Daniel Macmillan, son of Arran, and the launch of a Publishing Powerhouse
Or: How he 'Wrote his way out'*
In September 1842, a nervous young Scotsman boarded a train from London to Brighton, and then took a stage coach on a journey that would change his life. He was travelling to meet one of his literary heroes, responding to a pressing invitation that had taken him by surprise. Why would the wealthy and erudite Archdeacon Julius Hare, friend of William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, wish to meet a poorly educated shop assistant from the Isle of Arran.
Daniel had been living and working in London as an assistant at Seeley’s bookshop on Fleet Street since 1836 and was struggling to make anything of his life. Born the son of a crofter on the Isle of Arran, he was 29, and already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him in his forties. His father died when he was ten, and Daniel had been taken out of school and apprenticed to a bookseller in Irvine on the mainland. By the 1840s he had worked his way up through bookshops in Glasgow and Cambridge, and was now employed in London, living with his younger brother Alexander.
Daniel may not have had much schooling, but he had inherited a love of literature from his mother, and had become a voracious reader, keen to improve his knowledge of the world and of his trade. Furthermore he was keen to get on in the world, always pushing for the next promotion, the next opportunity. In the summer of 1840 he became fascinated by a new volume: ‘Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers’. It was a book of homilies, essays and sayings, collected from more than one source but primarily the work of two brothers, both clerics, named Julius and Augustus Hare.
The title must have caught his fancy, it would be something amusing for him and Alexander to discuss in their evening walks over London Fields. The original version had been published anonymously in 1827 but after Augustus died in 1833, Julius, shortly to be appointed Archdeacon of Lewes in Sussex, re-issued the work in his memory. It was perfectly pitched to appeal to young men such as the Macmillans who were trying to educate themselves and make their way in the world.
Daniel loved the book, waxing lyrical about it to all his friends, and in the way of many an enthusiast, became determined to communicate his pleasure to its author. His first fan letter to Julius Hare, written in September 1840, began ‘I feel so grateful to you for your volume of sermons that I cannot help breaking through the usages of society to express my thankfulness’. But Daniel wanted to do more than just express his feelings – he wanted to enlist Hare in a project to save men’s souls. Passionately he wrote of his concerns for his fellow clerks and shop assistants in London and the other big cities, men who found themselves morally and spiritually adrift, in need of the sort of guidance to be found in Hare’s work. Daniel was very clear that these men he had met and talked with at political, Chartist and Socialist meetings, would not read sermons, and despised the squabbling and humbug of the established churches. What they needed was a simple book of advice aimed at their own intellectual level. The letter that begins as fan mail ends as an enthusiastic business proposition. But Hare, although he replied kindly, did not take the bait.
There was no further correspondence until 1842, by which time Daniel had found another hero: Alexander Scott, a preacher, teacher and writer of pamphlets. Daniel felt compelled firstly to introduce Scott’s writings to the venerable Hare, and secondly, like a true disciple, to make it clear that he had spread the word about Hare among all his friends ‘in various parts of England and Scotland, friends in India, in Africa, in New South Wales, who bought … “Guesses at Truth” because of my recommendation.’ And, explained Daniel, they were all eager for the next volume. In a tactful way, Daniel was emphasising his claim to be noticed. A month later came the much longer reply that Daniel had been hoping for, as Hare, flattered by Daniel’s enthusiasm, was indeed delighted with Scott.
Greatly encouraged, Daniel wrote again, to remind Hare that his original purpose had been to interest him in taking up the cause of the Christian education of the ‘class of London clerks’. Every Sunday Daniel saw working men buying newspapers and reading them aloud to their illiterate friends, and yet nothing the Press was saying was helping these men find God. He sent Hare examples of two periodicals found everywhere – with circulations of thirty to forty thousand – ‘papers found on the tables of all small ale-houses, cigar shops, barbershops, coffeehouses…decidedly infidel in their tendencies and yet they are the real guides of great numbers’.
