economics of culture in london

The Economics of Culture in London, 1660–1740Author(s): Robert D. HumeReviewed work(s):Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 4 (December 2006), pp. 487-533Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2006.69.4.487 .Accessed: 14/06/2012 02:30

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huntington library quarterly | vol. 69, no. 4 � 487Pp. 487–533. ©2006 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce article content, consult the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions webesite, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: HLQ.2006.69.4.487.

� culture is a commodity produced for gain (whether pecuniary orotherwise) and offered for sale to the public, with or without success. This view of thepoems, plays, novels, music, and painting studied by scholars of the long eighteenthcentury has been widely acknowledged in the last fifty years, but its implications haverarely been pursued.1 My interests are unabashedly quantitative. The “New EconomicCriticism” and the “Discourses of Economics” now becoming popular have many use-ful things to tell us, but they seem singularly unconcerned with particular sums ofmoney involved in the production or purchase of books, performances, or paintings.There is a fundamental difference between such “imaginative economics” or “symboliceconomies” and the gritty realities of actual figures.2 As an example of what is possible

This article was written during a sabbatical year spent as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute ofHistorical Research, University of London. I am grateful to the Institute and its staff for their hospital-ity and good offices. An oral version of this essay was delivered as a plenary lecture at the Leviathan to Licensing Act Conference, Loughborough University, 16 September 2004. Other versions were given as lectures at the University of Aberdeen on 27 April 2005 and at the EC/ASECS meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, on 29 October 2005. For advice, assistance, and helpful criticism I am indebtedto Eve Tavor Bannet, Donald Burrows, Paul D. Cannan, David Coke, J. A. Downie, Don-John Dugas,Bertrand Goldgar, Clement Hawes, Benjamin Hebbert, Henry Horwitz, Kathryn Hume, DavidHunter, Paulina Kewes, Matthew J. Kinservik, Thomas Lockwood, Harold Love, Ashley Marshall, Judith Milhous, Ronald Paulson, Hermann Real, and Gill Spraggs. Special thanks to Elaine Hobby,who was the begetter of this enterprise, if not quite its midwife.

1. The classic overview remains J. H. Plumb’s “The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England,” a lecture given at the University of Reading in 1973 and revised for republication inNeil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commer-cialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982), 265–85. Among numerous backgroundstudies of use are Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760(1988; 2d ed. London, 1996); Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in theProvincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989); and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family For-tunes (1987; rev. ed. London, 2002)—the last concerning “Men and Women of the English MiddleClass, 1780–1850.”

2. See, for example, Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, eds., The New Economic Criticism:Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (London, 1999); and Linda Woodbridge, ed.,

The Economics of Culture in London,1660–1740

Robert D. Hume

in a slightly later period, I would point to William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in theRomantic Period, a genuinely revolutionary quantitative investigation of how the eco-nomics of publishing and the regulation of copyright and the book trade affected pub-lic dissemination of and access to not only literature but also political, social, andphilosophical ideas.3

For the 1660–1740 period information is in scantier supply than one couldwish. Systematic accumulation of the relevant economic data has barely begun, andanalysis of what has been collected remains rudimentary at best. We are probablytwenty or thirty years away from anything approaching a thorough and systematiccomprehension of the impact of economics upon English culture in this period. I offerthe present sketch of an overview in the hope that it will stimulate colleagues to collectand publish additional evidence and to employ that evidence in ways that will help us understand the possibilities open to the creators and vendors of culture in all itsmanifestations.

I shall address four principal questions. (1) Who were the consumers of eliteculture, and what could and would they pay? (2) What could be earned by writers, ac-tors, singers, musicians, painters? (3) Who actually profited from the sale of culture?(4) How did patronage affect the production of culture? Good answers can be offeredfor all four. A great deal of evidence exists, and though the market for culture changesenormously over the eighty years at issue, the changes are, I shall argue, relativelyclear and comprehensible. The costs of production, the price of purchase, and theprofits are essentially knowable. So are the classes of potential purchasers and the in-comes of the producers. The importance of patronage has been both misunderstoodand underestimated.

Three blunt explanations about the definitions, assumptions, and modusoperandi on which I am proceeding seem called for here at the outset. First, I shouldsay that I am using “culture” in a fairly narrow sense rather than a broad anthropologi-cal one. I am concerned with the modern West, and with the books, theater, music, andpainting produced for and consumed by what we would now think of as the middleand upper classes. Without quibbling over the meaning of “elite,” one might legiti-mately apply that adjective to the kind of culture I am investigating here. I am not talk-ing about bear-baiting, cock-fighting, or boxing. Darts and morris dancing fall outsidemy purview. So do one-penny ballads sold by peddlers. Play booths and freak shows atfairs as described by Ned Ward are likewise beyond my bounds. I do not for an instantdeny that a wide spectrum of customers went to Bartholomew Fair or contrariwise thatapprentices sometimes bought expensive places in the London theaters. I am deliber-ately focusing on those parts of culture patronized by the nobility, the gentry, and whatwe would now call the middle classes. Relatively little attention is devoted to music

� 488 robert d. hume

Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism (New York, 2003). For the con-cepts behind such work, see, for example, Kurt Heinzelman, The Economics of the Imagination(Amherst, Mass., 1980) and Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990).

3. Published by Cambridge University Press in 2004.

(other than opera) because the relevant information for this period is scanty and diffi-cult to interpret. I have incorporated some basic figures for concerts and the purchaseof instruments in my conclusion.4

Second, within the definition of culture adopted here, the scope of this investi-gation is broad and ambitious. Some readers of my draft have been disconcerted by mytreatment of both producers of culture and consumers of culture in the same piece. Thecombination is deliberate. Indeed, I believe that it is conceptually vital to any suchstudy. Culture cannot be consumed unless it is produced, but usually it will not be pro-duced unless it is consumed. To understand what was on offer and what could begained by it, we have to know what potential demand existed and what sort of pricespotential buyers could pay. The symbiosis between production and consumption can-not be ignored. Other readers have been uncomfortable about my treating perform-ance and print culture together. Yet a different group has expressed unhappiness aboutmy inclusion of painting and opera, which seem “different” from theater and books,and so elite as to fall entirely beyond the means of bourgeois consumers. I would arguethat we need such comparisons, including some that involve extraordinarily expensiveforms of culture. We learn something about the cost of books (for example) when wecompare their cost with theater, concerts, opera, and the purchase of paintings. Thedistinction between what is readily affordable for bourgeois consumers and what ispunitively expensive for them (or totally out of their reach) is important. This investi-gation cannot in its nature be exhaustive in any realm, but it can and should invitecomparisons.

Third, severe evidentiary problems must be admitted. Specific, verifiable figuresare lacking in almost every realm in which we need facts. We have some informationabout earnings, but little knowledge about how consumers actually spent their money.No daily records of theater receipts survive until 1714, and none for Drury Lane until1740. Concerts were becoming an important part of cultural life in London by the1690s, but I have little to say about them because financial evidence is sparse in the pe-riod at issue. We can only guess at prices for a large number of the books that were pub-lished, and we rarely know what their authors were paid. A great deal may ultimatelybe gleaned from domestic accounts surviving in manuscript (both about cost of livinggenerally and cultural purchases in particular), but this will require extended labor bymany scholars. Anecdotal evidence exists in only modest profusion, and it must be re-garded with skepticism. For example, where we can test newspaper reports of singers’salaries against actual contracts, account books, or court testimony, the published fig-ures turn out to be massively inflated in a large proportion of cases.5 When we are toldthat Dryden found a banknote for ₤100 under his dinner plate, the gift of the Earl ofDorset, we need to remember that ₤100 was a sum on which a bourgeois family could

the economics of culture in london, 1660–1740 � 489

4. The second half of the century is considerably better documented. For a useful overview, seeDeborah Rohr, The Careers of British Musicians, 1750–1850: A Profession of Artisans (Cambridge,2001).

5. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Opera Salaries in Eighteenth-Century London,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993): 26–83.

live for a whole year (an anecdote discussed below). We have no way to determinewhether this is a fantastically generous gift from a man who could afford such a gestureor a tall tale. To ignore such problems with evidence, or to pretend that we have all theevidence we could want, would be irresponsible. I believe, however, that the particu-lars collected and analyzed here are sufficient to substantiate a number of fairly strongconclusions.

This investigation focuses on elite as opposed to plebian forms of culture, but forthe most part we need to pay particular attention to the ordinary. What the Duke ofBuckingham could afford to spend or what Sir Peter Lely earned from painting is perti-nent, but not really the point. We would like to know what the whole spectrum of po-tential purchasers had to spend and what they bought. Likewise, we want to know notonly what sums were lavished on castrato opera stars but also what kind of living hack-writers and second violinists could earn. Shortage of evidence makes this difficult. Evenwithin the realms of the elite, our sources are skewed. We know quite a lot aboutAlexander Pope’s finances, but very little of Thomas Durfey’s or Eliza Haywood’s. How-ever interesting the figures preserved for Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Swift, or Fielding, theyare probably little more representative than those for Norman Mailer, Stephen King, orJ. K. Rowling in a later age. We should certainly not ignore Pepys’s extensive documen-tation of his spending—but must not forget that he rapidly became very rich. Our cen-tral concern needs to be with the normal and mundane, not the extraordinary.

� The Value of MoneyAny attempt to investigate the economics of the past inevitably falls foul of a crucialand essentially insoluble problem: we need to know what money was worth at any par-ticular date. One wants both to know the purchasing power of a pound at whateverdate one is writing about and to understand it in terms of present value. Unfortunately,the standard approach to such calculations leads to deceptive results, for reasons I shalltry briefly to explain.

The difficulty, in essence, is that various commodities, products, and serviceschange in cost at very different rates over time.6 Even if we knew exact prices for allsorts of things at all dates (which we do not), any single item may yield a wildly mis-leading “multiplier” for comparison to present-day currency when this figure is ap-plied to any other item. In the period at issue, food was very pricey while housing wascheap. Consequently, one cannot use the same multiplier for both. To the extent thatfigures survive, one can create an index of sorts, but such indexes tend to be misleading(as official government “cost of living” increases are today). Let me illustrate. The Eco-nomic History website price comparator (eh.net—which uses figures from the work ofthe highly respected John J. McCusker) tells us that in 1623 (the date of the First Folio),its ₤1 price was worth ₤107 in terms of buying power in 2002. By McCusker’s conver-sion factors, in 2002 terms, ₤1 had buying power of ₤92 in 1660; ₤108 in 1680; ₤111 in1700; ₤113 in 1720; and ₤98 in 1740. Over the long term, seventeenth- and early-


6. Equivalency in product is also problematic. As I write in 2005 one may get “lunch” in Londonfor ₤3 at McDonald’s or for ₤100 at Gordon Ramsay (the latter with only modest beverages).

eighteenth-century prices were relatively stable, and one might imagine that multiply-ing by one hundred would yield a general approximation of prices circa 2000. Thiswould, however, be a very reckless operating assumption. Working (somewhat tonguein cheek) from the weekly wages of unskilled laborers circa 1620, William Ingramcompares them with the earnings of minimum wage workers circa 1990 and estab-lishes a multiplier in the vicinity of one thousand—a tenfold difference.7 Even if we ac-cept Ingram’s more cautious suggestion that we should use a multiplier between fiveand eight hundred, that puts us in a different financial universe from a “modern equiv-alent” only one hundred times an early-seventeenth-century figure.

One must, of course, allow for differences in taxation. Income tax as we know itdid not exist in the period at issue, so an income of, say, ₤200 per annum was largelyspendable, and neither was there vat, but there were steep import duties and a varietyof wealth taxes. Estimates of annual incomes for various professions do not include ad-ditional income: the clergymen whose livings yielded less than ₤10—and there werethousands of them—must have supplemented their church incomes with teaching,clerical work, farming (consider Goldsmith’s Dr. Primrose), and other occupations.But adjust as we may, we will find that no single multiplier makes sense.

Consider theatrical salaries. Bottom of scale for an actor in about 1700 was ₤30per annum. One could live on this sum, even in London: Samuel Johnson estimated hisown basic living expenses at precisely that figure for his early years there.8 But by theeh.net multiplier, it would amount to ₤3,337 in 2002, which is not a sum on which tolive, however frugally. How much an eighteenth-century actor might have supple-mented his or her income is not possible to calculate. Top of scale for the most distin-guished living actors was ₤150 per annum (intended to be paid in full without a benefit),or ₤15,000 in modern terms by this multiplier. These sums seem far too low, even if weignore the incomes of film actors and opera stars. At these rates a 1s. gallery seat wouldcome to ₤5, a 4s. box seat to ₤20 (low by half or more). The price of an opera ticket for pitor box settled at 10s. 6d., which by the eh.net multiplier would amount to less than athird of the cost of a comparable ticket at the Royal Opera House circa 2000. Beer waswonderfully cheap in the early eighteenth century at 1d. per pot (whereas porter was 3d.and ale a steep 1s.–1s. 6d.).9 If we multiply by one hundred, the modern cost would beonly 42 pence, which is low by a factor of at least four and more plausibly six. Decentwine from a tavern, however, could cost 5s. a bottle (transport and tax both runninghigh), which would make it ₤25 if multiplied by one hundred and ₤75 if multiplied bythree hundred. The most common price of a small book or pamphlet was 6d., or about₤2.50 if our multiplier is one hundred. This is low by a factor of three. Housing wasrelatively affordable (6d. to half a guinea per week to rent two rooms), which mightimply a multiplier of at least six hundred.10 Fancy clothes tended to be very costly. By


7. William Ingram, The Business of Playing (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 36.8. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934–50),

1:103–6.9. These figures (and that for wine, below) are from César de Saussure, A Foreign View of England

in 1725–1729, trans. Madame van Muyden (1902; reprint ed., London, 1995), 99.10. Saussure, A Foreign View of England, 103.

16 December 1667 Pepys was cheerfully spending ₤6 on fabric for a cloak and ₤8 forthe “outside” of a velvet one.

The point here is obvious but vital: we cannot afford to succumb to the tempta-tion to say that ₤1 in 1700 has an equivalent buying power of any particular sum today,because the buying power varies drastically with what is being bought. In the little surveyjust concluded, we have seen multi pliers from 100 to 600, each arguably valid in itsown terms. We might say loosely that in the realms studied here prices have generallyrisen by two to three hundred times (sometimes more, sometimes less). Whether weregard the present value of say, 5 shillings, as ₤50 or ₤75 (or arguably more or less),most consumers of culture will find the sum significant—even if they can freely spendit. As I write, upper-tier prices in London commercial theaters are mostly ₤35 to ₤45,with cheapest unrestricted view at ₤15 to ₤20. A seventeenth-century family of foursitting in a box would now be spending ₤160, which in addition to a couple of cab ridesand some drinks would come to over ₤200 for the outing. The theaters are oftencrowded: obviously many consumers can and do pay this price. My point is that thecost of the jaunt is essentially similar in 1700 and in 2000; but to understand the cost -liness, we have to know who had the requisite money.11 This brings us to the problemof identifying and analyzing the potential buyers. We will find that for a very high per-centage of the population of London between 1660 and 1740, a sum of, say, 5 shillingswas far from negligible.

� Income Strata and the Purchasers of CultureWho could afford to spend how much on culture? How many people were potentialpurchasers of culture? Even the most systematic culling of surviving account booksand diaries will probably not lead to unassailable conclusions. Detailed statistical in-formation of the sort collected by the nineteenth-century British government neverexisted for earlier centuries. About the best we can now do for the period at issue is toturn to such familiar sources as Gregory King’s Natural and Political Observations (a1696 analysis of the economic situation as of 1688),12 Henri Misson’s Memoirs (con-cerning the reign of William III, translated in 1719), César de Saussure’s A ForeignView of England in 1725–1729 (translated in 1902), Jacob Vanderlint’s Money answersall Things (1734)—and, for comparison with a date beyond the period under consider-ation here, Joseph Massie’s Calculations of the Present Taxes (1761). To rely on figureswhose sources and mode of calculation we do not know and cannot fully check is manifestly dangerous.13 Historians have generally agreed, however, that faute demieux the figures must be used, albeit with some degree of skepticism and caution.


11. See Lee Soltow, “Long-Run Changes in British Income Inequality,” Economic History Review,2d ser., 21 (1968): 17–29.

12. “Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of Eng-land,” in Two Tracts by Gregory King, ed. George E. Barnett (Baltimore, 1936), 31.

13. G. S. Holmes, for example, points out some disquieting features of King’s figures and cate-gories; see “Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England,” Transactions of theRoyal Historical Society, 5th ser., 27 (1977): 41–68.

