Henry Colburn

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry Colburn died on the 16th of August 1855 at his house in Bryanston Square, having built one of the most influential publishing businesses in nineteenth-century London. He left behind a fortune sworn as under £35,000, a catalogue stretching from Jane Webb's early science fiction to the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, and a reputation for knowing precisely what the reading public wanted before they knew themselves. Who was this man? Where did he come from? And how did a largely unknown figure shape the literary taste of a generation?

• 2. Origins and Early Trade

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  On the 1st of June 1800, Henry Colburn was indentured as an apprentice printer to William Earle, a bookseller on Albemarle Street in London, for a term of six years and a premium of £1,000. That sum was substantial for a young man of uncertain background. Virtually nothing is known about his parentage, and the year of his birth is itself uncertain. The scholar Michael Sadleir proposed that Colburn may have been the illegitimate son of an Englishman by a French mother. The hypothesis is circumstantial but not without logic: Colburn was well-educated, fluent in French, and arrived in the trade with the capital to act independently almost from the start.

  Earle's establishment dealt in both English and foreign language titles, and that bilingual environment shaped what Colburn would do next. By 1806 he had acquired Morgan's circulating library on Conduit Street and began publishing his own titles. His first books leaned heavily on French and German popular fiction. Many of the French novels appeared first under the Chez Colburn imprint in their original language, then reissued in English translation. Works by authors including de Genlis, Cottin, Kotzebue, and von Krüdener made up much of the early list. A modest share of the early catalogue was nonfiction, including a statistical essay by Daniel Boileau and a natural history volume by William Brewster. Within two years of opening the Conduit Street house, Colburn had published titles in multiple languages across a range of genres.

• 3. Scandal, Fashion, and the Silver Fork

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  Lady Caroline Lamb handed Colburn one of his most profitable early coups when he published her roman a clef Glenarvon in 1816. The novel was a succès de scandale, thinly veiled enough to excite London society and brazen enough to sell through four editions. The following year, Lady Morgan's France appeared on Colburn's list and attracted a furious attack in the Quarterly Review in April 1817. That review did more good than harm to sales.

  These two books pointed toward something Colburn was already refining. The phrase "silver fork novel" was coined by William Hazlitt to describe a mode of fashionable fiction that gave readers a guided tour of aristocratic and wealthy life. Colburn became its leading commercial force, publishing authors including Bulwer Lytton, Theodore Hook, Harrison Ainsworth, Disraeli, Lady Morgan, Robert Plumer Ward, Horace Smith, and G. P. R. James. His series Colburn's Modern Standard Novelists ran from 1835 to 1841 and stretched to nineteen volumes. Hook was a particular favourite: at the height of Hook's London career, Colburn offered him £600 for a novel, and Sayings and Doings in 1824 was the result. Six thousand copies of the three-volume set are said to have been sold. In 1827, Colburn also published what is considered the earliest collection of detective stories, Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous Richmond, or stories in the life of a Bow Street officer.

• 4. Periodicals and Press Ventures

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  In 1814, with the support of Frederic Shoberl, Colburn launched the New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register as a direct rival to the old Monthly Magazine run by Sir Richard Phillips. The early editorial team included John Watkins and Alaric Alexander Watts. A new series began in 1820 under Thomas Campbell, and Bulwer Lytton, Theodore Hook, and Harrison Ainsworth all served as editors across successive series. The magazine ran until 1875, outlasting Colburn himself by two decades.

  On the 25th of January 1817, Colburn brought out the first number of the Literary Gazette, priced at one shilling. It became the earliest weekly newspaper devoted to literature, science, and the arts to gain lasting reputation. The opening editorial arrangements included Hannibal Evans Lloyd and Thomasina Ross, who had already worked together. William Paulet Carey supervised the fine arts coverage. After the twenty-sixth issue, dated the 19th of July 1817, William Jerdan bought a third share and became sole editor; Messrs. Longman acquired another third. By 1842 Jerdan owned the Gazette outright, and in 1862 it merged with the Parthenon.

  Colburn's relationship with the Gazette eventually soured. On the 31st of December 1827, he wrote to Jerdan that he had joined the new literary journal the Athenaeum because of what he called "the injustice done to my authors generally" by the Gazette. In 1828 he founded the Court Journal. That founding had its own backstory: David Lester Richardson had established the London Weekly Review in 1827 but was forced to give it up the following year. Under an agreement with Colburn, Richardson handed over control of the journal in exchange for a share in its profits. Colburn renamed the publication the Court Journal, and Richardson's anticipated profits never materialised.

• 5. Diaries, Naval History, and the Archive

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  At the suggestion of William Upcott, Colburn published the first edition of John Evelyn's Diary in 1818. He followed it in 1825 with Richard Griffin, 3rd Baron Braybrooke's edition of the Pepys Diary, then expanded editions in 1848-49 and 1854. These were not light entertainments. They were foundational primary sources, and Colburn's decision to bring them to a general readership helped establish both diaries as fixtures of British literary culture.

  His naval publishing was equally substantial. Edward Pelham Brenton's The Naval History of Great Britain appeared in 1837, and Life and Correspondence of John, Earl of St. Vincent followed in 1838. Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas's seven-volume Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson came out between 1844 and 1846. He also published G. P. R. James's three-volume Letters Illustrative of the Reign of William III in 1841. His series The Naval and Military Library of Entertainment, published in twenty volumes in 1834, collected work by authors including Marryat and Gleig on travel, memoirs, and military fiction aimed explicitly at readers in the Army and Navy. In 1826 he had published The Posthumous Works of Anne Radcliffe, including Gaston de Blondeville along with what is identified as the first known biographical essay on Radcliffe. The breadth of the catalogue, from scandal fiction to state papers, marked Colburn as something more than a commercial opportunist.

• 6. Partnership, Dissolution, and Retirement

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  In 1830 Colburn entered a formal partnership with his printer Richard Bentley. The arrangement lasted less than three years; it was dissolved in August 1832. Colburn briefly set up business again at Windsor before paying a financial penalty for breaching a covenant that prohibited him from publishing within twenty miles of London. He then opened a house in Great Marlborough Street and resumed business there.

  He eventually retired in favour of the firm Messrs. Hurst and Blackett, though he kept his name attached to a small number of titles. These included Elliot Warburton's Crescent and the Cross, the diaries of Evelyn and Pepys, Agnes Strickland's Lives, and Burke's Peerage. The copyrights connected to those titles went to auction at Southgate and Barrett on the 26th of May 1857, realising approximately £14,000. Colburn had been twice married; his second wife was Eliza Anne, the only daughter of Captain Crosbie. She survived him. He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, his property assessed at under £35,000, a comfortable but not extravagant figure for a man who had published Jane Webb's 1827 science fiction novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century among the thousands of titles that passed through his hands.