In the 1820s and 1830s, a new type of publication, designed for predominantly female middle-class audiences with leisure and money to spare, precipitated an unusual power-struggle in the field of illustrated literature. Gift-books and annuals were highly stylised, well-bound, affordable, mass-produced items of conspicuous consumption, designed as gifts for young women; their primary attractions to the purchaser lay in the proliferation of poems, stories and essays by famous authors, and increasingly on the availability of high-quality engravings. [1] A power-struggle in the publishing arena subsequently materialised owing to various elements of production practices and technological developments that challenged traditional modes of book production. Lower production costs and the ability to mass-produce texts, thanks to the inventions in the early 1800s of stereotyping, the Fourdrinier paper-making machine and the power-press, drove down the cost of books for the middle-class consumer. [2] In addition, the development in London of steel-plate engraving—which allowed for thousands more prints from a single plate than copperplate engraving—meant that publishers in this field could look to produce publications at a greater rate than artists and writers could supply material. The engravings began to dictate production practices, as it became clearer to gift-book editors that it was the illustrations that were driving demand and effecting profit. Authors had traditionally viewed themselves as the primary source of literary production, but were now being asked to ‘illustrate’ images that had been pre-commissioned by editors, leading inevitably to a tension between author and gift-book editor. As this paper will argue, the rise of the gift-book in the late 1820s precipitated a fundamental shift in the role of the author in the production of popular literature, particularly with regard to illustrated fiction. This phenomenon can be exemplified by a comparison between contributions made to the gift-books by Sir Walter Scott and his friend James Hogg.

Scott and Hogg are an interesting pairing when considering their chosen literary profession: while they were firm and loyal friends, their relative social and celebrity status dictated very different attitudes towards a publishing genre that threatened, to some degree, to level the playing field regarding their printed work. An examination of their illustrated contributions to the gift-books and annuals reveals the complexity of the literary and engraving trades at a significant point of flux. The 1820s and early 1830s saw a professionalisation of authorship, publishing practices, and the engraving process, which was in part sparked and driven by the introduction of the gift-book to the literary market. Scott himself acknowledged the impact that the gift-book, introduced by Rudolph Ackermann’s Forget Me Not in November 1822, had on popular publishing and readership. His introduction to his gift-book stories, written in 1831 and published posthumously, outlines the popularity of the annuals, and emphasises the attraction of the engravings:

The species of publication which has come to be generally known by the title of ANNUAL, being a miscellany of prose and verse, equipped with numerous engravings, and put forth every year about Christmas, had flourished for a long while in Germany before it was imitated in this country by an enterprising bookseller, a German by birth, Mr. Ackermann. The rapid success of his work, as is the custom of the time, gave birth to a host of rivals, and, among others, to an Annual styled The Keepsake, the first volume of which appeared in 1828, and attracted much notice, chiefly in consequence of the very uncommon splendour of its illustrative accompaniments. [3]

Scott’s willingness to participate in this highly visual and consumer-driven trade was at odds with some of his ‘higher-minded’ contemporaries’. As Laura Mandell has argued, the gift-books were largely responsible in the 1820s for creating a bourgeois aesthetic that competed with and countered the pre-existing dominance of canonical Romantic poetry, represented most assertively by Byron and Scott himself. [4] However, just as Scott bowed to the inevitable in acknowledging Byron’s superior marketability in poetry by turning to the novel, so he bowed to the inevitable shift in public taste towards the commodification of literature through the gift-books. Consequently, he earned substantial cash, while achieving increased public exposure at a time following the 1826 financial crash when he most needed it.

Hogg, by contrast, was initially delighted to have found a reliable source of income, which simultaneously satisfied his desire to experiment with genre and authorial voice. At a time when Hogg, like Scott, was struggling financially, the gift-books offered remuneration at a competitive and regular rate, particularly given the abundance of titles that Ackermann’s Forget Me Not triggered. Writing to Ackermann in 1827, Hogg says that ‘I am a poor man and never pretend to write for nothing, as I cannot afford it; but I leave always the equivalent to the pleasure of the publishers of the periodical works, whom I have never found ungratefull [sic] if my name and contributions proved of advantage to them’. [5] Hogg’s attitude to the gift-book culture, therefore, was one of a professional writer grateful for work. As time progressed, however, editors would take greater liberties with such authors, and the illustrations to these works would become an increasingly restrictive element to their creative licence.

