Archibald Constable & Co.

Lc name authority rec. n. n87864025

LC Heading: Archibald Constable & Co.

Biography:

Constable, Archibald (1774–1827), publisher, was born in the parish of Carnbee near Anstruther in Fife on 24 February 1774, one of the seven children of Thomas Constable (1736–1791) and Elizabeth Myles (1733–1819). Thomas Constable was a farmer who became noted for his interest in agricultural improvement and who came to manage the estates of the earl of Kellie.

Education and training

Constable was educated in the parish school of Carnbee, which he attended for about eight years. In his memoir Constable says that his interest in publishing began with the pleasure he took in a bookshop and stationer's which opened in nearby Pittenweem in 1786, and which led to his being apprenticed for six years from February 1788 to Peter Hill of Edinburgh, who had recently set up as a publisher. Hill's shop was initially in Parliament Close but about 1790 he moved to the High Street, at the Cross. The business was thus not just in the centre of Edinburgh, but at the centre of Edinburgh life, and through his work Constable became accustomed to meeting the literary figures who frequented the city, including Robert Burns.

During Constable's time as an apprentice Hill began to sell old books as well as new. When part of the library of the earl of Moray was offered for sale, Constable proposed a catalogue; he was entrusted with the task, which involved pricing as well as listing. Thereafter he regularly produced catalogues of books for sale, and expanded his activities into cataloguing private libraries for their owners. These activities laid the foundation of Constable's knowledge of books as objects, and fostered his contacts with many private collectors.

Early years as publisher

After the completion of his apprenticeship Constable stayed with Hill as his clerk for a further year, and on 16 January 1795, just before that year elapsed, he married Mary Willison (d. 1814), the daughter of an Edinburgh printer. At twenty-one Constable was determined to establish his own business. He spent a month in February or March 1795 in London learning about London publishing, and met the pre-eminent London publishers Cadell and Longman. Using a loan of £150 from two friends and £300 worth of books from his father-in-law to exchange for others, he got a basic stock. He then undertook a tour of Fife and Perthshire visiting big houses in search of old books to purchase, and on his return to Edinburgh he opened his own shop on the north side of the High Street, erecting the notice ‘Scarce Old Books’ over the door. He published his first catalogue in May 1795, and this won him many customers. These included Thomas Thomson, who in 1806 became deputy clerk register; David Herd, the song collector; George Chalmers, the Scottish antiquary who was chief clerk to the Board of Trade in London; Richard Gough, the English antiquary; Andrew Plummer, sheriff of Selkirkshire; John Pinkerton; and Walter Scott, although the exact year when Scott began to buy from Constable is not known. A supplement to his first catalogue attracted John, third duke of Roxburghe, the celebrated book collector, who became one of Constable's most regular customers. In the following year, on the advice of Professor John Leslie, he began to import foreign books, and this extended his connections with the Scottish academic establishment. ‘My great ambition’, wrote Constable, ‘was to pick up curious and valuable works relative to the history and literature of Scotland’, and he considered himself to be the first in the book trade to take ‘a deep interest in securing and preserving all books relating to Scottish literature’ (T. Constable, 1.22). Constable was an antiquarian bookseller until 1815, when he retired from that line of business in order to concentrate on publishing.

Constable's first works as a publisher, in the autumn of 1795, were religious and political pamphlets on current subjects such as the slave trade, but as the expenses were borne by the authors, he was able to learn about what did and did not sell without any risk to himself. The first publication commissioned by Constable was Fragments of Scottish History (1798), which included Robert Birrel's diary of 1532–1605, and William Patten's account of Hertford's invasion of Scotland in 1544 and Somerset's in 1547; Constable paid the editor, John Graham Dalyell, between £20 and £30. Soon afterwards Dalyell became curator of the Advocates' Library, and bought many books and manuscripts from Constable. Constable's first copyright purchase was the Discourses of the Revd Dr John Erskine, minister at Old Greyfriars, and at that time perhaps the best-known and best-loved inhabitant of Edinburgh.

The basis for Constable's later success as a publisher was established in these early years: he was forming good connections with London publishers who would accept large quantities of stock at wholesale prices, and also with the retail booksellers who sold the books to individual buyers; he was cultivating wealthy collectors and purchasers of books; and he was looking for good authors.

In his work as a book publisher Constable's staple output consisted largely of works of historical scholarship and modern editions of the kind of literature and history he sold as an antiquarian bookseller. In 1801, for instance, he published Dalyell's edition of Scottish Poems of the Sixteenth Century in two volumes, and John Leyden's edition of The Complaynt of Scotland; in 1802 he took a quarter-share in the first edition of Walter Scott's two-volume Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, for which Cadell and Davies in London were the lead publishers; in 1804 he published Scott's edition of Sir Tristrem and Alexander Murray's edition of James Bruce's Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (7 volumes), and had a fifth-share in the four volumes of Malcolm Laing's History of Scotland; in 1806 he was lead publisher in Robert Jamieson's Popular Ballads and Songs (2 volumes), and in 1814 of Scott's edition The Works of Jonathan Swift (19 volumes). These are but some examples of a great output that continued over all the years that Constable was a publisher.

Constable entered journal publishing in 1800 in setting up the Farmer's Magazine, and in 1801 he purchased the Scots Magazine, founded in 1739. He must soon have recognized that well-conducted journals would ensure a steady cash-flow, and so the list of journals under Constable's management is not surprising: in 1803 he became the publisher of the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal; he later added the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal and the publications of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Highland Society, the Caledonian Horticultural Society, and the Wernerian Society; in 1813 he became the publisher of the Edinburgh Annual Register.

The Edinburgh Review

Had Constable merely published works of scholarship and the journals of learned societies, he would have been a significant but not a great publisher. It was the establishment of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 that made him a publisher who mattered. The original idea came from Sydney Smith, who put it to Francis Horner and Francis Jeffrey. Although Jeffrey later said that he could not remember when the project was first discussed, by January 1802 the ‘founding fathers’ of the Review had chosen their publisher, Archibald Constable. Initially the Review operated as a collective: most of the twenty-nine articles of the first number were written by the editorial team; there was no individual editor, the group discussing all contributions in Jeffrey's flat in Buccleuch Place or on the premises of the printer, Constable's father-in-law, David Willison. The first number of the Edinburgh Review appeared on 10 October 1802. Early in 1803 Smith proposed to Constable that the Review should be put on a permanent footing, with a salaried editor, and with all contributors being paid. From the fourth number Constable paid Jeffrey to be editor, and fixed contributors' rates at ‘sixteen guineas per sheet’ (T. Constable, 1.49)—but according to Jeffrey many contributors received at least 20 or 25 guineas a sheet for their contributions. High fees attracted good contributors of a class who would not otherwise have been writing for reviews, but they also ensured the dominance of the editor.

Constable had a good product, but the success of the Review was dependent on sales. The book-buying public was concentrated in south-east England, and it was essential to have a London partner to push Constable's publications in the south: a normal division of responsibilities gave Scotland, the north of England, and all Ireland to Constable, and the rest of England (south of Leeds) and Wales to the London partner. The southern management of the Review was regularly moved. The first number was handled in London by Joseph Mawman, but subsequent numbers were entrusted to Longmans, who in 1803 bought a half-share in the Review. After issue 21 Constable bought back the half-share, and the London sales were then handled by John Murray, and from 1809 by Constable's own London ‘branch’, Constable, Hunter, Park, and Hunter. However, within a year Park died, necessitating the closure of Constable's London business in 1810. Sales of the Edinburgh Review were next handled by White, Cochrane & Co. Longmans purchased a half-share in the publication in 1814, and purchased it outright following Constable's bankruptcy in 1826. The variety of partners in the one venture was unusual, but as Constable had no capital, a London partner was essential. The lead publisher in any venture was responsible for the manufacture of the books, but by having London partners Constable was assured of an initial bulk sale which brought immediate money back into his own business.

In 1803 Constable took on a partner, Alexander Hunter, son of the owner of the large estate of Blackness in Forfarshire. The business was valued at £5000, and so Hunter put £2500 into what now became Archibald Constable & Co. Hunter had no publishing expertise. Nominally he was to act as the firm's accountant, but his real significance lay in his paying £2500 to Constable for a half-share in the business. It was the first time that Constable had had any money.

Scott as a Constable author

The extant records do not show that Constable had a long-term strategy for growth, and yet when looking at his actions one must conclude that he had a very keen awareness of that goal and what could attain it. If the Review changed Constable into one of the most important publishers of the age, his association with Scott was intended to make him the most successful. Walter Scott was already established as the best-selling author of the day. Longmans purchased the copyright of Scott's Minstrelsy in 1802 for £500, and of The Lay of the Last Minstrel in November 1805 for a further £500. Constable had a share in both, and knew the Lay had gone through six editions and sold 6700 copies by the end of 1806. Constable offered Scott 1000 guineas for the copyright of his next poem, Marmion, an unprecedented offer for a work of imaginative literature, and one which Scott accepted on 31 January 1807. Constable retained a half-share in the work, and sold quarter-shares to John Murray and to William Miller in London. It was a bold stroke, intended to secure Scott for the Constable stable. As an investment Marmion was overwhelmingly successful: the first edition of 2000 copies sold at £1 11s. 6d., and the 6000 copies of the third and fourth editions, published within eleven months of the first, sold at the cheaper price of 12s. But the strategic aim failed, not because of Constable, but because of his associates. In April 1808 Jeffrey published his hostile review of Marmion in the Edinburgh Review; he properly identified many issues for critical debate, but Scott found its manner and tone offensive, particularly when coming from a friend. In the October issue Jeffrey published an article against continuing the Peninsular War; Scott (like many others) cancelled his subscription. Then Hunter offended Scott who in January 1809 wrote ‘Constable & I are quite broken owing to Mr. Hunters extreme incivility to which I will certainly never subject myself more’ (Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 2.146).

Scott's break with Constable was disastrous for both parties. Indeed it can be argued that the seeds of their financial failure in 1826 were sown here, for Scott now established his own publishing company: on 19 July 1809 Scott and James and John Ballantyne signed a deed of co-partnery which set up the publishing business of John Ballantyne & Co. However, by 1812 John Ballantyne & Co. was in serious financial difficulties, in part because of a national financial crisis, and in part because Scott and the Ballantynes did not have Constable's instinct for marketable products. Their solution was to sell out to Constable.

What Scott did not know was that Archibald Constable & Co. was itself in financial difficulties. Hunter left the partnership in 1811, and Constable later noted: ‘Hunter advanced originally in 1804, £2500; in 1811 he had drawn that sum and about £4000 besides—consequently, with the £17,000 paid to him, he gained fully £21,000 by being A. C.'s partner’ (T. Constable, 1.160). On 1 May 1811 the business was valued at £35,930 and the incoming partners, Robert Cathcart and Cathcart's brother-in-law Robert Cadell, paid Hunter £17,000 for his share of the business. Cathcart did not put new money into the business: he bought out Hunter. In the following year, 1812, the firm purchased the copyright and stock of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for a price in excess of £13,000. However, Cathcart died unexpectedly in November 1812, and the remaining partners, Archibald Constable and Robert Cadell, were required by the terms of the agreement to purchase Cathcart's three-eighths share in the business. And when Thomson Bonar, who held a third-share in Britannica, died in 1813 Constable and Cadell had to repay his advances of £6000 and to purchase his share in the copyright, which the complicated terms of their agreement valued at £11,000; in all another £10,000 was taken out of the business.

Between 1803 and 1811 Archibald Constable & Co. achieved a phenomenal rate of growth, and the profits of £1350 paid to Cathcart in 1812 imply a prosperous company. But Constable's lack of working capital made him totally reliant on bank borrowing, and in the national financial crisis of 1812–14 Constable found it difficult to raise new loans to meet his obligations to buy Cathcart's and Bonar's shares in the business. In these circumstances Constable's negotiations with Scott were difficult and protracted. Eventually on 18 May 1813 Constable bought John Ballantyne stock valued at £1467 for £900, a discount of nearly 40 per cent, a quarter-share in Scott's poem Rokeby for £700, and volumes of the Edinburgh Annual Register valued at £2400 for £400, in all £2000 in bills payable in six, twelve, and eighteen months. A condition of the sale was that John Ballantyne & Co. ceased to be an active publisher.

Constable had regained Scott, but at a cost, and the firm's financial problems continued into 1814. So severe were they that Constable spent October 1814 in London, although his wife was dying (and indeed did die on 28 October), while he was away trying to reduce the firm's indebtedness to the banks by selling a half-share in the Edinburgh Review to Longmans, and stocks of books at discounted prices to whoever would buy.

