The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne by Richard Terry

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne by Richard Terry Ala Alryyes Richard Terry. The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. viii+ 215. $95. Stressing that his “book is not about the essential nature of plagiarism,” Mr. Terry “explores allegations of plagiarism as part of a wider rhetoric of literary detraction.” He further contends that in order to understand plagiarism in its historical context, one has to take stock of “the boundary pressure exerted by other concepts that are either contiguous or antonymous.” For him, plagiarism evolved less as a matter of a “moral” offense than an “aesthetic” compositional defect. The bordering concept was coined by William Temple, who attacked modern writers for “sufficiency,” “a smug self-reliance,” as Mr. Terry explains, “a sullen indifference to the creative example held out to us by earlier writers.” Temple’s notion, buttressing as it did a conceptual metaphor that informed the battle of ancients and moderns, lent itself to the century’s evolving valuations of imitation and originality. In Swift’s Battle of the Books (1704), “sufficiency” characterizes the spider that spins his compositions out of his own entrails. The bee, by contrast, ranges “thro’ every corner of Nature,” shaping what it collects into honey and wax, enriching mankind with both “Sweetness and Light.” Yet, as Mr. Terry points out, the debate of the bee and the spider in Battle includes a twist that Temple’s own discussion of “sufficiency” does not. The spider haughtily accuses the bee of what lies at the core of the original charge of plagiarism (which Mr. Terry traces to the Roman poet Martial): “Your livelihood is an universal Plunder upon Nature.” The bee, however, defends himself; he does no “injury” to the flowers and the blossoms he visits. Although Swift’s “satiric target” in the Battle was the spider (Bentley), for Mr. Terry, Swift clearly understood “full well that the figure of the bee invited associations of plagiarism.” And herein lies the usefulness of Temple’s “sufficiency” and the related debate between the spider and the bee: Mr. Terry’s analysis of the long-running battle of the ancients and the moderns brings into “sharp relief the difficulty of reconciling the principle of creative originality with an abiding ethic of deference to the cultural [End Page 130] past.” Indeed Dryden was accused by Gerard Langbaine (the younger) of robbing “deceas’d Authors” of “their Fame.” This difficulty of reconciling originality and tradition haunts one of the century’s greatest poets—one for whom “imitation” of the cultural past was a fundamental compositional cornerstone. Pope suffered accusations of plagiarism both because of the satiric nature of his work and because, as the century wore on, “the moral demarcation between imitation and plagiarism” became more “blurry.” Mr. Terry eminently succeeds in showing how “attitude” can be examined to open up literary explorations surrounding allegations of plagiarism. In addition to the “sufficiency” debate, he reminds us of one remarkable controversy that may have influenced Johnson’s take on plagiarism. Provoked by both personal and political reasons, the Jacobite William Lauder sought to discredit the high reputation that Milton—perhaps the most prominent apologist for the regicide—enjoyed. In an elaborate hoax, Lauder published a series of articles in the Gentleman’s Magazine in which he gradually built the case that Milton had plagiarized a panoply of neo-Latin authors when he wrote Paradise Lost. Lauder had, it turned out, interpolated lines from a published Latin translation of Milton’s epic into selections from “earlier Latin works by the likes of Masenius [Jacob Masen], Grotius, and Staphorstius and others” and then accused Milton of having copied them. This astonishing fraud found Johnson unwittingly supporting Lauder before his outrageous forgery was exposed. Mr. Terry convincingly argues that Sterne’s singular reputation for originality must have exacerbated accusations against him. He believes that we ought to distinguish Sterne’s rather egregious copying in his sermons from his more subtle use of unacknowledged sources in Tristram Shandy. This is no doubt true, and Sterne’s creativity with his “borrowed” material is indeed “keyed into some of the preoccupations...