Cross-checking King and Massie against raw data from the periods in question has ledto the conclusion that their figures are broadly reliable but that significant adjustmentsshould be made both in incomes at the top of the scale and in subdivisions of varioussocial classifications. For the purposes of this essay, I am therefore relying on the revi-sions to King and Massie proposed by Lindert and Williamson.14

An obvious question arises at this point: does inflation invalidate the use ofKing’s (emended) figures for any date other than circa 1688? Lacking alternativesources, historians have employed King for any time from about 1660 to a centurylater. Yet we know that prices fluctuated with drought and war: can we legitimatelyapply King’s figures to 1715 or 1740? Obviously, the fit is less than perfect, but we cancompare them with Massie’s calculations for the later 1750s, and the correlation is sur-prisingly good.15 The percentages assigned to various social classifications alter hereand there, but the “income shares” of various groups change very little. The per capitatotal went up a bit between 1688 and 1759 (about 18 percent according to Lindert andWilliamson’s proposed revisions of our primary sources), but the general economicpicture is not greatly altered.16 The population at this time remained fairly stable, in-creasing only about 8.5 percent over eighty years, to some 5,576,000.17 Inflation wasrelatively mild overall in the period at issue. Agricultural prices rise and fall with aber-rations in weather, and wars sometimes cause abrupt spikes (as around 1697), but suchsources as Horsefield, Beveridge, Deane and Cole, Burnett, and Mitchell suggest over-all stability in price structures (in sharp contrast to the Jacobean period, for exam-ple).18 Theater admission prices remain constant from 1660 to the 1740s; go up 1s. for


14. See Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Revising England’s Social Tables, 1688–1812,”Explorations in Economic History 19 (1982): 385–408, and “Reinterpreting Britain’s Social Tables,1688–1913,” Explorations in Economic History 20 (1983): 94–109. For example, in the earlier articlethey note that “Numerous 17th century documents strongly suggest that King grossly overestimatedcommon laborers and paupers, while undercounting artisans” (p. 387). They revise the total of personsin science and liberal arts down from 16,000 to 12,898 (p. 388). By their calculations, “King’s guesseson average family income are vindicated for lower-ranked occupations but disproved for the upperclasses” (whose incomes were substantially higher than King’s estimates [p. 391]). Testing King againstdata now available to economic historians, they offer a picture in which “the rich have got richer, thepoor are fewer, and the middle groups more populated” (p. 394). They are very blunt in stating thattheir revised figures are an improvement, while admitting that their calculations will be subject to further revision “as data accumulate” (p. 405).

15. King’s figures were not published until 1936, so Massie probably had no access to them.16. See Lindert and Williamson, “Reinterpreting Britain’s Social Tables,” p. 102 (Table 3). One can

derive a larger figure from other sources. The “real wage” index chart supplied by Wrigley and Schofieldsuggests a more than 35 percent increase between King and Massie, and a more than 40 percent increasebetween 1660 and 1740. See E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England,1541–1871 (1981; rev. ed. Cambridge, 1989), xxii.

17. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, 207–9.18. J. Keith Horsefield, British Monetary Experiments, 1650–1710 (London, 1960); Lord Beveridge,

et al., Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1: Price Tables(London, 1965); Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1967); John Burnett, A History of the Cost of Living (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1969); B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988). Current understanding of eighteenth-century economic history has changed rapidly in recent years, as witness the differences between the

box seats (causing some protest); and then remain unchanged until new theaters arebuilt in the 1790s.19 For the purposes of buying culture, ₤1 did not have greatly differ-ent purchasing power in 1740 from what it had in 1660.20 Neither (overall) were manymore people possessed of sufficient means to buy cultural artifacts. However, the pop-ulation of London was growing, and this increased the number of people with readyaccess to theaters and bookshops. To be specific, the population of London increasedfrom 375,000 in 1650 to at least 490,000 in 1700 and to 675,000 by 1750—an 80 percentincrease during a century in which the total population of England went up only about10.5 percent.21 In short, we possess some apparently stable and reliable figures about in-comes and costs. We are left to ask what those figures really mean.

Our problem, reduced to its crux, is simple. If we know that something cost,say, 5 shillings, is that a lot or a little? This depends on who is being asked to pay it,and people allocate their money in radically different ways. People who can easilypay will not necessarily do so; contrariwise, others will splurge or scrimp and save toacquire something.

According to Lindert and Williamson’s emendation of King’s figures, as of 1688only about 71,000 families in all of England had gross annual incomes of ₤100 or more(about 5 percent of some 1,390,000 families).22 We must, of course, remember that in-come derived from landholding could vary drastically from year to year depending onharvests and the ever-fluctuating price of corn. By their revision of King’s estimates,rank/occupation and income were as follows:


original edition of Floud and McCloskey (1981) and its successors; see The Economic History of Britainsince 1700, vol. 1: 1700–1860, rev. ed. (Cambridge, 1994); and Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, eds.,The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1: 1700–1860 (Cambridge, 2004). For an authoritative recent account, see M. J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social Historyof Britain, 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1995).

19. For the benefit of those not familiar with the pre-decimal currency Britain finally abandonedin 1971, I note that 12 pennies (abbreviated “d.”) constituted a shilling (“s.”) and twenty shillings con-stituted a pound. A guinea was 21s.

20. The authors of a recent study of class inequality with respect to income observe that “the rich,the poor, and the middle-income ranks consume very different bundles of goods and services,” whichmakes any index heavily weighted to staples misleading for upper-end groups. For the period at issuehere, they point out that “the cost of living for the poor rose and fell dramatically relative to the cost ofliving for the rich.” See Philip T. Hoffman, Davis S. Jacks, Patricia A. Levin, and Peter H. Lindert, “RealInequality in Europe since 1500,” Journal of Economic History 62 (2002): 322–55; quotations at 322and 325.

21. Roger Finlay and Beatrice Shearer, “Population Growth and Suburban Expansion,” in A. L.Beier and Roger Finlay, eds., London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis (London, 1986), 37–59at 39. Readers should note that historians’ estimates of the population of London vary widely through-out this period.

22. We need to remember that much or all of many of these incomes was derived from landedproperty and inheritance rather than from salary earned from a job. Urban property could be rentedout; country property could generate rents or farm produce or both. Many people who had salaried“jobs” derived part of their income from property. Shorter life spans meant that people inherited property sooner and oftener than is now the case.

High Titles and Professions Industry and Building200 Temporal Lords ₤6,060 p.a. 6,745 Artisans and Handycrafts ₤200 p.a.26 Spiritual Lords [Bishops]₤1,300 p.a. 162,283 Manufacturing trades ₤38 p.a.800 Baronets ₤1,500 p.a. 73,018 Building trades ₤25 p.a.600 Knights ₤800 p.a. 14,240 Miners ₤15 p.a.3,000 Esquires ₤562 p.a. Agriculture15,000 Gentlemen ₤280 p.a. 27,568 Freeholders ₤91 p.a.5,000 Persons in offices ₤240 p.a. 96,490 More freeholders ₤55 p.a.5,000 More persons in offices ₤120 p.a. 103,382 Farmers ₤42 p.a. 8,062 Persons in the law ₤154 p.a. Military and Maritime2,000 Clergymen ₤72 p.a. 5,000 Naval officers ₤80 p.a.10,000 More clergymen ₤50 p.a. 4,000 Army Officers ₤60 p.a.12,898 Persons in sciences & lib. arts ₤60 p.a. 50,000 Common seamen ₤20 p.a.

Commerce 35,000 Common soldiers ₤14 p.a. 5,264 Merchants and traders ₤400 p.a. Laborers and Poor21,057 More merchants and traders ₤200 p.a. 284,997 Laborers and outservants ₤15 p.a.101,704 Shopkeepers and tradesmen ₤45 p.a. 313,183 Cottagers and paupers ₤6.5 p.a.

23,489 Vagrants ₤2 p.a.

Some of these incomes supported large families and retinues. King presumes fortyfamily members and servants for the nobility, and households of twenty for the bish-ops. Averages are, of course, treacherous. Early in the eighteenth century sixteen of thebishops had incomes under ₤1,000 per annum; six received between ₤1,000 and₤2,000; three enjoyed incomes above ₤3,000. As late as 1762 Canterbury yielded₤7,000, Bristol just ₤450.23 But if King’s emended approximations are even roughly ac-curate, the economic capacity to purchase culture was very narrowly concentrated, inthe upper reaches of the groups specified in this list. The numerous small freeholders,farmers, shopkeepers, manufacturing and trade laborers, construction workers, min-ers, seamen, soldiers, laborers, cottagers, paupers, and vagrants simply could not af-ford to purchase or witness much (if any) elite culture.

We must assume higher than average income and prices for people living in Lon-don. Vanderlint calculates that the “annual charge of maintaining” a laboring man andhis wife and four children in London with food, light, coal, clothes, and two roomswould come to some ₤55 per annum, with food and clothes claiming between 55 and 75percent of the total—and housing estimated at only about ₤4.24 By his reckoning,seven-eighths of the population fell at or below this level. For a “family in the middlingStation of Life” (husband, wife, four children, and one maid) he calculates a basic annualbudget of ₤315 (plus ₤75 per annum needed to secure the future of wife and children).He assumes that such a family will spend ₤4 per annum on entertainment of friends and


23. See D. R. Hirschberg, “Episcopal Incomes and Expenses, 1660–c.1760,” in Rosemary O’Day andFelicity Heal, eds., Princes and Paupers in the English Church, 1500–1800 (Leicester, 1981), 211–30 at 212.

24. Jacob Vanderlint, Money answers all Things (London, 1734), esp. 22, 75–76, 141–42, 145–46.

some ₤50 on rent and taxes. In his view, the minimum annual income for a “gentleman”is ₤500. His figures imply that only about five thousand families in England would qual-ify, a substantial number of whom would be resident in London at least part of the year.Vanderlint’s assumptions correlate surprisingly well with the implications of King’s fig-ures. Some of the families possessed of such an income probably spent nothing on cul-ture, while some of the military officers and persons in sciences and liberal arts nodoubt spent disproportionately on books, plays, and music. Spending patterns are indi-vidual and highly variable.

A conceptual difficulty in the calculation of income needs to be addressed at thispoint. So far as I can see, King, Vanderlint, and others supply estimates of gross annualincome. How they factor in bartering or the economic benefit of doing some farmingon the side (if they do) is not at all clear. A related problem is that official cash income isnot necessarily the same thing as total benefit. Servants (and sometimes others) re-ceived food and lodging. Some positions were worth more in graft and gratuities thanin salary. This was true of Pepys’s navy job, and apparently true for some ticket takers inthe theaters. Figures showing nightly payments to members of the opera orchestra tellus nothing about what the players earned from concerts or from teaching. Secondaryincome can be more important than the primary income for which we have records.The actor William Pinkethman, for example, earned a ₤100 per annum salary (plus abenefit at ₤40 house charges), but even early in Pinkethman’s career John Downes saysenviously, “He’s the darling of Fortunatus, he has gain’d more in Theatres and Fairs inTwelve Years, than those that have Tugg’d at the Oar of Acting these 50.”25 We cannotknow how early arithmeticians arrived at their estimates or exactly what they included,and therefore such figures do not necessarily represent the whole of the incomes ofthose connected with the theater.

Mention must be made here of the problem of “class.” I do not propose to re-hearse the scholarly wars of the last forty years concerning the existence or non -existence of a “middle class.” No such thing was recognized during the period1660–1740 in any modern sense of that phrase. In King’s figures, and in reality, therewere a modest number of people who fell, economically, somewhere between artisans(who lived a notch above subsistence level) and the gentry. Terms such as “the mid-dling sort” and “the trading classes” were applied to such people at the time. Thesegroups had a high rate of literacy and some disposable income. Given the desperatepoverty of most of the population (upwards of 90 percent earning less than ₤50 perannum),26 the growth of this proto–middle class is obviously crucial to changes in theconsumption of culture.27


25. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (London, 1987),108. Pinkethman’s contracted salary as of 1709 is reported in the National Archives LC 7/3, fols. 113–14. He was a fabulously successful operator of fair booth shows and later of suburban sum-mer theaters.

26. This figure is from Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (NewYork, 1997), 19. King’s figures show 87 percent under ₤50; Lindert and Williamson’s revisions suggest83 percent.

27. For a wide-ranging introduction to the evidentiary problems and historiographic debates, seeMargaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780

Employing Peter Earle’s plausible estimates, we may guess that a “middling”family with a ₤200 income and two servants might on average have something like ₤16of discretionary income to spend in the course of a year.28 A bachelor of simple tastesmight have much more; some families would not have had a penny to spare. But look-ing to the average, this amounts to 27s. per month. A trip to the theater for papa,mama, and two bambini would cost exactly 4s. if they sat in the second gallery, took norefreshment, and walked to and from the theater. If they sat in a box, the jaunt wouldcost 16s.—probably plus 2s. for oranges all around and another 2s. coach fare to avoidthe muddy streets. Add a meal in a decent tavern, and the 27s. would be gone, to judgefrom Pepys’s reports of eating out.

A set of distinctions needs to be made. First, we must acknowledge the differ-ence between occasional and habitual consumers of culture. Many people might go tothe theater as a special treat, but they represent a very different market from those whowent two or three times a week (or more). Seasonal patterns represent another impor-tant difference. A London resident is a potential customer year round, or close to it;someone who lives in Remoteshire and comes for “the season,” a session of Parliament,or a court term will be a much more occasional purchaser. And third, there is the vitalquestion of the economic levels to which potential customers belong. Selling a book at6d. to three thousand people grosses ₤75; selling a fancier book at 5s. to five hundredpeople grosses ₤125 (ignoring dealer discounts). In the theater you may fill your sec-ond gallery at 1s. per head, but if the pit and boxes are sparsely populated you will havea very bad night.29

Contemplating the implications of these figures I will venture two observations.First, no more than about 5 percent of the total population of England and Wales couldhave had the discretionary spending capacity to indulge significantly in the purchaseof elite culture. Most of that group can have had little money to spare (what with debt,large families, dowries to pay, and so on). A good many probably came to Londonrarely if at all—and some must have been totally uninterested in culture. Second, mostof our 5 percent (and probably a moderate number of others) could indulge in rela-tively cheap books or amusements but could not regularly afford expensive ones. In thelate seventeenth century, when the population was still sparse and there were relativelypoor communications around the country, the critical mass of potential buyers of elite


(Berkeley, Calif., 1996). For a fundamental demolition of the “emulation” and other social models ofthe later twentieth century, see Henry Horwitz, “‘The mess of the middle class’ Revisited: The Case ofthe ‘big bourgeoisie’ of Augustan London,” Continuity and Change 2 (1987): 263–96. For a salutary ex-amination of the dangers of imposing our terminology on the period at issue, see Keith Wrightson,“‘Sorts of People’ in Tudor and Stuart England,” in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, eds., TheMiddling Sort of People: Culture, Society, and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (London, 1994), 28–51.

28. My discussion here is indebted to Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (London,1989), chap. 10.

29. Social geography within London is also an issue, especially for theaters. The location of Van-brugh’s Haymarket Theatre was evidently a drawback early in its history, and Goodman’s Fields wasbuilt in that location to make it accessible to customers who lived in the City. On the distribution ofwealth within late-seventeenth-century London, see M. J. Power, “The Social Topography of Restora-tion London,” chap. 7 of Beier and Finlay, eds., London 1500–1700.

culture was too small to make it very profitable. Such culture must, therefore, havebeen largely driven by the very small proportion of the population that was sufficientlyaffluent to afford luxuries. The economic history of the eighty years at issue here is es-sentially the story of how the buying power of citizens and the lesser gentry increasedto the point at which serious money could be made by appealing to the taste of what wewould now call middle class consumers.

By way of comparison with social categories and generalities about consumers,let us turn briefly to a very particular (if atypical) buyer. Samuel Pepys’s income and ex-penditures are extraordinarily well documented. Happily, he was an avid theatergoer, alover of music, and a bibliophile. At the start of the diary in 1660, he was a clerk with a₤50 annual salary (19 January 1660)—plus small fees and gratuities.30 Even out of thatlimited budget he contrived to give his mistress “Mrs Jem” a gift of ₤5 (21 January1660). At this time he deliberately carried only 3d. in ready money as a means of avoid-ing wasteful spending (16 February 1660). When he buys Playford’s “great book ofsongs” for 14s., he trades two others for it and adds 6s. 6d. in cash (13 February 1660).In the summer of 1660 William Coventry obtained a place for him as a Navy Commis-sioner at ₤350 (of which he got only ₤250 until the displaced officeholder died in1665), though he reckoned on 10 August 1660 that with gifts and commissions hemight expect to net ₤3 per day on average (roughly ₤1,000 per annum), and thisproved to be a considerable underestimate. Pepys continued to believe, however, that₤50 per annum was a satisfactory income for his parents (15 September 1663). Therewere, inevitably, expenses. He was relieved to be taxed only 10s. on his social standingin 1660, since he was well aware that as one now entitled to call himself “Esquire” heought to pay ₤10 (10 December 1660). He bought a piece of plate worth ₤19 as a thank-you gift for Coventry (4 July 1660), and as early as August 1660 he lavished ₤2 10s. on apetticoat for his wife (18 August 1660). Yet when he visited the theater in January 1661he took a place in the 1s. 6d. gallery—and was mortified when he saw clerks from hisoffice in 2s. 6d. places in the pit (19 January 1661). The same month he threw a preten-tious dinner party whose cost he calculated at “above” ₤5 (24 January). On 22 Novem-ber 1661 he gave a party at the Dolphin costing ₤4, plus another ₤2 for music; on 29 November he took an 18d. place in the theater.

Pepys could spend significant sums if he chose to. He agreed to buy and donate₤5 in books to St. Paul’s School (23 December 1661) and he paid a cheap painter ₤6(plus 36s. for frames) for portraits of himself and his wife (16 January 1662).31 By 1662he was promising his wife ₤20 for Easter clothes (9 February). Yet a maid cost ₤3 perannum (26 March 1662—plus food and lodging), and Pepys was shocked exactly ayear later when he had to pay ₤4 for a cook (26 March 1663). He laid out ₤8 10s. for avelvet cloak on 17 May 1662 and ₤5 for two perriwigs (31 October 1663) and was


30. References to Pepys (given here by date) are to The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Lathamand William Matthews, 11 vols. (London, 1970–83).

