“THROW yourself on the world without any rational plan of support, beyond what the chance employ of Booksellers would afford you”!!!
Throw yourself rather, my dear Sir, from the steep Tarpeian
rock, slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you had but five consolatory
minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in
them, rather than turn slave to the Booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars,
when they have poor Authors at their beck. Hitherto you have been at
arm’s length from them. Come not within their grasp. I have known many
authors for bread, some repining, others envying the blessed security of a
Counting House, all agreeing they had rather have been Taylors, Weavers, what
not? rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some to go
mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a
rapacious, dishonest set those booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a
fortune by book drudgery, what he has found them. O you know not, may you never
know! the miseries of subsisting by authorship. ’Tis a pretty appendage
to a situation like yours or mine, but a slavery worse than all slavery to be a
bookseller’s dependent, to drudge your brains for pots of ale and breasts
of mutton, to change your free thoughts and voluntary numbers for ungracious
Task-Work. Those fellows hate us. The reason I
take to be, that, contrary to other trades, in which the Master gets all the
credit (a Jeweller or Silversmith for instance), and the Journeyman, who really
does the fine work, is in the background, in our work
the world gives all the credit to Us, whom they consider
as their Journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and
cheat us, and oppress us, and would wring the blood of us out, to put another
sixpence in their mechanic pouches. I contend, that a Bookseller has a relative honesty towards Authors, not like his honesty
to the rest of the world. B[aldwin], who
first engag’d me as Elia, has not paid me up yet
(nor any of us without repeated mortifying applials), yet how the Knave fawned
| 1823 | “WELCOME, DEAD TIMBER” | 595 |
Yours truly,
Please to direct to me at India Ho. in future. [? I am] not always at Russell St.
