Preface and Acknowledgments

This is a book about books—books of travel and of exploration that sought to describe, examine, and explain different parts of the world, between the late eighteenth century and the mid- nineteenth century. Our focus is on the works of non- European exploration and travel published by the house of Murray, Britain’s leading publisher of travel accounts and exploration nar- ratives in this period, between their fi rst venture in this respect, the 1773 publication of Sydney Parkinson’s A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in His Majesty’s Ship, the Endeavour, and Leopold McClintock’s The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas (1859), and with the activities of John Murray I (1737– 93), John Murray II (1778– 1843), and John Murray III (1808– 92) in turning authors’ words into print. This book is also about the world of bookmaking. Publishers such as Murray helped create interest in the world’s exploration and in travel writing by offering authors a route to social standing and sci- entifi c status— even, to a degree, literary celebrity. What is also true is that the several John Murrays and their editors, in working with their authors’ often hard- won words, commonly modifi ed the original accounts of explorers and travelers, partly for style, partly for content, partly to guard the reputation of author and of the publishing house, and always with an eye to the market. In a period in which European travelers and explorers turned their attention to the world beyond Europe and wrote works of lasting sig- nifi cance about their endeavors, what was printed and published was, often, an altered and mediated version of the events of travel and exploration themselves. With particular reference to questions of authorship and the authority of what was being claimed in print, Travels into Print is a study of x preface and acknowledgments the relationships between the facts of travel and of geographical exploration and how the published versions of those travels came to appear in print. Geographical exploration, travel writing, and book history are each topics of considerable importance, perhaps especially so from the later En- lightenment to the middle years of the nineteenth century in which period European scientists, individual travelers, and public audiences turned their attention to the nature of the world beyond themselves. Study of these topics has generated widespread interest in and across several fi elds. Geographers and historians of science have stressed the importance of the published accounts of voyages of exploration and travel to the emergence of modern science and to modern ideas about the dimensions and the content of the world. Historians of cartography and of the visual arts before photography have scrutinized the images produced by these explorers and travelers, seeing in their sketches and maps not only attempts at convincing depiction but also expressions of anxiety about the problems that new and diverse geographies and peoples posed for notions of authenticity and for the cred- ibility of author and artist. Literary scholars and historians of the book have turned to the different forms of travel writing, to the exploration narrative as a genre, and to the production and edition history of travel texts. In one way or another, then, books printed and illustrated are no longer seen as simple bearers of geographical or historical truths but have themselves become the objects of scholarly enquiry. Travels into Print is intended as a contribution to these fi elds and as a demonstration of the fruitful links that can come from examining books as objects of knowledge from these different perspectives. Our work was greatly aided by the acquisition, in 2006, of the John Mur- ray Archive ( JMA) by the National Library of Scotland, and the move north from the Murray offi ces at 50 Albemarle Street, London, to Edinburgh, of this extensive and unique collection of material. The JMA is one of the larg- est and most important publisher’s archives in Britain. Our book is based on a detailed analysis of the JMA—principally of its rich manuscript materials, the correspondence fi les of letters into and out from the several John Murrays, and of the production and fi nancial records and ledger volumes, as well as of the printed books themselves. Where relevant, we have made use of other publishers’ archives, and manuscript and other sources, in or- der to illumine the story of exploration’s authorship and authentication. The research on which this book is based was initially supported, from 2008 to 2010, by a research grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Re- search Council for a two-year project titled “Correspondence: Exploration preface and acknowledgments xi and Travel from Manuscript to Print, 1768– 1846” (AH/F009364/1). This research project ended with a conference held at the Institute of Geogra- phy, University of Edinburgh, and in the National Library of Scotland in April 2010, and we are grateful for the comments and suggestions made by delegates concerning our ideas and for the stimulus of the papers delivered at this meeting. Further work from 2010 has been supported by the Univer- sity of Edinburgh, Royal Holloway, University of London, and the British Academy. The idea of correspondence that lies at the heart of Travels into Print embraces three related themes and sets of ideas, each of which provides a major thread running through and across the chapters of this book. The fi rst is epistolarity: the cultures and practices of letter writing as evident in works of travel. More generally, how did explorer-authors write? For whom did they write? The second is epistemology. Explorers and travelers have to convince their readers—and publishers, as well as their