Note 20 to Chapter 3 of the author's Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray, which University Press of Virginia published in 1992. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Among the Smith, Elder titles of the early 1840s were Ruskin's Modern Painters (1843), Darwin's Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842), the five-volume account Zoology of the Beagle Expedition, and an illustrated selection of Byron's poems called The Byron Gallery. It is true that the firm, underthe direction of Alexander Elder, had tried to establish a series of cheap fiction reprints called The Library of Romance, which was discontinued after fifteen titles, and the firm was committed to publish G. P. R. James's novels as he wrote them according to an open-ended contract from which Smith extricated the firm only after nine titles. (Sutherland has claimed James had wrangled the contract "with the twenty year old George Smith, just after he had taken over the family firm" [Sutherland, Novelists, p. 88], but Smith was twenty-two when he took over the firm and terminated James's contract the next year.) Among George Smith's own early acquisitions were R. H. Horne's New Spirit of the Age and Leigh Hunt's Imagination and Fancy. See Glynn, pp. 27-30, 35-36.
Last modified: 4 April 2001