ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO YEARS BEFORE screaming crowds would welcome the Beatles to New York, American fans waited with similar anticipation in Boston for the arrival of the biggest cultural celebrity of their day: Charles Dickens. This visit was probably the greatest thing that had ever happened to Boston Harbor, next to the vandalism that started this country in the first place. In the very least, it had been a while since anyone in the United States was this thrilled about a Brit setting foot on American soil. Just twenty-eight years before, in 1814, England had invaded Washington, DC, and set fire to the White House. But this was Charles “Defender of the Downtrodden” Dickens, baby. He may have called London home, but he was one of us. He wrote stories that spoke to our lives and situations, books that transcended state and economic borders. Dickens was “a phenomenon, an exception, a special production.” He was Beatlemania more than a century before the Beatles. Unfortunately, he also lived in an era before international copyright. So while he was enjoying Paul McCartney’s fame, he certainly wasn’t enjoying Paul McCartney’s fortune.
The American press loved Dickens. While a little grumpy about the throngs of worshippers in the streets, the New-York Evening Post seemed genuinely proud that “a young man, without birth, wealth, title, or sword, whose only claims to distinction are his intellect and heart, is received with a feeling that was formerly rendered only to emperors and kings.” The Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer ran a story just after he arrived, noting that Dickens was receiving attention beyond many “distinguished persons who had never been so feted by the nation, among them the ‘illustrious WASHINGTON, the Father of this Country,’ and ‘LA FAYETTE . . . a public benefactor, and the Nation[’s] guest.’” In the nineteenth century, the world of print had exploded into the mainstream culture of the English-speaking world. And Dickens was at the center of it all.
Charles Dickens didn’t inherit his noble status. He earned it with his own labor and unique talent. He was the embodiment of the American Dream. He was British, sure—whatever—but so were most American Dreamers just a few decades before. “His mind is American,” boasted the New York Herald, “his soul is republican—his heart is democratic.” What greater act of narcissistic affection can there be than to shout as a nation, We love you, Mr. Dickens! We love you because you are we!
For his part, Dickens returned that endearment. Upon settling into his room at the opulent Tremont House, he descended the staircase with his wife, jauntily announcing to his adorers, “Here we are!” Writing later, Dickens declared, “Boston is what I would have the whole United States to be.”
That’s a nice sentiment, Mr. Dickens, but here’s what Americans would be saying about you in just a few weeks’ time: “cockney,” “literary bagman,” “penny-a-liner loafer.” In case the outdated insults are a bit too obtuse for a modern audience, allow us to continue: “[Dickens is] the most flimsy—the most childish—the most trashy—[and] the most contemptible . . . [his writing is the] essence of balderdash reduced to the last drop of silliness and inanity.”
And then there’s this: “the sooner [Dickens] hangs up his fiddle, and himself with it, or jumps into the New River, the better it will be . . .”
Ouch. What the hell happened? Dickens’s sudden fall from American grace was reminiscent of the Beatles’ fall in 1966, when Lennon declared to a British daily, “We’re more popular than Jesus.” That went over in the American South about as well as anyone could expect. Dickens avoided making any comments about the god of Christianity, but he did say a few words about the god of America: Cold. Hard. Cash.
LIKE AUTHORSHIP, the idea of copyright as we understand it today has experienced an ongoing evolution. In 1842, America had no international copyright agreements. Copyright protection did exist (after the pattern established in England in the eighteenth century), but it was restricted to American citizens. This meant that writers from other countries, even the most celebrated, had no claim to the profits of any book printed and sold by American publishers. Nor did they have any means of stopping those publishers from producing them. Of course, the lack of reciprocal international copyright laws wasn’t doing any favors for American writers, either. It was to this more convincing point that Dickens first broached the subject of copyright, at the end of a speech in Boston about a week after he arrived. Initially, his comments were received with a flood of applause from the attendees. But within a few days, that sentiment had taken a decidedly worse turn.
With his first major hit in 1836, Charles Dickens achieved success right when literary celebrity was becoming popular. Dickens scholar Robert L. Patten explains that the author “thought of himself as a professional writer, an identity which an older generation deplored.” As scholar Florian Schweizer notes, “Due to the success of a few writers, a whole generation of readers started to believe that literature was the key to fame and fortune. Writing in 1837, the journalist James Grant confirmed that authorship had become a commonplace occupation: “‘You now meet with an author in every fifteenth or twentieth person you chance to encounter in the daily intercourse of life.’”
With the blossoming popularity of authors in the Romantic Age such as Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, publishers began to capitalize on the idea that customers would buy books simply because of a name. This was an important shift. An author’s name was part of the overall sale package, one more tool to move the product. Sooner or later, authors were bound to ask for a fair cut of that product.
In the first centuries of print, very few living authors wielded power by their name alone. Martin Luther was one; Shakespeare was another. Yet, as popular opinions of authorship changed, writers were able to use the expanding economy of print to seize more monetary rewards. This trend was part of a wider Enlightenment ideal that praised the right to property rather than regarding wealth as a source of depravity. Even ideas, by their very nature intangible, were slowly being accepted as property. That McDonald’s could own the word combination “I’m lovin’ it” would have been a revolutionary concept before the Enlightenment.
John Milton, for example, sold his manuscript of Paradise Lost, and his right to profit from any proceeds of the work, for five pounds in 1667. No matter how unfair this seems today, at the time it was business as usual. Authors produced and sold stories just as a farmer might raise a cow and sell the beef to McDonald’s, which then “processes” it for sale to a larger group of consumers at a profit. Because English protocopyright structures were built around literature as a single act of creation, laws protecting the rights to literature were often meant to protect those in charge of distribution, essentially the publishers of the day, not the original creator of the work.
As England’s philosophical and economic underpinnings shifted with the Enlightenment, so, too, did its view of copyright. A major breakthrough occurred in 1710. This was the year of the Statute of Anne, an English law entitled “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned” (hence why everyone agreed to call it the Statute of Anne). This act granted copyright holders rights to a work for a period of fourteen years. The protection could be extended one time, for another fourteen years, upon request. Boom. Problem solved. Before 1710 an author had legal recourse only in cases of “libel, blasphemy, or sedition” (where he was usually the criminal defendant, by the way). After the Statute of Anne, the author was now a legal entity who had ownership of his works. The full implications of this took a little time to sink in, but moving forward, reproductions could be printed only by permission of the author, or by someone to whom the author had sold the “rights” to his personal “copy.” Violate that, and an author finally had grounds to sue.
Foreigners were another story, however, and in the nineteenth century, that story began to change. International agreements were emerging among various developing nations, but one country that bucked that trend was the good ole U.S. of A. “Inasmuch as [Dickens] received 40,000 guineas per annum for his works in England . . . he had no right to ask Americans ‘to double the sum out of [their] own pockets.’” This was Boston’s response, in American Traveller, to Dickens’s calls for copyright reform.
First off, 40,000 guineas seems a bit high, even for Mr. Dickens. This staggering annual income would be roughly equivalent to £1.7 million in modern currency. Thinking Dickens had access to that extreme amount of capital was mistake number one. Yet, with that error firmly planted in their minds, it became pretty easy for people to slam the door in his face when he came asking for money. It would seem a little like Ebenezer Scrooge holding out Oliver Twist’s bowl and saying, “Please, sir, I want some more—money, that is.”
Publishers in America who were pirating Dickens’s books shared that indignation. Why should Dickens get paid twice? He’d already gotten his guineas back in England. Why should we Americans give him money in exchange for products that we consume? Sure, that’s the basic definition of capitalism, but you can just bugger off, capitalism, Dickens has enough money.
In the 1840s, America was the literary equivalent of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and the printers, publishers, and booksellers of this country were the ship’s captain, Edward “Blackbeard” Thatch. We were pirates, and what’s worse, we were proud of it—really, really proud of it. To deprive foreign authors of royalties was the American way. We were so famous for it that a new phrase was coined in the history of print just for us.
“No sooner is a literary venture of Bulwer[-Lytton], Thackeray, or Dickens afloat, than a whole baracoon of ‘bookaneers,’ as Hood called them, rushes forth to seize it.”
