The age of the gifted amateur has returned
The woes of publishing make it easy to forget that Fielding, TS Eliot and others were part-timers

Ian Jack writing in The Guardian, Saturday 2 May 2009

T.S.Eliot left.

We are in the twilight years of a certain kind of paid employment: the business of inking words on paper, to be read by a large audience that is largely unknown to the author.

The crisis in newspapers is especially acute. But neither is book publishing immune. Advances against royalties are tumbling, staff have been cut, publishers take far fewer risks. The recession offers only a small part of the explanation.

The fact is that generations are now growing up with the idea that words should be read electronically for free - a new human right - which has grave consequences for the people paid to compose and edit them. Writers and journalists like me, old enough to know manual typewriters, tend when we meet to congratulate ourselves on having seen "the best of it", meaning the years when a career could be based solely - mortgage secured, lunches enjoyed, etc - on small or large acts of English composition, often flawed.

This way of living reached its full bloom only recently, between the late 1980s and early 2000s, when the enormous expansion in newspaper pagination and a burst of new lifestyle magazines increased the demand for wordage and publishers bid against each other to pay out large advances (the sums look incredible now - £500,000 for a first "literary" novel) for no other reason, it sometimes seemed, than to give an editorial director crowing rights over his rivals. What nobody considered (certainly not me) was that paid authorship rested on certain technical, social and legal developments, old but far from ancient, that were about to be undermined and overtaken by a new technology that was much more democratic.

In other words, that paying an author to read his work wasn't an unchallengeable habit set in stone, like buying bread from a baker, but the result of two German inventions, moveable type and the rotary press, and two British ones, copyright law and that first large audience for print known as "the reading public".

Before Gutenberg devised his letterpress, literary production lay in the hands of scriveners, and writing was a spare-time hobby sustained by the patronage of the church or aristocrats. For a long time, the printed book did little to change this. Among writers, the play offered the best chance of a full-time writing career because a play had paying audiences - Shakespeare got a tenner for Hamlet whereas more than 60 years later Milton earned only a fiver from the first printing of Paradise Lost. By the 18th century, reading had spread from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Alexander Pope received £5,000 for his translation of the Iliad when an agriculture worker's wage was 10 shillings (50p) a week, while Daniel Defoe wrote his way out of debt and had enough left over to set himself up in a country house in Stoke Newington.

But these were exceptions. Patronage declined, and the writer at the end of the 18th century was often poorer than his equivalent had been at the beginning. Books were luxury items. A literate craftsman on £1 a week was hardly likely to fork out 13s 6d for a copy of Tom Jones, which meant that its author, Henry Fielding, depended for his living on his post at Bow Street magistrates court.
Only with the swelling of the British middle class did writing become a real possibility as a career. In 1812, the editors at the Edinburgh Review reckoned that there were "probably not less than 200,000 persons who read for amusement and instruction, among the middling classes of society". The Review paid its contributors well; it was anxious to establish the writer as a professional. Walter Scott is the most famous example of a new breed, exchanging a legal salary of £1,300 for a series of furiously written novels that sometimes earned him £20,000 a year, a lot of which went into building his Gothic castle in the Scottish Borders.

By the time Dickens, Balzac and Dumas were producing their highly profitable serial novels, the triangular foundations of the modern book trade - author, publisher, bookseller - had already been laid. Writers got advances against unwritten work and then flattered booksellers at "trade dinners" to persuade them to up their orders.

A bestselling author could make a small fortune for his publisher: Byron for John Murray, Dickens for Chapman & Hall, the word of God for William Collins, who bought a country house and a steam yacht by selling 300,000 bibles a year.

Until now, remarkably little about literary production has changed. Some authors - JK Rowling is the modern Scott - generate big profits, while others - let's think of Ian McEwan as Byron - certainly earn enough to keep wolves from their various doors. A misleading idea has arisen, however, that writers generally can earn enough money to do nothing else. The idea is ignorant of history, of TS Eliot keeping himself comfortable on academic stipends and a publishing house directorship, of Angus Wilson superintending the reading room at the British Museum. It may be that we have it because authorship is now so visible, with the author turned into a small celebrity. But we can all be authors now and publish ourselves on the web. What you might call the moral and aesthetic case for writing - to think, imagine and describe and then communicate the result to an audience - can be satisfied online. It just doesn't make any money. The age of the gifted amateur is surely about to return.

There is more.

Footnote:

A thoughtful piece don't you think? Sorry I missed it over the weekend and oly came across it just now while scrolling the Guardian's excellent website hence my late posting.