The Business of Literature

Abstract

Authors do not write books. Their toil produces manuscripts, which are then fashioned into books by a network of human labour ranging from the prosperous bookseller-publisher to the journeyman binder earning less than two pence an hour. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as now, literature was a business because books were a business. Publishers, printers and distributors of books earned their living, either well or ill, by a series of commercial transactions that led step-by-step from the author's manuscript to the book on someone's shelf. Samuel Johnson, the son of a bookseller, was probably exaggerating for effect when he famously opined that, ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’, but we know that authors as diverse as Behn and Dryden, Defoe and Pope, Goldsmith, Burns, Scott and Johnson himself all took great pride in the fact that they could earn their bread by their wits and their pens. Students of English literature are usually too preoccupied with other concerns to think about the writings of their favourite authors as having to find their way in the marketplace, as commodities which were bought and sold. Yet, that is what they were: if a published poem, novel, essay, or play failed to live up to its price, then most copies of the work might well end up being sold for wastepaper, only to become ‘Martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum’, as Dryden reminds us.

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