Scott and the ‘Toyshop of Literature’

Scott’s and Hogg’s attitudes towards the gift-books and their editors were very different, largely because of their relative celebrity status. Scott’s hand was almost coerced into involvement with these publications because of his financial difficulties and his desire to recruit some of the artists and engravers for the Magnum Opus edition of his novels. Remuneration from the annuals and gift-books was an attractive, but far from definitive, criterion for his involvement. His interaction with the editors of the Keepsake, for example, sheds light on the benefits and drawbacks that more celebrated authors encountered with this genre. An entry in his Journal for 30 January 1828 records a personal approach from Charles Heath, who offered him the editorship of the Keepsake:

His [Heath’s] object was to engage me to take charge as Editor of a yearly publication calld the Keepsake, of which the plates are beyond comparison beautiful. […] He proposed £800 a year if I would become Editor, and £400 if I would contribute from 70 to 100 pages. I declined both but told him I might give him some trifling thing or other. […] the pecuniary view is not flattering though these gentlemen meant it should be so. But one hundred of their close printed pages, for which they offer £400, is not nearly equal to one volume of a novel for which I get £1300 and have the reversion of the copyright. [6] [my emphasis]

This entry reveals not only the nature of the Keepsake, but Scott’s attitude towards it, his awareness of the value of his own work in the marketplace, and his willingness to participate in the project to meet his own purposes. His comment on the quality of the engravings highlights the pre-eminence given to the illustrations in these publications. For Scott, the editorship of such a publication was not a worthwhile exercise: while it would have provided a steady income, it was not a project with which he was willing to associate himself too closely. Over breakfast at Abbotsford the next day, he agreed with Heath and his partner, Frederick Reynolds, to contribute one hundred pages at £500 (a vast sum of money for a gift-book contribution), and he thus earned much needed cash while maintaining a respectable distance from the ‘Newsyear gift book’. [7]

Scott’s reluctance to engage fully in the gift-book franchise becomes apparent through the manner of work he sent to the editors. He was generally content to send material he had written years earlier that had been rejected by publishers or short stories and poems that took the minimum amount of time and energy for the maximum reward. His son-in-law J. G. Lockhart confirms this view:

The result was that Mr Heath received, for L.500, the liberty of printing in his Keepsake the long-forgotten juvenile drama of the House of Aspen, with Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, and two other little tales, which had been omitted, at Ballantyne’s entreaty, from the second Chronicles of Croftangry. But Sir Walter regretted having meddled in any way with the toyshop of literature, and would never do so again, though repeatedly offered very large sums—nor even when the motive of private regard was added, upon Mr Allan Cunningham’s lending his name to one of these painted bladders. [8]

Lockhart’s antipathy seems to be projected towards the gift-books’ heavily illustrated (painted) presentation; however, his vitriol towards the gift-book genre here was personally motivated (as was often the case), and a little disingenuous. An anonymous article in The Bookseller of 1858, entitled ‘The Annuals of Former Days’, reveals that Lockhart himself not only failed in a bid to establish his own literary gift-book, but that his failure was partly owing to his open aversion to illustration: ‘One of the most bitter revilers of annual publications was the late John Gibson Lockhart. He had made an unsuccessful attempt to establish one himself, which should depend for its success altogether on its literary merits; for it was coarsely printed, and professed to exclude engravings, upon principle’. [9] Lockhart had successfully and anonymously contributed another illustrated piece to The Literary Souvenir, entitled ‘Epistle from Abbotsford’, a romanticised and highly visual tour of the deceased Scott’s home (a preamble to the hagiographic Life), and was therefore very familiar with the gift-books’ reliance on illustration. However, Lockhart’s inability to swallow his considerable pride and ‘buy into’ the visual nature of the gift-books foiled his project for one of ‘literary merits’, signifying a shift away from the author within the publishing hierarchy; by contrast, Scott’s willingness to engage with the media of popular mass-culture (and to swallow his pride) made him a much more attractive and lucrative prospect for editors, particularly given the weight his name would add to their publication.

