The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 (review)

Before the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, the Society of Authors, the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland (later the Booksellers Association), and the Publishers Association had been created, and the figure of the literary agent had established itself firmly on the literary landscape. With a focus on the careers of the agents A.P. Watt and J.B. Pinker, Mary Ann Gillies examines this period of transition and professionalization in the book trade, providing a history of the rise of the publishing ‘middle man,’ as William Heinemann termed him – with derision – in 1893.

Gillies provides a good introduction to this late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century landscape, but her book is effectively two extended case studies of the careers of Watt and Pinker, and their interactions with the writers they represented. For Watt, these included Walter Besant (founder of the Society of Authors), Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling; Pinker numbered Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce among his clients. Drawing on previous studies of print culture and the literary agent (including James Hepburn’s foundational The Author’s Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent) and archival research, Gillies provides interesting material on the business models of the two agents, such as Watt’s promotion of his authors. Watt arranged for newspaper interviews and photo shoots for his authors, and sent out Kipling’s autograph to fans. Publishers would approach him, seeking to commission his clients to write for the literary marketplace. Pinker played the role of patron for his modernist clients, often advancing them money in addition to providing editorial advice and representation.

Literary agents, then, established themselves as a central part of the publishing business in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Gillies identifies a transition at the dawn of the twentieth century: from Watt to Pinker, and from what she perceives as the more ‘conservative approach’ of the former to the risky identification and cultivation of experimental writers by the latter. Watt mainly took on established authors, whereas Pinker championed new writers. Their difference is used as evidence to support the argument that Watt followed ‘conservative business practices’ (albeit ones that meant, as the conclusion concedes, that Watt’s agency still exists today, whereas Pinker’s effectively folded on his death). This analysis is questionable – Watt may have been more cautious in his choice of clients, but his development and establishment of those business practices mark him out as a commercial innovator. It is clear that Gillies prefers Pinker (the choice of cover image itself suggests this likelihood), and her occasionally partisan approach to the subject matter sometimes occludes the more general history of literary agency in the period. This history is referred to tantalizingly in a footnote, where it is revealed, for example, that there were over twenty agents in the 1890s.

A more comprehensive history of these agents, and other key figures such as Curtis Brown, would perhaps unearth a historical narrative rather different from that of transition from one individual figure to another, as proffered by the slightly over-engineered conclusion. (The coincidence of Watt’s death in 1914 at the beginning of the Great War, and Pinker’s in the modernist annus mirabilis of 1922, is a little too convenient.) Nonetheless, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain is to be strongly commended for its close attention to the most fascinating of literary mediators, and Gillies should be applauded for her careful and nuanced research of the interactions between individual agents and their clients. Between 1880 and 1920, literary agents became a central part of the book trade, and so much more than the ‘parasites’ to which Heinemann objected. Gillies does much to bring to scholarly attention their activity, practices, and impact.