The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. Kathryn Hughes
from the country, through their bustling tradesmen sons to their sharp, knowing granddaughters, these were the people whom Samuel was gearing up to supply with every kind of reading material imaginable, as well as some that had yet to be thought of.
And, for a while, he was flukishly successful. During those last few months of Sam’s informal apprenticeship, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been doing huge and surprising business in her native America. Since there was no copyright agreement with the States – in fact there would be none until 1891 – a whole slew of British publishers immediately scented the possibility of making a profit simply by reprinting the book and adding their own title page and cover. One of these was Henry Vizetelly, a brilliant but permanently under-capitalized publisher and engraver who made an arrangement with Clarke and Salisbury to split the costs of publishing 2,500 copies of the book to sell at 2s 6d. Initially Uncle Tom’s Cabin made little impact in Britain, but a swift decision to bring out a 1s edition paid speedy dividends. By July 1852 it was selling at the rate of 1,000 copies a week.
Using the extra capital that Sam had brought into the firm, he and Clarke now set about exploiting this sensational demand for Mrs Stowe’s sentimental novel about life among black slaves in the southern states of America. Seventeen printing presses and four hundred people were pulled into service in order to bring out as many new editions of Uncle Tom as anyone could think of – anything from a weekly 1d serial, through a 1s railway edition to a luxury version with ‘forty superb illustrations’ for 7s 6d. This was a new way of thinking about books. Instead of a stable entity, fixed between a standard set of covers, Beeton’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a spectacularly malleable artefact, one that could be repackaged and re-presented to different markets an almost infinite number of times.
Inevitably this feeding frenzy attracted other British publishers – seventeen in fact – who lost no time in producing their own editions of Mrs Stowe’s unlikely hit, often simply reprinting Clarke and Beeton’s text and adding their own title page. What many of them had missed, though, was the fact that some of these Clarke, Beeton editions contained significant additions to the original American text, comprising a new Introduction and explanatory chapter headings written by Frederick Greenwood. By unwittingly reproducing these, publishers such as Frederick Warne were infringing Clarke and Beeton’s British copyright. As a result of this greedy mistake, Clarke and Beeton were in an extraordinarily strong position, able to insist that the pirated stock was handed over to them, whereupon they simply reissued it under their own name. Uncle Tom probably achieved the greatest short-term sale of any book published in Britain in the nineteenth century, and the firm of Clarke and Beeton walked away with a very large slice of the stupendous profits. For a young man venturing into the marketplace for the first time, the omens must have seemed stunning.
Fired by his spectacular good fortune, Sam was determined to get first dibs on Mrs Stowe’s follow-up book. And so late in that delirious summer of 1852 he took the extraordinary step of tearing off to the States to beard the middle-aged minister’s wife in her Massachusetts lair. Initially she refused to see him, then relented and almost immediately wished she had not. The young man’s opening gambit, of presenting her with the electrotype plates from the luxury British edition, was sadly misjudged. Included among these was a cover illustration comprising a highly eroticized whipping scene, exactly the kind of thing that Mrs Stowe had taken pains to avoid. ‘There is not one scene of bodily torture described in the book – they are purposely omitted,’ she explained reprovingly to him in a later letter, probably wondering whether this brash young Englishman had really got the point of her work at all.
Next Sam tried cash, offering Mrs Stowe a payment of £500. If he thought that she would roll over in gratitude, then he could not have been more mistaken. For all that she liked to present herself as an unworldly minister’s wife, Mrs Stowe had a surprising grasp of the pounds, shillings and pence of authorship. It had not escaped her sharp attention that Sam, together with other British firms, had harvested from her work ‘profits … which I know have not been inconsiderable’. In the end she accepted the £500, together with a further £250, but not before making it quite clear in a letter to Sam that this did not constitute any kind of payment, promise, or obligation.
As if to emphasize to Sam that he was not quite the uniquely coming man he thought himself to be, the Fates conspired that as he left Mrs Stowe after his first interview, he bumped into another British publisher walking up her drive. Sampson Low had crossed the Atlantic for exactly the same purpose, to coax Mrs Stowe into giving him an early advantage in publishing the sequel to Uncle Tom. In the end Mrs Stowe agreed to furnish both Beeton and Low, together with another British publisher Thomas Bosworth, with advance pages of her next work, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As it turned out, this shared arrangement was lucky, since it meant that each of the firms got to bear only one third of the colossal losses. The Key turned out to be a dreary affair, nothing more than a collection of the documentary sources on which the novel had been based. The fact that Mrs Stowe insisted beforehand that ‘My Key will be stronger than the Cabin,’ suggests how little she understood – and, perhaps, cared about – the reasons for her phenomenal popular success.
It says something about Sam’s character that, right from the start, there were people who were delighted to see him take this tumble. Vizetelly, the man who had first brought Uncle Tom to Clarke but who had missed out on the staggering profits from the subsequent editions, was particularly thrilled at the loss that Sam was now taking with The Key. When Vizetelly, who was ten years older than Beeton and already recognized as a noisy talent in Fleet Street, had approached the lad at the end of the summer of 1852 to ask about his share of the profit, he was sent away with a flea in his ear and an abiding dislike of the cocky upstart. Decades later, writing his puffily self-serving autobiography, Vizetelly was still gloating over the fact that ‘With a daring confidence, that staggered most sober-minded people, the deluded trio, Clarke, Beeton, and Salisbury, printed a first edition of fifty thousand copies, I think it was, the bulk of which eventually went to the trunk makers, while the mushroom firm was obliged to go into speedy liquidation.’
Vizetelly’s claim that Clarke, Beeton went into immediate liquidation looks like wishful thinking. Certainly there is no formal record of them being forced to close down. Nor is it true, as earlier Beeton biographers have maintained, that it was at this point that Beeton ditched Clarke and went into business on his own. Right up until 1855 Clarke and Beeton were printing some books and magazines under their joint names while also continuing to work separately. It was not until 1857 that the break finally came, with characteristic (for Sam) bad temper. In February of that year Beeton v. Clarke was heard before Lord Campbell. Both parties had hired QCs, which hardly came cheap, to argue over whether Clarke, who was now operating independently out of Paternoster Row, owed Beeton £181. The wrangle dated back to the mad days of summer 1852 when, during their scrappy coming to terms over the profits of Uncle Tom, the firm of Clarke, Beeton and Salisbury had bought from Henry Vizetelly his profitable imprint ‘Readable Books’. Now that the relationship between Clarke and Beeton had dramatically soured, they were bickering like estranged lovers over small sums of money. The jury found for Sam, one of the few occasions in his long litigious career when he would emerge vindicated.
Typically Sam made huge cultural capital from the Uncle Tom affair. Not only did he manage to win Mrs Stowe round by his charismatic presence for long enough to extract introductions to several American intellectuals, including her brother Revd H. W. Beecher of Brooklyn, Wendell Holmes, and Longfellow, he also talked up his relationship with the celebrity authoress thereafter, managing to imply that she was anxiously watching over the affairs of Clarke, Beeton from the other side of the Atlantic. The Preface to the sixth edition of Uncle Tom, published this time by ‘Clarke & Co, Foreign Booksellers’, shows just how far he was prepared to go:
In presenting this Edition to the British public the Publishers, equally on behalf of the Authoress and themselves, beg to render their acknowledgements of the sympathy and success the work has met with in England … Our Editions are the real ‘Author’s Editions’; we are in direct negotiation with Mrs Stowe; and we confidently hope that when accounts are made up we shall be in a position to award that talented lady a sum not inferior in amount to her receipts in America.
Thereafter