[BITList] With whom it all began

[John Feltham]

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Smith,  George  Murray  (1824-1901), publisher, businessman, and founder of the Dictionary of National Biography, was born on 19 March 1824 at 135 Fenchurch Street, London, the oldest son and second of the six children of George Smith (1789-1846), stationer and publisher, and his wife, Elizabeth Murray (1797-1878), daughter of Alexander Murray, London glassware manufacturer. His parents were both of Scottish origin. From about 1873 Smith informally adopted Murray as his middle name as a tribute to his mother, and bestowed the name on all his children.

Family background and early life

The son of a small landholding farmer in north-east Scotland, George Smith's father first began his working life as an apprentice to the Elgin bookseller and banker Isaac Forsyth. He migrated to London in 1812 and was initially employed by the publisher Charles Rivington, and subsequently became a clerk for John Murray at Albemarle Street. A sober and devout man, Smith senior soon acquired the capital and expertise to establish a stationery business in partnership with another recent arrival from the north-east of Scotland, Alexander Elder (1790-1876) of Banff, with whom he took up premises at 135 Fenchurch Street in 1816.

Within the year Smith and Elder had begun publishing on a modest scale, their first title the anonymous Recollections of a Ramble during the Summer of 1816. For the first few years the firm's publishing policy was of necessity conservative, and few further titles were produced. After several years of cautious expansion, however, Smith and Elder found themselves in 1824 in a position to move to more generous premises at 65 Cornhill. Thereafter publishing activity began steadily to increase.

The turning point came with the acquisition in 1827, from the neighbouring firm of Lupton Relfe of 13 Cornhill, of the rights to publish the popular literary annual Friendship's Offering. Under the editorship of Thomas Pringle, Charles Knight, and Leitch Ritchie, the annual became over the next two decades the backbone of the Smith and Elder list, securing contributions from an impressive array of author celebrities, including Byron, Coleridge, Mrs Hemans, Macaulay, Ruskin, Southey, and the young Tennyson. Its publication is among some of the son's earliest memories:

For two or three days before its appearance everybody remained, after the shop had closed. Tables were set out, and we sealed up each copy in a wrapper. When the work was all over we were regaled with wine and cake, and sang songs. (Smith)
At its height the Friendship's Offering is reputed to have had a circulation of 10,000, the increased income and reputation generated by its success allowing the firm to branch out into a number of new publishing markets.

Between 1831 and 1835 Smith and Elder also published the annual Comic Offering, edited by Louisa Sheridan, including illustrations by Robert Seymour, later to achieve fame as the originator of The Pickwick Papers. 'The capital of the firm during these years was limited', Smith later recalled, 'but its courage was high'  (Smith). One daring, though largely unsuccessful, experiment was the launch of the Library of Romance, a series of fifteen volumes of cheap fiction which appeared under the editorship of Leitch Ritchie between 1833 and 1835. Purporting, in the words of its editor, to break 'the mischievous prejudice which prevails in the trade against works in less than three volumes', the library was several decades ahead of its time, its financial failure owing more to its uninspiring subject matter than its novel 6s. format.

By the 1840s the firm had developed a reputation for finely produced books, largely in consequence of their investment in lavishly illustrated works, usually at the instigation of Elder, who harboured a personal enthusiasm for the fine arts. Early examples include The Byron Gallery (1833), Clarkson Stanfield's Coastal Scenery (1836), and The Oriental Portfolio (1840). With the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843, Smith and Elder became publishers for John Ruskin, a connection that was to continue for many years.

Another important niche exploited early on by the company was for colonial reading matter, titles appearing in the 1830s and 1840s indicating a close attention to a clearly focused overseas market. Facts to Illustrate the Character of Indian Natives, China Opened, Van Diemen's Land as a Place of Emigration are all typical and demonstrate something of the geographical extent of Smith and Elder's colonial interests throughout this period. It was also at this time that they began to earn themselves a reputation for scientific publishing, among the most notable titles being a nine-volume edition of Humphry Davy's Works (1838). Andrew Smith's Illustrations of Zoology in South Africa appeared in several volumes (1838-47), as did a number of works by the young Charles Darwin, including Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1840-48). Although the company did not achieve its greatest success until several years later under the second George Smith, the reputation and connections that had been built up by the original partners during these early years were to stand him in good stead, providing the firm base on which the spectacular triumphs of the 1860s and 1870s were built.

In 1820 Smith senior had married Elizabeth Murray, also from Moray, and it was above the shop at Fenchurch Street that their eldest son was born in 1824. At the age of six the child had suffered a near fatal attack of 'brain fever' and, advised by the family physician to treat the child with utmost care, the parents appear to have treated him thereafter with inordinate forbearance. George and Elizabeth Smith attempted to provide for their eldest son advantages that had not been theirs. Initially he was sent to a boarding-school at Rottingdean and at ten attended Merchant Taylors' School, London. Thereafter he went to a school at Blackheath, and with his younger brother attended the City of London School in 1837.

