NOTES

I would like to thank James Woolley for his advice and assistance in the preparation of this essay. Stuart Gillespie, Paul Hammond, David Hopkins, Rob Hume, Paul Hunter and Pat Rogers were also kind enough to respond to my queries.

1. It should be noted that Professor Barnard has acknowledged that he has now revised his “unwise statement, made in 1963, that the Virgil was ‘through and through a commercial venture’” (“Patrons” 174).
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2. Until the value of the guinea was fixed at 21 shillings by royal proclamation in December 1717, its value fluctuated. At the accession of George I, it was worth about 21 shillings and sixpence.
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3. It should be borne in mind, however, that if the second subscribers are taken into account, Dryden’s Virgil attracted 349 subscribers, two of whom, as Barnard points out, were both first and second subscribers (“Patrons” 180n22).
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4. A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman. Some whereof never before printed, sig. A3r.
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5. Charles Montagu’s well-received Epistle to Dorset, “one of the most widely-praised Whig poems” of the 1690s, according to Abigail Williams, cost sixpence (173).
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6. A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born English-man[.] The Second Edition Corrected and Enlarg’d by himself, sig. A3v.
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7. All the quotations in this paragraph are taken from the undated folio half-sheet, The Case of the Booksellers Right to their Copies, or Sole Power of Printing their Respective Books, represented to Parliament, which was almost certainly published to inform the parliamentary debate on copyright which led to the Copyright Act of 1709. It is interesting that the author should maintain that “the greatest Charge in Printing is setting the Letters together,” as opposed to the cost of paper, which was extremely expensive, unless, that is, he was speaking about the cost after the paper had been purchased.
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8. The invitation is to be found in the June 1693 issue of The Gentleman’s Journal: or the monthly Miscellany. In a Letter to a Gentleman in the Country. Consisting of News, History, Philosophy, Poetry, Musick, Translations, &c., vol. 3, 195.
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9. Johnson makes the remark in the Adventurer no. 115 (December 11, 1753): “The present age, if we consider chiefly the state of our own country, may be stiled with great propriety THE AGE OF AUTHORS; for, perhaps, there never was a time, in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment, were posting with ardour so general to the press.”
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10. The most recent contribution to the debate is Dustin Griffin’s Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century (2014), esp. Chapter 11, “The Rise of the Professional Author?,” but Brean Hammond’s Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670-1740 (1997) should also be consulted.
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