The Fiction Earning Patterns of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot and Trollope

Abstract

In this paper the aim is to examine the first-form earnings of the novels of four major mid-Victorian novelists and to draw some preliminary deductions from the patterns and figures which emerge. Underlying a mechanical exercise is the contention that how a novelist is rewarded has a significant relationship to how he writes and the quality of what he writes. Without going much beyond tabular representation of these novelists' production and income one can elaborate four distinct career strategies. And these strategies conform usefully (though not entirely congruently) with the literary–critical judgements which are commonly made about the achievements in fiction of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and Trollope.