Daniel and Alexander Macmillan

English book publishers

• Alexander Macmillan
• Born: October 3, 1818
• Birthplace: Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland
• Died: January 26, 1896
• Place of death: London, England

• Daniel Macmillan
• Born: September 13, 1813
• Birthplace: Island of Arran, Buteshire, Scotland
• Died: June 27, 1857
• Place of death: Cambridge, England

The Macmillans started as booksellers and eventually founded Macmillan and Company, which would eventually become a major world publishing enterprise that endured into the twenty-first century.

Early Lives

The Macmillan brothers were of Scottish stock, sons of Duncan and Katherine Crawford Macmillan, who had a dozen children. Born in 1766, Duncan Macmillan lived on the Island of Arran. He succeeded his father-in-law in running a small farm. On this farm Daniel Macmillan was born in 1813. By 1816, the family had moved to Irvine in Ayrshire, where Alexander was born in October of 1818.

Duncan’s death in 1823 left the family hard-pressed. The eldest son, Malcolm, a schoolmaster who later became a Baptist clergyman, at the age of twenty-five became head of the family and did what he could to help keep it solvent. Nevertheless, financial exigencies forced Daniel, only three months past his tenth birthday, to become self-supporting. He was apprenticed to Maxwell Dick, a local bookseller, for seven years and was paid a small wage.

Young Daniel was so dependable that when Dick went to London on business in 1828, he was able to leave his teenage apprentice in charge. Daniel learned from Dick how to buy, sell, and bind books. Dick also taught Daniel how to handle and groom horses. The apprenticeship was largely a positive experience for Daniel, a frail child, of normal height, perilously thin, whose lungs were weak.

Alexander, the younger brother, attended Irvine Academy, where he enjoyed the more vigorous games his classmates played. He and Daniel both were accustomed to seeing their mother, a woman of intellect, read voraciously, and they both early developed a similar love of books.

When Daniel’s apprenticeship ended, the seventeen-year-old was in bad health. After working for booksellers in Stirling and in Glasgow, in 1833, Daniel sailed for London, a sixty-three-hour journey, to seek his fortune. He sought work there as a bookseller but found a more compatible job in a Cambridge bookstore, where he went at half the salary that Simpkin’s in London had offered him. He remained for three years in Mr. Johnson’s Cambridge bookshop.

In 1836, a year after his mother had died, Daniel returned to Scotland. Alexander by this time had an ill-paying job as usher in a school and was destitute. When Daniel was offered a job in London at Seeley’s in Fleet Street, he took it, and three years later, in 1839, he had arranged for Alexander to work in the same bookstore. Daniel, who shared lodgings with Alexander, assiduously promoted the younger man’s education.

By late 1842, the two brothers could think of opening their own bookstore, which they did in Aldersgate Street early the following year. Because of the shop’s out-of-the way location, it did not show a profit, although it attracted some of London’s most prestigious intellectuals. By June, 1843, the brothers had the chance to buy Mr. Newby’s shop in Cambridge and did so. Alexander kept his job at Seeley’s for a while to assure them of a secure income. Daniel left Seeley’s to devote full time to running the bookstore. Alexander was as active in the new venture as his job at Seeley’s permitted.

Before long, the brothers began a small publishing operation in connection with the new bookshop. By November 10, 1843, the first book bearing the Macmillan imprint was in the British Museum Library. By this time, both brothers were deeply in debt. Daniel had lung problems against which he constantly struggled. Then, early in 1844, he had a life-threatening hemorrhage, brought on by the long hours his new enterprise required.

Lives’ Work

Before Daniel moved to Cambridge, he had become friends with Archdeacon Julius Charles Hare, to whom he had written about one of Hare’s religious books. Through Hare, Daniel came to meet some of the notable writers of his day, among them F. D. Maurice, whose religious books had gained considerable celebrity. Religious books were best sellers in that era, so it was commercially prudent for publishers to have as many of them as possible on their lists of offerings.

The archdeacon and his brother helped finance the Macmillans when they bought Newby’s bookshop in Cambridge, lending them five hundred pounds at 4 percent interest. Despite Daniel’s continued ill health, the shop prospered. The most notable intellectuals from Cambridge University flocked to it, as did Cambridge students, who looked upon it as a second university.

Daniel was aware early of the need for re-editions of books by some notable writers, including Jeremy Taylor, John Donne, Henry Moore, and John Milton. He was too much in debt to do much about publishing these new editions, although in 1844 he published an edition of William Law’s 1723 answer to Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714, 1723), with a preface by Maurice.

At about this time, the Macmillans had the opportunity to buy for six thousand pounds a bookselling business, run by Thomas Stevenson, that had flourished in Cambridge for almost a century. The challenge of expanding in this way was great, and the only way the brothers could meet it was to take on a partner, a wholesale drug merchant.

In 1845, the brothers moved their enterprise to 1 Trinity Street, and it is there that William Wordsworth, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Kingsley were their guests. The Macmillans were becoming a force in British publishing. Both brothers were charming and patient. They made writers believe that the Macmillans had their best interests at heart and understood what they wanted to accomplish in their writing. An aura of trust and mutual understanding surrounded the brothers’ dealings with writers.

Alexander, a man of impeccable intellect and firm ideas, could respect people at odds with his thinking if their reasoning was sound. He had strong persuasive gifts and avoided intellectual confrontation; he took the arts seriously, and creative artists immediately sensed the depth of his devotion to the arts; and he stood ready to defend his authors. These qualities served him admirably as a publisher. When Cambridge University took Maurice’s professorship from him in 1853, Alexander lent Maurice his support and kept his controversial books in print.

Through Maurice, the Macmillans published the work of Charles Kingsley, the first author to bring them considerable financial success. Within a decade of their first venture in publishing, the Macmillans had published scores of books, many of them translations from the classics, for which a ready market existed. One of their enduring successes was the publication in 1852 of John Llewellyn Davies and David James Vaughan’s translation of Plato’s Republic, a book that went into countless editions and still sold well a century after it first appeared. Kingsley’s Phaethon and Isaac Todhuner’s Differential Calculus appeared in 1852 and were dependable sellers for years to come. In 1855, Macmillan press issued a reprint of Maurice’s 1853 book, Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament, which sold briskly.

On September 4, 1850, Daniel had married Frances Orridge. A desperately ill man, Daniel continued to live for only a little more than six years. During his brief marriage, he fathered four children. By 1852, however, it was necessary for him to be away from Cambridge frequently to breathe the sea air that gave him some relief from his illness. He and Alexander carried on a voluminous business correspondence during Daniel’s absences. Despite his illness and absence from the Macmillan Publishing Company, Daniel continued to be intimately involved in forming its policies, in soliciting manuscripts, and in directing the course those manuscripts took.

During the early 1850’s, Great Britain’s uncertain economic climate placed the Macmillans under financial pressure. Nevertheless, they had faith in their basic business policies, knowing that their company could survive periods of economic instability. Daniel, although ill, had worked from 1854 with Kingsley as Kingsley wrote Westward Ho! (1855), which proved to be one of Macmillan’s continuing windfalls, its earnings proliferating markedly after 1889, when the sixpenny edition of the work appeared.

When Daniel died, on June 27, 1857, Kingsley’s current novel, Two Years Ago, was breaking sales records, and the Macmillans, while not yet wealthy, were in a financially promising position. Upon Daniel’s death, Alexander, who had run the day-to-day operations of the company, became its head.

Shortly after Daniel’s death, Alexander opened a branch of the company in London. His nephew, Robert Bowes, who had worked for the company since 1846, ran this operation. Alexander routinely went to London on Thursdays and stayed overnight. During these visits, London’s literati flocked to the Henrietta Street offices in Covent Garden, where Alexander was at home to all comers. It was during these bristling sessions that the idea of Macmillan’s Magazine (1859-1907) was incubated. Alexander launched the magazine, and it became a force in establishing the course of both British and American writing during the nearly fifty years of its existence.

By 1863, Alexander was appointed publisher to the University of Oxford. He had moved his prosperous publishing company from Cambridge to London. Some of the most notable authors of the nineteenth century wrote for Macmillan, which by then had published Thackeray, Walter Pater, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hughes, Christina Rossetti, and Cardinal John Henry Newman.

In 1867, Alexander made his first trip to the United States and was well received. Although he had not gone abroad to establish an American Macmillan, the idea now seemed feasible to him. Daniel’s sons and his own were of an age that they would soon be entering the business, and an American branch provided just the sort of testing ground they needed. By November, 1869, the company had an American branch. Macmillan books printed after 1870 listed both London and New York on their imprint.

Significance

Daniel and Alexander Macmillan established one of the most influential and diverse publishing companies in the world. They were good businesspeople, well seasoned in their trade. Their chief skill, however, was their ability to identify and nurture talent. They had endless patience in their dealings with authors. They were willing to take risks by publishing works that might not sell, but by doing so, they achieved some of their most remarkable successes.

These two men, rising from humble origins and working against substantial economic and personal handicaps, helped establish the intellectual tone of the age in which they lived by making available to readers the most exciting and controversial ideas of their day. Their company, now in its second century, still affects the intellectual direction of the English-speaking world.

Bibliography

Foster, James. A Bibliographical Catalogue of Macmillan and Company’s Publications from 1843 to 1880. London: Macmillan, 1891. This comprehensive list shows the broad range of books that issued from Macmillan and Company during the days when Daniel and Alexander had their most direct influence upon it.

Graves, Charles L. The Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan. London: Macmillan, 1910. Although not comprehensive, Graves’s edition of the letters has an interesting interspersion of biographical data. The letters are well chosen and illuminate the early history of Macmillan and Company.

James, Elizabeth, ed. Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Collection of essays recounting the history of the company since its founding in 1843, based on recent research in the archives of the British Library. The essays explore Macmillan and Company’s nineteenth century business strategy, the company’s expansion into India and the United States, relations with Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and other authors, children’s publishing, and Macmillan’s Magazine.

Macmillan, Alexander. The Letters of Alexander Macmillan. Edited by George Macmillan. Glasgow, Scotland: University Press, 1908. These letters reflect both the range of authors with whom Alexander Macmillan dealt and the careful attention he lavished on them.

Morgan, Charles. The House of Macmillan: 1843-1943. London: Macmillan, 1944. This book remains the comprehensive history of the founding of the Macmillan company and provides a detailed biographical background of both of its founders as well as valuable information about other members of the Macmillan family.

Packer, Lona Mosk, ed. The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. This collection of 133 letters written to Alexander Macmillan and other officials of Macmillan and Company by Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Rossetti, between 1861 and 1889, reveals Alexander’s gentle and understanding handling of one of his notable authors and demonstrates the cordiality of the Rossettis’ relationship with their publisher.

Seiler, Robert, ed. The Book Beautiful: Walter Pater and the House of Macmillan. New Brunswick, N.J.: Athlone Press, 1999. Contains Pater’s letters to his publisher, written between 1872 and 1917. The letters, which have been annotated by Seiler, describe Pater’s literary career and activities at Macmillan and Company.