All we know is that by 1811, when the letters take up again, she had made a great stride forward. Sense and Sensibility was in the printer’s hands and Pride and Prejudice was in the full swing of revision. The writer’s block that had kept her frozen through the wandering years was dissolved. Presumably the moral crisis was over. She was thirty-five.
10
It was April 1811, and Jane Austen was staying with Henry and Eliza, who had moved to a house in Sloane Street and were still enjoying “riches and honours”. Worldly Eliza was obviously an admirable hostess. Where Edward, in Kent, tended to take it for granted that his sisters came to merge themselves (and help) in the family life of Godmersham, Eliza treated them as visitors, to be entertained. But then, Eliza had no children now that Hastings[9] was dead, and Edward had eleven. Anyway, Jane was enjoying herself. She was in touch with the Cooke cousins and had visited the Liverpool Museum and the British Gallery with Mary Cooke, “though my preference for men and women, always inclines me to attend more to the company than the sight”. William Bullock’s Liverpool Museum, now moved from Liverpool to Number 22, Piccadilly, was a curious gallimaufry of natural history, curios and antiquities, while the British Gallery was in fact the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts, whose winter exhibitions of contemporary painting were becoming increasingly popular.
As always on London visits, Jane had also gone shopping for muslin and trimmings, bonnets and china. She needed straw hats and pelisses with buttons that “seems expensive — are expensive, I might have said”. Eliza was arranging a busy social life and Jane was finding “all these little parties very pleasant”. There was to be a big party, too, with more than eighty invitations, and professional musicians: “Fanny will listen to this.” It is always interesting, when reading Jane Austen’s letters, to remember that some portion of each one, at least, was intended to be read aloud to whichever members of the family Cassandra might be with.
There was news of the sailor brothers. Frank had been “superseded in the Caledonia” and Charles might be in England at last (after nearly seven years) in the course of a month. Their old patron Lord Gambier was giving up his command to Sir Edward Pellew and “some captain of his succeeds Frank”, who had been Gambier’s flag-captain in the Caledonia. It is a reminder of how careers in the Navy then depended on patronage. Admiral Gambier, who had got Frank his early promotion, had gone back to sea, been ennobled after the Copenhagen expedition and court-martialled after a fiasco in the Basque Roads in April, 1809. It had been an unlucky business. Gambier, a confirmed Methodist, had disapproved of the flotilla of fireships with which his subordinate, the flamboyant Lord Cochrane, proposed to destroy the French fleet. His support had been inadequate, the attempt a failure and Cochrane furious. Called a “canting and hypocritical Methodist” by his subordinate, Gambier insisted on a court martial, which was packed in his favour and gave him an honourable acquittal. He returned to his Channel Command until 1811, when he was finally superseded and, inevitably, Frank went with him. As we have no letters for the period of Gambier’s court martial, we do not know what the Austens thought about it, though we can guess. Gambier was known for captaining a “praying ship” and Frank as “the officer who knelt in church”.
Frank, in fact, had not been present at the Basque Roads affair, having sailed for China in H.M.S. St. Albans the month it happened. It was merely bad luck that he happened to be Gambier’s flag-captain when he was superseded, and Henry, characteristically, was sure he would soon get another ship. Jane was less confident. “What will he do? And where will he live?” Life, for the self-supporting members of the Austen family was always precarious, but Frank was good at his job. That same July he took command of H.M.S. Elephant and served in her until 1814. He was to end his life as Sir Francis Austen, K.C.B., and Admiral of the Fleet.
His sister in Sloane Street had suffered a disappointment in “a very unlucky change of the play for this very night — Hamlet instead of King John”. It seems an odd source of disappointment until one remembers that King John would have had the famous Mrs. Siddons as Constance. “I should particularly have liked seeing her in Constance, and could swear at her with little effort for disappointing me.” As a result of one of Henry’s muddles, Jane also missed Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth the following week.
