Biographia Literaria
ordinary mode of publishing a work by the trade. I thought indeed, that
to the purchaser it was indifferent, whether thirty per cent of the
purchase-money went to the booksellers or to the government; and that
the convenience of receiving the work by the post at his own door would
give the preference to the latter. It is hard, I own, to have been
labouring for years, in collecting and arranging the materials; to have
spent every shilling that could be spared after the necessaries of life
had been furnished, in buying books, or in journeys for the purpose of
consulting them or of acquiring facts at the fountain head; then to buy
the paper, pay for the printing, and the like, all at least fifteen per
cent beyond what the trade would have paid; and then after all to give
thirty per cent not of the net profits, but of the gross results of the
sale, to a man who has merely to give the books shelf or warehouse room,
and permit his apprentice to hand them over the counter to those who may
ask for them; and this too copy by copy, although, if the work be on any
philosophical or scientific subject, it may be years before the edition
is sold off. All this, I confess, must seem a hardship, and one, to
which the products of industry in no other mode of exertion are subject.
Yet even this is better, far better, than to attempt in any way to unite
the functions of author and publisher. But the most prudent mode is to
sell the copy-right, at least of one or more editions, for the most that
the trade will offer. By few only can a large remuneration be expected;
but fifty pounds and ease of mind are of more real advantage to a
literary man, than the chance of five hundred with the certainty
of insult and degrading anxieties. I shall have been grievously
misunderstood, if this statement should be interpreted as written
with the desire of detracting from the character of booksellers or
publishers. The individuals did not make the laws and customs of their
trade, but, as in every other trade, take them as they find them. Till
the evil can be proved to be removable, and without the substitution of
an equal or greater inconvenience, it were neither wise nor manly even
to complain of it. But to use it as a pretext for speaking, or even for
thinking, or feeling, unkindly or opprobriously of the tradesmen, as
individuals, would be something worse than unwise or even than unmanly;
it would be immoral and calumnious. My motives point in a far different
direction and to far other objects, as will be seen in the conclusion of
the chapter.
A learned and exemplary old clergyman, who many years ago went to his
reward followed by the regrets and blessings of his flock, published
at his own expense two volumes octavo, entitled, A NEW THEORY OF
REDEMPTION. The work was most severely handled in THE MONTHLY or
CRITICAL REVIEW, I forget which; and this unprovoked hostility became
the good old man’s favourite topic of conversation among his friends.
“Well!” (he used to exclaim,) “in the second edition, I shall have an
opportunity of exposing both the ignorance and the malignity of the
anonymous critic.” Two or three years however passed by without any
tidings from the bookseller, who had undertaken the printing and
publication of the work, and who was perfectly at his ease, as the
author was known to be a man of large property. At length the accounts
were written for; and in the course of a few weeks they were presented
by the rider for the house, in person. My old friend put on
his spectacles, and holding the scroll with no very firm hand,
began--“Paper, so much: O moderate enough--not at all beyond my
expectation! Printing, so much: well! moderate enough! Stitching,
covers, advertisements, carriage, and so forth, so much.”--Still
nothing amiss. Selleridge (for orthography is no necessary part of
a bookseller’s literary acquirements) L3. 3s. “Bless me! only three
guineas for the what d’ye call it--the selleridge?” “No more, Sir!”
replied the rider. “Nay, but that is too moderate!” rejoined my old
friend. “Only three guineas for selling a thousand copies of a work in
two volumes?” “O Sir!” (cries the young traveller) “you have mistaken
the word. There have been none of them sold; they have been sent
back from London long ago; and this L3. 3s. is for the cellaridge,
or warehouse-room in our book cellar.” The work was in consequence
preferred from the ominous cellar of the publisher’s to the author’s
garret; and, on presenting a copy to an acquaintance, the old gentleman
used to tell the anecdote with great humour and still greater good
nature.
With equal lack of worldly knowledge, I was a far more than equal
sufferer for it, at the very outset of my authorship. Toward the close
of the first year from the time, that in an inauspicious hour I left the
friendly cloisters, and the happy grove of quiet, ever honoured Jesus
College, Cambridge, I was persuaded by sundry philanthropists and
Anti-polemists to set on foot a periodical work, entitled THE WATCHMAN,
that, according to the general motto of the work, all might know the
truth, and that the truth might make us free! In order to exempt it from
the stamp-tax, and likewise to contribute as little as possible to the
supposed guilt of a war against freedom, it was to be published on every
eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, and price
only four-pence. Accordingly with a flaming prospectus,--“Knowledge is
Power,” “To cry the state of the political atmosphere,”--and so forth,
I set off on a tour to the North, from Bristol to Sheffield, for the
purpose of procuring customers, preaching by the way in most of
the great towns, as an hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white
waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen on me.
