Henry Lawson and the ‘Pinker of Literary Agents’

Abstract

FIRST of all, get a good agent- and trust him with your soul, and let him alone. In 1902 that was Henry Lawson's advice to any aspiring Australian writer who was planning to go to London, as he himself had done two years earlier. It was advice based on experience 'that I paid ten per cent cash and gave the two hardest years of my life to get' ("'Succeeding"' 369). That those two years had also been productive and financially rewarding was, in large measure, due to James Brand Pinker (1863- 1922), one of the first—and certainly one of the best—literary agents in England at the beginning of the twentieth century.