Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 by Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers, Bill Bell (review)

Five years after the firm of John Murray was established in 1768 it published its first book on the popular subject of exploration. This was Sydney Parkinson’s A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas in His Majesty’s Ship, the Endeavour. In 1859 the firm published a two-volume work The Story of New Zealand: Past and Present—Savage and Civilised. These two volumes bookend the beginning and end of this study which covers 239 ‘Works of non-European exploration and travel published by the house of Murray’. The seemingly arbitrary end-date of the book marks the virtual ending of the large-scale expeditions supported by the British Government, particularly the Admiralty, which provided a great deal of the source material published by the first three John Murrays. The 239 titles were not the limit of Murray’s interest in travel and exploration. The present work focuses exclusively on exploration as opposed to less heroic, but still adventurous travel. Thus books of European travel such as Richard Ford’s famous 1845 Hand-book for Travellers in Spain are excluded, as are other volumes in Murray’s extensive Hand-book for Travellers series, established in 1836. Many of these covered the same geographical territory as those examined here.

The three authors are two historical geographers with previous publications in the field of travel writing and a former editor of this journal. The three present the results of their researches as one, and no division of responsibility for the individual components of the book is stated. Coverage is thematic rather than chronological. The seven chapters starts with often creased and waterlogged notes made in the field to the marketing of the finished volumes from 50 Albemarle Street. The geographical coverage was influenced by British imperial interests. Practical seamen and intrepid explorers who brave scorching deserts or frozen wastes are not always the most elegant stylists. Many were reluctant authors who had to be coaxed to put pen to paper on returning home. Editorial intervention was naturally far more extensive than for literary authors such as Jane Austen and Lord Byron. Admiralty expeditions usually laid out strict instructions about what was to be recorded, while guides for more independent explorers only came to be published near the end of our period. Murray had strong links with the Admiralty which helped the firm to gain access to materials which were official property. A right-wing publishing house had the right connections for this branch of publishing.

Exploration is a subject where Alice’s query about books being of no use without pictures applies with particular force. The cost of illustrations and maps was frequently a bone of contention between Murray and potential authors. Murray had high production standards, but there were limits as to how far authors could be indulged. The earliest of Murray’s exploration books were modestly presented, but in the 1810s John Murray II increased the number of engravings. His successor in 1841 turned down a work on North American Indians on discovering it needed hundreds of costly steel engravings, but the house of Murray was a comparatively late convert to the idea of cheaper books. Even longstanding authors could be demanding: David Livingstone complained that an illustration of his narrow escape from a lion was so bad as to be comic. Maps, particularly of newly explored areas, were another potentially costly headache, but they could be recycled in atlases in collaboration with cartographic publishers. A cynic might observe that freezing to death in the Arctic or dying of a tropical disease in the jungle was a good selling point, and allowed the publishers to produce the book as they pleased. When the manuscripts had been edited, printed, illustrated, and bound the...