Wilkie Collins and Copyright Wilkie Collins and Copyright Artistic Ownership in the Age of the Borderless Word s Sundeep Bisla The Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bisla, Sundeep, 1968– Wilkie Collins and copyright : artistic ownership in the age of the borderless word / Sundeep Bisla. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1235-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1235-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9337-9 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9337-9 (cd-rom) Collins, Wilkie, 1824–1889—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Intellectual property in literature. 3. Intellectual property—History—19th century. 4. Copyright—History—19th century. I. Title. PR4497.B57 2013 823'.8—dc23 2013010878 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 s CONTENTS S Acknowledgments vii Preface A Spot of Ink, More Than a Spot of Bother ix Chapter 1 Introduction: Wilkie Collins, Theorist of Iterability 1 Part One. The Fictions of Settling Chapter 2 The Manuscript as Writer’s Estate in Basil 57 Chapter 3 The Woman in White: The Perils of Attempting to Discipline the Transatlantic, Transhistorical Narrative 110 Part Two. The Fictions of Breaking Chapter 4 Overdoing Things with Words in 1862: Pretense and Plain Truth in No Name 183 Chapter 5 Ingesting the Other in Armadale 220 Chapter 6 The Return of the Author: Privacy, Publication, the Mystery Novel, and The Moonstone 240 Conclusion Real Absences: Collins’s Waiting Shadows 271 Bibliography 277 Index 297 s ACKNowLEDGMENTS S A N I NTERN AT I ON A L Postgraduate Research Award, University Post- graduate Research Award, and Overseas Postgraduate Research Scholar- ship funded by the University of Sydney and the Government of Australia allowed me the time to complete the research and early drafting of this study. A semester’s research leave from the City University of New York allowed me the time to complete part of the writing of it. Many friends and colleagues encouraged me along the way. Colleagues who generously commented on parts of the work include Paula Backsheider, Judith Barbour, Nicholas Birns, Deirdre Coleman, Simon During, Penelope Ingram, Bill Maidment, Anne McCarthy, J. Hillis Miller, Ariadna Pop, Véronique Pouillard, Simon Petch, and Joseph S. Walker. I thank John Maynard for having been a friend and supporter of this project, and its author, for many years. I also thank former CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein for his support. My teachers, especially Christopher Braider, David Bromwich, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, William Maid- ment, J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Richards, Mark Rose, and Alan Trachten- berg, had profound effects on the shape that this argument took. I thank the many people who responded with probing questions and comments when portions of this book were presented as talks at the University of Sydney, Columbia University, and the CUNY Graduate Center. vii viii Acknowledgments I thank for their assistance Eva Ksiazek and Peter McNiece of the Uni- versity of Sydney’s Fisher Library, as well as the staffs of Columbia’s Butler Library and Diamond Law Library, the New York Public Library, Yale’s Sterling Library and Goldman Law Library, Cambridge University Library, and the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge. I would also like to thank Sandy Crooms, my editor at Ohio State Uni- versity Press, for her unflagging and unfailingly congenial support of this study and the anonymous reviewers of the Press for their many helpful suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint material from essays origi- nally appearing in boundary 2, Dickens Studies Annual, Genre, and Victorian Literature and Culture. This material has been extensively revised. I thank my loving wife Caroline for her humor and help at crucial stages near the work’s completion. This book is dedicated to my parents, Amarjit Singh and Raghubir Kaur Bisla. I thank them for their unshakeable confi- dence over the years. s S PRE facE A Spot of Ink, More Than a Spot of Bother “I made a private inquiry last week, Mr Superintendent,” [Cuff] said. “At one end of the inquiry there was a murder, and at the other end there was a spot of ink on a tablecloth that nobody could account for. In all my experience along the dirtiest ways of this dirty little world, I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet.” —Collins, The Moonstone 136 THE BEGINNING of a project of long duration—and this project, having occupied its author for over a decade, would certainly qualify as such—is often difficult to conclusively determine. Nevertheless, even now I can still clearly recall the moment I first became conscious of its subject, the author Wilkie Collins. While an undergraduate at Harvard I would occasionally come across book sales at the back entrance of the university library. These were literary housekeeping events, designed more probably to free up space on the shelves than generate revenue, in which a thrifty student rummaging through a wide variety of texts—for one reason or another being “released,” as though back into the wild—might pick up something interesting for a reasonable price. It was at one of these potentially magic-filled Ivy League bazaars that I one day encountered on the surprise-laden trolley a copy of Collins’s intriguingly-titled The Evil Genius: A Domestic Story (1886). “Here is a prize,” I may well have thought to myself. The book was inscribed as a gift to the college by one “Samuel H. Scudder of Cambridge, 28 July 1886.” Scudder, as I would come to learn later, had been in his time a well-known ix x Preface entomologist, early editor of the journal Science, and at one point assistant to Louis Agassiz, the famous nineteenth-century naturalist and professor of zoology and geology. I bought his book—or should I say, rather, to be pre- cise Collins’s book—for the nominal price marked in at the top corner of the inside cover, a price not significantly greater or less, but bringing with it a more interesting backstory, than those inscribed in the other books on the trolley. The book came back with me to my River House dorm room for the cost of a whole half a dollar. My new possession had such brittle pages that it was clear it would not survive much further handling. I resolved to read it nevertheless, being care- ful not to do any more damage than time and the acid in the paper had already wrought. I cannot explain why I was drawn to this particular work among the dozens available that day. Perhaps it was the intriguing title that captivated me, a title made even more alluring by a gradual loss in our gen- eral cultural understanding of the once common phrase describing what might be called one’s “bad angel” or “false god.” I must undoubtedly also have been attracted—capitalism having its way with me—by the low, low price. But as enchanted as I may have been by the opportunity to buy a book so old for so little, I was still quite aware of this copy’s serious defects. Few other books for sale that day had seemed so far along the path to giving up the ghost, if not also as they more expansively tag it in Germany, the geist. Perhaps in purchasing it I had had vague hopes that, despite its condition, it would turn out to be one of those “finds” that make such intriguing viewing of our modern day television antiques shows. The book turned out to be a “find” all right, but not one of that particular type. Back then, I was not well versed in the to-ings and fro-ings of interna- tional commerce. I had yet to learn that the purchase of nineteenth-century English literature “on the cheap”—with no provision being made for pay- ment to the book’s foreign author—was something of an American tradi- tion. The nominal price and the book’s status as having been “released” from (abjured by?) the “Harvard College Library” in particular and the American Academy in general were just faint indications. The narrative contained (if only barely) within the binding would point me toward the larger picture: in his tale, Collins touches for a brief moment on the now nearly-forgot- ten, century-long Anglo-American literary property war when he places the lawyer Samuel Sarrazin into dinner conversation with Randall Linley, the brother of the wayward husband at the center of the narrative’s intrigues. Linley’s reference to the American people as “the most hospitable people in the world” prompts a surprising reaction: Preface xi Mr. Sarrazin shook his head; he had a case of copyright in hand just then. “A people to be pitied,” he said. “Why?” “Because their government forgets what is due to the honor of the nation.” “How?” “In this way. The honor of a nation which confers right of property in works of art produced by its own citizens, is surely concerned in protecting from theft works of art produced by other citizens.”1 (Evil Genius 115) This pointed, politically-charged reference to the copyright struggle, inserted into a book intended for an audience that would at the time have included many Americans—the scientist Samuel Scudder included—intrigued me.