New Books, New Men: City-Mysteries Fiction, Authorship, and the Literary Market

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

—Samuel Johnson

In an 1821 letter home to his mother from Bowdoin College, a young Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplated his career options:

I have not yet concluded what profession I shall have. The being a Minister is of course out of the Question. I should not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. . . . As to Lawyers, there are so many of them already that one half of them (upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation. A Physician, then, seems to be "Hobson's Choice," but yet I should not like to live by the diseases and Infirmities of fellow-Creatures. . . . Oh that I was rich enough to live without a profession. What do you think of my becoming an Author, and relying for support upon my pen?¹

While Mrs. Hawthorne may well have responded to the prospect of having an author son with somewhat guarded enthusiasm, Hawthorne's family did think enough of this career plan to fund a twelve-year "literary apprenticeship" for Nathaniel after his graduation from Bowdoin.² Hawthorne's letter, however, along with his use of the word "apprenticeship" to describe his early (and notably unprofitable) years as a writer, highlight a critical point: in antebellum America, authorship was not considered to be a "profession."

The only three careers that were consistently described as "professions," and to which a college education was seen as likely to lead, were medicine, law, and the ministry.³ In fact, one antebellum career advice manual precisely outlined this linkage of formal study and "the professions," comparing it to the less formal preparation for a "trade," noting that "some learn a trade, who should have studied a profession; others study a profession, who should have learned a trade."⁴ In its entry on authorship, this manual includes an engraving of a clearly wealthy man, in morning gown and ruffled shirt in a richly furnished library, replete with busts and leather-bound tomes, yet offers no description at all of the work that an author does or the training needed for it. Much to the contrary, the entry observes that "Very few persons are educated with the view to their becoming authors. They generally write on subjects pertaining to the profession or business in which they have been practically engaged."⁵ It is telling that Hawthorne proposes authorship as a career immediately after expressing his wish to live "without a profession." Mary Kelley has written that our understanding of female writers during the period has been limited by a tendency to view them as "leisured ladies" whose "effusions poured on to page after page, rather than that of the woman who worked, produced a product, negotiated in the literary marketplace, and received money for her labor."⁶ The same can be said, however, for male writers of popular fiction; we tend to view male authors through the lens of the college-educated, alienated-artist figures of the American Renaissance, instead of as employees in the industry of print, as one contemporary described them: "literature with them is, as with the publishers for whom they work, but a mercantile business."⁷

Why, then, the profusion of scholarship on the emergence of the "profession of authorship" in America? The book that charted the course for almost all research on American authorship is William Charvat's The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870, originally published in 1968. Charvat and many of his followers, however, all too frequently limit themselves to the study of writers who, by virtue of their class and educational backgrounds, could reasonably have been expected to become "professionals" in the antebellum sense—that is to say, the standard figures of the American Renaissance. So much of what we know about antebellum authorship is derived from the study of figures from a class for whom authorship was a form of "downward mobility," as Lawrence Buell has described it.⁸ Authorship, however, looks different from the perspective of people for whom...