Alexander on his travels

Macmillan reaches America

A simple piece from me today - I’m off on holiday, and here is the intrepid Alexander Macmillan going to the States in 1867:

Selling books into America as a British publisher was fraught with difficulty, not the least being the very high import duties, but crucially the lack of copyright laws, which meant that pirate copies of Macmillan’s books circulated across North America and there was nothing that could be done to prevent it from London. As early as 1865, while the dust of the Civil War settled, Alexander began to plan a trip to America, but business and family troubles delayed him and it was not until the summer of 1867 that he was ready to go, confident that the business was in safe hands. He wrote to a friend: ‘I hardly anticipate doing much actual business, but only to gain a more accurate idea of what can be done in the future. It will be much to get the goodwill of gentlemen engaged in educational work and to let them know what books we already have published, and also what we propose publishing in future.’

This letter is a great illustration of Macmillan’s enthusiasm for America, which may have been slightly dented during the war, but he perceived a country of enormous political, and economic, promise.

America! The land of life, of liberty, the hope of the world, inheritor of our greatness, our light, our freedom, alas! Inheritor to too great a degree of our arrogance, money-worship and faithlessness to high calling and gifts of God, but which on the whole she is shaking off nobly in spite of our imbecile arrogance and silly sneers – our . . . unpatriotic pirates and worshippers of slave-holding aristocrats! . . . what right have we to talk slightingly of the land that produced Peabody, and produces hundreds like him, men whose aim is not to ‘found families’ but to help forward God’s cause in the world!. . . . Of course, the Yankees have their faults, and when I see them I don’t hesitate to tell them in very plain words what I think of their faults. But have we none like them? Where did they get their brag from? Their love of money? Their contempt of other people? . . . Look at our contempt of the Irish, of France, of Germany, of America . . . of everybody and every race but our vain-glorious selves, on whom God had bestowed so much, and to whose cause, as a nation and in the mass, we have rendered back so little.

It was not the first time Alexander had crossed the Atlantic, as a youth he had worked as a deckhand, but travelling first class on Cunard’s RMS Scotia was a very different experience. The Scotia was the second largest ship in the world at that time, the star of Cunard’s steamship fleet and holding the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing. It was a paddle steamer, with no steerage quarters, designed for the rapid transport of first-class passengers. Alexander travelled in great comfort – enjoying two glass-windowed saloons, dining space for three hundred passengers, a bakery, a butcher and an icehouse on board. He was delighted to discover a couple of English lords among his fellow passengers. The ship arrived on 20 August, after a trouble-free ten-day voyage, Alexander whiling away his time reading the poetry of James Russell Lowell, Goldwin Smith’s Lectures and, for a little light relief, or ‘vacuous excitement’ as he called it, the popular bestseller Lady Audley’s Secret. Over the next six weeks, Alexander visited Illinois, Toronto, Niagara, Montreal, Philadelphia, Long Island, Washington, and Boston. It was a trip of a lifetime and never repeated. His experiences, and the people he met, made such an impression that he wrote it up as a lecture, ‘A Night with the Yankees’, delivered in Cambridge Town Hall in March 1868 and then printed for private distribution. Harvard Library’s copy is personally signed by Alexander for Senator Charles Sumner.

As always, Alexander was careful in his analysis to avoid sweeping generalizations or to pretend that one six-week journey could entitle him to pontificate upon a continent of thirty-four million people:

I will endeavour to confine myself strictly to stating things I actually saw . . . The craving which seems to haunt so many persons, both readers and writers, for complete rounded judgements of men and classes and nations, seems to me one of the most unhealthy in its nature, and injurious in its consequences, that can infect the mind and narrow the heart of man.

The RMS Scotia docked at Jersey City, and from there Macmillan took a ferry into New York, booking into the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

I here first made the acquaintance with the hotel clerk – a type of American gentleman that for serene lofty demeanour is, I think, unequalled by any of the genus homo I ever met . . . a dignified self-confidence and repose, with not a touch of what you would call rudeness, that seemed to me inimitable. But I found it in all other hotels I went to: it was the manner of the class – the repose that stamps the cast of Vere de Vere could not be finer. Once at Buffalo I had a slight touch of sauciness, which I was able to snub, but it was only momentary and the man soon recovered his armour.

Two nights aboard a sleeper train brought him to Chicago, where he spent two days.

The whole place had a raw, unsettled look, the pavement dry mud on the carriageway and planking on the footpath. It is the great corn market for Illinois and the great lake district. But the whole place had an unsettled feeling, as if one were on a sea of mud or sand, and gave one an experience as of mental sea-sickness. Yet I met some really pleasant cultivated men there; and this unsettledness is natural in a place which has grown so rapidly . . . I spent little time in that city . . . so distressed by the heat, choked and blinded with the dust, and annoyed by the snarling hum of the mosquito, that my frame of mind was not favourable to much study of the place . . . Besides there are a good many Irish. I saw gigantic placards on the walls summoning Fenian meetings for the overthrow of England.

