The emergence of the newly professional author, like the perennially 'rising' middle class, has been confidently located in many places and periods. An enormous expansion in the scale and variety of literary marketplace was the chief engine of this increase in the numbers of men and women pursuing authorship in the nineteenth century. At the time of the First Reform Bill in 1832, predictions of a sharp and accelerating increase in literary opportunity would have struck most people in the book trade. The growth of the market for newspapers and magazines remained central to the development of authorship for most of the nineteenth century. Journalism was the most common entry route into authorship in this period. Along with journalism, it was the literary market which provided most opportunities for the writer pursuing authorship as a full-time or full-time occupation. The American periodical market was important for British authors in spite of the lack of copyright protection.

British copyright's major failing during the nineteenth century was the fragmented and complicated state of the law. For British authors and publishers, international copyright became an increasingly desirable goal. Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd, elected MP for Reading in 1835, was the first to propose uniting the existing collage of copyright acts. Copyright could be seen as part of the portfolio of oppressive measures, particularly if a lengthy extension to its term was being proposed. For almost the whole of the nineteenth century America offered only informal protection to foreign copyright works. British copyright law remained in a state of disarray. A new domestic interest group, the Association to Protect the Rights of Authors, had been established. A delegation from the Association pressed the Prime Minister, Disraeli, for the appointment of a Select Committee or Royal Commission. A convention for an international copyright union was drafted, discussed at the Berne conference in 1883, held under the auspices of the Swiss government.