A History of Booksellers, the Old and the New

In treating of “technical literature,” we shall encounter many works which were rightly described by Charles Lamb as “books which are not books;” and the present chapter will be interesting rather as containing biographical notices of men who thoroughly deserved, and thoroughly achieved, success, than for any bibliographical anecdotes we can lay before the reader.

The value of technical literature, in a publishing point of view, had been correctly estimated in the very earliest times of bookselling annals, and Richard Tottell (or Tothill), an original member of the Stationers’ Company, and eventually their chairman, had in Edward the Sixth’s reign, and subsequently in Queen Elizabeth’s, succeeded in obtaining a patent for law-books; and when, through the petition of the Stationers’ Company, he was compelled to forego some of the works which he had thus monopolised, he warily “kept his law-books to himself, and yielded ‘Dr. Wilson upon Usurie,’ and ‘The Sonnets of th’ Earle of Surrey.’” Tothill, however, did still publish other books than those relating to the very remunerative branch of law; for, in 1562, he produced “Stow’s Abridgment of the Chronicles of England;” and, in 1590, “Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry.” His name would, probably, have been unknown, at all events forgotten, had he not occupied the Hands and Star in Temple Bar, the very same shop which, two-and-a-half centuries afterwards, Henry Butterworth again rendered famous as the great emporium of legal books.

Tothill was succeeded by John More (he had been previously represented, but only for awhile, by Barker and others), and we have already seen that Samuel Richardson, and Lintott’s granddaughter, had obtained the patent of King’s Printers for legal books; this brings us up in date to, at all events, the uncle of the subject of our present memoir.

Henry Butterworth, the most famous of all our law-publishers, was born on 28th February, 1786, in the city of Coventry. His father was a wealthy timber-merchant, and his ancestors fairly claimed alliance with the great county families, though Butterworth Hall, in the township of Butterworth, near Rochdale, in their possession since Stephen’s reign, had already fallen into alien hands. The Rev. John Butterworth, his grandfather, had removed from Rochdale to Coventry; he was well known as the author of a “Concordance to the Holy Scriptures,” which passed through several editions, and was the received work upon the subject until the appearance of Cruden’s more famous “Concordance.”

Young Henry Butterworth was educated at the Public Grammar School, in Coventry, and afterwards placed under the tutorial care of Dr. Johnson, of Bristol; but at the early age of fourteen, his education (inasmuch as book-learning was concerned) was considered at an end, and he entered the large sugar-refinery of Mr. Stock, of Bristol. But the hot atmosphere, and the incessant and laborious toil, proved too much for young Butterworth’s health, though the work had otherwise been rendered pleasant enough through his master’s kindness. As he had already shown much business talent and ability, Stock urged Mr. Joseph Butterworth, his own relation by marriage, and Henry Butterworth’s uncle, to do something for the lad. Joseph Butterworth accordingly made overtures to Henry’s family, and though they were loath to send their son to the distant trials and temptations of the metropolis, the offer was a tempting one, as it contained a tacit promise of admitting him, at some future time, to a partnership in the enormous business. Young Butterworth at once determined to accept the proposal; and on the 5th December, 1801, he arrived in London by the Bristol coach, having left Bristol straightway, without even having had an opportunity of bidding his relatives farewell.

The business carried on at No. 43, Fleet Street, was on a very extensive scale, and Joseph Butterworth was not only a well-known member of Parliament, but was an exceedingly wealthy and zealous philanthropist; and at his uncle’s dinner table young Henry Butterworth met many eminent and good men who were associated together to fight in a common cause—among others we may particularize Wilberforce, Teignmouth, Liverpool, Bexley, Zachary Macaulay, and Robert and Charles Grant—and from the time of his first introduction he enrolled his name among these ardent religious and social reformers.

Young Butterworth entered very heartily into the conduct of his uncle’s business, and, owing to his efforts, its relations were very vastly extended.

In 1813 he was in a position to marry a lady of birth and fortune, the daughter of Captain Whitehead, of the Fourth Irish Dragoon Guards, who not only afterwards entered fully into all his philanthropic projects, but possessed a refined and cultivated intellect, which found utterance in a volume of “Songs and Poems,” by E. H. B., published by Pickering in 1848, which are evidently, as the authoress says of another gift—

In 1818, Butterworth found that there was little likelihood of his admission, as had been previously agreed upon, to a satisfactory share of his uncle’s business; and having now to consider not only his own interests, but the welfare of a wife and family, he determined, with a sense of disappointment, to seek an independent roof, and there to carry out, on his own account, the art and mystery of law printing.

