Writing for Money, or The Distresses of a Hired Writer

Abstract

In the following pages I look at literary representations of the literary market in the eighteenth century, focusing on conflicting ideas about writing for money. In many works relations between monetary interest, political dependence and artistic form enact the dilemmas of a commercialised society in the specific domain of literature. With the growth of the print market and the definition of literary property, the image of the professional author was opposed both to the commercial author and to the gentleman author. The economic independence that came with the privatisation of the imagination and with the commodification of writing was seen as an advantage of the new commercial society.