Literature for the People: How the Pioneering Macmillan Brothers built a Publishing Powerhouse

From poverty on the Isle of Arran, via a little shop in Cambridge, two men with little education founded one of the world’s most famous publishing companies, bringing to their Victorian readers, authors as varied as Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hughes and Alfred Lord Tennyson. They combined fabulous networking skills with a keen business sense and a love of fine writing. Above all, the brothers, Christian Socialists, believed that publishing should have moral and political purpose.Within two generations the family would produce a British Prime Minister – quite the ‘rags to riches’ tale.

Sarah Harkness studied PPE at Mansfield College, Oxford, then joined an investment bank in the City, one of the first women working in corporate finance, where she enjoyed a highly successful career for twenty years. For the last twenty years she has served on a number of boards, including both public and private companies. Her interests have been primarily in the education, culture and health sectors, including three years as Pro-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield. She is now chair of Orthopaedic Research UK. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Sheffield University and an Honorary Fellowship at Mansfield College. In 2018, a ten-year personal interest in a pioneering Victorian artist and writer, Nelly Erichsen, led to her writing and self-publishing a well-received biography, which was longlisted for the 2019 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History. In October 2021 she was awarded an MA with Distinction in Biography at the University of Buckingham, studying under Professor Jane Ridley. In 2021 she won the Tony Lothian Prize, awarded by The Biographers’ Club, for the best proposal for an uncommissioned biography. Literature for the People: How the Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse was published by Pan Macmillan in May 2024.