[T]he concept of “plagiarism” cannot stand the stress of historical examination.
—Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969)
Asking what defined plagiarism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain is another way of asking what defined Romanticism. The central claim of this study is that the relationship was constitutive. The stakes in Romantic-period charges of plagiarism were aesthetic, and the contemporary debates regarding the legitimacy or illegitimacy of particular literary obligations masked a larger contest about how to come to critical judgment. But what did plagiarism mean for readers and writers in Georgian Britain? And what defined the success or failure of a literary work in the period that we have come to call Romanticism? As a determination of aesthetic failure, plagiarism and the critical discourse that surrounded it offer a sustained account of the cultural negotiations that shaped the literary expectations of early nineteenth-century readers and writers. This chapter provides an overview of the standards required to “prove” a charge of plagiarism in the Romantic period and focuses particularly on the ways in which the conventions of literary appropriation were historically distinct from both earlier eighteenth-century and current modern/postmodern constructions.
The basic parameters of plagiarism in the Romantic period were remarkably stable, although there were interpretive disagreements regarding the precise applications of the standards. The charge and its nuances are explored throughout the course of this study, in chapters dealing with the particular alleged plagiarisms of writers ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Byron, Clare, and Shelley. However, by way of introduction and summary, it will be useful to know that, in early nineteenth-century Britain, there was, in general, a distinction between two forms of plagiarism, one commonly designated “culpable” plagiarism and the other commonly designated “poetical” plagiarism. Only culpable plagiarism represented a moral indictment of an author, and it was almost impossible to demonstrate conclusively during the period. The difficulty stemmed from the complex circumstances that were required to show that plagiarism of this sort had occurred. In the period, culpable plagiarism was defined as borrowings that were simultaneously unacknowledged, unimproved, unfamiliar, and conscious. In the absence of any one of these elements, culpable plagiarism could not be said to have occurred.
In contrast, a writer could be persuasively charged with poetical plagiarism if borrowings were simply unacknowledged and unimproved. Plagiarisms of this sort were not culpable and, therefore, did not carry with them moral implications. Rather, the charges conveyed an aesthetic violation of the conventional norms by which “literature” was evaluated as distinct from other forms of expression, and authors found guilty of poetical plagiarisms were simultaneously guilty of writing badly. Plagiarism signaled a failure to achieve the minimum aesthetic objectives that constituted a successful work of Romantic-period literature, and to be charged with poetical plagiarism was to face a serious critical attack that focused primarily on questions of voice, persona, and narrative or lyric mastery. The question of improvement was central to this charge. Authors who acknowledged their borrowings and failed to improve upon them, of course, were not typically charged with plagiarism, although they were frequently derided as contemptible writers by reviewers. On the other hand, writers who did not acknowledge their borrowings, even implicitly (and implicit avowal was one category of acknowledgment), were not considered plagiarists, no matter how extensive the correspondences, if they had improved upon their borrowed materials. Where improvement existed, acknowledgment was irrelevant because improvement was understood as a de facto transformation of the borrowed materials.
Particular instances of early nineteenth-century plagiarism can be understood more clearly if we can appreciate the complex ways in which these categories of acknowledgment, improvement, familiarity, and consciousness operated in relation to each other. In the context of nineteenth-century critical discourse, each of these terms had a particular historically and culturally determined set of associations, and their relationship to charges of plagiarism, extrapolated here from a range of Romantic-period texts on the subject that I discuss in the course of this study, were often the subject of interpretive but not general disagreement.1
Acknowledgment: Apart from the obvious strategies of citation, a work could be considered implicitly acknowledged or “avowed” if a “well-versed” reader could be expected to recognize the original. Ironically, the more extensive the borrowing the more likely it was to have been considered acknowledged. The reemployment of texts that were familiar or should be familiar was considered sufficient acknowledgment, and, unlike some of the other, more particularized elements of Romantic-period plagiarism, this was generally true throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As A. C. Bradley argued early in the twentieth century regarding Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s borrowings from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in the 1830s and 1840s, “Sometimes a writer adopts the phrase of an earlier writer … with the intention that the reader should recognize it…. and if the reader fails to recognize it, he does not fully appreciate the passage.”2 However, the reemployment of borrowed material for the purposes of satire during the Romantic period, even where those intentions were explicit and the sources were acknowledged, could be considered plagiarism because satire was often understood by early nineteenth-century writers and readers to have violated the standard of improvement.
