though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation, The period of the booksellers. My Lord, Your Lordship's most humble, SAM. JOHNSON. It has been said that on the withdrawal of patronage the author fell from the company of courtiers to the gutter, and the phrase is hardly an extravagant expression of the hardships that the average author of the middle and the second half of the eighteenth century was compelled to undergo.' The old manner of support was withdrawn before a new one was evolved, and it took some time before a new and just economic equilibrium could be established. In the meantime, in this period of transition, the author was the chief sufferer. Literature was passing from the protection of patrons to that of the public, and the necessary medium through which it must reach the public was the bookseller. But the bookseller was naturally at first the stronger member in the new partnership. He was the man of business experience who knew how to drive sharp bargains in purchasing his wares, and as his wants were not so pressing as those of the beggar author, his bargains were not conditioned by his necessities. The prices paid for literary work were consequently extremely low, besides being irregular and uncertain. This uncertainty as to his income naturally begot in the author a careless and extravagant habit of life. He passed from the extremes of starvation to the extremes of dissipation; Macaulay says: "If a sum was bestowed on the wretched adventurer, such as, properly husbanded, might have supplied him 1 See below, p. 129. for six months, it was instantly spent in strange freaks of sensuality, and, before forty-eight hours had elapsed, the poet was again pestering all his acquaintance for twopence to get a plate of shin of beef at a subterraneous cook-shop." In a passage preceding the one just quoted, Macaulay gives a vivid summary of the characteristics of this transitional period: "A writer had little to hope from the patronage of powerful individuals. The patronage of the public did not yet furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices paid by booksellers to authors were so low that a man of considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little more than provide for the day which was passing over him. The lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich harvest was over and the period of famine had begun. All that is squalid and miserable might now be summed up in the word Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a scare-crow, familiar with compters and sponginghouses, and perfectly qualified to decide on the comparative merits of the Common Side in the King's Bench prison and of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him; and they well might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject, their aspirings were not equally high nor their sense of insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's Church, to sleep on a bulk in June, and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December, to die in an hospital and to be buried in a parish-vault, was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kit-cat or the Scriblerus club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been entrusted with embassies to the High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or in Paternoster Row."-Essay on Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson. But this is plainly the dark side of the picture. Macaulay is speaking here specifically of Johnson's early years in London when, possibly, the fortunes of authors were at a lower ebb than when Goldsmith began his literary career some ten or fifteen years later. In the Citizen of the World (Letter 84) Goldsmith himself says "a writer of real merit now may easily be rich, if his heart be set only on fortune: and for those who have no merit, it is but fit that such should remain in merited obscurity." And after his first few years of struggling his own income was more than sufficient to satisfy the needs of moderate living. Of this income, with Goldsmith as with the other writers of his period, the greater part was derived from that occupation known as hack-writing, or in Goldsmith's own Hackwriting. phrase, book-building. In this business of book-building Goldsmith was always deeply involved; at least one half of all his published writings might fairly come under this head. And that Goldsmith was no exception is evident from the frequent allusions to the hack-writer in the literature of the period. He was a familiar type and the object of much satire. Naturally the typical figure in these satirical pictures is not the man who ground out books on subjects that he was capable of treating, but the one who attempted subjects of which he was ignorant. Goldsmith himself was not entirely free of this fault, as we learn from Irving's account of his Animated Nature. He might, indeed, have been in Smollett's mind when the latter wrote his amusing description of a dinnerparty of hack-writers in his novel Humphrey Clinker. The guests at this party were accustomed to meet together on Sunday, as that was the only day on which they were safe from arrest for debt. They were all men who had translated, compiled, or abridged from the works of others, and their usual fate had been to write on those subjects about which they knew least. There was a Scotchman who gave lectures on the pronunciation of the English language, and the author of a book of travels through Europe and Asia, who had never been outside of London; a third "who labored under the aypopoßia, or horror of green fields, had just finished a treatise on practical agriculture, though, in fact, he had never seen corn growing in his life, and was so ignorant of grain that our entertainer, in the face of the whole company, made him own, that a plate of hominy was the best ricepudding he had ever ate." Books written with such equipment might well be not only as interesting as a Persian tale, as Johnson predicted that Goldsmith's Natural History would be, but also quite as wonderful. On another occasion Johnson said, concerning Goldsmith's venture, “Goldsmith, sir, will give us a very fine book upon the subject, but if he can distinguish a cow from a horse that, I believe, may be the extent of his knowledge of natural history." A bookseller of the eighteenth century. in one. The whole tribe of hack-writers was dependent on the bookseller. He was their Maecenas and their task-master In the life of Goldsmith, we have much to do with one who may stand as a typical representative of the class, Mr. John Newbery, publisher and general promoter of profitable industries. This worthy, born in 1713, the son of a small farmer, began life as an apprentice to a newspaper printer in Reading. On the death of his master, he thriftily paid addresses to the widow, and having won her, thus became proprietor of the business. Besides the publication of his newspaper, which was of course a much simpler undertaking at that time than at present, he carried on a general publishing business and a miscellaneous traffic in cutlery, haberdashery, and medicines of various kinds. In 1744 he shifted the center of his activities to London, still continuing his trade in books and patent medicines. Of the latter, his most famous product was a composition known as Dr. James's Fever Powders, just at that time a fashionable and popular remedy. The story of the Fever Powders is not only illustrative of Mr. Newbery's business ventures, but as well of the state of eighteenth century medical practice. The powders were the discovery of a Dr. James, a physician of respectable standing, and were supposed to be a cure for all ills that flesh is heir to. They were used in tremendous quantities, Dr. James and Newbery, his partner, both becoming rich men from their sale. It is not necessary to suppose that they were an entire fraud, though the indiscriminate use of them must often have resulted in much injury, as we know happened in the case of Goldsmith. It was a period however, when quackery flourished and, in the end, one nostrum was as bad as another. Fleet Street was the favorite haunt of the quacks, and the signs in front of their shops lured the unwary by their splendid promises. The notable thing is not that such wares were offered for sale and bought in large quantities, but that they should have numbered among their victims the most intelligent members of the community. A most remarkable and, on the part of the originator, honest delusion, was that concerning the tarwater remedy exploited by Bishop Berkeley, a name frequently occurring in the pages of Irving's Biography. A distinguished writer and a profound thinker on philosophical subjects, Berkeley published in 1744 a work entitled Siris, which is primarily an argument for the medicinal 1See below, p. 325. 1 |