But at this time Jane Austen had a talisman against all disappointment. Sense and Sensibility had been accepted for publication, and she was correcting proofs. “No indeed, I am never too busy to think of Sense and Sensibility,” she wrote to Cassandra. “I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child; and I am much obliged to you for your enquiries. I have had two sheets to correct, but the last only brings us to Willoughby’s first appearance. Mrs. Knight regrets in the most flattering manner that she must wait till May, but I have scarcely a hope of its being out in June.” In fact, Sense and Sensibility was not advertised until October. Jane Austen had a great deal to learn about the facts of publishing.
Unfortunately, no record exists of why Sense and Sensibility was chosen for publication, or of how it came to be accepted. But it was published by Thomas Egerton of the Military Library, Whitehall, which at once suggests a connection with Henry, the ex-officer. Henry had indeed acted for his sister this time, as their father had in the earlier approach to Crosby. A later letter of Jane Austen’s indicates that Henry actually put up (or at least guaranteed) the money for the printing of Sense and Sensibility. Writing of the second edition in November 1813, she says, “I suppose in the meantime I shall owe dear Henry a great deal of money for printing &c .” Egerton had not been prepared to risk publishing at his own expense, and the book appeared as printed “For the Author” by C. Rowarth, and published by T. Egerton. It is true that an ingenious author might contrive to postpone paying for publication until the first profits were in, but it does not sound as if Jane and Henry managed this. According to family tradition, Jane was so uncertain of success that she set aside a contingency fund from her small resources, in case of failure. Considering that in her day it cost between one and two hundred pounds to produce an average edition of a two or three volume book, it is hard to imagine how she could have managed without Henry’s help.
Publication at the author’s expense was perfectly respectable in those days, with none of the modern stigma of “vanity publication”. It had been used by Burns for his first volume of poems, and was to be used, later, by Browning for his. As late as 1890, an Authors’ Society pamphlet recommended it for fiction or poetry.[10] It must be remembered that at this time publishing was still in a state of flux, with large and prosperous firms like Constable, Longman and Murray gradually developing out of the combined publisher-booksellers of the eighteenth century. John Murray the second, for instance, still referred to himself as a “publishing bookseller” when writing to Walter Scott, though the poet Campbell described him as “the only gentleman, except Constable, in the trade”.
Modern author-publisher relations were in the future, and it is worth noting that the Oxford English Dictionary’s quotation for the use of the word “royalty” to describe “a payment made to an author, editor, or composer for each copy of a book ...” is dated 1880. In the early nineteenth century, various methods of publication were open to an aspiring author. He could still, as in the eighteenth century, publish by subscription, which had the advantage that he retained his copyright. Dr. Johnson and Pope, amongst many others, had solicited subscriptions for some of their work, though Dr. Johnson’s experience with his Shakespeare demonstrated the hazards of this method. Having issued his proposals and received his subscriptions in 1756, he had to admit, nine years later, that he had “lost all the names and spent all the money” before it was finished. Wealthy authors might wait for their subscriptions until the book was actually printed; poor ones had to ask for some or all of the money in advance to cover their printing costs. It is not, perhaps, surprising that the method was falling into disrepute by the end of the century. But Fanny Burney
, who sold the copyright of her first book, Evelina, for a total of thirty pounds, and got two hundred and fifty for her second, Cecilia, turned to subscription for her third, Camilla, and made three thousand. Jane Austen subscribed to Camilla, but subscription would not have suited her. It had to be done either by personal connection (and “puffing”) or by newspaper. advertising. And Jane Austen lived in the country, did not have a particularly wide or influential circle of acquaintance, and wished to remain anonymous.
Two other methods of publishing that preserved the author’s control had been tried in the eighteenth century. In 1765, the Reverend John Trusler had initiated a “Literary Society” with the aim of printing direct, without recourse to a publisher, and thus achieving lower prices and larger circulations while retaining the author’s copyright, but this cooperative venture seems to have had only a brief and qualified success. A limited start had also been made on publication in “Numbers”, the serial method that was to make fortunes for Dickens and his mid-nineteenth-century contemporaries. In the late eighteenth century, William Dodd’s Commentary on the Bible came out weekly in sixpenny parts, but it was, understandably, not in the same popular class as Nicholas Nickleby.
