Edward Moxon 1801-1858

Edward was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire on 12 December 1801, the eldest son of Michael and Ann Moxon. Michael had married Ann Watson on 30th December 1800 and were to produce a family of four boys and four girls.

Michael worked in the "woolen" town of Wakefield as a cropper, a worker who cut off the rough surface of the cloth with large shears before the material was pressed and finished so that the nap lay evenly.

Edward was fortunate to be selected to attend the Green Coat School, a charitable institution established to educate the poor of the town. At the age of nine Edward was apprenticed to a local bookseller, Edward Smith. It was evident, from an early age Edwards' interest in books and in particular, poetry.

He left his hometown about 1817 and set off to London. Little is known of his first four years in the capital but in 1821 he joined the publishing firm of Longmans. During his time with Longmans he worked himself up in the company, eventually taking charge of one of the country departments. These years brought him into contact with many literary figures of the time, contacts that would prove invaluable in future years.

Influential Friends

During his late teens and early twenties Edward was reading steadily and writing verse. In 1824 Edward submitted his poems to the poet and essayist Charles Lamb for his criticism and advice. Lamb took to the young man immediately, not for his poetry, (it was clear that he would never be a notable poet), but for his open, friendly demeanour. He became a regular visitor to the Lamb's household and kept Charles and his sister Mary supplied with news of the trade and a selection of the latest books.

With Lambs encouragement Edward published his first book "The Prospect and Other Poems" in 1826 through Longmans the firm in which he was one of their "best hands". Also in 1826 Edward visited Wordsworth in the Lake District, carrying a letter of introduction from Lamb. It was the first of many visits that were to last until Wordsworth's death in 1850.

In 1828 Edward, ever keen to advance himself, moved to Hurst, Chance & Co, a publisher located in St Paul's Churchyard. In 1829 Hurst, Chance & Co published their employee's second volume of verse, "Christmas" dedicated to Charles Lamb.

At this time, one of Edwards most influential literary friendships was with the poet and wealthy banker Samuel Rogers. Rogers was an important ally in the forming of Edward's literary fortunes.

Publisher in his own right

When, in 1830, Edward set out as a publisher it was Rogers who lent £500 to ease the precarious financial path of the first year. "Album Verses" by Charles Lamb was the first book to bear the imprint Edward Moxon 64 New Bond Street, London. The second book, was more significant in that it set the tone of future productions from the Bond Street premises. Rogers had withdrawn his established favourite narrative poem, "Italy" from his own publishers. He gave it to Edward to produce a prestigious edition illustrated by JMW Turner and Thomas Stothard. This book was beautifully presented, type styles and layout were simple but elegant and the small steel engravings are regarded as classics of their type.

Edward's friendship with the Lambs not only brought literary benefits but also an introduction to his future wife. Emma Isola had been unofficially adopted by the Lambs in 1826 and with the young Edward's frequent visits to the household a romantic attachment was hardly surprising.

1833 was a milestone year in Edward's life. The publishing business had flourished to such an extent that he felt confident enough to move to larger premises at 44 Dover Street, Piccadilly.

Now on a firmer financial footing Edward also felt he was able to support a wife. Edward and Emma were married on 30th July 1833 at Hanover Square, Charles Lamb gave the bride away and the newlyweds spent the next six weeks honeymooning in Paris.

In the first few years of business Edward had relied upon literary contacts made in association with Rogers and Lamb. They were well established writers with little attendant risk in publishing their works but in 1832 he was delighted to open an association with a promising young poet.

Important new friends

Alfred Tennyson was a young Cambridge graduate and Edward had taken an instant liking to the man and his work. It was an association that was to last 28 years, both on a personal and business level.

The first edition of "Tennyson's Poems" ran to 600 copies but due to unfavourable reviews, only 250 copies had sold after the first two years. Tennyson's rise to fame was thus, not one of overnight success and it is unlikely that the Moxon publishing house made any money from the association during the first 10 years. Tennyson had been so stung by the criticism of his 1832 volume that it took Edward 10 years to persuade Tennyson to publish again.

In 1835 Wordsworth moved his business to Moxons and enjoyed a resurgence in popularity under his new publisher.

Finally in 1842 Edward's chivvying paid off when "Tennyson's Poems" in two volumes became an instant success and the fortunes of poet and publisher became inextricably linked.

