Authorship

Abstract

In the final chapter, among other issues relating to fictional genre, I will consider the forms of composition encouraged by publication in weekly newspapers, and the degree of explicit control of content exercised by syndicators and editors. Here the concern is more with writing as property than as production, with authorship considered as an occupation rather than an act. The increasing professionalization of the role of the later Victorian novelist has recently been discussed both in relation to specific authors — notably, Michael Anesko on Henry James or Simon Eliot on Walter Besant — and in more general terms by scholars such as Peter Keating in The Haunted Study (1989) and Norman Feltes in Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (1993). Here the intention is to consider specifically the function of the newspaper market, which has thus far received little emphasis, as a catalyst for change in that process. First, in ‘Making a Living’ I shall outline the way in which two modes of connection with newspapers, regular employment as journalists and the occasional contribution of short or serial stories, help to explain the increase in the number of professional writers suggested by the statistical record. Then, in ‘Agreements and Agents’ we will look at how the practice of syndication, in particular, encouraged an increasing complexity in the contracts drawn up between authors and publishers, and increasing intervention by new types of ‘middlemen’.