Here's an interesting document that just came into my possession: it's a memorandum between Emily Sarah Holt and the publisher John F. Shaw for the sale of copyright to her novel Sister Rose:
The witnesses are Holt's brother James Maden Holt, MP and his fiancee, Anna Haworth. Holt sold the copyright for forty-two pounds.
One of the problems with writing the history of nineteenth-century religious fiction from the nuts-and-bolts angle--copyrights, royalties, correspondence with publishers, recruiting authors, in-house readers, etc.--is that virtually all of the publishers' archives have simply vanished. This is true even for still-extant publishers like the Religious Tract Society (now Lutterworth), where only partial records are available, and Burns and Oates (now Sheed and Ward), where the backfile survives but apparently not anything else. It's quite possible that some archives are still hanging about in attics or on top of wardrobes! This is the first time I have come across anything from John F. Shaw, a publisher with a large trade in relatively inexpensive Evangelical prize books.
In 1870, Holt would have been at the beginning of her novel-writing career. She had published a work of historical biography in 1861, Memoirs of Royal Ladies (2 vols.), with Hurst and Blackett, but the book was not well-received--not least because such collective biographies were regarded as an overworked genre by that point. However, after regrouping, she had a good reception for Mistress Margery: A Tale of the Lollards (Shaw, 1868). Holt was therefore not an unknown quantity, but not an established bestseller, either. For comparative purposes, one of the Religious Tract Society's most popular novelists, Hesba Stretton, had up until the mid-1860s been receiving "between 30 guineas and £50 for single-volume stories," [1] which suggests that for this type of publisher and this type of book, £42 would not have been outrageously low. It would be interesting to see what Holt was able to command a decade later.
[1] Elaine Lomax, The Writings of Hesba Stretton: Reclaiming the Outcast (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 74.
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