HENRY COLBURN:
THREE VOLUME NOVELS AND LIGHT LITERATURE.

Round Henry Colburn clusters a body of writers, lighter and gayer, and consequently more ephemeral than any we have yet noticed—men and women, too, for the matter of that, who purchased immediate success too often with a disregard of future reputation.

As a lad, Henry Colburn was placed in the establishment of William Earle, bookseller, of Albemarle Street, and after this preliminary training obtained the situation of assistant to a Mr. Morgan, the principal of a large circulating library in Conduit Street. Here he had, of course, ample opportunity of gauging the reading taste of the general public, and it is probably from this early connection with the library-subscribing world that he determined henceforth to devote himself almost exclusively to the production of the light novelties which he saw were so eagerly and so incessantly demanded. In 1816 he succeeded to the proprietorship of the library, and conducted the business with great spirit and success until, removing to New Burlington Street, he resigned the Conduit Street Library to the hands of Messrs. Saunders and Ottley, who, until their recent dissolution, were famous, not only for their circulating library, but for the tender care they bestowed upon the works of suckling poets and poetasters.

Before this change of residence, however, Colburn had already made several serious ventures on his own account. All through his long career we shall find that he speculated in journalistic venture with as much spirit as he showed in any of his daring schemes to win popular credit and applause. In 1814, with the assistance of Mr. Frederick Shoberl, he originated the New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register, on “the principles of general patriotism and loyalty,” founded, as its name implied, in direct opposition to Sir Richard Philips’ Old Monthly. Among the early editors were Dr. Watkins and Alaric Watts, but in 1820 a new series was commenced under the title of the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, and Thomas Campbell, the poet, was appointed editor. The agreement still exists in Beattie’s “Life of Campbell,” and was unusually liberal. He agreed to edit the periodical for three years, to supply in all twelve articles, six in verse, six in prose; and for these and his editorial services he received five hundred pounds per annum, to be increased if the circulation of the magazine materially improved. He was, of course, assisted by a sub-editor, and allowed a liberal sum for the payment of contributors. The magazine prospered, and passed successively through the editorial hands of Bulwer Lytton (1832) and Theodore Hook. In 1836 a third series appeared under Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and though Colburn parted with the proprietorship to Messrs. Chapman and Hall, and they in their turn to Messrs. Adams and Francis, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth was till yesterday at his editorial post, delighting our children with precisely the same kind of enthralling romances with which he beguiled our fathers.

In 1817 Colburn determined to introduce a paper upon the plan of a popular German prototype, and on the 26th January the first number of the Literary Gazette appeared, price one shilling. H. E. Lloyd, a clerk in the Foreign Department of the Post-Office, a good linguist, and a well-known translator from the German, was the chief contributor, and appears to have shared the editorial duties with Miss Ross, a lady afterwards pensioned by the Government. The reputation achieved was great, especially in reference to the Fine Arts, which were skilfully handled by William Carey, and at the twenty-sixth number Mr. Jerdan, formerly editor of the Sun, purchased a third of the property, and became the regular editor. Messrs. Longman eagerly embraced the offer of a third share, and with a staff of contributors, who varied from Canning to Maginn, the Literary Gazette obtained a wide popularity, and was recognized as an authority upon other matters than literature. At present, however, the Gazette is most gratefully remembered as having encouraged in its poetical columns (fairly and impartially opened to merit, however obscure), the earliest writings of Mrs. Hemans, Bowles, Hood, Swain, James Smith, Howitt, and even Tupper. In 1842 Jerdan bought out Colburn and the Messrs. Longman, and from his hands the editorship passed to L. Phillips, L. Beeve, and J. L. Jephson. In 1858 a new series was commenced, under, successively, S. Brooks, H. Christmas, W. R. Workman, F. Arnold, John Morley, and C. W. Goodwin. In 1862 it was finally incorporated with the Parthenon.

In 1816, the year before the foundation of the Literary Gazette, Colburn had, as we have seen, migrated to New Burlington Street, and soon rendered his shop famous as the chief emporium for the purchase and sale of novels and other light literature. The first book issued from the new establishment was Lady Morgan’s “Zana”—a work certainly not worth much, but scarcely meriting an attack in the Quarterly, which Talfourd stigmatises as “one of the coarsest insults ever offered in print by man to woman;” however, through the power of her ladyship’s name, and with the aid of skilful advertising—in which Colburn was perhaps the greatest expert in a time when the art had not reached its present high state of development—“Zana” proved eminently successful. Talented in a manner Lady Morgan certainly was, and, as a proof, is said to have made more than twenty-five thousand pounds by her pen. She had published a volume of verses at the unfortunately early age of fourteen, and this idea of precocity seems to us to accompany all her works.