Lockhart’s personal aversion, therefore, clearly leads him to overstate Scott’s antipathy towards the gift-books, but the latter did nevertheless feel that a certain public distance was necessary from a publication which was, by its nature, populist. He was also concerned about retaining control over his work: he notes in his Journal for example, following an offer from the booksellers Saunders and Otley of between £1500 and £2000 per annum to undertake a similar editorial role, that his main object was to ‘clear my debts and that is to be done by writing things of which I can retain the property’. [10] While the gift-books and keepsakes did afford Scott quick and ready cash at a time when he was attempting literally to write off his debts, they could not supplant his main cash cow, namely new and reprint editions of the Waverley novels; he writes, for example, that ‘[e]ach novel of three volumes brings £4000 and I remain proprietor of the mine when the first ore is cropd out’. [11] His eventual divorce from the gift-book industry was precipitated a year later in 1829 by an argument with Heath. Heath had been recruited as an illustrator for one of the volumes of the Magnum, but he incurred Scott’s indignation when he suggested that he be repaid for his services not with cash but with a new contribution for his Keepsake. Scott’s Journal entry for 27 February 1829 reveals his irritation, and his attitude towards the kind of work he was happy to supply to the gift-books:

The last post brought a letter from Mr. Heath proposing to set off his engravings for the magnum opus against my contributions for the Keepsake. A pretty mode of accounting that would be—he be damnd—I wrote him declining his proposal and as he says I am still in his debt I will send him the old drama of the House of Aspen which I wrote some thirty years [ago] and offerd to the stage. […] There are several manuscript copies of the play abroad and some of them will be popping out one of these days in a contraband manner. [12]

This strategy of sending old or sub-standard material for quick rewards was a way for Scott to maintain a relationship with the various editors of the keepsakes without muddying his hands too much in the mechanics of popular printing and publishing. It also allowed him to maintain a profile with precisely the audience that he and Robert Cadell were targeting with the Magnum, a publication that closely followed the physical format and production practices established by the gift-books.

It is important, however, to note that despite his antipathy, Scott did not completely disregard this industry. The popularity of the gift-books and annuals, and their potential to propel production and sales of the Magnum, mitigated against him wiping his hands clean of them. Despite his clear distaste for Heath and what he represented, the Keepsake had been a useful exercise in associating the ‘Author of Waverley’ with popular illustrated literature at a time during which he and Cadell were pushing their new edition of the Waverley novels. The use of artists and engravers who were popularly associated with such publications was a deliberate strategy of linking the annuals with the new collected edition in the readership’s consciousness. This is most explicitly articulated through his interaction with the artist Abraham Cooper: in 1828, Cooper sent Scott an illustration requesting some ‘lines’ to accompany it for publication in Thomas Hood’s Gem. This was an unusual situation for Scott, who was typically used to being illustrated, but he made an exception for Cooper, writing a poem called ‘The Death of Keeldar’, with a proviso outlined in a letter to the artist:

I avail myself of the opportunity which this gives me to present Mr Cadell of Edinburgh bookseller & publisher. He has in hand an extensive literary undertaking in which he is desirous of procuring decorations from the best artists and would feel his plan much defective if he had not two or three sketches from Mr. Cooper. I will be much obliged by you suffering [him] to explain his plan to you in which I take a very near interest. [13]

Cooper would produce some of the first illustrations for the Magnum in 1829, providing continuity in the public consciousness between the gift-books and Scott’s new anthology.

Fig. 1. Abraham Cooper, The Death of Keeldar, for the ‘Gem’ of 1829, edited by Thomas Hood

Scott’s interactions with the gift-book editors signal a changing relationship between author and publisher: the author is being asked to produce work at a greater frequency, to deadlines, for smaller rewards, for mass-proliferation, in works that were essentially often incoherent collections of literary and artistic paraphernalia. Owing to the emphasis placed on the illustration and engraving processes, the costs of which far exceeded the cost of an author’s contribution, even Scott became subject to the public consumption of popular illustrated literature. In resistance to this power-shift, Scott refused to commit new or original work: instead, he was happy to send the editors old cast-offs and second-rate pieces, which had the useful effect of maintaining a profile in the gift-book culture at little inconvenience to himself, in order to promote more pressing publishing concerns. The Magnum Opus, therefore, bears the traces of the gift-books’ highly ‘painted’ presentation, while Scott simultaneously distanced himself publicly from the ‘vulgar’ mass-production of illustrated literature.

James Hogg and Editorial Censorship

In contrast to Scott, James Hogg was very happy to have found a medium that offered regular (if not always reliable) income—a medium that encouraged him to explore his full range of narrative experimentation. As Janette Currie has pointed out, ‘Hogg could never demand the outlandish sums that were offered to Scott or Wordsworth, and the promise of lucrative rewards from editors keen to have his name on their list did not mean that actual payments were always high’. [14] Nonetheless, the annuals did provide him with ready cash for work which, by his own confession, could be produced quickly. Hogg’s most regular correspondent regarding the keepsakes was Thomas Pringle, editor of Friendship’s Offering and former partner of William Blackwood, Hogg’s primary publisher. In a letter to Pringle of 27 November 1828, he can barely conceal his relief at the prospect of regular income:

I have recieved [sic] from you first £5= and then £5= more which is surely far too much […] But so perfectly am I confounded by the number of annuals that if take me book sworn at this moment I do not know which is your’s and which I have wrote for and which not! But as you will likely know I got £6=1= from Ackerman by return of post after the M.S. reached him £5= from another I have forgot who £25=4= from a music publisher and Allan Cunningham has debited himself with other £25= [15]

Like Scott, Hogg had found himself in a difficult financial situation, while in addition he was finding it difficult to find publishers for his poetry. Ironically, this was in part owing to the success of the gift-book phenomenon: as Lee Erickson has pointed out, these books competed directly with poetry in the 1820s, and publishers were beginning to find that traditional volumes of poetry could no longer contend with a publication that offered its readers poems, short stories, extracts from the latest novels, and high-quality engravings. [16] The gift-books in fact catered perfectly to Hogg’s gift for diversity: diversity of genre, diversity of authorial voice, and diversity of subject matter. Most importantly, however, Hogg’s involvement in this industry places him, along with Scott, at the forefront of a new trend in illustrated literature. As I have argued elsewhere, both men were pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved, artistically and commercially, through cheaply produced, popularly consumed illustrated fiction and poetry. [17]

Scott’s status as gentleman and literary superstar allowed him to be somewhat cavalier with the contributions he made to the gift-books. With the exception of ‘The Death of Keeldar’, it was Scott who was illustrated by the editors; by contrast, Hogg often found himself in the position of having to illustrate (a term he uses in correspondence) engravings that were sent to him by the editors. Hogg’s popularity as ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ made him a desirable commodity for editors as a draw for the public, but he did not belong in the same social or celebrity sphere as Scott. As a result, editors like Pringle were comfortable taking greater liberties in outlining the type of contribution they required. This is exemplified in several illustrated contributions to gift-books, reproduced in the recent publication Contributions to Annuals and Gift-Books. For example, a poem Hogg contributed to Friendship’s Offering for 1829, entitled ‘The Minstrel Boy’, was written without Hogg apparently even seeing the illustration. The letter from Pringle requesting the contribution describes the illustration to Hogg:

You wd doubly oblige me if you could give me a few lines or stanzas under the title of ‘The Minstrel Boy’—for the illustration of one of our plates. It is a boy of perhaps 7 or 8 years of age with a shepherds pipe in his hand & a highland bonnet & plaid lying beside him—lying in the midst of a scene of wild magnificence—woods, hills and waterfalls. [18] [my emphasis]

