94. The Rise | Of The | Dutch Republic. | A History. | By John Lothrop Motley. | In Three Volumes. | Vol. I. | New York: | Harper & Brothers, | 329 & 331 Pearl Street. | 1856.
Motley wrote a letter to his wife, dated at London, May 10, 1854, in which he says that he has had the matter of copyright looked up, and finds that the English law will protect him if he publish his book recently completed, first, by however small an interval, in England. He then carried the manuscript to Murray, who received him civilly, and professed interest in his subject, promising an answer in a fortnight. But the answer, when it came, was unfavorable, and, being of the mind that "if Murray declines ... I shall doubt very much whether anybody will accept, because history is very much in his line," he seems to have tried no farther, but to have arranged with Mr. John Chapman to publish the Dutch Republic himself.
Throughout the transaction Motley was very modest and not at all sanguine for the success of his venture.
"It cannot take in England," he says to his mother in 1855, "and moreover the war, Macaulay's new volumes, and Prescott's, will entirely absorb the public attention." And again to his father, May 13, 1856, he says:
"I have heard nothing from Chapman since the book was published, but I feel sure from the silence that very few copies have been sold. I shall be surprised if a hundred copies are sold at the end of a year."
In reality, the book, as Dr. Holmes said, was "a triumph." Seventeen thousand copies were sold in England alone during the first year, and in America, where it was issued by the Harpers, just long enough after the English edition to fulfill all the demands of the copyright law, it was equally popular. Mr. Murray afterward asked to be allowed to publish The History of the United Netherlands, and expressed his regret "at what he candidly called his mistake in the first instance." Prescott, Motley's friend and generous rival, wrote from Boston, April 18, 1856:
"You have good reason to be pleased with the reception the book has had from the English press, considering that you had no one particularly to stand godfather to your bantling, but that it tumbled into the world almost without the aid of a midwife. Under these circumstances success is a great triumph...."
Octavo.
Collation: Three volumes.