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.