His purpose in visiting Chicago, apart from spending time with a bookseller there, was to visit his sister and brother-in-law, Margaret and Robert Bowes, who lived on the prairie about a hundred miles outside the city, in Waltham, La Salle. The pair had left Arran in the late 1840s, joining a small group of other Scottish emigrants scraping a living on Illinois farmland. Even here, in relative backwoods country, Alexander was impressed by the emphasis on education, with school buildings noticeable every few miles, and the farming folk eager to discuss politics and literature: ‘I met farmers in the prairies who had read and understood Carlyle, Mill, Buckle, Ruskin, Lecky and authors of that class.’ And ‘in every house I visited there was a good library, and books like Macaulay’s England and Hallam’s works were not infrequent . . . Unquestionably, I think the general intelligence of these simple men and maidens was up to the level of our ordinary middle class.’ He wrote to his wife on 29 August, ‘Life is exceedingly simple here, not unlike that of our old Arran friends, but with more tidiness in most respects and very much more plenty. The house where Margaret lives is about as large as the Glen Sannox manse.’

From Illinois he travelled to Canada, where he saw Niagara Falls, sailed down Lake Ontario and into Montreal ‘greatly changed since I saw it thirty years ago’. By mid-September he was staying with the publisher Lippincott in Philadelphia, then on to New York where he spent a weekend on Long Island with an amateur but highly respected Shakespearean scholar, Richard Grant White. In the city itself he dined with the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, and then spent a night in Washington where he visited the Capitol and was introduced to the President and to the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Joseph Henry. His support for the winning side in the war opened doors that may not have been available to some of his competitors. His final journey was to Boston, to stay with James T Fields, and then with Andrew White, founding Principal of Cornell University.

One of the main delights of his trip, as far as Alexander was concerned, was the munificence and philanthropy of the wealthy American, even from the young and newly minted, and his talks with White led him to tell the tale: ‘A Mr Cornell, who twenty-five years ago was a working mechanic, and who has made a large fortune by some discovery connected with the laying of telegraph wires, has just given half a million dollars to found a University in the upper part of New York State.’ He was impressed by the assumption that money should be spread across the community like this, and that the notion of leaving it all to the children was discouraged. He was equally impressed by the number of working men who owned their own homes or farmed their own plots. This, he believed, would surely lead to a more settled political climate: ‘Poverty, social degradation, want of a stake in the country – that is the fuel which kindles into fury and destruction at their fires. All old States in Europe will have to look to that disease’, wrote Alexander Macmillan, just three years before the Paris Commune.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

During his week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fields took him to a dinner of the Atlantic Club, where he met Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips: the Boston Set, the root and centre of the abolitionist movement beloved of Macmillan and his Christian Socialist friends. ‘They are unquestionably New America. No great idea that works through the States but has its birthplace, or at least its cradle, there.’ Longfellow invited him to lunch at his house. He heard Emerson lecture to an audience of two thousand on ‘Eloquence’: he had been given a platform ticket and took delight in the audience’s bright faces. At the other end of the scale he was taken to see a boys’ reformatory on board the Boston School Ship as a guest of Judge Russell, former host of Charles Dickens.

Throughout his travels, Alexander was delighted with how proud the people he met were of their country and their political institutions: ‘I found no one who did not at once, and strongly, express his confidence in the soundness of the Republican Government, and its ultimate power to carry their nation to great and permanent well-being.’ He was more determined than ever to assume the role of peacemaker between two nations that should be friends, and to work to repair the damage that had been done to transatlantic relations by the War.

However, the principal purpose of his voyage was to scout out supporters and allies in his ventures to increase book sales in such an educated and booming literary market. On his journey home, he sketched out his thoughts in a long letter to James MacLehose.

The high tariff is a terrible drawback, undoubtedly, and in case of an international copyright taking place, if the tariff continued American publishers would reap the benefit. But if we had a house there and an able man to manage it, this might be met. The true idea would be to have a printing office either of one’s own or connected with one you could depend on, so as to be prepared to publish there and here at the same time. A great international publishing house is possible, and could be a grand idea to be realized . . .

Alexander was not the first British publisher to have this thought, but as stated in the papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, ‘Only one house—Macmillan, in Britain—was truly successful in transplanting itself across the ocean.’

The search was on for the right person to send, and it was not until July 1869 that Alexander was able to tell the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, who supported his scheme, that the right man, had been found. In June 1869, Macmillan wrote to William Amery, of Pott and Amery in New York, explaining why he was opening his own branch office rather than appointing one of his existing partners on an exclusive basis.

Our desire that our name & publications should stand clear before the American public so that what is ours should be at all times clear . . . however might be interfered with, if another name were attached to it. And then when we sought hereafter to stand alone there might be difficulty in arranging matters so as to prevent in the public mind some idea of alienation as the course of separation. We have been much tempted by the very kind offer you make to calm us of so much anxiety & assurance at starting. But it seems to me that if we are to go into it at all we had better face it fully. If we fail – tho’ I have no fear – we cannot lose a great deal, and we can blame no one but ourselves.

This is very reminiscent of his brother Daniel Macmillan’s sentiments when they first opened their own shop twenty-five years before. If it all went wrong, there was no one to blame but themselves.

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