William Rufus Chetwood the original gig worker

0:00You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're in a podcast, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Or your new podcast for free today at RSS.com. You know, when you hear the phrase, a gig economy, you probably picture someone driving for a ride-share app. Right. Or, you know, a freelance graphic designer constantly hustling on a laptop at a coffee shop. Yeah, exactly. Just juggling five different clients just to make rent. It feels like a very modern, very 21st century kind of exhaustion. It does. It's really easy to think of the side hustle as like an invention of the smartphone era. Truth is, the mechanics of surviving gig-to-gig are centuries old. The tools change.

1:00But the hustle remains exactly the same. Completely the same. Which is why today, for this deep dive, we're looking at a stack of notes and research centered on a single, really fascinating Wikipedia article. It's about a man who might just be the ultimate original gig worker. We are diving into the life of an 18th century English, or possibly Anglo-Irish figure named William Rufus Chetwood. Such a great name, by the way. It really is. And the mission for this deep dive is to explore how this one man who was constantly hustling at the absolute center of literary and theatrical London actually shaped the pop culture we still consume today. Yeah, he really did. But, you know, his life also serves as a fairly brutal cautionary tale about the harsh economics of the creative world. Oh. And let's unpack this, because his resume defies any normal career path. It's absurd, honestly. We are talking about a guy who is simultaneously a publisher, a bookseller, a theatrical

2:01prompter, a playwright, a novelist, and a historian. And that inability to be categorized, that's exactly why you should care about him. Chetwood is essentially the invisible glue of the 1700s entertainment industry. Invisible glue, I like that. Yeah. Because when you understand his life, you were getting a backstage pass to how pop culture was actually manufactured, packaged, and sold three centuries ago. He's the man behind the curtain. Exactly. Pulling all the levers of this rackety growing entertainment machine. So, let's start at the beginning, or I mean, at least what we know of it, because chronologically his origins are totally opaque. Very murky. Right. We don't have a definitive birth year. We barely have a background, though there are strong hints he might have spent an extended period of time at sea early on. Which comes back to play a big part later. Oh, absolutely. But he just sort of washes ashore in the historical record. By 1714, he surfaces in Dublin, working as an assistant manager to Joseph Ashbury's theater company. Just jumping right into theater management. Right.

3:02And then by 1715, he publishes a work called The Life of Lady Jane Gray. But then in June of 1715, he lands what becomes his real anchor gig. The big one. Yeah. He becomes the prompter at the theater royal, jury lane in London. And he holds that job for nearly 20 years. Which I have to point out, holding any position in the 18th century theater world for two decades is an incredible feat of survival in a notoriously volatile industry. Highly volatile. I was actually trying to visualize what a 1715 theater prompter actually does, because today if we hear prompter, we think of like a teleprompter. Right. Or someone sitting at a box just whispering a forgotten line to an actor. Exactly. And based on the research, this feels much closer to a modern day live TV showrunner. Or maybe like an air traffic controller. Oh, the air traffic controller analogy is spot on. They aren't the stars wearing the fancy costumes, but they are holding the entire chaotic production together from the shadows. What's fascinating here is, when you consider the physical mechanics of an 18th century theater,

4:07there were no headsets. Right. There were no digital displays. As the prompter, a jury lane, Chetwood held the master copy of the script. In fact, he often held the only complete copy of the script. Wait, really? The only copy? Yeah. Actors were typically only given their specific lines and their cues, not the whole play. Wait, so the actors didn't even know the full story they were performing? Often, no. They just knew, you know, what they were supposed to say and when they were supposed to walk on. That sounds like a recipe for disaster. It could be. Which is why Chetwood was so important. He was the one person who saw the entire board. He organized the rehearsals. He managed the entrances and exits. Wow. This meant he had unparalleled intimate access to every single script that came through the doors, every actor who walked on stage, and every major playwright of the era. So he is sitting at the absolute center of the cultural zeitgeist. Daily. I mean, he is watching the crowd from the shadows every single night. Zording at all. Exactly.

