A World of Words: Romantic Fiction and the Literary Marketplace

A World of Words: Romantic Fiction and the Literary Marketplace 1 Anthony Mandal, Cardiff University [3] Literature may be an artefact, a product of social consciousness, a world vision; but it is also an industry. Books are not just structures of meaning, they are commodities produced by publishers and sold on the market at a profit […] Writers are not just transposers of individual mental structures, they are workers hired by publishing houses to produce commodities that will sell. ‘A writer,’ Marx comments, ‘is a worker not in so far as he produces ideas, but insofar as he enriches a publisher, insofar as he is working for a wage’. It is a salutary reminder. 2 The Romantic novel as we recognize it was shaped to no small degree by a confluence of technological, legal and economic currents, as much as it was shaped by the various ideological and aesthetic imperatives of the times. However, fiction of the period has been discussed typically in terms of its key authors (Austen, Scott, Burney, Edgeworth) and subgenres (sentimental, gothic, historical). What I want to consider today are those less immediately obvious, but equally significant print-cultural dynamics that shaped, transformed and characterized the novel during the Romantic era. [4] This paper is divided into three parts: 1) economic, legal & technological contexts; 2) overview of fiction production; 3) conclude with brief discussion about authorship. 1. Contexts The c18 witnessed an unprecedented rate of growth in demand for the printed word, marking the final stages of the transformation of Britain into a print-dependent society, both in the profusion of print and the expanding demographic of readers. According to the memoirs of the bookseller James Lackington, published in 1791: 1 This paper was first presented at The Romantic Book: A Day Symposium (23 June 2011), organized by Dr Shafqat Towheed and Dr Nicola Watson (Open University) at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Numbers in square brackets refer to the relevant PowerPoint slide that accompanies this paper. 2 Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976), 59–60. 1 [6] I cannot help observing, that the sale of books in general has increased prodigiously within the last twenty years. According to the best estimation I have been able to make, I suppose that more than four times the number of books are sold now than were sold twenty years since. The poorer sort of farmers, and even the poor country people in general, who before that period spent their winter evenings in relating stories of witches, ghosts, hobgoblins, &c. now shorten their winter nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales, romances, &c. and on entering their houses, you may see Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and other entertaining books stuck up on their bacon racks, &c. … all ranks and degrees now READ. 3 Recognizing an opportunity in the publishing market, Lackington made his fortune as a seller of remaindered books at low prices, listing some 12,000 items in his first catalogue of 1779, a figure which grew to 30,000 within five years, and advertising himself as the ‘Cheapest Bookseller in the World’. [7] Despite Lackington’s success selling discounted books, the biggest market for fiction was not the individual purchaser, but circulating libraries, which were one of the major success stories of the c18 and c19 literary marketplace. Circulating libraries were much like the Blockbusters of their day, allowing patrons who paid a membership fee to borrow a certain number of books over a set period of time. Books were expensive items to produce, making them expensive ones to purchase. Novels, often spanning a thousand pages, were particularly costly: mean prices for a popular novel during the Regency years were approximately 17s 6d, which is equivalent to just over half a week’s wages for a skilled workman or roughly £50 by today’s standards. Owing to their bulk, but also to assist in distributing a small number of copies among a large readership, the average novel was published in multi-volume format. In this way, a circulating library proprietor could purchase a few copies of a popular novel, but loan out each volume to individual patrons, thus maximizing the profitability of the book. Circulating library owners could make a significant 3 James Lackington, Memoirs of the First Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington (London: For the Author, 1791), 254–5. 