Bookaneers. Oh my, that’s clever. It makes you think of a whole fleet of well-read pirates mounting raids on libraries to pore over the treasured works of Jonathan Swift, Goethe, and William Wordsworth. And, in fact, American publishers liked to make similar claims as their motivation for piracy. See, books are cheaper when they’re stolen. Publishers claimed that pirating works allowed their prices to remain low, which in turn made the works more accessible to the public at large. So piracy = educating the masses. It’s an Enlightenment ideal. American printers were proud to be pirates because they pictured themselves as taking part in the education of the infant nation, just as they had taken part in its infant democracy.
Whether Dickens went to America with the express purpose of advocating for international copyright has been a matter of intense speculation and debate from the moment he arrived in Boston. Whatever his intentions may have been, he appears to have stumbled naïvely into a very awkward situation with the United States. It was like a first date. Both people have lofty expectations and dress to look as sharp as possible. They smile and say all the right things, but after a while they begin to realize that something’s off. It becomes clear that one of you isn’t as wealthy as you said you were, and things get really weird when he starts asking you for money. Then you get offended when he visits Richmond, Virginia, and hates all your slave plantations. Classic first-date hiccups.
Awkward or not, Dickens’s 1842 visit shone a light on the problem of American copyright. As straightforward as the solutions seem today, pirates controlled the vast majority of the printing presses in nineteenth-century America. As a result, literary boarding planks became symbols of patriotism.
I HAVE MADE UP MY MIND . . . TO GO TO AMERICA,” Charles Dickens cap-shouted to a friend in a letter dated September 1841.
Why did he want to go? Who knows? He never told anyone. A few historians have claimed that, from the very beginning, he planned to proselytize for copyright reform. American newspapers would claim that Dickens was a “mercenary,” a hired thug sent out by a cabal of British authors from some Literary Legion of Doom, which, let’s be honest, is the nerdiest of doom legions. Maybe he just wanted to pay a visit to his pen pal Washington Irving, or find out what a hushpuppy was, or see the PIGS on Broadway. (Sorry, that made it seem like there was a show called The Pigs on Broadway in 1841. We were just caps-shouting about the roaming passels of hogs that regularly foraged along Broadway—something Dickens found amusing enough to write home about.)
Whatever initially carried Dickens to the United States, one thing is for certain, he got here in style, on a fancy steamer, christened the SS Britannia, that could make the transatlantic crossing in just fourteen days. This leads us to gaffe number one on Dickens’s first date with America. We thought he had money, but he did not.
Because Dickens was “the most photographically famous person in Britain outside of the royal family,” everyone knew what he looked like. “[Dickens] was instantly recognizable on the streets, furiously walking, in flamboyant clothes.” If you closed your eyes and pictured Charles Dickens, this is what you saw: “a middle-sized person, in a brown frock coat, a red figured vest . . . a fancy scarf cravat, . . . [a] dickey . . . a double pin and chain . . . a gold watch . . . a shaggy coat of bear or buffalo skin that would excite the admiration of a Kentucky huntsman.”
His fashion style has been described as “graphic fancy.” On one leg of his American journey, he was actually mistaken for a riverboat gambler. That’s right, in comparison to the people in his immediate vicinity, Dickens looked like some fancy Dan trying to stroll off the pages of a Mark Twain novel.
When Dickens traveled, he did so in style. He boarded in the stateroom of the SS Britannia. Once on land, he stayed in presidential accommodations such as the Tremont House (America’s “pioneer first-class hotel”) and the Clifton House Hotel (where his “bedroom and sitting room windows looked straight down upon [Niagara] Falls”).
Wherever Dickens went he exuded fame and fortune. Still, fortune is not the inevitable successor to fame. Just ask any flash-in-the-pan YouTube celebrity. In reality, Charles Dickens was broke. Worse than broke, he was £5,019 in debt. The only way he was even able to raise the capital for the American excursion in the first place was to take a loan out on his next novel. On New Year’s Day 1842, he acknowledged receipt from his publishers of £885, and three weeks later pushed off for Boston.
