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If one were to investigate the lives of great writers and painters, one would find, I think, that the majority wrote and painted for money and recognition, and that the one reward they really wished for was a Box Office success.

Dickens, who is perhaps the healthiest genius in English literature, writing of a proposed new publication, says frankly:

I say nothing of the novelty of such a publication, nowadays, or its chance of success. Of course I think them great, very great; indeed almost beyond calculation, or I should not seek to bind myself to anything so extensive. The heads of the terms which I should be prepared to go into the undertaking would be—that I be made a proprietor in the work, and a sharer in the profits. That when I bind myself to write a certain portion of every number, I am ensured for that writing in every number, a certain sum of money.

That is the wholesome way of approaching a piece of literary work from the Box Office point of view. But Dickens well understood the inward significance of Box Office success and why it is a thing good in itself. As he puts it in answering the letter of a reader in the backwoods of America: