Down at Bristol, the ancestral town of both Longman and Rees, Joseph Cottle had been doing honest service—without, we fear, much profit—in issuing the earliest works of young men who were to take the highest rank among their fellows. Cottle had published Southey’s Joan of Arc in 1796, and in 1798 had issued the Lyrical Ballads, the joint composition of Coleridge and Wordsworth. When, in 1800, Longman purchased the entire copyrights of the Bristol firm, at a fair and individual valuation, the Lyrical Ballads were set down in the bill at exactly nothing, and Cottle obtained leave to present the copyright to the authors. In connection with Cottle and Longman, we must here mention a story that does infinite credit to both. At the very close of the eighteenth century, Southey and Cottle in conjunction prepared an edition of Chatterton’s works, to be published by subscription for the benefit of his sister, whose sight was now beginning to fail her. Hitherto, though much money had been made from the works of the “boy poet,” they had been printed only for the emolument of speculators.
The edition unfortunately proved a failure, but Longman and Rees entered into a friendly arrangement with Southey, and he was able to report in 1804 that Mrs. Newton lived to receive £184 15s. from the profits, when, as she expressed it, she would otherwise have wanted bread. Ultimately, Mary Ann Newton, the poet’s niece, received about £600, the fruits of the generous exertion of a brother poet, and of the good feeling of a kind-hearted publisher.
The first edition of the Lyrical Ballads did eventually sell out, and then Wordsworth, detaching his own poems from the others, and adding several new ones thereto, obtained £100 from Longman for the use of two editions, but the sale was so very slow that the bargain was probably unprofitable.
In this same year 1800 the house of Longman also published Coleridge’s translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein, written in the short space of six weeks. Very few copies were sold, but after remaining on hand for sixteen years, the remainder was sold off rapidly at a double price.
Southey (a Bristol man himself) met, too, with much kindness from the firm, but after his first poem with but little, as a poet, from the public. We have seen before that “the profits” on Madoc “amounted to exactly three pounds seventeen shillings and a penny.” No wonder that he writes to a friend, “Books are now so dear that they are becoming articles of fashionable furniture more than anything else; they who do buy them do not read, and they who read them do not buy them. I have seen a Wiltshire clothier who gives his bookseller no other instructions than the dimensions of his shelves; and have just heard of a Liverpool merchant who is fitting up a library, and has told his bibliopole to send him Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, and if any of those fellows should publish anything new to let him have it immediately. If Madoc obtains any celebrity, its size and cost will recommend it to those gentry libros consumere nati, born to buy octavos and help the revenue.” Southey’s prose, however, proved infinitely more profitable, and for some years he was the chief contributor to Longman’s Annual Review started in 1802, the same year as the Edinburgh Review. About this time Longman first went to Scotland, paid a visit to Walter Scott, and purchased the copyright of the Minstrelsy then publishing; and in the following year Rees crossed the borders, and returned with an arrangement to publish the Lay of the Last Minstrel on the half-profit system, Constable having, however, a very small share in it. Scott’s moiety of profits was £169 6s., and success being then ensured, Longman offered £500 for the copyright, which was at once accepted. They afterwards added £100, “handsomely given to supply the loss of a fine horse which broke down suddenly while the author was riding with one of the worthy publishers” (Owen Rees).
Already in the first few years of the century we find the house connected with Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Scott, but it was by no means entirely to poetry that Longman and Rees trusted. In 1799 they purchased the copyright of Lindley Murray’s English Grammar, one of the most profitable school books ever issued from the press—for many years the annual sale of the Abridgment in England alone was from 48,000 to 50,000 copies. Chambers’ Cyclopædia was entirely re-written, re-cast, and re-christened, and again, under the management of Abraham Rees, after whom it was named, came out in quarto form in parts, but at a total cost of £85. The ablest scientific and technical writers of the day were retained, and among them we find the names of Humphry Davy, John Abernethy, Sharon Turner, John Flaxman, and Henry Brougham. For the first twenty years of this century Rees’ New Cyclopædia filled the place that the Encyclopædia Britannica—“a Scots rival in little esteem”—was afterwards to occupy.
