To understand both Johnson’s career as an author and his writings about authorship, it can help to situate him in the context of mid-eighteenth-century authorship: who were authors in Johnson’s day? What changes were under way in the conditions and forms of authorship, from the days of Johnson’s first publication in 1735 to his posthumously published piece in 1785? What kinds of literary work were available to them? How were authors regarded by their contemporaries?

A republic of letters

It is commonly suggested that over the course of Johnson’s lifetime authorship was transformed – partly by Johnson’s own example – from ill-paid drudgery, ignominious dependence on a patron, or gentlemanly amateurism to a highly respected and well-remunerated “profession.” Literary historians in recent years focusing on the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century, on the development of a literary marketplace, on the Copyright Act of 1709 and the end of perpetual copyright in 1774, and on the “birth of the modern author” have supported this picture of progress by authors towards “independence.” But these terms have been underdefined, and their loose use distorts the world in which authors worked. The Copyright Act, for example, was regarded in its own day as a “booksellers’ bill”: it protected not an author, who commonly sold his rights, but the bookseller who bought them. The end of perpetual copyright had virtually no effect on new writing. It would be more accurate to say that change was slow and uneven, that authorship took many forms, that some older cultural practices persisted, including patronage and what has been called “scribal culture” (writing but choosing not to print), and that in the closing years of the eighteenth century most authors who sought to print still struggled not only to succeed but also to gain respect.