When in April 1859 Dickens started his own magazine, All the Year Round, he too became a publisher. Unlike Scott, he did not insist on anonymity. And unlike Scott, he was a canny publisher with an innate feel for what readers wanted and a fine editor of other authors' manuscripts. By nineteenth-century standards he was also a capricious purchaser of manuscripts, paying more to those whom he admired and using his power as publisher to overrule the commercial department. The magazine prospered as long as Dickens gave it his primary attention. Unlike Scott, Dickens was also canny in his dealings with book publishers, reducing them "to the purely functionary status of printer," an ability made explicit when he left bookseller-publishers Chapman and Hall for the printers Bradbury and Evans.
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