Before we follow him to his new abode, we will devote a few words to his uncle’s successful career. Joseph Butterworth, who had, in connection with Whieldon, founded a very large law-publishing business, realized, it is said, the largest fortune ever made by law publishing, and was one of the original founders of the British and Foreign Bible Society, its earliest meetings being held at his house in Fleet Street. His son died before him, and his business was sold to Messrs. Saunders and Benning; and after various fortunes, the shop became the Bible warehouse of Messrs. Spottiswoode.

Henry Butterworth, supported by his father’s capital, took a lease of No. 7, Fleet Street, a house which had been, as we have seen previously, occupied by Tothill and other ancient law publishers. And from this shop were issued the vellum-bound volumes whose contents are sacred to all but those assiduously apprenticed to the law. Butterworth’s position was still further improved by his appointment to the profitable post of Queen’s law publisher. To the general student the law-books of the period are as little known as they were to that worthy country justice who, wishing to learn something definite about the law he so zealously administered, told his bookseller to send him forthwith the “Mirror for Magistrates;” and the vastly popular law-books did not, of course, come within the province of the technical publisher. Butterworth, however, saw the decline of two works which had been regarded as time-honoured text-books on the subject—Burn’s “Justice” and Blackstone’s “Commentaries.” Many booksellers had made large fortunes out of Burn since the time when the author, wearied out with carrying his manuscript from shop to shop, had accepted a nominal fee to get it off his hands; and now Butterworth, by publishing Serjeant Stephen’s celebrated “Commentaries on the Laws of England”—the most successful law-work of modern times—erased Blackstone from the category of legal text-books.

Butterworth, however, though energetic as a publisher, found time to take part in the government of the city. In 1823 he was elected as representative of the ward of Farringdon Street Without, but he afterwards declined to be nominated to the office of sheriff. However, his connection with the city was still further strengthened by his appointment as Commissioner of Income and Property Tax, and Land and Assessed Taxes for London, and also as Commissioner of Roads. On his first arrival in town he had served in a light volunteer regiment, recruited to resist the aggression of the great Napoleon; and on his retirement from the corporation, about the year 1841, he received a captain’s commission in the Royal London Militia.

We gather something of Butterworth’s general kindness and consideration to those beneath him in station from the following anecdote:—Shortly after the passing of the new Poor Law Act in 1834, the guardians of the West Surrey Union ordered that the annual Christmas dinner for the workhouse inmates should consist, as wont, of roast beef and plum-pudding. The Poor Law Board—a new broom—was horrified at this munificence, and sent down their inspector, Dr. Kay, to inquire into the proposed extravagance. He offered a compromise by substituting boiled beef for roast, not that it would be in any degree cheaper, but that (a satisfactory object, we suppose, to the Board) it would not be quite so palatable. Butterworth, who was one of the guardians, was inflexible, and finally sent in his resignation; but as he was too useful a local authority to be spared, the Board sent back the resignation, and permitted the paupers to feast upon the disputed beef, roast.

In his later years Butterworth took much interest in church-building, and at Tooting, St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West, and his native city of Coventry, he subscribed large sums for that purpose.

After the death of his wife, which occurred in 1853, he gradually withdrew from general society, though he still attended the congenial meetings of the Stationers’ Company. The day of his death was, curiously enough, the most important day in the law publishing year—the first day of term—2nd November, 1860. On the previous evening he had given his annual admonition to those around him in business to awake up from the lethargy of the long vacation, and on the following morning it was found that he had passed away, as if in sleep.

For nearly sixty years Butterworth had occupied a leading position as a publisher and as a citizen, and during that period had won the friendship and respect of all who came in contact with him. The alms which his industry enabled him to make were conscientiously, quietly, and discriminatingly bestowed: and the painted glass memorial window erected to him in the choir of the Cathedral of St. Paul’s was a fitting tribute from a very large number of friends and admirers, many of whom had experienced the kindly assistance of his friendship and advice.

As we have previously seen, divinity and education were among the first subjects to attract a special attention, and works relating to them would otherwise have come within our category of technical books. No sooner, however, were the lawyers fairly supplied with special text-books than the doctors began to clamour for the like, and the publisher who has of all others most zealously administered to their wants is still happily amongst us.

John Churchill was born about the commencement of the century, and was apprenticed in the year 1816 to Messrs. Cox and Son, medical booksellers in Southwark. “The house of business was,” he says, “immediately adjoining Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals, and became the daily resort of the lecturers and numerous students of the schools; I thus early in life became known to the celebrated men of the day, little anticipating that eventually I should become the publisher of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital Reports, and of so large a proportion of the works that issued from the medical press.”

At the time when young Churchill entered the profession of medical publishing, the periodicals, and, of course, the standard technical works, presented a striking contrast to those at present in existence, for now the medical profession assert, with the greatest truth, that their special organs are of far higher intrinsic worth, and of far better “tone” of thought and expression, than those relating to any other purely technical subject. For years, however, after Churchill became a bookseller’s assistant the medical press was only on a par with the papers relating to the other professions, and was chiefly represented by the Medico-Chirurgical Review, founded by J. Johnson in 1820, and the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, a work we have already come across in our notice of Constable. These reviews contained no original reports, no strictures on the hospital appointments then jobbed, like everything else, to men of wealth, family, and interest. In fact, they consisted of little besides long and elaborate abstracts of new books.

On Sunday, 2nd October, 1823, the first number of a journal that was to cause a great revolution in medical literature, and to affect in no slight degree the whole medical profession, was issued from a small publishing shop in the Strand. The journal was, of course, the Lancet, and the publisher young Thomas Wakley. Wakley had walked the united hospitals of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s, and had taken his degree in 1817. He does not appear to have practised regularly till, about 1822, he took a small shop in the Strand, and with the assistance, in a pecuniary point of view, of Collard (now the senior partner of the famous piano factory) determined to start a thoroughly independent medical journal. The first number contained a report of a lecture by Sir A. Cooper, printed from memory. The professors and hospital officers fired up, and for long Wakley had to encounter the same difficulties and almost the same penalties which Cave had previously undergone in commencing his reports of Parliamentary proceedings. As a former student, Wakley attended the lectures, and, like other students, was seen to take occasional notes. Cooper could not, however, bring the charge home till he hit upon the device of calling at midnight at his lodgings, and asking to see the “doctor” upon urgent medical business, when he surprised him red-handed correcting a proof-sheet of a lecture. The discovery was so sudden and so undeniable that neither could refrain from laughter; and eventually Cooper, not ill-humouredly, offered to allow his lectures to appear if the proofs were first sent him for revision. Consequently, Cooper, though often criticised in the Lancet, never received a nickname, as did most of the other medical celebrities of the day. For instance, Brodie was known as the “little eminent;” Earle, the “cock sparrow;” Mayo, the “owl;” and Halford, the “eel-backed.”

The Lancet, for many years, was hated by that part of the profession interested in vested rights, and eagerly patronised by general surgeons and students. The language of the Lancet was as violent as the many abuses it attacked could justify; and Cobbett, who was a friend and adviser of Wakley’s, was adopted as a model, while a barrister, named Keen, used to join the party on printing nights to see that the free strictures were not legally liable as libels. An active, though unpaid, member of the staff, was Lawrence, who, however, forsook his reforming principles when once he became a placeman, and was succeeded by Wardrop, whose scurrility, wit, and venom did much in giving the Lancet a lasting reputation for raciness of style and satirical power. They were shortly afterwards joined by Mr. J. F. Clarke, who edited the periodical for upwards of forty years, and to whose amusing and graphic autobiography we are indebted for much of the preceding details. The success of the Lancet soon enabled Wakley to enter Parliament as a representative of Finsbury, and he actually combined together the work of the legislator, the coroner, and the editor, often toiling unremittingly for eighteen consecutive hours.

