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Living as an Author in the Romantic Period seeks to explode the notion that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries oversaw a transformation of the literary economy into one in which professional authors could make a living exclusively off their writing. The author’s detailed work with neglected archives, especially publishers’ ledgers and the Royal Literary Fund papers, fuels several original claims about authorship in the romantic period. This is a book that will matter and possibly even be field-changing.’
— Michael Gamer, British Academy Global Professor (QMUL) and author of
Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry(2017)
‘Matthew Sangster’s new book provides a compelling revision of the standard account of the advent of professional authorship in the early nineteenth century. Using remarkable archive material from publishers combined with other institutional records folded into engrossing case histories of individual writers,