31. Six years later, increasingly extravagant, Pepys was willing to pay ₤30 for a miniature picture ofhis wife’s head (29 March 1668). Five months after that, he wondered whether he should offer ₤200 fora Holbein in poor condition, “said to be worth ₤1000” (29 August 1668).

proud of being able to do so. Yet when he visited his bookseller on 10 December 1663to spend ₤2 or ₤3, he hesitated, wondering whether to buy a Third Folio Shakespeare(probably ₤1)—or Jonson, or Chaucer, or Beaumont and Fletcher. He wound up buy-ing Fuller’s Worthys and a collection of Letters of State. He certainly had the money: hisgross income by the mid-1660s was about ₤1,000 and more per annum, and he was saving about half of it. But when Pepys established a budget for 1664, he allocated 50s.(₤2 10s.) to theater for the whole year (2 January). He regarded the theater as a guiltypleasure: he tried to resist temptation and punished himself for succumbing, thoughwhat he spent was utterly negligible considered in the light of an annual income wellabove the average that King calculates for all categories save peers and bishops. As acontrast to Pepys’s lavish remuneration as a civil servant, we might look to the salaryscale of the Commission of Public Accounts when it was established in 1691. The sec-retary got ₤100 per annum; two bookkeepers got ₤80 each; the secretary’s assistant received ₤50; a messenger ₤30; a doorkeeper ₤25; and a porter ₤16.32

No doubt many prosperous people shared Pepys’s discomfort about spendingmoney on the ephemeral pleasures of the theater. Contrariwise, we may suppose thatmany people with a fifth or even a tenth of his income contrived to go to the theater atleast as often. Simple math, however, tells us that precious few people in England couldafford to buy the ₤1 and ₤2 books that Pepys indulged in. He did not regard himself asrich, however. After receiving some ₤70 in royal, ducal, and other bounty on his voyageto greet the returning king, he calculated his net worth as near ₤100 (3 June 1660). Asof August 1665 it had increased more than twenty-fold, to a point that he had oncethought would let him become a knight and keep a carriage (2 March 1662). By Octo-ber 1667 his net worth had risen above ₤6,000. To be really rich, in his view, oneneeded a net worth of ₤10,000 to ₤12,000 (19 February 1664). The Duke of Bucking-ham had an income of about ₤20,000 per annum in the 1660s and wildly overspent it.But a theater manager or a publisher in search of a customer base would haveregarded Pepys and others in his income bracket as the crucial upper-end supportersof elite culture. We must remember that when Charles II came to the theater (once or twice a month on average) he paid ₤10 to do so, and when he commanded a performance at court he paid a flat fee of ₤20.33 The value of royal attendance lay morein social cachet than in money—which often took years to collect in any case. Whenthe Duke of Buckingham attended the theater he presumably took a box—which costhim the same 16s. that Pepys spent in the later 1660s when he treated his wife and acouple of friends to a box. Elite portrait painters might hope for lavish commissionsfrom the very rich, but theaters and publishers had to rely on patrons well representedby the likes of Samuel Pepys. Thanks to the perquisites of his job, Pepys had money to


32. British Library, Harleian MS 1488, fols. 10–11. I owe this reference to the kindness of AlanDownie.

33. See, for example, the National Archives LC 5/139, p. 127 (bill for royal attendance at BridgesStreet in the later 1660s). If the queen attended too, a separate box was taken for her at the same price.In the 1680s James II and his queen sat together in the same box, saving ₤10 (LC 5/147, pp. 68–69).

burn—but he was far more inclined to spend it on showy clothes and dinner partiesthan on literature, music, and theater.

Purchasing patterns also vary across the centuries. We tend, for example, to buynew clothes, but in the long eighteenth century only the well-to-do would have doneso. Others would have gone to secondhand dealers, or to the “botchers,” who boughtworn-out clothes and repaired them. Clothes were re-used until they fell to bits andwere then sold to be recycled into paper manufacture. Obtaining prices for new clothesis not easy; getting prices for used clothing still harder—but even the theaters bought alot of used clothes for service as costumes. Book purchase is another form of consump-tion in which trade-ins and secondhand purchase were very much the norm for manypeople, and since prices were generally not advertised in any way they are very hard todetermine. Paintings could be bought secondhand from a dealer. Practically anythingmight be bought from a pawnshop. This is vastly less true today. (Automobiles are nowone of the few items that middling persons buy used rather than new.) Because of thenormalcy of early death, the total stock of household property turned over at a rapidrate, making a lot of “pre-owned” property available at all times. In the country, peoplelived off the land, traded produce, and perhaps did some quiet poaching. Many kindsof tradesmen gave credit (and knew they would have trouble collecting all of what wasowed them). We are not dealing with a pure cash economy and making the necessaryallowances is for the most part a matter of guesswork.34

� Earning a Living from the TheaterThe theaters were a potential source of income for playwrights, proprietors, perform-ers, and house servants. The principal beneficiaries, however, were proprietors. Twofactors exercise crucial influence on the money that could be made out of the theaters:capacity, or maximum gross, and restrictions on competition. Neither has receivedmuch attention from historians of the drama.

Relatively few figures survive concerning actor and playwright remunerationbefore 1642. Prices went up considerably from the ₤6 cash payments known for the1590s. Daborne reports potential profits of ₤20 or ₤25 per play circa 1613 and in the1630s Brome was getting 15s. and later 20s. per week salary plus a benefit worth at least₤5 for each new play.35 After 1660 playwrights received the profits of the third night(from the 1690s, also the sixth and ultimately the ninth night, if the play lasted thatlong).36 What playwrights actually earned from author’s benefits before 1714 is almostentirely unknown.37 In the 1660s the sums must have been small. The price scale was


34. I am indebted to Harold Love for several of these points.35. For a convenient overview of known evidence, see Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of

Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time (Princeton, N.J., 1971), esp. 97, 99, 105, 106. 36. Only Dryden is known to have received substantial additional remuneration over a lengthy

period, and he got a share in the King’s Company’s profits, not a salary. Those profits were probablyconsiderable at times, but their total value is impossible to estimate.

37. For a detailed analysis of all known evidence from 1660 to 1800, see Judith Milhous andRobert D. Hume, “Playwrights’ Remuneration in Eighteenth-Century London,” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s. 10 (1999): 3–90, on which the present discussion draws heavily.

4s. in the boxes, 2s. 6d. in the pit, 1s. 6d. in the first gallery, and 1s. in the secondgallery—in comparison with Shakespeare’s day, very steep charges. The original VereStreet and Lincoln’s Inn Fields theaters apparently held no more than four or five hun-dred spectators, and the gross receipts for a full house were probably about ₤50. Housecharges could not have been much less than ₤20 and the playwrights’ profit about ₤30 ifwe can assume something like a capacity audience.38 Later figures, however, show thatthe theaters were almost never full, even at benefits, so very likely they were not packedin the 1660s either. Dorset Garden and Drury Lane, constructed in the early 1670s, hada normal maximum gross of about ₤105 (with serious crowding); subtracting the cus-tomary house charges of ₤25, the playwright might receive as much as ₤80—if the playwas staged at all, and before a full house.

We can be reasonably sure that playwrights collected the gross, less whateverhouse charges were assessed. What we have no way to know is how much more theygained from gifts and benefit tickets sold above face value. A well-connected writer likeThomas Southerne who was prepared to undertake “the drudgery of sollicitation”could collect a lot more than someone like Dryden, who declined to demean himselfby pestering his wealthy friends and acquaintances.39 A patron could pay any sum fora ticket, and might not even use it. The expression “by guineas” employed in this con-text in the eighteenth century means that the purchaser gave a guinea for the ticket,even though the cash value was only four or five shillings—quadruple or quintuple theactual price.40

To be assured of eating, a playwright pretty much needed to get a new play suc-cessfully staged every year. This was essentially impossible, for lengthy periods. Quite afew new plays were professionally staged in London between 1660 and 1700 (morethan four hundred of them), but the number per year varies drastically. When theKing’s and Duke’s Companies were competing fiercely in the mid-1670s, twelve, fifteen, and even twenty new plays were staged in a season. When the union of 1682


38. The playwright could of course sell his script to a publisher, and might hope to sell some ticketsto patrons and friends for more than face value.

39. “Mr. Southern was industrious to draw all imaginable profits from his poetical labours. Mr. Dryden once took occasion to ask him how much he got by one of his plays; to which he answered,that he was really ashamed to inform him. But Mr. Dryden being a little importunate to know, heplainly told him, that by his last play he cleared seven hundred pounds; which appeared astonishing toMr. Dryden, as he himself had never been able to acquire more than one hundred by any of his mostsuccessful pieces. The secret is, Mr. Southern was not beneath the drudgery of sollicitation, and oftensold his tickets at a very high price, by making applications to persons of distinction: a degree of ser -vility which perhaps Mr. Dryden thought was much beneath the dignity of a poet; and too much in thecharacter of an under-player”; Mr. Cibber, and other Hands [i.e., Robert Shiels], The Lives of the Poets,5 vols. (London, 1753), 5:328–29. This source is late and of dubious authority. The ₤700 figure must beregarded with skepticism, but the principle probably holds true: a lot of money could be made by sell-ing benefit tickets above face value.

40. For this phrase and practice, see Zachary Baggs, Advertisement Concerning the Poor Actors(London, 1709). For a documentary example of the practice, see the “Private accounts of a Lady1736–1765,” Northamptonshire Record Office ASR 103. The “Lady” was a Mrs. Dummer, whose hus-band gave her sums from ₤125 to more than ₤200 a year “for my own expences.” For more than fifteenyears from 22 February 1748 she records a guinea to “Mrs Clive” at the time of her benefit.

terminated competition, the managers reduced the total to an average of four per yearfor the rest of the decade, and new plays remained difficult to get produced until the ac-tors’ rebellion and the re-establishment of a second company in 1695. Almost no onebut insiders managed to get plays staged by the United Company, and even veteranprofessional playwrights such as Dryden and Shadwell did not average anything like aplay per year, which might have supplied a modest but decent living.41

The actual benefit receipts known after 1714 for Lincoln’s Inn Fields (CoventGarden from 1732) show an average take for playwrights of ₤43 (with a range of zero to₤120) from 1714 to 1721. The average is ₤154 for 1721–28, largely because of the ₤491earned by Fenton for Mariamne and the ₤494 by Gay for The Beggar’s Opera (the mostsuccessful play of its era). Without those special cases, the average falls to ₤109, thoughonly four plays earned their authors less than ₤50. For the years 1728–37 the averagedrops to ₤79 (with a range from ₤6 to ₤315).42 (Drury Lane was a far more prosperoustheater until the mid-1720s, and playwrights may have done substantially betterthere.) These are not such meager amounts, but they suggest that only on the rarest oc-casions did playwrights’ benefits attract genuinely full houses—a pattern that contin-ues right through to the end of the eighteenth century. Insofar as fragmentary figuresmay be relied upon, we may deduce that the theaters tended to run at roughly 50 to 60 percent of capacity and could do so profitably at that level. By implication, we mayguess that the take for a lot of late-seventeenth-century playwrights was well under the₤70 or ₤75 that a full house would have brought them.

A ₤50-benefit per annum would have provided subsistence for a Carolean play-wright, though one could not have dressed for appearances at court or maintained afamily with any social dignity on such a sum. We must ask, however, how many play-wrights actually managed to get plays written and produced with such regularity.Aphra Behn (20 plays), John Crowne (19), John Dryden (26), Thomas Durfey (26),Nathaniel Lee (13), Thomas Otway (9), Edward Ravenscroft (12), Elkanah Settle (13),Thomas Shadwell (20), and Nahum Tate (8) probably could have contrived to live forsubstantial periods on their earnings from playwriting. Behn and Otway led notori-ously hardscrabble existences. Settle spent thirty years in poverty after he fell out offavor with the public about 1680.43 Shadwell’s actress wife must have earned a substan-tial income in the 1670s, but Shadwell himself was debarred from play production be-tween 1681 and 1688 because of his Whig politics. Dryden returned to playwritingonly after 1688, when he lost his lucrative posts as Poet Laureate and HistoriographerRoyal (and complained bitterly about digging in exhausted mines). Durfey was a song-writer. Lee spent much of the 1680s in a madhouse, but would probably have had ahard time supporting himself as a playwright after the union of the two acting compa-


41. For a convenient list of all plays at issue, see Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama,975–1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum, 3d ed. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London, 1989).

42. Milhous and Hume, “Playwrights’ Remuneration,” 10–15, 46.43. Settle earned what he could from City Pageants, but seems to have got only a pittance in com-

parison with playwriting. He received ₤2 3s. 6d. in 1692 and ₤11 1s. 6d. in 1703; see Frank C. Brown,Elkanah Settle (Chicago, 1910), 122, 125.

nies. Nonetheless, we may guess that these people all obtained most of their living fromplaywriting for periods of nearly a decade to upwards of twenty-five years. Dramatistsdid not enjoy a safe income, but could scrounge an insecure livelihood of sorts fromthe theater, given talent, industry, and a bit of luck.

The situation changed radically for the worse after the union of 1682 and basi-cally stayed bad. The new union engineered by Vanbrugh in 1708 terminated all seri-ous competition until John Rich reopened a second theater in 1714, but Rich’scompany barely stayed afloat for the first decade of its existence. The astounding sixty-two-night run of The Beggar’s Opera in 1728 triggered a theatrical boom, with as manyas four companies competing actively in London in the 1730s, but this state of affairswas abruptly terminated by the Licensing Act of 1737. Some 430 new plays were stagedby known writers between 1700 and 1750 (including afterpieces), but only two play-wrights got a play staged annually for anything like a decade—Susanna Centlivre (15plays from 1700 to 1718) and Henry Fielding (18 plays—including afterpieces andfringe productions—in eight seasons prior to the Licensing Act). Fielding did make aliving out of playwriting in the 1730s (partly at Drury Lane, but operating his ownpick-up company at the Little Haymarket in 1730 and 1731 and again in 1736 and1737). Centlivre’s husband held a position as cook in the royal household at ₤60 perannum. Farquhar wrung a bare living out of plays, doing hackwork as well and joiningthe army in mid-career. Charles Johnson had sixteen plays staged over a thirty-yearperiod, but many of them were dismal flops—and he took to running a tavern inCovent Garden. James Miller had half a dozen plays staged in the thirties, but he wasboth a clergyman and a journalistic pamphleteer.

A number of Carolean playwrights appear to have been able to earn a livingfrom their trade for substantial stretches of time, but between 1700 and 1750 only twoof 150 professionally produced playwrights had enough plays staged to support them-selves over a period of several years. This is a very important conclusion, because itflatly contradicts long-codified assumptions. J. W. Saunders, for example, quite rightlysays that before 1642 and after 1660 “the theatre provided the first fruitful soil in whicha profession of letters took root.” This largely ceased to be true after the 1682 union,and when Saunders says of the mid-eighteenth century that “the theatre was prosper-ous enough to provide a living wage, and more, for the writers who were prepared towrite to formula,” he is simply wrong.44 In the first half of the eighteenth century manywriters supplemented their incomes and a few enjoyed theatrical earnings of ₤300 andmore from single plays, but this is not the same thing as earning a living. Seventy-oneof the professionally produced playwrights wrote only a single staged play, and twenty-five more wrote only two. Only twelve writers among a hundred and fifty wrote morethan six plays in the half-century at issue. The playwrights who consistently profitedthe most were (not coincidentally) managers—Colley Cibber in the period under con-sideration, and later David Garrick. After the 1682 theatrical union, playwriting be-came an occasional and largely amateur enterprise and stayed that way until the 1780s.


44. J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London, 1964), esp. 68 and 113.

Contrariwise, what of actors? Unlike playwrights, they were unquestionablyboth professional and dependent upon the theater for their livelihood. Informationabout payment of actors prior to 1642 is extremely sketchy, but it suggests that in agood season in the mid-1630s a sharer in the King’s Men may have earned as much as₤180, while a principal at the Red Bull probably got something closer to ₤40. Hirelingsappear to have received between 5s. and 10s. per week during the season (about thirtyweeks) or between ₤7 10s. and ₤15 per annum—sums that presumably needed to besupplemented by strolling during the summers or by non-theatrical work.45 After1660 the system of actor-sharers and hirelings continued in both companies. TheUnited Company’s salary scale ran in steps from 10s. per week (1s. 8d. per acting day)to 25s., 40s., 50s., and 60s. (the last sum being deemed roughly equivalent to a three-quarter acting share).46 Under this system, shareholders’ incomes fluctuated withcompany profit, which might be advantageous—or not. In 1682–83 (a really good sea-son), a three-quarter shareholder got ₤126 15s. and a 60s. salaried actor ₤115 10s. In1684–85 (a bad season, interrupted by mourning for Charles II), the same shareholderreceived only ₤52 10s., while the hireling got ₤90. At the bottom end of the scale, the10s. hireling would have had ₤19 5s. in the former season, ₤15 in the latter. Anyone at40s. (₤2) per week certainly received a living wage from the roughly thirty weeks of thetheater season. At the very top of the scale and beyond, Thomas Betterton earned ₤461in 1682–83, though ₤61 was for management and ₤231 represented his dividends asholder of three building-proprietor’s shares in the Dorset Garden Theatre. Figures forthe King’s and Duke’s companies are much less complete, but we do now know that inthe mid-seventies each of the twenty acting shares in the Duke’s Company was worth₤50 to ₤60 per annum.47 A single-share member received that sum; a three-quartershareholder proportionately less. Betterton, who held 3.25 shares, received ₤169 foracting in 1675–76 (plus, of course, his managerial and theater-rent income).

Between 1687 and 1693 outside investors (“adventurers”) took control of theUnited Company and tried to improve profits by squeezing actors’ salaries andperquisites. Sharing actors’ profits were so poor that the sharers chose to go on salary,but salaries were systematically shortpaid. One result was the actors’ rebellion of 1694,which led to the re-establishment of a severely undercapitalized second company as anactor-cooperative at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.48 Another result—one whose impact af-fected the theater for more than a century—was the inauguration of an actor-benefitsystem that permitted favored actors to top up unsatisfactory or shortpaid salaries bytaking the profits of a performance for which they flogged tickets to friends and admir-ers. Except for rare “free” benefits, management was guaranteed its expenses, and theactor might make a great deal of money. If unlucky, the beneficiary could wind up


45. See Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time 1590–1642 (Princeton,N.J., 1984), 55–56, 106–12.

46. This discussion is deeply indebted to Judith Milhous, “United Company Finances, 1682–1692,”Theatre Research International 7 (1981–82): 37–53.

