ABSTRACT
By the end of 1882, Alexander Macmillan and George Lillie Craik had decided that it was time to bring to a close George Grove’s long tenure as editor of Macmillan’s Magazine. On 8 December, while Macmillan was indisposed with a cold, Craik sent Grove what was in effect a three-page letter of dismissal. Sales had been declining, Craik wrote, owing in part to ‘energetic competition’ from other periodicals, intensified the previous month by the successful launch of the sixpenny Longman’s Magazine, while ‘our payment for authorship was considerably increased’. It was therefore necessary for Macmillan and Co. ‘to consider our position’. Besides, because Grove was about to assume the directorship of the new Royal College of Music, ‘an office which must take up much of your time & energy’, it seemed appropriate ‘to make some other arrangement about the editing’. Craik reminded Grove, not quite accurately, that his predecessor, David Masson, had resigned his post ‘when he went to Edinburgh’ because he felt that his new duties were incompatible with his continuing as editor of Macmillan’s; but Craik did go on to suggest that Grove carry on until the end of the current volume, in April 1883.1
John Morley
John Morley succeeded Grove as editor of Macmillan’s Magazine in May 1883, with the start of Volume 48. He had been working for the House of Macmillan as a trusted publisher’s reader since the mid1860s, about the same time that he began contributing to the Magazine, when he was not yet 30. In 1877 it was Morley who had proposed to Craik the inception of what was to become the English Men of Letters series, which would reach 39 volumes under his supervision;2 he himself had written the one on Edmund Burke (1879). Not only had Morley proved his value to Macmillan and Co. in these ways, but he had already served with considerable distinction as the editor of another highly respected periodical, the Fortnightly Review, from 1867 to 1882, and of an equally admired evening newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, from 1880 to 1883. The additional fact that Morley was on excellent terms with both Alexander Macmillan and Craik must have made him seem to them Grove’s ideal successor.3
