Search Results

This chapter provides an insight into the career of John Murray prior to his association with Byron. It describes the establishment of the firm by the first John Murray and the difficulties faced by his son as he assumed control of the family business. Murray’s character, his entrepreneurial skill, and his ambition as a bookseller and publisher re the primary focus of this chapter. It also discusses the establishment and publication of The Quarterly Review.

The heightened presence from the later eighteenth century of travel publishing as a distinctive genre was coincident with the emergence of greater literacy in Britain, the development of a literary marketplace, and a recognition by publishers of the need to develop a clear strategy with respect to the publication of travel and exploration. The house of Murray at first moved only slowly in publishing accounts of overseas travel and exploration, many of its works before 1800 being co-published with other London firms. Its first ventures in this respect—in 1773 with Sydney Parkinson’s narrative, and in 1782 with a book of Indian travels by William Macintosh—are examined for what they reveal about the key issues of authorial credibility, truth in the narrative’s content, and style in the language. After 1815, as opportunities for overseas exploration opened up, and under the direction of John Murray II, with the assistance of John Barrow, Second Secretary to the British Admiralty, the house of Murray developed a clear focus on the quality of its publications in this field. This was continued and developed under John Murray III. The evolution of the explorer-author took place in association with the evolution of the Murray firm.

Another distinctive trend was the all-star revue film, as produced by most of the major studios. Each would serve as a guidepost to its company's reigning aesthetic as it addressed the new world of sound films. With The Hollywood Revue, MGM triumphed through a wise use of stars and production knowhow. With Show of Shows, Warner Bros. failed through a misspent budget and indifferent material. While Fox's Happy Days was tepid, Paramount on Parade was witty and resourceful. Universal's King of Jazz, by far the most spectacular of the revues, found artistic success at the expense of diminished audience favor. Seldom, after 1930, would such work ever be tried again.

This chapter describes the relationship between Byron and John Murray during Byron’s ‘years of fame’, years characterised by massive commercial success and popularity. Murray acquired fashionable new premises in Albemarle Street and Byron, while writing prolifically, began to seriously worry that he was writing too much. The chapter discusses the unusual friendship between Murray and Lady Caroline Lamb and examines contemporary reviews which chastised Byron for his rapidity of composition. The chapter focuses specifically on Byron’s ‘Eastern Tales’, with special attention paid to The Giaour.

The introduction to this book discusses the prevailing view of the unique relationship in Romantic Literature between Byron and John Murray. It offers a brief overview of attitudes towards booksellers and publishers in the 18^th century and argues that this perception was highly influential among later authors. It also interrogates the distinction between the terms ‘publisher’ and ‘bookseller’ and demonstrates the significance of this distinction as it relates to John Murray. The introduction concludes by providing a short overview of the content of the book.

John Courtney Murray had a profound understanding of where he was—and the story behind it. Born of Irish and Scottish immigrants in 1904, Murray had a vivid, first- generation knowledge of the American immigrant saga and the religious world of Roman Catholicism. This chapter highlights the important relationship between Murray's consciousness of the American proposition and the Murray family's own immigrant roots in New York City. It gives us a unique perspective on how the lived experience of the Catholic immigrant story of America—with its accounts of freedom, courage, and hard work—nurtured the ground from which Murray builds his understanding of a public theology. It argues that the pillars of Murray's theology focused on an immigrant's vision: human freedom, the courage to open up to genuine dialogue, and the hard work it would take to maintain it.

Private problems did not prevent Lane from working. He was indeed busy, for this was when he submitted the second draft of Description of Egypt to the publishing firm of John Murray. It was founded in 1768 by the first John Murray. It had steadily risen in status under John Murray II, the publisher of Byron, Austen, and many other renowned literary figures. Murray invited Lane during the last week of March 1831, for an interview in his famous drawing room at Albemarle Street, where he had received so many great writers. The Murray archives contain no record of the firm's negotiations with Lane, so the single source is a letter of several years later from Lane to John Murray III in which Lane would have presented his case in the best possible light, but there is no reason to doubt his general accuracy.

