Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850Various
History
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
Much more might be said of the relations between publishers and authors,
but we are compelled to economize our space. The truth, indeed, as
regards the latter, is simply this: It is not so much that authors do
not know how to make money, as that they do not know how to spend it.
The same income that enables a clergyman, a lawyer, a medical
practitioner, a government functionary, or any other member of the
middle classes earning his livelihood by professional labor, to support
himself and his family in comfort and respectability, will seldom keep a
literary man out of debt and difficulty--seldom provide him with a
comfortable well-ordered home, creditable to himself and his profession.
It is ten to one that he lives untidily; that every thing about him is
in confusion, that the amenities of domestic life are absent from his
establishment; that he is altogether in a state of elaborate and costly
disorder, such as we are bound to say is the characteristic of no other
kind of professional life. He seldom has a settled home--a fixed
position. He appears to be constantly on the move. He seldom lives, for
any length of time, in the same place; and is rarely at home when you
call upon him. It would be instructive to obtain a return of the number
of professional writers who retain pews in church, and are to be found
there with their families on Sundays. There is something altogether
fitful, irregular, spasmodic in their way of life. And so it is with
their expenditure. They do not live like other men, and they do not
spend like other men. At one time, you would think, from their lavish
style of living, that they were worth three thousand a year; and at
another, from the privations that they undergo, and the difficulty they
find in meeting small claims upon them, that they were not worth fifty.
There is generally, indeed, large expenditure abroad, and painful
stinting at home. The "res angusta _domi_" is almost always there; but
away from his home, your literary man is often a prince and a
millionaire. Or, if he be a man of domestic habits, if he spends little
on tavern suppers, little on wine, little on cab hire, the probability
is, that he is still impulsive and improvident, still little capable of
self-denial; that he will buy a costly picture when his house-rent is
unpaid; that he will give his wife a guitar when she wants a gown; and
buy his children a rocking-horse when they are without stockings. His
house and family are altogether in an inelegant state of elegant
disorder; and with really a comfortable income, if properly managed, he
is eternally in debt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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