Although he later blamed his inauspicious school career on bad teaching, Smith nevertheless appears to have perpetually tried the patience of his masters. A fractious child, he later recounted his disruptive influence on his classmates, early on earning himself a reputation for fighting. Despite this, he seems to have acquired a fair knowledge of Latin and managed to cultivate a talent for chemistry and mathematics. When the inevitable expulsion came-he was prematurely withdrawn at the beginning of the Easter vacation in 1838-it was with his exasperated master's recommendation that the child be sent to sea.

Throughout these years Smith appears to have been closest to his mother, who was more indulgent, and to his mind more intelligent, than his father. Although she harboured hopes for him of university followed by a career at the bar, the son was at the age of fourteen taken into the family firm. From childhood he seems to have had a natural interest in commercial ventures, and by all accounts had little trouble channelling his otherwise wayward energy into his new-found business career.

At about this time the two founders took on a third partner. Patrick Stewart (1808-1852), the son of a prominent Church of Scotland minister, was to join the firm as a junior in 1838, from which time the business became styled Smith, Elder & Co. Stewart, whose guardian was a chief partner in a leading Calcutta merchants, brought with him valuable contacts in the imperial trade, and thereafter the firm found itself engaging in an increased number of overseas speculations.

One of Smith's earliest memories was of the company's dealings with the intrepid entrepreneur Lieutenant Thomas Waghorn (1800-1850), who in 1829 had established the overland route to India. In the 1830s Smith and Elder acted as Waghorn's postal agents, later publishing several of his works, including Waghorn's Guide Overland to India (1842). His father's refusal to allow young Smith to ride with Waghorn on the leg between Paris and Marseilles was a disappointment that stayed with him. Later, as proprietor of the Cornhill Magazine, Smith was responsible for immortalizing Waghorn in the publication of Thackeray's Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846), which contained an account of the adventurer's exploits.

To Smith his new master was 'a young man of social tastes and ... brilliant gifts' and he admired him greatly  (Smith). Stewart became a liveryman of the Clothworkers' Company in March 1837 and in May 1838 took on Smith as apprentice for seven years, without salary as was the custom. At his father's insistence Smith began under Stewart to learn the trade from the bottom up, and soon acquired a range of manual skills, from quill-making to binding. One of the first tasks with which he was entrusted, and from which he later said he learned most about business practice, was to enter up overseas correspondence into copybooks. As he later recalled 'my business hours were from 7.30 in the morning till 8 o'clock in the evening, with half an hour for breakfast, an hour for dinner, and half an hour for tea'  (ibid.). Despite such 'needlessly long' hours, Smith continued to find time for recreation. His dinner hours were often spent on horseback at a riding school in Finsbury Square, a pastime that he enjoyed all his life.

It was also at this time that Smith allegedly began to cultivate a taste for 'good' literature. Through Leigh Hunt, for whom he soon published several works, he was introduced to the Museum Club, a select dining club which met weekly near the Strand, and which included the writers Douglas Jerrold, G. H. Lewes, and 'Father Prout'. 'The wit was brilliant, the jokes abundant, the laughter uproarious', Smith later recalled; 'often I came away from a meeting of the club with sides which were literally sore with laughter'  (Smith).

Early career

In the intervening years the publishing side of the business continued to prosper, and some time in the early 1840s Smith persuaded his father to entrust him with £1500 to speculate on his own publishing ventures. His first two experiments under this arrangement were to publish in 1844 R. H. Horne's New Spirit of the Age and Mrs Baron Wilson's Our Actresses, both moderately successful.

When his indentures expired in 1846, Smith took up his freedom of the Stationers' Company by patrimony and, following the death of his father and the retirement of Elder in the same year, found himself running the company in partnership with Stewart, who had by this time assumed responsibility for the foreign branch. A major crisis hit the firm only two years later, when Smith discovered that Stewart had for several years been misappropriating a large proportion of the company's profits. After being confronted by his younger partner, the disgraced Stewart was stripped of his partnership and, though he remained with the company for another two or three years, left eventually for India where in 1852 he committed suicide. Deeply affected by the debacle, Smith devoted a whole chapter of his memoirs to what he called this 'business cyclone', relating that he 'could not, at first, tell whether the firm was solvent or hopelessly insolvent ... it was only by limiting my expenditure within the narrowest possible limits, and by working like a slave, that I could pull the business through'  (Smith).

