• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The moral issues that arose from this were rather profound. For all that writers, scholars, and medical practitioners bewailed its ubiquity, very few were above a bit of judicious expropriation when it suited them. That included getting their own work pirated. Poets eager to avoid seeming ambitious of fame had long taken advantage of credulity about piracy accusations to get their work into print. Isaac Newton took a similar backdoor route to have some of his unorthodox religious texts published, for all that he worried genuinely about the prospect of his other works falling out of his control. That remark by Pope about Curll should not be taken at face value, either: in fact, Pope himself had craftily maneuvered Curll, the most notorious press pirate of his time, into unwittingly serving his own ends by issuing that correspondence. (It seems that Pope wanted to make an edition himself, but feared being caught breaching his correspondents' confidences.)9 And although authors might rail at the "hacks" and "dunces" populating Grub Street-a real street, adjacent to Moorfields, where many poor writers found lodgings -they were now the mainstay of the trade. A culture of piracy was one that could never be distinguished into two neat camps of the honorable and the dishonorable in the way that antagonists often professed to believe. Everyone involved was, to some extent, compromised.

Asa result, it was by no means straightforward to find a secure basis on which to assess the cacophony that was the printed realm. In practice, a panoply of strategies evolved to create, confirm, and contest the authenticity not only of books, but of medicines, machines, textiles, foodstuffs, and other creative goods. What an eighteenth-century citizen could be said to know, feel, or believe might depend on them. People found themselves living amid countless experiments in authenticity.

This world extended far beyond London. It reached across Europe, taking the notion of piracy with it. Everywhere it had its own sustaining legends. The buccaneer of reprinting was one. Another was the sadly heroic artist subsisting in a garret and paid by the line by some such rapacious bookseller. A third, grander in scale, was the idea of a "public sphere."10 This sphere had its distinctive genre, the journal article, and its representative location, the coffeehouse. Anyone who read journals and contributed back to them could supposedly claim citizenship. It asserted its cultural authority, on the basis that while any individual was fallible, a large enough number of readers could cancel out the foibles and passions of individuals. How far its sway extended into matters of politics or religion, and how legitimately, were matters of much debate. But printers, booksellers, authors, and readers did aspire-sometimes-to the standards explicit in this notion.

The public sphere in practice was riven with distinctions of place, rank, nationality, confession, and gender. Piracy shaped it in several ways. First, it assisted the sheer distribution of books and periodicals, especially beyond the metropolis. Second, it had an impact on the kind, quality, and price of books. Pirates reprinted the most profitable works in smaller formats and at far cheaper prices, mixing and matching contents as they saw opportunity. They therefore facilitated, third, a certain casualness of reading: their books were portable and relatively disposable. Daniel Defoe warned of a world that would be increasingly dominated by hack collections tatted up as treatises, until all learning would dissolve into "a general Rapsody of Piracy, Plagiarism, and Confusion."11 Finally, and perhaps most saliently, it raised questions of accuracy and authenticity. Generally, pirates sought to reproduce, not to originate. Reprinters boasted of their accuracy. But it was not always safe to trust that boast in particular instances. Pirates did sometimes seek to "improve" an original, if only to be able to advertise their edition