Longman

The circuit of the bench frontage of the Circus Maximus was very nearly a mile in length.

and the romans of imperial times certainly used ten times as much water as the modern romans but on the other hand habits change and rome as it is defined by lines drawn at the times of its greatest ascendancy the city that is enclosed by the walls of aurelian and including all the regiones of augustus an enclosure from which there could have been no reason for excluding half or more of its population could have scarcely contained a million it would have packed very comfortably within the circle of the grand boulevard of paris the paris that is of louis the fourteenth with a population of five hundred and sixty thousand and the rome of to-day were the houses that spread so densely over the once vacant campus matias distributed in the now deserted spaces in the south and east and the vatican suburb replaced within the ancient walls would quite fill the ancient limits in spite of the fact that the population is under five hundred thousand but these are incidental doubts on a very authoritative opinion and whatever their value they do not greatly affect the significance of these new great cities which have arisen all over the world as if by the operation of a natural law as the railways have developed end footnote but there are now ten town aggregates having a population of over a million nearly twenty that bid fair to reach that limit in the next decade and a great number at or approaching a quarter of a million we call these towns and cities but indeed they are of a different order of things to the towns and cities of the eighteenth century world concurrently with the aggregation of people about this new sort of centre there has been it is alleged a depletion of the country villages and small townships but so far as the counting of heads goes this depletion is not nearly so marked as the growth of the great towns relatively however it is striking enough now is this growth of large towns really as one may allege a result of the development of railways in the world or is it simply a change in human circumstances that happens to have arisen at the same time it needs only a very general review of the conditions of the distribution of population to realize that the former is probably the true answer it will be convenient to make the issue part of a more general proposition namely that the general distribution of populations in a country must always be directly dependent on transport facilities to illustrate this point roughly we may build up an imaginary simple community by considering its needs over an arable countryside for example inhabited by a people who had attained to a level of agricultural civilization in which war was no longer constantly imminent the population would be diffused primarily by families and groups in farmsteads it might if it were a very simple population be almost all so distributed but even the simplest agriculturists find a certain convenience in trade certain definite points would be convenient for such local trade and intercourse as the people found desirable and here it is that there would arise the germ of a town at first it might be no more than an appointed meeting-place a market-square but an inn and a blacksmith would inevitably follow an altar perhaps and if these people had writing even some sort of school it would have to be where water was found and it would have to be generally convenient of access to its attendant farmers now if this meeting-place was more than a certain distance from any particular farm it would be inconvenient for that farmer to get himself and his produce there and back and do his business in a comfortable daylight he would not be able to come and instead he would either have to go to some other nearer centre to trade and gossip with his neighbours or failing this not go at all evidently then there would be a maximum distance between such places this distance in england where traffic has been mainly horse traffic for many centuries seems to have worked out according to the gradients and so forth at from eight to fifteen miles and at such distances do we find the country towns while the horseless man the serf and the labourer and labouring wench have marked their narrow limits in the distribution of the intervening villages if by chance these gathering places have arisen at points much closer than this maximum they have come into competition and one has finally got the better of the other so that in england the distribution is often singularly uniform agricultural districts have their towns at about eight miles and where grazing takes the place of the plough the town distances increase to fifteen footnote it will be plain that such towns must have clearly defined limits of population dependent finally on the minimum yearly produce of the district they control if ever they rise above that limit the natural checks of famine and of pestilence following enfeeblement will come into operation and they will always be kept near this limit by the natural tendency of humanity to increase the limit would rise with increasing public intelligence and the organization of the towns would become more definite end footnote and so it is entirely as a multiple of horse and foot strides that all the villages and towns of the world's countryside have been plotted out footnote i owe the fertilizing suggestion of this general principle to a paper by grant allen that i read long ago in longman's magazine end footnote a third and almost final factor determining town distribution in a world without railways would be the seaport and the navigable river Ports would grow into dimensions dependent on the population of the conveniently accessible coasts or riverbanks, and on the quality and quantity of their products.

And near these ports, as the conveniences of civilization increased, would appear handicraft towns, the largest possible towns of a foot-and-horse civilization, with industries of such a nature as the produce of their coasts required.