5:07He sees which jokes make the audience roar with laughter and which dramatic monologues just completely put them to sleep. So he's getting a real time, nightly education in consumer demand. Yes. A masterclass in what the public actually wants. Which explains his next move perfectly. Because when you spend every night holding the master's script and watching the audience react, you are going to recognize the commercial value of the written word. It's inevitable. Right. It's a logical leap for Chetwood to realize he can monetize that access. Because he has his hands on literally every new play, he starts moonlighting as a publisher and a bookseller. The ultimate 18th century side hustle. Exactly. He takes his inside knowledge from the propters chair and leverages it. It's a brilliant pivot, honestly. He uses the physical access of his day job to fuel his own independent enterprise. And it was the perfect time for it, wasn't it? It was. You have to understand the mechanics of the print market at this time. Literacy rates were rapidly rising. Right. More people could read than ever before.

6:08Exactly. You had this brand new middle class with disposable income and just an absolute hunger for reading material. And Chetwood steps right into feed them. Even before he got to Drury Lane back in 1713, he shows up as the publisher of a piece called a poem on the memorable fall of Chloe's PS pot. Which is quite the title. It is. And it's attributed to Jonathan Swift. A huge name. Huge. But once he's established a Drury Lane, he really scales up. He starts partnering with the heavyweights of the publishing world. Men like Barty B. Bernard Lintot, John Watts, William Mears, and James Roberts. The big players at the time. Yeah. And together, they published several Shakespeare plays. They publish almost every new London play that hits the stage between 1719 and 1722. That's a massive market share. It's wild. And he even publishes works by major novelists like Daniel DeFoe. Ah, yes. Specifically, he puts out Malflanders and Colonel Jack, as well as Eliza Haywood's incredibly popular novel Love and Excess.

7:09And works by The Off-List Sibre, Thomas Durfe, Thomas Doggett, and Richard Savage's memoirs too. He is literally printing the foundation of the English novel and modern theater. But okay, here's where it gets really interesting. I want to challenge the narrative here. So for it. Looking at this list. I mean, putting out a crude poem about a chamber pot one day, and then publishing a foundational novel like Malflanders the Next. Was Chetwood actually a visionary taste maker who, you know, discovered these literary giants? Or was he just a guy who happened to own a printing press, throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck in a new consumer market? That is the crucial distinction to make. Chetwood was definitely not a visionary literary curator sitting in a Mahogany office trying to elevate high art. Okay. So more of the spaghetti on the wall approach. Totally. He was a highly pragmatic opportunist in the best sense. The 18th century print market was the Wild West. Because there were no real copyright laws, right? Copyright laws, as we think of them today, were barely in their infancy and incredibly

8:12porous. So it was just a free-for-all grab for content. Exactly. He didn't draw a hard line between high art and pulp fiction because the market didn't. He published What Would Sell. And he knew what would sell because he watched the jury lane audiences every night. Yes. He understood that people wanted scandal. They wanted adventure. They wanted romance. And they wanted it cheaply and quickly. Exactly. He was taking the mass market appeal he saw in the theater and applying it directly to the printing press. Culturally speaking, he was helping invent the concept of the mass market paperback. Just giving the people what they want. Yeah. But, you know, the problem of running a side hustle at that scale is the sheer exhaustion of it. Oh, absolutely. Reading, prompting, publishing other people's hits and dealing with other people's flops. After years of fixing other people's rough drafts, it's inevitable that Chetwood would look at the material crossing his desk and think, I can do this myself. Why am I just publishing this one? I could write it. Exactly. And that brings us to his transition into an original creator.

9:14He decides to cross the food lights. Which is always a dangerous transition. Being a great editor or a great producer does not automatically make you a great writer. It reminds me of like a modern podcast audio engineer, someone who spends a decade mixing other people's tracks and cutting out their mistakes. Right. And then they finally decide to drop their own indie album or write their own novel. So Chetwood starts writing his own plays. And how did that go for him? Well, his early attempts. They fail. Ouch. Yeah, works like South Sea or the bite or bit. And the stock drivers get published, but they remain completely unperformed. The irony. The theater world, the very world he helped run, rejected his original scripts. If we connect this to the bigger picture, notice what he does next. He doesn't stubbornly keep writing unstageable plays. No, he reads the room. He adapts to the market. He pivots completely. He leans into those rumors we mentioned about his early life at sea. And he starts writing adventure novels instead. Using what he knows or at least what people think he knows. Exactly.