When Dickens and his English publishers issued what turned out to be his breakout success, The Pickwick Papers, in serial parts (1836–37), they sold for a shilling a piece. (A complete set in parts now sells for thousands of dollars, but that’s beside the point, especially for Dickens.) This method of selling and distribution created a huge potential for profit, “transform[ing] Dickens, Chapman and Hall [his publishers] from minor figures in Victorian letters to titans.” Yet the author-publisher relationship as we know it today was still maturing, and Dickens saw exceptionally less personal profit from his early successes than a modern-day author would. Even with his unprecedented sales numbers, he wasn’t financially secure until 1847. That’s ten years after Oliver Twist (now worth tens of thousands of dollars), and three years after A Christmas Carol (now worth as much as thirty-five thousand). When Dickens, arguably the most famous author in the Western world, landed in Boston in 1842, financial security was still half a decade away.
Despite writing five runaway hits and almost single-handedly revolutionizing the way books were sold, Dickens had only ever received about three hundred fifty pounds from American publishers. Compare that to the quite modest two thousand pounds he made in England from The Pickwick Papers. With IOUs bursting out of his buffalo-skin coat pockets, it’s not hard to see how he might have felt compelled at least to mention copyright reform when a soapbox was presented to him. If Americans really were being expected to “double the sum” of forty thousand guineas annually “from their own pockets,” as the American Traveller complained, we were kind of admitting to fleecing Mr. Dickens out of two hundred thousand dollars a year in lost copyright revenues—and that sum of money was more than enough to wage a small war over.
“Before I sit down,” Dickens said at the tail end of a banquet thrown by the Young Men of Boston on February 1, “there is one topic on which I am desirous to lay particular stress.” His speech up to this point had focused on things like Little Nell, the thirteen-year-old protagonist of one of his latest novels, The Old Curiosity Shop. A pure and gentle soul, Nell (nineteenth-century spoiler alert) doesn’t fare too well by the end of her story. Dickens wasn’t quite at the level of George “Serial Killer of Everyone You Ever Loved” R. R. Martin, but Nell’s passing was a bitter pill for Dickens’s readers. He’d been touched by letters regarding her demise from “dwellers in log-houses among the morasses, and swamps, and densest forests, and deepest solitudes of the Far West.” That’s sweet. Round of applause . . . oh, wait, there’s more.
“I hope the time is not distant,” Dickens continued, “when [authors], in America, will receive of right some substantial profit and return in England from their labors; and when we, in England, shall receive some substantial profit and return for ours.”
He then ended with “I would rather have the affectionate regard of my fellow men than I would have heaps and mines of gold. But the two things do not seem to me incompatible.”
Essentially he was saying, Hey, guys, all I need is your love and support. I don’t actually need gold chains and bear coats and silk scarves and dickeys, but . . . I mean . . . there’s no reason I can’t have both, right?
Dickens closed to “tumultuous” applause from the audience. Maybe the tumult was for Little Nell, or maybe the Young Men of Boston really loved speeches about intellectual property rights. Either way, Dickens brought up an important point, one that he believed would resonate with American audiences: just as he was receiving almost nothing from the American sales of his novels, without a strong international copyright agreement, American authors were also being shortchanged abroad.
That should do it, right? If you want to rouse Americans, kick them where it counts—right in the coin purse.
He clearly hadn’t spent enough time with Americans. As one scholar summarizes, “[Dickens] mistook piracy for the result of administrative oversight, which could easily be rectified by a single piece of legislation.” This is probably how he pictured things going in his head:
Pardon me, people of America, it appears you have forgotten to pay me.
We’ll just look into that for you, Mr. Dickens. Good Lord, man, you’re right! Please accept our humblest apologies. And also this mountain of dollars.
Here’s how it actually went, in the New York’s Morning Post: “[It was] bad taste in Mr. Dickens to allude to the copyright business in his speech here.”
Such “pecuniary considerations” . . . “smells of the shop—rank,” railed the Boston Morning Post and the Courier and Enquirer.
Dickens was uncouth to “intrude his business upon those who assemble to pay homage to his genius,” tsk’d the New York Courier.
“[W]e want no advice on this matter, and it will be better for Mr. Dickens, if he refrains from introducing the matter hereafter,” threatened the Hartford Times.
Dickens either didn’t get those threats or didn’t care, because a week after his Boston speech, he brought the subject up again at a public dinner in Connecticut, with his most winning Victorian graces: “I would beg leave to whisper in your ear two words, International Copyright.”
Seeing as the economic tack hadn’t worked, Dickens retreated to his specialty: emotional appeal. What if withholding royalties from an author were enough to kill him? Could American stinginess murder an author as thoroughly as the cruelties of life murdered Little Nell?
