SOURCE: Erickson, Lee. “Traffic in the Heart: English Literature in the Publishing Market.” In The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850, pp. 170-90. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Erickson discusses the pressures of the marketplace on nineteenth-century authors, many of whom were forced to abandon their literary standards to meet the demands of their audiences.

Just think what a horrible condition of life it is that any man of common vulgar wit, who knows English grammar, can get, for a couple of sheets of chatter in a magazine, two-thirds of what Milton got altogether for Paradise Lost!

—John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera

English publishing in the early nineteenth century expanded at an even greater rate than it had in the eighteenth century and followed the rise in the general standard of living and the growth of the economy. As...