George Routledge and Sons

British, 1864 - 1912

BiographyLC name authority rec. n 81144562
LC Heading: George Routledge and Sons

Associated names: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Routledge, Warne, & Routledge.

MWA/NAIP files ::b (hdg.: George Routledge and Sons; usage: George Routledge & Sons; G. Routledge and Sons; note: earlier name Routledge, Warne, & Routledge; name changed 1865 when another son, Edmund, became partner in firm)

Biography (George Routledge):
Routledge, George (1812–1888), publisher, was born on 23 September 1812 at Brampton, Cumberland, the youngest of eight children of Robert Routledge (1760–1815) and his wife, Mary or Mally Calvert (1766–1843). At fifteen he was apprenticed to Charles Thurman, a Carlisle bookseller, and after six years secured release from this contract in order to seek employment in London. He was hired as a shop assistant by the large publishing and wholesale firm of Baldwin, Craddock, and Joy at 47 Paternoster Row. His employers clearly thought well of him as they increased his salary from £60 to £80 during the next three years, and placed him in charge of the binding department. In 1836 he decided to venture out on his own.

To assist him in his newly acquired shop at 11 Ryder's Court, Leicester Square, Routledge hired a promising fifteen-year-old, William Henry Warne. The following year he married his assistant's older sister, Maria Elizabeth (1814/15–1855), but soon learned that he could not support her on the income from selling books, so accepted a full-time job at the tithe office in Somerset House, leaving young Warne in charge of the bookshop. Under this arrangement, Routledge was able to work during the evenings on building up his stock of publications, adding a line of stationery, and from time to time writing a book himself. In 1836 he published his first work, The Beauties of Gilsland, which celebrated a spa near his native Brampton.

In 1843 Routledge combined his working and living premises at 36 Soho Square. At the same time he expanded his business by making frequent trips to booksellers in the north. He bought up remainders from other publishers and sold them at much reduced prices. On occasion he reprinted out-of-copyright works or pirated ones from America. In 1848 his brother-in-law William Henry Warne became a partner in the firm, and its name became Routledge and Warne. Three years later William's young brother, Frederick, was hired, and the firm was renamed Routledge & Co.

By the late 1840s Routledge and a few others, such as Henry Bohn and David Bogue, were convinced that there were a great many readers who were unwilling or unable to spend even 5s. or 6s. for a book, but they might be willing to pay cash for volumes costing just 1s. or 1s. 6d. Since the copyright of foreign works, especially American, was doubtful at best, Routledge considered them ideal as cheap reprints, and in the summer of 1848 launched his Railway Library, the first volume of which was The Pilot, by James Fenimore Cooper. Soon other volumes, mostly by American authors, appeared at unprecedentedly low prices. As the series caught on, out-of-copyright British fiction began to appear. Eventually Routledge bargained with authors for permission to reprint their older works, and G. P. R. James, W. Harrison Ainsworth, Frederick Marryat, and Benjamin Disraeli agreed.

When he inaugurated the Railway Library, Routledge could hardly have imagined the extent of its eventual success. In 1848 W. H. Smith opened his first railway bookstall in Euston Station, London, and similar outlets soon sprouted throughout the country. As demand for titles grew, Smith placed a standing order for 1000 copies of each new volume, ushering in an era of mass marketing. In the following years, Routledge issued several library series: Routledge's American Poets, Routledge's Books for the Country, British Poets, Routledge's Cheap Series, Routledge's Standard Novels, Routledge's Popular Library, and Routledge's Useful Library. However, the Railway Library was by far the most successful, comprising nearly 1300 titles at the end of the century.

In 1852 an unprecedented number of uncopyrighted reprints of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in Britain. Twenty firms published the novel in forty different editions, and Routledge printed versions ranging in price from 6d. to 6s. He sold more than half a million copies, a publishing record. Provided he could secure an early copy of a work and rush it into print, Routledge occasionally compensated American authors like Susan Warner (pseudonym of Elizabeth Wetherell), whose book Queechy (1852) was delivered on a Monday morning, and by keeping the presses going night and day, was bound and distributed to booksellers in one week. The initial printing was 20,000, but eventually 100,000 copies were sold.

The year 1852 was memorable for Routledge not only for the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin but also because he acquired larger business premises at 2 Farringdon Street. His recognition that continuing prosperity could not rest entirely on American reprints forced him to undertake in December 1853 what many regarded as a foolhardy speculation in contemporary English novels. He offered Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton £20,000 to include nineteen of his novels in the Railway Library for a period of ten years. Until that time only major firms like Longmans had dealt in such large sums. Routledge was gambling heavily on reviving the novelist's popularity through quantity sales, and the strategy worked. Each year thereafter they renewed their agreement, paying the author another £1000.

In 1854 Routledge opened a branch office in New York in order to gain better access to new American works, as well as to distribute his own publications in the United States. On one of his trips to America he persuaded Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to allow his poem Evangeline (1856) to be used in an illustrated edition with drawings by Sir John Gilbert and woodcuts by the Dalziel brothers. The idea proved so successful that it became the model for Routledge's gift books at Christmas.

Routledge's wife, Maria, the mother of their eight children, died in 1855. Three years later, on 11 May 1858, he married Mary Grace (d. 1898), the daughter of Alderman Thomas Bell, and sister to Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, first baronet (1816–1904). They had two children. George Routledge's eldest child, Robert Warne Routledge (1837–1899), became a partner in the publishing firm in 1858, and its name was duly altered to Routledge, Warne, and Routledge. The following year William Warne died.

During the 1850s the firm became especially adept at publishing works on the heels of key events such as wars and the deaths of statesmen. With the demise of Sir Robert Peel in 1850 it printed a hastily prepared biography, and two years later it did the same for the duke of Wellington. During the Crimean War Routledge collected the newspaper dispatches of William Howard Russell into a popular book in 1855 which sold 20,000 copies; he did the same with Russell's account of the Indian mutiny of 1857, which appeared in 1859.

Routledge introduced Every Boy's Magazine in January 1862. Initially edited by his son Edmund, it was intended to raise the tone of children's periodicals without sacrificing their appeal. It flourished for twenty-eight years and was imitated, although less successfully, by Every Girl's Annual (1878–88).

Routledge was in the vanguard of those who appreciated the value of illustrations in their publications. Initially he commissioned the four Dalziel brothers and other engravers to decorate the works of Shakespeare and books on natural history. In 1859, when Edward Moxon's deluxe and costly illustrated edition of Alfred Tennyson's poems was languishing in bookshops, he purchased the remainders and made an agreement with the author to reduce the selling price, whereupon the books were quickly sold. He promoted collaboration between the artist Walter Crane and the colour printer Edmund Evans, so that Crane's pictures appeared in children's stories, collections of poetry, and in the ‘yellowbacks’ sold in bookshops and railway stalls.

In 1864 the firm's premises in Farringdon Street were commandeered for railway expansion, necessitating a move to 7 Broadway, Ludgate Hill. A year later another son, Edmund Routledge (1844–1899), joined the firm, which may have precipitated the departure of Frederick Warne. At this time the business took the name George Routledge & Sons.

During the 1870s Routledge discovered the talents of younger artists such as Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway. Greenaway's book of nonsense verse with her own illustrations, Under the Window, became an overnight sensation in 1879, and her 1883 Almanack sold 100,000 copies. As long as George Routledge was actively involved in the firm, however, it never strayed far from the formula that had made his fortune: cheap reprints. In 1878 he acquired and reprinted the entire stock of Chapman and Hall's 2s. edition of the works of Charles Dickens, and in 1883 he inaugurated Morley's Universal Library, well-printed volumes of the classics priced at 1s., which continued until 1888.

At the end of his life Routledge spent more and more time in Cumberland, enjoying the role of a country squire at Stone House, Hayton. A Liberal in politics, he was appointed successively a county magistrate, a deputy lieutenant, and a high sheriff. In 1887 he retired, having published 5000 titles, an average of two volumes each week. In October 1888 he developed blood poisoning and had his leg amputated by the renowned Joseph Lister, the developer of antiseptic surgery. Routledge died on 12 December 1888 at his London residence, 50 Russell Square, leaving an estate worth at least £80,000 in addition to extensive real estate holdings. He was buried in the Kensal Green cemetery, London, and was succeeded in the business by his sons Robert and Edmund.

James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes
Sources F. A. Mumby, The house of Routledge, 1834–1934, with a history of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and other associated firms (1934) · N. Franklin, 50 years of British publishing: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1985) · DNB · G. Furlong, ed., The archives of Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd: (1853–1973) (1978) · Publishers' Circular (16 Jan 1888), 6 · Publishers' Circular (15 Dec 1888), 1748 · Publishers' Circular (31 Dec 1888), 1795 · The Bookseller (9 Jan 1889), 7 · The Times (15 Dec 1888), 10 · The Athenaeum (7 Jan 1888), 18 · The Athenaeum (15 Dec 1888), 814 · The Athenaeum (22 Dec 1888), 850 · Carlisle Patriot (21 Dec 1888), 1 · m. cert. [Mary Grace Bell]
Archives UCL, publishing records of Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd :: Herts. ALS, letters to Lord Lytton · U. Durham L., letters to Lord Carlisle
Likenesses R. T., wood-engraving, NPG; repro. in ILN (12 Jan 1889), 38–40 · photograph, Routledge & Kegan Paul [see illus.]
Wealth at death £80,000; plus real estate: Mumby, The House of Routledge, 133
© Oxford University Press 2004–15
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

James J. Barnes, Patience P. Barnes, ‘Routledge, George (1812–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/24184, accessed 20 Oct 2015]

Person TypeInstitution

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