Biography

John Murray II (1778-1843), was the second proprietor of John Murray publishing house. It had been founded by his father in 1768. When his father died in 1793, John was still a minor attending school. While still at school, his writing master slipped while repairing his pen and drove his penknife into young John's right eye, destroying the sight in that eye. His mother inherited the business and Samuel Highley was named to carry on the business. When his mother remarried in 1795, John went into partnership with Highley. In 1804, John dissolved the partnership with Highley.

Whereas Highley had concentrated on stock, Murray concentrated upon publishing. Under his leadership, such authors as Walter Scott, Jane Austen, John Wilson Croker, Leigh Hunt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Madame de Stael, Thomas Moore, Sir John Franklin (the explorer), Washington Irving, Isaac Disraeli, and Thomas Robert Malthus were published by the Murray publishing house. He also published the first cookbook for domestic cookery rather than institutional cookery.

It is Murray's association with George Gordon, Lord Bryon, for which he is primarily remembered as a publishser. Murray published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which was very successful, and other of Byron's works. The relationship between Murray and Byron was rocky, with Murray sometimes refusing to publish items submitted by Bryon, and Bryon writing abusive letters to Murray. It was Murray who, after paying two thousand pounds for Byron's autobiography, to be published posthumously, deemed that it would damage Byron's reputation, and burned it in the fireplace of the drawing room at the publishing house at 50 Albemarle Street on May 17, 1824.

Murray, who was a conservative and a Tory, decided that the conservatives needed a journal to answer the liberal Edinburgh Review. The first edition of the Quarterly Review appeared in 1809. It championed English morality, the aristocracy, and the Anglican church, and had strong ties to the Tory party. John Wilson Croker, secretary of the Admiralty and a literary man, was a prime contributor. Croker was known for venomous attacks on currently published material, especially that of Shelley and Keats, and it has been said that his attack on Keats's "Endymion" hastened that author's death. The Quarterly Review published its last number in 1968.

Murray hosted literary and political discussions in the drawing room of the publishing house, and the Athenaeum Club grew out of these gatherings.

Murray was known "the prince of booksellers" and his books were known to be elegant and discerning. During Murray's time at the helm of John Murray publishing house, the pattern of patronage of an author by a wealthy benefactor gradually gave way to a relationship between an author and his commercial publisher. Murray's relationship with his authors contributed a great deal to that movement.

As of this writing (Fall 2001), the John Murray publishing house is still publishing and still has its offices at 50 Albemarle Street, London.

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