published by John Murray between March 1829 and September 1834 and gives also the volumes in the Dramatic Series. The dates of publication are supplied from the Murray ledgers and are confirmed by advertisements in the volumes themselves, by reviews, and by Robert Pettie and Quintin Waddington, eds., The English Catalogue of Books, 1801-1836 (1914). The authors are identified from the title pages, Samuel Halkett and John Laing, eds., Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature (1926-62), The English Catalogue and Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends Memoir and Correspondence of John Murray (1891). Brackets around an author's name indicate anonymous publication. All the Family Library authors are included in the DNB except Washington Irving (see the DAB), John Barrow, S. Dunham Whitehead, and Charles Edward Dodd. For Barrow, see Frederick Boase, Modern English Biography (1892-1921).

       

Volume	Date	Author	Title (Number of copies printed/Total sold and distributed as complimentary copies)
The Family Library
1	30 March 1829	[J. G. Lockhart]	The History of Napoleon Buonaparte (27,500/20,241)
2	14 May 1829		vol. II of Lockhart's Napoleon (27,500/20,241)

                       

3	c. 12 June 1829	John Williams	The Life and Actions of Alexander the Great (15,000/11,746)
4	July 1829	Allan Cunningham	The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (14,000/11,083)
5	4 August 1829	[H. H. Milman]	The History of the Jews (20,000/12,823)
6	12 September 1829		vol. II of Milman's History (20,190/12,659)
7	October 1829	several hands[a]	The Natural History of Insects (17,471/9,331)
8	1 December 1829	[S. Dunham Whitehead]	The Court and Camp of Buonaparte (20,000/13,481)
9	29 December 1829		vol. III of Milman's History— see No. 5 above (20,090/12,298)
10	January 1830		vol. II of Cunningham's Lives— see No. 4 above (14,240/10,573)
11	27 February 1830	Washington Irving	The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (abridged by Irving) (15,000/11,606)
12	c. 1 April 1830	Robert Southey	The Life of Nelson (21,000/15,167)
13	June 1830		vol. III of Cunningham's Lives—see No. 4 above (14,320/9,333)
14	12 July 1830	[William Macmichael][b]	Lives of British Physicians (10,816/8,394)

                               

Volume	Date	Author	Title (Number of copies printed/Total sold and distributed as complimentary copies)
15	1 September 1830	G. R. Gleig	The History of the British Empire in India (10,374/7,786)
16	18 September 1830	Sir Walter Scott	Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Addressed to J. G. Lockhart (20,385/13,592)
17	December 1830	F. B. Head	The Life of Bruce, the African Traveller (10,035/9,562)
18	27 December 1830	Washington Irving	Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (15,724/7,804)
19	26 January 1831		vol. IV of Cunningham's Lives—see No. 4 above (14,410/8,189)
20	20 February 1831	[Edward Smedley]	Sketches from Venetian History (10,146/7,107)
21	14 April 1831	Francis Palgrave	History of England, Anglo-Saxo Period (15,151/6,581)
22	18 May 1831	Patrick Fraser Tytler	Lives of Scottish Worthies (10,000/5,476)
23	8 August 1831	[John Barrow]	A Family Tour Through South Holland; Up the Rhine; and Across the Netherlands, to Ostend (7,000/6,482)
24	1 September 1831	David Brewster	The Life of Sir Isaac Newton (12,500/6,669)
25	31 September 1831	[Sir John Barrow]	The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty (7,000/7,000)
26	19 December 1831	John Blunt	Sketch of the Reformation in England (8,000/6,541)
27	February 1832		vol. V of Cunningham's Lives—see No. 4 above,lb> (6,000/5,782)
28 & 29 & 30 }	28 March 1832	Richard and John Lander[c]	Journal of an Expedition to Explore the Course and Termination of the Niger (8,750 each/7,887 each)
31	15 June 1832	[Charles Edward Dodd]	The Trials of Charles the First and of Some of the Regicides (5,350/4,748)

                         

Volume	Date	Author	Title (Number of copies printed/Total sold and distributed as complimentary copies)
32	26 June 1832		vol. II of Smedley's History— see No. 20 above (6,000/4,948)
33	27 July 1832	Sir David Brewster	Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott, (11,000/8,997)
34	August 1832		vol. II of Tytler's Lives—see No. 22 above (5,200/4,359)
35	24 October 1832	[Sir John Barrow] A Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great (5,127/4,763)
36	26 November 1832	Henry Nelson Coleridge	Six Months in the West Indies in 1825 (6,295/4,232)
37	March 1833		vol. III of Tytler's Lives—see No. 22 above (5,159/3,747)
38	April 1833		vol. VI of Cunningham's Lives—see No. 4 above (7,043/4,386)
39 & 40}	January 1834	Washington Irving	The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon (5,640 each/3,556 each)
41 & 42 }	April 1834	Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee	Universal History, From The Creation of the World to the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century, vols. I & II (3,071 each/3,000 each)
43 & 44 }	5 June 1834		vols. III & IV of Tytler's Universal History (3,050 each/2,847 each)
45 & 46 }	16 July 1834		vols. V & VI of Tytler's Universal History (3,050 each/2,793 each)
47	22 September 1834	T. Crofton Croker	Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (5,000/3,398)

The Dramatic Series

       

1	23 April 1830		The Plays of Philip Massinger, vol. I (5,157/3,180)
2	October 1830		vol. II of the Massinger (5,205/2,162)
3	March 1831		vol. III of the Massinger (5,047/1,640)
4	3 May 1831	[Rev. E. Johnson, ed.]	Popular English Specimens of the Great Dramatic Poets . . . Æschylus (3,043/1,771)

   

Volume	Date	Author	Title (Number of copies printed/Total sold and distributed as complimentary copies)
5 & 6 }	May 1831	[Mr. Mitchell, ed.][d]	The Dramatic Works of John Ford: with an Introduction, Notes Critical and Explanatory (5,027 each/1,122 each)

The printing and sales of the Family Library and Dramatic Series can be summarized numerically as follows:                

	Family Library	Dramatic Series	Total
Copies sold	360,886	10,460	371,346
Complimentary copies	6,271	481	6,752
Copies remaindered from Murray	146,013	17,520	163,533
from agents	2,621	56	2,677
Adjustment[e]	107	-11	96
	-----	-----	-----
Total printed	515,898	28,506	544,404

Notes