Individualists like Blake might engrave their own works, but the ordinary author needed a publisher to deal with printing, circulation and advertising. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the wholesale book trade was developing, and the word “subscribing” which had meant a relationship between author and public had come to mean one between publisher and bookseller. But relations between author and publisher were still in a state of change.
With publication by subscription on the wane, there were three chief ways in which a publisher might agree to produce a book. If he was confident of its success, he preferred to buy the copyright outright. If he was not quite so confident, he might offer to pay all expenses and then share any final profit with the author, whose share seems to have varied from a third or half to as much as two thirds. Gibbon did well with two thirds of the profits for the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This method, of course, would develop into the modern royalty system. A variant on it was Murray’s publication of Byron’s Childe Harold. He began by offering to print it at his own expense, and share the profits equally with Byron, leaving the question of the copyright to depend on the poem’s success. He ended by paying six hundred pounds for the copyright, and clearing a handsome profit. But Murray was an unusual publisher.
Finally, a publisher who was dubious about a book’s success might offer to publish on commission; that is to let the author pay the expenses and take the receipts, subject to a commission paid to the publisher for his handling of the book. Here, too, the author kept his copyright. It is worth remembering that under an Act of 1709, copyright only lasted for fourteen years from publication, with a further fourteen years if the author was alive at the end of the first. An Act of 1814 amended this to give the author twenty-eight years, or the term of his life, whichever was the longer.
There were obvious hazards for the author in all these methods of publication. Jane Austen sold Susan outright to Crosby for ten pounds, only to have it languish unpublished for thirteen years. The moral of this may have been that Crosby had not paid enough. Sense and Sensibility was published on commission, covered its expenses and made her a hundred and forty pounds for its first edition. This presumably encouraged Egerton to make an outright offer of a hundred and ten for the copyright of Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen, who had asked for the very reasonable sum of a hundred and fifty, accepted this lower offer, largely, judging by her letter to Cassandra, to save Henry trouble. In fact, the hundred and ten did compare favourably with the thirty pounds Fanny Burney got for Evelina or the sixty that Goldsmith got for The Vicar of Wakefield. And there was another side to this outright sale. Publishers preferred it, and it gave them a much greater stake in a book’s success.
James Lackington, the bookseller, in his Memoirs, urged authors to sell their copyright to a reliable publisher as the best way of getting fair treatment. The argument was simple. If a publisher had paid a good price for the copyright in the first place, he might not clear his expenses and begin to make a profit until the second, third or even fourth edition. It was therefore very much in his interest to do his best in the way of advertising and publicity generally. And these played a considerable part in early-nineteenth-century publishing. Out of a total expense of between one and two hundred pounds, twenty to twenty-five often went on advertising. Often, but not always. Histories of publishing houses of the period have their share of modern-sounding letters from authors complaining about lack of advertising. Lemprière, of the Classical Dictionary, complained to Cadell (the publisher who refused First Impressions unread) that he had not sufficiently advertised his translation of Herodotus, which, significantly, had been published by subscription. On the other hand, Murray, publishing Childe Harold at his own expense, actually irritated his noble author by his ingenious pre-publication pushing. Perhaps as a result, the small first edition of five hundred copies sold out in three days, and was followed by second and third editions totalling three thousand copies. Byron was mollified.
It is interesting that of all Jane Austen’s books, only Pride and Prejudice, which Egerton bought outright, went into a third edition. He had more at stake, and may have made more effort. But his was not one of the large, prosperous publishing houses like Murray or Constable and it is possible that he could not afford to be generous, or, more important, to advertise and “puff” lavishly. William Lane, who ran the notorious Minerva Press, pandering to the contemporary taste for Gothic and sentimental trash, would resort to the gossip columns to promote his productions. Egerton, on the other hand, seems to have been content with the minimal formal advertising of Jane Austen’s books, but he may have pushed Pride and Prejudice in other ways. At all events it went into a second edition in 1813 and a third in 1817. Egerton probably did not mention this to Jane Austen, who might reasonably have asked for more money on the publication of the second edition, though I doubt if she would have done so. But what she would most certainly have done was correct the badly set dialogue that she mentioned when writing to Cassandra on February 4th, 1813. “The greatest blunder in the printing that I have met with is in page 220, V. 3, where two speeches are made into one.”[11] On the other hand, if Jane Austen learned of the second edition after the event, it might well have helped to account for her move to Murray.