For the next few years Smith, then barely into his twenties, supported his mother and sisters by taking on sole responsibility for running the firm. Smith recounts that it was not unusual for him to work until four in the morning and, from time to time, for up to twenty-two hours at a stretch. Dramatic action was called for, and one of the first decisions that the new proprietor took to set the house in order was to terminate his father's liberal publishing arrangements with the infuriatingly prolific G. P. R. James. In the past three years the firm had published no fewer than twenty-seven volumes by James, who wrote so fast, according to Smith, that there was at any given time a backlog of three or four manuscripts in the safe awaiting publication. One of the shrewdest of Smith's decisions in his early working life was to appoint William Smith Williams (1800-1875) as literary adviser in 1847. In Leonard Huxley's words it was Williams 'who was to hold the literary helm' for the next thirty years  (Huxley, 54). From the first, Williams played an instrumental role; he had a considerable hand in one of Smith's earliest coups and perhaps the single most important decision of his early career, the purchase of Jane Eyre (1847), which arguably made his reputation as a publisher overnight. The stories of the arrival of the fascinating manuscript and of the subsequent visits of Charlotte Bronte to London, where Smith introduced the novelist to her admired Thackeray, are now well known. After the novel's success Smith continued to cultivate his relationship with its author. In 1849 he oversaw the publication of Shirley, and over the next few years letters and packages were regularly sent between Cornhill and Haworth. Bronte soon became a close family friend, staying in the Smiths' home on four further occasions; although both Bronte and Smith continued to deny any intimate relationship, there is evidence for some romantic attachment during these years. It is common knowledge that Smith provided Bronte with the inspiration for the character of Dr John in Villette, a novel he published in 1851.

It was during this period that Smith began to build up the impressive literary list for which he would later be most famous. The year 1851 had seen the publication of the first volume of Ruskin's Stones of Venice, which was followed by a string of critical successes, with Thackeray's Esmond (1852) and Leigh Hunt's Imagination and Fancy (1844) among the most notable. In 1857, two years after the death of Bronte, Smith published The Professor, the manuscript of which the firm had originally declined a decade before; and in the same year Smith published Elizabeth Gaskell's highly successful Life of Charlotte Bronte, in which several references to his relationship with the novelist appeared.

On 11 February 1854 Smith married Elizabeth Blakeway (1825-1914), the daughter of a London wine merchant, having met her at a society ball only ten months earlier. The couple spent their honeymoon at Tunbridge Wells and later went on to Paris where, ever diligent, Smith continued to work throughout. As he later recalled, 'the charm and exhiliration of our honeymoon did not lull my business faculties into a slumber'  (Smith) and, much to the consternation of his young wife, Smith regularly took time to answer the Indian mail and keep up with business developments at home. It was while he was overseas that news broke of the Australian goldrush, prompting Smith to order a consignment of revolvers for export. 'I told my wife' by way of explanation, he later wrote, 'that we may as well extract the expenses of our honeymoon from Australian gold'  (ibid.).

Elizabeth Blakeway's beauty was legendary and her 'gifts of mind and character', records Huxley, were no less gracious than her outward presence  (Huxley, 82). For the first years of their marriage the couple lived at 112 Gloucester Terrace, London, the home Smith had formerly shared with his mother, and moved in 1859 to 11 Gloucester Square. By all accounts, soon after their marriage Elizabeth Smith took a sympathetic interest in her husband's business activities, providing valuable support and encouragement throughout the rest of his life.

The years of success

It was probably through his relationship with the Blakeways that Smith met the man who became his business partner for two decades. Henry Samuel King (1817-1878), who had married Elizabeth Blakeway's sister in 1850, joined the firm as partner for overseas trade three years later in order to allow Smith to concentrate fully on the publishing side of the business. By the time that he arrived in London, King had made himself a reputation for revolutionizing the Brighton book trade through his efficient distribution methods, and under his direction the firm continued to strengthen the colonial connections on which it was coming increasingly to depend. Soon the firm employed 150 clerks to oversee its continually expanding operations as supplies of goods from scientific instruments to newspapers flowed through its agencies at Java, Bombay, and west Africa. According to Sidney Lee 'the widening range of the firm's dealings with distant lands ... rendered records of travel peculiarly appropriate to its publishing department'  (DNB). One consequence of success overseas was increased mutual support between the publishing business and the imperial trade, so far more colonial titles were published. Two of the most successful were the Overland Mail, a weekly gazette launched in 1855 to carry British news to the colonies, and the complementary Homeward Mail, launched in 1857. Book titles published in these years also indicate attention to several overseas niche markets. Titles such as Cunningham's Buddhist Monuments in India (1854), Meadows's Chinese and their Rebellions (1856), and McRae's Manual of Plantership in British Guiana (1856), for instance, suggest something of the firm's extending geographical reach in its colonial interests throughout the decade.

