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

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 Brainsucker", 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.

Staging Henry Fielding: The Author-Narrator in <i>Tom Jones</i> On Screen

“…In contrast, Metin Hüseyin can be regarded as a classic 'metteur-en-scène', the anonymous craftsman for whom the room for individual expression and personal recognition is much more limited, and whose interests are subordinated to those of the studio or corporation he or she works for (Leitch 2005, 107-8). This type of distinction is perhaps particularly fitting for adapters of an eighteenth-century novel, given that period's similar distinction between the gentleman author and the hack writer, the evaluative tendency of such appellations notwithstanding (Berensmeyer, Guttzeit, and Jameson 2015). Seen as representatives of two different types of filmic authors, it is not surprising that they should position themselves differently in relation to the author of the original novel.…”