This chapter explores the impact of Byron’s exile on his professional and personal relationship with John Murray. Murray was a notoriously indolent correspondent and his failure to write regularly to Byron caused the poet much anxiety. The chapter examines the third canto of Childe Harold as a meditation on fame and literary reputation, and highlights the significance of Byron’s meeting with Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The final chapter documents the disintegration of Byron and John Murray’s literary relationship. It describes the publication of Don Juan and exonerates Murray from the charge of being completely opposed to the poem. The chapter focuses on the significance of Murray’s choice to publish the poem without his name, and the consequent effect on Byron, who felt disowned by his publisher of almost ten years.

Judeo-Christian exceptionalism took firm hold after World War II. The Supreme Court’s Everson (1947) and McCollum (1948) decisions raised the church-state barrier and convinced leading Catholics, many Protestants, and some Jews that secularism had become the nation’s quasi-official faith. The replacement of fascism with “godless communism” as the country’s enemy also heightened fears of secularization and unbelief. Lay Catholics took up both Judeo-Christian language and Judeo-Christian exceptionalism after the war. Will Herberg also sought a cross-confessional campaign against secularism, as many Protestants—especially Reinhold Niebuhr’s followers—warmed to that prospect. Education became a key battleground, as these figures decried the secularization of public schooling, and sometimes also the denial of public funds to parochial schools. Clarifying their views on the First Amendment, they rejected strict separationism and the journalist Paul Blanshard’s sensational attacks on Catholic political influence. These Protestants favored accommodationism: the view that the federal government cannot establish any particular faith but can—and must—promote all religious groups equally over and against secularism. Through private and public channels, they worked with liberal Catholics such as John Courtney Murray and Jewish advocates of Judeo-Christian exceptionalism to counter what they considered the growing dominance of secularism in American public culture.

The second chapter considers Livingstone’s own self-representation in the best-selling travelogue, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. Despite being one of the most celebrated Victorian travel texts, the book has received little critical attention. Treating the text as a mechanism of self-projection, the chapter discusses the narrative strategies by which Livingstone cultivated his public image. The body of letters between Livingstone and his publisher, John Murray, is central to the argument. Through this correspondence Missionary Travels is revealed to be a censored text, subject to a process of ‘impression management’. Livingstone’s editing practices become clearer when the published version of the book is compared to the original handwritten manuscript. While this manuscript has been routinely overlooked in Livingstone scholarship, it contains significant variations to the print version. Most importantly, Livingstone had originally included a protracted critique of the Cape-Xhosa wars. Engaging in counterfactual speculation, we might surmise that his posthumous reputation could have been rather different had he not excised this powerful extract. Yet, even as it stands in its published version, Missionary Travels should be considered a highly complex text and one that cannot be unproblematically categorised as imperialist.

Byron’s most significant marginalia concerning his Eastern reading and relationship with other authors occurs in Isaac D’Israeli’s The Literary Character of Men of Genius. Originally published as an essay in 1795, D’Israeli’s book was read by Byron more than once. Drawing on recent work on literary celebrity culture, the essay argues that D’Israeli’s Literary Character helped to form Byron’s ideas about literary authorship, fame, and literary authority. Not only did D’Israeli show Byron how to think and act as a professional author, as a translator of Leila and Mejnoun, he also profoundly influenced Byron’s The Bride of Abydos. The exchange between D’Israeli and Byron, mediated by John Murray, shows how D’Israeli served as a kind of literary forefather to Byron.

This chapter describes a perceived conflict between Judith Sargent Murray’s liberal religious Universalism and her identity as a Federalist. It argues that she attempted to address and resolve this perceived conflict in her writing. Drawing on legal discourse, newspaper writing, sermons, and letters, the chapter shows Murray situating her ideas in two related contexts. The first context is the debate around Massachusetts religious establishment, in which Universalists challenged orthodox ideas of divine justice and legally pursued religious equality, and the second is the transatlantic reaction to Jacobin de-Christianization during French Revolution. Responding to both conflicts in The Gleaner: A Miscellaneous Production, Murray seeks to differentiate Universalists from Jacobins, using the form of the miscellany to argue that privatized liberal Christianity can serve the public purpose that Federalists assigned to religion in a republic.