Improvement: By far the most important element of any Romantic-period charge of plagiarism, a successful improvement justified any borrowing, regardless of extent, and no other elements were necessary to defend an author from allegations of illegitimate borrowing. By the same token, in the absence of improvement, no other elements were necessary to indict an author on charges of poetical plagiarism either. Improvement did not necessitate an author making any change to the phrasing or wording of another author’s text; it was sufficient to alter the context of the borrowed work, which could include extending the idea, adding new examples or “illustrations,” or seamlessly integrating the borrowed text into the voice or style of one’s own production. Most often, discussions of improvement rested upon this matter of “seamlessness,” and unimproved texts were frequently described as monstrous, patchwork, or unassimilated, suggesting that the evaluation of literary works depended upon precise definitions of textual unity. Unity of style was paramount, and seamlessness depended more upon stylistic qualities of voice and tone than upon other narrative elements. This critical emphasis was supported in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century law, which recognized style as an element of literary property. Improvement represents one of the clear ways in which Romantic-period assessments of plagiarism rested upon aesthetic judgments, and the discourse surrounding it illustrates how invested early nineteenth-century writers were in appropriation, textual mastery, and the control of voice within a literary work.
Familiarity: The category of familiarity was subject to contemporary disagreement, and the debate concerning which texts constituted part of the common literary inheritance was related to other discussions on the establishment of national literature and on the relationship between “high” and “low” genres. The most conservative position considered as familiar only those major texts that were regularly taught as part of the national curriculum. Shakespeare and Milton were almost universally considered familiar texts, reflecting the nineteenth-century reevaluation of the status of both writers. The most inclusive position considered as familiar a far broader range of texts and included in that category works written in popular genres by contemporary authors. Although not precisely a matter of familiarity, it is worth noting that the protections of literary property only applied without contest to works that were, as the term suggests, identified as literary. Historical and scientific texts, which included travel narratives and folklore, were considered by many in the period as forms of knowledge or learning rather than invention and were treated by some writers as implicitly authorless texts available for general reemployment.
Unconsciousness: Psychological philosophy in the Romantic period was distinct from Freudian and post-Freudian constructions of the unconscious, and contemporary discussions of an author’s consciousness of an obligation cannot be easily understood in Freudian terms. The term unconscious was in regular use by the turn of the nineteenth century, and it was generally accepted that all writers would borrow unconsciously from time to time. Charges of culpable plagiarism were frequently dismissed on these grounds, and the standard was generous. Often even very extensive borrowings could be considered legitimately unconscious, in part because the knowledge of the act did not always preclude it having been performed unconsciously. The term coincidence is frequently used to describe unconscious plagiarisms and had particular philosophical associations.
The combination of these elements and the emphasis on improvement in particular suggests how deeply invested late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers were in textual strategies of assimilation, absorption, and appropriation. While Romanticism has been traditionally associated with the values of autogenous originality and invention, the cultural conventions of Georgian Britain privileged as literary achievements those novels, dramas, and especially poems that demonstrated mastery over a range of sources, and writers were given broad license to borrow from the works of other authors so long as those appropriations satisfied particular aesthetic objectives and norms.
