SOURCE: Myers, Robin. “Writing for Booksellers in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Case Study.” In Author/Publisher Relations During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris, pp. 119-55. Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1983.

In the following essay, portions of which previously appeared in the British Library Journal, Myers describes the grim life of an early nineteenth-century journalist and literary hack, Joseph Timothy Haydn, who wrote for forty years and barely earned enough to support himself and his family.

To become an author by profession is to have no other means of subsistence than such as are extracted from the quill; and no-one believes these to be so precarious as they really are, until disappointed, distressed and thrown out of every pursuit which can maintain independence, the noblest mind is cast into the lot of a doomed labourer. Literature abounds with instances of ‘Authors by...