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ABSTRACT
Robert D. Hume asks four principal questions in this article: (1) Who were the consumers of elite culture, and what could and would they pay? (2) What could be earned by writers, actors, singers, musicians, painters? (3) Who actually profited from the sale of culture? (4) How did patronage affect the production of culture? A survey of surviving figures for income strata and the prices paid by buyers suggests that the consumers of elite culture belonged largely to the wealthiest two percent of the population. Analysis of incomes shows that trying to earn a living as a writer, actor, or musician was a tough proposition. Patronage turns out to be surprisingly important, but more in terms of jobs, sinecures, and subscriptions than from individual largesse. Exact equivalencies to modern buying power are impossible to calculate, but scholars need to realize, for example, that in 1709 fully two-thirds of the books advertised in the Term Catalogues cost two shillings or less: a five-shilling book was pricey.
CULTURE IS A COMMODITY PRODUCED FOR GAIN (whether pecuniary or otherwise) and offered for sale to the public, with or without success. This view of the poems, plays, novels, music, and painting studied by scholars of the long eighteenth century has been widely acknowledged in the last fifty years, but its implications have rarely been pursued.1 My interests are unabashedly quantitative. The "New Economic Criticism" and the "Discourses of Economics" now becoming popular have many useful things to tell us, but they seem singularly unconcerned with particular sums of money involved in the production or purchase of books, performances, or paintings. There is a fundamental difference between such "imaginative economics" or "symbolic economies" and the gritty realities of actual figures.2 As an example of what is possible in a slightly later period, I would point to William St. Glair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, a genuinely revolutionary quantitative investigation of how the economics of publishing and the regulation of copyright and the book trade affected public dissemination of and access to not only literature but also political, social, and philosophical ideas.3
For the 1660-1740 period information is in scantier supply than one could wish. Systematic accumulation of the relevant economic data has barely begun, and analysis...