Henry Colburn (1784–1855) ran the most-talked-about London publishing house of the 1820s. His business model was straightforward: pay aristocratic and society writers above-market advances; pad the manuscripts to three volumes (the standard rental-library format); price each three-decker at the ruinous 31s 6d that the rental libraries would absorb on bulk subscription; promote everything aggressively through the literary-reviewing press, much of which he owned or paid.
The model worked. Colburn published the founding texts of two distinct subgenres of 19th-century English fiction. John William Polidori’s The Vampyre appeared in April 1819 under Colburn’s imprint — initially attributed to Lord Byron, which Colburn was happy to leave unclarified for substantial commercial benefit. The story sold out three printings inside a year and seeded the European literary-vampire tradition that would run from Polidori to Stoker’s Dracula.
Mary Shelley’s The Last Man appeared from the same house in February 1826. So did the 22-year-old Benjamin Disraeli’s first novel, Vivian Grey, in April of the same year. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828) followed. The substantial “silver-fork” subgenre — fashionable society novels for the rental-library reading public — was Colburn’s invention.
He overextended. He had bought out the rival publisher Richard Bentley in 1829, expanded too fast, and was bankrupt by 1832. He recovered through a settlement with creditors, continued to publish through the 1830s and 1840s at reduced scale, and was bankrupt again in 1853. He died at his New Burlington Street house in August 1855, aged 70.
The Colburn imprint outlived him by approximately a decade before being absorbed into the larger London publishing houses of the 1860s.