In 1803, we find the trade catalogue has extended so much in bulk and character that it is divided into no less than twenty-two classes. Among their books we note Paley’s Natural Theology (ten editions published in seven years), Sharon Turner’s Anglo-Saxon History, Pinkerton’s Geography, Cowper’s Homer, and Gifford’s Juvenal.
About this time too, they engaged very extensively in the old book trade, a branch of the business discarded about the year 1840. In a catalogue of the year 1811 we find some very curious books. Here are the celebrated Roxburgh Ballads, now in the British Museum; a Pennant’s London, marked £300; a Granger’s Biographical Dictionary, £750; Pilkington’s Dictionary of Painters, £420; two volumes of Cromwelliana, £250; an extraordinary assemblage of Caxtons, Wynkyn de Wordes, and other early printed books, one supposed to date from 1446; a unique assemblage of Garrickiana, and many other articles of a matchless character.[9]
Longman was himself indefatigable in business, for fifty years unremittingly he came from and returned to Hampstead on horseback; but as the rious branches of the trade clearly prove, the superintendence of so vast a business was altogether beyond the power of any single man; and perhaps nothing tended more to raise the firm to the eminent position it soon attained than the plan of introducing fresh blood from time to time;—the new members being often chosen on account of the zeal and talent they had displayed as servants of the house. In 1804 Thomas Hurst, with the whole of his trade and connection, and Cosmo Orme (the founder of the hospital for decayed booksellers) were admitted. In 1811, Thomas Brown, whom we have already noticed as an apprentice, became a member of the firm, and until his retirement in 1859, took the sole management of the cash department, with so regular and just a system that an author could always learn what was coming to him, and when he was to receive it—a plan not invariably adopted in a publisher’s counting-house. The firm was in 1824 further strengthened by the admission of Bevis Green, who had been apprenticed to Hurst in 1807. The title of the firm at this, its best known, period was, therefore, “Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.” When, however, Thomas Roberts entered, the title was changed to “Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green;” but we are anticipating, for Roberts died as recently as 1865, having acquired some distinction in private life as a Numismatist. For the sake of convenience, and for the sequence of the story, it will, perhaps, be as well to consider the firm as represented, as in fact from his leading position it was by Thomas Norton Longman, touching only upon the others individually when some directly personal interest arises. Before all these partnerships, however, were accomplished facts Longman had taken a much more precious, and even more zealous partner in the person of Miss Mary Slater of Horsham, Sussex, whom he had married as far back as the 2nd July, 1799.
Wordsworth of course continued his connection with the firm, though his profits were absolutely nil. Though a poetic philosopher he was not quite proof against the indifference of the public. In the edition of the Lyrical Ballads published in 1805 we find the significant epigraph, Quam nihil ad genium, Papinique tuum. In 1807, he published two new volumes, in which appeared many of his choicest pieces, and among them his first sonnets. Jeffrey, however, maintained that they were miserably inferior, and his article put an absolute stop to the sale. Wordsworth had, perhaps deprived himself of all right to complain, for his harshest reviewer did him far more justice than he was wont to deal out to his greatest contemporaries. In 1814, we find Longman announcing, “Just published, the Excursion, being a portion of the Recluse, by William Wordsworth, in 4to., price £2 2s., boards.” Jeffrey used the famous expression—“This will never do;” and Hogg wrote to Southey that Jeffrey had crushed the poem. “What!” retorted Southey, “Jeffrey crush the Excursion! Tell him he might as easily crush Skiddaw!” Wordsworth, who had invariably a high value of his own works, even of his weakest ones, writes also,—“I am delighted to learn that the Edinburgh Aristarch has declared against the Excursion, as he will have the mortification of seeing a book enjoy a high reputation to which he has not contributed.” For a while, however, Jeffrey’s curse was potent, and it took six years to exhaust an edition of only 500 copies. We need scarcely follow Wordsworth’s various publications (do their dates not lie on every table of every drawing-room in the land?), but the whole returns from his literary labours up to 1819 had not amounted to £140; and even in 1829 he remarks that he had worked hard through a long life for less pecuniary emolument than a public performer earns for two or three songs.