Unintended Authors: Piracy, Plagiarism and Property in Victorian Popular Culture

Monica Cohen

doi:10.46911/amtw8511

Abstract

The introduction to this special issue of the Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, “Unintended Authors,” argues that Victorian popular fictions crucially relied on incoherently regulated global artistic markets that made bargain-basement grabbing and reselling comme il faut. The absence of clear and uniform copyright statutes, case law, and trade practices across national, colonial, linguistic, and generic borders surprisingly did not obstruct nineteenth-century authorship; rather these conditions did the work of cultivating an extraordinary proliferation of scrappy innovators creatively reusing antecedents. A cast of rogue publishers, theatrical adaptors, and proto brand managers take centre stage here in an effort to recognize the collaborative, appropriative, and reiterative dimensions of nineteenth-century fictional entertainment.

Highlights

The organising principle of this special issue, “Unintended Authors: Piracy, Plagiarism and Property in Victorian Popular Culture,” posits that the absence of clear and robust national and international laws protecting originating authors and copyright holders had the surprising effect of animating Victorian pan-media markets with scrappy, innovative, and imaginative pioneers
While the “myth... of the single author as the owner of his own creative work” (Legette 2017: 1) percolated through each copyright debate in Britain from 1814 onwards, the enormous proliferation of platforms that made Victorian popular culture so expansive meant that nineteenth-century popular culture as a global network of circulated and recirculated works was rife with multitudinous opportunities to repeat, to repackage, to reimagine. Because it was not until late in the century that copyright protection became predicated on the spirit expressed in a work rather than on the material in which it was first built, the conditions for creative experimentation were bountiful. In light of these conditions, material and legal, it is difficult to categorise many creative innovators, significant they were to critical inventions in the transnational circulation of Victorian popular fictions
Consider the following figures as case studies studies that, taken together, demonstrate the need to reimagine the landscape of Victorian popular fictions in ways that include participants who have not previously counted as authors in a traditional sense

Summary

Four Case Studies

The organising principle of this special issue, “Unintended Authors: Piracy, Plagiarism and Property in Victorian Popular Culture,” posits that the absence of clear and robust national and international laws protecting originating authors and copyright holders had the surprising effect of animating Victorian pan-media markets with scrappy, innovative, and imaginative pioneers. This arena remained, and for a surprisingly long period of time, a virtual Wild West, a set of conditions and attitudes that seems to be as true in the print culture of the Ottoman Empire and in the translation practices of late-Qing China as it was in Victorian London or nineteenth-century Philadelphia. As Oren Bracha has argued, originality is the great “myth of copyright in America,” and, I would argue, in the nineteenth-century Anglophone world generally: “the strange inverse correlation between the increasing rhetorical importance of originality and its shrinking significance as a doctrinal requirement” means that noisy chatter about originality ironically accompanied escalations in unauthorised reuse (2008a)

Reuse in Context

My Four Case Studies

The Defense