2 income from the demand of readers for the latest literary and non-literary works, as attested to by the fortunes of the Noble brothers in the 1780s, William Lane’s Minerva Library in the 1790s and Henry Colburn’s English and Foreign Circulating Library in the 1800s, all of which adumbrated the incredible success of that Victorian edifice, Mudie’s Select Circulating Library (founded in 1842), which itself commanded significant power over c19 publishers. The expansion of print culture during the c18 was further driven by two other key factors. The first was the growth of the provincial book trade in England and the rise of the Scots publishing market, both of which challenged the hegemony that had operated for over three centuries in London. As well as challenge, however, this diversification led to a much more sophisticated network for the distribution and circulation of print, increasing supply and stimulating demand. The second noteworthy feature of the c18 was the emergence of a substantive and sustained periodical culture, commencing with early short-lived publications such as the Spectator, Idler and Rambler in the first half of the century, but continuing from the middle years onwards with The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Critical Review and The Monthly Review, before maturing in the early years of the c19 with the appearance of periodicals like the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and literary journals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Literary Gazette. The appearance of published material in such diverse forms was a driving force in ensuring that the Romantic period was one suffused with print, and it’s no surprise that the novel—a form paradigmatically imbricated with the fortunes of print—was the emergent literary genre of the era. [8] The commercial success of print as a ubiquitous form was abetted by two other determinants, without which much of the expansion and diversification that marked Romantic era print culture would not have been possible. The first involves the transforming legal relationship between text, publisher and author. The origins of the British book trade in the c16 had established 3 what John Feather has termed an ‘oligopoly’: that is, a system of protectionism that safeguarded the interests of a handful of metropolitan booksellers sanctioned by a policy of government control. This continued for well over two centuries, and was confirmed by the 1710 Statue of Anne, in which all existing rights were confirmed as the property of the current owners for 21 years, with new copies protected for 14 years with the possibility of an extension by a further 14. The incentive behind the 1710 Statute had been to encourage the diffusion of print by protecting the rights of its producers; however, its indirect effect was to enshrine the notion of ‘perpetual’ copyright and to strengthen the position of the oligopoly of publishers. The result was a fairly conservative and slowmoving print market that operated under a protectionist regime that limited competition, and thereby slowed innovation. This was challenged by a conflict between interpretations of copyright by the Scots and English legal systems, when Scottish publishers began to print books that were covered in England by the 1710 Act but not in Scotland. That in itself was not a problem: what was the problem was the traversal of these texts back into the north of England. English publishers decided to act, deeming this a breach of the law. However, while the English Chancery recognized copyright in its abstract sense as an extension of the common law of property, the Scottish Court of Session could not untether property rights from a material object. This division unravelled the concept of perpetual copyright in the case of Donaldson v Beckett, which revolved around action taken against Alexander Donaldson (an Edinburgh bookseller) who had published a reprint of James Thomson’s The Seasons. The case was appealed in the House of Lords, which deemed that perpetual copyright was ultimately against the public interest, thereby limiting the term of copyright to a maximum period of 28 years, after which a text would enter the public domain. 4 One direct result of this ruling was that publishing became a free market, and publishers could no longer rely on their existing copyrights to guarantee revenues, as once the term expired they were open to republication by any one. This led to the growth of cheap reprint series, but also to the hunt for innovation by publishers to seek out new works that would generate further income. If the first few hundred years of book trade had been dominated by a closed consortium of publishers and printers who saw that they had a common enterprise to protect, free trade became dominate ideology in the c19. There was a clear movement away from the closed, conservative coterie model towards one based on competition, which drove the market forward in new and exciting ways. New publishers emerged in the 1780s and ’90s unrestrained by traditions, seeking to capture the existing market and generate new ones. [9] As John Feather notes, the 1774 ruling threw the London trade into a confusion which it had not known since the lapse of the Printing Act [of 1662, which had introduced government regulation of the trade], the last formal breach in the protectionist walls. … The London booksellers … had been comprehensively and successfully challenged by Scottish entrepreneurs. It was their response to that challenge which saw the emergence of the publisher as the dominant figure in the trade in printed books in Britain. 4 Another result of the various responses to copyright legislation was the emerging profile of the author. While the 1710 Statute had allowed some authors a degree of autonomy from the vagaries of the publishing world, it was not until the 1774 decision that authors began to be recognized as the agents of production. Given the shift in emphasis away from publishers’ monopolistic rights, their fates were more contingently bound with those of their authors, while legal recognition of authors’ rights continued to grow. A further copyright Act of 1814 acknowledged this centrality, with copyright being extended to 28 years or the lifetime of the author (whichever was longer), thereby establishing a legal link between the author and their work. 4 John Feather, A History of British Publishing, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 68. 