What saved them all was Scott's Waverley. Constable offered £700 for the copyright of Waverley, but Scott refused, and instead granted what was effectively a licence to publish an edition of 1000 copies of Waverley in return for receiving ‘half profits’. These ‘profits’ were not profits in the modern sense of the term, but the publisher's receipts, less the cost of manufacturing and advertising. From this the publisher took half (and had to meet the costs of distribution and overheads from it), and paid the author half. By 1819 11,500 three-volume sets of Waverley had been sold, and the positive contribution to the publisher's income must have approached £3000 from that novel alone. Longer print runs on later novels, and higher prices (Waverley, 1814, was priced at £1 1s.; The Antiquary, 1816, at £1 4s.; and Kenilworth, 1821, at £1 11s. 6d.) increased their profitability. The first seven Waverley novels must have brought Archibald Constable & Co. over £20,000 by 1820.

Scott well knew the value of his literary property, and he knew the power given to him by the wealth his novels generated. But he did not use this power to increase his share of the income. Robert Cadell, Constable's partner, admitted that Scott might well have got better terms for himself, but Scott, through his agent John Ballantyne, offered titles to other publishers on the same or similar terms to ensure that he got money when he wanted it, and not when the publisher deigned to pay him. Thus his second novel, Guy Mannering, went to Longmans because, as a result of the precarious position of Constable & Co., Cadell delayed making an agreement in October 1814. The third, The Antiquary, came back to Constable. The fourth novel went to William Blackwood and his London partner John Murray to test their ability to sell fiction. But Scott came back to Constable, because he considered him to have a greater capacity to sell books than any other publisher.

The letters between Constable and Cadell in 1814 show that they hated Scott's business practices, and considered John Ballantyne thoroughly dishonest. But although Cadell wanted to have no more to do with Scott and the Ballantynes, Constable and Scott needed each other. Constable needed Scott because Scott was the most successful writer of the age. He had to pay to retain Scott as a Constable author, and even in 1818 was not sure of him. To secure Scott he purchased Scott's existing copyrights in 1819, and in the 1820s signed contracts for as yet unwritten and unnamed works of fiction. In 1822, for instance, he agreed contracts for three new novels on 11 March, 3 May, and 8 October, and felt it safe to do this because he had, in 1818, taken out insurance on Scott's life. Constable promoted Scott by advertising heavily, and by keeping him in the public eye; away back in February 1814 Constable had remarked to Longman ‘the necessity of keeping up Mr Scott's name by the greatest attention to the sale of his works increases every day’ (NL Scot., MS 789, 22). He was rewarded with an unparalleled flow of literary work, but the letters between them show that the publisher was repeatedly trying to control the flow, by getting Scott to speed up or slow down, to suit his sense of the market and his own financial exigencies. Scott needed Constable because Constable was better at selling books than anyone else, and thus facilitated Scott's lavish expenditure on Abbotsford.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

The third of Constable's major projects was the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which Constable purchased in 1812. When Constable commented on 8 May 1812 that it was ‘the greatest speculation we ever made’ (T. Constable, 2.302) he was right in both senses of the phrase, for he paid in excess of £13,000 for the copyright and remaining stock of the fifth edition, and proceeded to turn the work into the most distinguished compendium of knowledge of its day. The contents of the fifteen volumes of the fifth edition had already been determined before Constable made his purchase, but he at once commissioned Leslie and Dalyell to advise him on the defects of the fifth edition and what would be required to rectify them. On receiving their report Constable decided to publish a supplement. He commissioned new articles from eminent writers and scholars including Dugald Stewart the philosopher (whom he paid £1600), John Playfair the mathematician, and Walter Scott. He appointed Macvey Napier as editor of the supplement, paying him a fee of £1575, with an extra £735 if more than 7000 copies were sold, as well as expenses of £300. In 1819 Napier was employed as editor of the sixth edition, which was to extend to twenty-five volumes.

Constable claimed that sales of the Encyclopaedia between 1812 and 1821 brought in £60,000, that the profits to date could not have been less than £20,000 (T. Constable, 2.329) with £10,000 to come, and that the copyright was worth £12,000. But it is not the monetary value which most impresses the reader of Constable's (almost illegible) letters, nor even the immense generosity of his payments to contributors (by any standards so huge as to make the world of letters buzz with amazement), but the excitement he shows in planning the work, in commissioning articles, and in discussing the progress of the supplement with the editor. After the early numbers Constable left Jeffrey to get on with the Review; he interfered with Scott's work only occasionally and with considerable caution; but the supplement to the Encyclopaedia was his creation.