47. See Judith Milhous, “The Duke’s Company’s Profits, 1675–1677,” Theatre Notebook 32 (1978):76–88.

48. See Judith Milhous, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1695–1708(Carbondale, Ill., 1979).

owing management money.49 Figures published in 1709 by Zachary Baggs, the DruryLane treasurer, show that Robert Wilks earned ₤168 (including a fee for management)and added ₤90 from his benefit; Richard Estcourt had a ₤5 per week salary from whichhe earned ₤112 plus ₤51 from his benefit; Colley Cibber the same, plus ₤51 from a ben-efit; Anne Oldfield got ₤4 per week plus perquisites, making ₤70 in just fourteen weeks,plus ₤62 from her benefit.50 These are very decent incomes if paid in full, somethingthe proprietor, Christopher Rich, fiercely resisted doing. His attempt to enforce aprofit-sharing “tax” on actors’ benefits led to an explosion that got him shut down forfive years.51

The re-establishment of a second company in 1714 led to the employment ofmore actors, but did little to improve their conditions of employment. Initial relationsbetween Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Drury Lane were quite hostile, but by the early 1720sthe two managements had decided to cooperate rather than compete. In consequence,the managers signed a secret cartel agreement, the essence of which was that neithercompany could hire a performer who had worked at the other without a written dis-charge from the prior employer.52 Some salaries were actually reduced in the course ofthe 1720s, and performers were left with virtually no choice but to accept what theywere offered or leave for Dublin. The unlicensed companies and nonce troupes thatcame into being after the theatrical boom triggered by The Beggar’s Opera in 1728 haveleft almost no records behind them, but with the exception of Goodman’s Fields we maysafely assume that they did not provide a livelihood for their members. Fragmentaryrecords from a lawsuit concerning a fringe opera and theater venture in 1732–33 showdaily receipts from ₤10 5s. to ₤51 18s. for opera in English, and ₤2 12s. to ₤22 9s. forplays.53 For the latter, sixteen men and women were paid a total of ₤4 9s. 6d. for eachperformance—not a living wage unless paid virtually year-round. Occasionally, a fringetroupe scored a hit at the Little Haymarket (as Fielding did on four notable occasions),but usually such productions ran only a few nights and disappeared. Had the LicensingAct not been imposed, fringe theaters might eventually have offered alternative venuesand a living wage to performers, but they never did so in the eighteenth century.

Salaries are mostly unknown for Drury Lane in the 1730s, and they were proba-bly poor, since the company fell into disarray, provoking the rebellion that led to the extended walkout of 1733 and the importation of strollers as strikebreakers.54


49. See Robert D. Hume, “The Origins of the Actor Benefit in London,” Theatre Research Interna-tional 9 (1984): 99–111.

50. Baggs, Advertisement Concerning the Poor Actors. This season was shortened by almost a thirdby mourning for Prince George and an order of silence—making salary totals far lower than normal.

51. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “The Silencing of Drury Lane in 1709,” Theatre Jour-nal 32 (1980): 427–47.

52. The cartel agreement was long known by rumor, but its provisions were not printed and ana-lyzed until the 1980s. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “The London Theatre Cartel of the1720s: British Library Additional Charters 9306 and 9308,” Theatre Survey 26 (1985): 21–37.

53. The National Archives, E 112/1193, no. 1527. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “J. F.Lampe and English Opera at the Little Haymarket in 1732–3,” Music and Letters 78 (1997): 502–31.

54. See Robert D. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728–1737 (Oxford, 1988),155–64.

We do, however, possess nearly complete salary information for Covent Garden in1735–36.55 Principals earned ₤200 to ₤300 per annum in salary. Some forty membersof the company earned from 1s. 6d. to 8s. 4d. per diem (but almost all of them 5s. orless). Seventeen people earned a per diem stipend ranging from 10s. to about 30s. (orperhaps a little higher). Benefit profits for privileged members ran from deficits toabove ₤100, but most fell in the vicinity of ₤50 or ₤60. Some forty house servantsearned between 1s. and 5s. per night, though only four earned more than 2s. The treas-urer, an important and responsible part of the administration, received 6s. 8d., or ₤2 per week during the season—about ₤60 per annum. By a factor of two, the highest“performer’s” salary was paid by John Rich to himself (as Harlequin in pantomimes)—a stunning ₤3 6s. 6d. per diem or ₤20 per week. Over a full thirty-week season thatwould amount to ₤600, and of course as principal owner he received most of the com-pany’s annual profit as well.

Any good Marxist (or even a wobbly one) must rejoice in the evil example of thelong-eighteenth-century London theater. Those who own the means of productionprofit greatly at the expense of their unlucky employees. To raise capital to financebuildings and operations, Davenant sold off about half the stock in the Duke’s Com-pany in the 1660s, while Killigrew had to make similar if more complicated arrange-ments for the King’s Company.56 Actors retained managerial control throughout mostof the 1670s and 1680s, but Christopher Rich’s open assumption of power in 1693 to-tally altered the operational nature of London theater. If the patent duopoly were en-forced (as ultimately it was until the nineteenth century), then almost unlimited powerlay in the hands of those who could inherit or buy the patents united in 1682 or whocould get a limited term patent from the government (as Steele did in 1715 and othersafter him). Occasionally actors did succeed in becoming owner/managers (as Wilks,Cibber, and Doggett/Booth—and later Garrick—did at Drury Lane), but when thishappened they showed no disposition to share the wealth. Drury Lane fell into thehands of the Triumvirs soon after the silencing of Rich in 1709, and from the summerof 1710 the only competition they faced was from a very shaky opera company. In1712–13 Wilks, Cibber, and Doggett split a company profit of ₤4,050 pounds, getting₤1,350 each, plus acting salary and benefit (at least ₤300 more per head) and manage-rial salary.57 Total income for each this year was probably about ₤2,000. This was an


55. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “John Rich’s Covent Garden Account Books for1735–36,” Theatre Survey 31 (1990): 200–241. I remark in passing that failure to analyze the nearly onehundred extant account books seriously distorts our understanding of the entertainments offered bythose theaters. For more than a generation, dance offerings consumed 20 to 25 percent of the total per-former budget at John Rich’s theaters; see Judith Milhous, “The Economics of Theatrical Dance inEighteenth-Century London,” Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 481–508.

56. See Leslie Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (Cambridge, Mass., 1928),chaps. 5 and 6. On the King’s Company’s rather entangled ownership arrangements (especially as re-garded its theater), see Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Charles Killigrew’s ‘Abstract of Title tothe Playhouse’: British Library Add. MS. 20,726, fols. 1–14,” Theatre History Studies 6 (1986): 57–71.

57. Unknown at this date, but ₤1 13s. 4d. per diem in 1722, which is ₤10 per week or upwards ofanother ₤300 for the season; see Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Memos to the Treasurer atDrury Lane, 1715–1730,” Theatre Notebook 45 (1991): 16–30 at 22.

exceptionally good season, but even in 1715–16 (a poor one, with renewed competi-tion), each Triumvir must have taken home about ₤1,000.58 Multiply these figures byone hundred and you get a very decent annual income in present-day terms; multiplyby two or three hundred and you arrive at a fairly spectacular modern equivalent—always remembering too that there was no income tax.

Between 1660 and 1740 the London theaters were increasingly operated for thebenefit of their proprietors, not for the advantage of playwrights or performers. A play-wright earned nothing from his or her play after its first week (or at best, two), even if itcoined money for the company that staged it and stayed in the repertory for decades.The take from an author’s benefit(s) was utterly unpredictable and could range fromnothing to more than ₤100 in the seventeenth century and as high as nearly ₤500 bythe 1720s. Upper-end rewards were, however, a hundred-to-one shot. The top four orfive performers in a theater company could expect to make fairly good money (with aprosperous benefit, ₤200 to ₤300 or more by the 1720s and 1730s), but mid-rank per-formers were lucky to collect much more than ₤100 even toward the end of this period,while bottom-enders and house servants were working for artisan wages, not paidyear-round. The benefit system gave promise of windfall profits that were rarelyachieved.

A helpful view of the economics of the London theater about 1703 may be de-rived from the “Company Plan” drawn up by Vanbrugh when he was hoping to effect anew union and operate a combined theater/opera company as a monopoly under hisownership in the Haymarket Theatre that he was building.59 He intended to paysalaries in full, and hence made no provision for actor benefits. Six senior actors andactresses were penciled in at ₤120 to ₤150 per annum (with Betterton getting an extra₤50 “to teach”) and others at various levels from ₤100 down to ₤30. Seven dancers wereto get salaries from ₤20 to ₤60 (with another ₤250 to be divided among them on a per-performance basis). As music director the distinguished composer John Eccles was tohave a ₤40 salary, and twenty orchestral musicians were to get ₤1 per week (which Ec-cles would presumably have collected as well).60 Six singers were penciled in at a totalof ₤150 (plus ₤200 allocated for “when they sing”). The projected annual budget for180 performance days was ₤9,000 (or ₤50 per diem). Vanbrugh probably got his figures from Betterton (a vastly experienced manager), and they are highly realistic.The United Company had grossed an average of some ₤47 per diem from 1682 to1692. Vanbrugh planned a fancier, multi-media company and expected to exploit a


58. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Profits at Drury Lane, 1713–1716,” Theatre ResearchInternational 14 (1989): 241–55.

59. The plan survives in the National Archives LC 7/3, fols. 161–62.60. The musicians undoubtedly supplemented their theater salaries from teaching and concerts,

but what they earned from these sources is very thinly documented in this period. Dr. Burney reportsthat he received 5s. for each performance as a “supernumerary” member of the Drury Lane orchestrain the 1740s (as were “others, much my seniors”); Memoirs of Dr. Charles Burney, 1726–1769, ed. SlavaKlima, Garry Bowers, and Kerry S. Grant (Lincoln, Neb., 1988), 45. There is no imaginable way to cal-culate what portion of the musicians’ annual income such payments constituted.

well-managed monopoly. Known receipt totals for Drury Lane a decade later suggestthat Vanbrugh might reasonably have hoped to pocket ₤3,000 a year if he had beenable to absorb the rival company and operate without competition. His scheme wasnever realized, but in conception it is very much in line with other managements ofthis period. Theaters were not designed to benefit playwrights, performers, or the na-tional culture, but rather to fill the pockets of the entrepreneurs who built and man-aged them.

� Earning a Living from Books: Authors and PublishersThree issues are fundamental to comprehension of the difficulties of making a living asan author of books. Two are well known in book-history circles, the third less so. Thefirst is that because the royalty system was virtually unknown, authors almost alwayssold the “perpetual” rights to their work to publishers for a single cash payment upfront.61 The second is that print runs were small, which sharply limited the sums pub-lishers were willing to risk in buying manuscripts. In the period at issue, most editionsappear to have run between 500 and 1,500 copies. Even in the middle and later eigh-teenth century, the numbers remain low. Strahan was a major printer, but 97 percent ofthe 514 books he printed between 1738 and 1785 were issued in editions of no morethan 2,000 copies.62 The third point is that the price per copy had to be kept low onmost books, or they would have found very few buyers. Overall receipts were evenlower than they might seem, since publishers gave other booksellers a trade discountof 15 to 20 percent, making the net on a ₤1 book 16 to 17s.63

A few price statistics may be helpful. In Easter and Trinity terms 1670, 236books were advertised in the Term Catalogues. Of these, 196 cost less than 4s. and 139cost no more than 2s. Only seven were offered at ₤1 or more. The most expensive were₤2 10s. and ₤3—law books and a book of maps. The most common price by far was 1s.The cheapest titles listed went for 6d. (25 of them), though large numbers of one- and


61. Other arrangements were sometimes made. Authors sometimes accepted (or bought at a dis-count) a substantial number of copies, which they were then free to sell for whatever they could get. Tojudge from the contracts preserved in the Upcott Collection (discussed below), this was not very com-mon, but it probably proved quite profitable for some writers. For particulars of one such case, see R. B. McKerrow, “A Publishing Agreement of the late Seventeenth Century,” The Library, 4th ser., 13(1933): 184–87. For a learned Latin theological work to be sold at ₤1, the author was given 25 freecopies and the right to buy 100 copies at 15s. each (which if resold to friends at list price would gainhim ₤25). Alternatively, he could buy any number up to 100 copies at 16s. each, which lessened his riskbut also his putative profit.

62. See Patricia Hernlund, “William Strahan’s Ledgers: Standard Charges for Printing,1738–1785,” Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967): 89–111 at 104.

63. For background in this realm I am drawing generally on several sources, notably D. F. McKen-zie, The Cambridge University Press, 1696–1712: A Bibliographical Study, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1966);John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London, 1988); The Bowyer Ledgers, ed. Keith Maslenand John Lancaster (London, 1991); and John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4 (Cambridge, 2002). On changes in publishing at the start of ourperiod, see John Barnard, “London Publishing, 1640–1660,” Book History 4 (2001): 1–16. For vividdocumentation of the impact of prices on sales in a later period, see St. Clair, Reading Nation, esp. chap. 11.

two-penny publications were being issued.64 More expensive books could be had(many of them imported), but they were probably not worth advertising to the gen-eral public.

For comparison, let us analyze the parallel Term Catalogue lists in 1709 at the time of the publication of Tonson’s “Rowe” Shakespeare in six octavo volumes. Of152 titles advertised, 104 cost 2s. or less, of which 82 (fully half ) cost no more than 1s.The most common price was 6d. (40 titles) and 58 of the advertised works cost thatsum or less. In 1709, relatively few books were priced above 2s. A smattering of titles(four to nine per price bracket) were offered at 3s., 3/6, 4s., 4/6, and 5s. I would judgethat 6s. represented a normal top price for a book for which substantial sales were an-ticipated. Fourteen were offered at this price (five of them reprints). One was priced at7/6, four at 12s., one at 15s., and one at 30s.—which is a dizzying pound and a half. Thelast two were Tonson’s Virgil and Shakespeare editions, and in this company they standout like sore thumbs. Far from making Shakespeare cheap and widely available, as haslong been claimed, Tonson’s 1709 edition (and his 1714 duodecimo reprint to follow)were expensive volumes aimed at a premium market.65

Let us address the issue of what authors actually earned from their books. Weknow, of course, that Dryden got ₤1,200 for his translation of Virgil, and that Popemade something in the vicinity of ₤10,000 from his Homer. Prior collected a munifi-cent 4,000 guineas from the subscribers to his 1718 Poems (though what he actuallynetted is not clear to me). Swift received ₤200 for Gulliver’s Travels (a price negotiatedby the canny Pope), and Fielding made ₤700 from Tom Jones and ₤1,000 fromAmelia.66 These are, however, among the most famous writers of their times, and thefigures for Dryden, Pope, and Prior reflect subscription sets flogged hard by writerswith extraordinary social connections.67 The rates for Fielding reflect not only his


64. On the booming chapbook industry of the late seventeenth century, see Margaret Spufford’svery helpful Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1981). On a mid-seventeenth-century attempt to produce relatively inex-pensive “cultural” books, see Paulina Kewes, “‘Give Me the Sociable Pocket-Books. . .’: HumphreyMoseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections,” Publishing History 38 (1995): 5–21.

65. For detailed analysis, see Don-John Dugas and Robert D. Hume, “The Dissemination ofShakespeare in 1714,” Studies in Bibliography, forthcoming.

66. These figures are among those reported by Saunders, Profession of English Letters, 131–40, andrepeated by later scholars. We should note that Millar was badly burned by the terms he gave Fieldingfor Amelia. For a masterly account of Pope’s extraordinary earnings, see David Foxon, Pope and theEarly-Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. James McLaverty (Oxford, 1991), chaps. 1–2.

67. Much sympathy has been lavished on Milton, who received ₤10 for the first edition of ParadiseLost in 1667 (with another ₤5 due for each of two further impressions, if they appeared and sold out). As Peter Lindenbaum has pointed out, however, these were not unreasonable terms for the time; see“Milton’s Contract,” in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, eds., The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham, N.C., 1994), 175–90. The poem was big and expensive, the poet obscure and disreputable. We should also remember, as Lindenbaum observes inanother version of “Milton’s Contract,” that “Milton had enough inherited wealth not to need to make aliving from his pen”; “The Poet in the Marketplace: Milton and Samuel Simmons,” in P. G. Stanwood, ed., Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World (Binghamton, N.Y., 1995), 249–62 at 262.

celebrity but also the growing mid-century book market.68 What of “ordinary” earn-ings? Fortunately, we have two sources, both underexploited, that give us manyspecifics. One is the Lintot notebook published by John Nichols in 1814 that listsroughly 180 copyright payments to authors (plus 25 to Pope) for the period 1701–31.69

The other is the famous “Upcott Collection” (British Library, Add. MSS. 38,728–30),which includes full texts of more than 80 author-publisher agreements for the first half of the eighteenth century. Both have often been cited, but neither (so far as I candetermine) has ever been systematically analyzed.70 Extracting the figures producesinteresting results, though we must remember that in the case of Lintot we are dealingwith books issued by a single publisher (and books selected on an unknown basis), andin the case of the Upcott Collection we have a seemingly random set of agreements deriving from a relatively small number of publishers. How representative are thesesurviving remnants? I would not care to venture even a guess—but actual figures innumerous cases are better than pure speculation.