5 That’s not to say that authors weren’t exploited or that they could make a fortune from writing: more often than not, the typical novelist was a hack writer paid a pittance for their copyrights by their booksellers, something that continued to be the prevalent form of contractual exchange between novelist and publisher well into the c19. Nevertheless, the fact that the duration of copyright was now in essence associated with the author reflects the increasing prominence of this figure, signalling a shift in publishing arrangements that would come certainly to characterize the later c19—an age of writers such as Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, who exercised unprecedented power over their publishers. And, of course, the 1814 Act coincides with the seismic entrance of Walter Scott into the market for fiction, with his first novel, Waverley. [10] These legal escapades weren’t the sole imperatives that pitched the publishing world forward into accelerated patterns of production: a further determinant that facilitated the diffusion and diversification of print lay in various technological innovations that took place within a relatively short timeframe. Of all the costs of producing a book, paper was the single most expensive, constituting between one half and two-thirds. Paper during our period was largely handmade from linen rags, which were mainly imported from the continent, and were therefore a costly commodity. The long-standing conflict with France caused a hike of over 50% in the mean price of paper between 1797 and 1810, making books more expensive and therefore riskier items to publish. However, the slow and costly process of handmade paper was eventually replaced by the partial mechanization introduced through the Fourdrinier machine in 1807, driving down costs and speeding up production as the c19 continued. The process of printing itself was accelerated through two innovations: the mechanization of printing and the increased use of stereotype plates. [11] The process of printing texts had changed very little in the three centuries since the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 6 the late 1450s, relying on wooden hand presses to transfer the impression of inked type onto a page. The invention of the iron press by the Earl of Stanhope around 1800 demanded less physical effort to produce greater pressure across a larger area of paper, speeding up the process of printing and improving clarity. Further advances in printing came with the refinement of the Stanhope press as the Albion press in 1820, and the introduction of steam printing from 1814 onwards (although the take up of this was much slower, given the high infrastructural costs). But to put it into context, according to calculations by John Feather, while an iron press could produce 300 sheets of print per hour, a steam press could generate 1100 sheets, and later in the period around 4000 sheets. While steam printing didn’t play an immediate role in the production of fiction for the bulk of our period, by the 1830s it was being used increasingly to produce cheap reprint series such as Colburn & Bentley’s Standard Novels in large impressions. The setting of the type itself (‘compositing’) had always been a time-consuming operation that required a highly skilled workforce. Owing to the prohibitively high material cost of producing lengthy books such as novels, print runs for editions during the large part of the Romantic era averaged around 500–750 copies, perhaps 1000–1500 for well-regarded novelists. If a novel’s popularity led to the demand for further editions, the text for these would typically have to be laid out afresh, adding to the labour costs of the product. Stereotyping solved this problem effectively, as a mould was taken of the set type using plaster initially (from the mid-1780s onwards) and later papier-maché (from the late 1820s). A metal plate would be cast from the mould and used to print as many copies as demand called for: the only cost would have been to operate the printing press. When it looked like demand had abated or the plates had worn out, the metal could be melted down and recycled, thus keeping material costs relatively low. The use of stereotyping allowed for print runs (or ‘impressions’) in the thousands or even tens of thousands, enabling the production of 7 cheap reprint series such as Colburn & Bentley’s pioneering Standard Novels series, with books being produced at affordable rates that encouraged purchase by individuals rather than borrowing from circulating libraries. To put it into context, while the typical price of a triple decker was 31s 6d (the ‘guinea-and-a-half’ set price introduced by Constable for Scott’s Kenilworth in 1821, which remained the standard price for most of the c19), the Standard Novels cost 6s each. By today’s Growth in demand Cheaper costs in book production Search for technological innovation standards, while the triple