The 1820s

If the three great projects of Constable's first twenty years as a publisher were the Edinburgh Review, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Walter Scott, his ambition in the 1820s was to revolutionize publishing. On 17 January 1819 he offered Scott £12,000 for the purchase of all his copyrights, in fiction, in poetry, and in prose; Scott was initially reluctant, but was talked into agreement. Part of the objective was, as argued above, to secure Scott as a Constable author; another was, no doubt, to escape the necessity of having to deal with the Ballantynes (that was certainly a prospect relished by Cadell, although he was only allowed to enjoy the prospect: the aim was not realized). But Constable had a longer-term strategy: he immediately ordered collected editions of Scott's fiction and poetry. Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley appeared in twelve volumes in 1819, and the set was republished four times between 1821 and 1825, in three different formats. The collected poems, also in twelve volumes, appeared in 1820; by 1825 the set had been republished five times in five separate formats. Constable purchased further copyrights in 1821 and 1823, and the collections Historical Romances and Novels and Romances followed in 1822 and 1824. Working with his new partner in London, Hurst, Robinson & Co., Constable was realizing the value of literary property in a way no previous publisher had attempted. As before, marketing was the key. The product was designed for different market sectors: the octavo version of Novels and Tales sold at £7 4s., the duodecimo at £6, and the 18mo at £4 4s. Novels did not fit precisely into volumes, thus necessitating the purchase of complete sets. Advertising was again heavy, but the product was of higher value than sets of the individual novels, and so the unit costs were lower. The different formats were sold in different parts of the country: Hurst, Robinson & Co. was particularly adept at selling the cheaper 18mo, disposing of 5000 copies of Novels and Tales.

In 1823 Scott presented Constable with the manuscripts of all the novels, and this further raised Constable's ambitions, for on 25 March he proposed a new complete edition of the novels, in a handsome format, annotated by Scott himself: ‘in my opinion’, he wrote, ‘it is the Author only who could do anything at all acceptable in the way of genuine illustration’ (Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 7.354). Constable's estimate of the profit was £20,000, which he was prepared to share with Scott. Scott initially demurred, but by late 1825 had accepted Constable's proposals, and was working on Waverley, when the crash took place in January 1826.

Even bolder were Constable's plans for his Miscellany, and the mass publication of fiction and works of popular history. He laid his plans out to Scott at a meeting in Abbotsford in May 1825, which J. G. Lockhart reported in an exuberant and ample passage in his Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, bart.:

I have now settled my outline of operations—a three shilling or half-crown volume every month, which must and shall sell, not by thousands, or tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands—ay, by millions! Twelve volumes in the year ... so good that millions will wish to have them, and so cheap that every butcher's callant may have them. (Lockhart, 6.31)

Constable was planning ‘nothing less than a total revolution in the art and traffic of bookselling’ (ibid., 6.28). Scott recognized that the plan was both daring and visionary, and told Constable that he would be known as ‘the grand Napoleon of the realms of print’ (ibid., 6.31). The list was to include Scott's novels, but Hurst Robinson objected lest cheap reprints should harm sales of existing stock, and so on 30 August Constable told Scott that the series would consist of miscellaneous non-fiction works, some reprints of standard works, and other new titles commissioned for the series. The series was dedicated to the king, a privilege obtained by Scott, who wrote to George IV's secretary explaining:

Our great publisher in Scotland has formed a plan which, though intended for his profit in the first instance, cannot, I think, but have the best possible effect in supplying this new and extended demand for literature among the lower classes, by reprinting at a moderate rate, and selling at a low profit, a great number of the most standard English works both in history, in the belles lettres, as well as in science, and in the department of voyages and travels, natural history, and so forth. (Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 9.262–3)