This communication speaks volumes about the importance that gift-book editors were placing on the engravings. The engravings are no longer merely illustrations; it is Hogg who is asked to provide the ‘illustration’. Pringle does not even deem it necessary to provide Hogg with the actual image from which to work (a slight Scott never suffered with this genre). Instead, Pringle has a clear idea in his head of the type of work he wants from Hogg: ‘but give me some of the glorious romance of your own boyhood when the spirit of poetry & romance first began to pour over you the visions of fairyland which afterwards found expression in the immortal “Kilmeny”, & others of your loftiest Lays’. [19] This is an example of an editor—in this case Hogg’s friend—attempting to solicit a certain type of contribution to fit his gift-book, and more precisely to fit a pre-commissioned illustration.

As Currie has pointed out, Hogg was much more open to the opportunities that the gift-books presented to professional authors than many of his contemporaries. [20] The variety of gift-books and their audiences opened diverse channels for his multifarious narrative modes, but he still managed to push the boundaries of censorship and audience sensibility. Hogg’s irritation at editorial attempts to censor his work is displayed in his ability to subvert the images that were sent to him. A good example of this is a story published in the Forget Me Not of 1834 called ‘The Scottish Haymakers’, in which Hogg demonstrates how authorial resistance to editorial control while writing for an illustration resulted in something innovative. As Gillian Hughes has pointed out, the editor Frederic Shoberl must have sent a proof of the plate to Hogg from which to write. [21] Unfortunately, the letter has not survived, although we can deduce from Hogg’s prickly reaction a year later that Shoberl did not deem it necessary to provide him with any kind of context for the image: ‘You have a confounded way of sending me a picture without either telling me who is the artist or what is the story and I am not very acute at these things. I do not know what is represented by the print’. [22] Again, it becomes clear that the editor is placing the emphasis on image over text: the writer becomes the illustrator. Hogg’s response to this image is ingenious. Rather than frame his narrative around the central foreground lovers, his story takes its cue from the hay cart in the background, and the figures that surround it. Hogg leads the reader off with the hay cart into a disturbing story of madness, as a ventriloquist Mr Alexandre drives the owner of the hay cart insane by mimicking a crying child, while the lovers are only briefly referenced in the broadest possible generic terms. [23] ‘The Scottish Haymakers’ becomes a story about the instability of pictorial recreation of pastoral scenes—more to the point, Hogg demonstrates a resistance to editorial control in a way which did not necessitate censorship.

Another contribution, which was not published owing to missed deadlines, conforms to this same model. In 1829, the editor of the Amulet, Samuel Carter Hall, sent Hogg an engraving of a picture by David Wilkie entitled The Dorty Bairn, again encouraging a specific type of response from Hogg to illustrate it. Hall, in a letter of 25 June 1829, provides a contextual outline of the illustration with his request for ‘a few lines to accompany this plate’. He writes:

I enclose a print from a picture by Mr Wilkie—it is entitled ‘the Dorty Bairn’—and I believe he painted from some lines by his uncle (I believe)—It represents a little girl who has quarrelled with her bread & butter—her mother is saying ‘look at your pretty face’ and showing her a looking glass. […] I should far prefer them [Hogg’s lines] in the dialect of your country. [24]

Hogg’s response to this request is both faithful and expansive. Instead of producing a single, hermetic narrative contextualisation for the image, he uses the engraving as a springboard for his imagination, producing three still-life vignettes inspired by Wilkie’s picture. He responds to Hall’s request for a contextualisation for the image, but it is not in narrative form, as the editor would have expected: ‘The Dorty Wean’ recreates in words the domestic scene presented in Wilkie’s picture, using a dialect from Hogg’s own home in the Borders. He then provides two other pictures with words, which are related through their ethnographical and observational record of local expression and manners. ‘The Auld Naig’ is an imagined conversation located further north in the town of St Boswells, a vignette which is tangentially related to a corner of Wilkie’s famous painting Pitlessie Fair. The final vignette in this series, simply titled ‘David Wilkie’, is a description of a painting by Wilkie of a scene from Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd, presented in Hogg’s own authorial voice. By creating a series of literary tableaux in response to a single image, Hogg has again demonstrated an ingenious and stubborn resistance to editorial control; he follows suggestions to an extent, but not at the cost of producing something worthy of an artist he greatly admired. [25]

