"The most useful of citizens": towards a romantic literary professionalism.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

How few authors or artists have arrived at eminence who have not lived by their employment?

--Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

1. "Things Shall be Valued in Proportion as They are Rare"

THE OCTOBER 1796 EDITION OF THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE INCLUDED an alleged letter entitled "Affecting Address of a poor Student." In its own way, it was an elaborate job application. Appealing to the Gentleman's Magazine's concern for "the distressed of various descriptions," the correspondent wrote in order "to procure a situation in life which is not of the common kind, and, therefore, not likely to be obtained by common means." The source of his problems, but also the basis of a potential solution, he explained, was his enthusiasm for a literary life:

From a boy ... I have been particularly fond of study, and the love of books increases with increasing years. Unfortunately for me, my finances are too narrow to enable me to enjoy that learned leisure, which is peculiarly adapted to my inclinations.... With a mind not uncultivated, and inclination thus ardent in pursuit of knowledge, I find myself ill-calculated to undertake any servile employment in order to live.

His fondness for study had made him reluctant and even unable to perform less elevated work, but unfortunately, it had not led to any meaningful work either. Well trained but unemployed, and with his expectations raised by the high cultural standards of the literary domain that he had grown used to inhabiting, he had become overqualified. Having "[a]rrived to a time of life when most men consider their destination in the world as fixed," he lacked the things that most adults took for granted--a home, friends, money--and remained 'little acquainted with any of the various ways of procuring a subsistence." Worse than any of these hardships was the indignity of his position. Had he "been fairly used, there would have been no necessity for me to seek a maintenance by the medium I now do."

Neglected by a world that seemed unwilling to accommodate his career in a way that reflected his well-developed sense of cultural elevation, he had been reduced to doing what no gentleman should ever have to--appealing in a very public way to the readers of the Gentleman's because, "being in the literary department, it seems to me, that one of the most probable means to obtain the completion of my wish is to make it known through the medium of that Magazine which is most read by literary men." Forced by poor financial prospects, he had been driven to the degrading point of looking for the sort of work that would convert his patiently acquired cultural capital into financial capital, preferably by acting as a "librarian and secretary to some nobleman, private tutor to the children of some gentleman of fortune, or amanuensis to some literary man, who, from whatever cause, may wish for such an assistant." (1)

He was, in other words, an impoverished gentleman writing to more prosperous gentlemen in the pages of a magazine whose very name testified to the inherent connection between literary taste and gentility. His sense of grievance about having been denied the support that would enable him to continue to lead a literary life did not make his intervention in the Gentleman's any less conservative though. He was not denouncing the hierarchical nature of a world where higher learning and the upper classes had a naturally harmonious relationship, he just wanted to be a part of it. Nor, he implied, was this anything more than what his years of scholarly training had led him to expect.

His decision to publicize his concerns did not generate any solutions to his problems. He finished his letter by suggesting that any potential employers--those noblemen wanting a librarian and secretary, gentlemen of fortune searching for a private tutor for their children, or literary men in need of an assistant--write to the Gentleman's, which could then publish a notice to him in the next month's edition, but none appeared. Or maybe readers simply knew enough to read the letter ironically.

The fact that the letter was probably written by one of Gentleman's Magazine's staff writers casts the implicitly conservative implications of the student's search for patronage in the ironic light of authors' more radical struggle to redefine their relationship with their social superiors. The romantic period, like the century before it, was a time when many of the middle class were doing their best to acquire the distinguishing marks of the aristocracy through the conspicuous display of items such as clothing, carriages and manor houses, or more constructively, through participation in philanthropic societies associated with public rather than private virtue. (2)

Authors were involved in this process in a slightly different way. Rather than simply mimicking the trappings and commitments of the aristocracy, they were busy appropriating and redefining the cultural logic which made these markers of social distinction viable, stressing the importance of intellectual industriousness in terms which echoed and supplanted traditional assumptions about the public importance of landed wealth. By insisting on a set of values focused on the transformative power of writing rather than on the privileged leisure of an inherited estate as the basis of the public good, authors identified themselves as society's moral center, worthy of an elevated station precisely to the degree that they were able to replace the aristocratic ideal with an ethic that located them within, rather than above, the division of labor.

The monthly and quarterly journals and magazines, individual essayists, novelists, dramatists, and poets (and these categories were rarely mutually exclusive) commented obsessively on the state of modern literature and the status of the individuals who produced it. They were engaged in an often highly explicit debate about the identity and status of authors that had been evolving throughout the eighteenth century, spurred on by issues such as the recurring legal debates about copyright and the perceived excesses of the literary marketplace. These dynamics were intensified in the romantic period by the complex intersection of cultural and political upheaval which both exposed the discursive contradictions implicit in inherited constructions of the role of authors, and made their clarification all the more urgent.

