“Dear Smellie,—I am sorry for the defeat you have met with. Had you praised Lord Monboddo instead of damning him, it would not have happened.
“Yours, &c.
“John Murray.”
Murray, now that the Edinburgh scheme had come to nothing, commenced in 1780 a volume of annual intelligence of his own under the title of the London Mercury; and in January, 1783, with the assistance of a staff of able writers, among whom were Dr. Whittaker and Gilbert Stuart, who had lately come from Scotland, he started the English Review.
A great portion of Murray’s retail stock was medical books, and for many years the house had a reputation in the medical world. Of the books, however, which he published, those more latterly issued proved by far the most successful, such as Langhorne’s “Plutarch’s Lives,” Mitford’s “Greece,” and, in 1791, a thin octavo in which the elder Disraeli first gave the public his “Curiosities of Literature”—all of them works which have since been annual sources of revenue to the firm.
Murray found time, however, amidst all this business, to indulge his own literary tastes and aspirations, which had at one time been strong. Some of his pamphlets—such as the “Letter to Mr. Mason on his Edition of Gray’s Poems, and the Practice of Booksellers” (1777); his “Considerations on the Freight and Shipping of the East India Company” (1786), and “An Author’s Conduct to the Public, stated in the Behaviour of Dr. William Cullen” (1784)—acquired much transient reputation.
After a career, as successful we imagine as his wishes could desire, John Murray died on the 6th November, 1793, leaving behind him a widow, two daughters, and an only son, and bequeathing to the latter a business which was destined to carry the name of John Murray wherever the English language was spoken, and wherever English books were read, as the most venturesome and yet the most successful publisher who has ever, in London at all events, encouraged the struggles of authorship and gratified the tastes of half a world of readers.
John Murray, the son, the more immediate object of our memoir, was born in 1778, and was consequently only fifteen at the time of his father’s death. He had been educated primarily at the High School of Edinburgh, doubtless with a view of keeping up the Scotch connection, and had afterwards been removed to “various English seminaries”—among others to Dr. Burney’s academy at Gosport, where, through the carelessness of a writing-master, while making a pen with a penknife, he lost the sight of one of his eyes. The founder of the house not only left the business to his son, but left also a council of regency to manage affairs until he came to the natural years of discretion. By a last will, dated about one month before his death, the elder John Murray appointed four executors—among them his widow, Hester Murray, and Archibald Paxton, who in his letter to Falconer he had named as one of his principal advisers in adopting the bookselling trade. For a year or two after 1793 the name of “H. Murray” figures at the top of the bills and trade circulars, and then disappears from them, Mrs. Murray having, it seems, in 1795, married “Henry Paget, Lieutenant in the West Norfolk Militia,” and retired entirely from the management of the business. Murray was still too young to carry on the shop unaided, so his guardians admitted Mr. Highley, for a long time chief factotum in the shop and manager of the medical department, to a partnership with him. By the agreement the title of the new firm was to be “Murray and Highley;” the latter was solely to conduct the business, and to receive half the profits until young John came of age, after which they were to enjoy equal powers and “share and share” alike.
John Murray—reading a newspaper.
1778–1843.
Mr. Highley, who seems to have been a steady, plodding man with much latent exertion against all speculative venture, did little to increase the standing of the firm; probably he imagined that the trade in medical books, as it was attended with the least risk, was the most remunerative portion of the business. His worthy soul was vexed at the anger excited by Whitaker’s slashing articles in the English Review. “Enraged authors,” it appears, took to sending huge parcels of defiant, contemptuous, and, worse still, unpaid MSS. to the publisher of the Review, complaining of the treatment which their books suffered at the hands of his critics, and “enraged authors” seem at this time to have been about the only readers of the savage periodical in question. One of the last numbers contains a notice that all unpaid post parcels may be inquired for again at the General Post Office; and soon after Mr. Highley eased his shoulders of this burden by merging the English Review in the Analytical.