Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period

Chapter 3 Property and the Margins of Literary Print Culture

The idea of literary property in the Romantic period, as in the present moment, depends upon a legal and rhetorical principle that is essentially a contradiction. At the heart of both plagiarism and copyright is the belief that a text is simultaneously public and private or, more precisely, is simultaneously offered to the public on the condition of continued private ownership. This concurrency was resolved as a matter of copyright law early in the eighteenth century and was, for obvious reasons, welcomed by authors and booksellers as a means of circulating their productions while retaining title to them. However, this chapter considers the situation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for texts located at the extremes of either category—texts that were avowedly private, such as journals, patently public, such as folktales, legends, or ballads, or simultaneously public and private, such as commonplace books and certain manuscripts circulated in a coterie fashion. What were the standards for appropriating from these materials, and how were the categories of “private property” and “literary property” complicated by cultural productions of this sort? What was the attitude toward texts that were not obviously “literary” at all? In many instances, the answers to these questions are closely linked to another set of complications posed by issues of gender and by the status of particular genres and particular modes of transmission in the period. Women participated with far fewer cultural restrictions in the production and dissemination of works located at the limits of literary print culture, and, as I will demonstrate, these texts often appear to have enjoyed fewer protections as property than works identified as literature. At the same time, there is the curious fact that, during the Romantic period, it was extremely rare for a male author to be persuasively charged with plagiarism from a female author, even in instances where the texts participated in “high-culture” genres. Yet, the role that gender played in evaluating the legitimacy or illegitimacy of particular textual obligations is vexed because it is often very difficult to disentangle issues of authorial identity from contemporary cultural attitudes toward particular types of texts that circulated at the margins of literary culture. This chapter begins with an overview of how gender related historically to issues of copyright law and the ownership of intellectual property, and I discuss textual appropriations by Coleridge and, later, William Wordsworth from Friederike Brun, Mary Robinson, and Dorothy Wordsworth. Despite often extensive and unacknowledged verbal parallels, none of these borrowings were considered plagiarism as that charge operated rhetorically during the Romantic period, for reasons that might have had as much to do with attitudes toward genre—and particularly toward magazine culture and the domestic circulation of private journals and commonplace books—as with authorial identity. In the second part of the chapter, I consider examples of appropriation in texts that were closely associated with oral traditions, including the Gothic “plagiarisms” of Percy Bysshe and Elizabeth Shelley and of Matthew Lewis.

Gender and the Circulation of Private Property

The relationship among plagiarism, private property, and gender is a particularly relevant concern for scholars of the Romantic period, but the subject is unusually difficult to address. The historical record suggests that, in practice, plagiarism was primarily a charge leveled by one gentleman against another, and, although there were occasionally instances when women accused each other of this form of appropriation, it was remarkably rare for the term plagiarism to be used to describe instances in which a male author borrowed from a women author.1 Even on those occasions when the term was invoked for borrowings from women’s writing, the context is complicated by other factors. I return in the course of this chapter, for example, to DeQuincey’s contention that Coleridge did not plagiarize from the poetry of Friederike Brun because he improved upon her work. The claim of improvement was sufficient to justify an obligation almost regardless of any other element, but it is impossible to know to what extent aesthetic judgments of this sort were based on cultural expectations regarding gender. In Chapter 4, I discuss Byron’s borrowings from the travel narrative of Miss Tully, yet the gendered aspects of the obligation are muddied by the fact that her journal (a private genre) was published by her brother as A Narrative of Ten Years’ Residence at Tripoli in Africa; from the Original Correspondeme in the Possession of the Late Richard Tully, Esq., the British Consul (1816), a title that implied male ownership if not male authorship. Moreover, there was a contemporary perception among many writers and readers that travel narratives, as documentary rather than literary texts, were implicitly authorless materials, available for appropriation elsewhere. Most often, however, the term plagiarism was not used to describe borrowings of this sort, and, quite simply, men were not charged with plagiarism from women’s texts with any frequency during the early nineteenth century, although they borrowed from women writers on many occasions.

Understanding the historical silences regarding plagiarism from women’s texts in the Romantic period is largely a matter of balancing what we know or can discover about cultural attitudes toward women’s claims to intellectual property with what we know or can discover about the status of particular modes of textual circulation and the different protections afforded to particular genres. It is my own sense that, in the final analysis, issues of genre were more significant factors than issues of gender in the period, but it is also the case, of course, that gender and genre often were intimately connected. What we can say with assurance about the conditions of female authorship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is that women had, as a matter of law, limited rights to the private ownership of property and personhood. At the same time, their intellectual and rational capacities were underestimated as a matter of cultural convention. In these circumstances, women’s relationships to both intellectual property and expressivist aesthetics were necessarily complicated. The circumscribed rights of women to property were detailed by Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) in the 1760s, and the conditions that he outlines make clear how precarious a woman writer’s—and especially a married woman writer’s—relationship to her own text could be. In the late eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, the only women who could be said to own either their person or property independently were those claiming the legal status of feme sole, a category limited to unmarried women over the age of twenty-one and to widows. Children and especially women under the age of majority were, according to Black-stone, under the “empire” of the father, and the violation of the parent’s authority (or of the person of a woman under such authority) was considered a form of “trespass” against his property and his rights.2 While the law was particularly concerned to prevent the loss of this female property through unauthorized marriage, women in their minority were not entitled to manage their own property or to negotiate contracts except by parental permission. As a matter of strict interpretation, then, a woman under the age of twenty-one could only by way of parental concession control the productions of her own intellect or retain the copyright monies that she might earn.

Eighteenth-century law restricted the property rights of a married woman even more profoundly. For, while an unmarried woman in her minority retained, in most instances, the right to have her personal inheritance preserved, a married woman or feme covert had no legal existence and, therefore, no independent legal rights and no protections of private property, apart from those vested in pin money and paraphernalia. As Black-stone described her condition: “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband…. If the wife be injured in her person or her property, she can bring no action for redress without her husband’s concurrence” (Commentaries 1: 15). Not only was a married woman at the end of the eighteenth century denied the ability to take legal action on her own behalf, but any property that she might receive or create belonged, as a point of law, to her husband. Again, Blackstone argued that her “chattels personal, whether it be in possession, or in action [i.e., in bond or contract] … these a husband may have if he pleases” (Commentaries 2: 29). Having no independent legal personhood, a married woman under coverture was likewise debarred from drawing valid contracts or from drafting wills, except with the consent of her spouse. The implications for women’s rights to intellectual property during the period are unambiguous: a married woman could not be said to own the texts that she wrote. She was not entitled to control the circumstances in which her text was or was not published, and, if she sold her copyright, the earnings were not hers to manage.

In concrete terms, the laws of the British Romantic period meant that Mary Shelley, who had married in 1816, had no legal identity apart from Percy Bysshe Shelley and did not own the intellectual property of a work such as Frankenstein (1818) except through his goodwill. Nor is the example simply rhetorical, for, while many husbands encouraged the literary efforts of their wives and granted them the autonomy to manage these intellectual properties, this was a matter of courtesy alone. As late as the 1850s, the writer Caroline Norton, a member of the well-placed literary family that included Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the novelist Caroline Sheridan, confronted the legal realities of a woman’s entitlement to her own literary property, which she described in a pamphlet entitled English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854). Norton’s case, although coming at midcentury, had its roots in the Romantic era. During the 1820s, she emerged as a popular late-Romantic woman author with the publication of works such as The Sorrows of Rosalie (1829), and her legal entanglements began in the 1830s, when she fled her abusive husband and was left in precarious financial circumstances.3 Norton turned to writing as a means of support but found her husband prepared to avail himself of his legal rights to her intellectual productions. As she wrote in her pamphlet, “I turned my literary ability to account, by selling the copyright of my first poem…. [and] [i]t is not without a certain degree of romantic pride that I look back and know that the first expenses of my son’s life were defrayed from the price of that first creation of my brain” (25).⁴ However, she soon discovered that English law “gives a woman’s earnings even by literary copyright, to her husband” (22). In law, her literary efforts and their fruits belonged to her spouse, and they continued to do so until the passage of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857.

If Blackstone’s Commentaries represents the legal and cultural attitude toward women’s writing by the second half of the eighteenth century, then Norton’s testimony and her legal difficulties show the degree to which gender continued to shape a woman’s relationship to her intellectual property well into the Victorian era. However, women writers working in the Romantic period were at a particular disadvantage when it came to questions of plagiarism. While the ownership and infringement of copyright was a charge with concrete legal and financial implications in the early nineteenth century, it remained distinct from allegations of plagiarism, which were focused during the Romantic period on the category of improvement and its related elements of mastery, voice, and subjectivity. The legal restrictions placed on the feme covert and her incorporation into the person of her spouse had cultural implications for women generally, regardless of their legal status at a particular moment, for it was expected that a woman would and, in fact, should spend the majority of her life under the protection and authority of a male relative or a husband. As a result, the personhood of a woman was both legally and rhetorically subject to assimilation by men. In an expressivist aesthetic culture, in which the identity, voice, and persona of the author was sufficient to constitute literary property and essential to the judgment of poetic achievement, it is not difficult to anticipate the potential textual consequences of a woman’s conditional right to independent personhood. If men could assimilate her person, then why could they not assimilate her personal expressions as well? Perhaps more importantly, how would a Romantic-period woman writer, especially a married woman writer, succeed at all, under the conditions outlined for her? Early nineteenth-century aesthetics demanded that a writer craft a masterful textual persona, at a time when many women spent significant parts of their lives with their legal personhood suspended.