Fig. 2. David Wilkie, ‘The Dorty Bairn’, commissioned but never published in the Amulet, edited by S. C. Hall

Hogg’s relationship with the gift-books and their editors began in a spirit of mutual appreciation, but it gradually soured. This corrosion had many causes, one of which was the obvious shift in the relative importance of the author in the production of popular literature. This is demonstrated in the fact that Hogg was being asked to illustrate illustrations, a bizarre twist on the traditional mode of illustrated fiction, a precedent that paved the way for Dickens’s early relationship with his first illustrator, George Cruikshank. It also becomes clear from his correspondence that much of what he produced was being censored, returned, even lost, by editors who could not bring themselves to push the envelope of public taste. Hogg’s erratic temper and poor record-keeping precipitated often preventable arguments with the gift-book editors who had previously been solicitous towards him. He also demonstrates belligerence regarding the censorship of his work by editors. For example, Alaric Watts, editor of the Literary Souvenir, incurred Hogg’s displeasure in 1830 by assuming to provide him with advice on, and censorship of, his poetry. On 19 January 1830, he wrote to Cunningham complaining about Watts:

Pray is the poor affected fellow supposed among his contemporaries to be a rational being? I should like particularly to know as he has favoured me with a great many most sage and sapient remarks how to write poetry and the advices are so serious that I really think them well meant but I cannot tell whether to follow them or not till I know for certain that the man is not daft. [26]

He felt similarly disgruntled at censorship from Anna Maria Hall, editor of the Juvenile Forget Me Not, wife of Samuel Carter Hall, editor of another staple gift-book, the Amulet. He writes to Mrs Hall, ‘I sent you a very good tale and one of those with which I delight to harrow up the little souls of my own family I say it is a very good tale and exactly fit for children and no body else’. [27] This poem was most likely published in her husband’s Amulet for 1836, making the point that such raw material from a famous author, who had died in 1835, was too lucrative to waste for the gift-book editors. This letter also demonstrates the tight censorial control editors held over authors who were struggling to survive in a competitive marketplace. Despite his protestations, Hogg still provided Mrs Hall with another alternative, while simultaneously offering the original story to a more suitable publication.

It is the illustrated contributions, however, that offer the clearest picture of the reduced status of the author in the gift-book industry. Scott, owing to his pre-existing status as a country gentleman with pretensions to aristocracy, and as a literary superstar challenged only by Byron, was to some extent able to resist the demeaning effects of industrial book-production as represented by the gift-books, but even he was forced to interact with the ‘toyshop of literature’. Scott could afford to be belligerent with editors like Heath, while turning down the advances of Allan Cunningham for contributions to The Anniversary. [28] He could afford to send work he considered second-rate to editors he had to keep interested, in the knowledge that his work would be illustrated. This threat of illustration produced its own anxieties for an author who took as much control over the physical production and representation of his work as possible, but while he was recruiting artists and engravers for the Magnum, it was a risk he was willing to take. Hogg, meanwhile, was initially happy to engage in a medium which offered him regular work with a varied range. His work, by contrast with Scott, was used more typically as illustrative of the images that were sent to him. However, both writers demonstrate a resistance to editorial efforts to control their literary output: the keepsakes and gift-books were attempting to propound a certain consumable type of literature—poetry and prose which could be appreciated by the widest possible audience, and therefore the narrowest possible sensibilities. Scott, and particularly Hogg, found themselves fighting against this trend of generic literary production, albeit in very different ways. Nonetheless, what becomes clear through the production of the gift-books is that the relative status of the author in the production of popular literature was compromised by innovated production practices and increased public demand for affordable illustrated fiction.