This chapter uses the biblical exhortation, “love your enemies”, to illustrate John Courtney Murray's spiritual and intellectual journey. It shows how Murray grew deeper in his Catholic tradition before having to transcend and transform the limitations of that tradition in order to enter genuine dialogue with the world. The chapter notes that “while Murray never wrote much on loving one's enemies, he did have a clearly identifiable enemies list”. It takes us through Murray's list—the idea of Americanism, the professors and administrators at the Catholic University of America (who helped to silence him), American Protestants in general, and atheists in particular. The chapter describes Murray's “hatred” toward Protestants and atheists, how his own Catholic tradition consciously and unconsciously fostered that hatred, and how he found hidden in that tradition a way to “bear the cross” of others and come to love his enemies.

Part 2, “Secularism and the Redefinition of Democracy,” begins with a chapter exploring the distinctive challenges that Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers faced as Judeo-Christian formulations of democracy multiplied. It explains that many wartime commentators employed a “tri-faith” portrait of the American nation—one that deemed Protestants, Catholics, and Jews equally American—without using Judeo-Christian terminology, let alone theorizing democracy’s cultural foundations. Even liberal rabbis steered clear of Judeo-Christian rhetoric after 1941, as attacks on secularism spread and Christian personalism shaped the ascendant language of individual rights. In terms of individual groups, mainstream Protestants increasingly joined Reinhold Niebuhr in fearing secularism more than Catholicism. Liberal Catholics such as Carlton J. H. Hayes and John Courtney Murray reached out to these Protestants, seeking a cross-confessional or tri-faith alliance against secularism. Although a few Jews, led by the erstwhile Marxist Will Herberg, shared this vision, most joined nonbelievers and religious humanists in continuing to identify open-ended tolerance as democracy’s keynote—and portraying Judeo-Christian exceptionalism as implicitly totalitarian. Bitter conflicts over the nature of democracy and rights played out in scholarly gatherings and media outlets alike, as Americans clashed over the proper contours of the postwar global order.

Christopher Denny explores some of the early writings of the American Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray, better known for his later contributions to the Second Vatican Council. Locating Murray amongst other theoretical writers on Catholic Action, Denny demonstrates how Murray offered a reading of lay empowerment that did not succumb to the temptation to embrace materialism or negative liberty, but continued to affirm the freedoms of laypeople within a Catholic frame of reference.

The massive outpouring of public piety that characterized the postwar years accompanied a vigorous campaign against secularism, both at home and abroad. Dwight D. Eisenhower came to see the limits of Judeo-Christian terminology by the mid-1950s, perhaps with the help of his Catholic speechwriter Emmet J. Hughes. But other public figures (and many ordinary citizens) embraced that language, along with the dominant, Judeo-Christian exceptionalist understanding of democracy. Conflicts over religion and education continued, and theorists such as John Courtney Murray, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Will Herberg honed their arguments for religion’s political centrality, even as Niebuhr began decrying religious nationalism and anti-secularism. At the same time, some Jewish thinkers challenged Judeo-Christian terminology itself. The Catholic writer John Cogley also expressed doubts about anticommunism’s prominence in American Catholic thought. On the pluralist side, the liberal Protestant theologian Edwin E. Aubrey and the Jewish philosopher Horace M. Kallen offered positive renderings of secularism in the early 1950s, as part of their groups’ continued effort to identify open-ended tolerance as the central democratic ideal. Yet anticommunism and the accompanying critiques of secularism continued to dominate American public life through the McCarthy era.

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of how Byron became one of John Murray’s authors. It describes the crucial role played by Byron’s distant relation and self-appointed literary agent Robert Charles Dallas, and demonstrates the difficulty Byron faced in choosing whether to persist with the publication of satirical works with James Cawthorn, or to switch publishers and move to John Murray.