Dickens’s predecessor, the revered novelist, playwright, and poet Sir Walter Scott, had died near penniless in 1832, never receiving so much as “one grateful dollar” from his American fans. He perished tragically, broke and in debt, without enough money “to buy a garland for his grave.” (Today, first editions of his best-loved work, Ivanhoe, sell in the healthy mid-thousands of dollars.) If Americans hadn’t been so greedy, Dickens not so gently alluded, Scott “might not have sunk beneath the mighty pressure on his brain.” In other words, America, you killed Walter Scott.
Calling us moneygrubbers is one thing, but blaming us for the death of Sir Walter Scott? Aw, hell no.
“Mr. DICKENS has been honored with two public dinners since his arrival in the United States; and on both occasions he has made an appeal to . . . dollars and cents for his writings. We are . . . mortified and grieved that he should have been guilty of such a great indelicacy and gross impropriety . . . by urging upon those assembled to do honor to his genius, to look after his purse also!”
Indelicacy! Impropriety! Mortification and bereavement! It’s bizarre to think that a country built on capitalism would feel so importuned by Dickens’s request to be compensated for his work in “dollars and cents,” rather than hugs and kisses and unicorn smiles. But the state of copyright in the United States was a quagmire whose depths Dickens seemed genuinely ignorant of. Four days after his Hartford speech, the New World commented with unusual insight that “time, place, and occasion taken into consideration, [Dickens’s copyright remarks] seem to have been made in the worst taste possible.” Some of that American pushback can be explained by delicate events unfolding between the United States and Britain at the time. The rest can be explained by our printing presses. In particular, our publishers, who had “indelicate” aspirations of their own.
At the time of Dickens’s visit, America was at the tail end of a massive recession. Around 1834 the United States entered a boom economy, fueled largely by rising prices for land, cotton, and slaves. As bubbles are wont to do, this one burst, around the summer of 1836. With banks locking down on loans, and money shifting away from commercial centers in the East, America smacked into the Panic of 1837. Then “in 1839 panic set in again: a depression whose severity, according to one recent economic historian, ‘can most accurately be compared to that of 1929.’” The U.S. printing industry was hit particularly hard during these times.
Historian James Barnes sets the scene: “Perhaps nothing in the nineteenth century so influenced the American book trade as the depression of 1837–1843 . . . New publishers sprang up only to disappear a few years later amidst the ranks of debtors and insolvents. Editors moved from one journal to another, seeking to stave off the inevitable. Prices for books and periodicals fell lower and lower.”
Consider that, in the 1820s, books were priced in the two-dollar range. By the late 1830s those same books were selling for fifty cents—a staggering three-quarter price drop. How could the American publishing industry survive on such meager rations? Well, it did what most people are willing to do when they’re starving: steal.
In the midst of this economic recession, publishers came up with the idea of printing books in newspaper form. “Weeklies” were huge folio sheets of printing paper that could “go through the post at newspaper rates instead of those for magazines [or books], and such large sheets could be cheaply printed, requiring no binding or stitching, and yet had more reading matter than most literary periodicals.”
What kinds of materials could these publishers print cheaply in their weeklies? The stolen kinds, obviously. Brother Jonathan, based in Manhattan, was one of the first and largest of these weekly publications, and proudly boasted of “having first introduced into the cash newspapers the custom of reprinting [Dickens’s] novel[s] as they appeared in numbers.” These weeklies became a national phenomenon. Life in the publishing industry suddenly started looking up. U.S. printers had access to a constant stream of novels, paid no royalties to the authors, and delivered those novels to American readers in the absolute cheapest way possible.
As far as publishers in the United States were concerned, wholesale pirated material was a win-win for everyone involved. Publishing houses started seeing profits again, American readers were given access to novels they couldn’t have afforded otherwise, and foreign authors were granted the greatest gift of all: love. “The community . . . owes us a debt of gratitude,” crowed the New World.
