REPOST: Is your hearrt in your worrk?
The Partnerships of George Lillie Craik
It took the loss of a leg to launch George Lillie Craik into the two partnerships that would change his life: his marriage to the well-known Victorian novelist Dinah Mulock, and his subsequent admission to the partnership of Macmillan & Co. Until then he was not even the most successful or well-known George Lillie Craik in Britain: that honour belonged to his uncle, a Scottish philosopher and author, latterly a Professor at Belfast University.
In 1861 George Junior, as we may call him, was working as a poorly-paid accountant and travelling in the second class compartment of a night train from Glasgow to London. In the early hours of the morning the carriage was de-railed somewhere near Harrow. George was the only serious casualty, and the railway company ferried him to a London hotel, where it rapidly became clear that his badly fractured leg would need to be amputated. With his family 400 miles away, the only person he could think of in London to support him was a friend of his famous Uncle George, a woman they had both met at various literary and Christian Socialist gatherings and who had stayed with his family in Scotland. Her name was Dinah Mulock, and she was a popular novelist, author of the best-seller, John Halifax, Gentleman . Dinah was happy to help and, after supporting him through the operation, took him back to recuperate at her cottage, Wildwood, on Hampstead Heath, where she hosted him, his mother and his sister for several months. And one thing led to another…
On 29 April 1865, a very quiet wedding was performed at Trinity Church, Bath, the couple choosing to marry by special licence, which meant that no banns were required and fuss could be kept to a minimum. The bride hiding from her public was 39-year old Dinah Maria Mulock, the groom was the one-legged Scottish accountant, George Lillie Craik, aged 28. If they had been hoping to slip into matrimony unnoticed, they would have been frustrated: a news article was rapidly syndicated across Great Britain which wrongly identified the groom as George’s father, the 64-year old cleric James Craik. Dinah and George were forced to publish a correction, which only served to emphasis the unusual discrepancy in their ages.
When Dinah told her great friend the publisher Alexander Macmillan that she intended to marry and move to Scotland with George, he was taken aback and disappointed. Spurred into action by the potential loss of a woman on whom he had come to depend for literary counsel and contributions, Alexander made enquiries into George’s business abilities, and two months later offered to make him a partner in Macmillan & Co, if the couple would stay in London. George thus became the only non-family member of the rapidly-growing publishing house, and would survive Alexander, dying a very wealthy man.
Craik’s role in the firm was effectively to sweep up behind Alexander, who remained the guiding light of the firm, and the man of ideas. Craik deployed his accountancy skills, taking over the book-keeping, the contract negotiations, and the operational aspects of the business. Macmillan had only recently relocated from Cambridge to London, and had built splendid new offices in Bedford Street in Covent Garden, where Craik supervised a team of clerks and shop assistants, stomping up and down stairs on his wooden leg, encouraging the team in his gruff Scottish tones ‘Is your Hearrt in your worrk?’ Outside the office, Dinah and George settled into happy married life. Jane Carlyle wrote bitchily to her husband that they ‘did not look at all ill-matched. His physical sufferings have made up in looks the ten years of difference. He has got an excellent imitation leg.’
At first they took a house close to the Macmillan family in Tooting, Arran Cottage, perhaps named by Alexander Macmillan himself as Arran was the island which his family had called home until 1816. Then they instructed a promising young architect, Norman Shaw, to build them a splendid house in Beckenham, known as The Corner House, George irritating Shaw with late requests for a billiard room to be added. They adopted a daughter, a foundling baby, and christened her Dorothy. The couple were highly hospitable, they enjoyed mixing in the circles of eminent Victorian authors and artists, and Craik himself became particularly close to John, later Viscount, Morley, one of the readers for the firm.
Dinah died suddenly in 1887, while preparing for Dorothy’s forthcoming wedding to her cousin Alexander Mulock Pilkington. Was this just unfortunate timing? There are reasons to think that the marriage caused more than the usual stress to Dinah. Despite her mother’s passing, Dorothy pushed ahead rapidly with her plans and the wedding took place just a few weeks later, very quietly, again by special licence, again with no banns being read. Dorothy’s son was born just two months later, in Belgium. The well-worn images of Victorian melodrama seem to haunt the telling of George and Dinah’s life.
The friends and connections of the Macmillan publishing house rallied round George in his difficulties. A few months after Dinah’s death he was elected to the prestigious Athenaeum Club, his supporters including Robert Browning, Sir George Grove and William Holman Hunt, Henry James, Millais and WH Smith. He shared his partner Alexander’s love of poetry, and became a leading campaigner for the preservation of Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage in the Lake District. He joined the Board of the Fine Art Society, the New Bond Street dealers. In 1892 he married again, a Miss Anna Holme, previously a neighbour in Beckenham. She was thirty-two, George was fifty-five. They bought a house in Eversley, the village which would have been known to George as the parish of Charles Kingsley, one of Macmillan’s first and most successful authors. The next five years saw the death of Alexander Macmillan, and the incorporation of the partnership into limited companies in both London and New York, in which George maintained a substantial shareholding. When he died in 1905, his estate was valued at £92,479 (or £9 million in today’s values, according to the Bank of England calculator.)
George Lillie Craik may have lost a leg, but he found a wife, a career and a partnership that would ultimately establish him as one of the most significant figures in Victorian publishing history.
Have a nice break.