Enter the Literary Agent

The need for a study of the rise of literary agents in England towards the close of the nineteenth century and their profound impact on writing of all kinds, but particularly on the emergence of modernism, has been long-standing. This monograph makes stabs in the right direction but is neither the comprehensive nor definitive work its title so boldly suggests.

Gillies opts to focus on only two well-known agents, A. P. Watt and J. B. Pinker, and to present case studies for clients of each: for Watt, George MacDonald and “Lucas Malet” (the former now little known and the latter almost forgotten); for Pinker, Somerville and Ross and Joseph Conrad.Watt did have some big fish in his net, including Kipling and Wilkie Collins, although his list has on the whole worn less well than Pinker’s whose clients make up a pantheon of the literary elite, including Stephen Crane, Arnold Bennett, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, John Galsworthy, Katherine Mansfield. Among other clients, H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence quarreled with him, while James Joyce invoked his name in the Circe episode of Ulysses.

Gillies’s case studies scrupulously maintain gender balance, with one male and one female writer per agent (counting the Irish collaborating cousins Somerville and Ross as an entity), an evenhandedness deriving more, perhaps, from current preoccupations with political correctness rather than the realities of the late-nineteenth-century literary marketplace. The procedure involves amassing a wealth of detail about a writer of scant interest (Malet) mainly to score the small and obvious point that Watt flexibly dealt with clients, male and female. The account of Conrad’s massive career, so generously enabled by Pinker, is consequently foreshortened, handled in cursory outline rather than in depth, with some highly familiar territory traversed along the way.

In her introductory chapter, Gillies laboriously establishes her rationale and positions her work in a field that has witnessed intense growth over the past two decades. This is followed by a summary, if quite useful, discussion of the several changes on the publishing scene in late-nineteenth-century Britain. She then argues that, although many of the essential services were the same (selling copyrights, placing work, advising on work-in-progress) for both agents, there were two stages in the development of literary agency: an initial, more conservative one, pioneered by Watt, who made his services available mainly to writers of some reputation and cozied up to publishers; and a second stage, initiated by Pinker, who more adventurously sought out untried new talent and went to battle for it in the marketplace.

Although the author claims in her acknowledgments that this book was a decade in the making, some of her observations on Watt appeared in Publishing Research Quarterly as long ago as 1993. Given the time-span that this book was in planning and progress, the research energy on primary sources was not notably energetic, and it is surprising that the splendid collections of The Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas have not been called on. Moreover, the claim, for instance, that little is known of Watt’s origins can be overturned by a ten-minute trawl in the online 1851 Census of Scotland, which establishes that his father was a “book agent”—an important point about the future literary agent’s background (one found, too, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), and importantly coloring the later distinction that Watt hailed from the middle class. Ten years later, Watt himself was working as a “Linen Draper’s Assistant,” a position that surely provided him with firsthand knowledge of how trade was pursued.

Northrop Frye was known to quip that there were literary scholars who knew their way to the Public Records Office, and those who did not know it existed. Researchers interested in “material culture” ought surely to figure among the former, and it is surprising to observe that the bankruptcy papers of the Pinker firm housed...