It should also be apparent that these standards of plagiarism are distinct from modern twentieth- and twenty-first-century constructions of the term in clear ways. Perhaps most importantly, questions of improvement and ownership of tone and style no longer operate either legally or rhetorically in the same manner. Because plagiarism represents a statutory violation of property only insofar as it is related to the infringement of copyright or moral tort law, the legal definition of the term is inferred rather than explicit. However, as Stuart Green argues in “Plagiarism, Norms, and the Limits of Theft Law,” plagiarism can be defined as the failure to acknowledge the “source of facts, ideas, or specific language” and functions most commonly within the terms set out by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Rights as a violation of the “European doctrine of moral rights … [particularly] the right of attribution.”3 This definition differs from Romantic-period constructions of plagiarism in several distinct respects, particularly in its exclusive focus on the appropriation of specific language. In other recent court decisions, including Napolitano v. Trustees of Princeton University (1982), specific language has been understood to include the verbatim repetition of particular phrases or sentences, the use of paraphrase, and the reemployment of ideas or facts that cannot be considered generally known.4 Sub-semiotic similarities in voice, tone, or sentiment are notably excluded from this catalogue, and the appropriation of style or “spirit,” as early nineteenth-century writers understood those terms, no longer clearly constitutes plagiarism.5 As a result, modern cultural conventions likewise do not recognize the “improvements” created by textual mastery, which in the Romantic period meant that an author had infused the borrowed materials with her or her own subjectivity to the extent that it became “new” property even when verbatim parallels persisted.
Modern controversies surrounding plagiarism also emphasize the moral elements of the charge to a far greater extent than did the Romantics, who distinguished between culpable and poetical appropriations. In light of the current legal statutes (which have precedent in late nineteenth-century international law) that allow writers to prosecute plagiarism as a violation of moral rights, this investment is not surprising, and, as Green and other scholars have observed, the debate that surrounds plagiarism at the beginning of the twenty-first century is largely figured as a contest between the postmodernists and their detractors, traditionalists of a sort, who dismiss postmodernism as an exercise in moral relativism.6 The postmodern position, following from the early work of Barthes and Foucault, reads authorship as a cultural function with an institutional history and in its most extreme articulations proposes that plagiarism is a charge used in a market economy to discipline authors and to perpetuate “Romantic” ideas of solitary genius by obscuring the extent to which all writing is necessarily collaborative and intertextual.7 The traditionalists respond by arguing that this is a transparent effort to excuse plagiarism and the literary theft that it represents by casting it as a deconstructive activity. Both positions are fundamentally concerned with the moral elements of the charge. Scholars such as Rebecca Moore Howard and others working particularly in rhetoric and composition studies understand the recent and apparently epidemic rise of plagiarism on college campuses as the result of a rupture caused by Internet technologies in the structure of authorship, and they propose that student plagiarism often does not reflect an intention to defraud but rather an emergent collaborative relationship to literary property that needs to be explored.8 Traditionalists dismiss these claims as ridiculous, asserting that plagiarism has always been and remains a transgression against the property of another writer that merits moral condemnation.
Christopher Ricks, one of the most venerable of these traditionalists, has recently been at the center of a particularly acrimonious debate centered on the question of historicizing plagiarism. He has argued both in a 1997 British Academy lecture and in his Allusion to the Poets that plagiarism functions as a transhistorical category, and he indicts those who seek to historicize either it or the construction of literary property as apologists engaged in a pernicious moral relativism.9 Ricks’s response indicates how powerfully the moral elements of plagiarism continue to resonate in Anglo-American culture. As Paulina Kewes and the other contributors who respond to Ricks in her collection of essays Plagiarism in Early Modern England argue, understanding how plagiarism operated culturally in Renaissance and eighteenth-century Britain is a descriptive position rather than a proscriptive one. Indeed, the same can be said of the Romantic period.10 Ricks’s conflation of historicism with the destruction/deconstruction of moral and literary values is unfortunate because it defines our engagement with the past in a particularly narrow manner, but his outrage is a sign of how important the morality of plagiarism remains in current cultural contexts, postmodern or otherwise.