"We are optimists in literature," declared William Hazlitt, but his more pessimistic (and heavily gendered) verdicts on modern literature elsewhere--"a gay Coquette, fluttering, fickle, vain; followed by a train of flatterers; besieged by a crowd of pretenders ... the subject of polite conversation; the darling of private parties; the go-between in politics; the directress of fashion"--were more characteristic of the judgments of many of his peers. (3) Convinced that they were living through an age of cultural decline, they lamented the extent to which literature had become "a major fashion business. (4) For many critics, any claims that could be made for literary professionalism were inextricably rooted within a broader perception of the declining status of the modern author--a trend which was in turn bound up with the corrosive effects of a reading public whose lack of taste was reflected in the rage for bad novels and botched compilations, and with technological advances which made publishing easier than ever.

In an 1813 pamphlet on the renewed copyright debates, Sharon Turner warned that the value of literature, like all goods, was subject to the sacred laws of supply and demand: "it is an universal principle of public taste, that things shall be valued in proportion as they are rare.... This is as true in literature as in every other object of natural or artificial production. (5) Employing similar market terms, Vicesimus Knox agreed that "a market over-stocked reduces the price of the commodity.... When the dispensers of science, wisdom, and taste, were but few, they were honoured extravagantly. Others, who may possess the same degree of science, wisdom, and taste, will be less honoured, because they ... produced their inventions when books were multiplied." (6) "The LITERARY CHARACTER has, in the present day, singularly degenerated in the public mind," echoed D'Israeli. "The finest compositions appear without exciting any alarm of admiration, they are read, approved, and succeeded by others; nor is the presence of the Author considered, as formerly, as conferring honour on his companions; we pass our evenings sometimes with poets and historians, whom it is probable will be admired by posterity, with hardly any other sensation than we feel from inferior associates." (7)

Being "overstocked" was not the only problem. Critics worried that the demand for literature had not only grown larger, it had gone downmarket. Whether one celebrated this expansion of the reading public, with James Lackington, as an admirable form of cultural democracy ("all ranks and degrees now READ), or, denounced it, with T. J. Mathias, as politically ominous (peasants reading "the Rights of Man on mountains and moors and by the way side"), many observers accepted that a mass market for literature dominated by consumers who could not reasonably be expected to understand the importance of social status would inevitably generate a more quotidian impression of authors. (8)

This dilemma was compounded by the inextricable connection between forces of production and reception. "The excellence of writers depends greatly on the judgement of readers," Knox warned (WE 3: 119) Unworthy publications were dangerous because they produced a readership whose "depraved taste and deficient knowledge" made them "incapable of forming an adequate idea of works profoundly learned, and eminently well composed" (WE 3: 121). This not only further lowered the value of literature, it had the knock-on effect of producing even more bad authors in a self-reinforcing vicious circle: "All the human arts are found to flourish or decay according to the degree of esteem or of contempt in which they are held by the general opinion.... It is therefore of consequence to literature, and to the improvement of the human mind, that the dignity of the literary republic should be supported" (WE 3: 117).

These changes were felt to be reflected in the growing number and character of the people who were determined to supply the world with literature. In a "scribbling age, when every man who can write composes a pamphlet, and every journeyman bookseller erects himself into a publisher," as one Gentleman's reader put it, the dignity of the author was unlikely to escape unscathed (GM 62 [1792]: 934). In the first of his lectures on Milton and Shakespeare, Coleridge complained that

In older times writers were looked up to almost as intermediate beings, between angels and men; afterwards they were regarded as venerable and, perhaps, inspired teachers; but in modern days they are deemed culprits more than benefactors.... If a person be now seen reading a new book, the most usual question is--'What trash have you there?' I admit that there is some reason for this difference in the estimate; for in these times, if a man fail as a tailor, or a shoemaker, and can read and write correctly (for spelling is still of some consequence) he becomes an author. (9)

A correspondent to Blackwood's worried that "[a]uthorship, formerly a rare and envied distinction, is now so common as to lift a man (I should say a person, for it is now as much a female as a male quality) but little above the mass of men around him." (10)

For other worried critics, the maladies of contemporary literature were rooted in just the opposite problem. Authorship had become an epidemic spreading not just down but up the social scale. In doing so, it had become tainted...

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