For I was at that time and long after, though a Trinitarian (that is
ad normam Platonis) in philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion;
more accurately, I was a Psilanthropist, one of those who believe our
Lord to have been the real son of Joseph, and who lay the main stress on
the resurrection rather than on the crucifixion. O! never can I remember
those days with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most
disinterested. My opinions were indeed in many and most important points
erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself then
seemed cheap to me, compared with the interests of what I believed to
be the truth, and the will of my Maker. I cannot even accuse myself of
having been actuated by vanity; for in the expansion of my enthusiasm I
did not think of myself at all.
My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a rigid
Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in whom
length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been
borrowed for a foundery poker. O that face! a face kat’ emphasin! I
have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair,
pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his
thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a
last week’s shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of
colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose
he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the
neck,--the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,--slunk in
behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and
with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one
looking at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! But
he was one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and, as I was
informed, had proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one
of the horns of the second beast in THE REVELATIONS, that spake as a
dragon. A person, to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been
addressed, was my introducer. It was a new event in my life, my first
stroke in the new business I had undertaken of an author, yea, and of
an author trading on his own account. My companion after some imperfect
sentences and a multitude of hums and has abandoned the cause to his
client; and I commenced an harangue of half an hour to Phileleutheros,
the tallow-chandler, varying my notes, through the whole gamut of
eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in the latter
from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I promised, I
prophesied; and beginning with the captivity of nations I ended with the
near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of my own
verses describing that glorious state out of the Religious Musings:
------Such delights
As float to earth, permitted visitants!
When in some hour of solemn jubilee
The massive gates of Paradise are thrown
Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild
Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies,
And odours snatched from beds of amaranth,
And they, that from the crystal river of life
Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales!
My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy
patience, though, as I was afterwards told, on complaining of certain
gales that were not altogether ambrosial, it was a melting day with
him. “And what, Sir,” he said, after a short pause, “might the cost be?”
“Only four-pence,”--(O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal
bathos of that four-pence!)--“only four-pence, Sir, each number, to be
published on every eighth day.”--“That comes to a deal of money at
the end of a year. And how much, did you say, there was to be for
the money?”--“Thirty-two pages, Sir, large octavo, closely
printed.”--“Thirty and two pages? Bless me! why except what I does in a
family way on the Sabbath, that’s more than I ever reads, Sir! all
the year round. I am as great a one, as any man in Brummagem, Sir!
for liberty and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this,--no
offence, I hope, Sir,--I must beg to be excused.”
So ended my first canvass: from causes that I shall presently mention, I
made but one other application in person. This took place at Manchester
to a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. He took my letter
of introduction, and, having perused it, measured me from head to foot
and again from foot to head, and then asked if I had any bill or invoice
of the thing. I presented my prospectus to him. He rapidly skimmed
and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly the second and
concluding page; crushed it within his fingers and the palm of his hand;
then most deliberately and significantly rubbed and smoothed one part
against the other; and lastly putting it into his pocket turned his back
on me with an “over-run with these articles!” and so without another
syllable retired into his counting house. And, I can truly say, to my
unspeakable amusement.
This, I have said, was my second and last attempt. On returning baffled
from the first, in which I had vainly essayed to repeat the miracle of
Orpheus with the Brummagem patriot, I dined with the tradesman who had
introduced me to him. After dinner he importuned me to smoke a pipe with
him, and two or three other illuminati of the same rank. I objected,
both because I was engaged to spend the evening with a minister and
his friends, and because I had never smoked except once or twice in
my lifetime, and then it was herb tobacco mixed with Oronooko. On the
assurance, however, that the tobacco was equally mild, and seeing
too that it was of a yellow colour; not forgetting the lamentable
difficulty, I have always experienced, in saying, “No,” and in
abstaining from what the people about me were doing,--I took half a
pipe, filling the lower half of the bowl with salt. I was soon however
compelled to resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and distressful