Authors in early nineteenth-century Britain, however, were neither postmodern nor traditionalist, and they did not understand plagiarism primarily in moral terms. As I have suggested, the “culpable” element was nearly impossible to prove, and few writers in the early nineteenth century were charged persuasively with it. The current debates surrounding plagiarism and our twenty-first-century investment in the morality of authorship cannot accurately explain literary appropriation in the Romantic period. Yet, Romanticism is part of the modern controversy. It is “Romantic” authorship that postmodern scholars hope to deconstruct in the process of theorizing plagiarism and that the traditionalists are seen as defending.11 This definition of the “Romantic” is particularly unsatisfying because it bears so little historical relation to the complexities of plagiarism in Georgian Britain, and, at the same time, it is part of the critical inheritance of the field. The plagiarisms of the Romantic poets and of Coleridge, in particular, were debated vigorously throughout the twentieth century, but their appropriations have been read in relation to the modern or postmodern conventions of intellectual property. While investigations of this sort tell us a great deal about how we read the Romantics and about our imaginative relationship to our literary past, they tell us much less about how early nineteenth-century writers understood themselves, their poetic objectives, or their use of tradition.
The almost exclusive critical emphasis on the plagiarisms of Coleridge is one way of understanding the distortion that can be produced by applying twentieth- or twenty-first-century standards to late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century texts. Coleridge’s plagiarisms have been scrutinized in a half-dozen different book-length studies, and he has become the literary curiosity of the period in large part because his borrowings contradict the logic of Romanticism: he is the brilliant and innovative poet who claimed imaginative origins for his works but who borrowed covertly from the texts of other writers.12 The plagiarisms have generated sustained critical interest, I suspect, because Coleridge seems to represent the failure of Romanticism. Casting him as a damaged individual, consumed by private neuroses, twentieth-century scholarship treated both Coleridge’s personality and his plagiarisms as exceptional. Yet, Coleridge was not a nineteenth-century anomaly. The tension between originality and appropriation that his plagiarisms embody is the tension that defined the aesthetic objectives of literary Romanticism for the poets writing in the period. At the same time, the singular attention given to his borrowing is clearly disproportionate when we consider that William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Ann Yearsley, John Clare, Hannah More, Walter Savage Landor, and Matthew Lewis were all publicly accused of plagiarism in the periodical press.13 The celebrated plagiarisms of Byron, in particular, were the topic of a controversy that was far more extensive than any contemporary attention given to Coleridge’s borrowings, yet the critical tradition is largely silent on the matter. Why? The reason has to do, I think, with the assumption that plagiarism meant the same thing in the Romantic period that it meant in the twentieth century. Byron’s plagiarisms involved the appropriation of voice, style, and tone, elements that were legally and culturally recognized as elements of literary property in Georgian Britain. In the twentieth century, however, those particular protections no longer operated so powerfully, and Byron’s plagiarisms no longer obviously looked like plagiarism at all. Coleridge’s borrowings, on the other hand, demonstrated extensive verbatim correspondences, at the same time that his self-defense emphasized a model of unconscious appropriation that was familiar to his contemporaries but did not resonate with modern readers.
