Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

'Living as an Author in the Romantic Period seeks to explode the notion that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries oversaw a transformation of the literary economy into one in which professional authors could make a living exclusively off their writing. The author's detailed work with neglected archives, especially publishers' ledgers and the Royal Literary Fund papers, fuels several original claims about authorship in the romantic period. This is a book that will matter and possibly even be field-changing.' -- Michael Gamer, British Academy Global Professor (QMUL) and author of Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (2017) 'Matthew Sangster's new book provides a compelling revision of the standard account of the advent of professional authorship in the early nineteenth century. Using remarkable archive material from publishers combined with other institutional records folded into engrossing case histories of individual writers, Living as an Author in the Romantic Period reveals that the death of patronage has been prematurely announced. Even as writing became bound up with an array of networked cultural activities in a reconstituting field of literary production, marvellously brought to life in Sangster's study, the career of the writer as a singular occupation remained out-of-reach for most of its aspirants.' -- Jon Mee, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York, UK This book explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. It examines authors' interactions with publishers; the challenges of literary sociability; the vexed construction of enduring careers; the factors that prevented most aspiring writers (particularly the less privileged) from accruing significant rewards; the rhetorical professionalisation of periodicals; and the manners in which emerging paradigms and technologies catalysed a belated transformation in how literary writing was consumed and perceived Acknowledgements Contents Note on Abbreviations and Attributions Preface: The Life of the Author Introduction: What Was an Author in the Romantic Period? My Book, Myself The Mirage of Professionalism Shaming Authorial Labour Romanticism and Retrospection Change Over Time Chapter One: Publishers, Book Production and Profits The Price of Literature Publishing Arrangements: William Herbert’s Helga The Costs of Production: Isaac D’Israeli’s Calamities of Authors The Life of a Successful Book: James Montgomery’s The World before the Flood Co-operation and Collaboration in the Book Trade Chapter Two: Sociable Alignments Friends, Groups and Networks Character in Pen and in Print: Elizabeth Hamilton Versus Mary Hays Relational Self-Fashioning: Leigh Hunt’s Correspondence Women, Networking and Audiences Chapter Three: Succeeding in ‘the Worst Trade’ Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters? Thomas Moore and Sociable Authorship Felicia Hemans and the Poetry of Exchange Chapter Four: The Working Writer The Foundation and Philosophies of the Literary Fund Robert Heron: ‘The Case of a Man of Letters, of Regular Education, Living by Honest Literary Industry’ Eliza Parsons: ‘Compelled by Dire Necessity to Become an Author’ Patronage and Fashion: Robert Bloomfield as the Farmer’s Boy Southey’s Critique and the Profession of Authorship Chapter Five: The Oligarchs of Literature: Authority and the Quarterly Reviews New Criticism? Enlightenment vs. The Anti-Jacobin The Edinburgh’s Methodology Disciplining Authors and Readers The Quarterlies and Canonical Romanticism Chapter Six: Refashioning Authorship’s Purview Hannah More: Inculcating the Reading Nation Walter Scott: The Wizard of the North Lord Byron: Transcending Self-Promotion Coda: Print Proliferation and the Invention of the Artist Bibliography Manuscript Sources Periodical Sources Primary Works Secondary Criticism Index