Such a heavy overseas investment eventually rendered the company vulnerable, and ultimately led to a second financial crisis in 1857. As Smith recalled,

The Indian Mutiny cost me a fortune. It not merely wrecked one great branch of our business. Our customers were mainly men in the army. We supplied them with pistols, saddles, provisions, books, equipment of every kind. ... But in the Mutiny so many of our debtors were killed that a large amount was lost to us. (Smith)
Making a virtue of necessity, the resourceful Smith wasted no time in exploiting his colonial infrastructure even as it was falling apart. Within a year he had already published several titles relating to the mutiny itself. Harriet Martineau's Suggestions towards the Future Government of India appeared in 1858, followed later that year by John Chaplain's Narrative on the Siege of Delhi, Frederic Cooper's The Crisis in the Punjab, and William Edwards's Personal Adventures during the Indian Rebellion. In 1859 appeared Mrs Coopland's Lady's Escape during the Mutinies of 1857. Recovery after the mutiny appears to have been rapid, however, and while the company never again invested so heavily in the colonial book trade, within a year it had begun to bolster its already considerable reputation for literary publishing.

Perhaps the great tour de force of Smith's publishing career was in 1860 to launch the Cornhill Magazine and to appoint Thackeray as editor at a salary of £1000 per annum (it was doubled after the astronomical success of the first number). Shortly before its first appearance Thackeray insisted to Smith that 'the Magazine must bear my cachet you see and be a man of the world Magazine'  (Letters and Private Papers, ed. Ray, 4.150), and in much the same way that the name of Dickens came to be associated with Household Words, in most minds the Cornhill indeed became 'Thackeray's magazine'. Behind the scenes, though, the editor knew who the real strategist was, and after the immediate success dubbed Smith 'the Carnot of our recent victories'  (G. N. Ray, Thackeray: the Age of Wisdom, 1958, 300).

Essentially, Smith had arranged a division of labour that would allow him complete financial control over the enterprise while capitalizing on the talents and reputation of a well-connected literary figure. With Thackeray as editor, the publisher knew that he could attract established literary names in ways that a mere businessman could not. This was certainly a factor in negotiations with Tennyson, who as a result was eventually persuaded to crown one of the first issues of the Cornhill with 'Tithonus'. Whereas Smith's supplications to the poet had fallen on deaf ears, it took Thackeray's charm and influence to secure the laureate's skills for the enterprise. While Smith reserved an equal power of veto over contributions, it was understood that in future he would concentrate on the business machinery and that Thackeray would be primarily responsible for acquiring talent. Such a partnership had other, more practical advantages of course: it allowed Smith to balance his books in the way that he saw fit and allowed Thackeray to divorce himself from the troublesome and undignified matter of cash transactions. In short, it was the editor's responsibility to court new authors; the publisher's was the more mundane job of paying them. It would be unfair to suggest that this was always the case-Elizabeth Gaskell much preferred dealing directly with Smith than Thackeray, for whom she had little regard-yet such an arrangement was at least true in recruiting that important property of the new magazine, Anthony Trollope. 'I will write to Trollope saying how we want him', the editor announced to his publisher shortly before the launch of the Cornhill, 'you on your side please write offering the cash'  (Letters and Private Papers, ed. Harden, 2.906).

The professed aim of both editor and publisher was to acquire the best serial fiction of the day, combined with the most intelligent occasional writing. Its pages also included some of the most sumptuous illustrations of the period: artists employed in the early years included the likes of Du Maurier, Landseer, Leighton, and Millais. The cost involved in securing talent equal to the project's ambition was an extravagant gamble which remunerated its owner generously, its first issue selling no fewer than 110,000 copies. From then on, few authors could resist the prestige of getting their work into so many hands, and at such handsome prices. The list of contributors to the Cornhill was from the beginning formidable by any standard in the nineteenth century, the first number alone containing the first parts of Trollope's Framley Parsonage, Thackeray's Lovel the Widower and Roundabout Papers, and G. H. Lewes's Studies in Animal Life. For the second issue Smith secured the additional services of Elizabeth Gaskell and G. H. Sala. By the year's end Tennyson, Ruskin, Laurence Oliphant, George MacDonald, Anne Ritchie, Fitzjames Stephen, and Charles Lever had all thrown their talent behind the enterprise. The serialization of fiction, on which the Cornhill largely depended for its success, gave authors a great deal of power over the reading market, but it gave much more to the publisher. For his initial fee Smith almost always managed to secure the rights to the first book publication, and frequently earned himself first refusal on an author's next production.

