Authorship

Abstract

Abstract Samuel Johnson’s works and correspondence contain of wealth of remarks on the “adventures” of books in the eighteenth-century marketplace of print. Johnson has long been seen as a central figure in the history of professional authorship. As the author of the Lives of the Poets, Johnson was clearly interested in the life of writing. But Johnson’s ideas about authorship and letters were thoroughly conditioned by his keen awareness of practical questions of book production and publishing. Indeed, taken together, Johnson’s observations on a broad range of books—his own and others’—provide a compact but surprisingly comprehensive introduction to the landscape of the eighteenth-century book trades and the world of eighteenth-century publishing. Reading Johnson’s works and correspondence in the lights of bibliography (the study of books as material objects) and of book history (the study of books as social and cultural phenomena) suggests the extent to which he saw authorship not as a solitary intellectual or artistic endeavor, but as one inextricably—and properly—bound up with the commercial world of publishing.