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Chapter 3 ("The Writer as a Literary Property"), part 1, 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.
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[Decorated initial based upon "Major Sugarplums [Dobbins]" --one of W. M. Thackeray's illustrations for Vanity Fair]
uring the years of struggle to establish himself as a writer, Thackeray can hardly be said to have "had a publisher." Each new book had to find a home, often with a new publisher because his last book had failed to make money. By 1847 Thackeray's works had been published in book form by ten different publishers, of which four (Chapman and Hall, Macrone, Cunningham, and Hooper) are known to have paid him money. Another (Mitchell) published by agreement with him but claimed that returns did not even cover production costs, so there was no payment to the author. The other five (Taylor, Baudry, Berford, Cary and Hart, and Winchester), publishing unauthorized reprints, definitely did not pay. (Baudry is a possible exception, but there is no evidence one way or the other.)
Of the four who did pay, Chapman and Hall alone stuck with the author over a significant period of time. Indeed, the firm acted as Thackeray's bankers as well as publishers in the early 1840s. Then, for four years running (1846-49), Thackeray was able to count on them to publish his Christmas books.
Thackeray's relations with the Chapman firm in the second half of the 1840s was carried on as between equals in a business venture. In the turbulent revolutionary year 1848, Thackeray wrote Chapman suggesting the projected Christmas book, Kickleburys on the Rhine, be dropped in favor of a purely domestic and politically safe story [Letters 2: 444-45). Dr. Birch and His Young Friends became the season's offering that year. On the other hand, when Charles Lever parodied Thackeray as Elias Howle in the next month's installment of Roland Cashel, Thackeray's protest to Chapman that his publisher should not be "the office for this dreary personality" apparently made no difference. Yet Thackeray's business relations with Chapman and Hall proceeded on a professional level; subsequent letters deal with the production problems and illustrations for Dr. Birch [Letters 2: 466).
Rebecca and Rowena was Thackeray's last book published by Chapman [69/70] and Hall. On 17 September 1849, while he concerned himself primarily with producing Pendennis, Thackeray twisted his ankle badly enough to put him in bed for a few days. As luck would have it, he came down at the same time with a case of what may have been cholera, the worst of the illness coming on the night of 3 October. Obviously, he failed to prepare the next number of Pendennis for October; and though he pulled through and was declared out of danger by 15 October, he did not resume publication of Pendennis until 1 January 1850. He spent the end of October in Brighton to convalesce with "Dr. Sea Breeze," and on 7 November he began work, with Eyre Crowe's help, on the texts for Louis Marvy's Sketches after English Landscape Painters to be published by David Bogue in 1850. Bogue had very recently taken over the business of Charles Tilt, who had published Thackeray's Stubbs's Calendar in The Comic Almanac for 1839. Bogue wished both to build on Tilt's past interest and to take advantage of Thackeray's new popularity, so he wrote to Thackeray proposing republication of Stubbs's. On 21 November Thackeray replied:
The story of Stubb's Calendar has been already reprinted by me, in the "Comic Tales & Sketches" published by Cunningham in 1840 - It is my copyright, as all my works have been by verbal agreements with the publishers for whom I wrote, with the exception of certain contributions to the "Heads of the People" about wh. I forgot to make a stipulation: though I am advised that I can with perfect safety republish these latter in case I shd. think fit so to do.
I regret that I cannot consent to the republication of the Stubbs story, under the present circumstances.
I am working at the text for M. Marvy's engravings, & hope very shortly to deliver it to you. Nothing but illness wd. have prevented me from executing this task before now.
[Letters 2: 610-11
By 3 December Thackeray was well enough to accept a dinner invitation from George Smith, publisher of Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre. The two men had not met, but Brontë had asked Smith for a meeting with Thackeray. There is nothing in George Smith's recollections [quoted from Huxley in Letters 2: 611n] or Thackeray's own to suggest any lingering effects of his illness. Yet in December, Thackeray had to write Joseph Cundall to explain the delay in completing
the text for Marvy's book. Cundall, remembered primarily as a writer and publisher of children's books in the 1840s and 1850s, had previously been employed by Charles Tilt and had copublished several books with David [70/71] Bogue. He had just suffered bankruptcy and was continuing his publishing activities only in conjunction with other publishers when he apparently inquired on Bogue's behalf concerning the text Thackeray was preparing [McLean, pp. 1, 18, 22]. Thackeray wrote:
The gentleman whom I had engaged to get some biographical notices for Mr. Marvy's sketches is gone to France, hence my delay during the last month - but this month at any rate I promise you that the work shall be done, and always keep my promises.
I hope Mr. Bogue will settle with Mr. Marvy - what is it that I our to be paid for my contributions? It is a very difficult task to perform.
[Letters 2: 612-13]
It may be that in November, while Eyre Crowe was in France, Thackeray worked on Rebecca and Rowena, the 102-page continuation of the romance of Ivanhoe. Whatever the case, it was already December when he sent the manuscript to Chapman, at the same time asking to be paid £50 and saying, "The book has cost me more time than all the rest" [Letters 2: 613]. That left little time for publication, and it is perhaps understandable that mistakes should have been made, particularly with the title and preface, which are always the last to be prepared. Thackeray sent the preface together with copy for an advertisement to the publisher, who mistakenly assumed the preface was part of the ad. The whole apparently appeared together, for Thackeray wrote the publisher correcting the subtitle from "A Romance on Romance" to "or Romance on Romance" and adding: "What the devil have you gone & done? Why the devil didnt you send me proof You have gone & printed the preface with the advertisement - spoiled my point: offended Dr. Elliotson & annoyed me beyond measure." 4[Letters 2: 613-14] A partially corrected advertisement appeared in the Examiner on 1 December, without the preface but still sporting the erroneous subtitle, prompting Thackeray to write again: "The title as I wrote, and rewrote and recorrected is R & R or Romance on Romance not A [Romance on Romance]" [Letters 2: 614]. On 22 December the Examiner had miscorrected the subtitle to "Or A Romance on Romance," but the book itself never was corrected. Since the title page is a wood engraving, one wonders if perhaps the illustrator, Richard Doyle, might have initiated the problem. [71/72]
Such irritations may seem minor, but there is an evident coolness on both sides that attends the almost gentlemanly duty Thackeray fulfilled when he offered Chapman and Hall his next Christmas book, the one that had been scheduled for two years earlier when Dr. Birch was substituted, It is likely, too, that Thackeray's new stature as author of two successful major works made him less tolerant of Chapman and Hall's decidedly genteel, informal, and occasionally sloppy business practices. On the other hand, Thackeray himself tended to be informal about business agreements, as is suggested by his reference to the "verbal agreements" about copyrights in his letter to Bogue.
In August 1840 Thackeray dutifully broached the subject of The Kickleburys on the Rhine, his fifth Christmas book, offering Chapman and Hall an edition of 3,000 copies for £150. "I think," he wrote, "I have a right to a shilling per copy of a 5/ & often 7/ book: and intend to stipulate for that sum with my publisher" [Letters 2: 687). Chapman's reply on the back of Thackeray's letter was:
I find that there are about 350 copies of Rebecca [the 1849 Christmas book] now on hand out of the 3000 printed and I know that there are also a great many [illegible word] with the country booksellers. I don't think that a sale of more than 2500 could be depended on for the new book.
Under these circumstances, I could not, I am sorry to say agree to your proposal with any chance of profit to myself.
I am obliged to you for mentioning your intention to me before applying elsewhere & shall be sorry to lose the <advantage> ↑ value ↓ of your name, but it would be useless for me to undertake a speculation by which I feel assured I should lose.
[Huntington]
How wrong Chapman was and how right Thackeray was to hold out became evident soon enough. Chapman and Hall lost whatever hold the firm may have had on Thackeray. The relationship, however, had been a long and generally friendly one; and, although Thackeray's written correspondence with Chapman and Hall seems virtually to have ceased in 1850, his letters to others contain references to his having met and conversed with one or another of the partners from time to time for the rest of his life.
If Chapman and Hall was Thackeray's publisher in any proprietary way - Thackeray had assured the firm when offering it The Kickleburys in 1850 that he had spoken to no other publishers - it did not try very hard to hold him. Chapman obviously made his decision without reading any of the manuscript, and his change in wording from "advantage," which has a [72/73] positive meaning, to the ambiguous "value," suggests Chapman may not have been as sorry as he said about losing Thackeray. In any case, two other publishers were ready to take Thackeray away. The first was Bradbury and Evans. Vanity Fair became that company's publication almost by default. Thackeray had thought, when he first became a Punch writer for Bradbury and Evans, that he was associating himself with a less respectable magazine, but by 1846 this connection was not only economically important but one Thackeray had come to take seriously as a means of satire and ridicule against political and social evil. Yet to have his first major book published from "THE PUNCH OFFICE," after being rejected by at least one and possibly four other publishers, is an indication that he was settling for a familiar, somewhat lower class publisher. (Dickens, publishing his first work, Dombey and Son, with Bradbury and Evans at the same time, had no reference to Punch in the imprint of his numbered parts.) And once Bradbury and Evans had carried Vanity Fair through the risky part of its production to success and had offered Thackeray increased pay for his next novel before a word of it was written, he became a Bradbury and Evans author.