Daniel’s suggestion was that men such as Hare and his brother-in-law, fellow cleric and author Frederick Denison Maurice, should write regular letters to be published in these popular periodicals. The two clerics discussed the proposition, and Hare wrote back at length to Daniel, responding that simply inserting religious teachings into these papers would be ‘casting pearls before swine’ as they put it: perhaps a better answer could be a newspaper or journal specifically targeted at this audience. Hare wondered if Daniel would like to become an editor, and he invited Daniel to visit Buckwell Place, his extremely large and well-appointed rectory at Herstmonceaux, to discuss the problem.
The impact on Daniel of this visit to Hare’s beautiful and comfortable home, with some 12,000 books lining the walls of every room (and all of them, as he noted, read and annotated) can be judged by the lengthy letter he subsequently wrote to a friend. Daniel was overwhelmed, amazed to be so kindly treated by a family he considered almost noble in achievement and grace, a family who had also entertained some of Daniel’s literary idols: Thomas Arnold, De Quincey, Charles Lamb, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. He described Hare in great detail: his height, his hair, his expression ‘that of a very thoughtful, kind-hearted, simple-minded man, quite free from all self-consciousness.’ The contrast between the two men would have been marked: Hare was 47, public school educated, six feet tall, handsome, hale and hearty. Daniel was a much slighter man, his early poverty and ill health had not improved his physical appearance, leaving him frail. His Scottish accent would have been strong – this was a boy who had grown up in a household where his father spoke and preached in Gaelic.
The stay in Sussex was swiftly followed by the development of a real friendship with FD Maurice which would have a profound effect on Daniel’s life – he was to call his first two sons Frederick and Maurice in honour of the great man. Frederick Denison Maurice has been hailed by many as one of the greatest thinkers of the Victorian age – Tennyson would call him ‘the greatest mind of them all’. He was not just a theologian and a writer, but an educationalist, who developed most of the philosophy that underlay the Christian Socialist movement, while working in practice to promote the higher education of women and of the working classes. Daniel would not be the only young, impressionable disciple who would fall under his spell, as his influence on Victorian culture and political thought was far-reaching
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Daniel had already concluded that he would never be satisfied with a job as a clerk in a Fleet Street bookshop. His salary was now £130, his brother Alexander was earning £80. The added confidence that these two new impressive friendships gave Daniel, combined with the reassurance of a joint income of over £200 a year, encouraged him to establish his own business. The brothers could not afford premises in the fashionable West End, but the landlord of their lodgings in Charterhouse Square, Mr Sewell, suggested they open a small shop on the ground floor of his other property at 57 Aldersgate Street in the City, which Alexander would run, leaving Daniel to work at Seeley’s on the better salary.
Hare was an immediate and loyal customer, ordering books and bindings and introducing more friends. As Daniel wrote to him:
We are content to make the best of Aldersgate Street for the present, hoping to move west by and by. We have a very neat shop for a very small rent. … We have commenced in quite a small way. If a large tree grows from this small seed we shall be grateful. If not we shall be content; we shall feel that it is as it ought to be. We are determined that it shall not fail through indolence or extravagance. If the business should prosper, we shall, both of us, do our best to realise some of our ideals with regard to what should be done for the craftsmen of our land.
It was a brave statement, and laced with traces of his Calvinist fatalism, and his belief that he and his brother were working for God’s purpose on earth, in their own way. But in fact Aldersgate Street was not ideal, the site was too close to the established competition around St Paul’s, they had little stock and no captive customer base. However many books they hunted out from other shops and parcelled off to the friends and family of Julius Hare, this shop was never going to make their fortune.
In August 1843 a couple of Daniel’s old Cambridge friends tipped him off that a bookshop in Trinity Street, right in the centre of the city, was on the market. Daniel rather archly mentioned it in a letter to Julius Hare, saying that he had been to look at it, but regretted that taking the lease had proved beyond his means. In return he received a remarkable letter from the very kind Archdeacon: ‘What sum of money would you want to enable you to take Newby’s business at Cambridge? And what chance do you think there is of it proving a profitable one? My brother, [Marcus Hare] whom you saw here, on hearing what you said in your letter on the subject said that if it be so, means might perhaps be found to let you have a moderate sum of money at moderate interest with a reasonable security.’