Another additional advantage of owning such a prestigious vehicle was that it allowed the publisher to pursue new authors more aggressively than ever. After tempting Thackeray away from Bradbury and Evans, Smith soon made himself a reputation for similar acts of pecuniary generosity. In 1867 he offered George Eliot £10,000 for the rights to Romola; Eliot's former publisher, John Blackwood, regretfully admitted that he could not possibly compete with such an offer. After receiving the offer of £5000 for The Ring and the Book, an astonished Browning wrote to thank Smith for his 'liberal offer', so liberal in fact that the poet was anxious over whether 'you understand business, and will not harm yourself by your generosity'  (Glynn, 184). Such was his financial security by this time that, as Smith himself recognized,

I could afford to take risks for the gratification of my own literary tastes; and I could afford to pay prices to authors I liked ... which an ordinary publisher, who lives solely on his publishing profits, would hardly have ventured. (Smith)

Not only did Smith earn himself a reputation for liberality in financial arrangements, but also for the extravagance of the gifts that he sent to authors with impeccable timing. No end of letters of thanks were sent to the Smith, Elder offices for unsolicited packets of books, bon-bons, paintings, and in one instance an ice-maker. In 1861 the Saturday Review commented sardonically that Smith's 'judicious liberality' had given considerable impetus to a genre in which 'things produced with so little trouble are so well paid for'  ('Padding', Saturday Review, 19 Jan 1861, 63-4). G. A. Sala, who had personal dealings with the magazine, later told of his own firsthand experience of Smith's benevolence:

Mr. George Smith was a very munificent publisher. In fact, they used to say that he sent Albert Smith as handsome a cheque for an article of such brevity that Albert ... warned the too-bounteous bookseller that if he continued disseminating cheques of this kind he would come to poverty. ... He was, moreover, a festive publisher, and once a month the contributors and the artists of the Cornhill were bidden to a sumptuous banquet, held at a house in Hyde Park Square. (Sala)
Smith's generosity as a social host was another important factor in his growing reputation for extravagance. The scale of the Pall Mall dinners held in honour of his writers became legendary, as were the Sunday 'at homes' at Smith's Hampstead residence, instigated at Thackeray's suggestion.

By the mid-1860s Smith had firmly established himself as one of the leading publishers of the day, his company's annual turnover having increased over the years from £59,500 in 1851 to £627,000 in 1866. The list of names coming to be associated with the firm in these years-Arnold, Trollope, Thackeray, Gaskell, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, the Brontes, the Brownings-reads like a who's who of Victorian literature. One of the greatest compliments Smith received in his professional life was when in 1867 he was entrusted with the queen's Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands. Not all was glamour, however; while much is often made of the literary successes of the 1850s and 1860s, there has been little, if any, recognition of the amount of 'bread and butter' publishing in which Smith engaged in the same period. It is not generally known that the publisher of Jane Eyre and The Ring and the Book was also responsible for bringing to birth such forgotten classics as Scrivenour's Railways Statistically Considered (1851), Fitz-Wyggram's Notes on Shoeing Horses (1861), and Forsyth's The Sporting Rifle and its Projectiles (1863).

It was with the launch of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1865 that the company undertook its largest gamble to date. Some years before, Thackeray had suggested to Smith the idea of establishing a topical newspaper. The notion was revived in the publisher's mind largely at the instigation of Frederick Greenwood, a Cornhill contributor who had aspirations of founding a newspaper called the Evening Review along similar lines. After taking the idea unsuccessfully to the publisher of Fraser's Magazine, Greenwood turned to Smith with his proposal for a non-partisan publication that would, as its publisher later recalled, epitomize 'an honest and courageous daily journalism'  (Smith). The aim of the newspaper, according to Sidney Lee, was to provide an afternoon paper that would 'bring into daily journalism as much sound thought, knowledge, and style as were possible ... and to counteract corrupting influences'  (DNB). So adamant was he about the need for scrupulousness that Smith insisted from the first that his books should not be reviewed in its pages. Providing a mixture of news, topical articles, and commentary, the Gazette benefited from Smith's ability to enlist the help of a wide circle of acquaintances for its pages. Under the editorship of Frederick Greenwood, whom Smith found to be 'a man full of ideas and energy'  (Smith), the early numbers attracted contributions from the likes of Fitzjames Stephen, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, John Morley, and Charles Reade. Despite this auspicious start, the paper was not an immediate financial success. Soon after its launch a morning edition was tried, but it failed to attract advertising and was dropped after three weeks. Over the next two years, however, sales gradually began to improve, and within five years the Gazette found itself on a firm financial footing, prompting Smith again to attempt in 1869 a morning edition in direct competition to The Times. After four months the morning experiment had again failed, despite intense efforts on the part of the paper's owner and editor. The profit that the evening edition continued to yield for the firm was nevertheless considerable, leaving Smith at the beginning of the 1870s with more speculative capital than ever.