decker was around £100, each Standard Novel would have set purchasers back about £25. [12] 2. The production of fiction In this part of the talk, I want to consider patterns of production in fiction during the Romantic era, as well as giving a general survey of the aspects that these patterns describe. According to Simon Eliot, roughly 14,550 books were published in the first decade of the c19. Steady growth continued during the succeeding twenty years, followed by a minor drop in 1820s, and then by significant growth until 1850 (with the 1840s especially full). How did the novel fare in relation to this? 8 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1780 1785 1790 1795 1800 1805 1810 1815 1820 1825 1830 1835 FIGURE 1. PRODUCTION OF FICTION, 1780–1836 [14] The graph traces the production of new works of fiction between 1770 and 1836, extrapolated from data produced in a variety of projects with which I was lucky enough to be involved. 5 As the chart makes clear, an exponential leap in production occurs slightly before the 1790s, during the imprint year 1788, rising from 51 in 1787 to 80 new titles. (It’s interesting to note that this is precisely the time when a young Jane Austen began experimenting with fiction in her juvenile pieces.) A number of factors can be isolated for this rise, among them an emerging market for female authors and readers, coupled with a developing sentimental genre, more translations of continental works, the proliferation of circulating libraries and the success of newly formed publishing concerns. This growth continued pretty evenly, before a second surge in 1796, which 5 The English Novel,1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols (Oxford: OUP, 2000); The English Novel, 1800–1836: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in Britain and Ireland (Cardiff: Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, 2003); British Fiction, 1800–1830: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception (Cardiff: Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, 2004). 9 continued to the end of the decade. The majority of fictions that were published in these first 30 years were mainly the sentimental romances that had dominated the c18, but the 1780s and 1790s also saw the emergence of the gothic in substantive numbers, which went on to be one of the dominant fictional modes during the first decade of the c19. In addition, the 1790s saw the appearance in significant numbers of polemical fictions caught up in the revolutionary tide, by both radical writers such as William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft and Elizabeth Inchbald, and anti-Jacobin reactionaries such as Mary Ann Hanway and Jane West. At this point, it’s worth pausing to reflect on the status of the novel at the turn of the century, as it was a particularly dichotomized one. Two observations on the novel, made within a few years of each other at the end of the c18, perhaps best encapsulate the bifurcated response to the novel. The first comes from Frances Burney, perhaps the most esteemed, and certainly one of the most imitated, female novelists of the era. When working on her third novel in 1795, Camilla; or, a Picture of Youth, she commented: [15] I own I do not like calling [Camilla] a Novel: it gives so simply the notion of a mere love story, that I recoil a little from it. I mean it to be sketches of Characters & morals, put in action, not a Romance. 6 In contrast to this are comments made by Jane Austen, whose present-day popularity remains a phenomenon: I have received a very civil note from Mrs Martin requesting my name as a Subscriber to her Library … As an inducement to subscribe Mrs Martin tells us that her Collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature &c &c—She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel readers & not ashamed of being so. 7 6 Frances Burney to Dr Charles Burney, 18 June 1795; The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay), ed. by Joyce Hemlow et al., 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–84), III, 117. 7 Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 18 Dec 1798; The Letters of Jane Austen, 3rd edn, ed. by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 26. 10 Burney’s comments typify the majority view of the novel as an often degrading, sometimes illicit form of literary effort, with one reviewer accusing ‘modern novelists’ as those ‘who delight in palliating error, and in reconciling their readers to false and extravagant delineations of character and conduct’. 8 Novels were considered ‘buzzing insects which [have] received a temporary life from the warmth of the circulating library’, and anguished reviewers demanded ‘when will the dreary prospect be enlivened again by a work of real genius?’ 