Andrew Nicholson, editor
THE LETTERS OF JOHN MURRAY TO LORD BYRON
608pp. Liverpool University Press. £25 (US $50).
978 1 84631 069 0

Byron’s extraordinary popularity was attributed by disaffected Victorians to the meeting of his overweening narcissism with his public’s love of a lord: Hazlitt’s “spoiled child of fame as well as fortune”. Modernism’s rejection of the Romantic cult of the author ensured that this highbrow sense of distaste persisted well into the twentieth century; this was expressed in patronizing dismissals of swashbuckling tales such as The Corsair, which had sold 10,000 copies on the first day of publication (“a thing perfectly unprecedented”, as his excited publisher explained to Byron). On the other hand, the tail end of the celebrity cult still grinds out dismal biographies combining prurience and psychobabble in equal measure. There have been scholarly attempts to understand Byronism, of course: Samuel C. Chew’s 1924 descriptive account; William St Clair’s empirical approach in his 2004 study, The Reading Nation; and Tom Mole’s recent monograph on authorial celebrity.

However, the superbly edited and extraordinarily modestly priced Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron is an invaluable resource with which to find out exactly how a promising early nineteenth-century author was marketed and promoted by his entrepreneurial young publisher, and how this most competitive of writers, in turn, kept his finger on the literary pulse. These documents, painstakingly transcribed from the Murray Archive, which was only recently transferred to the National Library of Scotland, have hitherto been largely inaccessible, whether to Byron scholars or to historians of print culture. Andrew Nicholson, the scrupulous editor of Byron’s miscellaneous prose, has a wealth of experience enabling him to contextualize 171 of John Murray’s often hurriedly written missives by generous reference to Byron’s side of the correspondence. He also brings to bear his expert knowledge of the Regency writers who passed through the publisher’s doors in Albemarle Street and “Murray’s parlour boarders”, as Byron termed the éminences grises of the inner sanctum who advised Murray on his list. Nicholson is able to correct and supplement Samuel Smiles’s Victorian memoirs of the publisher, and point out the liberties taken by R. C. Dallas in his recollections of the poet’s debut. The scholarly apparatus is generous and accessible: with summaries of the contents of the letters year by year, a chronology, two indexes, a full bibliography, appendices on how Murray became Byron’s publisher, the newspaper attacks on Byron in 1814, and a sale catalogue printed in 1813 when he was planning to go abroad, as well as an informative preface introducing the volume, which is neatly divided into the letters sent to Byron before and after he left England in 1816.

This correspondence makes us privy to the peculiarities of a partnership which survived ten years against all the odds: for the two men were divided by differences in age, class, politics and, eventually, geographical location. Byron is, of course, one of the wittiest letter-writers in English, and this volume would be worth reading if for no other reason than to trace in full a relationship which evoked what Nicholson rightly describes as “unquestionably the best he ever wrote”. But one might go further. Murray’s importance has perhaps been underestimated, for it was often he who suggested new projects to the poet: “Does your Lordship never think of prose?”, “all the adventures that you have undergone, seen, heard of or imagined with your reflections on life & Manners”. (This would produce the Memoirs.) “Have you not another lively Tale like Beppo?” was the stimulus for Don Juan.

The London Scotsman John Murray II modelled himself on the Edinburgh publisher Archibald Constable, who had achieved the domination of British publishing through daring entrepreneurship: in offering terms so startlingly generous as to overrule any genteel qualms about “the trade” troubling the brilliant lawyers editing his Edinburgh Review, or inventing magical verse romances (Walter Scott). Murray therefore seized the opportunity in 1809, when Scott was disaffected with Constable and the Edinburgh Review, to obtain Scott’s help in setting up its Tory rival, the Quarterly Review. In 1811, Murray also obtained for his stable the aristocratic poet who had made his name with a cheeky satire targeting both Scott and the Edinburgh Review. Murray seems at first overwhelmed with Byron’s rank, referring to “lord” or “lordship” eleven times in the first letter, and even “My Dear Lord and Master” in another self-conscious missive. Doubtless Murray planned to market the Orientalism of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by selling lavish quartos to the wealthy, as Constable had sold them Walter Scott’s cod medievalism.

He deliberately fostered the poets’ rivalry. For example, on November 4, 1812, he wrote “I would be delighted, if your Lordship had had a new Poem ready for publication – about the same time (this month I believe) that Walter Scotts is expected”. Like Constable, he offered huge sums for the copyrights of his literary lion, for example a thousand guineas for two of Byron’s Oriental tales (“I won’t – it is too much, though I am strongly tempted, merely for the say of it”, Byron agonized in his diary). The policy backfired, for though the raffish lord decided not to lower himself by accepting remuneration, he wanted the glory, and would accept the money so that he could act the patron by disbursing it to needier writers such as William Godwin. The “Emperor of the West”, as Scott nicknamed the Piccadilly publisher, would be in agonies at this unbusinesslike procedure and the demeaning of what he regarded as a gentleman’s agreement, for he aspired to gentility as much as the peer enjoyed the cut and thrust of the marketplace. But Byron never forgot Murray’s generosity when he had the bailiffs in his house, and the publisher sent him a draft for £1,050 for The Siege of Corinth and Parisina. Though he refused this, before Byron went abroad he formally assigned Murray the copyrights of all the works published with him in consideration of £3,925. Thereafter he accepted payment and even drove a hard bargain.