By the time the Lancet was thus firmly established, Churchill, long out of his apprenticeship, had commenced medical publishing on his own account; and from his famous shop, in New Burlington Street, issued most of the standard works upon the subject; and, encouraged by the success of the Lancet, he determined to make his establishment the centre of periodical, as well as more permanent, medical literature. In 1836, was started therefrom the British and Foreign Medical Review, conducted first by J. Forbes, and afterwards by J. C. Conolly. In 1848, it was merged into the Medico-Chirurgical Review, which, from 1824 to 1847, had been under the editorship of H. J. Johnson. These two were now amalgamated into the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, which, dating from Churchill’s establishment, has acquired a professional standing equal to that of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews in more general criticism. In 1839, appeared the first number of the Medical Times and Gazette, which, under the editorial care of T. P. Healey, and subsequently of J. L. Bushman, has found a very large and influential clientèle.

The medical writers have at present something in common with the early authors. Their works bring them in more remuneration through eventual patronage than from habitual sale, but their patronage is that of all the great public, who are waiting to have their ailments cured. As an instance of the way in which literature may improve the position of a medical man, it is stated by Mr. W. Clarke that, through Elliotson’s clinical reports in the Lancet, his income was raised, in one year, from £500 to £5000. And yet, on the other hand, when he openly gave in his adherence to the newly-imported doctrine of mesmerism, his large public and private practice almost entirely deserted him; and as the legitimate organs were closed to one so abandoned as even to experiment in “the unknown,” he started a medico-mesmeric journal of his own, the Zoist, which was, of course, not published by Mr. Churchill.

There is necessarily the same want of general interest in medical as in legal bibliography; and, as in the latter case, works more popularly known were almost invariably published by the usual popular publishers. For instance, Dr. Buchan’s “Domestic Medicine”—probably the most profitable medical book ever written (but not to the author, as he sold the copyright for five pounds), after being re-written by Smellie—was issued in 1770, by the ordinary booksellers. During the author’s lifetime, nineteen editions, each of five thousand, were published, and the volume was translated into all the modern languages.

If Mr. Churchill’s catalogue can show no book with a popularity like this, it displays many which, appealing only to a class audience, and necessarily obliged to keep pace with the discoveries of the day, have at once retained their high price and yet reached the honour of numerous editions.

It is probably owing chiefly to this fact of an incessant demand by a large section of, at all events, one branch of students, that technical publishing has proved so remunerative, and has escaped, in a great degree, the risk attached to other departments of the trade.

At the close of the year 1870, Mr. Churchill resolved to give up the active management of his large business, and issued a farewell circular to the trade: “After fifty-five years’ active and immediate association with your profession, I see it my duty to retire into private life. Be my future days few or many, I shall ever retain a lively sense of the many friendships I have formed, and of the unvarying proofs of confidence and regard shown to me through so long a series of years. My pathway of life has been a happy one, bringing me into daily correspondence with the élite of the profession, and united with them in promoting the interests of science and literature, while the success of my many publications has both gratified and amply rewarded my exertions. My sons, John and Augustus Churchill, have been eight years associated with me. I may be influenced by a father’s feelings, but I believe I can honestly state that, by education, earnest purpose in the fulfilment of duty, a high sense of integrity guiding and regulating their transactions, they will be found worthy of your confidence, and thus maintain the character of the house whose reputation and business transactions have extended to all parts of the world.” To this honest expression of well-earned business contentment, we can only add our wishes that Mr. Churchill’s years of retirement may be as happy as his years of toil have been useful and beneficial.

Among other technical publishers, Mr. Henry Laurie, whose house dates from the commencement of English hydrography, and whose numerous publications are known wherever English navigation has extended, requires at least a mention here. The oldest existing house of this nature, but one, in Europe (Gerard Hulst Van Keulen & Co., of Amsterdam, being the exception), it was founded by R. Sayer, at the “Golden Busk” (53, Fleet Street), in conjunction with John Senex, the well-known cosmographer. Here Cook’s original charts were issued; and it says something for his accuracy that his “Survey of the South Coast of Newfoundland” has not yet been superseded. On Sayer’s death, the business was relinquished to Robert Laurie and James Whittle, and, in 1812, the former was succeeded by his son, R. H. Laurie, who, on the death of Whittle, became sole proprietor. In a short time, the business extended to the production of illustrations of all descriptions, whilst the maps produced, under the care of De la Rochette, John Purdy, and Mr. Findlay, still retained their pre-eminence; the business was, however, again restricted to hydrography. R. H. Laurie died as recently as January 19, 1858, leaving two daughters, and the establishment was continued under the direction of his sole executor, Mr. Findlay.