A man with a watch
before his eyes, penning exactly so many words every quarter of an
hour--one imagines that this picture might haunt disagreeably the
thoughts even of Mudie's steadiest subscriber, that it might come between
him or her and any Trollopean work that lay upon the counter.

The surprise was so cynically sprung upon a yet innocent public. At that
happy time (already it seems so long ago) the literary news set before
ordinary readers mostly had reference to literary work, in a reputable
sense of the term, and not, as now, to the processes of "literary"
manufacture and the ups and downs of the "literary" market. Trollope
himself tells how he surprised the editor of a periodical, who wanted a
serial from him, by asking how many thousand words it should run to; an
anecdote savouring indeed of good old days. Since then, readers have
grown accustomed to revelations of "literary" method, and nothing in that
kind can shock them. There has come into existence a school of
journalism which would seem to have deliberately set itself the task of
degrading authorship and everything connected with it; and these
pernicious scribblers (or typists, to be more accurate) have found the
authors of a fretful age only too receptive of their mercantile
suggestions. Yes, yes; I know as well as any man that reforms were
needed in the relations between author and publisher. Who knows better
than I that your representative author face to face with your
representative publisher was, is, and ever will be, at a ludicrous
disadvantage? And there is no reason in the nature and the decency of
things why this wrong should not by some contrivance be remedied. A big,
blusterous, genial brute of a Trollope could very fairly hold his own,
and exact at all events an acceptable share in the profits of his work. A
shrewd and vigorous man of business such as Dickens, aided by a lawyer
who was his devoted friend, could do even better, and, in reaping
sometimes more than his publisher, redress the ancient