The Murray–Byron relationship was fuelled by their joint relish for the hotly competitive nature of the literary market, and expressed in witty banter. But Murray sometimes took advantage of Byron’s good nature in pressing him to write to order in some way, and then the poet would explode in wrath and threaten to go elsewhere. Friction was exacerbated by Byron’s use of go-betweens such as the sponger Dallas, to whom copyrights were given as charity, and who seems to have attempted to play one publisher off against another. Murray felt utterly humiliated when Byron occasionally treated him like a tradesman, writing: “Indeed my Lord this is not worthy treatment of one whom you have suffered to absorb – the humble servant in the faithful friend”. Yet we also see him jealously attempting to cash in on Byron’s collaboration with the Jewish composer Isaac Nathan in writing Hebrew Melodies, instead of allowing the musician to reap all the benefit as the poet had intended. Byron’s friends Douglas Kinnaird and J. C. Hobhouse both warned Byron that Murray treated him as his own property, but arguably so did Hobhouse himself. Everyone wanted to own Byron.

Byron might never have been able to attain such a wide range of readers in the “years of fame” 1812–16, if it were not for Murray being publisher of the high Tory periodical which was the scourge of most other liberal writers. Moore, Owenson, Shelley, Keats, Barbauld and others found themselves at the mercy of the hatchet-man reviewer John Wilson Croker or the acerbic editor William Gifford, yet Byron admitted to Thomas Medwin that “Murray has long prevented ‘The Quarterly’ from abusing me”. We see from the Murray correspondence that there had been a protracted effort to procure a favourable Quarterly reviewer for the Oriental tales (George Ellis). Murray’s “synod” disapproved of some of Byron’s friends, noting “he is in bad hands”: Shelley and the Hunts would be anathema to them.

Murray carefully preserved all Byron’s manuscripts and papers, for which foresight scholars must be grateful to him today. He was also quick to procure a portrait of his most saleable poet to place over his mantelpiece – it would oversee the memoirs consigned to the flames after Byron’s death. Murray commissioned another painting to commemorate the reconciliation of Scott and Byron in his drawing room, which the letters show he had stage-managed, taking a detailed interest in the engraving of a silver sepulchral urn from Athens which Byron presented to Scott as a pledge of their friendship. But Byron would never rest peaceably within the Murray stable and, especially after he left England, this radical writer had to make compromises with the publisher and his advisers if his work was to see the light of day. Though Byron resisted Murray’s prurient attempts to tone down Don Juan, he allowed Gifford great latitude to decide on revisions of first drafts of the tales and dramas, respecting him as an upholder of Augustan literary standards. Murray fed him titbits of Gifford’s praise, while Gifford warned Murray not to overexpose him: “After all he is a wonderful creature – if I had him, I would keep him up carefully, & shew him only on high days and holydays”.

Murray habitually used Byron as an anonymous reader, for example sending him novels of Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney, and various poetry manuscripts. He also requested his opinion on the literary quality of all the latest publications: “Is there any thing but tinsel in Keates – Cornwall & Croly pray tell me”. Byron was sent parcels of books with tooth powder and corn plasters which he couldn’t obtain in Italy, and he forwarded relics from Waterloo, presents and poetry in return. Byron often recommended writers to the publisher, for example, James Hogg, when he had withdrawn The Queen’s Wake from Constable and Miller in 1814, and Coleridge’s “Christabel”, “Kubla Khan” and “The Pains of Sleep” in 1816. When Byron was a member of the Drury Lane subcommittee, he had recommended their melodrama The Magpie, which Murray published using a printer named Mr Dove.

When Byron had been a neighbour of Murray’s in the West End, they had communicated several times a day, enabling Byron to make last-minute alterations according to the advice of “the synod” and thus to maintain intimate interaction with the response of readers. The mercurial poet found it difficult to acclimatize to a month’s wait for an answer to his letter when he lived abroad and Murray was so busy he sometimes failed to reply promptly. Yet, because he was his literary lifeline, Byron used Murray like a sounding board for many of his most intimate reflections. As Nicholson points out, Byron virtually acted as Murray’s agent abroad, putting him in touch with Continental publishers and dealers.

The surprise about the break-up of the partnership, however, is that it did not come sooner than 1822, for, though Murray was not shocked by Don Juan, his decision to publish it anonymously and without the name of the publisher was misjudged, as Croker realized, and had subjected him to public derision when his links with the government protected the satire from prosecution. Cain, Heaven and Earth and The Vision of Judgment must each have made Murray’s heart sink, for, cut loose from Albemarle Street respectability, a more radical Byron took flight. His popularity in Europe and America, and with the British lower classes, outweighed the disapproval of literary critics in London. Unwilling to face up to the inevitable break, refusing to deal personally with the ungentlemanly John Hunt in handing over Byron’s manuscripts for the new journal, The Liberal, Murray was blamed for spitefully withholding the preface which might have prevented prosecution of the Vision. Nicholson argues that this is unfair, that Byron’s use of the abrasive Douglas Kinnaird as his agent had exacerbated the tensions, and the correspondence shows that the latter did sanction the publication of Werner by Murray. However, so cut-throat and ideological was Regency literary life that Byron’s association with even the most respectable of radical publishers was bound to cut him adrift from the British Empire’s “bookseller to the Admiralty and to the Board of Longitude”, John Murray. Andrew Nicholson’s delightful presentation of their unlikely friendship will be warmly welcomed by Byronists and cultural historians alike.

Caroline Franklin is Professor of English at Swansea University. Her books include Byron’s Heroines, 1992, Byron: A literary Life, 2000, and Byron, 2006.

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