10:15He writes the voyages, dangerous adventures, and imminent escapes of Captain R. Falconer. And then he strikes gold. The big hit. Yeah, he writes a massive hit. The 1726 novel, voyages and adventures of Captain Robert Boyle. This book was so popular it stayed in print until at least the mid 19th century. That's incredible. We even have records of an 1850 edition from Massachusetts. More than a hundred years of relevance for a guy throwing spaghetti at the wall that's a huge win. But he never gives up on the sage. Eventually, he cracks that code too. In 1729, he puts on the lover's opera. Ah, yes. And this is where his genius for recycling comes in. Because it wasn't a wholly original idea, it was an adaptation of an older 1718 play by Susanna St. Love called a bold stroke for a wife. He essentially repackaged it into a new format. She did. It went through at least three published editions and played in Dublin. The format he chose is key here.

11:15He adapted it into a ballad opera. I was actually going to ask you about that because the research mentions ballad operas a few times. What actually makes something a ballad opera as opposed to just, you know, a regular play with some music in it. So a ballad opera was a wildly popular 18th century format where the playwright would take pre-existing popular folk tunes. Like songs the audience already knew. Exactly. Broadside ballads stuff they knew by heart and they would write new satirical lyrics for them mixing those songs into the spoken dialogue. Well, that's clever. It was. It was a direct reaction against the high brow elite Italian operas that were so popular with the aristocracy at the time. It's like pop music theater. Very much so. The trend exploded in 1728 with a massive hit called the beggar's opera. So Chetwood sees the beggar's opera making a fortune and says, I can do that. Yeah. He grabs an older play by Susanna St. He've slapped some popular tunes into it and just ride the wave. Precisely. He was a master recycler of cultural trends.

12:16After the lover's opera, he followed it up with the stage coach opera, the generous free Mason and the mock Mason in the 1730s. Just turning them out. Oh, and an unpublished one called the Emperor of China. He even drops another novel in 1736, Captain W. O. G. Vaughan. His output is relentless because he knows how to adapt to exactly what the consumer wants at any given moment. But despite being this incredibly prolific guy, a proctor for two decades, a publisher of major works like Malflanders, a hit novelist, an adaptive playwright, his story takes a severe, really dark term. It does. Because the brutal reality of the 18th century gig economy is that there were absolutely zero financial safety nets. None at all. No residuals for plays performed by other companies, no 401ks, no health insurance. If you stopped working, you stopped eating. It's terrifying, honestly. And a shift in his personal life quickly catalyzed a massive financial downward spiral. A house of cards built on constant hustle collapses very quickly when the hustler falters.

13:16Yeah, let's look at how that collapse started. He had a first marriage that produced a daughter, Richabella. She actually followed him into the theater business and became an actress. Marry the Irish actor Tobias Gamea, right? Yes, exactly. But then, Chetwood has a fateful second marriage. In June 15, 1738, at St. Benets, he marries an actress named Anne Brett. And Anne had some serious theater connections. She did. She was the granddaughter of Collie Sibber, who was essentially theater royalty at the time. A massive actor, manager, and poet laureate. So this should have been a great match for him. It should have. They have two daughters together. But tragically, both of those little girls die in early childhood in the 1740s. That is just a profound personal tragedy. It completely derailed him. The historical record indicates this second marriage and the subsequent family tragedies heavily contributed to his severe financial difficulties. You can't just keep hustling through grief like that. No, you can't. And the ruin is incredibly swissed. By 1741, Chetwood is completely broke.

14:18He is surviving solely because Coven Garden threw him a benefit performance of William Congrives' play, the old bachelor. We should probably clarify what a benefit performance meant in this context. Yeah, please do. This was like a modern charity gala. Sort of, but much more direct. It really highlights just how desperate his situation was. In the 18th century theater, a benefit performance meant that the proceeds for that specific night after the basic house expenses were deducted went entirely to one individual. Oh, wow. It was usually a way to give an actor a bonus at the end of a season. But in Chetwood's case, it was a lifeline. It was the theatrical community, literally passing the hat so their former prompter could afford to eat. To go from running the floor at Rylane and publishing Defoe to relying on a single night's charity, that is a staggering fall from grace. It's heartbreaking. And from that point on, he spends his final decades just scrambling. In 1741, he publishes a collection called Five New Novels.

