A History of Booksellers, the Old and the NewCurwen, Henry
History
A History of Booksellers, the Old and the New
Curwen, Henry
Book industries and trade -- Great Britain -- History; Booksellers and bookselling -- Great Britain -- History
As, perhaps, the strongest proof of a man’s kindliness of heart,
Longman is invariably represented as being “almost adored by his
domestics, from his uniform attention to the comforts of those who have
grown gray in his service.” He was a liberal patron of the “Association
for the Relief of Decayed Booksellers,” and was also one of the
“Court of Assistants of the Company of Stationers,” but, with the
characteristic modesty of his disposition, paid the customary fine to
be allowed to decline the offices of warden and master of the company.
For many years the “House” had been London agents and part proprietors
of the _Edinburgh Review_, and when the commercial crash of 1826
destroyed Constable’s huge establishment, the property was virtually
in their own hands, and the number for December, 1826, is printed
for “Longman, Rees, Orme, Browne, and Green, London, and Adam Black,
Edinburgh;” and if we “read between the lines” of the new designation
we learn that Hurst had been concerned in some bill transactions,
and had been this year compelled to retire (he died an inmate of the
Charter House, in 1847), and we may also gather something of the strong
connection that was to be formed with the house of Adam Black.
Jeffrey retired from the editorial chair in 1829, but Macney Napier,
the editor of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ was appointed in his
stead, and the literary management of the journal was still continued
in Edinburgh. Sydney Smith ceased to write for the _Review_ in 1827;
but in 1825 an article was contributed on Milton, by a young man of
five-and-twenty; and Mr. Thomas Babington Macaulay, who, as Moore said,
could do any mortal thing but forget, was destined to be, not only the
most brilliant of the daring and talented band of Edinburgh Reviewers,
but eventually, one of the most powerful contributors to Longman’s
fortune and reputation.[10]
To return again to educational works, we find that in Mangnall’s
_Questions_ a property had been acquired that fully rivalled Murray’s
_Mrs. Markham_. A type now of a hideously painful and parrot-like
system of teaching (what negations of talent our sisters and mothers
owe to this encyclopædic volume we shudder to sum up!) it was imitated
and printed in every direction. Poor Miss Mangnall! who recollects
now-a-days that in 1806 she commenced her literary life with a volume
of poems? A very similar book, but on scientific questions, was _Mrs.
Marcet’s Conversations_, which was not only profitable to Longman,
but American booksellers, up to the year 1853, had reaped an abundant
harvest from the sale of 160,000 copies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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