Despite the continued financial success of the business as a whole, relations between Smith and his partner, King, became throughout the 1860s increasingly acrimonious, doubtless owing something to the latter's remarriage in 1863, less than three years after the death of his first wife, Smith's sister-in-law. The strain on business relations might be said to have begun when in late 1864 King had vetoed the firm's involvement in the Pall Mall Gazette, after which the responsibility for the newspaper had passed exclusively into Smith's hands. It is often assumed that it was his Conservative political sympathies that caused Smith's partner to distance himself from the venture. Personal circumstances probably also intervened, and from then on relations became increasingly strained. In 1868 it was decided that the company should be divided, with Smith taking the publishing business to 15 Waterloo Place and King remaining at Cornhill to continue supervising the overseas agency. A contemporary who witnessed the weekly meetings between the feuding partners recalled how

on alternate Wednesdays Smith would go to Cornhill and King would come to Waterloo Place to settle their partnership affairs. ... The brothers-in-law, who detested each other, would meet in the parlour and stiffly bow, take chairs, discuss the business of Smith, Elder, and Co., rise and, again bowing solemnly, would re-enter their respective spheres.
A condition of the separation was that King would agree not to engage in publishing for three years thereafter. Eventually he became a successful publisher in his own right, on his retirement leaving his publishing interests under the control of Kegan Paul & Co.

Later career

Like many successful people, Smith appears from an early age to have been sustained by the stresses of hard work. Describing a regular working day in the 1860s, Smith writes:

On Monday morning I went to my office in Pall Mall, and worked till five o'clock in the evening. I then walked or drove home to Hampstead, dined there; went at nine o'clock to the Pall Mall Gazette office-it was then a morning paper-and remained there till it had gone to press-which sometimes was not till six o'clock or even later. I then went to Waterloo Place, where I had a bedroom fitted up; took a cup of soup and went to bed. I slept for two or three hours; rose, took my bath and breakfast; the clerks came in with letters, etc. I dictated the replies and decided all business. I worked in this way till five o'clock; then I went to Hampstead Heath to dine, back again to the Pall Mall Gazette office and so da capo. (Smith)
Having worked ceaselessly throughout the first twenty-five years of his professional life, Smith found himself at forty-five with a personal fortune and with the social cachet that he had for years pursued. In 1861 he was elected to the Reform Club, his candidature proposed by Sir Arthur Buller and seconded by Thackeray, and in 1865 he joined the Garrick, nominated by Trollope and Wilkie Collins. Always keen to combine sociability with business interests Smith could now for the first time in his life concentrate all of his energies on the publishing that he so much enjoyed. With time on his hands, however, Smith found himself almost immediately in a state of nervous collapse. 'I was like a man who stepped out of his own skin', he writes; 'My condition was morbid to an almost lunatic degree'  (Smith). It is likely that the near sudden relaxation of his responsibilities precipitated severe depression, a condition that lasted for the next two years. Various medical remedies were tried and even overseas travel was attempted as an antidote, all to no avail. So severe was his illness that those close to him feared for his life. It was only when, at the suggestion of a lawyer friend, he launched himself into a new business venture that the clouds began to clear. In 1870 Smith took on a partnership with the shipping firm Bilbrough & Co., which thereafter became styled Smith, Bilbrough & Co. Relishing the pressures of decision-making that his new position required, and amused by the new range of personalities with which the shipping business brought him into contact, Smith's recovery was rapid.

Income derived from his publishing successes, not least the Pall Mall Gazette, had by this stage provided Smith with the means to invest in a range of business interests and to indulge in virtually any scheme that caught his imagination. His status as shipowner brought with it an opportunity to become an underwriter at Lloyd's, a post he soon relinquished owing to its relative low yield. By far the most profitable venture in which Smith was ever engaged involved buying the Apollinaris Company in 1880 to import German mineral water. The shares yielded an average annual profit of £30,000, and Smith sold them between 1897 and 1898 for £600,000. In less than twenty years Apollinaris had yielded him a record profit of £1,500,000.

Like many Victorian businessmen, Smith's sense of social responsibility was heightened by his financial success. In the late 1870s one of Smith's sisters had involved herself in Canon Barnett's philanthropic schemes to provide housing for the poor. Shocked by conditions he had witnessed in the East End, Smith was persuaded to finance the building of a block of low-rent residences in London's George Square Yard in 1883. While the initial outlay was considerable, Smith calculated that by charging a nominal rent the properties would nevertheless yield an annual return of 5 per cent. 'In this way', he reflected, 'the poor would have been helped without any loss of self-respect to themselves; and charity would be shown to have all the recommendations of a sound business investment!'  (Smith). Although Smith attributed the eventual failure of the scheme to his unduly generous benevolence, it is more likely that a combination of inefficiency and gradual neglect caused the buildings to be sold off in 1891.