Let’s be clear: Americans were the worst copyright offenders in the Western world. The theft of intellectual property that started out as a means to “jumpstart a new, more enlightened and democratic polity” had quickly become a pirated-version of Frankenstein’s monster—a Maggie Shelley’s Frankenstone, if you will. Dickens’s works were pirated so ubiquitously that you could find them on the back of railway timetables. This was an industry supported by more than two hundred thousand jobs, printing off three to four times as many books as Britain. Granting copyright protections to foreign authors would have been tantamount to economic hara-kiri. The very notion was patently absurd to U.S. publishers.
There is some truth to the claim that Dickens’s popularity in the United States was greatly fanned by the cheap availability of his novels. If he continued asking for those “dollars and cents,” U.S. printers threatened, “it was to be subtracted from the earnings of publishers whose presses had purportedly made the writer famous enough to be received as America’s guest.”
Yet the patriotism of those printers lasted only as long as it increased their profits. Homegrown American authors were hurt by these policies as well. Because domestic copyright had already been established, American authors had to be paid for their work (gasp). But why would a publisher bother with an inconvenience like that when he could just live off the fat of English bestsellers? Pirated works were so cheap that they were sold, according to Mark Twain, “at prices which make a package of water closet paper seem an ‘edition de luxe’ in comparison.” Books by American authors generally cost four times as much as pirated books. It’s as if books by English authors were being sold at used paperback prices, while American authors were sold exclusively at hardcover.
A growing number of American authors added their voices to the fight for copyright. For instance, the American poet James Russell Lowell attempted to cast shame on cutthroat publishing practices with his matronly slogan, “Better than a cheap book, is a book honestly come by.” Ha ha ha, shut up, Lowell. Sincerely, the American printing industry.
Now, if you’re thinking there should be more xenophobia in these nineteenth-century discussions, never fear: “The country is drugged from one end to the other with foreign literature which pays no tax,” complained Washington Irving. According to the American Copyright Club, British culture “sweeps the land, and puts at naught all petty distinctions of district and neighborhood, and settles down, at its leisure, into a dark, slimy, universal pond.” Competing with this flood of cheap, abundant, British literature was even described by inventor Samuel Morse as an ongoing “colonial bondage.”
Publisher Roger Sherman put it succinctly when he antagonistically wrote, “[Copyright reform is] the clamor of two hundred authors against the interests of fifty-five millions of people.” It turned out that two side effects of the 1837 recession had revitalized the American publishing industry: giant, cheap weeklies and teeny, tiny violins for authors.
After making a third attempt to address copyright reform at a New York banquet on February 18, Charles Dickens basically threw in the towel. This was the moment, during his first date with America, when he realized we were totally incompatible. “This is not the Republic I came to see,” he wrote. “This is not the Republic of my imagination.” Or in other words, You look totally different from your profile pic, America. It was obviously taken eight years ago and under noticeably better lighting.
On America’s end, Dickens was quickly living up to the first four letters in his name. As his disappointment in us grew, so, too, did his criticisms—much of which came in the form of his travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation, published a few months after his return to England; and his next novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, which began serial publication three months after that. When Dickens first conceived this picaresque novel, it was not supposed to take a detour to America. But after returning home, Dickens had a few complaints fresh in his mind. Americans were not portrayed in a particularly favorable light.
On a steamboat, “every gentleman on board appeared to have had a difference with his laundress, and to have left off washing himself in early youth,” Dickens wrote. Oh, Dickens: laundresses were for people with silk cravats and dickeys.
Our favorite scene is the description of one American dinner where a bell summons feasters to the table:
Three more gentlemen . . . came plunging wildly around the street corner; jostled each other on the steps; struggled for an instant; and rushed into the house in a confused heap of arms and legs . . . All the knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost in self-defense, as if a famine were expected to set in . . . The poultry . . . disappeared as rapidly as if every bird had had the use of its wings, and had flown in desperation down a human throat . . . Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and an awful thing to see.
And Dickens wrote that without ever setting foot in a Golden Corral, or the state of Texas. By the end of his fictional romp through the United States, Dickens’s protagonist Martin Chuzzlewit concluded that most Americans lack “that instinctive good breeding which admonishes one man not to offend and disgust another.”
Before arriving in America, Dickens expected to move through our streets and boroughs as a witty little observer, much as he had in London. In reality, though, he was constantly crushed by a throng of fans wherever he went. At one point, the riverboat carrying him and his wife docked in Cleveland for the night, and the next morning “a party of ‘gentlemen’” competed with each other to peer inside the cabin window “while [he] was washing and Kate lay in bed.”
