Mediating Authorship: Wordsworth, Copyright and Media History

ABSTRACT

This essay presents William Wordsworth’s advocacy for the reform of copyright laws as an event in Romantic media history. Previous scholars have discussed the poet’s engagement with Thomas Noon Talfourd’s petition in the 1830s as indicative of the period’s larger negotiation of the economic and cultural values of literary art. This essay argues that beyond issues of economic and aesthetic recognition, Wordsworth is aware of the significance of copyright as a central means of shaping the author’s communication with his readers. Within the proliferating mediascape in print in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Wordsworth draws on the agency afforded by copyright to intervene in the process of mediation. Proposing mediation as an important new analytical approach to the discourses and practices of Romantic authorship, this essay outlines Wordsworth’s efforts toward controlling the codes and channels of communication as crucial concerns in the period’s evolving print culture.

In recent decades, a “medial turn” has placed new emphasis on writers’ practical involvement in the quickly changing print culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This “marked turn to questions of media and mediation” (Brooke-Smith 343) challenges literary and cultural studies to recalibrate their fields of investigation. This essay sets out to articulate two kinds of interventions. On the subject level, I revisit William Wordsworth’s public advocacy for copyright reform as it unfolded through his correspondence and his sonnets on copyright in the context of Thomas Noon Talfourd’s parliamentary campaign of the 1830s. On the level of method, I suggest a media-oriented reframing of his advocacy as an intervention in existing scholarship on the role of copyright for Wordsworth’s notion of authorship. In contrast to established critical perspectives, as I outline in more detail below, I contend that the significance of copyright for Romantic authorship is not exhausted by its ambivalent imbrication in economic and cultural forms of capital. Instead, exploring the medial implications of Wordsworth’s engagement with copyright allows me to foreground a dimension of this engagement which has as yet only ever loomed on the margins of scholarship on Romantic authorship, but which I hold to be central to its articulation: copyright demarcates the poet’s ability to shape his work as an act of communication.

In his lifetime, Wordsworth witnessed an unprecedented rise in the volume and diversity of print media, as well as a rapidly expanding communications network through which these media reached an ever-growing audience. This expansion of the print market followed the substantial increase in published books, journals, pamphlets and more that marks the eighteenth century as the age of Enlightenment. In one of the founding texts of the recent medial turn, This Is Enlightenment (2010), the editors Clifford Siskin and William Warner argue that it is exactly the rise in written communication that defines this historical period. The Romantic period, they contend, is then characterized by a spreading “saturation” of the print market (19), in which the novelty of the proliferating media declines and is replaced by a sense of its ubiquity. One effect of this suffusion of print is a “desire to hide” from it (19). And John Guillory, in his account of the formation of the media concept, draws on John Stuart Mill’s definition of poetry as “of the nature of soliloquy” to present Romantic writers as adopting a “[d]isregard for communication,” foregrounding the text as a medium by “a darkening of its substance even as attention is drawn to it” (340).

While Siskin and Warner’s positioning of Romanticism as an event in the “history of mediation” (8) signals a key starting point for my argumentation, it falls short of accounting for the many forms in which Romantic authors actively engaged with the new and growing media landscape. In the following, I show that Wordsworth’s concern for copyright exemplifies that the Romantic author did not turn away from the new modes of mediation. Rather, besides serving as a vehicle for negotiating economic and aesthetic value, copyright provided the poet with an important tool with which to control his channels of communication within an increasingly dispersed print culture.

1. Mediating authorship

In the recent volume Remediating the 1820s, Jon Mee recounts how in 1823, Thomas De Quincey attempts to define literature against the times’ “dizzying proliferation of print” (qtd. in Mee 58), or, as De Quincey puts it: “our present enormous accumulation of books” (58). De Quincey concludes: “All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not to communicate knowledge” (58). For De Quincey, the “power” whose communication sets literary texts apart from the mere transmission of information, consists of the profound emotional experience literature is able to produce (see Mee 58). The desire to communicate such affective power, as we shall see below, is also central to Wordsworth’s “Essay Supplementary to the Preface,” appended to his 1815 collection of Poems. And indeed, De Quincey explicitly credits Wordsworth with providing the concept of “power” for his thinking about literature (58). De Quincey’s definition of literature is significant not only because its underlying opposition between emotive understanding and utilitarian knowledge continues to inform current ideas about Romanticism, as Mee avers (61), but also because it enacts this division from within a shared platform of communication.

