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CONSTABLE, ARCHIBALD, an
eminent publisher, was born, February 24, 1776, at Kellie in the county
of Fife, where his father, Thomas Constable, acted as overseer to the
earl of Kellie. After receiving a plain education at the school of his
native parish (Carnbee), he became in 1788, apprentice to Mr Peter Hill,
bookseller in Edinburgh, the friend and correspondent of Robert Burns.
About the time of the expiration of his apprenticeship, he married the
daughter of Mr David Willison, printer, who, though averse to the match,
was of some service in enabling him to set up in business for himself.
This latter step he took in the year 1795, opening a shop on the north
side of the High Street, near the cross, and devoting himself at first
chiefly to the sale of old books connected with Scottish history and
literature. In this line of trade he speedily acquired considerable
eminence, not so much by the extensiveness of his stock, for his capital
was very limited, as by his personal activity, agreeable manners, and
the intelligence with which he applied himself to serve the wants of his
customers. At an early period of his career, his shop was resorted to by
Mr J. G. Dalzell, Mr Richard Heber, Mr Alexander Campbell, Mr
(afterwards Dr) Alexander Murray, Dr John Leyden, Mr Walter Scott, Mr
Thomas Thomson, and other young men possessed of a taste for Scottish
literary and historical antiquities, for some of whom he published works
of no inconsiderable magnitude, previously to the close of the
eighteenth century. In 1801, he acquired the property of the Scots
Magazine, a venerable repertory of historical, literary, and
archaeological matter, upon which he employed the talents of Leyden,
Murray, Macneil, and other eminent men in succession, though without any
considerable increase to its reputation. In the preceding year, he had
commenced the Farmer’s Magazine, under the management of an able East
Lothian agriculturist, Mr Robert Brown, then of Markle: this work, which
appeared quarterly, for many years enjoyed a considerable degree of
prosperity, but eventually drooped with the class to whom it appealed,
and sank with the house of the publisher.
The small body of
ingenious and learned persons who, in 1802, originated the Edinburgh
Review, placed it under the commercial management of Mr Constable, who,
though unprepared for the great success which it experienced, was not
long in perceiving the high merits of its conductors, and acting towards
them in an appropriately liberal manner. The business of publishing this
great work remained with him for twenty-four years. In 1804, he
commenced the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, which remained
with him till 1826. It was throughout a successful publication. In 1805,
he published, in conjunction with Longman & Co. of London, the first
original work of Sir Walter Scott, "The Lay of the Last
Minstrel," the success of which was also far beyond his
expectations. In the ensuing year, he issued a beautiful edition of what
he termed "The Works of Walter Scott, Esq.," in five volumes,
comprising the poem just mentioned, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border, Sir Tristrem, and a series of Lyrical Pieces. Notwithstanding
the success of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," Mr Constable
was looked upon as a bold man when, in 1807, he offered Mr Scott one
thousand pounds for a poem which was afterwards entitled "Marmion."
Such munificence was quite a novelty in the publishing trade of
Scotland, and excited some attention even in a part of the island where
literary affairs had heretofore been conducted on a larger scale. Not
long after the appearance of this poetical romance, Mr Constable and his
partner had a serious difference with its illustrious author, which
lasted till 1813, although in the interval he edited for them the works
of Swift, as he had previously those of Dryden. An enumeration of the
many valuable books which were afterwards published by the subject of
this memoir, would be out of place in the present work; but the mention
of a few, such as Mr J. P. Wood’s excellent edition of Douglas’s
Scottish Peerage, Mr G. Chalmers’s Caledonia, the Edinburgh Gazetteer,
in six volumes, the Philosophical Works of Mr Dugald Stewart, and the
Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica, (the stock and copyright of
which work he purchased in 1812,) will be sufficient to suggest a career
far transcending in enterprise and brilliancy anything of the kind ever
known in Scotland. In 1804, Mr Constable had assumed as partner Mr
Alexander Gibson Hunter, of Blackness, and from that time the business
was carried on under the designation of Archibald Constable and Company.
A few years afterwards, when the concerns of the house had become very
extensive, Mr Constable thought it a hardship that so much of his wares
should pass through the hands of an English agency, who at once absorbed
a considerable share of his profits, and could not profess to promote
his interest with so much zeal as their own. He and his Edinburgh
partner therefore joined, December, 1808, with Mr Charles Hunter and Mr
John Park, in commencing a general bookselling business in London, under
the designation of Constable, Hunter, Park, and Hunter. This
speculation, however, being found to be unattended with the expected
advantages, was given up in 1811. In the early part of this year, Mr A.