That was not, however, an exclusive arrangement. The other publisher wooing Thackeray from Chapman and Hall did so far more deliberately and intentionally. With Chapman and Hall's release of its courtesy claim to his next Christmas book, by declining to pay £150 for it, Thackeray was free to offer it to George Smith of Smith, Elder, and Company, who immediately sent him a check for the full amount [Sutherland, Contracts, p. 171]. Thackeray replied in August 1850, "I went out of town early on the mg. of the 25th or I should sooner have acknowledged your letter, & the enclosed cheque for £150: the price of the Copyright of 3000 copies of my Xmas book for 1851 [i.e., December 1850]" (NLS). The first edition of 3,000 copies sold out immediately. On the day Smith wrote Thackeray with this news (and, by the way, enclosing a £50 bonus check), the Times printed an unfavorable review (later attributed to Charles Lamb Kenny). Thackeray's response, "An Essay on Thunder and Small Beer," appeared in the second printing of The Kickleburys, announcing itself as a "Second Edition," dated 1850. Two more reprints, the second called a "Third Edition," were issued in 1851. The printer's records for Smith, Elder no longer exist for the years preceding 1853, but it is clear that Chapman and Hall turned down a chance to make a tidy profit and thereby also lost any chance of enlarging [73/74] its share in an increasingly valuable literary property. Chapman and Hall's dealings with Thackeray had begun with caution, the formalities of contracts, and the proffer of advances in exchange for a security, the deposit of the family plate. These formalities later were dropped, and there were no written contracts for the Christmas books and no formal registration of titles with the Stationers' Register, facts discovered by George Smith in 1865 when he was trying to gain control of all Thackeray's copyrights [MS correspondence between Smith and Chapman, used by permission of John Murray, Publishers, the present owners]. Nevertheless, the Chapman and Hall firm seems to have paid its small profit-sharing dividends regularly, relying on gentlemen's agreements.
Bradbury and Evans exhibited a similar tendency toward informal agreements, and the company's hold on Thackeray was never a very firm one. It never stipulated for anything except the work it was about to publish. Anything else Thackeray undertook at the same time was none of its business or concern. With Smith, Elder, for example, Thackeray published The Kickleburys in 1850, The History of Henry Esmond in 1852, and Lectures on Eighteenth Century English Humourists in 1853, but in fact he was primarily a Bradbury and Evans author from 1847 to 1859
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Glynn, Jenifer. Prince of Publishers: A Biography of George Smith. London: Allison and Busby, 1986.
Harden, Edgar. "Thackeray: 'Rebecca and Rowena': A Further Document." Notes and Queries 24 (1977), 20-22.
-----. "Historical Introduction" to The History of Henry Esmond. New York: Garland, 1989
-----. "The writing and Publication of Esmond" Studies in the Novel 13 (1981), 79-92.
-----. "The Writing and Publication of Thackeray's English Humourists" PBSA 76 (1982), 197-207.
-----. The Emergence of Thackeray's Serial Fiction. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1979.
Huxley, Leonard. The House of Smith, Elder. London: priv. ptd. 1923.
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-----. The Buried Life. A Study of the Relations between Thackeray's Fiction an His Personal History. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952.
Spencer, Eddy. The Founding of the "Cornhill Magazine." Ball State Univ. Monograph no. 19. Muncie, Ind, 1970.
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Smith, George. Chapters from Some Memoirs. London: Macmillan, 1894.
-----. "The Recollections of a Long and Busy Life." 2 vols. Typescript. Quoted by Edgar Harden. "The writing and Publication of Esmond" Studies in the Novel 13 (1981), 80-81.
Sutherland, John. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976.
-----. "The Thackeray-Smith Contracts" Studies in the Novel 13 (1981), 168-83.
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Last modified: 9 April 2001