While modern constructions of plagiarism emphasize the moral elements of the charge and focus particularly on similarities in phrasing, Romantic-era constructions were primarily concerned with aesthetic and stylistic concerns, and, despite some interpretive disagreement, the definitions of culpable and poetical plagiarism went largely uncontested in the period. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers and their reviewers by and large agreed that allegations of plagiarism could be settled according to rubrics I have outlined. More importantly, both writers and reviewers understood the charge and its complexities to center on questions of literary judgment. Charges of plagiarism in the Romantic period were an occasion for a sustained critical assessment of a work, and this assessment was typically conducted as a public or semi-public dialogue between the writers and their reviewers—or, as in the case of Wordsworth and Byron and, later, Wordsworth and Landor, a dialogue between two writers in which one or both used the reviewers as mouthpieces. It is not difficult to find instances in which prominent writers of the period were accused of plagiarism, and, seen in aggregate, the pattern suggests that the literary climate was often ruthlessly competitive. Françoise Meltzer and Marilyn Randall have argued that power and dominance are frequently at the heart of allegations of plagiarism, and this is perhaps particularly true in the Romantic period.14 Conscious of their own involvement in creating “new” poetry, these authors were also keenly aware of the personal and professional stakes involved in failing to articulate the standards by which those works were to be judged. Wordsworth made precisely this point in the “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” (1815) of The Lyrical Ballads when he distinguished “new” literature from the simply “novel” or “popular,” writing that “genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe” and that “every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.”15 Coleridge likewise wrote of the “new school of poetry” instantiated by Southey and later Wordsworth, and in some respects the Biographia Literaria represents a sustained critical effort to recuperate the aesthetics of the new from the denigration associated with novelty in the eighteenth century.16 In this context, accusing one’s literary competitors of plagiarism—a charge implying precisely the opposite of “new”—offered the occasion simultaneously to dismiss the efforts of another writer as not part of the current literary scene and to demonstrate that exclusion through the exercise and often extended articulation of the aesthetic judgments one considered most valuable.
The sense that the Romantic poets shared that they were engaged in reinventing or reinvigorating English verse is, of course, directly related to the concept of originality that they have been credited with developing. Originality, however, is a difficult term, because during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it did not exclude the possibility of imitation. While the “original” is sometimes understood to imply ex nihilo invention and a solipsistic expressivism, it was employed during the British Romantic period to signify a form of imitation that was transformative because it was individual. In many cases, originality was a function of style rather than content. The earliest articulation of the original as an aesthetic category designating superior imitation is generally credited to Edward Young’s pre-Romantic Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), in which he defined as original the imitation of nature or of the universal rules presented by another author, as opposed to the imitation of his or her particular textual identity.17 Young argued that imitations from the universal, by which he meant the natural, the true, or the common cultural elements of another writer’s text, were original compositions, so long as the appropriation did not extend to personal characteristics, which included style and tone as well as a broader range of localized eccentricities and opinions.18 In Young’s formulation, the potentially “noble Contagion” (94) of plagiarism rested upon a clearly aesthetic judgment: had an author imitated the universal or the particular? In “The Defence of Poetry” (1821), Percy Shelley made a similar point when arguing for the originality of Virgil. It was, Shelley wrote, “with a modesty that ill became his genius [that Virgil] affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds … have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth.”19 Shelley’s argument was that, by copying the truth, Virgil had simultaneously borrowed from his predecessors and “created anew,” while his imitators—”mock-birds” such as Nonnus, Lucan, and Statius—had failed to write the highest form of poetry because they followed Virgil in the particulars. Thus, when we speak of the ways in which writers of the British Romantic period valorized the original, we need to incorporate into that model an acknowledgment of their simultaneous investment in imitation and assimilation.
