(This is an update of an earlier post.)
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money – Samuel Johnson
Charles Dickens supposedly wrote for a penny a word, which my high-school English teacher offered up as a reason why his books were so long. Just how miserable a wage was that? Even worse than it sounds.
Dickens lived in a largely deflationary era. From his birth in 1812 to his death in 1870, the pound dropped in value to £0.59, an average annual decline of 0.8% a year, according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator. Publishers cut prices relentlessly to get new readers; the first penny newspaper in London appeared in 1855. As publications cut costs, they had to cut their writers’ pay as well. Sound familiar?
Just how poorly Dickens was paid is a somewhat complex calculation. In Dickens’ day, there were 240 pennies to the pound. (Back in Merrie Olde England, 240 silver English pennies equaled one pound of silver.) One pound when The Pickwick Papers was first published in 1836 is the equivalent of £112.20 in 2018. At 240 pennies per pound, Dickens earned the modern equivalent of 47 English pennies a word, or 58 U.S. cents a word at the current conversion rate of $1.23 U.S. per pound.
Depending on your output, still not great money, albeit quite a bit above Dickensian poverty. If you can sell 100 1,000-word pieces a year, you’d have income of about $57.718. And, of course Dickens – writing longhand – had prodigal output.
The Pickwick Papers, published in serial form from March 1836 through November 1837, weighs in at about 396,000 words. Assuming the penny-a-word formulation is correct, and that one pound equaled 240 pennies, that would have been 1,650 pounds, or the equivalent of £185,133.33 today — $228,566 in greenbacks. Pretty good for a 26-year-old first-time author, right?
Not really. As it turns out, Dickens was paid £20 an installment for The Pickwick Papers, or £400 total. He earned no royalties. That’s equal to £44,881 pounds today, or $55,410. It’s still good money for a first-time author, but well less than a penny a word. (It’s probably closer to a farthing a word: A farthing was a quarter of a penny).
Dickens did become quite wealthy, in part because The Pickwick Papers taught him the value of owning his works and the royalties that came with them. Of course, two other factors probably helped, too: He was an incredibly hard worker, often editing and doing other work while writing at a feverish pace. And, of course, he was Charles Dickens.