 | |  |
Notes
Domestic Anecdotes of the French Nation . . . Indicative of the French Revolution (1794), sig. A5. I am grateful to the University of Illinois Library for meeting some of the extraordinary costs of publishing this essay and to James J. Barnes for his always generous counsel.
See Asa Briggs, "The Language of 'Class' in Early Nineteenth-Century England," Essays in Labour History, ed. Briggs and John Saville (1960), pp. 43-73.
The counter-revolutionary stance of the Family Library is studied at length in a book being prepared by the present writer.
NLS MSS 929, f. 137. I am indebted to the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland for permission to quote manuscript material in their holding.
See Alastair R. Thompson, "The Use of Libraries by the Working Class in Scotland in the Early Nineteenth Century," Scottish Historical Review, 42 (1963), 24.
I am grateful to John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., for generously allowing me to study these records and to cite figures from them in what follows.
The Spottiswoode ledgers are preserved at the British Museum (Add. MSS 48819) and provide similar information for Cunningham's British Painters, vols. 27 and 38, Dodd's Trials, vol. 31, Tytler's Scottish Worthies, vol. 34, Irving's Sketch-Book, vols. 39-40, and Croker's Fairy Tales, vol. 47. The Charles Whittingham Cost Book, also at the British Museum (Add. MSS 41885), provides information for Southey's Nelson, vol. 12. I have been unable to consult or locate the records of Murray's other printers for the Family Library. I am grateful to the Trustees of the British Museum for permission to quote from manuscripts in their possession.
See Michael Sadleir, The Evolution of Publishers' Binding Styles 1770-1900 (1930), pp. 39-48, 60-62; and John Carter, Publisher's Cloth, An Outline History of Publisher's Binding in England 1820-1900 (1935), p. 28.
The cost ledger figures on income are unreliable because they disregard the print-order overruns available for many volumes. These overruns varied from less than 1% to some 8% of the print order, but for the seventy-two printings recorded in the sales ledger they averaged only 1.2%. Because these overruns were included in the sales ledger, they are included in the determination of income given in Figure I.
Bibliophobia (1832), p. 31. Dibdin has other stories to tell here of the distress for booksellers brought on by the reform crisis.
Letter of February 1832, NLS MSS 5317, f. 98; the series Lockhart refers to is Cadell's reissue of the Waverley Novels in 5s. and 6s. volumes. There is some irony in Lockhart's finding that the Quarterly offered surer support than the Family Library, as he had taken up the Library with the hope of making himself independent of the fortunes of the Quarterly. Lockhart had written to Scott two years before, in January 1830, that "I am every day more anxious to see this property [the Family Library] established on a sure footing because every day shows me more clearly the impossibility of the Quarterly being in these days of mutation the stepping stone to any permanent benefits in my case, unless I chose to sacrifice its interests to mine" (NLS MSS 3912, ff. 165-166).
Murray Archives, quoted in Andrew Lang, Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart (1897), II, 99.
Murray allowed £200 for the two-volume Sketch-Book but kept it himself; he had been losing money on Irving's new books for some time.
The S.D.U.K. "standard" is reported as a piece of gossip in the New York Book-seller's Advertiser, 1 (Nov. 1834), 84.
The Literary Gazette for 24 Oct. 1829 reported that the book was "undertaken by an association of various scientific gentlemen,—one of the very highest being at their head" (p. 693). The Library of Congress Catalog of printed cards attributes authorship to James Rennie and John Obadiah Westwood, but it was Dr. Edward Ferguson who named the volume (see Lockhart to Murray, 10 Aug. 1829, Murray Archives). Rennie was briefly professor of natural history at King's College, London, and wrote on both insects and birds for the S.D.U.K. The Library of Congress can no longer verify the attribution to Rennie, and the present writer has found nothing else to associate him with the Family Library volumes.
Of the eighteen biographical sketches in this book, only the first six and the fifteenth are attributed to Macmichael by Herbert Spencer Robinson, editor of Macmichael's The Gold-Headed Cane (1932), p. xvi. Authors of the other biographies are not identified by Robinson; a 30 Sept. 1830 letter (Murray Archives) from Lockhart to Murray mentions a Dr. Hawkins as a co-editor. This may have been Francis Bisset Hawkins (see Boase).
The journal was edited for publication by Alexander Bridport Becher (1796-1876), hydrographer at the Admiralty and editor of the Nautical Magazine; see Robin Hallett, ed., The Niger Journal of Richard and John Lander (1965), p. 33.
The editors of the Dramatic Series are named in the Murray cost ledgers. Vols. 1-3 and 5-6 were based on William Gifford's editions of Massinger and Ford, the latter first published by Murray in 1827. All these plays were carefully "adapted for family reading, and the use of young persons," as the title page of the Massinger promises.
These adjustments (amounting to only .018% of the total) are required because twelve sets of figures in the sales ledger fail to sum properly. It is impossible to say from the available evidence whether these errors were in the entry of sales, in the count of the books received from the printer, or in the number of volumes finally remaindered to Tegg. All three sets of figures have nonetheless been regarded as reliable—i.e., they are the most detailed numbers available—for various uses in the calculations made for this essay.
| | |