Bernard Lintot was a publisher who produced quite a few upper-end books—Pope’s Homer, for example. Excluding payments to Pope (which total more than₤4,200) and some payments for correcting and editing, Lintot records payment ofroughly ₤3,026 to authors for 149 books. This amounts to about ₤20 per book, includ-ing large ones, small ones, and a few translations. If we subtract nine books for whichexceptionally high prices were paid (for example, ₤252 for Fiddes’s Body of Divinity,₤105 for Jacob’s Accomplished Conveyancer), then Lintot paid about ₤2,030 for the re-maining 140 books, or about ₤14 10s. each. Of these, the author received between ₤5and ₤10 15s. in fifty-seven instances, and less than ₤5 in thirty-one. We should notsneer at a ₤5 payment, but neither should we fail to distinguish between a meaningfulsum of money (which ₤5 was) and a livelihood (which it was not, even in 1700). If weaccept Samuel Johnson’s bare-bones estimate of ₤30 per annum for subsistence, then₤5 amounts to two months’ food and shelter. (If we look to Pepys, it represents a dinnerparty.) Relatively few of the Lintot items are pamphlets and occasional pieces. MarjoriePlant estimates that ₤4 or ₤5 was a standard fee for purchase of copyright early in theeighteenth century, and given the large number of small, cheap books that were issued,such a figure does not seem implausible.71

What do we learn from a comparison with the Upcott materials? From the firstthree decades of the eighteenth century, agreements for twenty-three original bookssurvive in that collection, for which the publishers paid authors some ₤678 for copy-


68. For a still useful overview of the earnings of “name” writers, see Harry Ransom, “The Rewardsof Authorship in the Eighteenth Century,” University of Texas Studies in English 18 (1938): 47–66.

69. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London, 1812–15),8:293–304. I say “roughly” because there are cases in which no sum is listed, or a complicated deal doesnot reduce satisfactorily to a single figure.

70. The Upcott Collection runs into the early nineteenth century. Judith Milhous and I hope soonto publish an analysis of the whole run of its contracts.

71. Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books(1939; 3d ed., London, 1974), 76.

right (an average of about ₤29 each). Another eleven agreements for translations ofvarious sorts total about ₤100, or some ₤9 each. Combining the two categories, thethirty-four books brought about ₤23 on average. If we look to the 1730s, we find thattwenty-eight original books brought about ₤35 each, though the figure for eighteenbooks in the 1740s falls back to ₤26. Looking at the contents of the Upcott Collectionfor the whole of the period 1701–49, the figures are about ₤31 for original books, orabout ₤27 if we include translations in the calculation. Money could of course beearned from hackwork. Upcott includes a small number of payments for revisions,proofreading, and indexing. These run from one to ten guineas.

Both sources include books of many kinds—poems, plays, history, translationsfrom the classics, mathematical and scientific treatises, how-to-learn foreign languageprimers, geography, philosophy, history, religion, and law books. We may ask how pay-ments for elite-culture books compare to those in other realms. The answer is that onaverage they so do quite favorably. Of the books reported by Lintot I would classifyfifty-four as broadly “cultural” (counting both originals and translations).72 Theircopyrights brought some ₤1,379, or about ₤25 per book. I would classify some forty-two books from the Upcott Collection as “cultural” in this period. They brought₤1,401, or some ₤33 per book. The range was wide. Dr. Sewell received ₤1 1s. 6d. for hispamphlet of Observations on the Tragedy of Jane Shore (Lintot), whereas James MooreSmythe somehow blandished Lintot out of ₤105 for his mildly successful comedy TheRival Modes (1727). Given the considerable theatrical success of Jane Shore and JaneGrey, we cannot be astonished that Rowe received ₤50 15s. and ₤75 5s. for them, re-spectively; but how could Lintot have imagined that Captain Killigrew’s vapid Chit-Chat (1718) was worth the ₤84 he paid for it?73

Until the 1740s, plays were unquestionably an author’s best hope for making asubstantial amount of money from literary work—unless he or she were sufficientlyconnected and celebrated to make a killing out of subscription publication. Let ustherefore consider the basic economics of play publication. The standard retail pricewas 1s. in the late seventeenth century, a sum that rose to 1s. 6d. for long plays and es-pecially attractive ones. If we assume that as many as 1,500 copies were printed andcould be sold at 1s., then after discounts to booksellers the publisher would probablygross something like ₤60. To judge from extant records, the cost of typesetting, paper,ink, warehousing, and overheads would have come to upwards of half this sum, leavingno more than ₤30 to ₤40 to be divided between the author (paid cash up front) and thepublisher (who paid all costs and assumed all risks).74 A more likely print run was 500,


72. Under this heading I have counted plays, poems, literary criticism, history, and philosophy.73. Timing could be crucial for the author of a play. Should one sell before the premiere for fear of

failure? Alternatively, should one wait and hope for theatrical triumph? Killigrew profited consider-ably by selling before the premiere. Contrariwise, Lillo would probably have received precious littlefor The London Merchant in 1731, but when he finally sold copyright in 1735 the price was a munifi-cent ₤105.

74. Type was expensive, and so was paper. In 1660 imported paper was taxed at 1s. per pound.Legislation in the 1690s (8 and 9 William c. 7) raised the duty on paper and books to 25 percent of thevalue; see Plant, English Book Trade, 200.

with a corresponding reduction in costs and net. Small wonder that Farquhar received₤16 2s. 6d. for the copyright of The Recruiting Officer in 1706. The ₤30 he got for TheBeaux Stratagem the next year is evidence of Lintot’s faith in its sales appeal. Of courseif a play failed to sell as anticipated the publisher could be significantly out of pocket,and if it sold slowly he might not see his money back for years. Publishers often choseto split the copyright two or more ways, which reduced both initial investment and po-tential profits—but also greatly reduced risk. A publisher might hope, of course, for lu-crative reprints (on which the author was normally owed nothing). Even bad playswith poor sales might have some value as part of a collected edition (Steele’s The LyingLover is an example). Copyright of all sorts of books was sold and resold among pub-lishers, and split into tiny shares and resold yet again decade after decade.75 With theprice at 1s. 6d., the potential gross from the first edition went up to about ₤90, withsomething on the order of ₤50 as profit. In a few extraordinary instances in the firsthalf of the eighteenth century, publishers paid as much as ₤105 for plays (Cibber’s TheNon-Juror is one instance). Assuming the 1s. 6d. price and 15d. receipts per copy (aftertrade discounts to booksellers), the publisher would have to figure on selling about1,680 copies just to cover the payment to the author. Upwards of 700 more sales wouldbe required to meet costs, so the publisher could not hope to make anything untilabout 2,400 copies had been sold.76

With this background in mind, we may consider what is known of the sale ofcopyright of plays—which is a great deal between 1700 and 1740.77 Anecdotal evi-dence suggests that ₤10 was considered a good price for a play in the reign of Charles II.We know that Dryden, the foremost writer of his time, got ₤20 for Troilus and Cressidain 1679 and 30 guineas for Cleomenes in 1692. For the years 1700–1740, we have pre-cise copyright sale prices for an astonishing eighty-three plays. Prices for mainpiecesin the early years of the century range from a dismal ₤3 10s. for Elkanah Settle’s TheCity Ramble (1711) to ₤107 10s. for Addison’s Cato (1713), a major theatrical triumph.Susanna Centlivre got ₤10 for The Busie Body in 1709. At this time ₤20 was a good pricefor a play, and ₤30 an excellent one; ₤50 was extremely unusual. The average was about₤22 (ignoring the aberration of Cato). Between 1714 and 1737 the average received forforty-seven mainpieces was ₤52, for ten afterpieces just ₤8. Clearly the scale went up,


75. Numerous examples are to be found in volume 3 of the Upcott Collection, British Library,Add. MS. 38,730. For analysis of such publisher-to-publisher deals, see Terry Belanger, “Booksellers’Sales of Copyright: Aspects of the London Book Trade 1718–1768” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,1970); and “Booksellers’ Trade Sales, 1718–1768,” The Library, 5th ser., 30 (1975): 281–302.

76. By way of comparison, we may turn to K. I. D. Maslen’s classic reconsideration of the claim thatthe sensational success of Robinson Crusoe made a ₤1,000 profit for its publisher; see “Edition Quanti-ties for Robinson Crusoe, 1719,” The Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969): 145–50. Maslen demonstrates that asmany as 6,000 copies were sold at a very stiff 5s. price. His figures imply that printing, paper, and stan-dard binding must have cost about ₤665 against total possible receipts of about ₤1,200. This does notallow for purchase of Defoe’s right in his copy, advertising, or overheads. If we assume that Defoe re-ceived ₤50–₤100 (and less is possible), we may deduce that the publisher’s profit was no more than₤400–₤500. Maslen provides figures to show that normal edition quantities for novels actually fellfrom 1,000 before 1750 to 750 and even 500 in the second half of the century.

77. The following comments are digested from Milhous and Hume, “Playwrights’ Remuneration,”esp. 35–43 and Appendix VII.

ranging from as little as 5 guineas for a mainpiece (Lynch’s Independent Patriot in 1737)to a ceiling of ₤105 (though the celebrated Thomas Southerne got a “very extraordi-nary” ₤150 for The Spartan Dame in 1719). That the market for publishing plays im-proved substantially between the 1670s and the 1720s is obvious. Much less evidentuntil the figures are calculated is that on average playwrights were earning approxi-mately one-third of their income from publication, a far higher proportion than onemight expect.78 This continued to be true throughout the eighteenth century. Playswere increasingly profitable to publishers, and some small measure of the gains trick-led down to authors. Playwriting sometimes yielded meaningful sums of money (andrare windfalls), but it was not really a viable means of earning a living. Writers lacking aprivate income or a non-literary profession had, therefore, to seek other ways of mak-ing ends meet.

Prior to 1700, journalism offered minimal possibilities, and cultural journalismalmost none. The appearance of the Tatler in 1709 started to change that. Exactly whatSteele earned is, unfortunately, a matter of guesswork. Richmond P. Bond does an ex-cellent job of combining and analyzing relevant figures, but they take us only so far.79

Costs of comparable periodicals appear to have run in the vicinity of 16s. to ₤1 perthousand copies for printing and paper. The circulation of the Tatler went as high as3,000 copies (though whether it stayed so high is not known). The cost of distributionis unknown, but must significantly have reduced the net on the 1d. retail price. Thegross might have been as high as the ₤37 Bond calculates. If we estimate ₤7–₤9 for pro-duction and half or a third of a penny per copy for distribution, then the net profitwould have amounted to anything from ₤9 to ₤17 per week. How this was divided be-tween the publisher and Steele we do not know. Neither do we know how much Steelepaid Addison and other contributors or who got the money from advertisements. IfBond’s figures and my further guesswork are valid, then authors might have earnedanything from ₤4 to ₤9 per week out of the Tatler, which in the terms we have beencontemplating is quite a lot of money. We must not forget that the imposition of stampduty in August 1712 raised the price of the Spectator by 50 percent and initially at leastreduced circulation “to less than half the number that was usually Printed before thisTax was laid.”80 The big money earned from the Tatler and the Spectator was madefrom the collected reprints that were issued steadily throughout the century. Tonsonand Buckley must have had a shrewd idea of the potentialities for profit: they paid Addison and Steele a startling ₤575 each for outright possession of reprint rights.81

Despite the success of these journals (and that of the Gentleman’s Magazine two


78. Ibid., 39–40.79. Richmond P. Bond, The Tatler: The Making of a Literary Journal (Cambridge, Mass., 1971),

chap. 2.80. Quotation from Steele in No. 555. On the impact of the Stamp Act, see The Spectator,

ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), 1:xxv–xxvii. Four decades later, Johnson is said to havemade 2 guineas for each Rambler essay (₤4 4s. per week); see Saunders, Profession of English Letters,142. His figures cannot be right, since the gross receipts amounted to no more than the author’s allegedfee and would certainly not have covered printing, paper, distribution, and the publisher’s cut.

81. Feather, History of British Publishing, 109.

decades later) periodicals remained relatively few in number and mostly short-lived.Circulation could vary widely. The Craftsman is often said to have had a circulation of10,000, but early in its life it sold about 700; sales did rise as high as 10,000 by 1730(possibly higher); fell to around 4,000 by 1735; and were back down to about 700 by1753, at which time Arthur Murphy was getting a guinea and a half per week as edi-tor.82 Study of Maxted’s figures on periodical publication suggests to me that the im-portance of periodicals to writers’ livelihoods is basically a post-1750 phenomenon.83

We must also remember that the Tatler and the Spectator were the greatest periodicalsuccesses of their century. By way of contrast, we may note that Fielding apparentlyearned 5s. per essay from the Champion in the later 1730s.84 In the 1740s the Westmin-ster Journal advertised for outside submissions “that fill up the whole Space usually al-lotted to Pieces of that Nature,” offering “Half a Guinea” in payment.85 This figurereceives indirect confirmation of a sort in the complaint in the preface of Memoirs ofthe Society of Grub-Street that the Gentleman’s Magazine’s abridgments of essays fromthe weekly papers amount to unfair appropriation of ma terial that had cost the news-papers some twenty guineas in “Copy-money”—that is, about half a guinea per issue,at least on average.86

Before ending this brief survey of what authors earned from sale of book copy-right and journalism, I need to call attention to some complexities in the realms of top-icality, contractual possibilities, and secret subsidy. A fine example in all three areas isJohn Philips’s Cyder, published by Tonson in January 1708.87 Philips’s poem celebratesthe 1707 Union with Scotland and was written as a piece of Tory political propagandaunder the patronage of Robert Harley. Tonson (a staunch Whig, but a man with an eyeto the main chance) paid a startling ₤40 for the poem and the contract specifies that ifthere is a second edition Philips will receive another ₤10. In addition to this very hand-some cash payment, he received one hundred large-paper presentation copies (proba-bly bound in calf ) and two luxury dedication copies bound in Turkey leather. Howthese copies were deployed and with what advantage to Philips we can only guess, butthe financial and sociopolitical benefits were probably considerable. Pellicer specu-lates (plausibly, I believe) that this amazingly generous contract was funded not byTonson but by Harley or his allies: Tonson provided a respectable front for a piece of


82. See Lord Bolingbroke, Contributions to the Craftsman, ed. Simon Varey (Oxford, 1982),xiii–xiv.

83. Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades, 1775–1800 (Folkstone, Kent, U.K., 1977), Table 9.84. See Thomas Lockwood, “Fielding and the Licensing Act,” Huntington Library Quarterly 50

(1987): 379–93. His source is Old England, 3 September 1748.85. Reprinted in Letters from the Westminster Journal (London, 1747), no. 4 (19 December 1741). I

owe this reference and the next to the generosity of Thomas Lockwood.86. Memoirs of the Society of Grub-Street, 2 vols. (London, 1737), 1:xiii. The writer (Russell?) com-

plains further that by publishing his magazine as a pamphlet, Cave avoided the “Stamp-duty,” morethan ₤200 of which had been paid by the source journals. At 6d. for a pamphlet of “three sheets and ahalf,” Cave gave the public greater “quantity” and “variety” than “any Book of the kind and price.”

87. For this illustration I am indebted to Juan Christian Pellicer, “Harleian Georgic from Tonson’sPress: The Publication of John Philips’s Cyder, 29 January 1708,” The Library, 7th ser., 7 (2006): 185–98.

political propaganda. Philips was a distinguished imitator of Virgil in Miltonic blankverse, not a political hack writer. He was, however, apparently a pen available for (dis-creet) hire. The secret service records for 1705 indicate a payment to him of “[o]nehundred Pounds, as Our Royall Bounty for writing a Poem in Blank Verse, on the Bat-tle of Blenheim.”88 What authors gained from their writing was not always the copy-right payment alone. The fact remains, however, that just as proprietors made most ofthe money out of theaters, booksellers were the principal beneficiaries of publication.

� Ultra-Elite Culture: Opera and PaintingOpera and painting provide a sharp contrast to other forms of elite culture. Operawas expensive to produce and expensive to attend. From 1708, it was increasinglyaimed at a very small group of potential customers. At times it generated huge cashflows and attracted extravagant patronage, but the beneficiaries were a few principalsingers. Early-eighteenth-century opera companies collapsed with monotonousregularity. Opera impresarios may have had high hopes, but they signally failed toexploit their performers. Painting was a solo rather than a group activity, and veryhard for an English person to break into, but even at the bottom reaches of the pro-fession, paintings were ferociously expensive. This fact notwithstanding, only a fewpainters found the profession lucrative.

In the late seventeenth century, “opera” meant “semi-opera,” done by the regu-lar theater companies in English with spoken dialogue. The Dryden-Davenant-Shadwell musicalized version of The Tempest (1674) was probably the most popularshow of its time. Purcell’s Prophetess, King Arthur, and Fairy-Queen (1690–92) wereextremely elaborate productions that severely strained the finances of the UnitedCompany. The reported costs of the major semi-operas ranged from ₤800 to ₤4,000.Since the usual annual receipts of the Duke’s and United Companies totaled around₤10,000, this represented quite incredible investment in a very small number of ex-travaganzas.89 Admission prices were apparently doubled at the time of premiereand raised by a shilling for revivals. Semi-operas were a special treat, probably givenonly a few times each season. Whether they were worth the cost and risk may bequestioned, but acting company profits could pay for them and they were per-formed by the company’s usual actors, supplemented with extra singers, dancers,and musicians.

The popularity of Italian opera on the Continent and the success of all-sungoperas in English mounted at Drury Lane in 1705 and 1706 led Vanbrugh to engi-neer the union of 1708, which gave him an opera monopoly at the Haymarket. Hiscompany went broke in less than four months that spring.90 Principal singers tried


88. The National Archives, T/48/17, fol. 3 (cited by Pellicer).89. On the scope, nature, and cost of such semi-operas, see Judith Milhous, “The Multi-Media

Spectacular on the Restoration Stage,” Shirley Strum Kenny, ed., British Theatre and the Other Arts,1660–1800 (Washington, D.C., 1984), 41–66.