Acknowledging that literature is a form of communication, De Quincey defines the literary through what it communicates, namely the particular “power” of its intense affective experience. For Wordsworth, however, as I will show, this emotive affordance is also bound up with how a literary text communicates. I hold that to examine this postulated connection between communicated power on the one hand, and the power to communicate on the other, necessitates an approach that accounts for the text as a medium of communication. In this study, I therefore combine a media studies perspective on historical media and mediation with a literary interest in the aesthetics of communication, as well as with a cultural studies concern for the social, legal, and political agency of the writer. From this perspective, Wordsworth’s thinking on copyright reform can be revealed as a contemplation not only of the printed text as a communicative medium, but also of the poet’s ability to inform the material transmission of his poetry to his readers within a particular matrix of social and cultural constraints. Controlling the mediation of texts through copyright is thus also connected to a mediation of the role of the author.

To speak of the mediation of authorship implies a broader conceptualization of mediation than is at play when we consider an aesthetic form as mediating a particular cultural context or issue. Siskin and Warner’s expansive definition similarly remains rooted in the medium of expression: “We use ‘mediation’ here in its broadest possible sense as shorthand for the work done by tools, by what we now might call ‘media’ of every kind—everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between” (5). Their definition entails the important distinction that mediation denotes the specific labor performed by a particular medium of communication. The notion of a history of mediation is then predicated on the mechanism inherent in this distinction: once a historically specific medium changes, associated forms of mediation change accordingly.

Such historical changes in mediation, however, do not happen automatically. Guillory remarks that “mediation cannot be reduced to an effect of technical media” (353). Instead, the communicative networks within which a particular medium functions crucially influence that medium’s expression. Guillory frames mediation as an analytical concept. Mediation brings into focus the political and economic discourses that shape the historical context within which the medium operates. In this sense, mediation works across the individual categories of historical context, author, technological medium, subject matter, and form, and highlights their dynamic interactions without reducing them to ideological representations of one another (360). Identifying Romantic mediations of authorship in this framework means to consider the multiple layers of cultural discourses and practices that inform the concept of an author as it emerges from a particular historical assemblage of ideals and material actions.

While the concept of media is usually posited as a late-nineteenth century invention (321), the burgeoning field of Romantic media studies has unearthed diverse ways in which authors began to grapple with nascent notions of media and mediation: “Debates about the origins, transmission, locality, and reception of poetry were sites for media theory avant-la-lettre” (Brooke-Smith 345). Issues of copyright had a determining impact on the unfolding of this communicative process in the Romantic period and therefore on the mediation of Romantic authorship.

Within their conception of a history of mediation, Siskin and Warner direct attention to copyright as one of the “new protocols” of the new publishing landscape: “the rules, codes, and habitual practices that help to secure the channels, spaces, and means of communication” (14). Besides copyright laws and related practices around literary property, other such protocols in the Romantic period include government censure and snooping. Situated as a central influence on the sprawling forms of communication, copyright comes directly to bear on authorship as the latter emerges in acts of communication.

In the extensive body of previous scholarship on Romantic authorship, copyright has played a critical role. Such scholarly work frequently follows Michel Foucault’s theorization that the modern conception of the author begins to come into its own when authorship becomes synonymous with ownership. There are instances earlier than the Romantic period when writers claimed authorship as a way of claiming economic property rights in their work, from Ben Jonson to John Milton (Chartier 18–19). The institutionalization of the author as owner of his or her creations, however, really begins to find traction over the course of the eighteenth century as copyright laws are being rolled out first in Britain, then slowly in the rest of Europe. This development occurs in concord with the transformation of the concept of property from a traditional claim to a modern contractual bond (Schoenfield 20, 110).

This strengthening of copyright in British legal history does not by itself confer a different status on the author. The symbolic power of the codification of copyright as the simultaneous codification of a new cultural conception of the author instead depends on concomitant economic and aesthetic discourses. Romantic notions of the creative individual author, as Jacqueline Rhodes points out, manifest “the culmination of a century-long development,” namely the rise of the professional writer (2). Yet the economic professionalization of individual authorship also brought commerce and aesthetic criticism into direct conflict. Martha Woodmansee outlines how the rise of a special sphere of aesthetic value in the eighteenth century, supposedly transcending mere pecuniary interests, at least partly resulted from the economic pressures on ambitious authors who, severely outperformed by more popular competitors, sought to bolster an alternative framework through which to assert their literary merit (see chapter 2). At the same time, this emphasis on some authors’ particular aesthetic value reinforced authorship as an economic and legal construct more broadly. “Original genius” did not only denominate a particular stamp of quality but also entailed the sense that an author’s unique inspiration strengthened their claim on their work as property (37). Copyright was both juridical reflection of and contributing factor in this radical but still contested transformation in the cultural valuation of authorship.

As Mark Schoenfield has shown, Wordsworth’s efforts to establish himself as a professional writer in the late-eighteenth century importantly coincide with the moment when copyright actually begins to make a difference in authors’ lives. Even though copyright in England had been institutionalized with the 1710 Statute of Anne, it was only the case of Donaldson v. Beckett in 1774 that marked its commencing impact on trade between authors and publishers (Schoenfield 254; Gamer 31). Copyright signaled the author’s increased market autonomy, yet its financial ramifications continued to carry a taint (see Newlyn 269–71). It is worth noting that this cultural stigma of financial success continues to inform attributions of aesthetic value to this day.