The bankruptcy

The grand Napoleon of the realms of print did not see the fulfilment of his greatest scheme because of his bankruptcy in January 1826 (although a modified version began publication on 6 January 1827). According to Lockhart in his Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, bart. (1837–8) the failure of Archibald Constable & Co. and James Ballantyne & Co., and of Constable, Cadell, Ballantyne, and Scott as individuals (there was then no limited liability and the personal assets of partners in a business were at risk), was due to a complete failure in accounting, exacerbated by a ‘maddening period of panic’ (Lockhart, 6.118) in the last weeks of 1825. It is not now possible to review the financial position of Archibald Constable & Co., as the accounts of Constable's trustees are lost; one list of Constable's liabilities indicates debts of about £150,000 and another about £200,000, but neither gives usable information about when and for what purpose the debts were incurred. Even so, the accusations of financial incompetence made by Lockhart against them all (ibid., 6.113–20) are incompatible with the fact that Constable as publisher and Ballantyne as printer had conducted two extraordinarily successful businesses for twenty-five years. They also take no account of economic conditions in the winter of 1825–6: there was a national financial crisis. Depositors fearing that banks would fail withdrew their money; the banks called in loans as they became due in order to meet their own liabilities. The result was that Constable was unable to recycle his firm's borrowings. In January 1826 the firm and its partners were bankrupt. Their property was sequestrated, and was sold over the next few years for the benefit of the creditors, who, in the end, were paid a dividend of only 2s. 9d. in the pound. In his Journal Scott commented: ‘Constable's business seems unintelligible. No man thought the house worth less than £150,000—Constable told me when he was making his will that he was worth £80,000 ... No doubt trading almost entirely on accomodation [sic] is dreadfully expensive’ (p. 71). Trading on accommodation, in other words relying on bank borrowings to finance the business, was expensive, but although it must have reduced the available profit it does not explain the enormous gap between assets and liabilities. It is probable that the firm overestimated the value of the stock; normally the value was reckoned to be what it would fetch if sold at advertised prices. More importantly, those responsible for selling the assets of Archibald Constable & Co. did not understand the value of copyrights: the Waverley copyrights were sold at auction on 19 December 1827 to Scott's trustees for £8400, but sales of the novels in the 1830s suggest that the copyrights were worth ten times what Scott's trustees paid for them. Of course had Scott's trustees not got a bargain Scott's own edition of the Waverley novels would never have proceeded, and would not have generated the enormous sums it did. None the less Constable knew the value of copyrights while his trustees did not, and his valuation of them may explain how he came to estimate his personal fortune at £80,000. In 1838 his eldest son, David, wrote:

But had the bankers of London understood the value of an assignment of copyright by an author to his publisher, and of such copyrights as those of the writings of the Author of Waverley or the Encyclopædia Britannica, as well as they understand the value of a bill of lading of a cargo of hides or tallow from St. Petersburg, I feel perfectly assured that no loss would have been sustained in any quarter, so far as literature and the publications of Constable and Co. were concerned. (T. Constable, 3.469)

Death

Soon after the failure of the business Constable and Cadell quarrelled, and parted company. Constable lost his fine house, and he and his family went to live in rented accommodation. He tried to re-create his life as a publisher but was deserted by Scott, who chose to work with Cadell. (The latter had seriously misrepresented Constable's negotiations with bankers in London in the weeks preceding the crash.) Constable's health had been in decline for some years: he suffered from ‘dropsy’, fluid retention possibly indicating partial heart failure. He died on 21 July 1827.

By his first marriage to Mary Willison, Constable had at least eight children, including Elizabeth, who married Constable's partner Robert Cadell on 14 October 1817 but who died on 16 July the following year. He married Charlotte Neale on 12 February 1818 and had a second family. At death he was destitute, and was able to leave nothing to his first family, but his second was supported by the proceeds of an annuity.

Constable's eldest son, David Constable (1795–1867), became a book collector, travelling on the continent in 1817 in search of old and valuable books, and assisting Scott and scholars such as Sir James Mackintosh (T. Constable, 2.521–7). He qualified as an advocate in 1819 and appears to have earned a modest income from the law. He inherited his grandfather's printing business, but his involvement with his father's financial affairs led to the sale of his collection and the loss of the printing business's most significant customer. This and his father's death in 1827 led to a breakdown. He married in 1828 and went to live in Brussels, had two sons and a daughter (who died in infancy), and became a widower in 1835. He had another serious breakdown, and retired to Ayrshire, before returning to Edinburgh and the protection of his brother Thomas [see below] and his family. He died on 4 January 1867.

Thomas Constable (1812–1881), printer, was born in Edinburgh on 29 June 1812. He learned the trade of printer with C. Richards of St Martin's Lane in London, and took over the Willison printing business owned by his brother David in 1833. He moved the business from Craig's Close, off the High Street in Edinburgh, to 11 Thistle Street in the New Town, and traded under his own name, Thomas Constable. By 1834 he had won contracts from Robert Cadell and Adam and Charles Black, the present and the future publishers of Scott's works. In 1835 he had four presses; by 1852 he