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Declarations of war, then uneasy truces, feature as often as London gossip and unctuous flattery in the extraordinary correspondence between the sixth Lord Byron and the second John Murray, whose fortunes had been built on the success of his most famous author. Byron is often imperious, Murray servile; but sometimes Byron is pacific, man-to-man, and Murray is emboldened to think himself his social equal. In the most notorious incident in the firm’s history, on 17 May 1824, Murray was a party to burning, in his own drawing-room grate, the only copy of the dead poet’s memoirs. Why did he do it? Humphrey Carpenter, in this jolly romp of a publishing history, the first book to cover all seven John Murrays (completed after Carpenter’s death by a discreet James Hamilton), felinely suggests that Murray wanted to prove that he was not just a tradesman but, as one contemporary newspaper put it, ‘a gentleman and a man of honour’.
The first John Murray (educated at Edinburgh High School and Edinburgh University) had a diffuse career before settling upon books. Like his occasional customer James Boswell, another Edinburgh native, he had a taste for drink and prostitutes. Like his son, he was recklessly sociable; like all his successors, he was defiantly not a literary man. His instincts were middlebrow — his audience should be ‘the Mob of Readers, the literary Amateurs, & . . . smatterers in taste’. To these smatterers he also sold partridge and woodcock, paste jewellery and Irish linen. He even tried exporting beer to Bengal.
John Murray II (blinded in his right eye at one of his many private schools) was as industrious as his father but more ambitious. In 1812, on the strength of the sales of Childe Harold, he bought 50 Albemarle Street. A grand house in a smart part of town, it remained the firm’s headquarters for the next 190 years. There, on the first floor, he presided over a literary salon where historians sparred with cabinet ministers and Byron first met Scott.
The reign of the third John Murray (Charterhouse and Edinburgh), the longest-lived of the line, coincided with most of Queen Victoria’s. He published Samuel Smiles’s Self-help and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. A keen traveller and geologist, he originated Murray’s handbooks, writing the first himself. They were immediately plagiarised by an up-and- coming German publisher, Karl Baedeker.
If ever a John Murray was a ‘gentleman’, it was John Murray IV. Like his son John Murray V (and, indeed, John VI and John VII), he was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford; like his son, he was given a royal knighthood, for publishing Queen Victoria’s Letters. Father and son both, to an extent, rested on the family laurels — the gentleman’s prerogative.
Only with the arrival of John Murray VI was the line reinvigorated. Born John Grey, Jock Murray was a boyish figure whose charm and jocularity belied a deep diligence. He was inspired to follow his childless uncle Jack into the business by meeting Conan Doyle on the stairs at Albemarle Street. Betjeman was Jock’s Byron; Osbert Lancaster, Kenneth Clark, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Freya Stark frequented his salon. He deserves a book all to himself. But, after his death in 1993, his pragmatic son decided that independence was no longer enough in modern publishing. He disposed of John Murray to Hodder Headline and, in 2004, sold its astonishing archive to the National Library of Scotland.
James Lees-Milne, an old schoolfriend of Jock’s (oddly unmentioned by Carpenter), was not published by Murray until 1990, when he was in his ninth decade. ‘A thrill to be published at last,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘by this Rolls-Royce of publishers.’ Rolls-Royce, once that most British and gentlemanly of institutions, is now of course owned by BMW, while Murray is part of Hachette.
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