Copyright Payments in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1701–1800

Although there have been extensive critical studies of the laws and conceptual understandings of early modern copyright in the past few decades, less attention has been devoted to the authorial payments that followed from those developments. Studies of individual authors or genres have collected details of payments to authors, but no comparative study of the values of those payments exists. This essay assesses 439 examples of copyright payments about which we know enough to match the payment to a particular edition of a book so that we can ascertain the book’s physical format and construction and thus estimate a publisher’s expenses relative to the price paid for the copy. We offer some comparative context for this Data within the larger body of publications across the century, in order to Gauge the degree to which these results are representative.