Smith, Elder & Co.

• 1. Introduction

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  Smith, Elder & Co. received a manuscript in 1847 signed with a name no one at the firm recognized: Currer Bell. That name was a fiction. The author was Charlotte Brontë, and the novel was Jane Eyre. Its publication marked the firm's first major success. How did a London publishing house come to attract so many of the era's most significant writers? And what becomes of a publisher's legacy once the firm itself is gone?

• 2. The Founding Partners

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  George Smith was born in 1789, Alexander Elder in 1790. Together they established a London publishing firm that was issuing books by 1826. George Smith died in 1846. The firm then passed to George Murray Smith, born in 1824, who would steer it through its most productive decades. Alexander Elder, the surviving co-founder, lived until 1876. George Murray Smith died in 1901, having guided the house through over half a century of publishing. The London and Edinburgh Magazine began in 1841 under the firm's banner. It was one of several ventures that would come to define the house's identity.

• 3. The Victorian Roster

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  Charlotte Brontë returned to the Smith, Elder & Co. list in 1854, when The Professor appeared in print. Robert Browning, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing all published with the house. Alfred Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Richard Jefferies, George MacDonald, and Charles Reade also published with the firm. William Makepeace Thackeray contributed The History of Henry Esmond in 1852. John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters had appeared under the firm's imprint as early as 1843, maintained a decades-long association with the house. Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book appeared in 1868-69. Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge followed in 1886. Arthur Conan Doyle's The Great Boer War appeared in 1900, and Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands in 1903. Beyond fiction and poetry, the house had been building a presence in the periodical press since the early 1840s.

• 4. Beyond the Novel

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  The Cornhill Magazine launched in 1859. By that point, the firm had already been running The London and Edinburgh Magazine for eighteen years. Smith, Elder & Co. had also been publishing works of natural history and science throughout those decades. Charles Darwin's Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle appeared between 1838 and 1843. Andrew Smith's Illustrations of the Zoology of South Africa ran from 1838 to 1850. The firm also produced the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography. Into the twentieth century, the house continued issuing reference and scholarly works. Morocco in Diplomacy by Edmund Dene Morel appeared in 1912. Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, A Family Record by William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh appeared the following year. The fate of the firm's archive would eventually be determined not by the firm itself, but by the publishing house that acquired it.

• 5. Acquisition and Archive

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  In 1909, the firm was being run by Reginald Smith. John Murray purchased Smith, Elder & Co. in the early 1900s, bringing the firm's independent existence to a close. The archive passed to the new owners and eventually became part of the John Murray Archive. That collection is now held at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. A.W. Rumney, who had been publishing cycling guides with the firm since 1898, continued to appear on the house's list for decades. The Dalesman, one of his later titles, carried a date of 1936. That means the Smith, Elder & Co. name appeared in print some thirty years after John Murray's acquisition.