“I Shall be but a Shrimp of an Author”: Gray, the Marketplace, and the Masculine Poet

Abstract

In 1767, an anonymous pamphlet appeared entitled The Sale of Authors, a Dialogue, in Imitation of Lucian’s Sale of Philosophers. Written by naval official Archibald Campbell, this pamphlet features Apollo and Mercury conducting an auction among booksellers for the premier writers of the day, including James Macpherson, John Wilkes, Charles Churchill, and Thomas Gray. With its magnified sense of poets’ powerlessness in the commercialized literary culture of midcentury England, Campbell’s text seems a typical attack on the vigorously expanding book trade. Yet while satirizing the transformation of writers into commodities, and emphasizing the diminished social stature that accompanies this change, Campbell manages to capture with some accuracy the defining features of Gray’s literary career. Most obviously, he calls attention to the poet’s departure from current norms of masculine behavior:

Apollo. I see this good company are not a little surprised, that so eminent a poet is wrapt up in a watchman’s coat. Pray, Mercury, inform them how it happened….

Mercury. You must know, having made many unsuccessful attempts to catch this great poet, I was at last obliged to have recourse to stratagem. Though he has a great deal of poetical fire, nobody indeed more, yet is he extremely afraid of culinary fire, and keeps constantly by him a ladder of ropes to guard against all accidents of that sort. Knowing this, I hired some watchmen to raise the alarm of fire below his windows. Immediately the windows were seen to open, and the Poet descending in his shirt by his ladder. Thus we caught him at last, and one of the watchmen, to prevent his nerves from being totally benumbed by frigorific torpor, lent him his great coat. Here you have him, watchman’s coat, ladder of ropes, silver tea tongs and all.¹

To be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing.

Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (1975)