15:20He leads London entirely. Looking for work wherever he can find it. Right. We see him working in Dublin in 41 and 44 and up in Belfast with his surviving daughter in 53. He is writing anything he can sell anything. He co-rides a tour through Ireland with Philip Luckham. He rides a poem called Killcanny. In 1750, he publishes a book called British Theater. And that 1750 book contains a really fascinating detail about his desperation. The book notoriously included a list of Shakespeare quartos, several of which were completely spurious. Okay. I need you to translate that. What is a quartet? And why does it matter if it's spurious? So, a quartet is simply a way of printing a book. You take a large sheet of paper, fold it twice to create four leaves or eight pages. Okay. It was the standard, relatively cheap format for printing single plays in Shakespeare's time. Collectors in the 18th century were already obsessed with finding early original quartos of Shakespeare's work. Ah, so when you say Chetwood included spurious quartos.

16:21He faked the historical record. Wait, really? Yes. He posted editions of Shakespeare plays that never actually existed. Why would he do that? Likely to pat out his book, make it seem more comprehensive, and drive up sales. He was inventing history to make a quick buck. Wow. He is literally faking it to survive. But even that doesn't save him. No. After a lifetime of relentless work, he dies on March 3, 1766, likely in the Martial C. Deadners Prison in Dublin. Which is a horrific way to end. It is. Because the Deadners Prison wasn't just a place where you sat at your sentence. You were locked up until your debts were paid off by family or friends. And the cruelest irony of a Deadners Prison was that you were charged by the jailers for your own room and board while inside. Exactly. If you couldn't pay your debts outside, you certainly couldn't afford to live inside. It was a financial death spiral. So what does this all mean? How does a man who published Malflanders ran the stage at Dury Lane for 20 years and wrote C novels that stayed in print for a century and of dying in a financial death spiral

17:24in Dublin? Well, his immense personal output simply couldn't outpace the brutal economics of his era. But the ultimate tragic irony of Chetwood's life culminates in his final major work. The 1749 one. Yes. During his absolute darkest financial days, right at the end of the 1740s, Chetwood wrote a book called A General History of the Stage. And he wrote it out of pure desperation, right? Totally. And he generated enough capital to stay out of the marshal's seat. A gig worker taking on one last gig to pay the rent. Exactly. But today, historians consider that book to be a highly valuable primary account of contemporary London and Dublin theater. Because he was there. Because he had been the prompter. Because he had held the master's script for 20 years, he knew where all the bodies were buried. He knew how the business actually operated. He died broke, locked in a cell because he couldn't pay his bills. But his desperate hustle to survive ended up preserving the very history of the stage that he had helped build. He wrote the history book because he needed the cash.

18:24Yeah. And in doing so, he made sure we remembered his era. Yeah. That is a sobering reality check. Think about the journey we just went on. William Rufus Chetwood was the ultimate connective tissue of his time. He really was. His fingerprints are literally all over Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Shakespeare reprints and the daily chaotic operations of the greatest theater in London. He was everywhere. He was everywhere. But his life proves in the starkest terms that proximity to greatness and even immense personal creative output does not guarantee a happy ending when you are a worker in a system with no safety nets. He built the very stage he couldn't afford to live on. His life is a testament to the fact that the people who manufacture pop culture rarely get to keep the profits it generates. This leads us with a final thought to mull over as we wrap up this deep dive. I want you to think about the invisible Chetwoods of our current digital era. Think about the unseen algorithm tweakers, the ghost fryters patting out influencer blogs,

19:26the assistant podcast producers. The gig workers keeping the digital content machine churning 24.7 without health insurance or job security. If someone were to write a definitive history of our modern digital stage 200 years for now. It would be written by the famous influencers you see smiling on your screen. Probably not. Or would it be written by the broke, exhausted behind the scenes gig worker who is actually pushing the buttons to publish it all. Think about who is really holding the master script. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're in a podcast, chances are you have something to say too. With rss.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at rss.com.