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Frances Brown and the ‘Modern’ Market for Print

In this chapter, I focus on a writer who got her start writing poetry and prose for the cheap popular press: Frances Brown. Like Cook, Brown was working class, but her impoverished upbringing as the daughter of a postmaster in a remote Ulster village placed her on a lower rung of the social ladder than Cook with fewer resources at her disposal. She lost her sight to smallpox when she was eighteen months old and learned about the world by listening to her siblings’ lessons and having family members read aloud to her. Once she began writing, her sister Rebecca served as her amanuensis. She began her career contributing poetry to the Irish Penny Journal, later published her work in the Penny Magazine, and developed an extensive career contributing poetry and prose to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Her careful navigation of the market for popular literature reveals the importance of cheap media formats (with differing levels of copyright protection) in a fashioning a writing career. Even though Brown’s work was often repurposed by scissors-and-paste journalists as if it were free content within the public domain, she was successful in establishing a celebrity identity and publishing her work in book form.