Frederick Douglass, Copyright, and the British Press, 1845-47

Alexis Easley

doi:10.46911/vrzz5968

Abstract

In 1845, Frederick Douglass established his copyright to the Narrative of the Life in the United States in order to receive just remuneration for his work. Yet Douglass also relied on a lack of international copyright law to disseminate his abolitionist message to a transatlantic audience. While Douglass made use of both copyright-protected and free-circulating forms of publication to reach a broad audience, he could not always control how his work and image would be reprinted and adapted in the transatlantic press. During his 1845-7 lecture tour, British periodicals and newspapers creatively recontextualised, abridged, and plagiarised his Narrative in articles and reviews. These forms of reuse were conventional in the publishing world of the 1840s, yet when viewed from a modern perspective, they seem to echo the exploitative practices associated with the American slave system.

Highlights

What did it mean for Frederick Douglass to claim copyright protection for his work when his own government defined him as property? In 1845, his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life, was published by the Boston Anti-Slavery Office
Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have argued, “the slave narrative represents the attempts of blacks to write themselves into being,” for Douglass a copyright notice seems to have served as a legal marker of this literary self-assertion, even if the law provided no protection for the author himself (1985: xxiii)
Viewed from one perspective, copyright law was a means of protecting the rights of authors to their intellectual property and ensuring just remuneration for their literary labour, but it defined a set “period of time at the close of which this text is transformed from an odd kind of private property into a part of the public domain” (9)

Summary

Introduction

What did it mean for Frederick Douglass to claim copyright protection for his work when his own government defined him as property? In 1845, his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life, was published by the Boston Anti-Slavery Office. While the editors of Chambers’s and Littell’s were careful to include publication details as part of their reviews of Douglass’s Narrative, this was not always the case in other in other adaptations of his text Another magazine of popular progress, the People’s Journal, presented its summary of the Narrative as a “Memoir of Frederick Douglass” (28 November 1846). Aliquis’s poem, located on page 8 of the same issue of the Western Times, seems to support the paper’s abolitionist stance, as reflected in its editorial and account of the anti-slavery meeting, by highlighting the harsh details selected from Douglass’s Narrative that echoed examples from his public lectures. In the London Journal, the reference to the horrors of slavery serves as an incitement to read on – both for those who empathise with the abolitionist cause and those who might desire sensational entertainment

10 July 1847 17 July 1847 24 July 1847 31 July 1847 7 August 1847

Findings

Conclusion