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Thomas Norton Longman (1771–1842) was an English publisher, who succeeded to the
Longman Longman, also known as Pearson Longman, is a publisher, publishing company founded in London, England, in 1724 and is owned by Pearson PLC. Since 1968, Longman has been used primarily as an imprint by Pearson's Schools business. The Longman bra ...
’s publishing business in 1793.


Biography

Thomas Norton Longman was born in England, son of Thomas Longman (1730–1797), and his wife, Elizabeth Harris (1740-1808). He was also the great nephew of Thomas Longman (1699-1755) who founded the Longman publishing house in 1724. Longman was the eldest of twelve siblings and the third generation Longman to run the family’s lucrative publishing business. It was Longman who in 1799 purchased a major share in the copyright of Lindley Murray’s ''English Grammar'', which had an annual sale of about 50,000 copies. This and other works by Murray added to a sizeable backlist of widely used Longman educational books – soon to appear regularly in separate catalogues – most of them regarded as textbooks. Longman interest published extensively for the theatre in early nineteenth century. It has sometimes been suggested that this line of business was the result of the marriage of his father in 1760 to the sister of Thomas Harris, who for many years was the proprietor and manager of Covent Garden, one of the three licensed theatres in London at that time. In fact, Longman had previously published several plays performed outside London. The Longman interest in the theatrical market is also reflected in translations of plays, among them
August von Kotzebue August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue (; – ) was a German dramatist and writer who also worked as a consul in Russia and Germany. In 1817, one of Kotzebue's books was burned during the Wartburg festival. He was murdered in 1819 by Karl L ...
’s ''The East Indian'' (1799). Some British dramatists had the majority of their books published by Longman; others were ‘printed under the authority of and by permission of the managers from the prompt books’. Longman playwrights included John O’Keeffe (1747–1833),
William Pearce William Pearce may refer to: Entertainment * William Houghton Sprague Pearce (1864–1935), American artist * Bill Pearce (1926–2010), American singer and trombonist * Billy Pearce (born 1951), English actor and comedian Politics * Sir William ...
(1738–95), Thomas Morton (1764–1838) and
Frederick Reynolds Frederick Reginald Reynolds (7 August 1833 – 18 April 1915) was an English first-class cricketer who played for Cambridge Town Club and other Cambridge-based sides from 1854 to 1867, and for Lancashire County Cricket Club from 1865 to 187 ...
(1764–1841). Longman also purchased the
copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
from
Joseph Cottle Joseph Cottle (1770–1853) was an English publisher and author. Cottle started business in Bristol. He published the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey on generous terms. He then wrote in his ''Early Recollections'' an expos ...
, of
Bristol Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city i ...
, of Southey's ''
Joan of Arc Joan of Arc (french: link=yes, Jeanne d'Arc, translit= �an daʁk} ; 1412 – 30 May 1431) is a patron saint of France, honored as a defender of the French nation for her role in the siege of Orléans and her insistence on the corona ...
'' and Wordsworth's ''
Lyrical Ballads ''Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems'' is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in litera ...
''. He published the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and
Scott Scott may refer to: Places Canada * Scott, Quebec, municipality in the Nouvelle-Beauce regional municipality in Quebec * Scott, Saskatchewan, a town in the Rural Municipality of Tramping Lake No. 380 * Rural Municipality of Scott No. 98, Saska ...
, and acted as London agent for the '' Edinburgh Review'', which was started in 1802. Longman's great-uncle and father called themselves "booksellers", not publishers, although they all produced books on their own account. In contrast, Longman and his partners (Rees, Orme, Hurst, Green) – still calling themselves (and being called) booksellers – have passed into history as ‘publishers’, a term whose meaning had changed during the course of the eighteenth century. Before Longman took the reign of the business, there was no concept of ‘ publishers’. Booksellers brought book shares and the cumulative earnings were shared by all the share holders. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Longman began to consolidate the business and moved to buying the works outright, for a one time down payment. Longman famously paid Thomas Moore, a famous Irish balladeer, an unprecedented sum of £3,000 in 1813 for his, yet to be written, poem '' Lalla Rookh'' (1817). This amount was later surpassed when Longmans paid
Thomas Macaulay Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, (; 25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as the Paymaster-General between 1846 and 1 ...
£20,000 on account of the profits for the third and fourth edition of ''
History of England England became inhabited more than 800,000 years ago, as the discovery of stone tools and footprints at Happisburgh in Norfolk have indicated.; "Earliest footprints outside Africa discovered in Norfolk" (2014). BBC News. Retrieved 7 Februar ...
'' in 1856. When the ‘ Copyright Act’ of 1814 was under review, Longman gave informative evidence to the select committee on copyright in 1813, a year before the act was passed, which extended the term of fourteen years laid down in the 1710 Act to twenty-eight years, or – if the author was alive at the end of that time – for the rest of his or her life. Longman died at the age of 71, in August, 1842 and left an inheritance of £200,000 for his widow and family.


Family

Longman married Mary Slater, of Horsham, Sussex, in 1799. They had seven children. The eldest daughter, Mary Longman, married Andrew Spottiswoode in 1819. The eldest son, Thomas Longman (1804–1879) married Georgina Townsend Bates. He succeeded his father, becoming the fourth generation Longman to join the publishing business.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Longman, Thomas Norton British publishers (people) 1771 births 1842 deaths