9 Such responses did little to mitigate the production of fiction, which had found a receptive audience and a proliferation of writers willing to publish their works in abundance, with William Lane’s Minerva Press singlehandedly generating new novels at almost industrial levels. As the c19 opened, production of new titles continued, although the sporadic growth of the 1790s was balanced by a more restrained rise in production, probably explicable through the anti-Jacobin reaction of the mid-1790s. By the later 1800s, however, production leapt up again, particularly with the appearance of scandal novels and formulaic gothic fictions that derived from the models pioneered by Ann Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis (a personal favourite being T. J. Horsley-Curties’s shameless composite of 1807, The Monk of Udolpho). In many ways, the novel was at its lowest point of quality during the 1800s, while it enjoyed a high point of output. In the main, typical novels consisted of salacious works of one kind or another, works meant to titillate and feed the consumptive appetite of voracious readers. The accelerated production of the period sat awkwardly with the war of attrition being fought on the continent, and it was inevitable that a change was inevitable. As the Regency began, a transformation can be discerned in the attitudes towards fiction, one which registered a shift towards a more ‘domestic’ ideology that later became the quintessence of Victorian fiction. 8 9 Monthly Reivew, 2nd ser. 35 (Aug 1801), 429–30. Critical Review, 65 (June 1788), 486; Critical Review, n.s. 1 (Apr 1791), 471. 11 Religious, most notably evangelical, writers entered fiction with a purpose in mind: to tame the novel and to educate its middling-class and gentry readers. Beginning around 1808 with Hannah More’s propagandist eulogy of the domestic virtues, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, this moralizing incursion attempted to tame the excesses of the novel by redirecting its audience to the fiction of ‘home’. Another powerful domestic inflection was introduced by the appearance of ‘national’ fictions by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan that reflected on British relations with Ireland after the 1801 Act of Union, offering complementary readings of the condition of Ireland that were respectively ‘rational’ and ‘romantic’. The novel of the 1810s was being reformed as a vehicle that might contemplate serious issues, but in a manner that could be ideologically disentangled from the more fraught polemical associations of the Jacobin era. Productivity during the Regency period reduced quite considerably, with output during the 1810s constituting only 86% of that during the 1800s. Although not reducible to a single set of circumstances, a number of factors can be seen as reining in the exuberant buoyancy of the novel market. The Napoleonic conflicts had a profound economic impact on British industry (particularly through the reciprocal blockades that took place), limiting imports of paper which raised the price of book production. Inflation had risen to a highpoint at the turn of the c19 (36.5% in 1800), while income tax introduced in 1799 continued to affect middle-income Britons until its post-war abolition in 1816. Import duties had quadrupled between 1790 and 1815, while the national debt escalated from £228 million in 1793 to £876 million in 1816. Within the novel market itself, a period of restraint began to operate, resulting from the combination of the ‘serious’ turn in fiction, the economic climate and the fall in foreign translations from 15% in the 1800s to a mere 5% in the 1810s. 12 But the view wasn’t altogether bleak, as the status of the novel began to improve in quarters that might have been previously been considered hostile towards fiction, and even the staunchest opponents of popular fiction began to see that, carefully handled, it might offer a useful vehicle for didactic practice. Hannah More, for instance, explained her entry into novel writing as a conscious attempt to redirect a genre she had earlier called ‘pernicious’: [16] I thought there were already good books enough in the world for good people; but there was a large class of readers whose wants had not been attended to;—the subscribers to the circulating library. A little to raise the tone of that mart of mischief, and to counteract its corruptions, I thought was an object worth attempting. 10 Mary Brunton, author of best-selling religious material during the Regency period, attempted to obviate the inherent conflict between rectitude and fiction, commenting: Why should an epic or a tragedy be supposed to hold such an exalted place in composition, while a novel is almost a nickname for a book? Does not a novel admit of as noble sentiments—as lively description—as natural character—as perfect unity of action—and a moral as irresistible as either of them? 11 It was around this time that Walter Scott made the transition from poetry to fiction, and the phenomenal success of his historical novels, which commenced with Waverley; or, ’tis Sixty Years Since. In many ways, Scott’s fiction extends the turn towards the ‘domestic’ that characterized evangelical tales and national romances, and can be understood in post-Waterloo terms as a celebration, as well as an attempted construction, of a reconciling ‘Britishness’ that would serve to sublimate the contemporary disparities of the country (cultural, political, religious) within a unifying myth of historicized, homogeneous nationhood. In her extensive analysis of the critical 10 Hannah More to Sir William Pepys, Dec 1809; William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More, 4 vols (2nd edn, London: Seeley and Burnside, 1834), III, 313–14. 