He received hundreds of requests for locks of his hair. One New York barber who serviced him turned around and immediately capitalized on this by offering his hair clippings for sale.
“I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go . . . If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude. If I stay at home, the house becomes, with callers, like a fair . . . I take my seat in a railroad car, and the very conductor won’t leave me alone. I get out at a station, and can’t drink a glass of water, without having a hundred people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow.”
Perhaps some of those mouth gazers were looking to see if the ads in one newspaper were true. “His ‘rather yellow teeth,’ showed, said the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times . . . that he did not avail himself of ‘Teaberry Tooth Wash’ or ‘Hufeland’s Dentifrice,’ the virtues of which commodities were described elsewhere in the paper.” You know Americans love you when they break out the merch. Using Dickens’s early pen name, one New York grocer advertised “Boz Pork & Beans.” Nothing gets you in the mood for Oliver Twist like a can of gelatinous legumes and pork fat that only starving children would consider edible.
At first, Dickens embraced this deluge of American attention. Then he tolerated it. Then he hated it. After a few weeks, our incessant rudeness came to represent all that ailed American society. The “mass of your countrymen,” Martin Chuzzlewit announced, “begin by stubbornly neglecting little social observances . . . acts of common, decent, natural, human politeness . . . From disregarding small obligations, [Americans] come in regular course to disregard great ones”—such as copyright reform, the plight of the poor, and the elephant in the room: slavery.
Charles Dickens was supposed to be our great English ambassador of goodwill. At the time of his visit, tensions had been mounting between the United States and Britain over issues such as the Canada-Maine boundary, the Oregon boundary dispute (“Fifty-four Forty or Fight!”), and England’s search and seizure of American slave ships. (Britain had abolished slavery as an unlawful evil in 1833.) But Dickens was supposed to fix all that! He was supposed to show the world how awesome we really are! Instead, he wouldn’t shut up about copyright, and then called us all gluttons bereft of human politeness. He offended our capitalism just because we were stealing, and offended our national character just because we were rude.
In a display of patience and generosity, we even invited him to tour a tobacco slave plantation in Virginia. That’s right, a premium tour of a slave plantation. For the foremost literary activist regarding society’s most abused classes. According to his biographer Michael Slater, “[Dickens] could hardly have failed to be struck by the incongruity of being toasted in a slave-owning community as a writer whose work makes us ‘feel for the humblest’ and ‘creates in all of us a sympathy for each other—a participation in the interests of our common humanity, which constitutes the great bond of equality.’” In disgust, Dickens canceled all future travel plans in the American South.
During the last legs of his American journey, Dickens traveled as far into the frontier as St. Louis, Missouri, a place he found to be “intolerably conceited.” On his return, he stayed at Niagara Falls, whose majesty helped to dull his disappointment in this transatlantic trek. It was at the Falls that he “at last found that sublimity of nature he had been so ardently hoping to experience in America.” It was also here that he received an open letter addressed to the American people and signed by twelve of the most influential authors in Britain, as well as a separate letter by historian and satirist Thomas Carlyle. The letters strongly argued for an international copyright agreement between the two countries.
Dickens forwarded these letters to newspapers in New York, Boston, and Washington, DC, and to J. P. Kennedy, a pro-copyright congressman from Maryland. The letters had little to no effect. Some contemporaries have looked at this move through a lens of perfidy because the letters were sent to various news outlets without Dickens explicitly stating that he’d requested that they be written. What appeared to be a spontaneous and collective protest from the British Isles had in fact been orchestrated by Charles Dickens.
Perfidious or not, the letters were a feeble volley as Dickens retreated from the American press corps. By the end of his trip, the same newspapers that had welcomed him like royalty were calling him an “adventurer,” a “mercenary,” and a hypocrite—it bordered “on the ridiculous for [Dickens] to lecture Americans . . . about dollars, who is clearly convicted of a supreme love of them.” The “sacred wrath of the newspapers,” as Dickens put it, had won.