G. Hunter retired from the Edinburgh house, on which occasion Mr
Constable, acting on the liberal view which he usually took of the value
of his stock, and perhaps not unwilling to impress the world with an
exalted idea of his prosperity, allowed to his partner a greater amount
of actual cash (seventeen thousand pounds is understood to have been the
sum paid,) than what was justly his due. Mr Robert Cathcart of Drum,
writer to the signet, and Mr Robert Cadell, then a clerk in Mr Constable’s
shop, were assumed in Mr Hunter’s place, and the firm still continued
under the designation of Archibald Constable and Company. Mr Cathcart
being carried off after a few days’ illness in November, 1812, Mr
Cadell remained Mr Constable’s sole partner.
Mr Constable and his
partner published after 1813, all the poetical works of Sir Walter
Scott, and the whole of his prose fictions (excepting the first series
of the Tales of My Landlord) down to the year 1826. The vast amount of
lucrative business arising from these publications, and others of nearly
equal popularity and importance, produced in the subject of this memoir
the sincere though erroneous conviction that he was a prosperous, and in
one respect a wealthy man. He had never, it is true, possessed much free
capital: he had scarcely ever known what it was to be exempt from
difficulties for ready money; yet he could calculate for certain on the
productiveness of several of his more important speculations, and he
every day saw around him such a large and increasing amount of stock,
that nothing less than the demonstration of figures could have given him
greater assurance of his affluent condition. That demonstration
unfortunately was wanting. Mr Constable was no arithmetician. His mind
was one of those which delight in forming lofty enterprises and
ambitious schemes, but are too much engrossed with the glories of the
ultimate object, to regard much the details by which it is proposed to
be accomplished. For very many of his publications, the literary
labourer was greatly over-paid; in most cases he printed a much larger
impression than was necessary, or, if the demand came nearly up to the
supply, the benefits of success were lost upon an undemanded second
edition. He had a magnificent way of transacting every kind of business,
seeming in general less to regard the merits of the matter in hand, than
the dignity of his name and profession. Proceeding in this manner,
rather like a princely patron of letters, than a tradesman aiming at
making them subservient to his personal interest, Mr Constable was
easily led into a system of living greatly beyond his real means, and
from which the pressure of no embarrassments, however severe, could
awaken him. Another error, to which the steps were perhaps as natural
and easy, was his yielding to the desires of his friend Sir Walter
Scott, for money, and the means of raising money, as a fore-payment of
literary labour. Both men were in some degree intoxicated by the
extraordinary success they had met with in their respective careers,
which seemed to assure them against the occurrence of any real
difficulty in any of the processes of worldly affairs; and, mutually
supporting their common delusion, they launched without rudder or
compass into an ocean of bank credit, in which they were destined
eventually to perish. The reverence of the publisher for the author was
not greater than was the confidence of the author in "the strong
sense and sagacious calculations," (his own words) of the
publisher. Both afterwards discovered that they had been in a great
measure wrong, as even the works of a Scott could only produce a certain
sum, while the calculations of Mr Constable, though bearing the impress
of an ardent and generous temperament, were not conducted upon those
rules which alone will ensure good results in commercial affairs. It is
painful to reflect on the change which adversity brought over the mutual
sentiments of these distinguished men. Mr Constable lived to lament on a
death-bed the coldness which the results of his bankruptcy had
introduced into the mind of his former friend, and to complain (whether
justly or not) that, if he had not been so liberal towards that friend,
he might have still known prosperity. Sir Walter, on the other hand,
lived to suffer the pain of pecuniary distress in consequence of the
loose calculations of himself and his publisher, and to entertain in his
benevolent and tranquil mind, so changed a feeling regarding that
individual, as prevented him from paying the common respect of a friend
to his remains, when, in the hour of calamity and sorrow, they were
transferred to the grave.
