Intellectual Property Ideology and the Birth of British Romanticism
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2014 Pirates of Romanticism: Intellectual Property Ideology and the Birth of British Romanticism Jason Isaac Kolkey Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Kolkey, Jason Isaac, "Pirates of Romanticism: Intellectual Property Ideology and the Birth of British Romanticism" (2014). Dissertations. 1275. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1275 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2014 Jason Isaac Kolkey LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO PIRATES OF ROMANTICISM: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IDEOLOGY AND THE BIRTH OF BRITISH ROMANTICISM A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE BY JASON I. KOLKEY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2014 Copyright by Jason I. Kolkey, 2014 All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, PIRACY, AND THE BIRTH OF ROMANTICISM 1 CHAPTER 2: DEAD LEAVES: SOUTHEY, SHELLEY, AND THE ANXIETY OF PIRACY 35 CHAPTER 3: MISCHIEVOUS EFFECTS: BYRON, SCOTT, AND ADAPTING TO THE ILLEGITIMATE 88 CHAPTER 4: DIVIDING THE CARCASS: FRENCH REPRINTS AND THE BORDERS OF TEXTUAL LEGITIMACY 132 CHAPTER 5: ORGANIZING ANARCHY: CLASS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN PERIODICALS AND GRAPHIC SATIRE 178 CONCLUSION 224 REFERENCE LIST 232 VITA 246 CHAPTER 1 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, PIRACY, AND THE BIRTH OF ROMANTICISM In August 1817, printer Richard Carlile reproduced without permission the series of satirical squibs for which radical bookseller and author William Hone was already awaiting trial on charges of blasphemous libel. Attorney-General Sir Samuel Shepherd pressed those charges on the basis that Hone parodied material from the Book of Common Prayer, though the author’s obvious intent was to mock government corruption rather than any particular point of Anglican dogma. Shepherd, it seems, lacked the confidence to pursue an accusation of sedition on behalf of a government widely perceived to be just as the satirist portrayed: decadent, unjust and uncaring toward the poor, and staffed by obsequious social-climbers. As Hone prepared to defend his rhetorical choices and the much compromised liberty of the press, he expressed disapproval of Carlile’s reprints. He feared their continued dissemination would worsen his chances of acquittal and wrote requesting a meeting to discuss the matter with the printer on 8 August (Hackwood 116). After the printer went ahead with publication anyway, Hone wrote to The Times to publicly proclaim himself “much disgusted” and disavow the new editions, explaining he had “no intention of republishing those works in any other shape than the report of [his] trials.”1 1 The Times, 24 December, 1817, 3. 1 2 This dramatic instance reveals the complex legal situation of unauthorized reprinting in early nineteenth-century Britain and its function as a political act. Operating in the gray areas of copyright and libel law, if not challenging them outright, radical and other pirate publishers offered cheap access to ideas that seemed to threaten a reactionary government. In the process, they defied original authors and publishers’ power to dictate how texts would be represented and who would be able to read them. Carlile in particular went beyond simply reproducing the texts for his versions of the liturgical parodies, inserting marks of his own personality and political convictions. Each edition he put out of a work that might be declared seditious or blasphemous was in itself a textual performance affirming both the righteousness of his cause as a radical and freethinker and the ineffectuality of prosecutors who could not even bring a printer to take them seriously.2 The paratext of the squibs continued to play out the public identity he had newly established in his post as publisher of Sherwin’s Political Register and presented an aggressively radical rhetoric. His approach to political discourse clashed with the texts he reprinted, markedly more incendiary than Hone’s humorous calls for reform while lacking in the bookseller’s relative satirical sophistication. Carlile included his name and business address on the title page in accordance with the 1799 Seditious Societies Act, which sought to curtail just such cheap political publications by requiring that all printers register with authorities and keep records of their clients. At the same time, he seized the opportunity to openly sneer at the prospect of the government's wrath. His editions of Hone’s works proclaim they are “Printed and 2 For a discussion of the performative nature of illegitimate publishing, see Neil Fraistat, “Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance.” 3 Published by R. CARLILE, late of LAW'S HOLD, in