A History of Booksellers, the Old and the New

by Henry Curwen

The printing expenses of his enormous business had been very considerable, and in 1830 he resolved to take his principal printer, Mr. Richard Bentley, into partnership; but the alliance did not last long, and in August, 1832, the connection was dissolved, and Colburn relinquished the business in New Burlington Street to Mr. Bentley, giving him a guarantee in bond that he would not recommence publishing again within twenty miles of London.

However, his heart was so intuitively set upon the profitable risks of a publisher’s career, that he could not quietly retire in the prime of life, and, accordingly, he started a house at Windsor, so as to be within the letter of the law, but the garrison town was sadly quiet after the literary circles of London, and to London he again returned, paying the forfeiture in full. This time he opened a house in Great Marlborough Street, as his old establishment in New Burlington Street was, of course, in possession of Mr. Bentley, whose business had already assumed formidable proportions. At Great Marlborough Street, Colburn succeeded in rallying round him all his old authors, and, perhaps, the greatest triumphs that date from thence, are Miss Strickland’s “Lives of the Kings and Queens of England and Scotland,” for the copyright of the first of which he paid £2000. Burke’s “Peerage,” “Baronetage,” and “Landed Gentry” were also among his most profitable possessions.

Throughout the whole of his business life, Colburn had a very keen perception as to what the public required, and of the market value of the productions offered him; and yet he was almost uniformly liberal in his dealings. His judgment of copyrights was occasionally assisted by Mr. Forbes and Mr. Charles Ollier.

Of course, among the multitude of books he produced, many were utterly worthless, beyond affording a passing recreation to the library subscribers, and many even were pecuniary failures. The most ludicrous of these failures was a scheme originated by John Galt, a constant contributor to the New Monthly. This was a periodical, which, under the title of the New British Theatre, published the best of those dramatic productions, which the managers of the great playhouses had previously rejected. The audacity of the scheme carried it through for a short time, but soon the unfortunate editor was smothered amid such a heap of dramatic rubbish, coming at every fresh post, to the table of the benevolent encourager of youthful aspirations, that he was fain to acknowledge the justice of the managers’ previous decisions.

Although Colburn was throughout his career chiefly successful as a caterer for the libraries, supplying them with novels, which, by some mysterious law, were required to consist of three volumes of about three hundred pages each, the cost of the whole fixed immutably at one guinea and a half, his “Modern Novelists,” containing his best copyright works, in a cheap octavo form, attained the number of nineteen, being published at intervals between 1835 and 1841, and formed a valuable addition to the popular literature of the time.

Finally, Colburn, having acquired an ample competence, retired from business, in favour of Messrs. Hurst and Blackett, still, however, retaining his name to some favourite copyrights. He had been twice married, the second time, in 1841, to the daughter of Captain Crosbie, R.N.

After a period of well-earned leisure, rendered pleasingly genial by the constant society of his literary friends, Henry Colburn died, on the 16th of August, 1855, at his house in Bryanston Square.

The whole of his property was sworn to be under £35,000, and went to his wife and her family. Two years later, the seven copyrights he had reserved were sold by auction, and realised the large sum of £14,000, to which Miss Strickland’s “Lives of the Queens of England” alone contributed £6900.

As publisher of three volume novels, Colburn was succeeded by two principal rival houses, with the foundation of each of which he was in some way concerned. As Mr. Bentley’s establishment in New Burlington Street was only a further development of Colburn’s old house, a few words may not be out of place concerning it. In 1837, Mr. Bentley proposed to start a periodical to rival the New Monthly, and at the preliminary meeting it was proposed to call it the Wit’s Miscellany, but James Smith objected to this as being too pretentious, upon which Mr. Bentley proposed the title of Bentley’s Miscellany. “Don’t you think,” interposed Smith, “that that would be going too far the other way?” However, the name was adopted (Mr. Bentley denies the accuracy of this anecdote—but se non è vero, è ben trovato). One of the chief contributors to the new Miscellany was Barham, who had been a school chum of Mr. Bentley’s at St. Paul’s, and, until 1843, the “Ingoldsby Legends” delighted the public in the pages of the Miscellany. The last poem of the “Legends” was published in Colburn’s New Monthly, but by Barham’s express wish, the song he wrote on his death-bed, “As I Lay Athynkynge,” appeared, as fitly closing his career, in Bentley. The first editor of Bentley’s Miscellany, was no less a man than Charles Dickens, who had previously contributed the “Sketches by Boz” to the Morning Chronicle, and who soon, as the author of Pickwick, became the most popular writer of the day. Mr. Bentley was one of the first publishers to secure Dickens’s services, and in his magazine “Oliver Twist” appeared. The editorship afterwards passed into the hands of Mr. Harrison Ainsworth and Mr. A. Smith. For the magazine, as for his ordinary business, Mr. Bentley secured the aid of most of the writers who had graduated first under Colburn; and to enumerate them would, with the exception of “Father Prout,” be merely a repetition of names already mentioned, and those who have won popularity since then have scarcely yet had time to lose it. An amusing story, however, worth repeating, has been recently told by the Athenæum, anent “Eustace Conway,” a novel by the late Mr. Maurice. “We believe,” says that journal, “we are not going too far in telling the following story about it. Mr. Maurice sold the novel to the late Mr. Bentley somewhere about the year 1830; but the excitement caused by the Reform Bill being unfavourable to light literature, Mr. Bentley did not issue it till 1834, when he had quite lost sight of its author, then a curate in Warwickshire. The villain of the novel was called Captain Marryat; and Mr. Maurice, who first learned of the publication of his book from a review in our columns, had soon the pleasure of receiving a challenge from the celebrated Captain Marryat. Great was the latter’s astonishment on learning that the anonymous author of ‘Eustace Conway’ had never heard of the biographer of ‘Peter Simple,’ and, being in Holy Orders, was obliged to decline to indulge in a duel.” Mr. Bentley died in September, 1871, and was succeeded in the business by his son, who for many years had been associated with him.