Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790–1820

Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820 JA N F E R G U S JA N IC E F A R R A R TH A D D E U SzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUT At the end of the eighteenth century, a woman who considered herself genteel had few options if she wanted or needed to make money. Workingclass women could procure jobs as servants or shop assistants; the work was ill-paid and constricting, but it was available. Those in the middling classes who desired larger incomes were generally barred from the sort of employment where such incomes were feasible. Of the few professions open to women, acting was the most lucrative, but it was self-promoting and flamboyant — and hence morally suspect. Writing alone offered the promise of decent wages without demanding a lengthy apprenticeship or even a remarkable genius — and a writer’s gentility might survive relative­ ly undamaged. Perhaps the rush of women into print during the last half of the century can be traced to such considerations. Whatever the rea­ sons, as Judith P. Stanton has shown, the number of published women writers increased dramatically —by about fifty percent per decade —in the second half of the century, with fiction and poetry the favored genres.1 Money became the subject as well as the object of many of these women, who often created what Edward Copeland has called “fictions of employ­ ment.” Writers for the Minerva Press, such as Agnes Maria Bennett, whose father was a grocer, depicted employment as a practical and necessary means of support, whereas the more genteel authors viewed earned money with a certain unmistakable distaste.2 In Frances Burney’s Wanderer (1814), for instance, Juliet Granville suffers a complicated mixture of satis­ faction and distress when she is first paid for her needlework: 191 192 / f e r g u s /t h a d d e u s There is a something indefinable, which stands between spirit and delicacy, that makes the first reception of money in detail, by those not brought up to gain it, embarrassing and painful. Burney’s fictional character never quite resolves her relationship to her earnings, but Burney herself eventually learned how to negotiate with her publisher. And Burney was not unique. Archival records show that many of the other women who chose to enter the profession of authorship at the end of the eighteenth century were also able to deal firmly and suc­ cessfully with their publishers. Because partial publishing records have survived, we have been able to study in detail portions of the careers of two women writers at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth: Mary Dar­ by Robinson (1758-1800) and Amelia Alderson Opie (1769-1853). Robin­ son published five works with Hookham and Carpenter, who were essentially fashionable booksellers producing as a sideline a few titles each year.4 The Hookham records, previously unknown to scholars, provide a rare view of transactions between authors and small publishers in the 1790s. Because Thomas Hookham and James Carpenter engaged in a lawsuit after the dissolution of their partnership in 1798, the records sur­ vive among the Chancery Masters’ Lists in the Public Record Office (C104/75/1-3). They consist of two large ledger books labelled F and G and one small “Petty Ledger” labelled F. All three ledgers document credit purchases between 1791 and 1798 by individual customers, usually other booksellers or members of the aristocracy and gentry residing in London. Some pages of ledgers F and G also include information about the print­ ing, publishing, and sale of various Hookham publications. Hookham’s accounts with Robinson are especially well documented and revealing.5 In mid-career Robinson switched from Hookham to the house of Long­ man, a large company which sold only to the trade, and the move to the larger house entailed a more profitable relationship between author and publisher, as the archives indicate. Opie’s thirty-year association with Long­ man was also profitable, but subject to stresses, as reflected in her pub­ lisher’s letters to her.6 As writers, both women developed middling to strong contemporary reputations in a variety of genres, and...