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Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Morton N. Cohen
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Extract

In 1865, an unknown author calling himself Lewis Carroll compelled a leading publishing house, Macmillan & Company, to suppress the first edition of a children's book entitled Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1886, the same author, better established, instructed the same publisher to dispose of the first edition of The Game of Logic, also meant for children, as not up to his standards of book production. In 1889, Carroll condemned the entire first run often thousand copies of The Nursery “Alice”; and in 1893, when he found that a later run (the sixtieth thousand) of Through the Looking-Glass had come from the presses with the illustrations not well printed, he ordered Macmillan to scuttle those copies as well.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 7 , Spring 1979 , pp. 31 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

NOTES

1. Nine of thirteen volumes survive. They cover the following periods of Dodgson's life: 2 Jan. 1855 to 25 Sept. 1855; 1 Jan. 1856 to 17 Apr. 1858; and 9 May 1862 to Dodgson's death in January 1898. Quotations from C. L. Dodgson's letters and diaries © C. L. Dodgson Estate. Quotations from Macmillan letters © Macmillan London Ltd. “Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan” © Morton N. Cohen. No part of this article may be reproduced without permission.

2. Page numbers after diary quotations refer to Green, Roger Lancelyn, ed., The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1953).Google Scholar Where a quotation stands without a page number, it comes from the unpublished portion of the diaries.

3. For Dodgson's photograph of Combe, see Cohen, Morton N., ed., The Letters of Lewis Carroll, 2 vols., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), facing p. 508.Google Scholar

4. Graves, Charles L., Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan (London: Macmillan, 1910), p.387.Google Scholar Most publishers reject manuscripts they later wish they had published, and Alexander Macmillan is no exception. He turned down Thomas Hardy's first novel, turned away Shaw and Barrie, and refused to meet Mrs. Humphry Ward's terms for Robert Elsmere. Nor was he immune from Victorian prudery. To a friend who proposed to reissue some eighteenth-century novels, he wrote: “You begin with Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne. But what are you to do with their dirt? Modern taste won't stand it. I don't particularly think they ought to stand it” (Graves, , p. 249).Google Scholar

5. Macmillan, George A., Brief Memoir of Alexander Macmillan (privately printed, 1908), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar (reprinted in Macmillan, George A., ed., Letters of Alexander Macmillan [Glasgow: Maclehose, 1908]).Google Scholar

6. “The Bookman” Directory of Booksellers, Publishers, and Authors (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1893), p. 122.Google Scholar

7. For more on the Victorian practice of publishing “on commission” and on “half-profits,” see Nowell-Smith, Simon, International Copyright Law and the Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 50–51Google Scholar; and Gettmann, Royal A., A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 103–11.Google Scholar

8. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, p. 62.Google Scholar

9. The letter is in the Huntington Library, California.

10. For more on the cancelled edition of Alice, see Williams, Sidney Herbert, Madan, Falconer, and Green, Roger Lancelyn, eds., The Lewis Carroll Handbook (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 27–33Google Scholar; Ayres, Harry Morgan, Carroll's Alice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936)Google Scholar; Bond, W. H., “The Publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 10 (1956), 306–24Google Scholar; and Weaver, Warren, “The First Edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: A Census,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 65 (First Quarter, 1971), 1–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (London: Unwin, 1898), pp. 146–49.Google Scholar The deleted wasp fragment came to light in 1974 and has been published on its own and with commentaries; see, for instance, Gardner, Martin, ed., The Wasp in a Wig (New York: Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1977)Google Scholar; Cohen, Morton, “Alice: The Lost Chapter Revealed,” Telegraph Sunday Magazine, 4 09 1977, pp. 12–21Google Scholar; and “A Suppressed Adventure of ‘Alice’ Surfaces after 107 Years,” Smithsonian, 8 (12 1977), 50–[57].Google Scholar

12. The House of Macmillan (New York: Macmillan, 1944), p. 79.Google Scholar

13. Lewis Carroll, 2nd ed., (London: Constable, 1976), p. 153.Google Scholar

14. Alice in Many Tongues (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), p. 23.Google Scholar

15. Lewis Carroll: Fragments of a Looking-Glass, trans. Sheed, Rosemary (New York: Crowell, 1976), pp. 134, 140.Google Scholar

16. See Cook, E. T., The Life of John Ruskin, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: George Allen, 1912), ch. 18, esp. II, 330–31.Google Scholar

17. “Mr. Lewis Carroll's Books,” p. 683.Google Scholar

18. On 11 August, the “Literary Gossip” column of the Athenaeum (p. 180)Google Scholar reported the fact of reduced trade allowances on Lewis Carroll's books and concluded that “this departure from trade custom will doubtless prejudice booksellers against … [Rhyme? and Reason?], and probably interfere with its sale.”

19. Collingwood, , pp. 227–28.Google Scholar

20. “Mr. Lewis Carroll and Booksellers,” pp. 802–03.Google Scholar

21. “Authors as Dictators,” p. 803.Google Scholar

22. “Variable Discounts to the Public,” p. 898.Google Scholar

23. “Authors as Dictators,” p. 898.Google Scholar

24. P. 244, reprinted in Macmillan, Frederick, The Net Book Agreement 1899 and the Book War 1906–1908 (privately printed, 1924), pp. 5–8.Google Scholar

25. Collingwood, , pp. 227–28.Google Scholar