Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [145]
Brydges's copyright campaign, like that plotting, can seem in retrospect willfully idiosyncratic. But he came closer to success than one might initially have supposed, and he thought of it as his proudest moment.78 And we should also remember that he had many allies -including much of the highest echelon of the London publishing industry. He was in practice quite able to make common cause with commerce in its oligarchic form. Moreover, many of his antagonists' arguments were in fact no less outlandish than his own. After all, it was the defenders of copyright who resurrected Corset is and proclaimed a pre-1710 right of universal piracy. And the factual relics of his campaign would survive it to be revived by later critics of publishing monopolies, starting with Charles Babbage.79
But there is more to be said than that. The outlandish character of Brydges's campaigns was in fact a central element in them. His understanding of his own nature was forged in the late 1780s and 1790s through the Chandos campaign and his early attempts at novel writing. What lasted from those years was a conviction that he was essentially (whatever his outward appearance) aristocratic, sensitive, secluded, poetic, and temperamental. It was as such that he wrote himself into his Gothic novels -especially Fitz Albini, in which he appears as a reclusive lord given to poetic insight (the name of the work comes from combining two elements of Brydges's purported family tree). When he himself was not their hero, characters from his elaborate genealogical past served the turn, displaying traits that he thought he had identified in his pedigree. But the point is that as much as he inserted himself in Gothic and Romantic narratives, at the same time he inserted Gothic and Romantic narratives in himself. Brydges lived his life from one lightning-limned discovery in a ruined crypt to the next. Such glimpses inspired both his general genealogical faith and his specific discovery of the true descent linking himself to Gibbon. In these glimpses, in his recurrent need to define genius, and in his impassioned proclamations about aristocracy, popularity, and originality alike Brydges aspired to the identity of a distinctly tragic Romantic hero. And it was this aspiration, more than argument, faith, or need, that drove his campaigns. Indeed, throughout the years of the copyright conflict he never ceased to issue restatements of the Chandos claim in such terms. The claim recurred in every imaginable literary form: poetry (from sonnets to multivolume epics), novels, imaginative biographies, periodical essays, and editedworks. Brydges even endured six years of "drudgery" to edit Collins's peerage in nine volumes, apparently in order that a few pages might "transmit a record of his family wrongs to posterity." In all of this, as Beltz rightly said, his life became agothic novel. For one dizzying moment, at the fag end of old-regime Britain, the identity and role ofprinted authorship looked like becoming merely one more subplot in "the eternal Chandos Romance. "80
Victorian Britain prided itself on standing at the summit of industrial, economic, and scientific achievement. Its factories supplied the world, its ships held sway on the oceans, and its engineers, naturalists, and electrical researchers ranked with the