"Trials of a Publisher" by Agnes Repplier examines the professional hardships endured by John Murray, the celebrated London publisher, drawing on the recently published volumes of his memoirs and correspondence to overturn the popular assumption that publishers prosper at the expense of suffering authors. Repplier opens by challenging the conventional wisdom of Murray's era, which held that publishers were autocrats who grew wealthy by exploiting writers. The familiar quip that "Now Barabbas was a publisher" reflected widespread sympathy for authors and suspicion of those who profited from their work. Murray, however, emerges from his own correspondence not as a tyrant but as a man of extraordinary patience, generosity, and forbearance who was subjected to relentless demands, impertinence, and ingratitude from nearly every quarter. His Scottish business partners, Constable and James Ballantyne, treated the London firm as a convenient source of funds, with Ballantyne borrowing so frequently and so heavily that Murray was eventually forced to sever the connection. His partial ownership of Blackwood's Magazine caused him continuous distress, as the journal's habit of delivering pointed personal attacks on public figures generated a steady stream of angry letters directed at Murray himself, since editor Gifford scrupulously protected the anonymity of contributors. Even the Quarterly Review, Murray's own proudest creation, was a source of sleepless nights, its editor being constitutionally indifferent to publication deadlines and its contents reliably offending someone with each new issue. The essay then surveys the parade of impecunious writers whose dealings with Murray ranged from the merely presumptuous to the genuinely extraordinary. James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, borrowed money with the serene confidence of royalty, condescended to Murray with magnificent self-importance, and when loans were delayed, complained bitterly about being unable to afford a Christmas goose. Leigh Hunt offered his unfinished poem "The Story of Rimini" at a price his friends assured him was too low, accepted Murray's far more modest counter-proposal, received payment in advance of what was owed, and then immediately proposed that Murray purchase the copyright outright for the full four hundred and fifty pounds he had originally demanded. The subsequent negotiations were so exhausting that a letter from Blackwood congratulating Murray on finally escaping Hunt's correspondence reads as entirely sincere. Madame de Staël presented difficulties of a different kind. Murray paid fifteen hundred pounds for the English and French editions of her work on Germany and lost money on the transaction. Her son subsequently wrote demanding four thousand pounds for a later work, with a tone Repplier compares to that of a footpad. Murray declined, and the book, when eventually published after de Staël's death by another firm, proved a failure. The most elaborate episode involves Coleridge, who proposed to translate Faust and opened negotiations with a letter of stupendous length expressing superb contempt for the reading public, philosophical reluctance to work for money, and extended meditations on language as sacred fire and the Muses as vestal priestesses. When Murray responded with a businesslike offer of one hundred pounds, Coleridge replied with a second letter even longer than the first, declaring the sum inadequate for work executed to the utmost of his powers. The translation was never made, and Repplier suggests that even Murray's patience had reached its limit under the weight of the correspondence itself. Byron, though sometimes petulant and demanding, at least received from Murray a dignified and moving letter asserting that a man in the publisher's position could possess the feelings and principles of a gentleman, a quiet remonstrance that speaks to the indignities Murray endured from those whose work he championed. The essay closes by noting that the friends of authors were often as trying as the authors themselves, offering inflated valuations of manuscripts and expecting Murray to accept their assessments as binding. The Reverend Milman forewarned Murray that his friends considered his poem worth a very high price, and Murray was obliged to explain, as politely as possible, that since he was the one paying, his own judgment of the commercial prospects was more relevant than theirs. The most stinging example of ingratitude comes from Southey, who, having received generous payment from the Quarterly for many years, wrote to inform Murray with characteristic frankness that he suspected his time could be more profitably and more worthily employed than in writing for his journal, even at the price offered. Throughout, Repplier's tone is one of affectionate irony. She presents Murray as a figure whose dignity, patience, and genuine love of literature made him uniquely vulnerable to exploitation, and her essay serves as a witty corrective to the enduring mythology of the suffering author and the tyrannical publisher.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1922 · Genre: Essay, Literary Criticism, Non-Fiction