Macmillan's First 100

"We have commenced quite in a small way," said Daniel Macmillan when he and his brother Alexander began to publish books in 1843. "If the business should prosper. . . ." It did. And having become one of the world's greatest, richest publishing houses, Macmillan & Co. commissioned Macmillan Author Charles Morgan (The Fountain) to write a history of its first 100 years. Recently published in England (U.S. publication this spring), The House of Macmillan is an entertaining story of the book world's liveliest centenarian.

Caution and Carroll. The founder brothers, Daniel and Alexander, were born of poor farmers from the Scottish island of Arran.* Devout Protestants, fervent educators, they were also canny as brook trout. Their first books, cautiously selected for their long-term moral, educational and financial value, included such titles as Elements of the Gospel Harmony, A Guide to the Unprotected in Matters of Property and Income ("by a Banker's Daughter"), Differential Calculus, History of the Book of Common Prayer (of which a revised edition is still on Macmillan's list today).

Early in the game, the brothers' religious interest paid off in a big way. A clergyman friend, the Rev. Charles Kingsley, brought them a novel he had written called Westward Ho! "The right article and no mistake!" cried Alexander. He was dead right. Two years later the brothers hit the jackpot again with Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays. Soon they added Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold to their list, gained wide prestige with Palgrave's Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics and The Cambridge Shakespeare.

Probably the most versatile, and certainly the most eccentric, of all Macmillan authors was mathematician, clergyman and humorist Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Lawn Tennis Tournaments: The True Method of Assigning Prizes, with a Proof of the Fallacy of the Present Method; An Elementary Treatise on Determinants and Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry, For the Use of Beginners).

Lewis Carroll drove Macmillan's crazy with suggestions. He urged them to use gold type. He sent them a huge diagram illustrating the "correct" way to wrap and tie parcels. He liked his books to appear in different formats--50 copies in a red binding, 20 in green, 20 in blue, two in vellum, one with primrose edges, one with a piece of mirror set in the cover. He also conducted some inside operations: "In thousands of copies of his books he had inserted . . . a 'Caution' in which he had disavowed authorship of a story . . . published in a magazine over his signature. He had not written it, the 'Caution' explained; he had done no more than forward it to the editor on behalf of a foreign lady, whose name he gave. Now, when it was too late, he found he had given the name of the wrong lady."

Tennyson and Nature. Daniel Macmillan died, and prospering Alexander moved to "The Elms" in London's Upper Tooting. Writers, clergymen and artists flocked to his house. One of these visitors was the great clerical dignitary, Master of the Temple Alfred Ainger. The Master's evening readings of Shakespeare were famously good and deservedly famous because he himself became so excited that he would suddenly break forth, "Pucklike, into a shadowy dance, swift, graceful, unreal." Another favorite of Alexander's, in fact his idol, was Alfred Lord Tennyson, who did nothing more spectacular than to walk and smoke with his publisher the meanwhile booming aloud his new poem.

It was not long before Alexander began to look afield. The Macmillans set up branch offices in Canada, Australia, India, New York (today the independently managed U.S. house alone has a yearly turnover of ten million dollars). Soon Macmillan's educational series served the world; its school "readers" appeared in Afrikaans, Swahili, Arabic, Anglo-Chinese and various Indian dialects. Massive works such as Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians appeared, as well as such famed series as the English Men of Letters and Great English Churchmen. Two magazines were founded, Macmillan's and Nature, and to this day Nature is Britain's most honored scientific periodical.

Hardy and Shaw. Like every publishing house, Macmillan made some crashing mistakes. Unlike most, it could afford them. One of its experts dismissed the writings of Henry James as "honest scribble work and no more." After characterizing the early works of William Butler Yeats as "sheer nonsense," Macmillan's really went overboard and insisted that his works had no more enduring value than "Maeterlinck's . . . Ibsen's . . . or Rossetti's."

When in 1868 an unknown writer named Thomas Hardy submitted his first novel (The Poor Man and the Lady), it drew one of the "gigantic, honest letters" for which Alexander was noted. "Is it conceivable," the publisher protested, "that any man, however base . . . would do as you make the Hon. Guy Allancourt do? Is it within the range of likelihood that any gentleman would pursue his wife at midnight and strike her?" But the publisher was not unaware of Hardy's possibilities: "You see," he concluded, "I am writing to you as to a writer who seems to me of, at least potentially, considerable mark. . . . If this is your first book I think you ought to go on. May I ask if it is, and--you are not a lady, so perhaps you will forgive the question--are you young?" Replied modest young Hardy faintly: "Would you mind suggesting the sort of story you think I could do best?"

In 1880 George Bernard Shaw sent Macmillan's his first novel (Immaturity). The firm's official reader was impressed but dumbfounded. "I ask myself what it is all about," he muttered. Shaw's second novel (The Irrational Knot) was rejected as a work "of the most disagreeable kind." No. 3 (Cashel Byron's Profession) filled the reader with "disgust." No. 4 (An Unsocial Socialist) led Macmillan's to beg for something "of a more substantial kind." Trumpeted Shaw: "Your demand . . . takes my breath away. Your reader, I fear, thought the book not serious--perhaps because it was not dull. If so, he was an Englishman. . . . You must admit that when one deals with two large questions in a novel, and throws in an epitome of modern German socialism as set forth by Marx as a makeweight, it is rather startling to be met with an implied accusation of triviality."*

Grandsons and Names. Today, as they have for 47 years, the directors of the House of Macmillan meet in the firm's St. Martin's Street offices. In the chairman's room stands the huge round table built for Alexander in 1860 and pitted with the graven initials of the literary great who attended his parties. Only one Macmillan male descendant remains as an active director--Daniel Macmillan, Founder Daniel's Eton-educated grandson. To the earlier directors' unrivaled string of 19th-Century names--including Pater, Tennyson, John Morley, Meredith, Kipling, Yeats, "A.E." (G. W. Russell), Gladstone, Rossetti, Henry James--the latter-day successors have added such authors as Wells, Chesterton, Edith Wharton, Rebecca West, John Masefield, Sean O'Casey, Edith & Osbert Sitwell, J. M. Keynes, G. D. H. Cole. Not to mention Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

*Scotsmen have founded an unusually high percentage of Britain's publishing houses, including A. & C. Black, Blackie, Blackwod, Chambers, Collins, Constable, Murray, Nelson.

*Last year Centenary-Historian Morgan showed Shaw these letters and reports. Cracked Shaw: "I really hated those. . .novels."

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