90. For extensive documentation and analysis, see Vice Chamberlain Coke’s Theatrical Papers,1706–1715, ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (Carbondale, Ill., 1982).

to demand as much as 700 guineas, and he wound up paying four principals ₤400 ormore each for a total of only twenty-nine or possibly thirty performances. Aftertwenty-three performances Vanbrugh had received ₤2,943, spent ₤4,090, and lost₤1,147—a sum he absolutely could not afford.91 Later companies fared little better.Experience proved that an opera company could perform only twice a week, so fortyto fifty performances per season were as many as could be hoped for. Because priceshad to be stratospheric, the audience was of necessity ultra elite, so it comprised rela-tively few people, who came again and again. They tended to get tired of a show aftersix or eight performances, which necessitated a steady stream of expensive new pro-ductions. Vanbrugh’s successors in opera management decided that the answer wasto import superstar castratos, who did attract customers but also demanded un-precedented salaries. Nicolini came to London in 1708. As of 1709 his terms were aguaranteed salary of 800 guineas, plus perquisites and a benefit—an astounding fig-ure when compared with the fraction of that sum earned by top actors for four timesor more the number of performances.92 Even prices with an 8s. top (double the reg-ular theater price) could not bring income into line with costs.

The collapse of the Italian opera company run by Heidegger in 1717 might logi-cally have led to the return of opera to Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and to per-formance in English. The relatively plebian nature of those venues and their patrons,and the presence of George I on the throne, produced a very different result. The RoyalAcademy of Music was granted a charter by the king in 1719 as a for-profit joint stockcompany that attracted a pledged capital upwards of ₤20,000, with a ₤1,000 per annumsubsidy provided by the king himself.93 The venture was conceived at the time of theSouth Sea Bubble and reflected the unrealistic thinking then prevalent among specula-tors. With so much money available, the company made no attempt to contain costs.Prices were raised to half a guinea (10s. 6d.) for pit and boxes and to a dizzying 5s. forbalcony seats. No account books or daily receipts for the venture survive, but recentlydiscovered papers from the committee of directors give us some financial particulars.The directors imagined that they would have a full house every night, and that theycould afford to pay the principal castrato (Senesino) and the leading lady ₤1,500apiece, with seven secondary singers at salaries ranging from ₤300 to ₤1,100.94 Theopera orchestra was expanded from about twenty-one players to thirty-four at salariesthat ran from ₤30 to ₤100 for a projected sixty-night season. (Further details are notgermane to my concerns in this essay.) The cost of the company for the season of1720–21 was probably around ₤14,000, meaning that the venture would have neededto gross some ₤233 per night for sixty nights to break even (or a totally unrealistic ₤350for a forty-night season). Earlier opera companies had a terrible time grossing ₤125


91. Ibid., 97–98.92. Milhous and Hume, “Opera Salaries,” 30.93. The charter was only recently discovered and published. See Judith Milhous and Robert D.

Hume, “The Charter for the Royal Academy of Music,” Music and Letters 67 (1986): 50–58.94. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “New Light on Handel and The Royal Academy of

Music in 1720,” Theatre Journal 35 (1983): 149–67.

per night, and the season rarely extended to forty nights. Management hoped to attractenough subscribers that they would not be dependent on nightly sales. A season sub-scription, then and later, was normally 20 guineas (₤21). The Royal Academy some-times enjoyed packed houses, but inability to keep costs under control led to itsbankruptcy and collapse in 1728, massive capitalization notwithstanding. Little isknown of the finances of the successor company managed by Handel and Heidegger inthe 1730s. It charged similar prices. Chance preservation of box-office reports for a fewnights tells us that it had 170 subscribers in 1731–32 (worth about ₤89 per night on av-erage), but only 140 in 1732–33 (about ₤73 per night), and that for ordinary nights thewalk-in trade could bring as little as ₤54 7s.95

The crux of the problem was the cost of what appealed to the nobility andgentry versus the number of them able and willing to pay what the opera companyneeded to charge. David Hunter has argued convincingly that in the time of Handelno more than thirteen hundred families in all of England were sufficiently wealthy tobe able to afford even one season subscription.96 Some did not live in London andrarely or never went there; some were evidently not so enamored of opera as to bewilling to pay ₤21 a season (let alone more for spouse and children). For ₤50 onecould buy a more than decent coach. Today we might ask whether a couple wouldrather buy a Honda Civic or have a season subscription to the opera. Those alreadydriving a Rolls Royce (or even a mere Mercedes) might well opt for opera—or forrace horses, private jets, or African safaris.

Italian opera kept dying and getting resuscitated in London during the eigh-teenth century. Opera was glamorous; the price made it socially exclusive; and it at-tracted a clientele quite different from that at the other theaters. Huge sums ofmoney flowed into opera companies—and out again. On the Continent, opera wasusually mounted in a court theater, heavily subsidized by the local prince or duke. InLondon, the entrepreneurial model never worked for any length of time. The wonderis that hope sprang eternal in managers’ breasts: social cachet and the enormous in-come stream blinded undertakers to the non-viability of the enterprise. In sharpcontrast to publishing and theater, opera companies benefited their principalsingers, not their proprietors.

Painting was a totally different kind of enterprise and an even more exclusiveone. Opera could be enjoyed occasionally as a treat by those willing to spend 10s. 6d.for a single ticket (or for 5s. by those prepared to sit among hoi polloi in the gallery).Buying paintings was definitely the privilege of those with substantially more dis-posable income. Purchasing or commissioning art does take us beyond the realms of


95. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Box Office Reports for Five Operas Mounted byHandel in London, 1732–1734,” Harvard Library Bulletin 26 (1978): 245–66. For a more general ac-count of the venture, see Robert D. Hume, “Handel and Opera Management in London in the 1730s,”Music and Letters 67 (1986): 347–62.

96. David Hunter, “Patronizing Handel, Inventing Audiences: The Intersections of Class, Money,Music, and History,” Early Music 28 (2000): 32–49. Hunter’s groundbreaking article is one of the fewserious attempts at analyzing the impact of economics on culture in this period.

theater and publishing explored in this essay—but public exhibition of art in themodern sense was a thing of the future. The Royal Academy of Arts was not foundeduntil 1768, and its famous Summer Exhibitions were to evolve from its original func-tion as a school. During the period under consideration here, art had to be bought orprivately viewed.

This is not the place for an extensive survey of painters’ fees and incomes, asubject still in need of systematic investigation. Happily, several scholars have re-ported enough particulars to give us a fairly good idea of the spectrum of prices,which range from steep to mind-boggling.97 In the 1670s Lely charged ₤60 for a por-trait. As of 1703 Kneller was getting ₤50 for a whole-length, ₤30 for a three-quarter,and ₤15 for a bust, but by 1706 he had raised his prices to ₤60, ₤30, and ₤15 with thenew kit-cat size at ₤20. Dahl got ₤21 10s. for a half-length in 1711. Around 1720Richardson was charging 20 guineas for a three-quarter and 10 for a bust; by 1730 hehad upped his fees to 70 guineas for a whole-length, 40 for a three-quarter, and 20 fora bust. We are talking here of commissioned originals from distinguished artists. In aletter of 23 March 1741 Joseph Highmore wrote to a friend that “the price of a Copyis allways half that of an original,” adding that he had not painted originals “underthe rates of 10, 20, and 40 guineas for heads, half lengths, and whole lengths theseeighteen years.”98 Copies were usually executed mostly or entirely by studio assis-tants, though Highmore adds, “I do every thing myself, which I believe is not true ofone painter in England besides [himself].” Pictures resold at auction (whether im-ported or locally executed) tended to vary widely in price.99

Prices spiraled upward during the eighteenth century. As a beginner in the early1740s, Reynolds got just ₤7 for two busts, but by 1761 he was demanding 100 guineasfor a whole-length, 50 for a three-quarter, and 20 for a bust. In 1764 his price went upto 150, 70, 50 for a kit-cat, and 30 for a bust. By the later 1770s he had raised his fees to200 guineas for a whole-length and 50 for a bust. In 1790 he wrote to Sheridan that awhole-length with two children would be 300 guineas. Gainsborough started out inthe 1740s charging three to five guineas per bust, but by 1787 was charging 160 guineasfor a whole-length, 80 for a three-quarter, and 40 for a head. History paintings tendedto be considerably more expensive than portraits. Reynolds reportedly received 1,500guineas for The Infant Hercules (bought by the Empress of Russia), and his oil sketchfor the Nativity of 1779 for the New College window brought him 1,200 guineas fromthe Duke of Rutland.


97. The figures that follow are drawn except as noted from two valuable modern studies: David Mannings, “Notes on Some Eighteenth-Century Portrait Prices in Britain,” British Journal forEighteenth-Century Studies 6 (1983): 185–96 (see esp. 187 and 192); and Iain Pears, The Discovery ofPainting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1660–1768 (New Haven, Conn., 1988).

98. Letter to James Harris, part of the Malmesbury Collection (9M73) in the Hampshire RecordOffice. I owe this reference to the kindness of Donald Burrows.

99. See Pears’s Table 1 (Discovery of Painting, 218–25) for statistics on 545 paintings by 122painters that fetched more than ₤40 at auction between 1711 and 1759. Only one of the paintings wasby an Englishman.

Lower-end prices were far less dizzying. Pears reports that Brook (a local painterin Bury) got ₤8 12s. for three portraits in 1716, and Mrs. Brown (a rare female painter)₤8 12s. for two half-lengths and a three-quarter in 1717. Even these sums would havebeen out of the reach of most of the population, special indulgence or no. Prices out-side London and Bath run to a completely different scale: even at mid-century Man-nings reports 2 guineas for a head and 6 for a small full-length—this from the youngRomney. More figures for journeymen painters working in London would be good tohave, but we get some idea of the possibilities from the wonderfully detailed accountspreserved for Arthur Pond (1701–1758), printed in full by Louise Lippincott. Pond wasa painter, agent, dealer, restorer, collector, and printseller. His income from portrait-painting varied wildly, but was sometimes upwards of ₤300 per annum and reached₤372 in 1749. Over fifteen years his prices drifted higher. In 1734 he was getting 6guineas for a head in oil; by 1748 he was getting 10. His price for a full-length wentfrom 16 guineas in 1738 to 35 in 1748. Lippincott’s Table 6 records his income frompainting, costs, profit, and living expenses—the last item often more than his prof-its.100 Not enough people wanted his portraits, and he maintained the pretentiouslifestyle appropriate to a would-be society painter out of his considerable earnings fromhis other activities. On a couple of occasions his gross annual income exceeded ₤1,000.We cannot suppose that Pond was typical of anything. He was a successful and highlyprosperous man, but not more than a mildly successful painter. In the 1730s, however,he was charging almost half an opera subscription for a single kit-cat crayon head.

We get a slightly different sense of the situation if we look at Hogarth, a sensation-ally successful artist who was both painter and engraver. When Hogarth auctioned hispaintings in 1745, Horace Walpole bought a small portrait for only 5 guineas, but Har-lot brought ₤88 4s. and Rake a dazzling ₤184 16s. Strolling Actresses fetched 26 guineas,Four Times of Day ₤127 1s., Danae 60 guineas.101 The total proceeds were nearly ₤500,but Hogarth was not pleased. Back in 1731–32 the Harlot subscription was “over₤1500,” and “by 1735, with the Engravers’ Act, he was secure and could live off thecontinuing sale of old prints as well as new subscriptions and topical prints.”102 This il-lustrates the growing potentialities of a less-than-elite market. Back in 1724 at a timewhen “there were no laws protecting the artist,” Hogarth had issued his Masqueradesand Operas engraving at 1s. and promptly found himself undersold by pirates at 6d. In1745 his topical engraving of Lovat “probably sold upwards of 10,000” at 1s. and “earnedupwards of ₤300” in a few weeks (after costs and dealer discounts).103 Hogarth, of


100. Louise Lippincott, “Arthur Pond’s Journal of Receipts and Expenses, 1734–1750,” Walpole Society, vol. 54 for 1988 (1991): 220–333 (a transcript of British Library Add. MS. 23,724 with index);see also her Tables 4 and 7. For a wonderfully helpful analysis of the socio-politics and economics ofhis career, see Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond (New Haven,Conn., 1983).

101. Figures from Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1991–92), 2:229–38. Byway of comparison, note that in the 1730s Sir Robert Walpole paid ₤320 for a Poussin, ₤315 for foursmall Murillos, ₤500 for a Salvator Rosa, ₤700 for one Guido and ₤500 for another, ₤300 for a PalmaVecchio.

102. Ibid., 45.

course, represents the pinnacle of success for engravers in his era. If we look to ArthurPond’s career as a printseller, we find steep expenses, limited sales, and slow return onconsiderable investment.104

Engravings were by no means “cheap,” but they were a way for artists to godownmarket without undercutting single picture prices. By the middle of the eigh-teenth century a growing number of potential customers could pay a shilling per printif they chose to.105 Oil paintings, however, remained out of reach for all but the decid-edly well-to-do—and until the middle of the century they remained very much theprovince of foreign rather than native-born artists.

� PatronagePatronage—principally in the form of subscription publication and governmentjobs—is more important to the economics of cultural production in this period thanperpetual lamentations about the absence of patrons might lead us to expect. The pic-ture we get from most literary historians is essentially that presented by Saunders inThe Profession of English Letters (see n. 44, above). The gist of it is that after 1660 writersrapidly become professionals who make writing their trade and thereby earn their liv-ings. A substantial number of people evidently did eke out subsistence of a sort, butmostly of a precarious Grub Street kind.106 Authors perpetually grumbled about theparsimony of publishers and the lack of generous patrons, a litany of complaints thattends to distract us from reality. A more accurate picture suggests that a very high pro-portion of serious writers with serious cultural ambitions did not earn a living by sell-ing their work to the public. Pope, for example, earned quite normal small sums formost of his work (₤15 here, 30 guineas there). The roughly ₤10,000 he earned fromHomer was the result of the celebrity, social connections, and genteel arm-twistingthat enabled him to peddle several hundred subscriptions at a dizzying 5 and 6 guineaseach.107 Each of the 575 subscribers to the Iliad was paying a tenth of the average an-nual income of one of King’s “Gentlemen in the Liberal Arts and Sciences.” Whetheryou calculate the 6 guineas paid by each subscriber as a relatively modest ₤1,260 or amore generous ₤1,900 in terms of 2005 value, you are looking at a total on the order of₤725,000 to ₤1,000,000 in present-day buying power. This is not a commercial sale: it isa form of patronage bestowed by the nobility and gentry. I emphasize this point be-


103. Ibid. 45, 276.104. See Lippincott, Selling Art, chap. 7.105. Single engravings could sell in sufficient numbers to make substantial profits, and engravers

were better protected by law than authors as of 1735. One might wonder why there were not manymore “series” of scenes published such as those extant for the popular Flora (1729). The answer seemsto be that such series cost about 15s. and hence could not appeal to a mass market; see Judith Milhous,“Gravelot and Laguerre: Playing Hob on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage,” Theatre Survey 43(2002): 148–75.

106. For two of the best accounts of “professional writing” in the first half of the eighteenth cen-tury, see Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London, 1972); and Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740:“Hackney for Bread” (Oxford, 1997).

107. For detailed analysis of Pope’s net gains, see Foxon, Pope and the Early-Eighteenth-CenturyBook Trade, 61–63, 99–101.

cause Maynard Mack has suggested that Pope’s contract with Lintot represents “theend of the patronage system,” a crucial step toward the author’s being able to live by po-etry alone.108 Pope’s Homer was very nicely produced, but like his Shakespeare, it waspriced vastly above the level at which it could be sold to the book buying public.109

Luxury subscriptions were one form of patronage; government posts were another. Congreve became a Commissioner for Licensing Hackney Coaches in 1695 at₤100 per annum (basically a sinecure); from 1705 to 1714 he was a Commissioner forWines at ₤200; and from 1714 he collected more than ₤700 a year as Secretary for theIsland of Jamaica, the beneficiary of a special warrant from the Secretary of State allow-ing him “to conduct the office by deputy.”110 Vanbrugh not only became an eminentarchitect but was also appointed Comptroller of the Queen’s Works while still youngand was given a lucrative job in the College of Heralds in 1704 (which he was able tosell in 1725 for ₤2,400).111 Jonathan Swift wept and wailed about being stuck in Dublinas Dean of St. Patrick’s (an English bishopric being what he wanted)—but we must notforget that from 1713 he earned a tidy ₤800 per annum as dean, a sum that made him avery prosperous person indeed, and a writer who never needed to worry about theeconomics of publishing.112 James Thomson worked as a tutor when young, earned aconsiderable amount of money from his early poems, and was given a ₤300 govern-ment sinecure in 1733. He lost it in 1737 when his patron died but was given a ₤100pension by the Prince of Wales in 1738, and in 1746 Lord Lyttelton got him appointedSurveyor-General of the Leeward Islands, a ₤300 sinecure.113 Some kinds of employ-ment were not so above-board. For a number of years Harley paid Defoe at least ₤250(and more probably ₤400) per annum for a variety of services. Defoe was not scrapinga living out of his poems and pamphlets.114


108. Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New York, 1985), 863.109. On the earlier history of subscription sales, see Sarah L. C. Clapp, “The Beginnings of Subscrip-

tion Publication in the Seventeenth Century,” Modern Philology 29 (1931): 199–224, and “SubscriptionPublishers Prior to Jacob Tonson,” The Library, 4th ser., 13 (1933): 158–83.

110. See John C. Hodges, William Congreve the Man (New York, 1941), 53–54, 81–87, 98–99. Addison did far better out of government appointments, but Hodges’s bemoaning “the meagreness ofCongreve’s governmental pay” before 1714 seems overdone (p. 86).

