If we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once in high reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented upon by the grave; but of whom we now know only that they once existed.

Samuel Johnson

 

Sometimes the situation in Australia, with respect to writers, resembles that in early eighteenth-century England.

The Dog-star rages! nay ‘tis past a doubt,
All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:
Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

Thus Pope, in ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’. The scene he describes was undoubtedly more fevered than ours. There were virtually no constraints with regard to defamation or copyright, or ‘professional’ competence. As books came off the printing press they engendered more books and pamphlets in turn, continuations, disputations, commentaries, squibs, and parodies. Writers were essentially public creatures in ways that might seem strange, or attractive, to us now, depending on the point of view. They were, to adapt the title of a pamphlet by Richard Savage, the unfortunate hack immortalised by Dr Johnson, ‘authors to be let’, employed in the combat between political factions, active in religious controversies, quick to turn their hands to vilification, and adulation. ‘He lived in those days,’ Pope wrote of himself in the introduction to The Dunciad: