@color_fool Most of the authors simply don't care. I mean, they would be happy if they could make a living by writing(Blake could not though), but they generally wouldn't go as far to assume that readers would still be interested in their works 100 years later, and even if future readers would, the authors themselves wouldn't live that long to benefit anything from their fames. Besides, a large proportion of the "pop literature" of one generation usually won't make the textbooks 100 years later. Some poets in the 19th century were very well-known and sold well in their lives, but nowadays even the literature students at the unis won't spend any time looking at their works. The literary "canon" itself shifts from time to time.

@color_fool I was reading some research papers on the authors and their professional jobs other than writing recently and I'm interested in this topic, so please allow me to explain this a little bit further: most of the English authors by the 19th century were relatively wealthy; they were either aristocrats, or well-educated middle-class people. As to the fiction writers, publishing "fictions" was not a badge these writers would be willing to wear on their bosoms, on the contrary, most of them avoid being known as "fiction writers" by their relatives and friends because writing these things for leisure might sound unbecoming for people with their social status... Poets enjoyed higher reverence though. William Blake, conversely, was stone broke in his lifetime. Nevertheless, he did not count on earning much money by his poetry when he lived, letting alone conceiving a future fame. Blake's case may further prove that, whether rich or poor, authors mostly did not expect much afterlives of their works or their fame after death. However, in the 20th century, things were a little bit different...but that's an age too close to us.