Daniel seized his chance, never bashful about coming forward, and his reply ran to nineteen closely argued pages. He was persuasively excited about the opportunity - in particular, the situation was very good, being across the street from the gates of Trinity College with only Stevenson’s shop at Number One Trinity Street offering any competition. Daniel understood the merits of being a big fish in a small pool: ‘I should give [it] close and careful attention, and in Cambridge could get well known quicker than in London.’ His proposal was that he himself would take responsibility for running Cambridge until it was making profits, and meanwhile Alexander would continue to manage the Aldersgate shop.
Daniel felt that he needed to be absolutely honest with the Hare brothers about the state of his health. After all, he himself had feared that he had consumption, particularly as he understood that it ran in families, and he had already lost his parents and two older brothers at a young age. However, a doctor had recently pronounced him healthy and said ‘that if I lived to turn thirty I should in all probability live to be an old man’. Nevertheless, he planned to take out a life insurance policy to provide cover of a thousand pounds.
The reply from Julius Hare was swift and very encouraging:
I have read your accounts of your life and prospects with much interest and am quite disposed to agree with you that there is a strong likelihood of your succeeding at Cambridge. An intelligent person there, knowing something about books, would be likely to find favour in the eyes of both the older and younger members of the University and by writing to some of my own friends…I think we could manage so that you should not be long in getting known. … And we should be very thankful if by doing so we can help in placing you in a situation where you may be better able hereafter to effect something for the great object of your life, which I doubt not you will always keep steadily before you.
Hare offered to lend £500, more than £55,000 at today’s values, if Daniel could raise the balance from other friends. Hare was taking the role as mentor and advisor to Daniel, challenging him to justify his plans and think through his opportunities. He had no children, and was happy to take a fatherly interest in his young protégé.
The next two months were particularly trying for Daniel, as Mr Newby was difficult to negotiate with, not surprisingly distrustful of this young man with the consumptive look, the strong Scottish accent and no assets of his own. But by 12 October he had arrived at an agreed deal. The capital was lent as to £500 by Hare and £250 by Mr Burnside, one of Daniel’s previous employers. The independent valuation when it came showed stock and fixtures at £634, about £100 more than Daniel had expected, so he accelerated his plans to mark down the stock and turn it quickly into cash. He set to work with extraordinary haste, in a mess of carpenters and painters, creating a catalogue, giving orders for fresh books, and finding a great deal of rubbish to be dealt with and disposed of. The Cambridge Chronicle of January 1844 published a notice that the Macmillan brothers would be clearing out surplus stock soon, for cash only, to make space for ‘more carefully selected books.’
In no time at all Daniel had overdone it and the cold January weather and biting Cambridge winds brought on an extremely severe attack of his old illness, with, for the first time, a haemorrhage of blood from his lungs. Alexander was summoned and took the first coach up to Cambridge – but in his haste he took an outside seat and by the time he arrived he was also prostrated, with sciatica. The pair did not seem to have been a good investment for Burnside and Hare. Alexander wrote to Hare in February 1844 about his brother: ‘The doctor said that with very great care he would get over it in a month or two but that unless he was entirely relieved from all anxiety about business at once and for some time there was little hope of his recovery.’ Julius immediately took up his pen urging Daniel to keep Alexander with him and give up the London shop as soon as practicable. ‘with your excitable temperament, constant care would be needed to prevent a relapse. Your plan was a prudent one but it seems rather ordained that the two brothers should work together in the same spot than divided’. Very sadly, Daniel had to agree, writing to Hare: ‘We have resolved to follow your kind suggestion. As soon as my brother can leave me he will go to London to get rid of the shop.’ For the next fifteen years the brothers would struggle together to build a business in Cambridge.