At the suggestion of his friend Mr. Upcott, Colburn undertook, in 1818, the publication of “Evelyn’s Diary,” and its success would have been almost unparalleled had it not been followed in 1825 by the “Diary of Pepys.” For more than 150 years this work reposed unread and unknown, until Mr. John Smith succeeded in deciphering the stenographic characters which had concealed so much amusement from the world. The work, edited by Lord Braybrooke, was published in two volumes at six guineas, and though this and the two succeeding editions, at five guineas, were almost worthless from the editorial excisions they had undergone from the too-modest fingers of the noble editor, the issues went off very rapidly, and Colburn obtained a very handsome profit on the £2200 he had paid for the copyright. In the fourth edition of 1848 Lord Braybrooke was urged to restore those characteristic passages which he had before condemned, and the full value of the work, as a photographic picture of an amusing, though dissolute, time was firmly established. Evelyn had before given us the history of Charles the Second’s Court, with a gravity and openly-expressed reprobation which finely suited his character of a worthy and dignified old English country gentleman; but still it is now to the pages of Pepys that all the world turns for an account of the royal domestic life of certainly the most infamous period of our annals. He is so charmingly garrulous, jotting down each night such quaint thoughts on what he had seen during the day, writing them by his fireside, with the same nonchalance with which he put on his night-cap, and with as little suspicion of ever being surprised in the one act as the other, that his truthfulness, his openness, and his scarcely-concealed partiality for as much vagabonding and frolicsome society as Mrs. Pepys would permit, carry the reader irresistibly along with him.

It is, however, when we come to the novels that Colburn ushered into the world, that we strike upon the one vein of profitable ore that he made so peculiarly his own; and facile princeps of all his novelistic clients, stands Theodore Hook. To understand the genius of all Hook’s works, it is essential to take a short retrospective view of his life and character. Two things, above all else, strike us in regarding him—that he possessed the greatest love of joke and frolic, and the most marvellous memory with which ever man was gifted. As a boy of seventeen, he dashed off an amusing comedy; this, he tells us in the really autobiographical sketch of “Gilbert Gurney,” was the process. “To work I went, bought three or four French vaudevilles, and filching an incident from each, made up my very effective drama, the ‘Soldier’s Return.’” And for this bantling he received the handsome first-earnings of fifty pounds. Living, at a time when other boys were at school, in the gayest of all society in London, a welcome guest behind the curtain at every theatre, and hailed as a good fellow in every literary coterie, young Hook led a rollicking, devil-may-care life, giving the world back with interest the rich amusement he gathered from it. Now, making a random bet that a corner house in Berners Street should, within a week, be the most famous house in London; and within the time taking his opponent to a commanding window, that he might acknowledge that the wager had been fairly won; and the strange scene in the thoroughfare must have soon convinced him. The Duke of York, drawn by six grey horses, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor in formal state, every woman of notorious virtue, every man of any fame or notoriety, porters bustling up with wine-casks and beer-barrels, milliners with bonnet-boxes crushed and battered, pastry-cooks with dainty dishes that the street gamins soon picked out of the gutters, undertakers with rival coffins, variously made to exact measurement, hackney-coaches, and vans, and waggons by the hundred—in fact, half the world of London was there by invitations especially adapted to move each individual case, and the other half soon came as spectators. The impotent “Charleys” of the day found their efforts useless to dispel the block and crush, and long before the crowd was cleared away, the next day’s papers were ringing with the “Berners Street Hoax.” Again, we find him donning a scarlet coat, and, as the Prince Regent’s messenger, delivering a letter to an obnoxious actor, eagerly inviting him to dine with that august personage; and then joining in the crush outside Holland House, to see his enemy come away discomfited as an impostor. No occasion was sacred from his jests, and his exuberant spirits were scarcely in accordance with the tranquillity of academic life. At his very matriculation the Vice-chancellor, struck by his youthful appearance, asked him if he was fully prepared to sign the thirty-nine articles. “Oh, certainly, sir,” replied Hook with cool assiduity, “forty, if you please.” Indignantly he was told to withdraw, and it took weeks of friendly interposition to appease the outraged dignitary. At the age of twenty he wrote his first novel, but it was a failure, and he shortly afterwards received the appointment of accountant-general and treasurer at the Mauritius. Here he stayed for some years, leading a life of pleasure, and going to the office only five times in the whole period, when suddenly a commission was appointed to inquire into the accounts, and he was dragged off from a supper, given in his honour, to prison, charged with a theft of £20,000, and sent under arrest to England. This “complaint of the chest,” as he observed to a friend who was astonished to see him back so soon, was afterwards reduced to £12,000, and for this he was judged to be accountable, and put into the debtors’ prison. Here, from his diary, he seems to have enjoyed himself as much as ever, drinking as a loyal subject should, to the “health of my august detainer, the king.” However, political influence was brought to bear upon the Government, and he was set at liberty with the burden of the debt hanging very lightly round his neck.