'Literary adventurers': editorship, non-fiction authorship and anonymity

Abstract

The professional literary gentleman of the nineteenth century was expected to publically dissociate himself as much as possible from writing for money, which was all too readily associated with hacks and penny-a-liners, despite earning a living through literary production. Indeed, while John Forster made sure the contracts he negotiated for Dickens were increasingly favourable for the novelist, Forster also felt that his friend should behave, where money was concerned, with the modesty and restraint befitting a professional gentleman (Forster 641). The unattributed article “Literary adventurers,” published on the 10th of October, 1863, in All the Year Round, is a surprising departure from this paradoxical Victorian coyness about remuneration. It proudly claims that literature has become a profitable business in the nineteenth century. Presenting the view that authorship becomes a legitimate profession only when it is able to generate income, the article effectively equates money with respectability. Moreover, this respectability – or profitability – of authorship supposedly stems entirely from the periodical press. At the time “Literary Adventurers” appeared, the second series of Dickens’s The Uncommercial Traveller was also in publication in All the Year Round. In these “uncommercial” sketches, the traveller supposedly “never gets any commission” and purports to “know nothing about prices” (Dickens 1). This satire of the traditional, leisurely authorship, devoid of monetary motives obviously fits in well with the image of the author-craftsman. The untenable position of the author as an idle lounger sustaining himself (quite admirably) on undisclosed means is highlighted in The Uncommercial Traveller, and concretized by description of the miserable position of the eighteenth-century patronage-dependent author in “Literary Adventurers.” The article argues that the tendency of the nineteenth-century periodical press to pay its authors not only raises up authorship as a profession, but also the quality of literary production. Interestingly, for this improved quality to become possible, the article claims that the “duties” of an author as “a member of the industrial world” (AtYR X.155) have had to adapt. And yet, while it derides the notion that authors should be primarily concerned with contributing to the “abstract interests of the commonwealth of letters” (AtYR X.154), the article does not explicitly state its stance on what an author’s writings should achieve. The only information it provides on the subject is ex negativo. In this paper, I seek to explore the article’s remarkable - yet unspoken – positioning of authors within an explicitly market-driven literary field