In the meantime the publishing branch went from strength to strength. Never one to rest on past victories, Smith guided the firm into a major new niche market when in 1873 he took on Ernest Hart to advise on developing medical publishing. Apart from an extensive list of monographs, one of their first undertakings was the highly regarded London Medical Record, which was followed a year later by the launch of the Sanitary Record.

When William Smith Williams retired in 1875 Smith appointed James Payn as literary adviser. Payn's gifts lay at the popular end of the literary market, and under his direction the publishing department continued to extend its sphere of influence in that direction, particularly in fiction. Influential authors who joined the firm under Payn included Henry James, whose Daisy Miller and Washington Square appeared in the Cornhill in 1878 and 1880 respectively. Having published Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd in the Cornhill in 1873, Smith was also responsible for bringing The Mayor of Casterbridge to light in 1886. The year 1880 brought Richard Jefferies to the list, when his Hodge and his Masters caused a sensation. Thereafter Jefferies published all his books with the firm. In 1887 began George Gissing's association with the company, the year in which Thyrza was published. One of Smith's final and most spectacular coups was in 1888 to acquire Mrs Humphry Ward's phenomenally successful Robert Elsmere, a book in which he took personal interest, given that Mrs Ward was niece of his long-time close friend Matthew Arnold.

In 1882 Smith arrived at the idea of commissioning the project with which his name and reputation became associated more than any other. The initial ambition-to produce a multiple-volume 'dictionary of universal biography'-was modified when, at the suggestion of Leslie Stephen, Smith was persuaded to restrict his aims to the nevertheless remarkably ambitious 'dictionary of national biography'. Late in 1882 the project was begun, Smith working closely with Stephen as editor. 'In every detail of the work's general management', reports Lee, 'he took keen interest and played an active part in it from first to last'  (DNB).

It is significant that Smith's parting gesture to the reading world should be a scheme which allowed him to bring together his impulses towards literary excellence and social philanthropy in such a way as to vindicate the ideal of private benevolence. 'I liked the idea of a private individual undertaking a work which was really national', he confessed, 'and which outside England is only possible by virtue of the resources of the state'  (Smith). For the final two decades of his life Smith spent the greater part of his energies helping to oversee what he viewed as the most significant of all his publications. Under his management sixty-three volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography appeared between 1885 and 1900, with remarkable punctuality at the rate of one every three months. Smith's own account of the task suggests something of the personal vigilance that was required to satisfy such a demanding production schedule:

Sometimes-say about 4 o'clock in the morning-I would wake and perplex myself with fears that, from a literary point of view, the work might fail. I was haunted by a dread of inaccuracies. But, on the whole, the work has been very well done and I am very proud of it. I venture to say that no other book involving the same amount of labour and anxiety has ever been published. Nobody who has not been behind the scenes, and witnessed the difficulties we have had to meet, can appreciate the real quality of the work. We have taken infinite pains, we have never grudged toil or expense. ... There has been notably too a very fine spirit amongst the contributors, a loyalty to the interests of the Dictionary, a zeal to maintain its standard, a generous willingness to take infinite pains in its service. I suppose the sense that they were taking part in a great enterprise acted as some sort of an inspiration. They knew, too, that the Dictionary was not undertaken for commercial ends, nor designed to fill its originator's pocket. They were serving literature when writing for it. (Smith, quoted in Huxley, 186-7)
That he saw the scheme lose something in the region of £70,000 was inconsequential, he believed, to his overall purpose. As Lee pointed out, the Dictionary of National Biography more than any other scheme satisfied Smith's 'independence of temper'  (DNB). Suspending his belief in market values and the profitability of excellence, his rationale for the dictionary was that it should constitute a repayment in kind to the nation that had provided him with a personal fortune and a long and busy life.