These cultural and aesthetic discussions of the role of Romantic copyright offer important accounts regarding the conceptualization of the author in the period. However, such accounts tend to downplay the significance of the conditions within which the author’s work was published and received. The disciplinary branch within literary studies that constitutes the exception here, with its long-standing investment in the “mediations of literature by technologies such as print,” is book history (Guillory 361). Exemplifying this in his recent Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry, Michael Gamer highlights how the copyright reforms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries afforded Romantic writers unprecedented opportunities to retain ownership of their works and thus to continue to re-edit and re-publish them in explicit attempts at shaping their public personas as authors.

Approaching the complexities of Romantic authorship through a cultural concept of mediation retains the important cultural and aesthetic discourses that outlined authorial agency and esteem but incorporates a new sense of the Romantic author’s active involvement in the production of their texts as communicative media. In particular, a medial perspective on the implications of copyright breaks with a scholarly tradition that only considers copyright in the context of the finished text. In this tradition, copyright is solely about the published work, which has been removed from further authorial intervention as soon as it has entered the print market. Instead, the case of Wordsworth exemplifies how the legal affordance of copyright enables the poet’s desire to continue to change and re-edit his poems and collections even after they have entered the medial space of the public sphere.

2. Wordsworth’s advocacy for the copyright bill

While the main period in which Wordsworth actively contributed to a plea before parliament for the extension of copyright was in the mid-1830s, he had already commented on the issue in letters as early as 1808 (Zall 133). And throughout his life, his view on the matter remained fairly constant. Wordsworth longs for a perpetual legal protection of an author’s claim on the property of his work. The legal reality was different. Since the Statute of Anne of 1710, authors only held their copyright for fourteen years plus an additional fourteen years if they were still alive. In common trade practice, however, a traditional sense of perpetual copyright did persist for the larger part of the century. This ended only in 1774 with Donaldson v. Beckett, yet even this decision had little immediate effect on authors since copyright was almost universally transferred to the printers and booksellers on sale of the manuscript—a practice that continued to hold sway until the late nineteenth century (Seville 149). Wordsworth’s engagement with copyright is thus particular not only because of his public advocacy for its reform but also because “his career involved continual negotiations over contracts and copyright” (Schoenfield 7). In 1825, Wordsworth writes to Alaric Watts: “I do not wish to dispose of the copyright of my works” (Letters 4: 380–81). Yet copyright was not universally seen as something worth keeping. For the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth received both the sum of thirty guineas and, after enquiring about it as his publisher Joseph Cottle sold his business to Thomas Longman, also received his copyright as a gift. This gift was symbolic rather than anything else, as Susan Eilenberg comments, because the copyright for Lyrical Ballads “was valued at nothing” (353).

Despite his private realization of the value of copyright, it was not until the 1830s that Wordsworth’s views on the issue manifested themselves in a more public intervention. In 1837, the MP Thomas Noon Talfourd, with whom Wordsworth had been friendly since meeting him through Charles Lamb in 1815, began a campaign, which would last several years, to extend the lease of copyright—not to perpetuity, as the poet might have wished, but at least to the duration of the author’s life plus sixty years (Seville 18; Rhodes 6). At first, Wordsworth was reticent to throw his increasing cultural capital behind Talfourd’s parliamentary petition quite as publically as Talfourd desired. As Wordsworth writes to his friend in April 1838: “I shall … endeavour to get over every objection, which I feel to appearing publicly as a Suppliant, for what I consider cannot be denied without the most flagrant injustice to the best Authors of the Country, and a correspondent injury to its literature” (6: 553). Wordsworth frames his backing of the reform as a far-reaching campaign to establish a just recognition of the best writing in the country. Beyond such grand—and elitist—rhetoric, his personal investment is nevertheless clear in his other comment to Talfourd in the same letter of “having written scarcely less than 50 notes or Letters, many of them to members of Parliament in support” of “your Copyright Bill” (6: 553).

Wordsworth’s zeal in securing a longer copyright lease has most often been interpreted as driven by financial motivations. There is good evidence that this played at least a substantial role in the poet’s involvement with Talfourd’s campaign. Part of the justice Wordsworth seems to be claiming for worthy authors is the financial recognition their labor as professional writers deserves (see Schoenfield). As Talfourd pressed upon his peers: “Is it unjust, in the case … of Wordsworth, now in the evening of his life, and in the dawn of his fame, to allow the author to share in the renumeration [sic] that society tardily awards him?” (qtd. in Swartz 484). Here, Talfourd draws on Wordsworth as an exemplary benefiter from his petition. Wordsworth’s sales had indeed increased throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century, even after poetry sales decreased in the 1820s when the price for paper after the Napoleonic wars dropped and prose became the more profitable genre of the day (Erickson 43). In this context, a longer copyright potentially meant a longer share in these profits not just for Wordsworth but also for his heirs.

