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Friday 5 December 2008

The Seven Lives of John Murray

The house that Jock built

James Fergusson reviews a history of the publishers John Murray

When John Murray was sold in 2002 it was billed by the Daily Telegraph as ‘the oldest independent book publisher in the world’. The firm had been in the same family since the first John Murray began selling books in Fleet Street in 1768. It was also, reported the Telegraph, ‘the last of London’s “gentlemen publishing houses” ’. But when were publishers ever gentlemen? The poet Byron wrote of his publisher in 1816, ‘I believe Murray to be a good man with a personal regard for me. But a bargain is in its very essence a hostile transaction . . . Do not all men try to abate the price of all they buy? — I contend that a bargain even between brethren — is a declaration of war.’

Declarations of war, then uneasy truces, feature as often as London gossip and unctuous flattery in the extraordinary correspondence between the sixth Lord Byron and the second John Murray, whose fortunes had been built on the success of his most famous author. Byron is often imperious, Murray servile; but sometimes Byron is pacific, man-to-man, and Murray is emboldened to think himself his social equal. In the most notorious incident in the firm’s history, on 17 May 1824, Murray was a party to burning, in his own drawing-room grate, the only copy of the dead poet’s memoirs. Why did he do it? Humphrey Carpenter, in this jolly romp of a publishing history, the first book to cover all seven John Murrays (completed after Carpenter’s death by a discreet James Hamilton), felinely suggests that Murray wanted to prove that he was not just a tradesman but, as one contemporary newspaper put it, ‘a gentleman and a man of honour’.

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