It was certainly a struggle. The account books for 1843 to 1846, show that they barely kept their head above water and were constantly in need of small loans from local friends and Burnside to pay their bills. Their salvation would have to lie in the slow but steady creation of a publishing imprint, which in time would overtake the bookshop and create a successful, international company. The first book published by the House of Macmillan was lodged at the library in the British Museum on 10 November 1843, and it was a very simple piece, not surprisingly considering everything else on the brothers’ plate at that time. Nonetheless the very subject matter they chose was symbolic – they were determined to spread knowledge to all classes, and if they could not find the books they thought were needed and wanted to sell, they would commission and publish them for themselves. Alexander had worked as a teacher, and the book was a manual for schoolmasters called ‘The Philosophy of Training’, by AR Craig. It ran to just 92 pages, containing ‘suggestions on the necessity of normal schools for teachers [ie teacher-training colleges] to the wealthier classes, and strictures on the prevailing mode of teaching languages’.
The next volume they published still bore the London address as well as that of 17 Trinity Street, Cambridge and ran to 120 pages: “The Three Questions: What am I? Whence came I? Whither do I go?” by William Haig Miller, a bank clerk that Alexander had got to know at the Parish Sunday School. However, neither of these slight books, by unknown authors, would make significant money or create a name for the House of Macmillan. What they needed was a stable of authors with recognition and selling power among the educated Victorian intelligentsia, and Julius Hare warmly introduced Daniel Macmillan into the centre of just such a stable. His network of contacts soon became Daniel and Alexander’s network too, assiduously cultivated, at times with almost reverential respect.
Of course, Hare could only encourage his friends to visit the shop, it was up to the entrepreneurial brothers to cultivate these relationships. As Thomas Hughes, who knew them well, wrote ‘Now, partly through Hare, partly through Maurice, but much more by the brothers’ power to win always the respect and nearly always the affection of those they met, they were making friends, and because in friendship, as in all else, they were unswerving and untiring, they did not lose them.’ Their clients became their guests, then their friends, and often their authors. Many undergraduates had only been sent to Cambridge as a prerequisite to taking holy orders, and now struggled to make sense of their studies, finding no help from their tutors. To these young men, the guidance and wisdom of the friendly Macmillan brothers was invaluable.
By 1845, with Daniel’s strength and spirit much recovered, and Alexander working full-time alongside him, the publishing business could take off in earnest – issuing seven books that year which covered non-fiction subjects as wide-ranging as law, theology, poetry, mathematics and mechanics. There was a strong bias in favour of Cambridge academics as authors. That same year saw the brothers take a highly significant commercial risk. The death of their chief competitor, Stevenson, who operated out of 1 Trinity Street, offered them the chance to acquire his business. They were delighted to relocate to the prime retail position in Cambridge, a corner house facing west towards the Senate House and with living accommodation for the pair of them
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From this point on the relationship with Hare began to diminish in importance in comparison with the new responsibilities of the business. However it is clear that Daniel never forgot what he owed his first supporter: in June 1853 he wrote a long letter, which began:
I have seldom ventured, when writing or speaking to you, to do more than allude to how much I feel that I owe to your great kindness and that of your brother Marcus. But I seldom forget it: my wife and my brother join with me: and our children will learn to love and reverence your name. If it had not been for your kind help and encouragement and friendly recommendations I should not have been here.
Within four years, both Daniel and Hare would be dead, but some thirty years later, when Thomas Hughes, a family friend, was asked to write the biography of Daniel, the encounter with Julius Hare was given due prominence as the turning point in the fortunes of the brothers. Daniel’s children had indeed remembered the story. The surviving correspondence shows that it was no myth, and that Hare’s surprising and spontaneous generosity was pivotal.
Postscript: Daniel Macmillan died this day, 27 June 1857, and is buried in Mill Road Cemetery, Cambridge
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*My little tribute to Lin Manuel Miranda!
This looks brilliant - are they anything to do with the one who started the cancer charity?!