The Suppression of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: An Unpublished Letter from Lord Holland to Samuel Rogers

This article faithfully reproduces a letter from Lord Holland to Samuel Rogers, including deletions, hyphenated words, underlines, and paragraphs, to evidence how Samuel Rogers interceded in the suppression of a fifth edition of Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Rogers’s knowledge of the publishing market, its publishing houses and successful authors, made him one of the most formidable and important of Byron’s acquaintances and contemporaries in the 1810s. This article demonstrates the important role of Rogers as an individual whose political negotiations and literary advice impacted the literary landscape of the Romantic period. The decision to suppress the fifth edition of English Bards also shows how Byron navigated literary and political opinion, as well as the role of sociability in the production and genetics of literary text. Professional authorship in the Romantic period was performed within this context of social networks.

Conclusion

Rather than being defined by their membership of a particular constituency of ideological or sociopolitical war experience, writers hold and express complex and evolving views on the war. Studying authors’ careers reveals not only that their writing was influenced by the war, but that, simultaneously, the circumstances of their artistic and professional development shaped the manner and mode of their literary reactions. More than has been fully appreciated, American writers drew on native literary and historical culture to assess the Great War. Ultimately, however, American writing about the war was idiosyncratic, complex, and subject to change, as writers’ ongoing reactions to the war were influenced by the intricate group of intrapersonal and interpersonal variables that shaped professional authorship.

Workers as Artists

Walter Besant denied that there was any necessary connection between the literary and the commercial value of any given literary work, but in his fiction and nonfiction he acknowledges that literary and commercial experiences often overlap. Besant’s advocacy for professional authorship in The Autobiography and The Pen and the Book and his call for a Palace of Delight in All Sorts and Conditions of Men foreground the intertwining of commerce, utility, and production with art, literature and taste. Both Besant’s fiction and his nonfiction reveal that the presence of the economic in aesthetic experiences is both necessary and productive.

Introduction

The introduction to the volume sets Richard Marsh in his historical context and argues that our understanding of late-Victorian and Edwardian professional authorship remains incomplete without a consideration of Marsh’s oeuvre. The introduction discusses Marsh as an exemplary professional writer producing topical popular fiction for an expanding middlebrow market. The seeming ephemerality of his literary production meant that its value was not appreciated by twentieth-century critics who were constructing the English literary canon. Marsh’s writing, however, deserves to be reread, as its negotiation of mainstream and counter-hegemonic discourses challenges our assumptions about fin-de-siècle literary culture. His novels and short stories engaged with and contributed to contemporary debates about aesthetic and economic value and interrogated the politics of gender, sexuality, empire and criminality.

Shiftiness in Keats's ‘Ode on Indolence’

This essay identifies a kind of shiftiness at work in Keats's ‘Ode on Indolence’. Apparent both in the poem's depiction of indolence as a wavering between mind states, and in its wordplay, ambiguity and structural instability, this shifty quality presents an unsettling, more mischievous side of Negative Capability. This quality may account, too, for the peculiar textual instability of the ode, which has seen the order of its stanzas variously rearranged by critics and editors over the course of its bibliographical history. The essay concludes by considering the indolence of the poem's title in relation to a pun contained in its epigraph, which raises questions about what drives poetic creativity and considers the distinction between the labour of professional authorship versus ideas about inspiration and organic composition.

“As Fully Incomprehensible as the Northern Lights”: Literary Identities in The Adventures of an Author

This essay considers an anonymously-written and understudied novel, The Adventures of an Author (1767), as self-consciously reflecting the complexities and multiplicities of professional authorship in the mid-eighteenth century. Containing a vividly-realized fictive print society, this two-volume work revolves around the exploits of a writer-protagonist named Jack Atall who confusedly constructs his own literary autobiography. Investigating The Adventures of an Author as a comic negotiation of developing conceptions of authorship and the book trade, the novel is read as ironically underlining how discussions like Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition and Ralph’s Case of Authors fall short in defining and defending the professional author. It can be argued that Adventures represents the period’s conceptions of authorship as unstable, depicting the chaotic inclusivity of the Republic of Letters and the inability of authorial polemics to contain and control the operations of the literary marketplace.