11 Mary Brunton to Mrs Izett, 15 August 1814; Alexander Brunton’s Memoir, in Mary Brunton’s Emmeline. With Some Other Pieces. […] to Which Is Prefixed a Memoir of her Life (Edinburgh, 1819), p. lxxiv. 13 reception of the Waverley Novels, Ina Ferris has pointed out that, while Scott met with general approbation, he was not as phenomenally successful as writers in the following decade made out: [17] What matters is not so much that the 1814 reviews did not form quite the ‘guard of honor’ claimed … as that within six years the Waverley Novels had achieved such authority and prestige that the moment of their entrance into the literary field was already legendary. 12 Unsurprisingly, novel production began to pick up in the 1820s, and it was in this decade that fiction overtook poetry as the dominant literary genre. The 1820s saw the appearance of numerous male-inflected novels that followed in the wake of Scott’s historical narratives (such as those by W. H. Ainsworth), as well as a number of military adventure novels by Thomas Gaspey and silver-fork novels of Robert Plumer Ward. The 1830s followed much of the pattern established in the preceding decade, particularly in the prolific output of the historical novelist G. P. R. James , the naval tales of Captain Marryat and the silver-fork fiction of Benjamin Disraeli and Catherine Gore. But an equally important aspect of fiction to note about the 1830s isn’t simply the production of new titles, but the substantial impact made by Scott’s Magnum Opus edition which appeared between 1829 and 1833, and which itself led to the inauguration of Colburn & Bentley’s Standard Novels series in 1831. The Standard Novels made books affordable for individual purchase, and featured not just classic authors but also authors of recent years, among them Ann Radcliffe, James Fenimore Cooper and Jane Austen. The print runs of editions changed drastically, due in no small part to the implementation of stereotyping: nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of Walter Scott, whose later novels such as Rob Roy (1818) and Ivanhoe (1820) achieved print runs of 10,000, when only a few years previously, popular novelists like Scott could have expected runs of a few thousand at best. 12 Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, ), pp. 80–1. 14 3. Authorship The history of the Romantic novel is, in many ways, the history of women’s writing. For the majority of our period, the novel was associated with women, both as writers and as readers. A number of studies have recognized this, although literary history has tended to locate the 1790s specifically as the highpoint of female-penned fiction. However, this assumption needs qualification, as Figure 2 [19] makes clear. 70% Unknown 60% Female Male 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1780 1785 1790 1795 1800 1805 1810 1815 1820 1825 1830 1835 FIGURE 2. AUTHORSHIP OF FICTION BY GENDER, 1780–1836 It’s certainly the case that the 1790s mark a crucial time during which female novelists gained clear ascendancy in the novel market (publishing 41.5% of total output of new fiction, in contrast to 32% by men). However, the bibliographical record reveals that after a roughly even gender distribution of authorship during the 1800s, the production of female-penned fiction during the 1810s exceeds that of the 1790s, with women producing just over half of new novels, compared to just under 30% 15 by men. In essence, the 1810s signal a time when a mature novel market was coming to terms with a new sense of priorities in the wake of the French Revolution. It is also interesting to note that, after two unsuccessful attempts to publish her novels in 1797 and 1803, this is the time when Austen’s works finally achieved publication—precisely because the novel market of the 1810s favoured female authors. However, Walter Scott seized the moment far more effectively, transforming himself from poet to novelist in 1814. Austen herself anticipated what Scott’s manoeuvre signalled for women novelists, when she complained two months after the appearance of Waverley: [20] Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair.—He has Fame & Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths.—I do not like him, & do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it—but fear I must. 13 Certainly, Scott’s entrance into the world of fiction marked a transformative moment in the history of the novel, when it began to be divested of its feminine associations and was beginning to be seen as a professional space that could be safely occupied by male writers, anticipating the world of Dickens and Thackeray that was only a generation away. As the graph makes clear, within six years of Austen’s comment, the pattern of the preceding three decades had been inverted and male authorship dominated the 1820s (51.5% male; 29.5% female) and 1830–36 (57% male; 30% female). [21] [22] More specific patterns emerge if we compare the 1790s to the 1810s: at a most basic level we can turn to the issue of productivity, which demonstrates a decade conducive to the authorship of multiple works. Of 288 identifiable individual authors publishing 495 titles with 1790s imprints, 63.5% released only one title, just under 20% published two, 9% issued three, 3.5% released four, while the remaining 4.5% released five new titles or more. This last group of were, unsurprisingly, 13 Austen to Anna Austen Lefroy, 28 Sep 1814; Letters, p. 277. 16 dominated by women, who outstrip men nine-to-four, with totals of 72 new titles by women compared to 15 by men. The 1810s saw the publication of 529 titles by 316 individual authors, which divided up as follows: 70% published only one work, 15% released two, 7% issued three, 2% published four, and the remaining 6% or so published five or more works. Of this last group, only one-sixth of the authors are men (responsible for 84 volumes, in contrast to 320 by women). The most striking contrast between this decade and the 1790s is the shift towards extremes in the 1810s: there is a greater proportion of writers publishing single works, but there is also a slight rise in more prolific individuals. As well as suggesting a more restrictive economic climate in which publishers might only gamble on one or two works by unknown authors, this push towards the margins might also indicate a more mature market, capable of sustaining greater numbers of both newer novelists and established writers. [23] Four key ways for an author to secure publication during this period: i) subscription (a legacy from the c18, through which payments were solicited in advance from patrons to cover the costs of publication; subscribers’ names would be listed in the published volume, and they would typically be given a copy of the book upon publication: Frances Burney published her third novel, Camilla; or, a Picture of Youth, by subscription in 1796); ii) sale of copyright (the most common form of contractual exchange during the Romantic period, wherein the author would cede all rights to the text to the publisher for a one-off payment: Jane Austen sold Pride and Prejudice to Egerton in 1813); iii) publishing on commission (the author would cover the costs of publishing the book, along with a 10% commission to the publisher: Austen published her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, in this way); iv) ‘half-profits’ became increasingly popular during our period and was used by particular publishers (e.g. Longmans) and authors (notably, Walter Scott), through which all net profits after the costs of publication were shared equally between author and publisher. 17 But was novel-writing a profitable enterprise during the Romantic period? Excluding some exceptional success, the answer is ‘no’. The most single successful profit made by a female novelist was that of Frances Burney, who sold the copyright for the first edition of Camilla for £1000 to her publishers; in fact, she made a mere £250 from selling her first two novels and £4000 from her last two. Without doubt, however, Ann Radcliffe rises above her peers, earning the sums of £500 for The Mysteries of Udolpho and £800 for The Italian. Walter Scott was able to use the fortune gleaned from his publishing career to build his manorial pile in Abbotsford and invest in a printing company of James Ballantyne, before the crash of 1826 bankrupted him and led him to work on the Magnum Opus edition. But these were the exceptions rather than the rule: James Raven surmises an average payment of £80 for the sale of copyrights, but suggests that most sales would be closer to the lower price of 5 guineas (£5 5s). So, for example, Jane Austen sold the copyright to what would later be Northanger Abbey for £10 in 1803, before buying it back in 1816 for the original sale value; in fact, Austen’s total literary earnings came to around £1600, most of which was received posthumously (she only saw about £680 in her lifetime, which works out very roughly by today’s standards to just over £40,000 by today’s standards for nearly ten years’ of regular writing and publishing). As attested to by the numerous case files of the Royal Literary Fund (a charitable society established in 1790 for the relief of indigent authors), novelists who sought to make their living by the pen found it an unsatisfactory profession. Many were amateurs who wrote as a pastime, but the majority were the anonymous hacks who operated as cogs in great novel-producing machines like the Minerva Press. These amateur or hack writers contributed to the enjoyment and pleasure of many readers—Jane Austen herself included—but are now forgotten despite their aspirations to fame and profit. Much work is now being undertaken by Romanticists to rediscover who these 18 ‘minor’ writers were and to gauge more fully their valuable contribution to the republic of letters that developed through the c18 before transforming into the professionalized world of print in the c19. Although the lives and works of an increasing number of these writers are being recuperated by recent scholarship, unfortunately there are many more for whom all we’re now left with (if we’re lucky) is nothing more than a name on a title page or in a publisher’s ledgers. I’ll leave you with a brief obituary published in The Times for 27 January 1854, written for Hannah Maria Jones, who wrote around 25 novels, beginning in 1824 and enjoyed literary success particularly during the 1830s: [24] A Sad Fate—Anna [sic] Maria Jones, authoress of the Gipsy and other popular novels of the day, died on Tuesday, at 18 Salisbury-place, Bermondsey, in the most abject poverty. Her remains await, in all probability, a pauper's funeral. 14 14 The Times, Friday, 27 Jan 1854, p. 5. 19