Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800

Before the development of a full-blown literary "market" in which an author might hope to make an independent living, books were brought to readers with considerable assistance from patronage. Dustin Griffin offers the first comprehensive study of the system of literary patronage in early modern England. Combining the perspectives of literary, social, and political history, he lays out the workings of the system and shows how authors wrote within it, manipulating it to their advantage or resisting the claims of patrons by advancing counterclaims of their own.