Arriving back in London on June 29, 1842, Dickens took out his revenge in the most effective way possible—by using our craving for celebrity against us. American Notes lambasted the United States. Martin Chuzzlewit takes that unplanned detour to America just to denounce our gluttonous, boorish ways. And we bought it. In droves we consumed it. As much as he railed against America, Charles Dickens was still the most popular author in the English-speaking world. American Notes became a best seller in the United States; so did Martin Chuzzlewit. No matter what Dickens put in his tales, we had no choice but to eat it. It tasted too good to stop. Like an entire box of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies, we cried and ate, and cried and ate some more.
The newspapers that crucified Dickens’s character couldn’t help themselves from including even his most caustic stories within their pages. To do otherwise would have been to slit their wrists and spill so many moist dollars on the floor. “[Printers in America] were driven by popular demand and their own covetousness to go on stealing the very text they would have to denounce as slanderous in other parts of their . . . newspaper.” Dickens wouldn’t get financial recompense for his stories, but who can put a price tag on throwing shade at your haters, and knowing they have to print it on page one?
AS THE awkward first date with America receded into painful memory, Dickens might have cast his eye across the pond to see what his copyright crusade ultimately accomplished. The answer would have been nothing.
Wait, no: nothing would have been better than what actually resulted from Dickens’s American tour. Panicked by the torchlight being shone on their pecuniary piratical printing practices (say that five times fast), members of the book trade in Boston gathered at the Boston Museum on the night of April 26, 1842, for an emergency meeting.
These pillars of the Boston printing community met to draft an official letter to Congress petitioning against any species of international copyright reform. Dickens was still making his way back to New York from the western frontier at the time, and even though he’d already lost the American copyright debate, Boston wanted to mount his head on the Old North Church.
The American printers requested that any imported books face duties. And to make the situation for British authors infinitely more insulting, the Boston letter claimed that Americans must be free to adapt English works “to our own wants, our institutions, and our state of society.”
Wow. Do not mess with printers. Dickens went from Americans stealing his work to having tariffs levied against his overseas book sales, to publishers changing his stories to better accommodate American “wants and institutions.” Incidentally, that’s something, according to Dickens, they’d already been doing. We’re not sure what changes were made, but we imagine they went something like this:
American Oliver Twist—Fagin explains that his gang of pickpocketing children is entirely necessary to jump-start the local economy.
American A Christmas Carol—The ghost of Marley appears to Ebenezer Scrooge and warns him to raise the minimum wage, but that it doesn’t actually need to be high enough for the Cratchits to pay rent.
American A Tale of Two Cities—This becomes a story about who has better pizza, New York or Chicago. Since it’s a work of fiction, Chicago wins.
For the next fifty years, American printers were lawfully able to plunder the literary treasures of the world. Voices were raised from time to time, but economic incentives for piracy were just too powerful.
In 1886, representatives from ten countries signed an international treaty at the Berne Convention, which granted automatic copyright protection to authors regardless of their country of origin. The United States sent observers to Berne but refused to become a signatory. Five years later, in 1891 (twenty-one years after Charles Dickens died), the U.S. Congress passed the Chace Act, which finally extended copyright to select countries (including Britain) as long as their work was “simultaneously published or ‘manufactured’ in the U.S.” America did eventually join the Berne Convention and extend copyright protections to everyone, but not until March 1, 1989. Yes, you read that right. From two years before the publication of A Christmas Carol to the authors of this book attending elementary school—that’s how long it took to pass comprehensive international copyright laws in America.
If Dickens hadn’t already been depressed enough about the state of American piracy in the nineteenth century, he’d probably be more depressed if we could tell him that there are many “Americas” in the world today. China and India are basically us from 1842, when it comes to stolen books, movies, music, and video games. Dickens might even enjoy the irony that American cultural products are currently pirated at a higher rate than those of any other country in the world.
As time marches on, many of the issues of copyright have become murkier, not clearer. Which brings us to the Internet. Oh, Mr. Dickens, let us tell you about the Internet. Content piracy may be the keystone keeping that whole damn infrastructure together. “We can note that today’s struggles,” writes one copyright historian, “are fought in terms that would be eminently comprehensible to those nineteenth-century reformers who battled over how broadly to extend rights and powers to authors.”
On second thought, let’s not tell Mr. Dickens about the Internet.