Business practices

Edward was unlike other publishers of the day in his business dealings. He was a lover of poetry who indulged himself in the publication of works that he himself found an affinity. It says much of his taste in that after the death of Charles Lamb in 1834, he appears not to have solicited other opinions in what he should or shouldn't publish. It is clear that he could have made more money publishing inferior works underwritten by wealthy authors but he chose not to do so and at a time when poetry wasn't selling as well as 20 years previously, he not only made a living from publishing it, he made his fortune.

His relationships with many of his authors was not just on a business footing. He was a social friend of both Wordsworth and Tennyson, accompanying Wordsworth on a trip to Paris, Wordsworth's children on a holiday to the Pyrenees and Tennyson on a tour of France and Switzerland.

Growing Family

Edward and Emma had started their family in December 1834 when Edward Isola was born. Sadly their eldest boy only lived seven years but seven other children lived to maturity, two boys and five girls, they were; Emma, Lucy Gertrude, Charles Isola, Mary Louisa, Catherine, Maria Wordsworth and Arthur Henry.

Edward was by the early 1840s a well respected and successful publisher. His list of authors read like a who's who of Victorian poets and when in 1843 Wordsworth was offered the post of Poet Laureate it was Edward who was entrusted with the task of receiving the appointment at St. James's Palace.

Like many wealthy Victorians Edward was an inveterate traveller. Not for him the confines of the office or bookshop, he spent a large proportion of his business life cultivating literary contacts at home and abroad. When they were able, Emma and the family accompanied him but only during his summer visits to Broadstairs, on the Kent coast. These summer trips were not solely for pleasure but a rest cure. It is evident from letters that from as early as 1837 Edward suffered frequent bouts of serious ill health. During the 1830s and 40s it seems to have had little effect on his business but in the last decade of his life it's significant that few new names were added to his list of writers.

Established Reputation

When Wordsworth died in 1850 Tennyson accepted the position of Poet Laureate. It was a time of great success and public recognition for the poet and his publisher. Earlier that year, after much urging from Edward, Tennyson had agreed to the publication of his elegiac reflections on the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. "In Memoriam" was a critical and commercial success and is recognised as his greatest work.

In 1849, reflecting the Moxon family fortunes, Edward's younger brother William, by now a wealthy London barrister, had an imposing house built on Putney Heath. It's unclear wether William ever intended the house for himself as he seems never to have lived in it. Edward, Emma and their children were ensconced there by 1851, as shown by the census return, along with Edward's mother Ann, sister Elizabeth and assorted servants. William at this time was still living in the long established family home at 105 Ebury Street. Brothers Alfred and John, both heavily involved in the bookshop side of the business were living in Dover Street.

Tennyson's Illustrated Edition

Edward seldom published illustrated works but when he did he used only the best artists and engravers. Having set a very high standard with the publication of "Italy", using JMW Turner for many of the illustrations, he set out in 1853 to produce a de luxe edition of "Tennyson's Poems".

Tennyson was reluctant, at first, to allow artists to interpret his poems but when the services of "The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" was enlisted his reticence soon faded. It was Edward however, who had the unenviable task of liaising with the temperamental artists. It was to take a heavy toll on his health.

When the book finally appeared in 1857 at a price of 32 shillings it was received with mixed reviews. In an effort to appeal to the more conservative buyer Edward had used several established artists as well as the radical Pre-Raphaelites for the more adventurous. In the process the book pleased neither camp and consequently sales were slow. Although the publication is now considered a landmark in book illustration, it lost the Moxon publishing house a great deal of money and had a substantial influence in the collapse of Edward's fragile health.

Untimely Passing

On April 2nd 1858 Edward wrote his will and on June 2nd a codicil was added. Later that day he died leaving an estate of £16000. There is rarely a good time to die but Edward's passing was particularly inopportune. Earlier in the year Alfred, Edward's younger brother and stalwart of the company had also died. Edward's two sons, Charles Isola and Arthur Henry weren't of age, Charles was 16 and Arthur 10. The eldest daughter Emma was in her early twenties but in Victorian society it was unlikely she would have been considered for a responsible company position. Edward's widow Emma was the main beneficiary and in compliance with Edward's wishes Frederick Evans, (of the printers Bradbury & Evans) was appointed manager with an input from Edward's barrister brother William.

After Edward's death the title page imprint of Moxon publications changed to Edward Moxon & Co.. The publishing house was still operating profitably but its strength was based on Edward's expertise and personal relationships with his authors. With the keystone missing, the fabric of the company was seriously undermined and a gradual decline was threatened if careful management wasn't exercised.