While the discussions surrounding plagiarism in Georgian Britain functioned as a crucible in which the literary values of Romanticism were contested and articulated by writers and their readers, that debate was inevitably shaped by the broader legal and cultural contexts surrounding issues of intellectual property. Unlike copyright infringement, piracy, or forgery, plagiarism was not a charge with direct legal consequences, but it was informed by many of the same concerns, and, although the history of copyright and its influence on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century publishing is not the subject of this book, there are several significant parallels. The development of a Romantic attitude toward plagiarism that is distinct from earlier eighteenth-century or neoclassical conventions can be traced to the 1760s and becomes culturally dominant by the 1790s, and this emergence mirrors the contemporary legal debates concerning copyright, intellectual property, and the commodification of authorship. Historians such as Mark Rose, Brad Sherman, Lionel Bently, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee have documented the complex arguments that shaped copyright law and its related “battle of the booksellers” in eighteenth-century Britain, and they demonstrate that, in the period bracketed by the repeal of the Licensing Act in 1694 and the decision of Donaldson v. Beckett in 1774, the conflict was between two competing models of intellectual property, which Rose characterizes as “natural” versus “proprietary” or “artificial.”20 The natural argument extended the position outlined by John Locke in the second of his Two Treatises of Government (1690), in which he argued that, through the investment of labor into an otherwise unclaimed property in the state of nature or disuse, an individual could claim a natural and implicitly permanent right of possession over property either real or intellectual.21 The proprietary argument held that intellectual property could only be owned by social convention and in a limited manner, in order to protect the expansion of knowledge and learning, which needed to circulate freely in order to ensure the progressive civilization of culture. This proprietary argument was privileged in the Statute of Anne in the first decade of the eighteenth century, but the copyright restrictions it created were prevented from enactment until the 1770s. The legal history of copyright during the first three-quarters of the century swung from one pole to the other. The proponents of the natural law argument were vindicated in Webb v. Rose (1732) but undermined by the Society for the Encouragement of Learning Act (1736); they won a decisive victory with Millar v. Taylor (1769) but were finally reversed by Donaldson v. Beckett (1774), which confirmed original limitations to copyright (fourteen years, plus an additional fourteen years if the author were still living) proposed in the Statute of Anne.22 This interesting history is primarily relevant for understanding Romantic-period attitudes toward plagiarism because it explains one of the central metaphors employed by writers in bringing charges of illegitimate appropriation: the metaphor of the literary estate. Wordsworth was particularly invested in comparing literary borrowing to the trespass upon a figurative “manor,” and his commitment to seeing literary property as a natural right comparable to the ownership of real estate placed him in conflict with writers such as Byron and even Coleridge who tended to view the possession of texts as less restricted. In some respect, then, the Romantic poets continued to play out the debate between natural law and proprietary models, as indeed did early nineteenth-century culture more generally.
I have said that distinctively Romantic attitudes toward plagiarism began to emerge in the 1760s and operated coherently in British culture by the 1790s. One sign of this was the renewed interest in charges of plagiarism that began in the decade following Donaldson v. Beckett. Despite the notable celebrity of the attacks on Milton at midcentury, early eighteenth-century writers were less invested in charges of plagiarism than their Romantic successors were. Although writers were, of course, accused of plagiarism in eighteenth-century Britain, Augustan literature privileged displays of erudition, imitation, and satire that Romanticism subsequently deemphasized in favor of originality. Because an author’s engagement with learning and tradition was a crucial component of his or her ability to “instruct and delight,” extended allusions to and unacknowledged borrowings (both particular and universal) from classical and contemporary literary sources were routine in the eighteenth century. A writer could rely upon “well-versed” readers to recognize and to appreciate the complexities of the imitation being presented; or, as Richard Steele described it: “Poetry being imitation, and … that imitation being the best which deceives most easily, it follows that we must take up the customs which are most familiar or universally known, since no man can be deceived or delighted with the imitation of what he is ignorant.”23 Because they were more concerned with erudition than with uniqueness, earlier eighteenth-century writers did not need to negotiate the complex tension between originality and imitation that in many respects defines literary Romanticism. Plagiarism represents a critical effort to negotiate that tension, and the interest in charges of illegitimate appropriation during the 1780s and 1790s indicates how central the issue was to the evaluation of literary texts in the Romantic period.
