Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Authorship: The Development and Legitimation of a Literary Profession

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Victorian Literary Businesses

  • 243 Accesses

Abstract

The chapter begins with the historical context of professional authorship, highlighting the impact of copyright on an author’s ability to earn money and control their literary property. The narrative moves to explore the practice of frequenting gentlemen’s clubs to do business as authors used clubs to socialise with their professional network and find new opportunities. The chapter then addresses one of the defining features of Victorian publishing, serialisation—discussing how the format of journalism underpinned authorship in particular demonstrating how Charles Dickens used serialisation to reach a wide readership. The chapter closes with a study of the practices used by women such as publishing under male pseudonyms or anonymously. Through an analysis of letters written by Charlotte Brontë in relation to the publication of Jane Eyre, this chapter demonstrates how women circumvented gender stereotypes to get published.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 119.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

Archives

  • Several collections were consulted at the British Library, the full reference is Archives and Manuscripts, British Library, London (cited in endnotes as [item location, collection name], BL).

    Google Scholar 

  • A. P. Watt Records #11036, Rare Book Literary and Historical Papers, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (cited in the endnotes as A. P. Watt [UNC]).

    Google Scholar 

Sources

  • “Advertisement.” The Athenaeum, 26 March 1836, 232.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, Christine. Bronte, Charlotte (1816–1855). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bell, Bill. “From Parnassus to Grub Street: Matthew Arnold and the House of Macmillan.” In Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition, edited by Elizabeth James. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, Arnold, and James Gordon Hepburn. Letters of Arnold Bennett: Edited by James Hepburn. 4 vols. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

    Google Scholar 

  • Besant, Walter. Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant. [S.l.]: Hutchinson, 1902.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “The Maintenance of Literary Property.” Paper presented at the Grievances Between Authors and Publishers: Being the Report of the Conferences of the Incorporated Society of Authors Willis’s Rooms, London, March 1887.

    Google Scholar 

  • Black, Barbara. A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bonham-Carter, Victor. Authors by Profession: From the Introduction of Printing Until the Copyright Act 1911. Vol. 1. London: Society of Authors, 1978.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Gent and London: Academia Press and The British Library, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brennan, Zoe. Brontë’s Jane Eyre: A Reader’s Guide. London and New York: Continuum, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brontë, Anne, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, with a Preface and Memoir of Both Authors. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1870.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cowell, F. R. The Athenaeum: Club and Social Life in London, 1824–1974. London: Heinemann, 1975.

    Google Scholar 

  • Craig, Carys. Copyright, Communication and Culture: Towards a Relational Theory of Copyright Law. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deane, Bradley. The Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market. Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Outstanding Dissertations, edited by William E. Cain. Abingdon: Routledge, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Edited by His Sister-in-Law and His Eldest Daughter. London: Chapman & Hall, 1880.

    Google Scholar 

  • Easley, Alexis. First Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feather, John. “Copyright and Literary Property.” In A Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. A History of British Publishing. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “The Publishers and the Pirates: British Copyright Law in Theory and Practice, 1710–1775.” Publishing History 22 (1987): 5.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain. London: Mansell, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  • Finkelstein, David, and Alistair McCleery. An Introduction to Book History. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fitzgerald, Percy Hetherington. The Garrick Club. London: Stock, 1904.

    Google Scholar 

  • Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. 2 vols. Vol. I, 1812–1847. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fraser’s Magazine for Town and County. “The Athenaeum Club-House.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and County, March 1830.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 2 vols. Vol. 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gettman, Royal A. A Victorian Author: A Study of the Bentley Papers. Digital ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gillies, Mary Ann. The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gissing, George, and Bernard Bergonzi. New Grub Street: Edited with an Introduction by Bernard Bergouzi. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968 [1891].

    Google Scholar 

  • “Gossip of the Week.” The Literary Gazette, 27 March 1858, 304–305.

    Google Scholar 

  • Granovetter, Mark S. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–1380.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hay, Cecil. The Club and the Drawing-Room Being Pictures of Modern Life: Social, Political, and Professional. London: Robert Hardwicke, 1870.

