“How The Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse”: Sarah Harkness of the Macmillan brothers
From an impoverished childhood in the Scottish highlands to Victorian London, Literature for the People is the inspiring story of two brothers – Daniel and Alexander Macmillan – who built a publishing empire - and brought Alice in Wonderland to the world. Their remarkable achievements are revealed in Sarah Harkness’ entertaining, superbly researched biography.
“It’s a real story of serendipity” said Sarah Harkness on how she came to write Literature for the People: “I was fascinated by Nelly Erichsen, an artist that lived next door to the Macmillan brothers in Tooting in South London, and so I came to them as a family, rather than as founders of a business and I thought theirs was a story that needed telling.”
As part of her research for the book, Harkness reviewed 2000 pieces of hand-written correspondence in a year found in the Macmillan archives, with the brothers’ letters looked after by The British Library: “I’m very lucky that Alexander Macmillan had a very legible hand! Alexander wrote luminously. He gave writers enormous feedback - even writers he had no intention of publishing - and he was a funny writer and so his letters were a delight to read.”
Together with Alysoun Sanders, former Macmillan archivist, Harkness explored the Macmillan Archive uncovering company deeds and documents that hadn’t previously made it onto the record.
‘What makes this such an important story is that these are two men from the very humblest of circumstances.’
Sarah Harkness
“What makes this such an important story is that these are two men from the very humblest of circumstances”. Daniel and Alexander were the youngest sons of a Scottish crofter on the Isle of Arran. Their father sadly died when they were young children, and so at the age of ten Daniel became an apprentice to a local bookseller and this started the family’s involvement in the book trade. Later on, Daniel had begun working in a bookshop on the Strand in London and managed to persuade his employer to give Alexander a job as well.
“If you think of the background of that family: how poor they were, how destitute they were after their family died and you think that, within 30 years, Alexander is a wealthy man of business and Daniel’s grandson will marry the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and become Prime Minister, it’s quite an extraordinary rags to riches story” observes Harkness. “And it’s driven by their faith and their determination and that very Scots feeling that you just have to work very hard to get what you want in life.”
Daniel and Alexander Macmillan had a very close partnership and that was focused on their shared belief that education should be available to all. “Although everybody is familiar with the books Macmillan were famous for publishing, the backbone of the business was textbooks. The very first book that they ever produced was a teacher training manual, so education was always at the heart of it.”
“They were occasional flukes of literary success - Tom Brown’s Schools Days [Thomas Hughes, 1857] and later Alice in Wonderland by [Lewis Carroll, 1865] - but the main money was from textbooks. As the education acts in Victorian England brought more and more children into the school system and as universities were set up, they were right in the right place.”
Watch the full interview with Sarah Harkness below.
Literature for the People
by Sarah Harkness
From an impoverished childhood in the Scottish highlands to Victorian London, this is the inspiring story of two brothers – Daniel and Alexander Macmillan – who built a publishing empire – and brought Alice in Wonderland to the world. Their remarkable achievements are revealed in this entertaining, superbly researched biography.
'Absorbing' – Literary Review
Daniel and Alexander arrived in London in the 1830s at a crucial moment of social change. These two idealistic brothers, working-class sons of a Scottish crofter, went on to set up a publishing house that spread radical ideas on equality, science and education across the world. They also brought authors like Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy and Charles Kingsley, and poets like Matthew Arnold and Christina Rossetti, to a mass audience. No longer would books be just for the upper classes.
In Literature for the People Sarah Harkness brings to life these two warm-hearted men. Daniel was driven by the knowledge that he was living on borrowed time, his body ravaged by tuberculosis. Alexander took on responsibility for the company as well as Daniel’s family and turned a small business into an international powerhouse. He cultivated the literary greats of the time, weathered controversy and tragedy, and fostered a dynasty that would include future prime minister Harold Macmillan.
Including fascinating insights about the great, the good and the sometimes wayward writers of the Victorian era, with feuds, friendships and passionate debate, this vibrant book is bursting with all the energy of that exciting period in history.
'Revealing . . . Persuasive and fluent' – New Statesman