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Notes
A complete study of this phase of American literary history will eventually give us a fuller knowledge of the pressure of financial needs and the financial rewards of literary success. Such studies of literary popularity as Frank Luther Mott's Golden Multitudes are a step in this direction. An extended study is soon to be published by Professor William Charvat of Ohio State University. His book will be the first concentrated attack upon the general problem.
Nathan C. Brooks to James Montgomery Bird, December 3, 1838; MS letter in the University of Pennsylvania Library.
Edwin P. Whipple, Recollections of Eminent Men, with Other Papers (Boston, 1893), p. 166. For purposes of comparison it is interesting to note that the young William Dean Howells in 1858 was planning a contribution to the Odd Fellows' Literary Casket. "The Casket pays $2.00 a page," Howells wrote Miss Victoria M. Howells, December 26, 1858 (Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. by Mildred Howells, New York, 1928, I, 16-17). At this early date Howells had published nothing in book form.
These figures are from Longfellow's manuscript account book in the Longfellow House, Cambridge, Mass. Of the $315, $25 came from the Token, an annual; $20 from the Ladies' Companion (New York); and $270 from Graham's Magazine.
Luke M. White, Jr., Henry William Herbert & the American Publishing Scene, 1831-1858 (Newark, N.J., 1943), p. 34.
Longfellow to George W. Greene, May 28, 1840; letter printed in Samuel Longfellow, The Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston, 1899), I, 367. A distinctly minor writer, J. H. Mancur, also envied Willis his large earnings. He termed Willis "a monopolist of four magazines." Mancur writes that Robert Hamilton, an associate editor of the Ladies' Companion, "some time since, told me Willis drew $1200 per annum from three periodicals." Willis' writing for Graham's, Mancur thinks will raise his income to $1600. Mancur's small income rankles within him. "Now rating my merit to be as compared with Willis' as 6 is to 12 . . . I find myself continually grumbling that I can only earn . . . at the average rate of $23 p month, or 276$ or 280$ p annum, not the fourth of Willis' earnings." (Mancur to R. W. Griswold, November 28, 1842; MS letter in Boston Public Library.)
"The Pay for Periodical Writing," Weekly Mirror, I, (October 19, 1844), 28. This article is attributed to Poe by Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, A Critical Biography (New York, 1941), p. 436.
William Charvat, "Longfellow's Income from his Writings, 1840-1852," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XXXVIII (1944), 9-21.
During part of 1841 and until September of 1842 Graham paid Benjamin a regular salary to assist in securing desirable contributors.
These transactions are the subject of the following letters. Poe to Longfellow, May 3, 1841; letter printed in John Ward Ostrom, Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), I, 158. Longfellow to Poe, May 19, 1841; letter printed in Samuel Longfellow, op. cit., I, 390-91. Graham to Griswold, October 6, 1841; MS letter in New York Public Library. Benjamin to Graham, October 19, 1841; MS letter in Boston Public Library. Longfellow's letter to Poe is referred to in Graham to Longfellow, December 23, 1841; MS letter in the Longfellow House, Cambridge. This is the Graham to Longfellow letter mentioned above. Graham to Longfellow, January 7, 1842; MS in the Longfellow House, Cambridge. Benjamin to Longfellow January 7, 1842; MS letter in the Longfellow House. Graham to Longfellow, January 20, 1842; MS letter in the Longfellow House. Poe figures in this correspondence, for he was editor of Graham's Magazine from March, 1841, to April, 1842. Subsequent correspondence from Graham's contributors is answered by Rufus W. Griswold, who served as editor from May, 1842, to September, 1843. For the negotiation of Longfellow's longest contribution to Graham's Magazine see Law-rance R. Thompson, "Longfellow Sells The Spanish Student," American Literature, VI (May, 1934), 141-150.
These long contributions generally brought a lower per-page rate than short articles. Graham paid Bryant and Dana and N. P. Willis $50 for single prose contributions. One of Willis's, which ran to 4½ pages, figures out at a per-page rate of $11.11.
For details see the present writer's "Mrs. Emma C. Embury's Account Book, A Study of Some of her Periodical Contributions," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, LI (August, 1947), 479-85.
Benjamin to Graham, October 26, [1841]; MS letter in Boston Public Library. These were probably the two sonnets of Benjamin which were printed in the January, 1842, issue of Graham's Magazine.
Tuckerman to Griswold, October 11, 1842; MS letter in Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Yet, by 1850, Tuckerman was receiving $30 for two articles (Tuckerman to Graham, December 14, 1850; MS letter in Historical Society of Pennsylvania).
Mary Alice Wyman, Two American Pioneers: Seba Smith and Elizabeth Oakes Smith (New York, 1927), p. 121.
Street to Griswold, August 8, 1842; MS letter in Boston Public Library. The poem was probably "The Burning of Schenectady." It appeared in book form late in 1842.
Herbert to Griswold, April 19, 1842; MS letter in Boston Public Library. The story ran to 21 printed pages. At $100, the per-page rate would have been about $4.75.
Herbert to Griswold, June 19, 1843; MS letter in Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Herbert was thus willing to accept about $2.10 per page.
Paulding to Griswold, January 31, 1843; letter printed in Passages from the Correspondence of . . . Rufus W. Griswold (Cambridge, Mass., 1898), p. 135.
Mrs. Osgood to John Sartain, December 5, 1848; MS in Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Sartain became the publisher of the Union Magazine in 1849. He was probably lining up his contributors, prior to assuming control of the magazine.
Graham to Taylor, June 7, 1844; MS in Cornell University Library. Graham had printed one poem of Taylor's in June, 1843. The poems mentioned in the letter were probably the two printed August and October, 1844, for subsequent poems reflect his European travels. If so, $15 per poem was a good rate of pay for Taylor, who as yet had not achieved high popularity.
Donald Grant Mitchell to Mrs. Mary Perkins Goddard, January 17, 1848; letter printed in Waldo H. Dunn, Life of Donald G. Mitchell (New York, 1922), p. 181.
Graham to Bayard Taylor, December 2, 1850; MS letter in Cornell University Library. In this letter, Graham told Taylor that he had spent "$4000 for the engraving-printing and coloring of Jan'y plates." The cost of the January issue would have been heaviest, for Graham always tried to "spread" himself at the beginning of the year, when most subscriptions were renewed.
Moreover, Graham claimed, the minimum rate for contributions per issue for years had been $800.—Editorial item, Graham's Magazine, XLIII (November, 1853), 554.
Editorial item, Graham's Magazine, XLI (November, 1852), 556. By the following February, this figure had risen to $87,000 (XLII, 222). I have no doubt that Graham is exaggerating. Yet, a cost of only $500 per issue for the first ten years of publication would total $60,000. Graham's competitor, Godey, made an even more absurd exaggeration (Godey's Lady's Book, XL, [February, 1850], 88). He claimed to have spent $200,000 for contributions. The Lady's Book was then in its twentieth year, and Godey was claiming to have spent an average of $10,000 per year, an utterly absurd claim, considering the type of writers he printed and his general rate of payment.
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