It was always in connection with a port or navigable river that the greater towns of the pre-railway period arose.

Hume probably, at Hutcheson's suggestion, sent Smith a copy of his Treatise, a fact which sufficiently indicates the report he had received of the youthful Adam's abilities.

It comes out in another letter that Hume was desirous of changing his publisher and obtained from Hutcheson an introduction to Mr. Longman.

It was actually by this publisher that the book was bought out in seventeen forty.

Apart from a stray fact or two, as for instance, his attempt to obtain a tutorship in a nobleman's family with a view to travel, Hume's life at this stage is little more than a record of his literary labors.

That's right.

So that book was first published by Longmans on the 25th of February, 1889.

The first thousand copies sold out very quickly and a second thousand were printed that same month.

Conan Doyle said in Memories and Adventures, the book duly appeared in February 1889, and though it was not a boom book, it had extraordinarily good reviews.

It was the first solid cornerstone laid for some sort of literary reputation.

Yeah, and it's one of these important points in Conan Dore's career, this, that he actually maintains a relationship with Longmans.

And he works with various publishers, of course, but Longmans actually also published The Captain of the Pole Star and Other Tales in 1890.

Then another one of his historical novels, The Refugees in 1893, another 17th century novel, which we've covered in a previous episode.

She may have meant to say Rumpelstiltskin, the name of a dwarf immortalized in the grim fairy tales with which we had been familiar in our childhood.

but her variation struck me soundly and i said to myself i'll write a story about him but in truth the story upon that inspiration wrote itself i had a fine time with it and my own children to whom it was read in manuscript heartily approved it then alexander strahan the publisher and the first editor of the famous contemporary review saw it and proclaimed with many a scottish blur that it was a verra fine piece o work my boy and does ye credit and he carried it off and published it in his new magazine for children afterward the eminent firm of longmans green and longmans a paternoster row hard by st paul's in london considered it and said if you can collect half a dozen others of the same sort we would be glad to issue them in a volume it was easy for me in the late seventies to do that though now that i am in the late seventies myself i should beg off so a little green and gold book was printed it was called yellow cap and other fairy tales and bore the great longman's imprint and they sold i believe a great many of them but the only story in the collection about which readers afterward wrote to me was rumpty dudgett's tower and to-day after nearly five-and-forty years i still receive occasional kind words on the subject my mischievous little dwarf manifested vitality of course the longman's volume has long been out of print but in the latter part of eighteen seventy eight i came back to america after a twelve-year stay abroad and found my friend richard watson gilder writing high as editor of the century and subordinate to him a delightful young fellow named clark who was conducting a magazine for young people they had seen rumpty dudget and wanted to republish it in the latter periodical so i sold them the american copyright and thought i was doing well could i not write a dozen as good or better tales whenever i had a mind to such is the self-confidence of an author whose years are but thirty-six i soon letters began to come from children and from their mothers saying pleasant things about the story and asking for more like it but things which i thought of more importance occupied me and i postponed complying with their requests Besides, my sister Una had gone to heaven and could no longer inspire me with her word.

letters continued to come however and presently they were from mothers who had been children when the story first appeared and now wanted the old story for children of their own and asked me to publish it in book form i began to regret not having kept my american copyright because when i suggested its return to me by the century people they would reply that they intended when they could get down to it to repent the story themselves so i was fain to wait and to bid my correspondents to do likewise but editors die in the course of time and properties change hands and i myself lost track of the matter though those letters still kept on arriving from time to time i wish i had kept them there must have been hundreds the children who had become mothers were grandmothers now and wanted the story for their grandchildren but nothing could be done poor rumpty dudget was buried beyond digging up again so it seemed would a tribe of great-grandchildren arise once more miraculously knowing about the story and demanding its resurrection at all events about the first of the new year i got a letter from frederick a stokes company of new york in consequence of which negotiations took place leading up to the publication of the present little volume he bears a bad character in the tale but there must really be something good in him and now he makes his bow to little persons who were not born into this world until nearly half a century after he left it When I look at the list of the year's books, it strikes me that he appears in strange and alien company.

But that is not my affair.