An argument that reads the absence of contemporary charges of plagiarism from women’s texts as essentially a matter of gender bias would proceed, I think, along the grounds laid out above, and, as I have suggested, there are some reasons to anticipate that female authors might have faced particular challenges in an aesthetic climate so firmly rooted in the mastery of identity and in the person of the author. However, at the same time, there clearly were successful women writers during the Romantic period who did, despite the legal rhetoric, find their own voices and live with a clear sense of self. Indeed, male contemporaries often praised women writers for their literary accomplishments, suggesting that the idea of women’s genius was not a cultural impossibility. However, these male contemporaries also borrowed, often extensively, from the works of women writers, and they were not charged with plagiarism for these appropriations. At a historical moment when accusations of plagiarism were flung fast and furious in the literary gazettes and were brought against authors as original as Byron or as attentive as Wordsworth, this omission hints at some form of larger exclusion from Romantic literary culture, its competitions, and its stakes.

However, if gender and a woman’s legal relationship to intellectual property during the period is one way of understanding the scarcity of plagiarism charges that followed from the appropriation of women’s texts, cultural attitudes toward particular genres and particular patterns of cultural production is another, and, of course, the two elements often cannot be viewed in complete isolation. Yet, it is also possible to understand the absence of plagiarism charges in relationship to the texts of individual women writers in the context of a broader set of assumptions both about what constituted plagiarism and about how that charge applied differently to works depending on their mode of transmission or relationship to a consciously literary culture. Plagiarism during the Romantic period was a primarily aesthetic criticism and was an allegation of the misappropriation of conventionally literary property. The authors of texts that were predominantly recognized as subliterary genres—journals, ballads, folktales, newspapers, and criticism or reviews consistently, travel narratives and histories frequently—were typically not charged with plagiarism, and the authors of literary texts who appropriated from these materials often distinguished between these sources and sources with literary origins. In Cultural Capital: The Problems of Literary Canon Formation, John Guillory argues this point clearly in regard to commonplace books, “vernacular works,” and “popular” Romantic genres. Guillory’s contention is that the production of “literature” as a form of cultural capital during the eighteenth century depended upon its discursive isolation from other oral or textual traditions, and he locates the Romantic period particularly as a moment of aesthetic crisis when, “[f]or the first time poetic genres and prose genres are comparable as literary genres.”5 It is for this reason, Guillory proposes, that

Wordsworth can conjure an apocalyptic scenario in which the works of Milton or Shakespeare are swallowed up in the sea of popular writing only because the distinction between serious and popular genres produces no corresponding linguistic differentiation…. [The result is a] division of literary production into “literature” and the genres which are by definition subliterary or nonliterary[.] (132-33)

Guillory suggests here that Romantic writers were particularly concerned with articulating a distinction between literary and subliterary genres, for reasons that were both aesthetic and essentially bourgeois. This argument is confirmed, I think, by the different ways in which the rhetoric of plagiarism seems to have applied to texts identified with particular genres or modes of production. As part of the critical language of literary Romanticism, the exclusion of certain texts (and perhaps certain authors) from discussions of plagiarism would have functioned as a means of affirming the distinction between literary and subliterary genres—a distinction in which many of the period’s most familiar writers were deeply invested.

Gender and Improvement in the “Hymn before Sun-rise”

Among Coleridge’s literary obligations, his appropriations from a poem by the German poet Sophie Christiane Friederike Brun (1765-1835) have been particularly celebrated, and Coleridge’s borrowings in this instance are a clear example of the ways in which issues of gender and subliterary modes of transmission such as newspaper circulation become difficult to separate conclusively. The correspondences between Brun and Coleridge were first noted publicly by DeQuincey in the Taifs Magazine essays, where DeQuincey claimed that Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny” (1802), published as part of his writing for the Morning Post newspaper, was a little more than a translation of Brun’s “Chamonix, beim Sonnenaufgange” (Chamounix, with the Sun Rising), which had been published in 1795.6 Adrien Bonjour documented the full extent of the debt to Brun’s work, demonstrating in parallel text comparisons the extensive correspondences between the “Hymn before Sunrise” and both Brun’s poem and her notes. Norman Fruman later revealed that Coleridge misled even his closest intimates about the nature of the poem’s composition, claiming to have “involuntarily poured forth” the hymn.⁷ However, despite the obvious nature of the parallels, the modern academic controversy exemplifies an a historical understanding of Romantic-period plagiarism generally and highlights Coleridge’s attitude toward transitory genres in particular.

Considered in terms of the Romantic-period definition of plagiarism, Coleridge’s reemployment of Brun’s verse was legitimate because it met the standard of improvement. Even DeQuincey argues that it was, stating that charges of plagiarism could not be brought against Coleridge in this instance because his poem had improved upon Brun’s original. Improvement represented one of three instances (along with unconsciousness and familiarity) in which borrowing, however extensive, was permitted, and it is true, of course, that Coleridge turns a twenty-line original into a eighty-five-line hymn. While as modern critics we are keen to understand the role of gender in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century attitudes toward literary appropriation, the case of Coleridge’s debt to Brun offers little insight because, by contemporary standards, no plagiarism had occurred. This is not to say, of course, that the influence of gender still might not have been central to this assessment: it is possible—I suspect, even likely—that the judgment of improvement in respect to a woman’s text was a foregone conclusion in some instances. DeQuincey treats the improvement as obvious and dismisses the charges in a brief paragraph; the obligation was never the subject of an extended Romantic-period critical discussion elsewhere, making it impossible to know for certain the degree to which gender might have influenced DeQuincey’s evaluation. However, in regard to Coleridge and the question of his culpability, at least, the question of gender is secondary. Whatever the prejudices upon which DeQuincey and his contemporaries based their judgments, Coleridge’s amplification of Brun’s original verse would have been considered a species of improvement. This would have been true even had Coleridge not extended the length of the poem, for improvement did not require any change or addition to the language; it only required that the new author unify the voice of the poem. And, certainly, the guiding subjectivity of the poem is a voice that, with the hindsight of history at least, we have come to recognize as distinctively Coleridgean.

Quoting and Poetic Dialogue in the Morning Post

However, while the degree to which the contemporary assessment of Coleridge’s debts to Brun was shaped by the element of gender can only be a matter of speculation, Coleridge’s relationships with other women writers provide a fuller picture of his attitude toward his female contemporaries and toward texts associated—as Brun’s poem was—with transitory genres and periodical publication. For it is also possible that the mode of circulation affected the judgment of improvement in regard to the debt to Brun. Part of the dilemma is that Coleridge, like many of his contemporaries, does not seem to have considered as entirely literary those works published in ephemeral or periodical sources such as the newspaper, regardless of genre. His exchanges with the Delia Cruscan poet Mary Darby Robinson in the Morning Post from 1797 to 1800, in particular, offer considerable information on the ways that Coleridge perceived aspects of literary property, competition, and exchange, but in ways that make it difficult to disentangle how the influence of gender operated as distinct from attitudes toward certain paths of cultural transmission. The exchanges between Coleridge and Robinson have never been a question of plagiarism; however, their poetic dialogue is replete with instances of influence, assimilation, and verbal echoes that suggest that, at least as a matter of rhetorical posturing, Coleridge was willing to engage with Robinson as a colleague in the context of the newsprint media.

The poetic conversation between Coleridge and Robinson includes a series of poems that each author composed primarily for publication in the Morning Post. Out of financial necessity, Coleridge began writing for the paper in early December of 1797 and, after a year’s unofficial hiatus while touring Germany, resumed work for the publication in late November of 1799. Robinson had begun supplying pieces for the Morning Post as early as 1794 and, by 1799, in no less dire financial circumstances, had become a poetry editor for the newspaper. This professional proximity led to a series of poetic responses to each other’s work between 1797 and 1800.

The dialogue between Coleridge and Robinson can be characterized as falling into three distinct sets of exchanges, the first beginning in late 1797 when Coleridge arranged to have his poem “The Visions of the Maid of Orleans” appear directly before Robinson’s “Ode to the Snow-Drop” in the 26 December edition. While Coleridge’s intent behind this initial juxtaposition was at least partly political, his publication in the issue of 3 January 1798 of a direct (although pseudonymous) response to Robinson suggests that his interest in her poem went beyond editorial convenience.8 In this response, entitled “The Apotheosis, or the Snow-Drop,” Coleridge sympathetically responds to Robinson’s self-identification with the passing and forgotten snowdrop, bested by its springtime rival “The gaudy Crocus” (l. 21). While Coleridge’s poem demonstrates the conventional elements of sensibility, it also represents a genuinely collegial gesture by introducing into the dialogue the explicit attention to Robinson as a poet. In the course of the “Apotheosis,” Coleridge argues that, through “imitative sympathy” (l. 15), Laura (a figure for Robinson and one of her pen names) has magically transported the snowdrop beyond time to the Muses’ eternal Pieria. As a gesture toward another poet, Coleridge’s characterization of Robinson in the “Apotheosis” suggests that he was not reluctant either to acknowledge her as a fellow professional or to place—pseudonymously at least—his work in relation to hers.

These pseudonymous exchanges between Coleridge and Robinson were suspended during the period in 1798 and 1799 when Coleridge was in Germany and out of contact with the paper, but the dialogue resumed, this time more openly, in 1800 when Coleridge had renewed his involvement with the Morning Post and its poetry section. The more direct nature of the second exchange was undoubtedly a result of the personal friendship that had developed between Coleridge and Robinson in January and February of 1800, and William Godwin’s diary records several instances where the two poets met socially.⁹ Robinson initiated the exchange this time, publishing her “Ode Inscribed to the Infant Son of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.” in the 17 October 1800 edition of the Morning Post. In this poem Robinson at once accepts and returns the collegial gesture that Coleridge had made in “The Apotheosis” by publicly celebrating Coleridge as a poet (e.g., “the magic of his loftier muse” [I. 82]) and by casting her poem as an exchange between two writers. Coleridge responded by publishing on 24 November a brief poem entitled “Alcaeus to Sappho,” which E. H. Coleridge identified as having been addressed to Robinson, and by also sending privately to Robinson his poem “A Stranger Minstrel.”¹⁰ The public-private bifurcation of Coleridge’s response to Robinson is critical for understanding the ways in which self-representation was essential to this public dialogue.

Both of Coleridge’s poetic responses to Robinson enact the rhetorical gesture characteristic of the public dialogue between them from the beginning: each poem offers the acknowledgment of the interlocutor as a professional colleague and fellow poet. In “Alcaeus to Sappho,” the literary nature of the address is obvious, but it was also meant particularly, since “Sappho” was a pseudonym with which Robinson had been associated openly in the Morning Post. In “A Stranger Minstrel,” however, the collegial gesture is far more extensive. In this poem, which Coleridge even after Robinson’s death made an effort not to have published, he applauds Robinson in superlative terms as a poet of “divinest melody” (l. 51). More importantly, the poem engages for the first time in a direct textual assimilation from Robinson’s work. In creating this panegyric, Coleridge quotes at intervals from lines of Robinson’s verse, drawing from her recent poems “The Haunted Beach” (1800) and “Jasper” (1800). The public-private distinction that Coleridge made between these two poems and his reluctance to publish “A Stranger Minstrel” suggest his ongoing concern with issues of voice, ventriloquism, and the mastery of style.

In both “Alcaeus to Sappho” and “A Stranger Minstrel,” Coleridge’s relationship to the text of another poet was becoming increasingly intimate but in markedly different ways and to markedly different ends. Coleridge appears not to have been troubled by the publication of “Alcaeus to Sappho,” an identifiable but textually distinct tribute to a colleague, while the more dialogic text of “A Stranger Minstrel” gave him pause. In the context of his broader relationship to Robinson, this hesitation is understandable. With the publication of The Lyrical Ballads (1798), Coleridge’s professional star was rising. He had long viewed his writings for the Morning Post as hackwork and, mirroring a broader cultural distinction between literary and subliterary genres, had prevented his serious poetic efforts from appearing in its pages, even when short of copy. As he explained to Josiah Wedgwood in January of 1798: “The few weeks I have written for the Morning Post, I have felt thus—Something must be written and written immediately—if any important Truth, any striking beauty occur to my mind, I feel a repugnance at sending it garbled to a newspaper.”11 His reluctance did not stem from any high estimation of “A Stranger Minstrel,” a poem he dismissed in 1802 as “silly” and regrettable (CLSTC 2: 903-6). Rather, Coleridge’s concern was lest his poetry—especially his serious poetry—be linked too closely in the public arena either with Robinson’s verse or with a periodical mode of production. Not only did “A Stranger Minstrel” develop through quotation and allusion a lyric voice in internal dialogue with Robinson’s works; it celebrated poems that were particularly close to Coleridge’s imaginative territory. The allusions in the poem to Robinson’s “Haunted Beach” were particularly treacherous for the manner in which they drew attention to the intimate relationship her verse had with his own. In November of 1800 Robinson had published a collection of poems under the title Lyrical Tales, and her choice of title was undoubtedly intended as a nod toward Wordsworth and Coleridge’s recent volume. The Wordsworth family, at any rate, was irritated by the proximity, since they feared confusion between Robinson’s volume and the planned second edition of The Lyrical Ballads, in progress at just that moment. As Dorothy Wordsworth complained to a correspondent in September of 1800: “Mrs. Robinson has claimed the title and is about publishing a volume of Lyrical Tales. This is a great objection … as they are both printed at the same press and Longman is the publisher of both” (LWDW1: 293). Even more particularly, the Lyrical Tales had included Robinson’s “Haunted Beach,” which, in its portrayal of a “shipwrecked mariner” and a “band of Spectres,” clearly appropriated themes and incidents from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Meanwhile, as Coleridge may have known by December of 1800, Robinson was also at work on an additional poem, addressed “To the Poet Coleridge,” in which she adopted the themes, imagery, and language of “Kubla Khan.” In these poems Robinson continued to make the collegial gestures that had been the foundation of their professional friendship and public exchanges, but she appears not have appreciated the distinction that Coleridge made circa 1800 between his writing for the Morning Post and his serious literary efforts. His willingness to publish one poem and not the other was a function of Coleridge’s investment in crafting for himself in his serious publications a voice uncontaminated by popular contexts or by other subjectivities. While “Alcaeus to Sappho” might acknowledge the talents of a contemporary and bear his name, it was a poem consigned to the ephemera of newsprint. As part of the printed exchange with Robinson, the piece served to identify Coleridge as a poet publicly, without jeopardizing the reputation of his loftier efforts. On the other hand, by mixing Robinson’s texts with his own, “A Stranger Minstrel” blurred lines that Coleridge preferred to keep publicly distinct and called attention to the intimate dialogue and gracious ventriloquism their poems enacted. As a private piece of correspondence, the poem testifies to the genuine esteem and affection in which he held Robinson; but publicly, Coleridge had the professional sense to appreciate the dangers of associating himself too closely—either textually or personally—with a woman whose social and professional reputation was not and could not be entirely respectable or with a genre as indiscriminate as newsprint. The exchange suggests that Coleridge was more than willing to complicate the categories of gender and authorship—willing to acknowledge a female contemporary in public and willing to foster a friendship with her privately. However, in the end, what Coleridge was not prepared to do was publicly place his poems in the same sort of dialogue or collaboration that he had embraced with Wordsworth, and it is difficult to know to what extent this was a matter of gender rather than genre.

Coleridge’s willingness to publish “Alcaeus to Sappho” in the Morning Post has a final twist. While the exchanges between Coleridge and Robinson involved familiar themes of quoting (a form of ventriloquism, after all), assimilation, allusion, and voice, the textual history of “Alcaeus to Sappho” brings Coleridge’s readers squarely back to the issue of plagiarism. As Norman Fruman discovered, Wordsworth actually had written the poem and sent a copy of the verses to Coleridge in a letter of 27 February 1799 (45-46). Coleridge had suggested some revisions to the poem, but Wordsworth had quickly abandoned the piece, written in the context of the Lucy poems, as one for which he did not “care a farthing” (LWDW 1: 256). When it came to a matter of farthings, however, Coleridge apparently could take the trouble to care for it. Coleridge was consistently pressed to fulfill his copy requirements for the Morning Post, and the poem was sent, apparently with Coleridge’s revisions, to the paper’s general editor, Daniel Stuart, on 7 October 1800. There are several ways to understand this additional instance of unacknowledged borrowing: its composition followed a period of intimate exchange between Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Wordsworth may have given Coleridge leave to use the poem as a token of friendship; indeed, the revision Coleridge made to the poem (changing its subject from Lucy to Sappho, for example) was perhaps sufficient, to his mind, to voice and to “improve” the poem. Perhaps the borrowings were even unconscious in the sense that Coleridge brought to that term. However, I suspect that the truth of the matter is that neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge considered the poem sufficiently well crafted to merit treatment as literary and consequently consigned it, as piecework, to the ephemera of paid professional writing. Whatever the case, the normally territorial Wordsworth did not express dismay about the reemployment of this abandoned poem. In fact, the context of the appropriation is finally more interesting than the particulars of the occasion: it is curious that so many of Coleridge’s “plagiarisms” should be concentrated in the paid work that he performed in order to make a living or in professionalized genres, ranging from the poems in the Morning Post—which included the publication of the “Hymn before Sunrise” on 11 September 1802—to his late public lectures and the extended critical review that is the Biographia Literaria. While Coleridge often protested the financial disadvantage that serious literary authors faced and participated in shaping the emerging rhetoric of the poet as professional writer, his investment in ownership and intellectual property had little to do with those poems, essays, and lectures by which he often made a living. In drawing this final contrast between Grub Street and the literary, Coleridge was reflecting an element central to Romantic-period appropriation: the clear distinction between literary properly and commercial print culture. Yet, as a number of scholars have shown, genre was often gendered, and late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers frequently cast literary genres as masculine and denigrated subliterary commercial genres as feminine. As Peter Manning argues in Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts, Byron specifically discriminated between literary and popular texts, and in his mind commercial success and “professionalization [was] equated with the feminine.”12 Coleridge’s relationship to commercial print culture and to the texts of other writers may have reflected a similarly complex intersection of genre and genre.

Domestic Circulation and the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth

If Coleridge’s borrowings from Friederike Brun and Mary Robinson reflect the subliterary status of texts that circulated in the context of commercial print culture, the borrowings from the unpublished journals of Dorothy Wordsworth by various members of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle reveal the contemporary attitude toward texts that remained ostensibly private. As an unmarried woman, Dorothy Wordsworth was entitled to the fullest measure of properly rights available to a woman at the end of the eighteenth century. Yet, her language and imagery were routinely reemployed in the poetry of both William Wordsworth and Coleridge, and these borrowings were not characterized as instances of plagiarism during her lifetime, although the obligations are apparently considerable.¹³ The most familiar of these appropriations is William Wordsworth’s recourse to the language of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden journal in “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (1804). William Wordsworth’s familiar poem announces:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.14

The textual correspondences between his poem and Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal are apparent. In her journal, she had described how:

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway. (109)¹⁵

William Wordsworth clearly finds the source for his poem’s imagery in his sister’s journal, and he uses several of her particular expressions in its articulation. However, while the extent of the borrowing is significant, charges of plagiarism during the Romantic period did not depend on the degree of correspondence but, rather, on judgments concerning consciousness, familiarity, and improvement, and, as I will argue, evaluations of improvement, in particular, often intersected with broader cultural attitudes toward genre, literary status, and perhaps gender. In addition to these obligations to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals in “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” William Wordsworth also relied upon his sister’s text in early poems that included “A Night-piece” (1798), “A whirlblast from behind the hill” (1798), “Repentance” (1802), “Alice Fell” (1802), “Beggars” (1802), “To a butterfly” (1802), “To a small celandine” (1802), and “The redbreast chasing the butterfly” (1802). While it is impossible to know without specific historical commentary how contemporary readers might have applied the aesthetic judgment of improvement in particular instances, contemporary evidence suggests that authors were often given considerable license to borrow from works such as private journals that circulated beyond the margins of literary print culture. Works of this sort were often cast as implicitly authorless texts, making the mastery of voice and, therefore, the judgment of improvement remarkably uncomplicated. In fact, in her writings, Dorothy Wordsworth struggled with her own ambivalence about identifying herself as a poet and frequently disavowed the literary nature of the texts that she produced. In doing so, she was participating, of course, in a conventional set of assumptions about the impropriety of female authorship. However, the marginal modes of transmission that she adopted—the coterie circulation of her poems, the public-private nature of her private journal, and the collaborative nature of her commonplace book—also marked her texts as available for appropriation in ways that contemporary literary texts often were not. Quite simply, private unpublished journals, regardless of the author’s gender, did not typically enjoy the protections granted to public literary texts.

I discussed in Chapter 2 the concerns that surrounded the publication of this poem for Coleridge and the various stratagems that he employed in the public presentation of the work to forestall charges of plagiarism. The preface directly engages the question of plagiarism and goes so far as to acknowledge other writers whose works were indebted to his literary innovations. In light of this abundance of caution, it is striking that Coleridge does not mention borrowings from private materials, even in general terms. Yet, his poem appropriated from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals. On 7 March 1798, for example, she had written in her journal, “One only leaf upon the top of the tree—the sole remaining leaf—danced round and round like a rag blown by wind” (Journals 9), and this image and vocabulary reappeared in Christabel when Coleridge wrote: “The one red leaf, the last of its clan, / Which dances as often as dance it can, / …. / On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky” (ll. 49-52). In addition to this correspondence, Mary Moorman has identified another half-dozen parallels between Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and Christabel, suggesting a pattern of unacknowledged assimilation. However, these borrowings do not appear to have produced particular concern or resentment, in large part because unpublished private journals such as Dorothy Wordsworth’s texts generally were not considered to have inherently literary properties. Within the Italian Shelley-Byron circle, the private journals of Edward Ellerker Williams were treated in much the same manner as Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, and Williams’s notebooks were likewise used an unacknowledged source of material for the consciously literary poems and novels of Edward Trelawny and Thomas Medwin in ways that never elicited controversy or contemporary charges of plagiarism.¹⁶ Borrowing successfully from private materials of this sort and “improving” upon them simply did not represent a significant aesthetic challenge. Transforming a subliterary private expression into a component of a literary work likely represented an obvious degree of improvement and one sufficient to forestall charges of poetical plagiarism.

While Romantic period attitudes in general cast subliterary materials such as private, unpublished journals as implicitly authorless texts, Dorothy Wordsworth frequently disavowed any investment in asserting the literary nature of her texts or her authorial rights to them. In her private correspondence, she frequently claimed to “detest the idea of setting myself up as an Author” (LWDW 2: 453), and she represented herself as writing simply for the private pleasure of her family. In an 1806 letter to Lady Beaumont, she wrote to refute the suggestion that she was “capable of writing poems that might give pleasure to others besides my own particular friends” and even insisted that she could never be “bold enough the hope to compose verses for the pleasure of grown persons” but only for children (LWDW 2: 24). Regarding the Grasmere journal, in particular, she claimed to have written only to “give Wm pleasure by it” (Journals 15-16), and it is likely that the extended Wordsworth household took her at her word and understood these materials as communal resources intended for private entertainment. In making these statements, Dorothy was drawing upon a set of familiar eighteenth-century cultural conventions regarding the impropriety of female authorship. As Robert Halsband and Irvin Ehrenprein argued some time ago, there were essentially two kinds of women writers in the period: “respectable women who wrote primarily for their own or their friends’ amusement, and the faintly or frankly disreputable women who published for profit.”17 In her correspondence, especially with Lady Beaumont, Dorothy Wordsworth is careful to place herself firmly in the former category. There were significant social pressures placed on genteel women writers (or women aspiring to gentility), regardless of their marital status, to imagine their literary works in relation to a limited coterie and to the genres suitable to domestic circulation, especially subliterary genres such as commonplace books, travel journals, manuscript or vanity-press poems, and private theatricals. This localization of women’s writing within a domestic sphere likely had additional implications for the ways in which the private nature of their property was understood. If for male “authors” private intellectual property typically was synonymous with individual ownership and attribution in the public arena of literary print culture, the same was not always true for women “scribblers” of a certain class whose private texts were often treated as shared domestic or social resources. In many instances, women’s writing was regarded as communal, even when the work made its way into print, and to charge another writer, and especially a male writer, with plagiarism from such a text—a charge that implied the unsuccessful interpenetration of authorial subjectivities—would have been regarded as both unwelcome and inappropriate.18 Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, as private domestic texts kept separate from the public contests of print culture, may not have represented a species of literary property and may not, therefore, have been subject to the critical and aesthetic evaluation that charges of plagiarism implied at all.

However, Dorothy Wordsworth’s explicit disavowal of authorship and her gestures toward the private household nature of her texts stand in contrast to other reflections in which she recorded feeling “more than half a poet” (Journals 104), and there is some evidence that she was sensitive to the appropriations from her writing. Her journals and, later, her circulating commonplace book incorporate several self-consciously literary efforts, and at least one of these poems, “Thoughts on my sick-bed” (1833), engages with the issues of appropriation and textual interpenetration that shaped her experience as a writer in the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle. In the poem, Dorothy asks:

And has the remnant of my life

Been pilfered of this sunny Spring?

And have its own preclusive sounds

Touched in my heart no echoing string?

Ah! Say not so—the hidden life

Couchant within this feeble frame

Hath been enriched by kindred gifts,

That, undesired, unsought-for, came

With joyful heart in youthful days

When fresh each season in its Round

I welcomed the earliest Celandine

Glittering upon the mossy ground;

With busy eyes I pierced the lane

In quest of known and unknown things,

—The primrose a lamp on its fortress rock,

The silent butterfly spreading its wings,

The violet betrayed by its noiseless breath,

The daffodil dancing in the breeze,

The carolling thrush, on his naked perch,

Towering above the budding trees.

Our cottage-hearth no longer our home,

Companions of Nature were we,

The Stirring, the Still, the Loquacious, the Mute—

To all we gave our sympathy.

Yet never in those careless days

When spring-time in rock, field, or bower

Was but a fountain of earthly hope

A promise of fruits & the splendid flower.

No! then I never felt a bliss

That might with that compare

Which, piercing to my couch of rest.

Came on a vernal air.

When loving Friends an offering brought.

The first flowers of the year,

Culled from the precincts of our home.

From nooks to Memory dear.

With some sad thoughts the work was done,

Unprompted and unbidden.

But joy it brought to my hidden life,

To consciousness no longer hidden.

I felt a Power unfelt before,

Controlling weakness, languor, pain;

It bore me to the Terrace walk

I trod the hills again;—

No prisoner in this lonely room,

I saw the green Banks of the Wye,

Recalling thy prophetic words,

Bard, Brother, Friend from infancy!

No need of motion, or of strength,

Or even the breathing air:

—I thought of Nature’s loveliest scenes;

And with Memory I was there.19

The poem was included at the end of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal for 1833 and was also copied into the commonplace book that she kept at this time and circulated among her social circle. The inclusion of the poem in the commonplace book suggests that it was something she was reasonably proud to have written. Susan M. Levin was one of the first critics to call attention to the metaphors of authorship and appropriation that Dorothy Wordsworth develops in the poem.20 In her reading of “Thoughts on my sick-bed,” Levin draws particular attention to the word “pilfered” (l. 2), which suggests, she argues, a comparison with the manner in which “[h]er observations were taken little by little (pilfered) by other writers” (136) and to the flowers described in the poem. The flowers, Levin observes, “are those of William’s poetry: ‘the celandine,’ ‘the primrose,’ ‘the violet,’ ‘the daffodil’” (135). While Levin’s claim is that “the poem is in ambiguous dialogue with William’s great decade” (135), I extend this reading and propose that Dorothy Wordsworth’s poem rhetorically discovers her “hidden” role in the collaborative authorship from which William Wordsworth’s public works emerged. William Wordsworth was particularly indebted to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals in the early years of his career for information on the details of the local landscape, and her invocation of the daffodil and the celandine recall the close textual relationship between her descriptions and his poems “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and “To a small celandine.” However, the final lines of “Thoughts on my sick-bed” represent not only the conflation with the Lucy poems that Levin recognizes (135) but also part of a larger pattern of ventriloquism—or, more accurately, self-ventriloquism in the poem. The last stanza of “Thoughts on my sick-bed,” with its emphasis on “I thought of Nature’s loveliest scenes; / And with Memory I was there,” recalls not only “Tintern Abbey” and its prophecy of future memory but also the last stanza of “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” in which William Wordsworth had described how “oft, when on my couch I lie / …. / They [the daffodils] flash upon that inward eye / …. / And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.” Returning to the language of William Wordsworth’s poem and, therefore, circuitously to the public context of the language of her journal, Dorothy Wordsworth claims for her own “couch of rest” (l. 31) the agency of her brother’s. She echoes William Wordsworth’s appropriations from her journals in order to locate the origins of both literary works in a domestic context. The recuperation performed by the allusive textual relationships represents, while not perhaps a claim to authorship, a form of complex self-imitation and a projection of the voice of the self elsewhere that confirms Dorothy Wordsworth’s mature perception of herself as something “more than half a poet” and suggests that she remained personally invested in those texts that she saw silently reemployed in the public literary sphere.

While the borrowings from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals cannot be said to represent instances of Romantic plagiarism, both the manner of the appropriations and her literary reflections upon them gesture toward some of the ways that the conventions of gender and class complicated the ideas of authorship and intellectual property in the context of a cultural moment that distinguished between the individual possession of literary texts and the more communal property of subliterary texts. In practice, Romantic-period plagiarism was a mode of criticism, centered in the periodical reviews and concerned fundamentally with issues of public representation and the aesthetic development of persona. Texts that remained either rhetorically (as in the case of genteel women’s writing) or literally (as in the case of unpublished journals such as Dorothy Wordsworth’s) private were beyond its scope of inquiry.

Gothic Plagiarisms in Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire

Far more troubling for nineteenth-century reviewers than these appropriations from private texts were those from subliterary productions that were manifestly public and yet did not have their origins in commercial print culture—elements drawn from legend, folktale, popular song, and oral history. These stories occupied a position within print culture but were simultaneously beyond it, and charges of plagiarism from these sources are among the most illuminating examples in the period. The controversy surrounding another collaborative partnership highlights the difference. In 1810, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his sister Elizabeth published a coauthored volume of poetry, under the pseudonyms of Victor and Cazire, in which they appropriated from the Gothic writings of Matthew Lewis—a writer whose own plagiarism from folktale and legend had been the subject of sustained critical controversy.

Many of the details surrounding the composition and publication of this volume, entitled Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810), are uncertain, in large part because most of the print run was destroyed following the discovery of extensive borrowings and because its existence remained apparently unknown even to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most intimate friends and to his early biographers. Published in the autumn of 1810 by Joseph Stockdale, the work contained recent poetry written by both Percy Bysshe and Elizabeth Shelley. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s first love, Harriet Grove, recorded in her journal having “Received the Poetry of Victor & Cazire” (SHC 2: 590) on 17 September, and the book was advertised in the Morning Chronicle on 18 September.21 Several brief and dismissive reviews of the volume were eventually published, including reviews in the 1810-11 volume of The Poetical Repository and the April 1811 edition of The British Critic; apart from these few notices, the poems disappeared from public attention until their rediscovery and republication at the end of the nineteenth century.22 While both Percy Bysshe and Elizabeth Shelley contributed poems to the volume, their productions are not identified within the work, and the authorship of individual verses is difficult to confirm positively. Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire comprises seventeen poems, some of which directly imply female authorship (e.g. “To Miss——, from Miss——”), while others have clear connections to later publications by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Various pieces of correspondence hint at the individual authorship of particular items but not always reliably. Neil Fraistat and Donald H. Reiman, the most recent editors of Shelley’s juvenilia, conclude that Elizabeth Shelley probably wrote five poems in the volume and that Percy Bysshe Shelley probably wrote another eleven.²³ The remaining poem was, as the Shelleys’ publisher first noticed, not written by either of the volume’s authors: it was a poem by Matthew Lewis.

John Stockdale had observed this literary appropriation in the Victor and Cazire volume only after the work had been published and advertised. Upon informing Shelley of this discovery, it was agreed that the book should be removed from circulation and all remaining copies destroyed. In 1827, Stockdale published an account of these events, writing:

Some short time after the announcement of the poems I happened to be perusing them, with more leisure than I had till then had leisure to bestow upon them, when I recognized one which I knew to have been written by Mr. M. G. Lewis, the author of “The Monk,” and I fully anticipated the probable vexation of the juvenile author when I communicated the discovery to Mr. P. B. Shelley. With all the ardour natural to his character he expressed the warmest resentment at the imposition practiced upon him by his coadjutor, and entreated me to destroy all the copies, of which about one hundred had been put into circulation.²⁴

The poem that Stockdale recognized was Lewis’s “The Black Canon of Elm-ham, or, Saint Edmond’s Eve; An Old English Ballad,” which had been included in his collected Tales of Terror (1801), a book that was a particular favorite of the young Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Victor and Cazire edition had included a poem, entitled “St. Edmond’s Eve,” that was, in fact, nothing more than a reprinting of Lewis’s poem.

While Percy Bysshe Shelley’s efforts to cast the blame for this deception onto his anonymous “coadjutor” are understandable, it is difficult to believe that he was unaware either of Lewis’s poem or of the placement of it in the volume.25 In fact, the question of personal responsibility is the least compelling aspect of the entire affair. Far more interesting is the fact that the obligations in the Victor and Cazire volume have been taken as an incontrovertible example of plagiarism. The borrowings are word-for-word, the original author is not cited, and the similarities are, ipso facto, plagiarism—or so the critical argument has run. This term has been used in each of the major editions of the Shelley juvenilia to describe the borrowings in Victor and Cazire, beginning with the first Garnett edition of 1898 and continuing through the Cameron edition of the 1960s and the Fraistat and Reiman edition of 2000. Yet, the appropriations in the Victor and Cazire volume were not labeled plagiarism in the Romantic period, either by Stockdale or by the periodical reviewers, who had not failed to notice that “[t]here is no ‘original poetry in this volume” (Poetical Repository 617). This absence of contemporary charges of plagiarism surrounding the Victor and Cazire volume could simply be a matter of chance, of course. However, it is more likely that the omission signals an important distinction. The liberties taken with “St. Edmond’s Eve” in Victor and Cazire may not have represented a matter of plagiarism so much as a matter of imposture and copyright violation. It is difficult to imagine that contemporary readers would not have recognized the inclusion in the volume of a poem drawn from Lewis’ popular horror collection and published under the same title as the original. The borrowing was hardly recondite, and, as we have already seen, where a work was broadly familiar and where readers could be expected to credit the actual author, culpable plagiarism, in the Romantic-period sense, would not have occurred.

By reprinting Lewis’s poem rather than assimilating it, however, Percy Bysshe and Elizabeth Shelley had opened Stockdale to charges of copyright violation and themselves to charges of imposture or fraud. Shelley’s editors have suggested that the inclusion of Lewis’s poem in the volume was probably deliberate and intended as an elaborate prank, on the order of the Rowley hoax. In his Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858), Thomas Jefferson Hogg recorded that the youthful Shelley “had a certain sly relish for a practical joke, so that it were ingenious and abstruse, and of a literary nature; he would often exult in the successful forgeries of Chatterton and Ireland,” and the publication of an unoriginal poem in a volume entitled Original Poetry might well qualify as adolescent humor of precisely this sort.²⁶ However, the consequences of forgery and imposture were, in fact, rather more severe than the consequences of plagiarism. After all, Thomas Chatterton was reputed to have killed himself as a result of his literary impostures and the subsequent disgrace they brought upon him, and the very fact of this cultural representation, regardless of its accuracy, reveals how grave the social consequences of such deception could be. William Henry Ireland’s Shakespearean frauds were the subject of considerable legal inquiry, and the infamous eighteenth-century cleric William Dodd was sentenced to hang for forging financial instruments and impersonating Lord Chesterfield in writing.27 Percy Bysshe and Elizabeth Shelley were not, of course, in danger of consequences this dire, but the fraudulent representation created in the Victor and Cazire volume exposed them to more serious criticism than either might have imagined. For, as Jack Lynch has argued, the eighteenth-century attitude toward literary duplicity made little distinction between it and other forms of imposture; Samuel Johnson considered it a form of “treason” and characterized “[t]he nature of fraud, as distinct from other violations of right or property [as] consisting] in this, that the injured man is induced to concur in the act by which the injury is done.”²⁸ Nicola Trott has shown that, as late as 1825, textual impersonation (including the use of pseudonyms) was satirically associated with fears of “being hanged for forgery.”²⁹ While plagiarism was a primarily aesthetic transgression during the Romantic period, having no direct consequence in law, both copyright piracy and fraud were violations of property with concrete legal and financial implications. The fact that Stockdale was moved to suppress the Victor and Cazire edition and to destroy an entire print run of nearly 1,500 volumes suggests that he understood the more serious nature of the jeopardy in which this prank might have placed them all. After all, nineteenth-century publishers had little incentive to worry about charges of plagiarism, the consequences of which affected the reputation of the author almost exclusively. John Murray never proposed to destroy editions of Byron’s poetry simply because Wordsworth or the periodical reviewers were alleging plagiarisms, and none of the numerous contemporary commentaries that I examine in this book suggest that plagiarism was a publisher’s concern. However, booksellers and publishers did have good reasons for protecting themselves from the scandal and from the potential legal consequences of printing a work that might be viewed as a fraud, imposture, or copyright violation, and Stockdale’s reproduction of “St. Edmond’s Eve” in its entirety and under the original (albeit truncated) title was arguably precisely such a violation.

While the inclusion of Lewis’s “The Black Canon of Elmham, or, Saint Edmond’s Eve” in the Victor and Cazire volume, then, may have represented an instance of fraud or infringement rather than plagiarism, there are other appropriations throughout the volume that we might expect to have occasioned more conventional charges of illegitimate borrowing. There are several poems in Victor and Cazire that silently borrow from the works of contemporary writers and in ways that are more directly associated with the complex conditions of early nineteenth-century plagiarism. The presence of one of these appropriations was first noted by Thomas Medwin, who wrote in his Life of Shelley (1847):

Chatterton was one of his [Shelley’s] great favourites; he enjoyed very much the literary forgery and successful mystifications of Horace Walpole and his contemporaries…. One of his earliest effusions was a fragment beginning—it was indeed almost taken from the pseudo Rowley:

Hark! the owlet flaps his wings

In the pathless dell beneath;

Hark! ‘tis the night-raven sings

Tidings of approaching death.30

Although Medwin apparently was not aware of the Victor and Cazire volume, he is quoting (with minor inaccuracies) in this passage from the first stanza of a poem that Percy Bysshe and Elizabeth Shelley had published under the title “Ghasta; or, the Avenging Demon!!!” Percy Bysshe Shelley probably was the author of this poem, and there can be little doubt that in composing the work he borrowed directly from Chatterton’s verse. Richard Garnett characterized this debt in 1898 as “an audacious plagiarism” (xxiii), and, indeed, the stanza is lifted, with a few changes, from the “Mynstrelles Songe” in Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude … wrotten by Thomas Rowlie (1777), in which Chatterton had written:

Harke! the ravenne flappes hys wynge,

In the briered delle belowe;

Harke! the dethe-owle loude doth synge,

To the nyghte-mares as heie goe; (ll. 982-85)³¹

While Percy Bysshe Shelley has altered the archaic language and has reversed the order of his ornithology, the image and style are substantially the same. Had Victor and Cazire been subject to serious literary criticism in the contemporary reviews, this borrowing might well have occasioned charges of poetical (but perhaps not culpable) plagiarism. Both the critical notices of the volume, at any rate, agreed that the poetry in the volume had little to recommend it, and it seems unlikely that the Shelleys’ borrowings would have been considered improvements.

However, the appropriations in the Victor and Cazire volume also need to be understood in relation to the broader anxieties about origins that Gothic literature elicited among contemporary readers. Gothic texts were remarkably allusive and assimilative in their narrative and verse conventions and were prone to highly contested charges of plagiarism. As E. J. Clery has argued in The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800, there was throughout the period a “perceived tension between originality and imitation in commericalised Gothic fiction” that stemmed from the systematic textual interpenetration practiced by authors writing in the genre.32 In noting Percy Bysshe Shelley’s obligation to Chatterton, Medwin had taken some pains to place the discussion in the context of Gothic literature and questions of its originality. Immediately following the quotation from “Ghasta,” Medwin explained:

I had had lent me the translation of Bùrgher’s “Leonora”…. It produced on Shelley a powerful effect; and I have in my possession a copy of the whole poem, which he made in his own hand. The story is by no means original, if not taken from an English ballad. For the refrain,

How quick ride the dead,

Which occurs in so many stanzas, Burgher is indebted to an old Volkslied[.] (Life of Shelley 1: 62-63)

Medwin calls attention here to a common feature of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic literature: it often drew specifically from folklore, including ballads, ghost stories, and local legends, for its materials. Lewis had emphasized the folk “origins” of “The Black Canon of Elmham” by appending the identification “An Old English Ballad,” and one of the central questions in assessing plagiarism in Gothic genres, and in the Victor and Cazire volume more specifically, concerns the degree to which “common” oral narrative or verse traditions qualified as private literary property during the Romantic period.

This question of the relationship between plagiarism and the folk tradition in Gothic genres emerges more directly at another point in Shelley’s “Ghasta,” when he appropriates additional materials for the poem from Lewis’s novel, The Monk (1795). The central narrative of “Ghasta” can be traced to Lewis’s novel and, particularly, to the scenes in the fourth chapter describing the apparition of the Bleeding Nun. In addition to similarities of incident and characterization, there are several direct verbal parallels, including Shelley’s reemployment of the nun’s ghastly incantation. In The Monk, the scene focuses on Raymond mistaking the nun for his paramour, Agnes, whom he assumes has arrived in disguise. He clasps her to his bosom and professes his devotion to her, only to discover the next morning from the peasants that no woman had been seen. The next evening, she returns, and he recognizes her as the Bleeding Nun of local legend when she exclaims:

Raymond! Raymond! Thou art mine!

Raymond! Raymond! I am thine!

In thy veins while blood shall roll,

I am thine!

Thou art mine!—

Mine thy body, mine thy soul! (166)

The climactic scene of Shelley’s “Ghasta” borrows from this passage. In Shelley’s poem, the central character is confronted with a female ghost who claims him as her lover with the pronouncement

Thou art mine and I am thine,

Till the sinking of the world,

I am thine and thou art mine,

Till in ruin death is hurled—(ll. 73-76)

Modern readers may quarrel with the idea that this borrowing represents a substantial plagiarism, but there is little doubt that some Romantic-period readers would have charged Shelley with plagiarism for his appropriation in this instance. For, while Lewis was Shelley’s immediate source, Lewis had borrowed as well in writing this passage and had been charged with plagiarism for the same obligation. Lewis’s sources had been equally familiar, and, if anything, Lewis could claim an avenue of defense not available to Shelley: his materials had included not only other literary works but also narratives drawn directly from the arena of folklore and oral tradition.

Gothic Literature and the Possession of Folklore

As Louis F. Peck has observed, “Lewis’ reputation as a shameless plagiarist became quickly established [after the publication of The Monk] and has survived to this day.”33 The periodical reviews that followed the publication of his Gothic romance were nearly unanimous in decrying the tale’s lack of originality and its obligations to, by Peck’s calculation, “more than fifty works and authors” (21). In fact, Lewis drew from a wide range of source materials, primarily German and French. Syndy Conger, for example, has demonstrated extensive and often direct borrowings from the lyric poetry of “Storm and Stress” Romanticism, including works such as Burger’s “Lenore” (1773), Herder’s “Der Wasserman” (The Waterbearer) (1779), and Schubart’s “Der ewige Jude” (The Wandering Jew) (1784).³⁴ Other important characterizations and narrative events in the novel Conger identifies as drawn from texts including Musäus’s “Die Entführung” (The Elopement) (1782-86), Schiller’s “Der Geisterseher” (The Ghostseer) (1787-89), Flammenberg’s Der Geisterbanner (1792) and its English translation The Necromancer; or, a Tale of the Black Forest (1794), and Weber’s “Die Teufels-beschwörung” (The Exorcism) (1791). However, the status of these works as literary property was not a straightforward matter in the Romantic period, because many of the stories Lewis appropriated were based on narratives drawn from ghost stories, local legend, ballads, and oral tradition. Claims that Lewis had plagiarized from these sources suggest that the definition of familiarity as a standard in evaluating early nineteenth-century plagiarism was complicated by borrowings from outside the self-consciously literary tradition and particularly by narratives that represented a communal, oral inheritance.

Many readers assumed that Musäus’s “Die Entführung” was Lewis’s textual source of the Bleeding Nun legend, and the controversy surrounding these obligations is intensified by Lewis’s claims, probably truthful, not to have encountered the story in this print version until the publication of Musäus’s Volksmä rchen der Deutschen (German Folktales) in 1805, a decade after the first edition of The Monk. Yet, as Conger demonstrates, Musäus’s tale includes all the central details and some of the precise language present in the Bleeding Nun scenes. To make matters worse, Lewis had already been charged with plagiarizing these same passages from a different source: Stephanie de Genlis’s Les Chevaliers du Cygne; ou la Cour de Charlemagne (1795). In the fourth (expurgated) edition of The Monk in 1798, Lewis had responded to these allegations in a preface that explained the source of his materials:

I can only account for it [the resemblance between his Bleeding Nun episode and that in “Les Chevaliers du Cygne”] by supposing that Madame de Genlis had heard, while in Germany, the same tradition which I have made use of…. The story which was related to me, was merely, that the castle of Lauenstein was haunted by a spectre habited as a nun (but not as a bleeding one); that a young officer by mistake ran away with her, instead of the heiress of Lauenstein…. and that the words which she used to repeated to him were in the original, “Frizchen! Frizchen! Du bist mein! / Frizchen! Frizchen! Ich bein dein! / Ich dein! Du mein! / Mit leib’ und seel.” (Conger 95)

Lewis explains here that his source was not, in fact, Genlis—nor would it later be Musäus—but was instead a version of this familiar folktale that had been orally communicated to him. Indeed, in The Monk, the Bleeding Nun tale is explicitly identified as an oral tradition that has escaped textual history. Agnes asks Raymond “can you possibly have lived in Lindenberg for three whole months without hearing of [her]?” (Lewis 151) and proceeds to explain, “All my knowledge of her history comes from an old tradition … handed down from father to son…. It is surprising that in all the chronicles of past times this remarkable personage is never once mentioned” (Lewis 152). Lewis’s veracity in recounting his own exposure to the story is possibly suspect, but the point in respect to matters of literary property and plagiarism remains the same: Lewis evokes the traditional oral transmission of the tale as a justification for his reemployment of it, and the suggestion is that folktales, like ancient ballads, were understood as authorless texts and as part of a shared national history.

However, although Lewis claimed not to have borrowed the legend of the Bleeding Nun from a printed source, he was careful to acknowledge the obligation to the oral tradition in his prefatory advertisement published in the first edition of The Monk. In that advertisement, he had identified three textual sources from which he had borrowed, and he noted, once again, that the story of the Bleeding Nun had its origins in folk tradition:

The first idea of this Romance was suggested by the story of Santon Barsisa, related in The Guardian [31 August 1713].—The Bleeding Nun is a tradition still credited in many parts of Germany; and I have been told that the ruins of the castle of Lauenstein, which she is supposed to haunt, may yet be seen upon the borders of Thuringia.—The Water-King, from the first to the twelfth stanza, is a fragment of an original Danish ballad—And Belerma and Durandarte is translated from some stanzas to be found in a collection of old Spanish poetry…. I have now made a full avowal of all the plagiarisms of which I am aware myself, but I doubt not that many more may be found of which I am at present totally unconscious. (Lewis 32)

In light of this “full avowal,” the charges of plagiarism brought against him are extraordinary, and it is particularly curious that his appropriation of the Bleeding Nun story generated some of the most intense criticism. While his other explicitly textual attributions were accepted and while the suggestion of additional “unconscious” plagiarisms prompted a more thorough investigation of his reading than he might have desired, there appears to have been a critical reluctance to accept the folkloric source of the Bleeding Nun. Lewis’s reviewers, in other words, persisted in their efforts to locate the print origins of his tale, despite his identification of it as part of an oral cultural tradition. Instead, Lewis’s periodical reviewers attempted to discover in Musäus or in Genlis—texts that had drawn from the same folk traditions from which Lewis was appropriating—the real source of his borrowings. These repeated allegations of plagiarism in the periodical reviews suggest that folkloric materials, or what would have called until the second half of the nineteenth century “Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature,” disrupted and complicated the conventional attitudes toward private property and authorship.35

It is not surprising that oral or folk materials should have been a topic of some uneasiness when it came to matters of literary property, particularly because Romanticism as an aesthetic and a national movement was tied to the emerging interest in popular traditions during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in both Britain and Germany. In Britain, the revival of interest in the oral tradition was closely associated with the development of imperial identity at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, as Katie Trumpener argues in Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Charting the relationship between the revival of Scottish nationalism and the “restoration” of a lost oral tradition in the Poems of Ossian, Trumpener demonstrates that folk traditions operated as powerful embodiments of a shared national and racial past.³⁶ If these imperial effects offered an invitation to Romantic-period subjects to identify with and to assimilate an imagined cultural heritage held in common, at the same time popular antiquities were being transformed legally into a category of private property at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as those who had previously been seen as collectors gathering together a shared cultural heritage became the owners of private manuscripts and materials. As Penny Fielding has argued in Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction, the rise of connoisseurship in the early nineteenth century generated a contemporary debate regarding the ownership of cultural artifacts, including the ballad tradition.³⁷ Rhetorically positioned as both culturally common and privately collected, popular antiquities occupied territory beyond the conventional arenas of either print culture or proprietorial authorship, and as a result there was a resistance to seeing works in the oral tradition as “literary” material.

At the same time, the ownership of oral culture in the Romantic period is additionally complicated by extent to which it highlights the disjunction between commercial and aesthetic categories of authorship. Like other texts located at the margins of literary print culture, oral materials were understood as implicitly authorless and, therefore, available for appropriation in a relatively straightforward manner. The problem, of course, is in defining what constituted the “absence” of authorship in a text at this period. Vernacular works typically lack authors in the most literal sense because they cannot be associated with individual-specific origins and because they are part of a larger national or communal process of composition and transmission that escapes private ownership. However, vernacular works may also have been understood in the Romantic period to lack authors in a more narrow aesthetic sense: the literary ownership of a work depended primarily on the production of a controlling “spirit” or “style” (in other words, on the production of an “author”) that improved and appropriated any borrowed materials. Style, however, is a rhetorical effect that to some extent depends upon a textual articulation to fix its individual identity. Oral traditions, ironically, were among those materials in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that were most likely to be understood as voiceless and as most readily available for assimilation. The internal and aesthetic production of literary identity, however, was not the same thing as the external production of legal ownership, just as plagiarism is not the same thing as copyright infringement, and the appropriation of vernacular materials was often controversial because it revealed a fissure in the structure of authorship, namely, the extent to which authorship as a term operated simultaneously in two discourses that could not always be reconciled.

This bifurcation and the ways in which its was revealed and complicated by the possession of vernacular materials are explored at some length in the works of James Hogg, where the production of voice dominates both his aesthetic concerns and his mediated relationship to both print and oral culture. Peter T. Murphy, in Poetry as an Occupation and an Art, devotes a chapter to Hogg’s complicated textual relationship with John Lockhart, who inserts the voice and persona of Hogg into the Noctes Ambrosianae (1822-35) and, in doing so, parodies Hogg’s novel The Three Perils of Man: War, Women, and Witchcraft (1822)—a work that itself explores the problem of an author claiming to own oral productions.38 Murphy makes two important points about this exchange: first, that the ownership of voice in a literary context is complicated by the simultaneous impossibility of owning vernacular traditions and the necessity of mastering them in print; and second, that Lockhart’s strategy of appropriation—his “brain-sucking” (124)—is based on models of domination and absorption over the voice of the borrowed text. As Murphy writes, “the subject [Hogg] becomes enslaved to his absorbing Master…. Contest over voice, as I have argued again and again, is not superficial, not purely ‘formal’” (124). From the legal perspective on authorship, Lockhart’s caricatures of Hogg and his textual style are perfectly permissible. From the aesthetic perspective, Lockhart has appropriated (or misappropriated) one of the central elements of Hogg’s literary property and in ways that threaten the coherence of his authorial persona.

While Murphy reads this literary competition as it played out in contemporary print culture, Penny Fielding offers a more particular analysis of Hogg’s novel that highlights the ways in which the literary ownership of oral materials depends on textual mediation, perhaps particularly in instances where the origins are a common vernacular tradition. Reading the scene in the novel in which the character Colley Carrol humorously claims to be the author of a popular traditional song, while asking the audience to remind him of some of the verses, Fielding considers the problems with the ownership of oral materials generally in Romantic-period culture and proposes that the “authority [of ownership] depends on the text’s becoming fixed, with a stable existence before any particular telling; that is, the text’s being written down” (Writing and Orality 13). Read in this context, the investment of Matthew Lewis’s reviewers in locating the print sources of his oral materials can be understood as a reaction to the ways in which the vernacular disrupted the aesthetic and commercial judgments that constituted the production of authorship. At the same time, the textual imperatives of Romantic-period authorship, which required that oral traditions be “fixed” before their assimilation into print culture, may have helped to produce the fashion for collecting ballads and songs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This same tension between the public and private nature of the oral tradition is apparent even in the prefaces to The Lyrical Ballads (1798). In the 1798 “Preface,” Wordsworth and Coleridge famously set out to justify and to describe a form of poetry that was both spontaneous and written in the language of the common man, and in striking these particular notes they were reflecting an earlier eighteenth-century fashion, first popularized by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, for regarding traditional ballads as national poetry.39 William Wordsworth later reiterates this point about the importance of the ancient folk-ballad tradition for the development of British Romanticism in the “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” (1815) when he defends the “compilation[s]” of Thomas Percy.⁴⁰ In praising Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Wordsworth addressed the problems of authorship, assimilation, and influence raised by works in the oral and historical tradition, describing the Reliques as

collected, new-modelled, and in many instances (if such a contradiction in terms may be used) composed by the Editor, Dr. Percy. This work did not steal silently into the world, as is evident from the number of legendary tales, that appeared not long after its publication; and had been modelled, as the authors persuaded themselves, after the old Ballad. The Compilation was, however, ill suited to the then existing taste of city society…. The critic triumphed, the legendary imitators were deservedly disregarded, and, as undeservedly, their ill-imitated models sank, in this country, into temporary neglect; while Burger, and other able writers of Germany, were translating or imitating these Reliques, and composing, with the aid of inspiration thence derived, poems which are the delight of the German nation…. The Editor of the Reliques had indirectly preferred a claim to the praise of invention, by not concealing that his supplementary labours were considerable! … I have already stated how much Germany is indebted to [the Reliques]; and for our own country, its poetry has been absolutely redeemed by it. I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques[.] (PWWW 3: 76-77)

Wordsworth negotiates in this passage some of the central “contradiction [s]” raised by Percy’s reemployment of folk tradition: Percy is at once poet and editor; his works are at once composed and collected. “Fixing” the textual identity of the vernacular tradition, in an environment where authorship was to some extent a judgment of voiced mastery and personal labor, represented an act of creative and commercial invention. However, while Wordsworth argues for the poetic accomplishment achieved by Percy in his “supplementary labours,” many of Percy’s contemporary critics had dismissed the literary merits of the Reliques out of hand and had argued for the merely historical and editorial nature of his volume. While Percy’s right to draw from the “old Ballad” tradition and the print ephemera or private manuscripts in which it had been recorded went largely uncontested, the aesthetic consequences of these borrowings were more problematic. What was not clear was the degree to which Percy had created a literary work and, by doing so, appropriated as private property his common sources.

Lewis faced a similar dilemma. At stake in the plagiarism controversy surrounding The Monk was not so much Lewis’s reemployment of German ballads and folk tales—stories that, as Wordsworth observes, were themselves the result of a far more complicated process of cultural transmission and often had their historical origins in the English oral tradition—as the question of his literary accomplishment. Borrowing from works designated as literary was a relatively straightforward matter in the Romantic period, although the critical evaluation of these obligations was subject to a particular set of interpretive judgments. However, if Lewis’s appropriations were to other authored print sources, then the operative categories of evaluation became questions of consciousness, improvement, and familiarity. Having acknowledged the possibility of “unconscious” plagiarisms in the “Advertisement” to The Monk, Lewis had effectively forestalled charges of culpable plagiarism, and the critical stakes remaining would be exclusively aesthetic: questions of the degree to which Lewis had improved upon or assimilated his borrowed materials, which was another way of asking whether Lewis had succeeded or failed as an author. With materials drawn from an anonymous and oral tradition, however, there was no clear process for coming to critical judgment. Certainly, an author could not have been charged persuasively with culpable plagiarism, an allegation that functioned in the Romantic period to prevent harm being done to the reputation of the individual author. Likewise, in cases of an obligation to a folkloric national tradition, the category of familiarity and the distinctions used to evaluate it collapsed under the weight of the obvious, making it irrelevant whether the debt was unconscious or demonstrated improvement. However, in matters of aesthetic plagiarism—the part of the charge that mattered most to the Romantic writers and to their reviewers anyhow—the obstacle was serious. In evaluating aesthetic plagiarism, the absence or presence of improvement was the judgment that finally mattered, and, as we have seen, improvement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depended upon the consciously literary elements of voice, subjectivity, and style rather than on changes in word-for-word linguistic correspondences. If these oral materials were not literary but were historical, if they were not the productions of a unified author expressing his or her subjectivity and infusing the work with his or her style but were documentary, common, or traditional records, then how to decide if improvement had occurred? And if one could not come to judgment about improvement, then how to come to judgment about aesthetic merit when the two were inextricably linked? The cultural rhetoric followed from the legal conditions of the period: in the eighteenth century, it was literary property that copyright protected as privately owned, and it was borrowings from literary property that charges of plagiarism were equipped to negotiate. This is not to suggest that published histories were not subject to copyright protections or to charges of plagiarism. Rather, the point is that the definitions of history and its relationship to private authorship were also in transition during the Romantic period, and certain genres of “popular antiquities,” including oriental tales, travel narratives, and the Gothic, were considered as less privileged forms of private property on account of their close associations with the alternative narrative conventions and ontological claims of what we would now designate as science, history, archaeology, and geography.41 In light of this complexity, one can perhaps forgive Lewis’s reviewers for their desire to locate his borrowings and to formulate their judgments in the context of literary print culture.

Lewis’s tendency in The Monk to borrow from sources in or related to the oral folk tradition is characteristic of Gothic literature—or of what Nick Groom has called the “national Gothic”—more generally.⁴² As a genre, Gothic literature challenged the contemporary expectations regarding private authorship, and this often made these works particular targets for charges of plagiarism. As a result, they also became the subject of important critical discussions about literary judgment and its limits. The Gothic genre’s particularly intimate relationship to legend, like the ballad form’s relationship to oral song, represented a version of the problems of multiple-use property that occupied eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture at large. After all, these traditional and often rural tales and stories were part of a common literary inheritance that predated the legal and rhetorical isolation of private authorship and intellectual property. Yet, as the controversy surrounding The Monk demonstrates, the reemployment of these materials in print forms could often only be evaluated by a different set of conventions, emerging from the discourse of literary property and plagiarism.

In this respect, the charges of plagiarism surrounding Gothic literature are a function of the same cultural conventions that produced the silent appropriations from the private domestic texts of women writers or from works published in transitory and commercial media. As the examples from both the Wordsworth and Shelley households demonstrate, plagiarism in early nineteenth-century Britain was inextricably connected to judgments of literary status and merit, and texts located at the boundaries of literary print culture were frequently viewed as implicitly authorless at a historical moment when aesthetic achievement was a function of uniquely identifiable textual subjectivity. As Andrew Bennett has argued, “A key element in the modern conception of ‘literature’… is the commodification of authorship,” and, as we have seen, participation in early nineteenth-century print culture to a large extent determined the literary status of a text and the protections of ownership and identity afforded to its author.43