[202] Messrs. Crosby & Co. of Stationers' Hall Court, London.
[203] Mr. Austin Dobson, in his introduction to Northanger Abbey (Macmillan, 1897), makes the mistake of saying that the 'advertisement' of the first edition of 1818 tells us that the MS. was disposed of to 'a Bath bookseller.'
[204] Memoir, p. 129.
[205] This implies that (if Susan and Northanger Abbey were the same) no arrangement was concluded in 1809. Indeed, it does not appear that the author contemplated a re-purchase at that time; and the publisher was unwilling to relinquish his rights on any other terms.
[206] Later writers have not even been content to accept the 'publisher in Bath,' but have found a name and habitation for him. Mr. Peach, in his Historic Houses in Bath, published in 1883 (p. 150 note), says: 'The publisher (who purchased Northanger Abbey), we believe, was Bull.' Mr. Oscar Fay Adams, writing in 1891 (Story of Jane Austen's Life, p. 93), becomes more definite in his statement that 'nothing of hers (Jane Austen's) had yet been published; for although Bull, a publisher in Old Bond Street [sc. in Bath], had purchased in 1802 [sic] the manuscript of Northanger Abbey for the sum of ten pounds, it was lying untouched—and possibly unread—among his papers, at the epoch of her leaving Bath.'
It is true that Mr. Dobson, unable to find the authority for Bull's name, is a little more guarded, when he amusingly writes, in 1897:—
'Even at this distance of time, the genuine devotee of Jane Austen must be conscious of a futile but irresistible desire to "feel the bumps" of that Bœotian bookseller of Bath, who, having bought the manuscript of Northanger Abbey for the base price of ten pounds, refrained from putting it before the world. . . . Only two suppositions are possible: one, that Mr. Bull of the Circulating Library at Bath (if Mr. Bull it were) was constitutionally insensible to the charms of that master-spell which Mrs. Slipslop calls "ironing"; the other, that he was an impenitent and irreclaimable adherent of the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho.'
Mr. Meehan, in his Famous Houses of Bath and District (1901), is the most circumstantial of all, writing on p. 197:—
'Her novel Northanger Abbey, which is full of Bath, was finished in 1798, and in 1803 she sold the manuscript for ten pounds to Lewis Bull, a bookseller in the "Lower Walks" (now "Terrace Walk"). Bull had in 1785 succeeded James Leake, and he in turn was succeeded by John Upham. Bull was the founder of the well-known library in Bond Street, London—for many years known as Bull's Library.
[207] Memoir, p. 80.