Amid all the talk of busi­ness mod­els for journ­al­ism, I thought you might be inter­ested in an example from his­tory — the col­lapse of the busi­ness model for poetry.

At the turn of the nine­teenth cen­tury, rhymesters were rolling in it. In 1811, Sir Wal­ter Scott’s advance for Rokeby enabled him to buy Abbots­ford.

Two years later, Lord Byron — “Verse hath a bet­ter sale than prose” — got the equi­val­ent of over half a mil­lion for the copy­right on a few minor poems. In 1818, even a young unknown like John Keats could receive what today would be over £70k for the copy­right for Endymion.

What made these sums pos­sible was not the time­less bril­liance of the con­tem­por­ary poetry — after all, who now wants to wade through Byron’s early efforts at vam­pire poetry, or Rokeby? — but the high price of books.

The prices didn’t last. By the end of the 1820s, both Keats and Byron had lived fast and died young. Wal­ter Scott had aban­doned long, dull his­tor­ical poems for length­ier, duller his­tor­ical novels.

The poetry busi­ness had been killed off by tech­no­logy. A couple of broth­ers, the Fourdriniers, helped bring to mar­ket a new, cheap way to man­u­fac­ture paper. By 1825, half the paper in Eng­land was machine-made. On top of that came the intro­duc­tion of a new French print­ing tech­nique — sterotyping.

Books became much more afford­able. The tight, con­densed style of poetry, inten­ded for pub­lic read­ing and re-reading, found itself los­ing out at the bot­tom end of the mar­ket to reviews that bundled verse with travelogues, short stor­ies and essays for private consumption.

At the top end of the mar­ket, the young, afflu­ent women who had pre­vi­ously bought poetry, or had it bought for them, were read­ing annu­als and albums prin­ted on the new, bet­ter qual­ity paper and car­ry­ing pic­tures of great paint­ings and pub­lic fig­ures (celebrit­ies). Pub­lish­ers wanted light lyr­ics to accom­pany these engrav­ings, not lengthy and lugubri­ous poems.

By 1827, poet John Clare wrote to his pub­lisher: “I hope for your sake that the Poems may turn the tide and sell bet­ter…” The pub­lisher — John Taylor — replied: “The Poems have not yet sold much… All the old Poetry Buy­ers seem to be dead, the new Race have no Taste for it.”

Clare ended up get­ting by not on selling his poetry, but on phil­an­thropy. Muxh, much later, poetry hadn’t stopped, but poets had jobs.