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• Title: Dickens, Invention, And Literary Property in the 1850S (Critical Essay)
• Author : Dickens Quarterly
• Release Date : January 01, 2007
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 185 KB

Description

In Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (2004), Clare Pettitt argues at length that Charles Dickens believed in an identity of interests between mechanical inventors and literary artists and that he "clearly sees" patent reform and copyright reform "as parallel, and this link becomes manifest in the novel he started to write in 1855, Little Dorrit" (188). She gives particular emphasis to the representation of the mechanical engineer Daniel Doyce, which, in her view, expresses many of Dickens's "own anxieties about authorship and intellectual property" (140) and which serves as a "model of his own creativity" (193). She argues further that Dickens was "keen to conserve the construction of the individual inventor despite all the evidence that invention was no longer a solitary or neglected pursuit" (140). Pettitt is not alone in this conflation of the mechanical inventor with the literary artist. In an otherwise exemplary article on the professionalization of literature during the nineteenth century, Robert Patten suggests, "it may be to such characters [as Doyce] ... that we should turn for an image of the artist working in and for society in Victorian literature" (29). So, too, Peter Garrett in The Victorian Multiplot Novel identifies the author with the inventor. But an article in Household Words, published only two years before Little Dorrit, argues that mechanical invention and literary creativity are two very different modes of production, and thus should be treated differently by the law. In the words of Henry Morley, the author of the piece, and one of Dickens's most trusted correspondents, "Between the copyright of a book and the patent of an invention there exists not so much as the bond of a remote cousinship" ("Patent Wrongs" 7. 233). It is inconceivable that Dickens would have allowed such a categorical statement to appear, about a subject so dear to his heart, and to his pocketbook, without his approval. Indeed, its testy and defensive quality bespeaks what Mary Poovey has referred to as the essentially "contested" nature of "writing, and specifically the representation of writing" at mid-century (Uneven Developments 105). It is this contestation, as manifested in the debate over copyright reform, which this article will explore.

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