• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1969 0

a German philosopher. They made prize of any worthwhile literary vessels they came across, every issue containing extracts from major British and Continental authors. Its crew professed to fear none but the barque Boz (Dickens's pen name, of course) - "a queer craft, all-of-a-twist." (As the Corsair elsewhere put it: "Why will the next story by Boz be like the invention of the laurel crown? Because it belongs to the firstseizer.") It also followed phrenology and animal magnetism, profiled Ada Byron, and revealed an interesting commitment to proletarian creativity by denouncing the pedagogic initiatives of the "march of intellect" as "penny-magazining [the masses'} way to scientific dullness." But the paper was also exemplary in not being what it seemed.

The Corsair was the brainchild of the flamboyant N. P. Willis. Willis went to London himself to establish its sources, where he quickly made the acquaintance of Charles Babbage,John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Captain Marryat (with whom he fought a duel), and Thackeray. This last became the Corsair's London correspondent. Meanwhile Willis reported discovering a British piracy of his own work. But he denounced this as resulting from the scandalous state of American law. "See the effect of our robberies of English authors," he declared: such larceny existed only because of "our defective law of copyright." This betrayed the real purpose of the whole venture. In fact, the very egregiousness of the Corsair was supposed to prove how morally irredeemable American practice was. It thus launched frequent broadsides against what it called, with only apparent paradox, "the piratical law of copy-right." Willis actually thought copyright should be both universal and perpetual. His paper existed to prove the need for its own destruction.25

Writ large, Willis's venture succeeded. The newsprint pirates gave reprinting a bad name. Harper led the counterattack, prompted partly by a conviction that New World spies were trying to steal works the firm had in press and partly by suspicions about the setting of a fire at its premises. A short but bitter price war ensued. Meanwhile, the Post Office, fearing that the mail might collapse under the strain of the reprint papers, abruptly reclassified them as pamphlets. This jacked up the postage rate from about 2C-3C per issue to I2C-18¢ and eliminated at a stroke their economic viability. The papers denounced the postal service as for betraying their ideal of "universal diffusion of information." But it did no good. Brother Jonathan folded quickly; the New World followed soon after. The genre expired with them.

FOR AND AGAINST TRANSATLANTIC COPYRIGHT

Fresh from their humiliating defeat in New York, Saunders and Otley turned to Harriet Martineau to organize a petition of British authors to the U .S. Congress. Martineau complied. The resulting document was signed by fifty-six writers, including Bulwer, Carlyle, D'Israeli, Edgeworth, and Southey. Along with Charles Dickens's notoriously undiplomatic comments while visiting in 1842, it inaugurated what became a decades-long struggle for international copyright between Britain and America.

The rather nonplussed addressee of Martineau's petition was Senator Henry Clay. Clay had been Mathew Carey's most prominent ally in developing the American system. But in the wake of his marginalization by the Whig Party he needed a new cause, and he swiftly moved to adopt this one. Creating an international system would not be an easy task, he realized. The internationalization of copyright was itself an unprecedented idea. Not even the German states had a common literary regime at this time (although it was commonly believed in America and Britain that they did). The only real precedent, moreover, was that resulting from the union of Ireland and Britain, which was hardly an auspicious example given its effect on the Dublin industry. And many publishers, and especially printers, would be against it. Philadelphia's in particular protested that it would price "honest farmers" out of America's "reading community"