Precisely what constituted plagiarism in the pre-Romantic period has been explicated by Richard Terry in his essay “‘In Pleasing Memory of All He Stole’: Plagiarism and Literary Detraction, 1747-1785.”24 Examining attitudes toward plagiarism at midcentury and in the context of the Lauder controversy, in which Milton was posthumously charged with (and vindicated from) plagiarism, Terry argues that neoclassical writers were particularly and often exclusively concerned with verbatim parallels.25 Indeed, “it is perhaps only at this time,” he writes, “that those parts of a literary work over which it was felt that an author could exercise a proprietorial role shrink down so severely to the merely phraseological” (193-94), and he cites as evidence Richard Hurd’s 1751 testimony that plagiarism is confined to “the same arrangement of the same words.”26 Terry suggests that this perspective on plagiarism reflects a broader eighteenth-century belief in the “inseparability of invention and imitation” (188), and the perception that an author could borrow from other texts in the process of composing an original work is one that Romantic-period writers shared to a considerable extent with their immediate predecessors. However, the neoclassical emphasis on plagiarism as the reemployment of word-for-word particulars gave way by the last quarter of the eighteenth century to conventions that also characterized the appropriation of stylistic and tonal elements as a literary transgression, and this evolution was related to the increased privileging of both textual originality and identity from the 1770s onward.
Put another way, the aesthetic problem faced by writers at the end of the eighteenth century was how to be simultaneously original—in the more complicated sense of that term articulated by proto-Romantics such as Young—and free to appropriate from the literary tradition, and the solution to this problem lay in the privileging of authorial subjectivity. In his definition of originality at midcentury, Young had distinguished between the particular and universal elements of an imitation and had proposed that originality only precluded the imitation of the particular elements of another writer’s text. This distinction was codified as a matter of law in the 1760s and 1770s by a series of legal decisions that defined authorial style, sentiment, and tone as elements of literary property. While authors had advocated for the protection of sentiment, in particular, as early as William Warburton’s 1747 essay A Letter from an Author to a Member of Parliament Concerning Literary Property, the decision in Tonson v. Collins (1760) formalized this nascent discourse by finding that, while style could be considered a factor in determining a charge of literary appropriation, it could not be the sole element of the charge, because “only some few may be known by their style … the generality are not known at all.”27 The decision concerned charges of plagiarism alleged in The Spectator, and the rhetorical effect of this limitation on the extent to which style alone could constitute literary property was to associate distinctive style with the highest literary achievements. By the mid-i770s, style was considered an important element in the evaluation of a text, and it was generally recognized as part of the literary property an author possessed. W. Enfield argued, for example, in his essay Observations on Literary Property (1774) that “the style or mode of expression the author used to express their sentiments [was] the exclusive domain of literary property,” and this aesthetic valuation of the personal or particular elements of a text as original property was reiterated by Francis Hargrave, who proposed in his Argument in Defence of Literary Property (1774) that, “a literary work really original, like the human face, will always have some singularities … to characterize it and to fix and establish its identity.”28 In the 1770s a legal discourse emerged that increasingly located property rights in the identity of the author and defined originality in terms that recognized a distinction between the imitation of the universal and the particular. While particular borrowings included, of course, the unacknowledged or wrongful appropriation of verbatim expression, of idea, or of narrative “machinery,” it also extended to similarities in style, tone, and “spirit.”
Romanticism in its various articulations emerges directly out of this context and contributes to establishing these ideas as culturally dominant by the end of the eighteenth century. Because the central tension concerned the negotiation between originality and imitation rather than the exclusive valuation of originality as autogenous invention, writers of this period were centrally concerned with strategies of appropriation and assimilation. One of the results was an intense reemergence of public interest in charges of plagiarism in British print culture from circa 1790-1840. The reevaluation of the role of “particular” imitations in literature also affected the critical reception of certain literary genres. The denigration of satire in the 1780s and 1790s reflects the change inaugurated by new attitudes toward plagiarism. During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, satirical imitation was distinguished from plagiarism, and there was the tacit understanding that appropriation for the purpose of satire could rise to the standard of instructive wit. The rise of the English novel depended upon the same conventions of self-imitation, approximation, and mimicry that characterized the Age of Satire generally; Alexander Pope did not trouble himself unduly about adopting Horace’s Satires for his comic purposes, and Henry Fielding was not charged with plagiarism of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) upon the publication of his directly imitative Shamela (1741), although Tobias Smollett later accused him of plagiarism for covert and less extensive borrowings from Roderick Random (1748) in Tom Jones (1749).29 By the end of 1780s, however, a satirical author could no longer be certain of his or her license to borrow with impunity, and the Romantics, it seems, lost something of the sense of humor their predecessors possessed. As Thomas Lockwood argues in Post-Augustan Satire, the late eighteenth century saw the decline of verse satires in particular, and the Romantics often viewed the genre with hostility rather than appreciation.30 More recently, Stephen Jones and Gary Dyer have documented this same critical devaluation, although each argues for the continued presence of satire in the Romantic period.31 This relative decline in the status of satire is related to the pursuit of plagiarism that accelerated during the 1780s and into the 1790s. Authors who had not been charged with plagiarism for satirical works published in the 1750s and 1760s found themselves facing belated charges of plagiarism by the end of the century.
