The emergence of the newly professional author, like the perennially ‘rising’ middle class, has been confidently located in many places and periods. Only in Victorian Britain, however, do we find a significant number of authors themselves claiming the mantle of professional status. Although the secure social and financial standing ideally associated with the traditional professions would remain tantalisingly elusive to all but a few full-time writers, the ubiquity and persistence of these claims reflect significant shifts in authors’ roles in the literary marketplace over the course of the nineteenth century. An age that saw the great flowering of the novel from Dickens to Eliot to Hardy, as well as the appearance of such influential figures as Carlyle, Tennyson and Ruskin, also witnessed the emergence of an ideal of respectable authorial status equidistant from both the ignominy of the Grub Street hack and the unworldliness of the writer as romantic seer. ‘Literature has become a profession’, George Henry Lewes declared in 1847. ‘It is a means of subsistence almost as certain as the bar or the church.’ While chronic financial uncertainty – the chasm concealed by Lewes’s ‘almost’ – continued to define the lives of most of those who wrote for a living, more and more sons and daughters of the educated classes, particularly, nevertheless came to view writing as an entrepreneurial activity as well as an artistic, political or intellectual one, an activity that held out the promise of mending family fortunes, furnishing a respectable career, and even granting, for the lucky few, untold fame and wealth.