The alliance that Murray had formed with the Ballantynes was soon dissolved, for Murray, though venturous enough, was a man of business, and their loose, slip-shod way of general dealings, did not at all satisfy his requirements. William Blackwood, then a dealer in antiquarian books, was chosen instead as Edinburgh agent, and, in conjunction with him, Murray purchased the first series of the “Tales of My Landlord.” This was in 1816, and some payments for Quarterly Review articles was well-nigh the last business communication between Scott and Murray.
Now that Murray had so completely rivalled Constable in one line—that of the Review—he wished to rival him in another. Constable had made an apparent fortune out of Scott’s poetry, in which Murray had in one case, to the extent of one quarter, participated. Scott had, it is true, left Constable, but was for the present unalienable from the Ballantynes, who at this moment enjoyed the dubious services of a London branch.
Looking round among the young and rising writers of the day, for one who was likely to enhance the fame and increase the wealth of his house, Murray mentally selected Lord Byron, then known, not only as the noble poetaster of the “Hours of Idleness,” but as the bitterest satirist who had dipped pen in gall since Pope had lashed the hack-writers of his time in the “Dunciad.” Murray made no secret of his wish to secure Byron as a client, and the rumour of this desire reached the ears of Mr. Dallas, the novelist, who happened at that very moment to be seeking a publisher for a new poem in two cantos, by his distant cousin and dear college chum, Lord Byron. Byron had just arrived from the East, bringing with him a satire, entitled “Hints from Horace,” of which he was not a little hopeful, and also, as he casually mentions, a “new attempt in the Spenserian stanza.” Dallas read the “new attempt,” and, enthralled by its beauty, forthwith undertook securing its publication. But, even in those days of venturous publishers and successful poems, the matter looked easier than it proved. Longman declined to publish a poem by a writer who had so recently lashed his own favourite authors. Miller, of Abermarle Street, a notable man in his day, and generous withal (had he not given the widow of the late Charles James Fox £1500 for her defunct husband’s historical fragments, and did he not eagerly snatch at one-fourth share of “Marmion?”) would have none of it, his noble patron, Lord Elgin, being abused in the very first canto. Dallas then appears to have heard a rumour of Murray’s willingness; the manuscript was taken to him, and £600 was offered, there and then, for the copyright. Byron was at that time unwilling to receive money for work done solely for love and fame; he had lately attacked Scott in a directly personal manner, as “Apollo’s venal son:”—
“Though Murray with his Miller may combine
To yield thy Muse just half-a-crown per line!”
and generously made a present of the copyright to Dallas—a brother author, less gifted in purse and brain—and thus the bargain was concluded. This was the commencement of a friendship between author and publisher which has, perhaps, only one parallel in literary annals—that of Scott and Constable. From the letters between Byron and Murray we can discern clearly that the connection, tinged as it was with much generous feeling on both sides, was far from being of a purely commercial nature.
“Childe Harold,” for this, of course, is the poem referred to, was “put in hand” at once. Quartos were then in vogue for all books likely to attract attention, and Murray insisted that profit as well as portliness was to be found therein. Byron was for octavos and popularity; but as he said wofully at the end of one of his letters, “one must obey one’s bookseller.” During the progress of the printing, Byron would lounge into the shop in Fleet Street, fresh from Angelo’s and Jackson’s. “His great amusement,” says Murray, “was in making thrusts with his stick, in fencer’s fashion, at the ‘sprucebooks,’ as he called them, which I had arranged upon my shelves. He disordered a row for me in a short time, always hitting the volume he had singled out for the exercise of his skill. I was sometimes, as you will guess, glad to get rid of him.” As for correction, Byron was willing enough to defer at any time to Murray’s advice, upon all questions but politics, though only to a limited extent: “If you don’t like it, say so, and I’ll alter it, but don’t suggest anything instead.” In one letter we find a strange absence of a young writer’s anxiety anent the importance of typography. “The printer may place the notes in his own way, or in any way, so that they are out of my way.” In another: “You have looked at it? to much purpose, to allow so stupid a blunder to stand; it is not ‘courage,’ but ‘carnage,’ and if you don’t want to see me cut my own throat see it altered!” Again, but later, “If every syllable were a rattlesnake, or every letter a pestilence, they should not be expunged.” “I do believe the Devil never created or perverted such a fiend as the fool of a printer.” “For God’s sake,” he writes in another place, “instruct Mr. Murray not to allow his shopman to call the work ‘Child of Harrow’s Pilgrimage!!!’ as he has done to some of my astonished friends, who wrote to inquire after my sanity on the occasion, as well they might!” To John Murray we imagine Lord Byron must have appeared as much of a contradiction as he did to the world outside.
Byron was extremely anxious that no underhand means should be used to foster the success of “Childe Harold.” “Has Murray,” he writes to Dallas, “shown the work to any one? He may—but I will have no traps for applause.” On receipt of a rumour from Dallas, he indites a stormy letter to Murray, absolutely forbidding that Gifford should be allowed to look at the book before publication. Before the letter arrived, however, Gifford had expressed a very strong opinion, indeed, as to the merit of the poem, which he declared to “be equal to anything of the present day.” Byron wrote again to Murray, “as never publisher was written to before by author:”—“It is bad enough to be a scribbler, without having recourse to such shifts to escape from or deprecate censure. It is anticipating, begging, kneeling, adulating—the devil! the devil! the devil! and all without my wish, and contrary to my desire.”
In the early spring of 1812, “Childe Harold” was ready, and three days before its appearance, Byron made his maiden speech in the House of Lords; a speech which was received with attention and hailed with applause, from those whose applause was in itself fame. It is needless here to recapitulate the success of “Childe Harold,” how, on the day after publication, Lord Byron awoke, and, as he himself phrased it, found himself famous.
The publication of “Childe Harold,” was not the only important event of this year, 1812, to the subject of our memoir. In this same year, Murray purchased the stock-in-trade of worthy Mr. Miller, of 50, Albemarle Street, and migrated thither, leaving the old shop, east of Temple Bar, to be re-occupied by-and-by (in 1832) by the Highley family.
Here it was, at Albemarle Street, that Murray attained the highest pinnacle of fame on which ever publisher stood. His drawing-room, at four o’clock, became the favourite resort of all the talent in literature and in art that London then possessed, and there were giants in those days. There it was his “custom of an afternoon,” to gather together such men as Byron, Scott, Moore, Campbell, Southey, Gifford, Hallam, Lockhart, Washington Irving, and Mrs. Somerville; and, more than this, he invited such artists as Laurence, Wilkie, Phillips, Newton, and Pickersgill to meet them and to paint them, that they might hang for ever on his walls. Famous tales, too, are told of the “publisher’s dinners;” of tables surrounded as never any king’s table but that of the “Emperor of the West’s” had ever been. As Byron makes Murray say, in his mock epistle to Dr. Palidori—