Final years

Toward the end of his career Smith gradually withdrew from his duties. In 1880 the ownership of the Pall Mall Gazette passed to his son-in-law Yates Thompson, and in 1881 his eldest son, George Murray Smith, joined the firm. They were joined by his second son, Alexander Murray Smith, in 1890, and in 1894 by his other son-in-law, Reginald John Smith. Although he kept up an intense personal interest in the Dictionary of National Biography, Smith relinquished principal control of the firm thereafter to Reginald and Alexander, the first son having stepped down owing to ill health in 1890. The changing commercial landscape that faced the firm at the turn of the century, Smith himself realized, was almost as radically different as his had been from his father's, publishers now going in hot pursuit of materials in ways that made even this most acquisitive of Victorian businessmen marvel at 'the difference between the old and the new regime'  (Smith). The same careful nurturing of fresh literary talent continued to be a governing principle at Waterloo Place, even after his departure, and led to the acquisition of work by emerging talents at the end of the century, including J. M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

After spending his life bringing the literary labour of others to light, Smith in retirement had time to turn to literary work of his own. In the early 1890s he began compiling his 'Recollections of a long and busy life', a fascinating and genial account which-apart from four chapters prepared for the Cornhill Magazine with the editorial assistance of the Australian writer William Fitchett-remained largely unpublished. Not a work of great literary skill, the 'Recollections' nevertheless conveys a lively mind, full of tact and intelligence, if a little overbearing in its opinions. It provided the principal source for Lee's lengthy memoir of Smith that prefaced the first supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography, and later for Leonard Huxley's The House of Smith Elder.

In later life Smith received public recognition for his publishing achievements, and was awarded an MA in 1894 from the University of Oxford for services to English literature. Other honours followed: in May 1900 his role in completing the dictionary was honoured by a small dinner which the prince of Wales attended, and on June 30 a banquet, attended by the great and the good, was held for Smith and his contributors at the Mansion House.

With the exception of the extended bout of depression between 1868 and 1870, and despite the diagnosis some years earlier of a mild heart condition, Smith throughout his life enjoyed relatively good health. In or around 1895, however, he was found to be suffering from what Lee calls a 'troublesome ailment which he bore with great courage and cheerfulness' (most probably a form of cancer). Over the next five years the condition grew worse, necessitating an operation which took place at his home in Park Lane on 11 January 1901. Although the surgery was deemed successful at the time, Smith remained weak, and consequently requested a move to Byfleet, Surrey, in March, in the hope of convalescing in the country. After a continued decline, he died at St George's Hill, Byfleet, of a heart attack brought on by septic absorption on 6 April 1901. He was buried five days later in Byfleet churchyard.

The posthumous tributes were overwhelmingly laudatory. One of the many letters of condolence came to his widow from Lord Rosebery, who wrote of his 'admiration ... for Mr. Smith as the founder of the greatest literary monument of the Victorian era [the Dictionary of National Biography] and ... the publisher of Jane Eyre'. Smith was survived by his wife (to whom he bequeathed the dictionary) and children, three girls and two boys. At Reginald Smith's death in 1916 the assets of Smith, Elder & Co. were acquired by John Murray, except that of the dictionary, which passed, at Elizabeth Smith's request, to Oxford University Press.

Of the few images of Smith that have survived, the earliest is a portrait, now at the Bronte Parsonage Museum, showing him in his twenties. Apart from the look of serious determination, there is nothing particularly remarkable about his appearance. A more striking portrait, by George Frederic Watts, shows a middle-aged man with thinning hair and an impressive full beard. A third image, painted by John Collier in 1901, and now owned by the National Portrait Gallery, shows a balding but dignified and handsome man, with neatly groomed white beard and moustache.

Bill Bell 

Sources  G. M. Smith, 'Recollections of a long and busy life', NL Scot., MS 23191 + DNB + [L. Huxley], The house of Smith Elder (1923) + J. W. Robertson Scott, The story of the Pall Mall Gazette (1950) + C. Redway, 'Some reminiscences of publishing fifty years ago', The Bookman (1891), 186 + J. Glynn, Prince of publishers: a biography of George Smith (1986) + The letters and private papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. G. N. Ray, 4 vols. (1945-6) [with 2 vol. suppl. , ed. E. F. Harden (1994)]  + G. A. Sala, 'Things I have seen and people I have known', Daily Telegraph (4 March 1893), 4 + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1901) + d. cert.
Archives NL Scot., John Murray archive, corresp. and ledgers + NL Scot., corresp. and business MSS, incl. TS memoir + University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, corresp. and company file copies, special collections, HM 791-821 | BL, corresp. + Bodl. Oxf., letters from Sir Theodore Martin, MS Eng lett e.307 + Bodl. Oxf., letters from Anthony Trollope, MS Eng lett d.413 + U. Birm., corresp. with Harriet Martineau, HM 791-821, 1206-1210 + U. Durham, Grey of Howick collections, letters to General Charles Grey
Likenesses  J. Collier, oils, 1901, NPG · G. F. Watts, oils, unknown collection; copyprint, NPG [see illus.] · portrait, Bronte Parsonage Museum, Haworth, Yorkshire
Wealth at death  £931,968 13s. 4d.: resworn probate, March 1902, CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1901)




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