The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660-1730 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660-1730 Susan Paterson Glover Jody Greene . The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660-1730. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. US$49.95; £32.50. ISBN 978-0-8122-3862-4. Towards the close of Daniel Defoe's novel The Fortunate Mistress, the narrator's increasingly desperate daughter pleads with the Quaker woman for assistance in identifying her mother : "she is my Mother! and will not own me." This multiple signification of owning—to declare something one's property (dating back to Anglo-Saxon law), to acknowledge a possessory relationship in relation to kinship or authorship (OED), and to confess or admit something to be true—is at the centre of Jody Greene's ambitious study of ownership and authorship in Restoration and early eighteenth-century England. The received history of copyright situates its origin in the transfer of "ownership" from the printer or publisher, with the entrance of the copy in London's Stationers' Register, to the author, whose property [End Page 124] in a printed work remains protected during and following his or her lifetime. This history cites the Act for the Encouragement of Learning by Vesting the Copies of the Printed Books in the Authors, or Purchasers, of such Copies, during the Times therein Mentioned (8 Anne c.19), which came into effect 10 April 1710, as the first legal recognition of the author's rights in his or her work. Greene claims that this narrative fails to consider adequately the Faustian bargain made by early writers in order to have their property recognized by the 1710 statute. Her argument is presented in two parts: the first traces the efforts of the English state, beginning with the Tudors, to regulate and control the output of the presses. As print historians have made increasingly clear, liability for "authorship" in the early modern period is spread across a network of writers, typesetters/compositors, printers, and booksellers, and the "author" is simply primus inter pares; the state regulators will be pleased to lay hands on him (and occasionally her, as in the case of Elizabeth Cellier), but any of the others will do in the author's stead. Greene teases out the historical process whereby the author function is increasingly hived off from the collectivity of production and distinguished with an originary liability for the printed text. Against the analysis that sees the 1710 Act as the visible and historic separation of licensing and surveillance from an author's property rights, Greene adjusts the balance by suggesting that the price for the protection of property was the concomitant burden of liability. Citing Foucault's observation that the emergence of "the author" is contingent upon his or her vulnerability to punishment, Greene links the recognition of the author's property (the author either entered his/ her own copy into the Register or assigned title to a printer or bookseller) with the government's increased capacity to fix liability. In part 2, "The Dangerous Fate of Authors," Greene turns not to a parallel exploration of prosecutions and trials in the print trade subsequent to 1710, but to several authorial test cases. The salient exemplum here is Daniel Defoe, an obvious but perhaps problematic choice. Having been pilloried for anonymous work that other printers hawked and profited from, Defoe supported vigorously in the Review and his Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704) the public identification of the author with his or her work ; the property right would serve at least as a "consolation prize," as Greene puts it, in return for accountability (22). But the chameleon-like Defoe proves a slippery example; despite his righteous assertions that he writes nothing but what he publicly "owns," his staggering oeuvre of anonymous texts has ensured that the scholarly determination of his canon remains a work in progress. To be both anonymous and exempt from liability was merely a reflection of Defoe's modus operandi. Greene's exclusive focus on Defoe prior to the passage of the 1710 statute leaves unaddressed the degree to which Defoe suffered under its provisions. [End Page 125] Greene's...