Business Falters

The first five years after Edward's death were reasonably prosperous. Under the management of Frederick Evans the sales of Tennyson had flourished and with every new issue of the poet's work all previous company records were exceeded. Idylls of the King, in 1859 sold 40000 copies and in 1864 Enoch Arden sold 60000 copies as a first edition. In 1864 James Bertrand Payne, a longstanding clerk in the company, was appointed the new manager, at a salary of £400. Soon Emma and Arthur made Payne a partner, an act that was to prove very costly for the Moxon family. Payne's business style was brusque and opinionated and was disliked by most and by Tennyson in particular. It was Payne's publication of Tennyson's work without his permission that soured the previously cordial relations between poet and publisher. Despite the impressive sales from Tennyson's works few other popular writers had been added to the company list and with the departure of Tennyson in January 1869 the fate of the famous publishing house was sealed.

In April 1869 Payne surrendered all his interests in the business for the princely sum of £11000 but the action was too late. Payne still managed the company from 1869 to 1871 under the name of Edward Moxon, Son & Co. and the company was then bought by Ward, Lock & Tyler. The purchase was made giving Emma "a large sum" and an annuity of £250 and a further sum to her children after her death.

The purchasers used the Moxon title for a further six years and in 1877 the name of Edward Moxon finally disappeared from the list of London publishers.

EDWARD MOXON was a representative early Victorian. He came into young manhood with social sympathies and personal ambition. He was not without desire to do something fine in his lifetime. He possessed more than a trace of Charles Lamb's unaffected interest in people. As he became a responsible businessman and associated with men of financial means, he compromised with his sympathies. In private life he may have remained socially sympathetic with workingmen and denunciatory of bad conditions in society, but in his business life be swung over to the middle-class view. He wished, probably as yearningly as did his friend Tennyson, to take account of actual developments in contemporary life and thought, for his moral earnestness was strong and serious.

He admired in poetry the characteristics which the people, the right people, of course, of his time thought excellent. He would not otherwise have been a successful publisher. He responded to refined sentiment somewhat rhetorically expressed, to ideals, to a confused mysticism, as readily as any reader or critic of his day. He looked upon nature in a Wordsworthian mood, aware of its goodness and beauty and taking to heart the moral lessons to be read in it. Lyric melody excited him. Yet, too, like the better readers of that time, he recognised the note of greatness in poetry, the high mood, the penetrating vision, the imaginative sweep of ideas, the illuminating phrase. In studying his life one recognises sincerity in his love of poetry and in his admiration of genius.

To him as a widely reputed publisher of poetry came scores of manuscripts. Poets of all degrees of worth coveted the name of his firm for their books. It would have been easy for Moxon and most natural, had he possessed low standards of judgment and a completely commercial outlook upon his business, to issue many volumes of mere verse. Many writers were ready to meet expenses out of their own purses. Moxon published enough minor verse, certainly, as the record shows, and yet probably mere bagatelle to what he might have published profitably. Only a few little known names appear on his list of authors,Mrs.C.G Phillipson, Mrs.F.Butler, Miss Frances Browne. The other minor names, Lord Hanmer, Patmore, SterIing, Trench, Cunningham, Barry Cornwall, Hartley Coleridge, have to their credit something commendable in the eyes of readers of today. His taste and judgment in poetry during nearly thirty years of publishing kept low the percentage of popular and minor poetry compared with the quantity of enduring poetry that he accepted and put before the pubIic.

Moxon was his own reader of manuscripts. No record has been found of consultation with any of his friends about he quality of the poetry or of any other manuscript that was submitted to him, although without doubt be did seek advice on occasion. He saw Wordsworth always once a year and in some years several times and corresponded with him freely, and yet no letters and no talk reveal that Moxon sought his judgment. Rogers he met frequently, and yet Rogers was not consulted. John Forster was reputedly his lifelong friend and a critic, but his opinion of manuscripts seems not to have been asked. Many authors wrote to Moxon commending writers or writings to his consideration, but no record shows Moxon asking their counsel. He made up his own mind. Tennyson, Browning and Elizabeth Barrett came to him as comparatively unknown writers; their poetry was unlike in nature and appeal; he published the poems of all three. He early knew the value of the poetry of Shelley and of Keats.

There was Something attractive about a publisher who himself wrote verse. Moxon's poetry seems to us today imitative and uninspired but to the readers and some of the writers of his day it was both pleasant and commendable. The phrases he used were current coin, but he played with them lovingly. The sonnet occupied his most constant attention. He wrote several sonnets that have beauty and a sense of form. The poetic inversion, the harsh endings of the second person singular, the poeticised forms of prepositions and exclamatory words were in fashion in those days, one must remember. So were allusions to earlier writers and invocations to them and to the Muse. The sentiment of the poems was usually familiar: "Better it is to win the heart than mind"; "Ah, what is life, a dream within a dream"; "My love I can compare with nought on earth", these represent the type. Occasionally he turned to contemporary affairs and wrote out his sentiments, as in the sonnet occasioned by the debate in Parliament on the motion for a revision of the Pension List;

The times are full of change; and restless men,
Who live by agitation would devour
The widow's mite -her all, the orphan's dower,-
If upright minds do not, by speech and pen,
Their fury check......

