Look here: will you write to Thring.
Please write to Thring.
I say: have you written to Thring yet?
G.B.S.
I doubt whether he had. Those chance sums he poured from time to time into Frances' lap were usually not what they should have been, an advance on a royalty. Orthodoxy he sold outright for £100. No man ever worked so hard to earn so little.
When later Gilbert employed Messrs. A. P. Watt as his literary agents a letter to them (undated, of course, and written on the old notepaper of his first Battersea flat) shows a mingling of gratitude to his agents with entire absence of resentment towards his publishers, which might be called essence of Chesterton:
The prices you have got me for books, compared with what I used weakly to demand, seem to me to come out of fairyland. It seems to me that there is a genuine business problem which creates a permanent need for a literary agent. It consists in this—that our work, even when it has become entirely a duty and a worry, still remains in some vague way a pleasure. And how can we put a fair price on what is at once a worry and a pleasure? Suppose someone comes to me and says, "I offer you sixpence for your History of the Gnostic Heresy." Why, after all, should I charge more than sixpence for a work it was so exuberant to write? You, on the other hand, seeing it from the outside, would say that it was worth—so and so. And you would get it.
Shaw continued his attempts to stimulate the reluctant playwright.
Two years after drafting the scenario, he writes:
10 Adelphi Terrace, W.C.
5th April 1912.