the County of Surrey, but now of 183, Fleet Street; and sold by those who are not afraid of incurring the displeasure of his Majesty's Ministers, their Spies or Informers, or public plunderers of any denomination.” The government soon answered Carlile’s jibes, and he found himself arrested as well. He was imprisoned at King’s Bench Prison eighteen weeks before the author came to answer for the moral character of the squibs at trial (Holyoake 11-12). Fortunately, Hone brought his wit and extensive knowledge of satire to bear in his three trials of December 18-20th, 1817, explaining such parodies were as old, at least, as the invention of printing; and he had never heard of a prosecution for a parody, either religious or any other. There were two kinds of parodies; one in which a man might convey ludicrous or ridiculous ideas relative to some other subject; the other, where it was meant to ridicule the thing parodied. The latter was not the case here, and therefore he had not brought religion into contempt. (Three Trials 18) The combination of Hone’s arguments and reading the parodies into the court record led the jury to laugh the state’s case out of court on all three charges.3 With the author cleared of blasphemous libel, Carlile proceeded to print further versions by the end of December, adding dedications directly referencing the trials and his time in jail while blatantly jeering at Shepherd’s inefficacy. He jokingly presented a Hone squib excluded from the blasphemy charges, The Bullet Te Deum, as the fruit of his 3 Kyle Grimes sums up the importance of Hone’s broad appeal and circulation strategies: “The particular strength of Hone's parodies in this context lay in their ability, despite official efforts to squelch radical discourse, to reach a huge and diverse audience via a decentralized network of distribution, a kind of samizdat which was the legacy of a waning eighteenth-century chapbook and ballad literature. It is hardly surprising that the government tried to stop this circulation; after all, Hone's parodies were both available and accessible to readers of virtually all social and economic classes and they tended thus to level the hierarchies within the British readership that Shepherd sought to enforce. But it is also not surprising that the government's repressive efforts failed. The cumbersome machinery of libel prosecution simply cannot stifle a text that circulates primarily through the countless face-to-face interchanges of popular culture rather than through the more localized and tangible channels of the mainstream publishing industry” (152). 4 own time of enforced reflection. His dedication claimed the piece, clearly inspired by the rock thrown at the Regent’s carriage in January 1817, was a “translation of an ancient Greek Manuscript,” which had been “the productive amusement of a prison hour” and thanks Shepherd for “[t]he kind notice and protection you have condescended to shew towards me for the last eighteen weeks …” In the dedication to a reprint of the Political Litany he turns to gloating specifically over Hone’s acquittal and the additional attention brought to his satires by the trial: The effect of the informations which you have filed against those Parodies, which have been so nobly and successfully defeated, and justly held up to public derision, have operated like a magic wand on the public mind. All! All are anxious to have them, which hath afforded me the opportunity of dedicating to you this Second Edition. I congratulate you Sir, as an Attorney General, more friendly to the Cause of the People, the Cause of Reform, than any of your predecessors; for whilst you will condescend to notice such trifling squibs, and make that of importance which otherwise would have sparkled and vanished, you render the country a most essential service, by holding up to its view, the real and undisguised characters of your employers. Through these additions, the squibs themselves represented the conflict they inspired, reinforcing Hone’s rhetoric and allowing Carlile to relish portraying his own fearless contempt for the government. For Carlile and other radical publishers, the very act of producing texts that were considered “illegitimate” because of their blasphemous or seditious content, lack of permission from the author, or both, as in the case of the Hone pamphlets, could serve as a blow against corruption and repression. Carlile rallied like-minded radicals around the persona he carved out for himself as an unconquerable and irreverent agitator, unconcerned for maintaining the trappings of respectable or civil discourse and willing to violate of the concepts of intellectual property. Convinced the stakes for his publishing 5 operation were the very minds and liberty of England’s lower classes, he could brook no compromise in his ability to reproduce and alter texts.