publisher’s editors and literary advisers— of the truth claims of what they were writing about. Seeing things for oneself is a different route to truth than being told by others. One’s preparedness as a traveler in a strange land to believe things told by others depends strongly on trust in the teller, not just in the knowledge being imparted. How did explorer-authors justify the claims they made in and of their works and, even, of themselves? Simply, by what means did the written book claim to correspond with the real world it purportedly depicted? The third is editing. This term embraces processes of authorial mediation by the publisher. At different times, in different ways, and for different reasons, the Murrays and their editorial employees amended authors’ words. We show here how common this later redaction by publishers of explorer’s “in- the- fi eld” writing was and what the resultant effects on the fi nal printed work were. Editing also encompasses books’ edition history and knowing why certain books were reissued or revised, or published at a different price or in a different format. Our initial period of interest, cover- ing the non-European travel and exploration material in the JMA between 1768 and 1846, refl ected the foundation of the house of Murray in 1768 and James Cook’s pioneering voyage that year into the Pacifi c, accompa- nied by Sydney Parkinson, and the synthesis of British polar exploration by John Barrow of the Admiralty in his Voyages of Discovery and Research within the Arctic Regions (1846). As the research began to focus in forming this book, our period altered to refl ect the fi rst Murray publication in 1773 arising from the Cook- Parkinson Endeavour expedition, and moved into the 1850s to encompass further examples of explorers’ book writing and xii preface and acknowledgments publisher’s bookmaking by looking at the works and words of David Liv- ingstone, Charles Darwin, and Joseph Hooker among others. Our terminus in 1859 is not simply arbitrary—it refl ects a particular moment in British exploratory culture as an era of large, often Admiralty- sponsored voyages of science and territorial investigation gave way to increasingly individual and touristic travel. We have incurred many debts in undertaking this work and it is a plea- sure to acknowledge them. By far our greatest debt is to David McClay, curator of the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). Without his support, courteous guidance through the material, and gracious responses to a barrage of questions and requests during the years spent consulting JMA materials, this book would be very much poorer. We also owe thanks to other NLS staff, notably to Rachel Beattie, Kenneth Dunn, Chris Fleet, and George Stanley, and we are grateful to the NLS for its reproduction of images from the Murray manuscripts and printed works and for the permission of the trustees to include them. We also acknowledge the support of Virginia Murray and John R. Murray of the house of Murray for their interest in the project and, particularly, for supplying from private family collections the illustrations of John Murray I, John Murray II, John Murray III, John Barrow, Alexander Burnes, and the drawing room scene from 50 Albemarle Street, London, which appear in the color plates. Other illustrative material was supplied by the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and by the National Portrait Gal- lery in London. David McClay, Virginia Murray, William St. Clair, and Bill Zachs, author of the defi nitive work on Murray I and his foundation of the publishing dynasty, kindly read the typescript in its near-fi nished form and made suggestions that greatly improved the fi nal version. The cumulative bib- liographical work relating to the non- European books of travel published by Murray in our period of concern has benefi ted from the assistance of Helen Beaney, Department of Early Printed Books and Special Collections, the Old Library, Trinity College Dublin; Tricia Boyd, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh Library; Sophie Connor, Rare Books, Cambridge University Library; Timothy Cutts, Rare Books Librarian at the National Library of Wales; Mastan Ebtehaj, Middle East Centre Library, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford; Samantha Gibson, the London Library; Paul Hambelton, National Library of Scotland; and Jeremy Hinchliff, Balliol Li- brary, Balliol College, Oxford. We thank the librarians and archivists in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the British Library, the National Maritime Mu- preface and acknowledgments xiii seum, the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections for their assistance. Conference audiences at meetings in Cape Verde, Edinburgh, Las Vegas, London, Manchester, Munich, Seattle, Toronto, and Valencia helped us refi ne and defend our interpretations. For additional insight, we thank Benjamin Colbert, Felix Driver, Mike Heffernan, Nigel Leask, Da- vid Livingstone, Fraser MacDonald, Sarah Millar, Miles Ogborn, Jonathan Wild, and Karina Williamson. We have benefi ted enormously from the re- ports of the readers appointed by the University of Chicago Press. In Abby Collier, Christie Henry, Ryan Logan Smith, and Yvonne Zipter of the Press, we could not have wished for better editors and publishers: encouraging, forgiving, patient. If they and others have amended our words, it has always been for the better. As we were fi nishing this book, news came through of the untimely death of Susan Manning, Grierson Professor of English at the University of Edin- burgh and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities there. Susan Manning discussed the ideas contained in this book with each of us at one time or another. This book is dedicated to her memory.