"The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship”: A Late Eighteenth-Century Satire of Grub Street

Authors

  • Ingo Berensmeyer Justus Liebig University Giessen
  • Gero Guttzeit Ghent University
  • Alise Jameson Independent Researcher

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v4i1.1103

Keywords:

Grub Street, Satire, John Oswald, Authorship, Poetry

Abstract

Originally printed in the first issue of The British Mercury in 1787, “The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship” is a piece of satirical short fiction that has so far received only little attention in discussions of eighteenth-century print culture and practices of authorship. Probably written by the Scottish radical John Oswald (c. 1760-1793), “The Brain-Sucker” is told in the form of a letter by a farmer who tells an absent friend about his unfortunate son Dick, whose brain has become infected by poetry. This “disorder” leads Dick to London, where he falls prey to a ruthless publisher, known as “the Brain-sucker”, who keeps him like a slave in a Grub Street garret. The farmer then travels to London to save his son from the clutches of the Brain-Sucker. We present the text, for the first time, in a critical edition, collated from the three surviving copies, with textual and explanatory notes. In the accompanying essay, we discuss the text’s context of origin in late eighteenth-century Grub Street and the cultural implications of its satirical presentation of authorship.

Author Biographies

Ingo Berensmeyer, Justus Liebig University Giessen

Ingo Berensmeyer is Professor of English and American Literature at Justus Liebig University Giessen and Visiting Professor of English Literature and Culture at Ghent University. His research interests are in Shakespeare and the early modern period, literary theory and aesthetics, media and cultural ecology, and Britain in the 1950s. His most recent publications are: 'Angles of Contingency’: Literarische Kultur im England des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (2007); a study guide to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2007), Literary Theory: An Introduction to Approaches, Methods and Terms (2009), and the co-edited book Perspectives on Mobility (with Christoph Ehland, 2013).

Gero Guttzeit, Ghent University

Gero Guttzeit is a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Research on Authorship as Performance” at Ghent University. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the topic “The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric” at the University of Giessen. He has published on rhetoric and literature in the eighteenth century, antebellum American literature, cultural representations of philosophers, and the contemporary detective film.

Alise Jameson, Independent Researcher

Alise Jameson holds a Ph. D. in English literature from Ghent University and wrote her dissertation on “Constructions of Authorial Personae: Case Studies Illustrating the Conceptualizations, Myths, and Critiques of Eighteenth-Century Authorship.”

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Published

2015-06-17

How to Cite

Berensmeyer, I., Guttzeit, G., & Jameson, A. (2015). "The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship”: A Late Eighteenth-Century Satire of Grub Street. uthorship, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v4i1.1103

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2015)

Section

Special Topic: Between Geniuses and Brain-Suckers. Problematic Professionalism in Eighteenth-Century Authorship

License

Authorship allows authors to hold both the copyright and the publishing rights over their work without restrictions. However, a mention of their first publication in Authorship will be highly appreciated.