The economic conditions within which works of prose fiction were printed for sale in Great Britain during the Romantic period were set by a legal decision of 1774. In that year, following a struggle that had lasted for decades, the House of Lords, acting as the supreme court for civil cases in Great Britain, confirmed that the practice of perpetual intellectual property, which had been a central feature of the English book industry since around 1500, was unlawful - indeed that it had been unlawful for over sixty years. Since the passing of the Act of Parliament of 1710, commonly known as the Act of Queen Anne, the court determined, the only intellectual property regime permissible under the law of Great Britain was the precise set of statutory provisions laid down in that Act. Queen Anne's Act had formally recognized that an exclusive right to make printed copies of a text for sale - “copyright,” although the word was not used - is an authorial right that comes into being with the act of composition.

The statute gave an author the legal right to assign his or her copyright to a publisher for a period of fourteen years, with provision for a possible further fourteen years if the author were still alive at the end of the first fourteen. Provision had been made for a transitional period after the Act first came fully into force, but after 1774, the maximum length of time during which an intellectual property holder could exercise a monopoly right to sell printed copies was twenty-eight years “and no longer” in all circumstances. Queen Anne's Act applied, with a handful of exceptions (mainly official religious texts whose status was laid down in other legislation), to all texts printed in Great Britain since the arrival of printing.