Although for the greater part of the period under discussion the drama tended to compare unfavourably in financial terms with the novel, its natural competitor in the nineteenth century, the disparity between the two has sometimes been overstated. Questioned on the relative economic status of the novel and the drama at the 1866 Committee of Inquiry, Charles Reade agreed that the former was still on balance more remunerative for authors, mainly because theatre managers, unlike publishers, were not in the business of offering large advances. As Reade and others were prepared to recognise, however, the economic fortunes of theatre were in the process of improvement. During the 1860s dramatic authorship slowly begins to recover its financial viability.

From about 1840 to 1860 the drama was incapable of producing high returns for any author and, as has been discussed in the previous chapter, that was one of the reasons why Bulwer Lytton recognised that his future lay with the novel. In the highest reaches of the novel market large advances (sometimes of the order of £2,000–£3,000) became relatively commonplace. Anthony Trollope ceased to sell his novels outright in 1860 and switched to a profit-sharing system which brought him a very comfortable average yearly income of about £4,500, while George Eliot in the early 1870s made £9,000 out of Middlemarch alone. Away from the upper extreme, the gap between the earning power of the novel and the drama diminishes.