111. See Kerry Downes, Sir John Vanbrugh: A Biography (London, 1987), 236–43; and The Com-plete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, ed. Bonamy Dobrée and Geoffrey Webb, 4 vols. (Bloomsbury,1927–28), 4:169.

112. See Louis A. Landa, “Swift’s Deanery Income,” in James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa, eds.,Pope and His Contemporaries: Essays Presented to George Sherburn (Oxford, 1949), 159–70. The feeshad to be collected, and they did vary. As early as 1700 Swift was given a three-parish living thatbrought in ₤230 per annum (less the generous ₤57 he paid his curate)—a living he kept for life; seeDavid Nokes, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (Oxford, 1985), 37, 63. Thus Swift’s income fromthe Church of England was upwards of ₤1,000 per annum. Landa points out that as of 1742 Swift’sgoods and chattels were valued at ₤10,000. Swift was notably generous in his charitable contributions,but he died a wealthy man.

113. Old DNB and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Thomson had reportedly earned₤1,000 from publication of his poems by 1729, and he got 457 one-guinea subscribers to the Seasons in1730—among them Pope, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, and Edward Young.

114. See J. A. Downie, “Secret Service Payments to Daniel Defoe, 1710–1714,” Review of EnglishStudies, n.s. 30 (1979): 437–41.

We tend to think of “patronage” in terms of commissions, ex gratia paymentsfor dedications or memorial poems, private service, or hospitality (of the sort the Earlof Burlington provided to an inner circle, or that John Gay received from the Queens-berrys).115 The anecdote about Dorset giving Dryden a ₤100 banknote is a fine tale,but strains credulity. Dorset was probably rich enough to make such a gesture, butsuch anecdotes have a way of improving in the telling.116 We possess almost nospecifics about such matters. When Swift writes to Gay that “the usuall dedication-fee” was “20 guinneas,”117 we have no way to guess whether this is pie-in-the-sky orsomething a relatively celebrated writer might hope for. Even 5 guineas would be afairly munificent gift from anyone but a genuinely rich patron: 5 guineas is the equiva-lent of ten top-price tickets to the Royal Opera House today (₤1,750). We know thatpoor old Elkanah Settle sent specially bound copies of sycophantic poems to notablesin the hopes of cadging a gift, but what sort of return such efforts brought is impossibleto say.118 Fake dedications were apparently a dodge of long standing. As early as 1608,Dekker describes in his Lanthorne and Candle-light how “falconers” would put to-gether a pamphlet of poems and have it printed at their own expense, each copy with adifferent name at the head of the epistle dedicatory. Flattered recipients reportedlycoughed up “four or six angels” (roughly ₤2–₤3 at the time).119 Dekker adds that somesharpers would buy up “any old book, especially a sermon or any other matter of divin-ity, that lies for waste paper and is clean forgotten, add a new printed Epistle to it and,with an alphabet of letters which they carry about them being able to print any man’sname for a dedication on the sudden, travel up and down most shires in England andlive by this Hawking.”

I strongly suspect that the real importance of patronage lay not in lordly gifts butin jobs. A court appointment or a semi-sinecure could provide a living. As an exampleat the top of the scale, consider G. F. Handel. Much has been written about his eco-nomic woes and his need to appeal to the middle class, but he was given a ₤200 royalpension by Queen Anne as early as 1713 and by the mid-1720s was the recipient of


115. On patronage of all these sorts, see Dustin H. Griffin, Literary Patronage in England,1650–1800 (Cambridge, 1996). Figures on individual bounty are in short supply.

116. The source is the not particularly reliable Giles Jacob, The Poetical Register: or, the Lives andCharacters of the English Dramatick Poets, 2 vols. (London, 1719–20), 2:16. James M. Osborn is unchar-acteristically uncritical of this anecdote (John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems, rev. ed.[Gainesville, Fla., 1965], 10); James Anderson Winn quotes Dryden’s statement of gratitude for a“most bountiful Present” in his dedication of the “Discourse on Satire” (1693) while wisely avoidingany speculation as to the sum involved (John Dryden and His World [New Haven, Conn., 1987], 435).

117. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1963–65), 3:267.118. Two exemplars were offered for sale (and reproduced in facsimile in the catalogue) at the

John R. B. Brett-Smith sale (Sotheby’s, 27 May 2004), together with notes by Bishop Percy (a formerowner), who recorded that “Mr Saml Johnson has told me that Settle latterly had one Standard Elegy &Epithalamion printed off with the Blanks which he filled up with the name of any considerable personwho either Died or Married in order to extort Money from them or their Families.” Item 527 repro-duces the binding of “A Funeral Poem” on the Earl of Kingston (1713), bound with the Kingston coatof arms and bordered in black.

119. Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year. . .and Selected Writings, ed. E. D. Pendry (1967; reprinted., Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 215–20. I owe this reference to the kindness of Gill Spraggs.

₤600 per annum in personal payments from the royal family.120 A recent and reveal-ing analysis of his bank accounts shows that he managed to accumulate a great deal ofcash, totaling some ₤17,500 (in addition to considerable personal property) by thetime of his death. He died worth about ₤20,000.121 A surprising number of successfulwriters and musicians did in fact obtain a substantial part of their livelihood from gov-ernment posts—and premium subscription publication (definitely a form of patron-age) was of enormous benefit to some of those who had the connections to make itwork for them. This continued to be true for a long time, as Samuel Johnson’s energeticefforts on behalf of unfortunate friends’ subscriptions testifies.

Patronage did exist at lower levels as well as grand ones. One might systemati-cally hang around in spots where one could hope to cadge invitations to dinner withsomeone who maintained a generous table as a form of social sharing (while advertis-ing his own superior status and prestige). Smollett’s description in Humphry Clinker ofhis own Sunday dinners for less fortunate writers probably represents something likethe truth for a slightly later period.122 One disadvantage was the need to tip the greatman’s servants.123 Another instance of non-cash patronage was access to books: in aday before public libraries, many impoverished writers must have relied on booksellersand affluent collectors for the chance to see, use, and sometimes borrow books theycould not afford to buy.

Royal patronage did exist, Handel being a preeminent example of a beneficiary.Charles II’s regular attendance at the public theaters must have been good for business,however frugal his payments (of which detailed records survive in the Lord Chamber-lain’s papers). James II made two ₤20 gifts to John Crowne, apparently as significationsof his pleasure in seeing Sir Courtly Nice and Darius—though these payments areunique in the Lord Chamberlain’s records.124 Recently discovered privy purse recordsshow that George I appears to have attended something like half of the opera perform-ances at the King’s Theatre when he was in London, and he made gifts ranging from20 to 50 guineas to the principal singers for their benefits.125 His ₤1,000 annual sub-sidy for the Royal Academy of Music was only a drop in a very leaky bucket, but it wasa conspicuous public gesture. By the 1720s, however, elite culture in London hadgrown in scale and cost to a point that made any imaginable crown subsidy essentiallyinsignificant.126


120. For a detailed accounting of Handel’s receipt of these royal pensions throughout the rest of hislife, see David Hunter, “Royal Patronage of Handel in Britain: The Rewards of Pensions and Office,”forthcoming.

121. See Ellen T. Harris, “Handel the Investor,” Music and Letters 85 (2004): 521–75.122. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Lewis M. Knapp, rev. Paul-Gabriel

Boucé (Oxford, 1984), 124–33 (J. Melford’s letter of 10 June).123. On this practice, see Saussure, A Foreign View of England, 120. Saussure says that the footmen

were entitled to 1s. each. 124. The National Archives LC 5/148, pp. 64 and 195.125. See Donald Burrows and Robert D. Hume, “George I, the Haymarket Opera Company and

Handel’s Water Music,” Early Music 19 (1991): 323–41.126. For an important account of patronage of several sorts later in the century, see David Stoker,

“Greek Tragedy with a Happy Ending: The Publication of Robert Potter’s Translations of Aeschylus,Euripides, and Sophocles,” Studies in Bibliography 46 (1993): 282–302. Potter was an impecunious

� Some Tentative ConclusionsWhat conclusions can be drawn from this welter of facts, blanks, puzzles, contradic-tions, and methodological difficulties? Lindert and Williamson forthrightly warn theirreaders that all “results” of their important re-jiggings of King and Massie “representworking hypotheses, not firm findings.” I must issue a similar reminder here; we havesome very solid particular facts and figures, but they are radically incomplete, and howfairly they represent the totality of such data can only be guessed at.

I have suggested that consumers of elite culture represented no more than about5 percent of the population, and that most of the consumption must have come in thetop 1.8 percent or so, whose incomes amounted to ₤250 per annum or more. Prices forbooks and theater (not to mention opera and painting) put them out of the reach ofmost of the population. A high proportion of the profits of publishing and theater (ex-cepting opera) went to proprietors, not to authors or performers. Earning ₤200 perannum was possible for a small minority of principal actors, but would have been ex-ceedingly difficult for all but a few authors unless they had other sources of income.Most participants in the creation of elite culture earned incomes that placed them eco-nomically in the bottom half of the middling sort (which is no surprise, but putsperennial complaints in perspective). The theater patent grants of the 1660s (rein-forced by the Licensing Act of 1737) destroyed any possibility of competition amongmultiple theaters, appeal to niche markets, or seeking a broader audience by selling tothose of lower income. They also squelched any hope that the performers might beable to work for their own advantage rather than as hirelings. Rights accruing to au-thors from the 1710 copyright act appear to have been largely nil until the decision inDonaldson v. Becket in 1774 decisively denied publishers’ claim to the purchase ofperpetual copyright.127

Between 1660 and 1740 we can see a gradual shift in elite culture as its focusmoves away from court and aristocracy and toward consumers of the middling sort.This is the cliché, and there is substantial truth in it. We must, however, understand justhow small that middling group remained even at the end of the eighteenth century, letalone at mid-century. Various factors did help expand the pool of potential buyers ofculture, but only very slowly. Improvements in technology eventually made cheaperprinting feasible. Gradual increases in literacy helped book sales. Growth of urbanareas in England led to more printing and more bookshops outside of London: in 1680


parson/schoolmaster who had to beg and borrow money to pay for publishing his impressively sub-scribed translations because he could find no buyer for the copyright. At the age of 67 he received a₤300 prebend appointment at Norwich and a year later a ₤470 living in the area. For Potter, the rewardfor publication was eventually preferment in the church, not profits from sales. I suspect that this well-documented case from the 1760s–1780s represents sociopolitical and economic realities that hadchanged little in the course of the preceding century.

127. On this case, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge,Mass., 1993). Even Donaldson v. Becket did not terminate predatory practices among publishers; seeNancy A. Mace, “Charles Rennett and the London Music-Sellers in the 1780s: Testing the Ownershipof Reversionary Copyrights,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129 (2004): 1–23. Recent schol-arship has proved that concern with “originality” (long held to derive from the 1710 act) actuallyevolved and became important in the mid- and later seventeenth century; see Paulina Kewes, Author-ship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (Oxford, 1998).

only four other cities had a population over 10,000.128 The growth of London itself wasa boon to booksellers and would have been a greater boon to theaters had they notbeen artificially stifled by government decree. We should not, however, assume thatculture had become “middle-class” (whatever that means) by 1740. A look at Massie’sfigures for 1759 provides a blunt reminder that the social strata defined by King hadchanged far less than one might suppose. As late as 1800 male literacy was only about60 percent, and female literacy about 40 percent—and had increased very little in half acentury.129

Much basic investigation remains to be done in relation to incomes, social pat-terns, education, theater, publishing, painting, and music. As more is learned, scholarswill probably confirm some of my findings and emend, improve, or disprove others.Freely acknowledging the possibility of future rethinking, I shall offer three basic observations.

(1)The nature of the cultural market evolved dramatically between 1660 and1740. This observation arises not so much from the questions I asked at the outset asfrom a survey of the evidence reviewed here. The ways in which the production andconsumption of culture changed were almost totally unforeseeable in 1660, and be-cause they were gradual and little recognized by commentators at that time we tendnot to recognize how drastic they really were. In June of 1660, with Charles II newly re-stored to the throne, what would the outlook for elite culture have seemed to be? Ashrewd and ambitious would-be participant in the production of Carolean culturewould almost undoubtedly have started from the assumption that the court would (asalways) be the focus and principal prop of genteel culture in all its forms. Many of theimportant writers would themselves be courtiers like Sidney or Suckling (not writingfor filthy lucre), and those who needed to augment their income would seek patronage.Looking to past models, would-be important writers with serious pretentions mightbe clergymen (Donne), or government functionaries (Milton under Cromwell—notthat Milton would have been seen as important in 1660), or seekers of royal patronage(Spenser). Courtiers who had survived the Interregnum period might expect to oc-cupy favored positions (as Davenant and Killigrew promptly managed to do) or toenjoy the favor of the wealthy and mighty (as Cowley did with the Duke of Bucking-ham). The prompt establishment in 1660 of two theater companies under the namesand protection of the king and the Duke of York seemingly signaled the revival of royaland noble patronage for the arts. Writers, musicians, painters, and dancers might rea-sonably look forward to a new era of fabulous masques lavishly funded by the king andthose seeking his favor. Indeed, had Charles II spent on masques, court theater, paint-ing, and music what he devoted to mistresses, the history of elite culture over the nexthalf century (and possibly far longer) might well have been significantly different.


128. James Raven, “The Economic Context,” in Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 568–82at 572.

129. See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century(London, 1997), 167; and R. S. Schofield, “Dimensions of Illiteracy, 1750–1850,” Explorations in Economic History 10 (1973): 437–54. For a useful discussion of literacy, see Hunt, The Middling Sort,esp. 84–89.

In 1660 a sensible observer would almost inevitably have predicted a return tosomething like the norms of circa 1630, but virtually all assumptions quickly provedfalse, though realization of their falsity was long resisted. The radical decline of thecourt as a center for high culture would have seemed inconceivable in 1660, butWilliam III had no interest whatever in such matters and Queen Anne little more.George I patronized opera, but not English-language entertainments or literature.Even Charles II and James II were huge disappointments: they were kept very short ofmoney and spent their discretionary funds in other ways. Theater was a public enter-tainment, but the patent monopoly (or more precisely duopoly) that Charles II agreedto in 1660 was to have drastic effects on theatrical operations and competition for up-wards of two hundred years. One of these effects was to put playwrights (and their pay)squarely under the thumbs of those who controlled the patents. How drama and the-ater would have evolved if left unregulated is anyone’s guess. In 1660 no one could haveimagined that in future decades theaters would suffer direct competition from orches-tral and vocal concerts, or that huge sums of money would be poured into a (highly un-profitable) stand-alone opera company.

Our cultural observer of 1660 could certainly not have supposed that publishers(who hardly existed in the modern sense) would eventually become central to thefunding of elite culture. In 1660 publishing still seemed to lie permanently in the irongrip of the Stationers’ Company (though unlicensed publishing had flourished in thestormy 1640s), and the market was, in any case, manifestly tiny. What was unforesee-able was the scale of consumption and distribution of culture in the eighteenth century.A large and vital part of Carolean literary culture was scribal, not meant to be printedand widely disseminated.130 Political news-sheets, pamphlets, and broadsides of theCromwell era notwithstanding, in 1660 no one could have dreamed of the world of theDaily Courant (founded in 1702) and its imitators, nor of cultural journals such as theTatler and the Spectator (fl. 1709–1712), let alone the Gentleman’s Magazine (founded in1731 and reaching a circulation of 15,000 by the 1740s).131 Pondering the immensity ofthe changes involved, we must recognize that by about 1710 the world of the court co-terie was increasingly a thing of the past and that elite culture was being purveyed insomething like the modern world of mass media. The changes took place gradually overmany decades, but the rapid rise of daily newspapers created a tipping point.

(2) To try to earn a living as a writer, actor, or musician was a tough proposition.What constitutes “a living” is, to be sure, a matter of definition. Samuel Johnson’s in-come was under ₤100 for the first twenty years of his London career,132 and his ₤10 forclothes and linen, a garret at 18d. per week, and dinner for 8d. (including a penny for thewaiter) makes no allowance for a wife and children. King’s ₤60 per annum average forthose in the Liberal Arts and Sciences implies a very limited lifestyle, but is a sum thatfew hack writers could have hoped to earn. Vanderlint’s ₤500 per annum minimum to


130. For two quite different but ultimately congruent views of this matter, see Robert D. Hume,“‘Satire’ in the Reign of Charles II,” Modern Philology 102 (2005): 332–71; and Harold Love, EnglishClandestine Satire, 1660–1702 (Oxford, 2004).

131. See Plant, English Book Trade, 57.132. Saunders, Profession of English Letters, 143.

live as a gentleman cannot have been achieved by more than a tiny percentage of writersand musicians. By Lindert and Williamson’s reckoning, to earn ₤400 per annum was tobe in the top seven-tenths of 1 percent and to earn ₤100 put a family in the top 5 percent.To earn more than ₤45 per annum put a family in the top 16.5 percent. Such percentagesshould not mislead us. The ₤50 or ₤60 earned from a successful play in the Carolean pe-riod was not bad pay, but nothing like a comfortable London living for a family for ayear—and after the union of 1682, the 1670s must have looked to playwrights like agolden age. The figures for sale of copyright preserved in the Upcott Collection and theLintot notebook suggest that the usual rates remained anything but lavish throughoutthe first half of the eighteenth century. The only really big sums earned by cultural writ-ers were from subscription publication: we should not forget that Lintot paid Pope farmore for the Iliad and the Odyssey than he did in toto for all 149 books by other writersfor which his payments are known.

