Abstract
For historians of economics, the Macmillan archive is a relatively unexploited treasure. It is a treasure because Macmillan published most of the leading English economists writing during the period of the initial archive: Henry Fawcett, William Stanley Jevons, Herbert Somerton Foxwell, Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall, John Neville Keynes, John Shield Nicholson, J. A. Hobson, A. C. Pigou and John Maynard Keynes.2 It is relatively unexploited in that, except for some studies of Jevons, Marshall and Maynard Keynes, historians of economics have not used it.3
I should like to thank the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge for permission to cite material from the Keynes Papers in the Modern Archive Centre in the College, and from Keynes’s writings generally; and Christopher Johnson for permission to cite one letter from the Robbins Papers which will eventually reside in the British Library of Political and Economic Science. Unpublished writings of J. M. Keynes copyright The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge 1998.
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Notes
The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume HI: 1925–1930, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), pp. 35, 38; A Change of Perspective: the letters of Virginia Woolf Volume III: 1923–1928, edited by Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), pp. 194–5, 282.
D. E. Moggridge, Maynard Keynes: an Economist’s Biography (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 40, 838, plate 9.
The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, edited by E. Johnson and D. Moggridge, 30 vols (London: Macmillan, 1971–89), XVII, 3.
Lydia and Maynard exchanged letters daily when they were apart, which, given his Cambridge commitments, meant at least four days a week during term time. A selection of letters written before their marriage was published as Lydia and Maynard: Letters between Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes, edited by Polly Hill and Richard Keynes (London: André Deutsch, 1989).
Keynes to Dan Macmillan, 25 October 1913 (Add.MS. 55201, f. 28). Keynes’s review of J. A. Hobson’s Gold, Prices and Wages (1913), published in the Economic Journal, September 1913, concluded: ‘Belonging to no one race or age more than another, there lives an intellectually solitary race of beings who by some natural prompting of the soul think about monetary theory in certain specific, definite ways, superstitious or delusive, mystically, not materially, true, if true at all. All of these will find their natural instincts expressed here in forms more plausible-topical than they can usually shape themselves. Mr. Hobson has given us the Mythology of Money, — intellectualised, brought up to journalistic date, most subtly interlarded (and this is how it differs from the rest) with temporary concessions to reason’ (JMK, xi, 388).
There are at least two exceptions — the French economist Leon Walras, and the English economist Philip Wicksteed. For all Walras’s books from 1874 onwards, the name of L. Corbaz et Cie of Geneva appeared on the title-page, along with those of one or two booksellers such as Guillumin et Cie of Paris and H. Georg of Basel. However, Corbaz, a commercial printer and stationer, merely acted as banker and business agent. Walras paid all the expenses and supplied the books to the booksellers on a sale or return basis at a 50 per cent profit margin. Unlike Keynes’s, it was not an arrangement of choice. Nor was it a profitable arrangement for Walras: in 1891, when he closed his accounts on a number of publications, including the first edition of his Elements d’economie politique pure, he owed Corbaz 1803 francs (William Jaffé, William Jaffe’s Essays on Walras, edited by D. A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 84–5). In the case of Wicksteed’s The Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution (1894), the publisher was Macmillan. Sales were few: his daughter remembered him giving most of his copies away, and saying that ‘only four copies had been sold — two of them to his prospective sons-in-law’ (Rebecca Wicksteed to Lionel Robbins, 7 September 1930, Robbins Papers).
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© 2002 D. E. Moggridge
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Moggridge, D.E. (2002). A Risk-bearing Author. In: James, E. (eds) Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523456_11
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