ABSTRACT
In Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (2004), Clare Pettitt argues at length that Charles Dickens believed in an identity of interests between mechanical inventors and literary artists and that he “clearly sees” patent reform and copyright reform “as parallel,
and this link becomes manifest in the novel he started to write in 1855, Little Dorrit” (188)* She gives particular emphasis to the representation of the mechanical engineer Daniel Doyce, which, in her view, expresses many of Dickens’s “own anxieties about authorship and intellectual property” (140) and which serves as a “model of his own creativity” (193)* She argues further th a t Dickens was “keen to conserve the construction of the individual inventor despite all the evidence that invention was no longer a solitary or neglected pursuit” (140)* Pettitt is not alone in this conflation of the mechanical inventor with the lite ra ry artist* In an o th erw ise exem plary a rtic le on th e professionalization of literature during the n ineteenth century, Robert Patten suggests, “it may be to such characters [as Doyce] * * * that we should turn for an image of the artist working in and for society in V ictorian literature” (29)* So, too, Peter G arrett in The Victorian Multiplot Novel identifies the author with the inventor*
But an article in Household Words, published only two years before Little Dorrit, argues that mechanical invention and literary creativity are two very different modes of production, and thus should be treated differently by the law* In the words of Henry Morley, the author of the piece, and one of Dickens’s most trusted correspondents, “Between the copyright of a book and the patent of an invention there exists not so much as the bond of a remote cousinship” (“Patent Wrongs” 7* 233)* It is inconceivable that Dickens would have allowed such a categorical statem ent to appear, about a subject so dear to his heart, and to his pocketbook, without his approval* Indeed, its testy and defensive quality bespeaks what Mary Poovey has referred to as the essentially “contested” nature of “writing, and specifically the representation of writing” at mid-century (Uneven Developments 105)* It is this contestation, as manifested in the debate over copyright reform, which this article will explore*
In the view of Household Words, the distinction between literary and mechanical invention is a simple but important one: the writer is more
closely bound to his creation than the mechanical inventor, whose work may well have proceeded by way of successive stages over a number of years, and have been influenced by the contributions of many other people* A writer has a natural right to property in his literary work, a right denied to a mechanical inventor who uses his intellect to obtain “something external to himself’ that may well be profitable even without a patent (233)* The argument expressed in “Patent W rongs” is a direct riposte to Thackeray who had himself equated mechanical labor with literary invention: “Don’t we see daily ruined inventors,” he asked rhetorically in The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century (1853)* “If these suffer, who is the author, that he should be exempt?” (qtd* in Pettitt 161)* In Thackeray’s view, the market alone would establish the “honest value” of a literary work (Pettitt 162)* Household Words, on the other hand, argued that the market alone was insufficient* Something else was needed: copyright protection*
T his d is tin c tio n betw een literary crea tiv ity and m echan ica l innovation rests on a particular understanding of the role of the literary artist in society* It draws on the deterministic arguments of the patent abolitionists of the early 1850s, abolitionists such as Isambard Kingdom Brunei who insisted in 1851 that:
the most useful and novel inventions and improvements of the present day are mere progressive steps in a highly wrought and highly advanced system, suggested by, and dependent on, other previous steps, their whole value and the means of their applications probably dependent on the success of some or many other inventions, some old, some new. (492)
Henry Morley resorts to the same metaphor in “Patent W rongs,” albeit m ore ten ta tiv e ly : “Im provem ents are suggested in each a rt or manufacture as it grows; they are steps of progress, and we are not quite sure that the first man who climbs a step should hold it for a number of years as his own” (233)*