Egerton must have made a pleasant profit on Pride and Prejudice, but he was still dubious about Mansfield Park, which was once more published on commission, at Jane Austen’s expense. By this time she had earned and invested two hundred and fifty pounds, so that she had her contingency fund against disaster. We do not know exactly what she earned with Mansfield Park, but when Murray offered four hundred and fifty pounds for the combined copyrights of Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Emma, Henry told him that this was in fact less than the total his sister had made on Mansfield Park and the second edition of Sense and Sensibility. I think possibly Henry, who was ill at the time, may have been mistaken (or, characteristically, have exaggerated) here, for the note of her literary earnings that Jane Austen made in the last year of her life indicates a figure of three hundred and fifty pounds for the earnings to date on Mansfield Park and the second edition of Sense and Sensibility.
Mansfield Park was so badly printed, and in so small an edition, that it is not surprising that Jane Austen should have considered a change of publisher. Egerton also apparently hesitated over a second edition, and this may have been the last straw. The next thing we know of is John Murray’s offer of four hundred and fifty pounds for the combined copyrights of the three books in Jane Austen’s control. “It will end in my publishing for myself I daresay,” said Jane Austen.
It did. She kept the copyrights of Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Emma, and the ledgers of John Murray show that Emma and the second edition of Mansfield Park were published at her e
xpense, with ten per cent commission to the publisher. The results might be said to justify John Murray’s caution. The figures for 1816 show that Emma made a profit of £221 6s. 4d. (that is after deduction of the expenses of publication and the publisher’s commission), but at about the same time the second edition of Mansfield Park made a loss of £182 8s. 3d. Logically enough, the loss on the second book was set against the profit on the first, and in her summary of her earnings Jane Austen refers to £38 18s. for the first profits of Emma. One must assume that John Murray kept the odd penny.
Jane Austen’s own figures show that she earned less than seven hundred pounds in her lifetime and there is no pretending that this does not compare miserably with the profits other people were making. Constable offered Walter Scott a thousand pounds for Marmion before he had seen it, and Longman offered Moore three thousand pounds for Lalla Rookh before the poet had written a line. This was poetry, it is true, and one must remember that the trash turned out by the Minerva Press, and similar panderers to the new reading class, had brought the novel into disrepute, but just the same Maria Edgeworth was earning between fifteen hundred and two thousand pounds a novel.
Jane Austen was right, later in her life, when she said that people were more apt to borrow and praise than to buy her novels. In her lifetime, she never touched the mass market, not even the all-important one of the libraries. This may have been largely her own fault, and on two counts. First, she was a great innovator. People nourished on the Gothics of Mrs. Radcliffe and her like would make a much easier transition to Walter Scott’s vast romances than to Jane Austen’s “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory”. But equally important was her dislike of publicity. She would not be a “wild beast”. If she was ever invited to the literary gatherings at John Murray’s house in Albemarle Street, where Scott met Byron, she did not go. She was neither a lame peer nor a dramatic bankrupt. She was merely a quiet spinster who wrote supremely well. Perhaps if she had lived longer, and gone on writing, her sales would have built up steadily, as the word passed from cultivated person to person. As it is, a letter from Cassandra to John Murray of 1819 indicates that as Jane’s literary executrix, she had received £479 1s. 2d. for Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which had been published posthumously in December, 1817. But the figures from Murray’s ledger are not altogether encouraging. The posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in fact cleared £495 17s. 7d. by 1820, while Emma netted a total of £372 12s. 11d., and even the second edition of Mansfield Park finally cleared £118 18s. 4d., but by 1821 Murray must have felt that the books had had their day. The last figures for Emma and Mansfield Park are for “balance of copies sold at sale”. The books had been remaindered.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 15