Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century by Dustin Griffin (review)

Halfway through this discussion of differing ideas of authorship in the years from 1660 to 1800, it is concluded that “With respect to the shape of their writing lives, writers differ from each other in degree but not in kind.” As well as resembling Tolstoy’s more famous comment on families, the dictum sounds as a counterpoint in Mr. Griffin’s study. Variants on it reappear, reminding the reader that in spite of erstwhile taxonomic attempts to categorize or typify the literary career (a word interrogated for its eighteenth-century shifts in one chapter) the matter of such careers remains stubbornly irreducible: some authors may be more or less carefree or careful with regard to posterity, some may write to the sound of their carriage wheels, and some with high-minded (or long-winded) deliberation, but all significant examples of authorship cannot be made into schemes or arrangements without showing the narrowness of the arranger.

This book offers a series of case studies, collected in part from Mr. Griffin’s prolific publications approaching authorship from different angles. Some of his writing is corrective, lamenting the tendency to assume a seamless transition from the author dependent on patronage to one as a free agent, albeit reliant on the literary market, or the assumption of the mid-century poet as an alienated and isolated figure. Mr. Griffin has pursued these subjects elsewhere (as his footnotes remind us), and rightly laments such generalizations, correcting some of his own earlier ideas.

Although there are short chapters on collaboration, and longer ones on the author as a necessarily social figure in the Restoration, and the key emergence of authorship as a profession in the next century, the study is also loosely based around a chronology of major writers: it starts with Milton, who, given his pronouncements on his desired literary career and his apparent shaping of it, is one beginning of modern authorship. It ends with Gray, who, for all his Miltonic obsessions, was a very different sort of author, his authority wavering as he cultivated a readership that he did not really believe existed. In between there is much attention to major figures such as Dryden, Pope, and Johnson, who all either took part in important shifts in authorship, or reflected on such changes. The book commences with Johnson’s remark, in 1753, on the present being an “age of authors”: there were always more people willing than able to write; the difference is that the modern literary market offers all an apparent opportunity, however chimerical. As Johnson knew full well, the result was often misery, though it also produced the type of jobbing writer (or author by profession) who is perhaps too little understood by modern criticism, falling between the clichés of Grub-Street failure and self-defined genius.

A chapter looks closely at three examples of such authors: William Oldys, Thomas Birch, and James Ralph. The last is one example where the analysis is a little understated: as is pointed out, Ralph wrote for party and for the stage, but his most well-known work, The Case of Authors by Profession (1758), a grumble about the state of the writer in the free market, is more important as an argument for the dignity of the professional author, and thus entitlement to a respectable living (much good that it did him). Conversely, another chapter explores the European humanist ideal of the “Republic of Letters,” and how the term was understood (and at times misunderstood) in Britain, from brilliant but eccentric or often controversial scholars (Bentley, Gibbon, the more obscure Thomas Ruddiman) to figures like Johnson, both a man of letters and an author by profession, who mixed freely with people from both worlds, and exemplifies the change from constituents of such a republic being distant “scholars” to more immediate “authors.”

Such a description of the book may make it sound disparate, a circling of the question, but there is so much matter here that it does not feel either...