Brunei and Morley, in turn, borrow heavily from Thomas N oon Talfourd, the W hig M*P*, who between 1832 and 1842 introduced legislation to extend the term of copyright from the existing 28 years or the life of the author to the life of the author plus 60 years* It was during these debates that those in favor of reform argued that authors were in a unique position because they possessed a special property-a product of their own individual minds-that should be treated specially by the law* Many of the best writers, it was argued, those who wrote for posterity and no t for immediate gain, m ight only develop a large readership after their deaths, after the current term of copyright had expired*
In contrast, those who argued against the extension of the copyright term — a collection of radical freetraders, utilitarians, and political economists-insisted that literary property was no different from other forms of property and that the writer deserved no special treatment* For them , p rin ted m aterial should be treated like a m echanical invention* It deserved protection, but because of the monopolistic tendencies of such protection, any term had to be of a very limited duration (Vanden Bossche)* Any longer term would, it was thought, increase the cost of books and serve as a “tax on knowledge*” Thus, the conflation of literary invention and mechanical invention, copyrights and patents, was a crucial rhetorical move for those who opposed Talfourd and the extension of the copyright term* The radical Thomas Wakley, for instance, wanted to know “why a distinction was made between the mere bookwright and the producer of other inventions?” (Hansard, 6 April 1842, 11* 1378)* For Wakley, a writer is diminished to a “mere bookwright,” a maker of books akin to a craftsman, the demystified producer of material property like any other*
Talfourd countered such arguments in 1838 by insisting that, despite some “points of similarity” between mechanical and literary invention, “there are grounds of essential and obvious distinction*” For instance, if a mechanical invention “were not h it on this year by one, [it] would probably be discovered the next by another; but who will suggest that if Shakspeare [sic] had no t written “Lear”, or Richardson “Clarissa”, other poets and novelists would have invented them?” (qtd* in Pettitt 63)* Notably, Dickens was one of a number of contemporary writers who were signatories to a petition, presented on 27 February 1839, in support of Talfourd’s bill, and he warmly praised Talfourd in his dedication to The Pickwick Papers for “the inestimable services” that he had rendered the literature of his country, and his fellow authors, “by securing to them and their descendants a perm anent interest in the copyright of their works” (xxii)* Dickens also used Nicholas Nickleby, his novel written during the early years of the copyright debates, to ridicule the idea tha t the extension of the copyright term was “an insurmountable bar to the diffusion of literature among the people,” and “that those who wrote for posterity should be content to be rewarded by the approbation of posterity” (198-99; ch* 16)*
My point is this: Dickens would have resisted any facile association between copyrights and patents because it would have placed him in an untenable position: it would have rhetorically aligned him with those whom he opposed, the critics of copyright reform, and undermined one of the main arguments for the extension of the copyright term* W ith this in mind, Henry Morley’s exasperation and defensiveness become more understandable* To repeat: “Between the copyright of a book and the patent of an invention there exists not so much as the
bond of a remote cousinship” (HW 7. 233). As if to reinforce this distinction, Household Words and All the Year
Round typically underscore the collaborative nature of m echanical invention, and its long gestation period. In 1851, Household Words remarked of the invention of the telegraph: “This was long work. W atching, deep study, thousands of experiments, suggestions, and reasonings; numberless plans and models-not of one man, or of two, but of thinkers in many countries, in many generations-” (H unt 2. 241)* The same is true, as well, of the screw propeller (Capper 8. 18184), which is developed increm entally by a host of inventors: Mr. Lyttleton; Mr. J. P. Smith; “a Swedish officer” named Ericsson; and “Mr. Griffiths.” Even Paxton’s Crystal Palace was ultimately the product of centuries of labor: “there have been many steps of progress, some faint and many wholly obscured. ... If Science had no t been at work in every direction for the last fifty years-Political as well as Chemical and M echanical Science-the four hundred tons of sheet-glass could not have been produced” (Knight 3. 121). In 1860, All the Year Round made a similar claim about the steam engine and the railway: “Nothing is perfected in a moment ... steam and railroads have had their times of gradual development like the rest. They have not sprung up in a night, nor grown to their perfection in a generation” (“A Cornish G iant” 3 .393).