However, as Susan Eilenberg notes, even an extension of copyright protection to sixty years would have yielded only moderate profits (354). She instead suggests that in prolonging the legal ownership of his work, Wordsworth was securing a “refuge from oblivion,” and thus a slice of immortality, by holding on to his work even beyond his death (369). Richard Swartz similarly sees the securing of a legacy as the poet’s principal concern, though rather as a paternalistic gesture of creating an estate for his heirs with as much symbolic as economic value. I contend that beyond such economic and symbolic desires for a legacy, Wordsworth’s lobbying for the prolongation of copyright was fueled by concerns about what a longer protection of his ownership in his poems would mean for his ability to shape their mediation and reception.

As part of his parliamentary petition, Talfourd appropriates Wordsworth’s own words for his campaign. In a particularly pertinent speech, Talfourd argues copyright must be extended because the “true original genius” is frequently obliged to “create the taste by which he shall be appreciated” before reaping any reward for his labors (qtd. in Swartz 484). Talfourd borrows these words from Wordsworth’s “Essay Supplementary to Preface” of the 1815 edition of Poems. The corresponding passage in the essay proclaims “that every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed: so has it been, so will it continue to be” (80, original emphases). Extended or even perpetual copyright, as Rhodes explains, would protect the innovating author’s long-term financial prospects and thereby his ability to affect this gradual or “organic” creation of a new—and improved—aesthetic taste (8). The link that, through Talfourd, connects this passage in the “Essay” to the copyright bill illustrates the significance of copyright for issues of reception.

In the context of the 1815 Poems, Wordsworth’s pronouncement about originality’s long road to glory can be read as a defense against the unfavorable critical reception he was expecting. Criticism, as Lee Erickson remarks, intervened between the poet and his readers, and Wordsworth feared that bad reviews might keep him from reaching the large audience he hoped for (41). Wordsworth is indeed rather hostile in his portrayal of a public readership in thrall to bad taste and bad influence (84; see also Schoenfield 215).

The corrupting “factitious influence” of criticism which Wordsworth invokes (“Essay” 84)—already anticipated in the 1800 preface to the Lyrical Ballads and later embodied by Francis Jeffrey—was only one reason why the readership for the 1815 volume remained relatively small. Another contributing factor was its more expensive binding, which together with the modest number of printed copies could not but limit the readership (Erickson 40). Wordsworth seems to have been aware of the obvious contradiction between his hope for a larger audience and the choice of a finer but more costly edition because he continues to explore the option of a less expensive publication and does eventually publish his four-volume Poetical Works (1832) in a cheaper and thus more accessible edition (Letters 5: 226n1). His initial reluctance to produce cheaper copies, as Thomas Owens suggests, also derives from a feared loss of influence over his readership once it grows beyond the familiar elite circle able to afford his expensive quarto editions (32–33). Wordsworth’s emphasis on the need to create “the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” is thus connected with the specific conditions—and strategic considerations—of the volume’s publication, from production value and price to expected buyers, and Wordsworth’s hope to enlarge his readership in the future.

The “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” also elaborates his ideas about the communicative bond he envisions between himself and his readers. In this regard, the essay pursues a strategy similar to the new preface to the edition. David Duff notes that “the whole thrust of the Preface is to tell his readers how to read, and not to read, the poems” (86). The “elaborate critical apparatus of the 1815 edition,” Duff suggests, “is part of that educative process: a means of accelerating the creation of an appropriate taste by explaining the principles on which the poems were written” (86). The critical pieces in the 1815 edition intervene in the mediation of his poetry not merely by themselves; they also articulate a meta-communicative conception about the relationship between author, work and reader.

Copyright is important for this conception of communication because it provides the legal and practical agency to maintain the channel as well as the code of the communicative interaction with readers. In the essay, Wordsworth explicitly explains the process by which he establishes a connection with his readers through a concept of communication. By the early nineteenth century, the meaning of communication had lost much of its early emphasis on the physical communion between the participating actors and had come principally to denote the transmission of information (Guillory 331). In a striking historical recovery, Wordsworth’s conception of communication reactivates the earlier meaning of presence. He states that “every great poet … in the highest exercise of his genius, before he can be thoroughly enjoyed, has to call forth and to communicate power” (“Essay” 82, original emphasis). Wordsworth’s use of “power” here anticipates De Quincey’s later equation of the concept with literature’s affective depth. For Wordsworth, “power” seems to denote the poet’s capability to first perceive and then inscribe feelings in a way that promises to evoke an adequately intense affective response in the reader. From the first preface to Lyrical Ballads, the transmission of “elementary feelings” (97) is central to Wordsworth’s aesthetic philosophy.

The poet’s communication of power through the form of the poem, Wordsworth states in the 1815 essay, then provokes a “co-operating power in the mind of the reader” (81). Stacey McDowell shows that Wordsworth is aware also of the potential failure of such cooperation, but that he imbues his poems with a promise of potential affective community, which is activated once readers reciprocate the trust he has placed in their reception (61–64). Crucially, Wordsworth emphasizes in the essay, the potential success of such communicative reciprocity relies on the integrity of the poetic text. Because the “medium” of language is mutable, Wordsworth points out, the “genius of the poet” is needed to produce a linguistic representation of affective experience sufficiently stable in “shape and quality” to be successfully communicated to the reader (82). In the essay, Wordsworth does not elaborate the extent to which the poet’s active involvement is required to safeguard the stability of the poetic message, whether his stabilizing force is necessary beyond the textual composition. In the larger context of Wordsworth’s mediating practices, however, I argue that his continued interventions in the material practices of the printing and distribution of his texts suggest that he saw the control of these as equally substantial to the success of his poetic communication.

For Wordsworth, copyright reform thus presented an opportunity to ensure what information theory might today call the integrity not just of the message but also of the physical channel of communication. Copyright could potentially protect from three possible challenges to this integrity: oblivion, alteration, and piracy.

3. Copyright and the challenges of communication

The danger to fall into oblivion refers to the danger of works becoming out-of-print. If copyright expires and the printing of works is almost entirely motivated by popular demand, then any author who has not secured a readership by that point is at risk of not being republished. In the 1815 essay, this is a fate Wordsworth attests even to Chaucer in some collections of English poetry, solely put together by market demand (79). And it is a fate his parliamentary campaign made only too real. While Talfourd championed Wordsworth and testified to his national fame, their key opponent in the parliamentary debate, the printer Thomas Tegg, proclaimed:

I, like the public at large, have not arrived at the maturity of poetic taste, to be fully sensible of [Wordsworth’s] beauties; … the admiration of that style of poetry is still confined to the gifted, or initiated few … . I cannot help suspecting, that the heirs of Mr. Wordsworth will not find his admiring minority … increase very fast for some generations to come; at any rate, it is not worth while to alter the law for the chance of it. (qtd. in Swartz 501)

If publication relied solely on market demand, a stagnant or even decreasing readership threatened a fate similar to Chaucer. For Wordsworth, copyright was also about simply making sure that his works could remain in print.

The second danger to the integrity of Wordsworth’s channel of communication referred to printers like Tegg himself, who specialized in cheap editions of texts whose copyright had lapsed. His shoddy printing earned him Wordsworth’s condemnation. In a letter to Edward Quillinan, Wordsworth gives voice to this attitude in marked fashion: “The wretch Tegg says his ‘line is to watch expiring Copyrights’, and would be, no doubt, if he dared to murder the authors for the sake of getting sooner at his prey” (7: 43). But worst of all, for the poet, Tegg, like others, also printed abridged and otherwise altered editions (Swartz 503). The 1830s in general saw a massive increase in such publications, partially in the wake of the steadily rising literacy among the working classes. This incisive development in the mediation of texts in the period put Wordsworth’s aesthetic project at risk of becoming prey to meddling printers like Tegg. For the poet, such meddling threatened to sever the valuable emotive-communicative bond he aimed to establish with his readers.

Wordsworth’s petition before parliament, presented by Talfourd, makes explicit how consequential a robust and extended copyright law is for the production and reception of his work. Copyright is essential “in order to secure copies correctly printed, and to preclude the sending forth of books without the author’s recent or last editions or emendations, by those publishers who are ready to seize upon expiring copyrights” (Talfourd 114). Here, authorship clearly emerges as a medial practice, with copyright as the enabling framework. All the aspects mentioned in the petition form key elements in Wordsworth’s active involvement with the medium of his work, from editing and copyediting to the protection of the work’s integrity from deformity in altered reprints.

In his authorial practice, Wordsworth is a keen editor. He is protective of his oeuvre, and as Gamer has shown, uses re-edited collections of his poetry as a vehicle to mold his literary persona and poetic legacy. Regarding individual editions, Wordsworth follows explicit aesthetic conceptions of how he intends the collection to communicate with readers from the perspective of sequential and thematic arrangement. Everywhere we can see Wordsworth’s “determination to control his final text” (Erickson 50). With a view to the 1815 Poems, Duff concludes that for Wordsworth, the “editorial task has become a continuation of the original act of composition” (87). For the poet, authorship includes the continued practice of editing as an intervention in the conditions of mediation.

