"The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship”: A Late Eighteenth-Century Satire of Grub Street

Ingo Berensmeyer,Alise Jameson,Gero Guttzeit

doi:10.21825/aj.v4i1.1103

Abstract

Originally printed in the first issue of The British Mercury in 1787, “The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship” is a piece of satirical short fiction that has so far received only little attention in discussions of eighteenth-century print culture and practices of authorship. Probably written by the Scottish radical John Oswald (c. 1760-1793), “The Brain-Sucker” is told in the form of a letter by a farmer who tells an absent friend about his unfortunate son Dick, whose brain has become infected by poetry. This “disorder” leads Dick to London, where he falls prey to a ruthless publisher, known as “the Brain-sucker”, who keeps him like a slave in a Grub Street garret. The farmer then travels to London to save his son from the clutches of the Brain-Sucker. We present the text, for the first time, in a critical edition, collated from the three surviving copies, with textual and explanatory notes. In the accompanying essay, we discuss the text’s context of origin in late eighteenth-century Grub Street and the cultural implications of its satirical presentation of authorship.

Highlights

Printed in the first issue of The British Mercury in 1787, “The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship” is a piece of satirical short fiction that has so far received only little attention in discussions of eighteenth-century print culture and practices of authorship
Gero Guttzeit is a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Research on Authorship as Performance” at Ghent University
He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the topic “The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric” at the University of Giessen. He has published on rhetoric and literature in the eighteenth century, antebellum American literature, cultural representations of philosophers, and the contemporary detective film

Summary

Introduction

Printed in the first issue of The British Mercury in 1787, “The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship” is a piece of satirical short fiction that has so far received only little attention in discussions of eighteenth-century print culture and practices of authorship. “The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship” was originally printed anonymously on May 12, 1787, in the first issue of The British Mercury, a short-lived magazine that combined radical political essays with satire, miscellaneous literary oddments, and caricatures by Gillray and Rowlandson.

Results

Conclusion