Smith, Elder and Company (London)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

British publishing company active throughout the 19th-Century. It was purchased by John Murray in the early 1900s, its archive now kept as part of the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Established first as bookseller's and stationer's in Fenchurch Street, London, by George Smith (1789–1846) and Alexander Elder (1790–1876) in 1816, the firm successfully continued under George Murray Smith (1824–1901).

The firm achieved its first major success with the publication of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in 1847, under the pseudonym of "Currer Bell".

Other major authors published by the firm included Robert Browning, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, John Ruskin, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson and George Gissing.

Beginning in 1841, they published The London and Edinburgh Magazine and from 1859, they published Cornhill Magazine.

They are notable for producing the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB).

A history of the firm was privately printed in 1923. A digitised version of which is available here:

The House of Smith Elder / by Leonard Huxley. London: William Clowes & Sons, 1923