    Google Scholar 

  • “Jane Eyre: An Autobiography.” The Critic, 30 October 1847, 277.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, Samuel. Johnson’s Dictionary. Boston: Charles J. Hendee, 1836.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnstone, Judith, and Hilary Fraser. “The Professionalization of Women’s Writing: Extending the Canon.” In Women and Literature in Britain 1800–1900, edited by Joanne Shattock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Joseph, Marrisa. “Members Only: The Victorian Gentlemen’s Club as a Space for Doing Business 1843–1900.” Management & Organizational History 14 (2019): 123–147.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Judd, Catherine A. “Male Pseudonyms and Female Authority.” In Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, edited by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kenyon, Karen Smith. The Brontë Family: Passionate Literary Geniuses. A Lerner Biography. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kipling, Rudyard, and Thomas Pinney. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. 6 vols. Vol. 1. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Law, Graham, and Robert L. Patten. “The Serial Revolution.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: 1830–1914, edited by David McKitterick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Leary, Patrick. The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London. London: The British Library, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leary, Patrick, and Andrew Nash. “Authorship.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain 1830–1914, edited by David McKitterick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, Sidney, George Smith, and Leslie Stephen. George Smith, a Memoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1902].

    Google Scholar 

  • “Literary Intelligence: Gossip of the Literary World.” The Critic, 15 June 1850, 312.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lycett, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation. London: Windmill Books, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Major, Lee Elliot. “Athenaeum Opens Its Doors to Women Members.” The Guardian, Thursday 3 January 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martineau, Harriet. Autobiography. Edited by Linda H. Peterson. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mays, Kelly J. “The Publishing World.” In A Companion to the Victorian Novel edited by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Millerson, Geoffrey. The Qualifying Associations: A Study in Professionalization. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964.

    Google Scholar 

  • Milne-Smith, Amy. “Club Talk: Gossip, Masculinity and Oral Communities in Late Nineteenth-Century London.” Gender & History 21, no. 1 (2009): 86–106.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nayder, Lillian. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • “Our Weekly Gossip.” The Athenaeum, 3 August 1867, 149–151.

    Google Scholar 

  • “Our Weekly Gossip.” The Athenaeum, 5 May 1855, 523.

    Google Scholar 

  • Owen, Lynette. Selling Rights. 7th ed. London: Routledge, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Patten, Robert L. Bentley, Richard (1794–1871). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • “Poetry of the Million.” The Athenaeum, 4 July 1846, 682.

    Google Scholar 

  • “Reminiscences of the Old Chapter Coffee-House, Paternoster Row, London.” The Leisure Hour, 30 June 1859, 409–412.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rossetti, Christina Georgina. “Death’s Chill Between.” The Athenaeum, 14 October 1848, 1032.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rubery, Matthew. “Journalism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture, edited by Francis O’Gorman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Salmon, Richard. The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sanders, Valerie. “Women, Fiction and the Marketplace.” In Women and Literature in Britain 1800–1900, edited by Joanne Shattock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Seville, Catherine. Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shorter, Clement. The Brontës: Life and Letters. 2 vols. Vol. 1. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Margaret, ed. The Letters of Charlotte Bronte: 1829–1847. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spiers, John. Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sturrock, June. “Literary Women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Dynevor Terrace.” In Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, edited by Nicola Diane Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sutherland, John. “The Victorian Novelists: Who Were They?” In The Book History Reader, edited by David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • “The Literary Profession.” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 6 August 1842, 225–226.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trollope, Anthony. Autobiography. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Thackeray. English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1901.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tuchman, Gaye. Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012 [1989].

    Google Scholar 

  • Wald, James. “Periodicals and Periodicity.” In A Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • Waller, Philip. Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1879–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weedon, Alexis. Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilkes, Joanne. Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Woodmansee, Martha, and Peter Jaszi. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yates, Edmund Hodgson. Edmund Yates: His Recollections and Experiences. London: Richard Bentley, 1884.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Mr. Thackeray, Mr. Yates, and the Garrick Club: The Correspondence and Facts. Stated by Edmund Yates. London: Printed for Private Circulation, 1859.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Henley Business School, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Marrisa Joseph

Authors
  1. Marrisa Joseph
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Joseph, M. (2019). Authorship: The Development and Legitimation of a Literary Profession. In: Victorian Literary Businesses. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28592-0_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation