The London Publisher Who Took Mary Shelley's Plague Novel After Everyone Else Refused It

Henry Colburn (c. 1784–1855) was the substantial most operationally aggressive London publisher of the substantial first three decades of the 19th century. He had opened a substantial circulating library and bookshop on Conduit Street in Mayfair in 1806 at approximately age 22, had expanded into book publishing in 1808, and had built through the subsequent two decades a commercial publishing house that specialised in books no other London publisher would touch.

The Colburn list included Polidori’s The Vampyre in 1819, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man in 1826, the early novels of Benjamin Disraeli through the 1820s and 1830s, the silver-fork society novels of Catherine Gore and Theodore Hook through the Regency and early Victorian periods, and dozens of politically-controversial memoir-and-diary volumes from recently-deceased public figures.

It also went bankrupt twice.

What he published

The Colburn operational model was counter-cyclical to the standard London publishing establishment. The Murray, Longman, and Macmillan houses of the period specialised in respectable classics, scientific and reference works, and safe contemporary novels. The Colburn niche was books the respectable houses would not print.

The Polidori Vampyre of 1819 was the early signature publication. The novella had been originally drafted at Lord Byron’s 1816 Geneva villa during the year without a summer; Polidori had shopped it to London publishers for three years without success; the Murray and Bentley houses had declined it as commercially marginal and as politically delicate (it had been originally attributed to Byron by the publishing trade and Byron’s public reputation was difficult to handle in the 1819 climate). Colburn took it. It became one of the commercial successes of the 1819 publishing year.

The Shelley Last Man of 1826 was the Colburn list’s most distinguished and commercially troubled publication. Mary Shelley had completed the three-volume plague novel in late 1825; the standard London publishing houses had declined the book on multiple grounds (the apocalyptic-pessimistic subject matter was out of fashion in the post-Waterloo recovery period; the Shelley reputation was damaged by the recent Percy Shelley scandal-and-drowning history; the 750-page three-volume length exceeded the standard novel format). Colburn took it. It commercially failed — Mary Shelley earned approximately £400 from the publication, the Colburn house lost more than that. The novel is now considered one of the founding works of apocalyptic fiction.

The Disraeli years

The commercial rescue of the Colburn house through the late 1820s came from young Benjamin Disraeli. The future Conservative Prime Minister had begun his career as a commercially-aggressive silver-fork novelist; the 1826 Vivian Grey had been Disraeli’s successful debut; subsequent Disraeli novels (The Young Duke 1831, Contarini Fleming 1832, Henrietta Temple 1837, Coningsby 1844) were Colburn-published and commercially successful.

The Colburn-Disraeli relationship substantively functioned through approximately the 1830s and 1840s.

The bankruptcies

Colburn went bankrupt twice. The first was in 1829, when an over-aggressive advance-payment policy to attract authors away from the established rival houses left him with debts approximately equal to his realisable assets. He resolved that bankruptcy by partnering with Richard Bentley — the two formed the Colburn-Bentley partnership in 1829 — and pooling capital. The partnership lasted three years before mutual recriminations dissolved it in 1832; Bentley kept the lower-end novel list and Colburn the upmarket memoir list.

The second bankruptcy came in 1841, again from over-extended author advances. He resolved this one by selling his backlist for ready cash, retreating to a smaller publishing operation on Great Marlborough Street, and rebuilding more conservatively through the 1840s. He died at home in Bryanston Square in August 1855, aged 71, leaving a estate that included the residual royalties on the Disraeli and silver-fork novel backlists.

The Colburn list was the early-19th-century European literary equivalent of a high-variance investment portfolio: many small losses, a few spectacular successes, and the occasional book (Polidori’s Vampyre, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man) that would prove more durable than any of the commercially successful titles in his own decades.