Authors and Artemus Jones: Libel Reform in England, 1910–52

Abstract

This article argues that the novel was collateral damage in English law’s reaction to mass-market newspapers. A 1910 court decision made the writer’s intention irrelevant in libel cases. As a result, publishers became vulnerable to defamation suits from people unknown to a novelist but who happened to share a name with a fictional character. Drawing on the Society of Authors archive and the records of the Porter Committee on the Law of Defamation, the article reconstructs the campaign to exempt fiction from liability in cases of unintentional defamation.