[W. E. Aytoun], from ‘Advice to an Intending Serialist', Blackwood's Magazine

Has been wrongly attributed to Samuel Warren. Aytoun (1813–65), part-author of the ‘Bon Gaultier’ Ballads, was Professor of Belles-Lettres at Edinburgh. The article purports to be a letter from a practising novelist to an aspirant, ‘T. Smith, Esq., Scene-Painter and Tragedian at the Amphitheatre’. Assuming that his first and great purpose will be ‘to make money, and to make as much as you can’, the writer offers ironical advice on how to achieve this. After discussing fiction of the Charles Lever type, he turns to Newgate novels and attacks such ‘dunghill’ subjects ‘which the imagination shudders at whenever they are forced upon it’. But Smith, being ‘a bit of a Radical’, is more likely to be tempted into abusing the upper classes ‘as tyrants, fools, and systematic grinders of the poor’.