Wordsworth is also a keen copy editor. The very first selection of his poems complementing the collections edited by himself is Hine’s Selections from the Poems of William Wordsworth, Esq., Chiefly for the Use of Schools and Young Persons, published in 1831 by Wordsworth’s new publisher Edward Moxon. Wordsworth agreed to the project mainly because it was a volume aimed at the educational market and because the editor, Hine, was a great admirer of his. This does not keep Wordsworth from scrupulously supervising the passage of the volume into the world of his readers. After inspecting the finished copies, he sends Moxon a list of errors and demands a loose sheet of corrections to be included in any as yet unsold editions (Letters 5: 395). Wordsworth makes use of the legal and political power invested in him by his copyright to impress his influence on every aspect of the transmission process, from composition to the compilation of the physical medium of the book.

Wordsworth is also observant of the effect of the printed text on the page. In 1838, he remarks that “if poetry and prose present themselves to the eye upon the same page, a large majority of readers will take to the prose in preference, which is rather humiliating and mortifying to a pains-taking Poet!” (6: 515). To him, the formal arrangement of the poem on the page matters. In consequence, any infringement on the form is also an infringement on the poet’s intention and on the communicative process that unfolds between poet and reader. Schoenfield notes that critics who broke poems apart to discuss them in excerpts in their reviews irritated Wordsworth (321n15). Wordsworth took a studied interest in how his poetry could be presented on the page in his correspondence with his publishers:

I think so little is gained by having the lines wider apart, that I would chuse the 36 sheets in preference to the 40, but on account of the overflowing lines, I could myself have no pleasure in looking at either the one page or the other. In the American Ed: … not a single 10-syllable verse overflows, whereas in the pages sent me as specimens there are nine in one and 11 in the other; which both disfigures the book very much, and occupies so much space. … Could not the book be printed on paper sufficiently wide to allow of a ten-syllable verse being uniformly included in one line, as something very considerable would be saved in space. This would lessen the cost which wider paper would require. I repeat that I have an insurmountable aversion to overflowing lines, except where they cannot be avoided. (Letters 6: 647)

Wordsworth is indeed “pains-taking” in his attention to the presentation of his words on the page. It is striking how in this commentary Wordsworth assumes the unusual combination of author and printer. He is not only concerned with how the lines look on the page but also with what it would cost to display them in different formats.

Money certainly played a significant role in many of Wordsworth’s publishing decisions, but it was never the sole motivator. While contemplating the best financial outcome of editions for himself and his family, he always also considered the effect his decisions would have on the development of his readership, as well as on the process of mediation. On the one hand, he dismisses the idea of publishing too large volumes, for instance, because their daunting prices would discourage the “thousands whom I would wish to have as Readers” (6: 515). Too cheap editions, on the other hand, he reviles both as unappealing physical objects, which would devalue the poetry contained within, and because they would be less cost-effective than more expensive but better-made alternatives. Economic decisions form part of his mediation of himself as an author and stand alongside the aesthetic and medial practices that shape the form in which customers and readers interact with his poetry.

As long as Wordsworth holds the copyright to his works, his authorial right to edit and intervene in the process of his poetry’s mediation is secured and legitimized by the political and legal power of the state. The limits of this authority, however, are painfully apparent to the poet in the context of the international piracy of his works. Within England, Wordsworth does not seem to have been imposed upon other than by the influx of international pirated copies, which was substantial, however (Owens 33–35), and which Wordsworth unequivocally considers “a breach of the Law” (Letters 5: 225). As Jason Kolkey’s discussion of Percy B. Shelley’s struggle with pirated editions shows, Wordsworth might have been unusually lucky in this security from unauthorized English re-prints at least. Outside of England, Wordsworth would have liked to stop the spread of pirated copies but he acknowledges that he can do nothing in the absence of international copyright laws.

The most prominent pirated editions of Wordsworth’s poems are an American edition, printed in 1837, and a French edition, printed in 1828 by the publisher Galignani in Paris. Knowing that neither edition breaks any laws, he clarifies (in May 1830) that they are piracies only “in moral not a legal sense”; Galignani “neither violates the law of France nor of England—but surely he breaks through the old Christian Law of doing as he would be done by” (5: 268). While brandishing the publisher’s amorality through an older law, as the new laws of property have not caught up with the poet’s desire for copyright control, Wordsworth’s frustration at Galignani’s piracy is mainly driven by the financial loss he fears from the cheap French edition (4: 656). The pirated editions play a significant role in Wordsworth’s aversion to cheap prints.

By 16 November 1836, Wordsworth is aware of the danger that an absence of copyright might result in “garbled” pirated editions (6: 321). However, in this regard he is actually quite pleased with both the French and the American editions. From the latter’s line arrangement, as we have seen, he even derives inspiration for a proposed re-publication of his poems. When Galignani—whose name Wordsworth subjects to an almost certainly intentional array of misspellings—sends him a prestige copy of the French edition, Wordsworth is both admiring and livid. In 1828, he writes to Henry Crabbe Robinson that Galignani

has sent me a Royal Vellum Copy—a poor Compensation for his Piracy—one thing however is laudable, the book is printed with admirable accuracy, I have not noticed a single error that I am not myself answerable for—I agree with you that the honour is worse than nothing, and I cannot but think the Paris Edition will much hurt a Sale sufficiently languid. But how can we expect that foreign Nations will respect our literary property when our laws of copy right are so shamefully unjust. (Letters 4: 690–91)

Wordsworth is anxious about the piracy’s impact on domestic sales, but he identifies the root cause of the matter not just in the French but also in the English copyright laws, which he asks Robinson to publicly address a decade before Talfourd would begin his petition. Yet Wordsworth is impressed by the “accuracy” of the pirated edition (see also Owens 24–25). While acknowledging the averted risk of a mangled misprint of his work, which would have seriously injured his sense of poetic power, Wordsworth recognizes that in his case the absence of international copyright has not diminished communication with his readers.

Quite to the contrary, Wordsworth notes with pleasure the growing readership his pirated editions have earned him in substitution for any financial rewards. With regard to the French edition, he states that “I … have been assured from 2 credible quarters that the Sale of it has been very extensive” (5: 225). And regarding the American edition, he remarks to Moxon that “Miss Martineau I am told has said that my poems are in the hearts of the American People” (6: 519). At the same time, Wordsworth is anxious about this new readership gained exclusively through the inexpensive piracies over which he has no authorial control (Owens 31). The piracies add to the economic pressure to produce cheaper editions and embrace an evolving literary marketplace. Wordsworth repeatedly tries to regain the authority of his reception and counters economic concessions with heightened aesthetic attention to the mediation of his poems. Owens illustrates this by outlining Wordsworth’s scrupulous work on his cheaper 1845 edition of collected poetry, with the poet intimately shaping the edition’s printed aesthetic, from the number of lines per page, to the size of the margin, to the quality of the paper (34–35). Wordsworth’s aesthetic responses to the pirated editions confirms my argument that his thinking about copyright is not exclusively concerned with securing economic gain. Copyright directly affects his ability to shape the communicative aesthetic of the printed text. As a case in point, he knows that the pirated editions of his poems could have taken very different forms and therefore recognizes their fidelity and broadening of his communicative reach against the background of the more disturbing remediations the absence of copyright protection would have allowed.

4. Pleading for authors: the sonnets on copyright

In the final section of my analysis, I extend my reframing of Wordsworth’s intervention in the copyright laws to the sonnets he wrote for the occasion of his reform efforts. Written in the same public mode as his later sonnet sequence against capital punishment, “A Plea for Authors, May 1838” and “A Poet to His Grandchild” were composed at the height of Talfourd’s campaign. The first sonnet is a relatively straightforward, if “sarcastic,” argument about the perceived injustice of a too short lease on copyright (Schoenfield 320n9). Wordsworth argues that the law is skewed to profit those mediocre authors who achieve instant but fleeting popularity:

Law but a servile dupe of false pretence,

If, guarding grossest things from common claim

Now and for ever, She, to works that came

From mind and spirit, grudge a short-lived fence. (5–8)¹

Wordsworth again characterizes true poetic power as inhering in those works impressed by a particular sensitivity of the author. This notion of poetic genius, which recalls his conception of communication in the 1815 essay, is further developed in the sonnet’s concluding couplet: “No public harm that Genius from her course / Be turned; and streams of truth dried up, even at their source!” (13–14). Implying that any crime against original genius must be seen as a public harm in a just society, Wordsworth speaks from the position of the author whose recognition has not yet reached the status he thinks he deserves. He underlines the argument frequently repeated in the Talfourd campaign that longer copyright protection will eventually lead to a higher level of cultural sensibility by incentivizing gradual rather than immediate acclaim. The image of the “streams of truth” that flow from work to audience emphasize, in turn, that copyright directly impacts readers’ capacity to access poetry’s communicative offer of affective and intellectual revelation.

The coupling of copyright and communication is even more pronounced in the second and much more obscure sonnet, “A Poet to His Grandchild”:

SON of my buried son, while thus thy hand

Is clasping mine, it saddens me to think

How Want may press thee down, and with thee sink

Thy children left unfit, through vain demand

Of culture, even to feel or understand

My simplest Lay that to their memory

May cling;—hard fate! which haply need not be

Did Justice mould the statutes of the Land.

