Like accounts of the eighteenth-century professions, which have described both the growth of collective independence and an enduring state of “personal subservience” to patrons, the history of eighteenth-century authorship provides divergent explanations of how a writer's merit – the term itself has contradictory meanings – could be evaluated and rewarded. The traditional, Whiggish narrative traces an arc of emancipation that runs from the impoverishment of the place-seeking Grub Street hack to Samuel Johnson's commercial triumph, finally culminating in the author's withdrawal from the marketplace and Romantic poetry's aesthetic freedom. We have seen how this narrative is adapted by critics who understand Romantic transcendence in material or “class” terms. An alternative stresses the continuity of “clientage not class” for authors over the course of the century, as demonstrated for example by Dustin Griffin, who emphasizes that “virtually every writer of any significant reputation” up to the end of the century benefits from various forms of patronage even as they all seek to publish and profit from their wares. These conflicting accounts provoke a choice between an earlier and a later date for the final passing of a vertically organized, “old” regime, but at the level of individualized poetic experience, they also represent coexisting possibilities. Thus, the autonomy of the poet, construed as self-determination in relation to patrons and to other audiences, proves to be imaginable in advance of those large-scale trends that are generally understood to account for real authorial independence.