1 - Introducing the Authors

Summary

What does it mean to be an author of novels or plays in the Georgian period? Authorship was certainly not associated with originality and ownership of one's own work. Authors tended to characterise themselves as subject to the desires of others – their audience, their booksellers, their kin – and driven to put their work into the public domain out of necessity rather than pride. Works were ‘authored’ by those desires and the hand that wrote was that of a scribe. This may of course have been the conventional modesty topos or a familiar kind of complaint that all labour produces. But here too we might say that what is – authorial Being – lies elsewhere than in the consciousness of the writer. Indeed, it was often perceived to lie in the imagination of the audience or reader.

Writing for the novel and writing for the theatre were often compared, and they were compared in conventional terms: the playwright is seen as one among many who bring a performance into being, whereas the novelist is envisaged as a solitary creator. In this, the playwright is not necessarily at a disadvantage or less likely to acquire recognition. There is some safety in numbers: a play's composition through plural makers may well hit popular taste(s) with more certainty and in that variety. Moreover, a play is tested in performance and the audience can express a desire to see the performance repeated or not. The novel – composed in isolation, put into print before it is exposed to its audience – speculates in lonely autonomy about its potential reception in the many minds of its readers.

Statistics appear to bear out this distinction. Even the most successful works of fiction had little market penetration by comparison with theatrical performances. Michael Suarez summarises prose fiction's place in the print market: Robinson Crusoe went through six editions of 1,000 copies each in its first four months, and Pamela sold some 20,000 copies in fourteen months. The average edition size for fiction 1770–99 was 500 copies and few novels went into second editions. Between 1703 and 1753 – the period in which the novel is emerging as a popular challenger to dramatic fiction – fiction publication (counting by titles) represents ‘slightly less than 3.5 per cent of all surviving titles’.