A Book time-cherished and an honoured name

Are high rewards; but bound they Nature’s claim

Or Reason’s? No—hopes spun in timid line

From out the bosom of a modest home

Extend through unambitious years to come,

My careless Little-one, for thee and thine! (760–61)

Previous scholars have been baffled by this poem. Eilenberg, for instance, finds its propositions “bizarre” (370n4). Schoenfield marks an exception when he identifies in the sonnet an explicit association of the “economic and literary motives” in the debates around copyright (260). At first, the sonnet’s argument may indeed seem absurd: why should the expiration of copyright cause the poet’s heirs to lose the ability to understand even his “simplest Lay”? Economic deprivation may reasonably result from a loss of royalties, but what about the ability “to feel or understand”?

I suggest that the poem expresses anxiety about what happens when the shape of the author’s work is no longer secured by the legal constraints of copyright and meddling forces disrupt the communicative contact. The initial reference to the speaker’s orphaned grandchild already evokes an interrupted bond, whereby the filial line represents continuing ownership of the poetic work. As Schoenfield notes, the “ultimate effect is to render interdependent the fates of poetic and genetic progeny” (260). The argument then shifts to describe the consequences of expired proprietary control over the work for future offspring. They, presumably like anyone else, are barred from making sense of the power the text had previously been able to impart. Schoenfield’s remarks on Wordsworth’s intentionally posthumous publication of the Prelude are pertinent here:

Given Wordsworth’s care in continually revising his work, his anxiety involves not only how much money his family will make from the Prelude but whether his family will be able to preserve the relationships of his poems against the literary marketplace’s ability to dissolve his canon and open up interpretative gaps. Such gaps would not merely allow misreading but would make the correspondence of labor between reader and writer impossible. (259–60)

The sonnet underlines that it is not poverty but “the vain demand of culture,” which is as hollow as it is misguided in its taste, that leads to the rupture in understanding and communication.

The sonnet ends by invoking the hope that the injustices of the current copyright laws may be amended so that the speaker’s grandchild is saved from deprivation. The final lines conjoin the hopes for the offspring to last “through unambitious years to come” with the desired effect of an extended copyright that upholds the channel of communication until the public begins to appreciate the work. The domestic image of “the bosom of a modest home” seems to underline the private origins of Wordsworth’s intervention in English law, even if it was taken to the very public parliamentary stage.

5. Conclusion

After several postponements, Talfourd’s copyright bill finally passed in 1842, extending copyright protection to the author’s life plus seven years or to forty-two years, depending on the length of the author’s life (Seville 4). Wordsworth’s promotion of copyright reform may have been exceptionally fervent and driven by his anxiety about the fate of his work in the age of new regimes of mediation, but he was not alone in his efforts. Fellow writers like Robert Southey, Harriet Martineau, Robert Browning, Walter Scott, Leigh Hunt, Charles Dickens, and Joanna Baillie also supported the copyright petition. The issues raised by Wordsworth’s petition and its debate thus indicate important nodal points in the changing Romantic mediascape and its contemplation by those contributing to it.

Copyright highlights questions of value oscillating between economics and literary merit in the increasingly consumer-oriented publishing sphere of the time. The debate points to the author’s role, real and idealized, in shaping a reading public at a moment when alternative, pluralistic publics formed all over the country through correspondence and news media. Most significantly, perhaps, copyright emerges as a central condition of Wordsworth’s desire and ability to exert control over the mediating process through which his poetry communicated with his readers. The existing copyright laws already presented him with a form of political agency within the economic and legal constraints of the time that few other poets claimed for themselves to this extent. His involvement with the efforts to reform copyright laws then even further foregrounded his recognition of the aesthetic power enshrined in the legal principle.

The recent media turn in Romantic studies and its “new interest in the technologies of communication that enable literary culture,” Brooke-Smith argues, “is itself occasioned by the radical media shift that we are experiencing today” (343). There seems indeed an important sense in which a media-specific perspective on the Romantic period not just reveals previously overlooked mediations of authorship but presents a formative pre-history of contemporary upheavals. In many ways, the questions of control of communication and ownership of intellectual creations that drive Wordsworth’s private ideals and public advocacy continue to inform the digital transformation of informational media today. In the current age of hyper-connectivity, the illicit sharing and appropriation of intellectual property has scaled new heights of technological possibility and velocity, which can make it exceedingly difficult to enforce authors’ proprietary rights. The dispersions of digital media might present a particularly far-reaching challenge to modes of authorial control, but the legacy of Romantic authorship is sufficiently persistent to demarcate ownership of mediation as a central if contested cultural ideal.

Notes

1 The two sonnets are cited from the Cambridge edition of The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Paul D. Sheats (760–61). While Wordsworth would have probably appreciated the scholarly care of the edition, he would quite certainly have objected to how the frequent overflowing lines interfere with his sense of how the poems should be mediated to his readers. The edition illustrates how frequently publishing demands, for instance, about space and margins, can clash with authors’ visions for how their works should come before the eye of the reader.