Owning The English Rogue: Commerce and Reputation in Restoration Authorship

What did it mean to ‘own’ a text in the Restoration? The word establishes a proprietary, possessive relationship between an individual author and a work, often thought to have been inaugurated by the Copyright Act of 1710. A text that is ‘one’s own’ is no one else’s – it is not co-authored and not plagiarised from other sources. As a piece of literary property, it may offer financial reward for the author’s labour. Yet, as Jody Greene argues in The Trouble with Ownership, to ‘own’ in this period could also mean to ‘own up to’ – to admit to having been responsible for the work. Although Greene focuses specifically on legal liability, this double meaning of ownership had more general implications for the growing number of professional writers in the second half of the seventeenth century. For them to attach their names to a work might mean creating a ‘brand name’ leading to success in the marketplace, but it could also tarnish the author’s ‘good name’ through association with a disreputable or too-obviously commercial book. Taking (or being given) credit for a text could therefore affect the ‘credit’ – in terms of money or belief – that an author might receive from readers and/or book-trade colleagues. The two poles of ‘property’ and ‘propriety’ in literary ownership, which Mark Rose distinguishes in Authors and Owners, were thus closely linked in practice.

This paper examines a particularly stark demonstration of these attractions and pitfalls of authorship in the case of The English Rogue, one of the most successful works of prose fiction published in the Restoration. While a number of scholars (including Paulina Kewes and Brean S. Hammond) have traced the ‘prehistory’ of professional authorship and literary property prior to the passage of the Copyright Act, their work has focused almost exclusively on writing for the theatre. Although drama was the major commercial genre in this period, however, concerns over how best to construct a suitable authorial role, earn a living from writing, and prevent others unfairly profiting from one’s work did not apply to playwrights alone. Indeed, prose fiction allows us to see these issues in a more unmediated form, since it does not involve the inherently collaborative nature of performance or the third-night benefits due to dramatists, but only interactions within the print marketplace. Moreover, the emerging genre of serial fiction (of which The English Rogue became a part) placed a special emphasis on the continuity of authorship and/or quality from one instalment to the next in order to motivate further purchases, while also requiring some aesthetic justification for the work’s growing length.

A significant aspect of this case is that the two known writers involved, Richard Head and Francis Kirkman, were both also booksellers deeply involved in the Restoration literary trade. Both were thus predisposed to see books in commercial as well as aesthetic terms, and familiar with treading the fine line between these views. Indeed, the professions of author and bookseller were, as Lisa Maruca argues in The Work of Print, never as separate in this period as they were later reified to be. As The English Rogue demonstrates, a bookseller might commission, or author, texts as well as arranging their printing and sale. By filling all of these roles over the course of their careers, Head and Kirkman provide a vivid illustration of literary professionalism in the Restoration, as well as its precariousness: both were frequently on the verge of bankruptcy, repeatedly moving premises or altering their business models with varying degrees of success. This has caused them to suffer in the estimation of later critics: F. W. Chandler, for instances, describes the two as ‘poor-devil hacks who set pens to paper for hire alone....While Head may have been only half disreputable, Kirkman was beneath contempt, and his treatment of Head is indicative of what his other dealings doubtless were’ (211). A more detailed examination of their works, however, shows that – in contrast to the stark opposition drawn by Chandler – the questions of ‘hire’ and reputation were actually intertwined, and both Head...