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Updated: May 16, 2025
His translation of Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine thousand pounds and made him independent. But the activity of the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners, who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order.
Next they talked of "what was in the paper." Homais by this hour knew it almost by heart, and he repeated it from end to end, with the reflections of the penny-a-liners, and all the stories of individual catastrophes that had occurred in France or abroad. But the subject becoming exhausted, he was not slow in throwing out some remarks on the dishes before him.
But, in the fifteenth century, the vast majority of writers of manuscripts, those who were in general employment from not commanding the high prices obtained by the "crack" transcribers, and might be compared to "penny-a-liners" among us, suppliers of scraps of news to the papers, were still to be found only in convents, knowing more about ploughs than books, and for literary acquirements standing on a par with professors of handwriting and dancing masters of the present day.
One easily perceived that he was not a man of liberal education; he had rather too much of the 'society' accent; his pronunciation of foreign names told a tale. But I thought him good-hearted, and when the penny-a-liners began to busy themselves with his affairs, I felt sorry for him. Nothing to his dishonour came out in the trial.
"I ain't proud, 'cos its sinful," nor over careful with whom I try a fall; but I confess a preference for more creditable antagonists than American penny-a-liners. So, I let them lie. On the fourth evening of my imprisonment, there was an unusual stir in the building soon after nightfall.
The confession was certainly sensational enough to satisfy the most exacting of penny-a-liners, and a lasting tribute to Holmes' undoubted power of extravagant romancing. According to his story, some of his twenty-seven victims had met their death by poison, some by more violent methods, some had died a lingering death in the air-tight and sound-proof vault of the castle.
Political writers; correspondents, "special" and "local;" reviewers; reporters; stenographers, or "gallery" men; dramatic and musical critics; "paragraphists" the new name for fire and murder manifolders, and other "flimsy" compilers; and, penny-a-liners: each and all, are, severally and collectively, "editors," beneath the star-spangled banner of equality and freedom.
Waxing bold, the penny-a-liners grew savage, until the very skies rained lies and bitter slanders upon poor Keats. Sensitive, soon he was wounded to death. After a week of sleeplessness, he arose one morning to find a bright red spot upon his handkerchief. "That is arterial blood," said he; "that drop is my death-warrant; I shall die."
In the course of it he declared: "If some persons, deceived by caricatures, false portraits, penny-a-liners, and lies, credit me with a colossal fortune, palaces, and above all, with frequent favours from women . . . I here declare to them that I am a poor artist, absorbed in art, working at a long history of society, which will be either good or bad, but at which I work by necessity, without shame, just as Rossini has made operas or Du Ryer translations and volumes; that I live very much alone, that I have a few firm friends; that my name is on my birth-certificate, etc., just as that of Monsieur de Fitz-James is on his; that, if it is of old Gaulish stock, this is not my fault; but that de Balzac is my patronymic, an advantage which many aristocratic families have not who called themselves Odet before they were called Chatillon, Duplessis, and who are, none the less, great families."
Continually puffed besides by incompetent magistrates anxious to conceal their own deficiencies, and hand-in-glove with the penny-a-liners of that time, they became a sort of superstition. Although as a Preventive Police they were utterly ineffective, and as a Detective Police were very loose and uncertain in their operations, they remain with some people a superstition to the present day.
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