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By Root 2147 0

literary pirates were outsiders against whom a form of propriety could be defined, defended, and upheld as fundamental to order. And that propriety, in retrospect, was one of nascent capitalism. It valued creative individuals' property, and compromised with monopoly, all in the interests of encouraging a speculative practice centered on undertaking what were seen as printing "projects." If a reformed realm of print were to serve as the bulwark of a free Protestant nation, then pirates both had to exist and had to be expelled. By the end of the 1730s, when the first rounds of this battle were culminating, they had made another new term into a household word. That word, nowhere used in the original law of 1710, was copyright.

Piracy flourished so scandalously in a city that saw the origins not only of capitalism, but also of the modern natural sciences and mechanical arts. The London of Atkyns and Henry Hills was also the London of Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, and Isaac Newton. The question of how this could possibly be-of how experimental science could be created in the same place, and sometimes in the same bookshops and printing houses, that saw piracy boom-is the subject of the next chapter. For now, however, it is important to insist that the origin of the concept in struggles of the book trade was never forgotten. That much was made very evident in a spoof of Dante's trip to Hell written by the scabrous Grub Street wit Ned Ward in 1700. Ward's hero finds himself at one point face to face with a crowd of squabbling printers and booksellers - the two camps mobilized byAtkyns. They have arrived at the critical point of their feud:

AThrong of angry Ghosts that next drew near, Large as a Persian army did appear; Each to the rest show'd Envy in his Looks, Some Writings in their Hands, some printed Books. The learn'd Contents of which they knew no more, Than the Calves Skins their sundry Volumes wore, Down from the bulky Folio to the Twenty-Four. As theypress'd on, confus'dlyin a Crowd, Piracy, Piracy, they cry'd aloud, What made you print my Copy, Sir, says one, You're a meer Knave, 'tis very basely done. You did the like by such, you can't deny, And therefore you're as great a Knave as I.... Printers, their Slaves, b'ing mix'd among the rest, Betwixt'em both arose a great Contest: Th'ungrateful Bibliopoles swoln big with Rage, Did thus their servile Typographs engage: You Letter-pickingJuglers at the Case, And you Illit'rate Slaves that work at Press, How dare you thus unlawfully invade Our Properties, and trespass on our Trade.

The printers respond to this charge by claiming that the Stationers' Company was originally chartered for them alone, as they had indeed claimed in the Restoration struggle. And as had happened then, all parties are then silenced by the courts. The Stationers are eventually sentenced to an eternal torment. Their fate is to have to read an endless list of Grub Street screeds, all the while being flayed alive by their hack authors, and basting in their excrement atop a pyre of pamphlets.8

THE PIRATE SPHERE

By the mid-eighteenth century a slew of improprieties were thought to characterize the rampantly commercial realm of credit in this, the first consumer age. Piracy became their common name. In print, plagiary could be piratical; so could epitomizing, or abridging, or even translating. Edmund Curll's edition of correspondence between Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift was, Pope said, "surreptitious and pyrated," even though the text had not been printed before. In mechanics, engineers and inventors began to call their rivals "pirates." So did mapmakers keen to preserve their charts from imitators, and artists like Hogarth eager to garner an income from engraving (fig. 3.1 portrays one engraver's anguish at the pirates he encountered). Apothecaries, physicians, naturalists, and poets all shared this rhetoric of piracy in their respective fields.

FIGURE 3.1. An eighteenth-century artist's anguish at piracy. "Tim. Bobbin's Rap at the Pyrates," in J. Collier [Tim Bobbin, pseud.], Human Passions