James Fraser (publisher)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  James Fraser, a Scottish publisher from an Inverness family, ran his business out of 215 Regent Street in London from the early nineteenth century until his death in 1841. He is remembered today chiefly through his connection to Thomas Carlyle, whose landmark work Hero Worship Fraser brought into print. Yet the man behind that celebrated imprint led a life far more turbulent than a respectable address on Regent Street might suggest. A violent confrontation on the street, a lawsuit that ended in a settlement worth far less than anyone hoped, a magazine named after someone else, and a private family life kept quietly off the record: these are the threads that, woven together, tell the story of who James Fraser actually was. What drove a landed baronet to assault a publisher in broad daylight? Why did the magazine Fraser is remembered for bear another man's name? And how did a business built on literary friendships survive its founder by four decades?

• 2. The Regent Street Publisher

  ›

  At 215 Regent Street, Fraser built a list that included some of the most recognizable names in Victorian letters. Thomas Carlyle's Hero Worship appeared under his imprint, and that relationship defined Fraser's reputation more than any other. J. A. Froude, who later wrote Carlyle's biography, recorded the texture of that partnership with characteristic sharpness. Froude described the dealings between Carlyle and "the infatuated Fraser, with his dog's-meat tart of a magazine" in terms that suggest the author's affection was mixed at best. The phrase stuck. Fraser's circle, however, extended well beyond Carlyle. William Makepeace Thackeray, James Hogg, Thomas Love Peacock, and Francis Sylvester Mahony all appeared in his orbit, making the Regent Street address a kind of informal headquarters for a generation of writers working in London. Froude himself was among the contributors, which gives his later biographical portrait of the publisher a particular insider quality.

• 3. The Berkeley Assault

  ›

  On the 3rd of August 1836, Grantley Berkeley walked into Fraser's premises and assaulted him. The trigger was a review that Fraser's magazine had published criticizing Berkeley's novel Berkeley Castle. The attack was not a polite disagreement. Cross actions followed in court on the 3rd of December: Fraser sued for assault, and Berkeley countersued for libel. The jury returned damages of £100 for the assault and just £2 for the libel. The disproportion tells its own story. Berkeley had struck a man over a book review, and the court agreed that he had done wrong. But the court also found that the criticism published had crossed a line, even if the line was a narrow one worth only two pounds. Fraser emerged from the affair vindicated in physical terms and barely touched in financial ones, but the incident fixed his name in the public record as a publisher willing to print opinion sharp enough to provoke a response.

• 4. Fraser's Magazine

  ›

  Fraser's Magazine began publication in February 1830, though its name had nothing to do with its publisher. The magazine took its title from Hugh Fraser, a barrister who had co-founded it alongside William Maginn. James Fraser himself apparently preferred to call it simply "The Town and Country". That private preference was overruled by usage, and the magazine became one of the more significant literary periodicals of the age. Carlyle, Thackeray, Hogg, Peacock, Froude, William Allingham, Mahony, and others contributed across the years of Fraser's ownership. After Fraser died in 1841, the title passed to G. W. Nickisson, whose name first appeared on the masthead in 1842. Five years after that it transferred again, this time to John William Parker. Under Parker and his successors the magazine continued under its original name until October 1882, when it was superseded by Longman's Magazine. The life of the publication outlasted its founding publisher by more than forty years.

• 5. The Gallery of Portraits

  ›

  Between 1830 and 1838, Fraser's Magazine ran a sustained artistic project called The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters. The gallery comprised 81 portraits, most of them drawn by Daniel Maclise, with accompanying text by William Maginn. In 1833 a quarto volume appeared collecting 34 of those portraits in a single bound edition. The complete gallery did not appear together in print until 1874, when it was republished for the first time in its entirety. A later edition, The Maclise Portrait Gallery by William Bates, expanded the selection to 85 portraits and was published in London in 1883, with the images reduced in size and the literary commentary given more space. The gallery preserved likenesses of writers who might otherwise have remained unillustrated, and its republication decades after Fraser's death showed that the project had outlasted any single moment in literary history. Maginn's texts alongside Maclise's drawings made the gallery a document of a particular London literary world, one that Fraser had helped to assemble.

• 6. Family and Death

  ›

  Fraser had one illegitimate son, born in 1833 to a woman named Mary West. The boy, James Fitzjames Fraser West, received medical training and went on to practice as a surgeon at Queen's Hospital, Birmingham. The choice to record both the mother's name and the son's professional career in the historical record is unusual for a figure of this period, and it suggests that the connection was acknowledged rather than hidden. Fraser died on the 2nd of October 1841 at Argyll Street, London, after what the record describes as a lingering illness. He was thirty-seven years old. His magazine, with its misattributed name and its roster of distinguished contributors, carried on without him into an era he never saw.