In 1819, Millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, Williamâs son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly âVictorianâ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeareâs works and Pilgrimâs Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of âbooks for the millionsâ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everymanâs Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition â publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Jules Verne was an unusual author as he was a French writer whose work was accepted and absorbed by the machine of English literature. Verne had invented the genres of science fiction, or âsci-fiâ as it is often abbreviated and there was no other English author writing on this subject at the time. Curiously Verne was thought of as an auteur pour les enfants in France. His fascination with futuristic science and fantastic situations was seen as rather puerile and fatuous alongside the serious and heavyweight novelists of his time, such as Honoré de Balzac.
In Britain it was another story. Scientific and technological progress had shaped the success of the British Empire and people were consequently far more open to Verneâs flights of fancy. He anticipated phenomena that seemed quite likely to occur from the British point of view, because they as a nation had been responsible for the lionâs share of advancements in science and technology that the world then enjoyed.
The translations of Verneâs work, however, often left something to be desired. They were heavily edited so that any perceived anti-British sentiment was erased, thus making the works unfaithful to Verneâs original manuscripts for the sake of political correctness. In addition to this political censoring, the translators had problems with transliterating measurements and calculations from metric to imperial standards. Verne had been fastidious in his scientific accuracy, thereby lending his work a weight of scientific realism and authenticity, while the translators in contrast had been rather lackadaisical in their efforts so that the precision was lost, literally, in translation. Educated and learned English readers, thinking the translations to be true, thought of Verne as a little facile, coming up with sound basic ideas but failing in his attention to detail. Even in the mid-19th century people understood the importance of research in making a novel credible.
Despite these setbacks, Verne became the âFather of sci-fiâ by pioneering the genre. His canon includes Voyage au Centre de la Terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth) and Vingt Mille Lieues Sous les Mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). He even anticipated space flight with