The poem appeared in the 1835 volume, but was not, and rightly so, reprinted in the 1837 edition. The London Evening Standard as late as November 7,1871 pronounced sonnets of Edward Moxon "far above the average of the verse published in the name of poetry in these days." There is no question but that the sonnets played a not-unimportant part in establishing Edward Moxon as the poet's publisher.

In 1825 John Murray reminded Walter Scott that the business of a publishing bookseller was not in his shop or even in his connections, but in his brains. Moxon knew that it was not in his shop, for he spent comparatively little of his time there, but he did believe that it lay in his connections. He therefore built it about them. In the process his own personality came to be so essential to his affairs that when he was ill his business declined and when he died it tottered for a few years and then collapsed. It was Moxon himself that people trusted and whose affairs they patronised, not the business firm.

The tenor of Sheridan Knowles's comment, "You and I, old fellow, have not been together like ordinary publishers and Authors," indicates that Moxon succeeded in acting toward the writers whose works he published, not like a tradesman bent only on the making of money, but like a literary friend who, knowing the bookmaking and bookselling business, advised with them.

Tennyson was a sensitive, exacting, and to a publisher often an exasperating man, yet Moxon and he were in friendly and business relations for twenty-six years. Wordsworth had never been an easy person for publishers to get along with, nor was Harriet Martineau, yet Moxon gave them satisfaction over a period of several years. All three of these. writers would promptly and militantly have resented unfair, ungenerous, or dishonest treatment. The Moxon letters to Wordsworth show both directness and tact under trying circumstances, as well as much liberality.

The play of Moxon's personality in his business one sees in the very successes and failures which came to him. He did not bring to the point of profitable publishing writings for which he had little affection. Of the work of living writers he admired extravagantly the poetry of Wordsworth and that of Tennyson: he pushed their books to success. For Browning's verse there is no record of his having had esteem: the poet himself thought that Moxon did nothing for him. He loved the theater and, like a true Victorian, Talfourd's and Knowles’s verse dramas: he made the writings of both men financially remunerative. Examination of his twenty-eight years of business shows that not a year passed in which he did not publish at least one book by one of the three men whose writing he most deeply valued, Lamb, Wordsworth, Tennyson; and in certain years he published something by each of them.

Moxon was independent in conduct. He was not drawn from his purposes by publishing fads or by the successes of other publishers. The "trade" held him in esteem.When one recalls that he entered business in debt and remained in it only about a quarter of a century, yet left a sizable estate, one sees that his business ability was for early Victorian days of the right kind. The sixteen thousand pounds that he left represent, If distributed equally over his business years, an annual profit of nearly six hundred pounds. In the eighteen-thirties the quality of poetry was at low ebb; it was distressingly sentimental and rhetorically moral. Shelley and Keats having recently died, had not yet received general recognition; Rogers, Campbell and Southey, even in the judgment of cultivated readers, were their superiors. Recognition of Wordsworth's genius had hardly more than arrived, certainly popular repute had not come to him. Several minor poets were endeavouring to make verse serve social and revolutionary purposes. But by the time of the eighteen-fifties Shelley and Keats were coming into heir own; Wordsworth was widely read: Tennyson, Browning,Eizabeth Barrett, D.G. Rosetti, William Morris, and Christina Rossetti were writing poetry of quality. It would be absurd to think of Moxon as having made possible this public appreciation of better poetry, and yet his dignified conduct of his publishing business, his taste and judgment, his recognition of genius and devotion to it, his reputation and record as a publisher of excellent poetry certainly contributed to the flow of the tide. DoubtIess his success in publishing encouraged poets, as the good poetry they wrote helped him.

Edward Moxon fairly well fulfilled Robert Southey's wishes for him made on the occasion of his marriage to Emma Isola, that he might enjoy all happiness in his new state of life, that all things might prosper for him to his heart's content, that his love of letters might not make him neglect his business as a bookseller nor his business wean him from his love of letters, and that he might unite them as successfully as Dodsley did before him, live longer (A wish that was not granted to him) and leave behind him as estimable a name.