The incomes of theatrical performers exhibit an acute bifurcation: the majorityrange from the barest subsistence level to modest comfort, but principal performerscould do very well indeed—though only proprietors (and some building-share ownersin the seventeenth century) could be said to have lavish incomes. This is the impressionone gets from fragmentary early records, and it is certainly what we find in 1735–36,when we first have almost complete records of pay and benefits for a whole company.Among the 148 regular employees of Covent Garden Theatre that year, we find just onewho made more than ₤400 (John Rich, the aptly named proprietor). Fourteen morehad total incomes of at least ₤200, and another ten had incomes between ₤100 and₤200. Roughly one-sixth of the company was in the top 5 percent of incomes, nation-ally speaking, though only the proprietor received an income sufficient to live as a“gentleman” in Vanderlint’s terms. Extra income might be earned from fairs or sum-mer theater or strolling. Women might capitalize on their bodies, discreetly or other-wise. Musicians and dancers would typically moonlight as teachers,133 or play atprivate parties. The pay of the house servants was paltry, but many of them probablyhad other jobs and many belonged to two-income families—as did quite a few actors.

Actors in employment could count on a regular income (barring fire or plagueor closure for royal mourning). Writers could not, and their always irregular incomesranged from very marginal (or worse) to lavish. When we consider the buying powerof money between 1660 and 1740, we realize that the few writers, actors, musicians,and painters at the top end of the income spectrum were very well off indeed. The₤1,000–₤2,000 per annum taken home by Wilks, Booth, and Cibber put them in a veryexclusive group. The 1,500 guinea salaries (plus private concerts and gifts) collected bythe opera stars of the 1720s gave them something like the status rock stars enjoy


133. Pepys paid his wife’s music teacher a heady 10s. per song (31 August 1667) but this can hardlyhave been the going rate paid by any but the gentry. The famous eighteenth-century instance of a pros-perous London music teacher is Dr. Burney. In the period at issue a good example is Jean-BaptisteLoeillet, who worked for the opera and theater orchestras but published “Lessons” that he evidentlysold to his society students. He died very comfortably off in 1730 with an estate including an extensivecollection of instruments (ODNB).

today—and made them the subject of obscene poems and envious commentary in thenewspapers.

Most notable writers did not make their livings (let alone their fortunes) by theirpens. Dryden is often regarded as one of the earliest “professional writers,” but weshould remember that he married a woman with a ₤3,000 fortune and enjoyed lucra-tive royal posts for most of his career.134 The ₤200 per annum they were supposed toyield was irregularly paid, but his brother-in-law held a senior exchequer position andhelped Dryden collect most of what was owed him. When he lost his royal patronageafter the revolution of 1688, he was able to capitalize on his position as England’s fore-most man of letters. His translation of Virgil (a subscription publication) broughthim ₤1,200. A lot of work went into that massive volume, but by way of comparisonwe should remember that no other translator except Pope earned such remuneration.In 1714 the learned Lewis Theobald contracted with Lintot to translate the Odysseyinto English blank verse at the rate of ₤2 10s. for every 450 Greek verses (also supply-ing explanatory notes) and “[t]o translate likewise the Satires and Epistles of Horaceinto English rhyme” at the rate of ₤1 1s. 1d. for every 120 Latin lines.135 TranslatingAeschylus’ tragedies was to bring him ten guineas in toto.

Judging the prosperity or poverty of writers, actors, and musicians is doubly dif-ficult because we do not know the scale of their expenses. If we assume that ₤50–₤80per annum was a competence, then quite a few people scratched out a fairly precariousliving. If we accept Peter Earle’s analysis, then we must suppose that anyone with lessthan a ₤200 income was not really living what in later centuries would be thought of asa bourgeois life. Given the tiny print runs and the daily gross of the theaters (whichgenerally operated at under two-thirds of capacity), there was simply not enoughmoney spent on books and theater to generate many such incomes, especially after thepublishers and proprietors had taken their hefty cuts. Occasional success storiesnotwithstanding, few authors consistently made much money by publishing books.James Ralph’s famous “Case” of 1758 is shrill and whiney (“there is no Difference be-tween the Writer in his Garret, and the Slave in the Mines”), but the dismal picture heconveys clearly had a great deal of truth in it. Publishers and managers profited farmore than writers.136 Marjorie Plant’s dour verdict on publishing is borne out by ex-tant figures for this period: “The person who was of no account whatever . . . was theauthor.”137 Large sums were occasionally earned by authors, but for a great many ofthem, writing was less a means of earning a living than a way of helping piece togethera living or supplementing another source of income. As Geoffrey Holmes concluded,“very few poets, dramatists or writers of serious pretension could hope to live prosper-ously by their literary work alone. . .bona fide men of letters usually had to find otherways to support themselves.”138


134. See Winn, John Dryden and His World, Appendix C.135. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 8:301–2.136. James Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession as Trade Stated With Regard to Booksellers, the

Stage, and the Public (London, 1758), quotation at 22.137. Plant, English Book Trade, 68.138. Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State, and Society, 1680–1730 (London,

1982), 32.

(3) Cultural products were punitively expensive for all save a very elite minority.I feel slightly foolish belaboring so obvious and elementary a point, but such insistenceis apparently necessary. Theater historians have faithfully pointed out that the mini-mum cost of admission to Shakespeare’s Globe was probably 1d., whereas after 1660both patent companies charged twelve times that sum—but virtually no effort hasbeen made to analyze the effect of this increase on the size of audience, its social spec-trum, or the economic impact on actors and writers. The very scholarly CambridgeHistory of the Book in Britain for 1557–1695 has little to say about either the cost of producing books or buying them. John Brewer’s admirably wide-ranging survey ofeighteenth-century English culture mentions economics of any sort only occasionallyand casually, and the massive collections on “consumption” that he has co-editedhardly refer to the subjects of cost and money at all.139

I feel compelled to underscore the fact that cultural production and consump-tion can occur only if someone generates the product and someone else buys it. Thecost of production and the availability of discretionary funds to purchase the resultsare therefore not an incidental issue. For those concerned with issues of elite versuspopular culture, the price to the consumer would seem to be fairly critical. These mat-ters also have important implications for the concept of a “bourgeois public sphere”enunciated by Habermas and now in common use. Habermas put heavy stress on in-clusivity and a bourgeois reading public comprising a wide range of classes. Yet wehave good reason to believe that 5 percent represents an upper-end estimate of the pro-portion of the British population circa 1700 who had the money to buy any but thecheapest books.140 This is not the place to spar with Habermas and his followers, but Ihave to say that the economic realities of the time seem to me to cast grave doubt on thereality of his largely hypothetical construct. The plain fact is that items of consumptionthat we have regarded as bourgeois were decidedly elite in the first half of the eigh-teenth century.

Opera and painting were stratospherically expensive; theater was pricey; andbooks of the sort that contained plays and poems were by no means readily affordableby those of “the middling sort.” Cheap books did exist and were widely bought. Blag-den’s statistics show that some 400,000 almanacs per annum were purchased in the1660s, which means that nearly one-third of all households in England acquired one—a startling percentage of those that contained one literate person.141 Large numbers of


139. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination; John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and theWorld of Goods (London, 1993); Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture1600–1800 (London, 1995).

140. This conclusion has been reached in several studies that approach the subject from radicallydifferent angles: by David Cressy in “Literacy in Context: Meaning and Measurement in Early ModernEngland,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, 305–19; by myself in the present essay; and by J. A. Downie in “How Useful to Eighteenth-Century English Studies is the Paradigm of the ‘BourgeoisPublic Sphere’?” Literature Compass 1 (2003): 1–18.

141. See Cyprian Blagden, “The Distribution of Almanacks in the Second Half of the SeventeenthCentury,” Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 107–16. Wholesale prices reported by Blagden vary, but1d.–2d. was common, with known retail prices running 2d. to 7½d.

chapbooks were printed, some of them devotional (“Penny Godlinesses” in Pepys’sterm), some purely for entertainment (Pepys’s “Penny Merriments”). A large numberof chapbooks were practical: cookbooks; gardening books; explanations of bonds, billsof sale, etc. They were distributed in large numbers by the numerous hawkers and ped-dlers (2,500 of whom paid ₤4 for a license in 1697 when Parliament passed a law re-quiring one). As Spufford observes, “These chapbooks really were priced within reachof the agricultural labourer if he could read, and if he desired to.”142 Relatively fewcopies survive: they were printed on cheap stock, and they were used as toilet paper.Poems and plays fall in a totally different category. Their usual minimum price wasthree to six times (and as much as twelve to eighteen times) that of a chapbook. Theprobable print run of most Carolean plays was no more than 500 copies.143 The pricewas relatively steep (₤10–₤22.50 in modern terms?) and the market limited—thoughat 1s. or 1s. 6d. a play quarto was cheap by the standards of a place in the pit or boxes,which ran 2s. 6d. and 4s. respectively.

We are probably safe in assuming that a fair number of Londoners and visitorscould pay a shilling to sit in the gallery of a theater. Far fewer could readily have af-forded a place in the pit or boxes, or so the (emended) scales of income calculated byKing imply. Surviving records strongly suggest that the theaters were rarely anythinglike full, and further that the galleries were not more crowded than the expensive partsof the house. When theaters were altered or rebuilt, the designers did not choose topack in more galleryites in the place of posh customers. We have no reason to believethat management could have improved its gross by catering to cheap-seat customers.Early and late, the theaters provided entertainment for a clientele that could and wouldpay steep prices.

Paintings were so expensive even at the bottom end of the price scale as to be defacto out of reach for all but a minuscule percentage of the population; ₤3–₤6 was not asum even the middling sort could readily spend. When Pepys pays ₤30 for his wife’sminiature, he is committing an extrava gance that should stagger us. Public desire forart is no doubt reflected in the burgeoning market for engravings, which when pricedat 6d. or 1s. were within reach of a vastly larger number of buyers. That this market wasgrowing by the 1730s is evident from the sales enjoyed by Hogarth.

Opera tickets were relatively affordable at one-fortieth the season subscriptionprice for pit and boxes, but surviving figures imply that relatively few people chose tobuy them. Records of cash receipts imply an average of no more than about 150–200buyers most nights, gallery sales included. David Hunter has calculated that onlyabout 12 percent of the families that could afford a season subscrip tion actually paidfor one, commenting wryly on the “relatively low level of market penetration.”144 We


142. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 48, 116.143. McKenzie points out that paper was “the most expensive element” in publishing, “and once

printed not re-usable,” so “it made better sense to test the market with small editions and then to printa work again if demand warranted it.” This leads him to caution us against “drawing inferences abouttotal demand from the number of known editions”; “Printing and Publishing 1557–1700: Constraintson the London Book Trades,” Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 4:553–67 at 556.

144. Hunter, “Patronizing Handel,” 36.

must remember, however, that not all of those families lived in London, or even cameto town for part of the year. I would guess that perhaps 600 or 800 families were in Lon-don enough of the year to consider subscribing, which would put the degree of partici-pation more at the level of 18 to 25 percent. This seems quite high for so expensive anentertainment in a language almost no one under stood, especially given that as a sub-scriber one would see the same shows six, or eight, or even ten or more times.

Increasing interest in music on the part of a broader public is evident by the1690s in the rapidly rising popularity of “music meetings” and the publication of bothcollections of music and single-sheet songs. Printed music aplenty was sold for homeuse, but it tended to be quite expensive.145 Purcell’s operas were a dizzying 30s. (thesame price as Tonson’s Shakespeare of 1709); Eccles’s song collection cost 15s.; themusic of single operas circa 1710 ran 9s. Walsh’s price range ran from 6d. to 9s. with anaverage around 3s.–4s. Songs and dialogues from The Island Princess cost 3s.; “Ayres”from various plays were relatively inexpensive at 1s. 6d. Some effort was made to reacha broader audience. Single songs from Thomyris could be had for a penny in 1708, andnumbers of the Monthly Mask of Vocal Music were priced at just 6d.

The existence of this burgeoning market leads us to an obvious question: whatdid instruments cost for home use? So far as I am aware, singularly little research hasbeen carried out on the economics of the manufacture, sale, and resale of musical in-struments, but Benjamin Hebbert has very generously shared with me some of the ini-tial results of his ongoing investigation of this subject.146 No range of advertised pricesis known; what the cheapest new instruments cost is not recorded, and instrumentsmight be inherited or bought secondhand. Surviving information, however, impliesthat musical instruments would have been decidedly costly for all but a tiny percentageof the population.147 Upkeep for stringed instruments, for example, was not a negligi-ble matter; good quality strings were ferociously expensive.148 For home use, virginals(supplanted by the spinet in the course of the 1660s and 1670s) were particularly ap-pealing for the use of young ladies because after the initial purchase upkeep was low


145. See William C. Smith, A Bibliography of the Musical Works Published by John Walsh . . .1695–1720 (London, 1948), esp. pp. xv and plates 7 and 27 (which reproduce price lists).

146. See Benjamin Hebbert, “The London Music Trade 1650–1725” (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford Unver-sity, in progress). This thesis promises to become an important book.

147. Pepys, for example, bought a bass viol for ₤3 on 21 August 1663 (plus 10s. for carving its head).Viols, violins, spinets, and theorbos of the sort that might have been bought by Playford aficionadosseem to have sold for ₤4–₤6. Fine English bass viols, Cremonese violins, and instruments for profes-sional court musicians tend to range toward ₤12. Decent harpsichords seem to have run ₤12–₤14. Oldinstruments or a fancy theorbo could easily fetch ₤20 but reportedly could go as high as ₤100. Thespinet Pepys bought for ₤5 on 15 July 1668 would have represented a month’s income for one of King’s“Gentlemen Educated in the Sciences and Liberal Arts.” Expensive purchases will inevitably be betterrecorded than cheap ones: we have no way to judge how typical the prices paid by Pepys or the adminis-trators of the Chapel Royal may be.

148. Hebbert informs me that a court musician could expect to spend ₤5 a year on strings and thatThomas Mace charged 10s. for the “first Stringing” of a lute and 5s. a quarter “to maintain each Lutewith Strings.” Mace was at pains to deny the common view that “one had as good keep a Horse (for Cost)as a Lute” (Tho. Mace, Musick’s Monument [London, 1676], 43–44, 46).

and tuning costs might well be absorbed into the cost of a teacher. Harpsichords (espe-cially double manual models) were very costly to maintain.149

Whether concerts represented serious competition for the theaters is not clear,but I suspect not. The late-seventeenth-century theaters provided large amounts ofmusic every night, with a special overture and act-tunes for every play.150 Music couldbe heard free in church or for just 1s. at the cheapest concerts or at inns providing hoursof dance music at the same price. Concerts varied widely in price, but the tonier onestended to be 5s., which was above the top price for a theater ticket. The idea that the riseof oratorios in the 1730s represents a move toward middle-class taste and greater af-fordability than operas must be at least partly wrong. The normal price for oratorios wasexactly the same as for operas (10s. 6d., and 5s. in the first gallery). As Hunter bluntlyand rightly concludes, Handel did not write for the middling sort for the simple reasonthat “they could not afford to attend” performances of his music “except very occasion-ally.”151 Ready access to quality music for the middling sort is probably what drove thepopularity of Vauxhall, founded in the 1660s but radically refurbished and recon-ceived in 1732. Admission was just 1s. (and remained so until 1792); most of the otherpleasure gardens followed suit. Ranelagh was the most expensive at 2s. 6d. (includingcakes and tea).152 The famous statue of Handel that adorned Vauxhall from 1738 wassurely not an accidental choice: the proprietors were advertising an elite product formass consumption.153

We cannot afford to ignore the value of money. Sixpence sounds like nothing,but it is not negligible to anyone who earns 12d. for a day’s labor, and may be significantto someone who earns ₤100 per annum but has a family to support. A price of 5 shillings made a book costly or simply unobtainable for fully 99 percent of the popu-lation. John Brewer rightly points to the importance of Bell’s publishing reprints ofplays, available for 6d. each, and editions of poets’ works for 1s. 6d. in the 1770s and1780s; but when he says that a complete collection of the 109 volumes of poets wasavailable unbound “for a mere eight guineas” he is very misleading.154 The price wasindeed a bargain, but there was nothing “mere” about eight guineas even at the end ofthe eighteenth century. The bottom line is simple: if we are to comprehend the produc-tion and consumption of culture in this or any other period, then we must understandthe economic realities that controlled them.

the pennsylvania state university


149. Detailed figures are printed and analyzed in Judith Milhous and Curtis Price, “Harpsichordsin the London Theatres, 1697–1715,” Early Music 18 (1990): 38–46. In 1706 Drury Lane paid 5s. fortuning each harpsichord (and 2s. 6d. for each spinet).

150. See Curtis A. Price, Music in the Restoration Theatre (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1979).151. Hunter, “Patronizing Handel,” 38–40.152. I am grateful to David Coke for price information. His book on Vauxhall is eagerly awaited.153. See Otto Erich Deutsch, Handel: A Documentary Biography (London, 1955), 456 (and illus-

tration opposite 480). It was executed in white marble by Roubiliac, cost ₤300, and was vigorouslypublicized.

154. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 486.

abstractRobert D. Hume asks four principal questions in this article: (1) Who were the consumers of eliteculture, and what could and would they pay? (2) What could be earned by writers, actors, singers,musicians, painters? (3) Who actually profited from the sale of culture? (4) How did patronage affectthe production of culture? A survey of surviving figures for income strata and the prices paid bybuyers suggests that the consumers of elite culture belonged largely to the wealthiest two percent ofthe population. Analysis of incomes shows that trying to earn a living as a writer, actor, or musicianwas a tough proposition. Patronage turns out to be surprisingly important, but more in terms ofjobs, sinecures, and subscriptions than from individual largesse. Exact equivalencies to modern buy-ing power are impossible to calculate, but scholars need to realize, for example, that in 1709 fullytwo-thirds of the books advertised in the Term Catalogues cost two shillings or less: a five-shillingbook was pricey.


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