Thomas Mallon has discussed the most celebrated instance in Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism, where he details the charges made against Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-67). Sterne’s novel was first published serially just after midcentury without controversy, although contemporary readers could not have failed to recognize his use of source materials. Indeed, early reviewers such as Edmund Burke emphasized that the “story is in reality nothing more than a vehicle for satire.”32 By the 1790s, however, Sterne was being accused of plagiarism from sources that ranged from sermons to Shakespeare, and these charges persisted until at least as late as 1821, when Walter Scott derided Sterne as an “unhesitating plagiarist.”33 Although many of the charges brought by his chief antagonist of the 1790s, John C. Ferriar, were dismissed, the incident demonstrates the interest in debating questions of plagiarism in the periodical reviews that developed at the end of the century and the change in cultural assumptions about what constituted legitimate appropriation.
The charge of plagiarism that Wordsworth brought in 1804 against the satirical poet Peter Bayley reflects this same shift in sensibilities, and it highlights how closely plagiarism was connected to questions of style and to the particularities of literary property.34 In his complaint, Wordsworth alleged that Bayley simultaneously plagiarized from The Lyrical Ballads and satirized them through “ridicule” and “parody.”35 Although Wordsworth recognized that his texts had been reemployed in order to exaggerate and to ridicule them, he insisted that these appropriations constituted plagiarism, and his perspective can be understood more clearly if we reflect that satire necessarily focused on the imitation of particular rather than universal elements of a literary production. The humor of satire depends upon the mimicry of individual characteristics and authorial eccentricities—but particular appropriations were not elements of an original text. As a result, satires were particularly prone to charges of plagiarism, and often those charges centered on the imitation of style.36 Wordsworth had characterized Bayley’s plagiarisms as “absolutely by wholesale” (1: 455), despite the fact that there are no extended word-for-word correspondences between the two volumes. The similarities that grieved Wordsworth were similarities in tone, sentiment, and spirit, textual features that he regarded as elements of his literary property.
This example is among the particular instances of early nineteenth-century literary appropriation that this book sets out to explore more fully, and, like so many other allegations of plagiarism in the Romantic period, Wordsworth’s indictment of Bayley demonstrates how historically distinct the discourse was that shaped attitudes toward the charge in Georgian Britain. Over the course of this study, I consider how the rhetoric of plagiarism was used in concrete instances to articulate these and other aesthetic judgments in order to privilege particular literary values. Then, as now, plagiarism mobilized a broad set of cultural expectations regarding ownership, authority, imitation, originality, and legitimacy, but each of these terms operated in a context that was informed for early nineteenth-century writers by the awareness of their own inheritance, one that necessarily did not yet include them or the mythology of the “Romantic” author. The Romantics could not have known that they were Romantic, and their understanding of plagiarism did not and could not reflect the emphasis on autogenous originality only later ascribed to them in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship. Inflected by contemporary legal conditions and marking an internalization of the values of imitation and assimilation that dominated literary culture during the eighteenth century, the public controversies surrounding plagiarism became one of the critical occasions upon which early nineteenth-century British writers and their readers contested, considered, and finally defined the aesthetic objectives of the new literature that they were in the process of imagining.