Mr Constable had in early
life entertained literary aspirations only less ambitious than those by
which he distinguished himself in commercial life. Though wanting the
advantages of an academical education, he wrote his own language
fluently and correctly. Scottish antiquities formed the department in
which he desired to exert himself, and the present writer has heard him,
amidst the pressing cares of business, express a touching regret for the
non-fulfilment of the hopes which he once entertained in reference to
this favourite study. From respect for his literary abilities, Miss
Seward bequeathed to him her whole correspondence, in the expectation
that he would personally undertake the duty of editor; a task, however,
for which he found it necessary to employ a substitute, in the person of
Mr Morehead. The only literary efforts of Mr Constable which have ever
been ascertained, consist in the editing of Lamont’s Diary in 1810,
and of a compilation of "The Poetry contained in the Waverley
Novels," and the composition of a small volume which appeared in
1822, under the title of "Memoir of George Heriot, jeweller to king
James, containing an account of the Hospital founded by him at
Edinburgh." Having become a widower in 1816, Mr Constable, in 1818,
married Miss Charlotte Neale who survived him. In the early part of
1822, he was obliged, by a due regard to his physical and mental
energies, to reside for some months in England. It may also be mentioned
among the particulars of his life, that, in 1823 though professedly a
Whig in politics, he was included by the liberal policy of the
government in a list of new justices of the peace for the city of
Edinburgh. In the same year, he removed from the warehouse he had
occupied for nearly thirty years in the High street, to an elegant
mansion adjacent to the Register House, in the New Town, which had
become his own by purchase from the connexions of his second marriage.
In the year 1825, Mr
Constable projected perhaps the most remarkable of all his undertakings
- a Miscellany of Original and Selected Works, in Literature, Art, and
Science, which be designed to publish in small fasciculi at one
shilling, every three constituting a volume. Having marked the tendency
towards a system of cheap popular reading, which was at this time very
observable in the public mind and in the bookselling business, he had
resolved to take advantage of the irresistible impulse, for the
reproduction of some of his best copyrights; calculating securely that
these, especially if mixed up with new productions from the pens of the
best modern writers, would appropriate a large share of the patronage
extended by the people to cheap works, while the vast sale that might be
expected as a consequence of their humble price, could not fail to
afford an ample remuneration to all concerned. The design was one
worthy, in its daring novelty and its liberal promise, of a publisher
who, in almost all his enterprises, had shown a comprehensiveness of
mind above his fellows. Nor can it be doubted that, if carried into
execution with the whole powers of the original house, and the prestige
which the name of Constable now carried to every British ear, it would
have met with a success more than sufficient to redeem the fortunes of
the establishment. Unfortunately the commercial distresses which marked
the close of 1825, operated unfavourably upon a London firm with which
Archibald Constable and Company were intimately connected, and at the
close of the January of the ensuing year both were compelled to stop
payment. The debts of the latter house were understood to be about a
quarter of a million, for a considerable part of which Sir Walter Scott
unfortunately stood responsible. The stock, in which the subject of this
memoir was wont to contemplate an immense fund of dormant wealth, was
consequently sequestered, and its real value, (especially on a
peremptory sale) being very different from the apparent, it sufficed to
discharge but a small part of the existing obligations.
Mr Constable, who at this
time had the young family arising from his second marriage springing up
around him, now retired into comparative privacy, to experience the
usual fate of those whom fortune has suddenly deserted. Most of his
friends, having suffered considerably by his bankruptcy, and being
deeply impressed with a sense of the imprudence which had led to that
event, paid him no longer any regard, though, while his fortunes lived,
they would have given "fifty, nay, an hundred ducats for his
portrait in little." Notwithstanding these painful circumstances,
to which was soon added a return of some dropsical ailments which had
formerly afflicted him, he resolved to make an endeavour for the support
of his family, by commencing, though with material restrictions of plan,
the Miscellany which had formerly been announced. Having made the
necessary arrangements with the trustee upon the sequestered estate, he
issued the first number late in the year 1826, being the beginning of a
reproduction of captain Basil Hall’s Travels, which that gentleman,
with a kindness worthy of his distinguished abilities, had conferred as
a present upon the veteran publisher. Though unable now to command all
the copyrights and new productions which he originally contemplated, he
succeeded in calling around him some of the rising talent of the day,
and would in all probability have soon been once more engaged in an
extensive and enterprising course of business, if death had not stepped
in to claim his part. Mr Constable gradually sank under his dropsical
ailment, and, on the 21st of July in the year just named, breathed his
last, at his house in Park Place, in the fifty-second year of his age.
Mr Constable was of middle stature, and, in his latter years, of
somewhat unwieldy bulk; his countenance, a fair index to his mind,
displayed lineaments of uncommon nobleness and beauty. |
