[drn-discuss] *amazing* article on the high costs of copyright monopolies in the 18th century

[peter.lockley at okfn.org]

alas that the book is an academic edition that will set you back 90 quid....


> See also the excerpted summary at: http://www.okfn.org/drn/node/46
>
> title: Out of Bounds
> author: Ian Gilmour
> book_reviewed: The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period by William St
> Clair, Cambridge, 765 pp, £90.00
> publication: London Review of Books
> date: 2005-01-20
>
> 'Johnson wrote The Lives of the Poets,' Elizabeth Barrett Browning
> grumbled, 'and left out the poets.' She exaggerated, of course, but a
> book of that title which omitted Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and
> all the Elizabethans, Donne and nearly all the Jacobeans, while
> including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith,
> Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading. The fault
> was not Dr Johnson's. The guilty men, as a contemporary noted, were not
> 'the illustrious scholar but his employers, who thought themselves . . .
> the best judges of vendible poetry'.
>
> Johnson's 'employers' were a bunch of London publishers anxious to
> further their own interests against a superior collection of poetry,
> compiled in Scotland, which the London publishing houses regarded as
> illegitimate competition. Since they were chiefly concerned to defend
> their copyrights, some of them dubious, and to stifle the Scottish
> interloper, their selection, which they imposed on Johnson, was the
> outcome of a complicated commercial negotiation conducted in secret
> among themselves, not of a serious consideration of which British poets
> should be honoured by inclusion in the book. Such behaviour, as William
> St Clair amply demonstrates in his magnificent, original and compelling
> study, was characteristic of the London publishers. His book stretches
> far wider than its title suggests. He has a mass of new and fascinating
> things to say about the centuries that followed the invention of
> printing and also about the Victorian age which succeeded 'the Romantic
> period'.
>
> St Clair is concerned to reveal not what people should have read or
> could have read, but what they did read. To discover that and assess the
> influence of books, as he points out, it is not enough to do what many
> previous scholars have done: see which books of the time subsequently
> became famous and popular and which were well reviewed by
> contemporaries, and assume that they are the books people were then
> reading. Good reviews do not necessarily ensure a wide readership, and
> people do not confine their reading to new or recently published books.
> St Clair cites Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman
> as an example of a book whose later prestige has led scholars to
> overstate its influence at the time. Although it had a respectable, but
> not spectacular, sale in the 1790s, St Clair believes that it made
> little or no difference to the prevailing attitude to women. The sales
> of books advocating or maintaining the inferiority or subordination of
> women to men was so many times greater that Wollstonecraft's feminism
> was 'simply overwhelmed'.
>
> His own approach is very different. He has spent years of productive
> investigation in libraries, publishers' archives, printers' ledgers,
> City livery companies' records, Parliamentary select committee reports
> and many other sources. As a result, he has ascertained the number and
> price of many books that were published and printed, which old books
> were available at the time and what they cost. Now a senior research
> fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, St Clair was formerly a senior
> civil servant in the Treasury and so knows about figures and gets them
> right. He has been able to find out what people were actually buying and
> reading and which books, because of their price, were out of reach of
> most of the reading population. Yet his detailed research has not
> resulted in a dry-as-dust tome. Much of the detail is in the three
> hundred pages of appendices, though even most of these repay close
> study. The Reading Nation is clearly written and is throughout enjoyable
> to read.
>
> To be able to read a book, two things are necessary: first and
> obviously, literacy, and second, the ability to buy, borrow or hire the
> volume. It is this second requirement which has so often been ignored.
> The price of a book was scarcely less important than the ability to read
> it. Apart from the obvious costs of paper and printing, the key factor
> in determining its price was the intellectual property rights of the
> author, or rather the printer or publisher. St Clair tells us, surely
> rightly, that the invention of intellectual property in Europe in the
> 15th century was 'part of an economic and business response to the new
> text-copying technology of print. With manuscript copying, virtually no
> fixed capital was employed.'
>
> In 1583, the formal intellectual property regime was legally inaugurated
> when a Privy Council report recommended that the first printer of a text
> be granted exclusive rights over it. Shortly afterwards, the Stationers'
> Company, a London guild, was endowed by the state with many valuable
> intellectual properties; and from then on the London publishers
> maintained a quasi-monopolistic position by their ownership, real or
> pretended, of intellectual property rights over virtually all well-known
> books. Both then and later, there was a community of interest between
> the London publishing houses and the state. Like all monopolists, the
> publishers wanted to prevent outside competition and to make large
> profits by inflating the price of their goods. Keeping books expensive
> also suited the state both then and later, since it ensured that only
> the well-off could afford to read such dangerous commodities.
>
> The printed book industry soon became just as tenacious of what it
> regarded as its intellectual property rights as were landowners of their
> rights of property over acres of countryside, although, as St Clair
> points out, real property and intellectual property do not closely
> resemble each other. He does not, however, mention perhaps the most
> important difference between them. Many landowners wanted to keep their
> land in their family for centuries, if not permanently, by creating
> legal settlements which would make it impossible for succeeding
> generations to alienate the land in question. But they were not allowed
> to do so for more than a generation – and then a new settlement was
> needed. The principle that 'perpetuity' was forbidden existed before and
> throughout the reign of Henry VIII. 'The mischief that would arise to
> the public,' a Master of the Rolls later said, 'from estates remaining
> for ever or for a long time inalienable or untransferable [would be] a
> damp to industry and a prejudice to trade.' The mischief caused by
> virtually permanent intellectual rights was no less conspicuous, yet
> over them there was no rule against perpetuities.
>
> Until the 1620s, property rights in Shakespeare's plays were distributed
> among a number of printers. Consequently, the plays could be bought
> individually and cheaply and were widely read. But the prospective
> publishers of the First Folio bought up most of those rights, with the
> result that from 1623 nearly all the plays could be bought only in one
> large expensive volume. The effect of this, St Clair writes, was to
> bring Shakespeare 'in from the playhouses, the law courts and the
> country fairs to the hall and the library . . . The book which
> celebrated and monumentalised Shakespeare as a great English author
> simultaneously removed him from most of the nation's readers.' What
> happened to Shakespeare happened on a smaller scale to most writers.
>
> The assertion by publishers of their intellectual rights not only
> prevented the production of reasonably priced books which could be
> afforded by much of the reading population, it also stopped the
> publication of anthologies, abridgments, adaptations and books of
> quotations. For 150 years after 1623, only one Shakespeare anthology,
> that of Dr Dodd in 1752, was permitted. Twenty-five years later, despite
> the efforts of Dr Johnson and others to save him, Dodd was hanged for
> forgery – of a banknote, not of Shakespeare.
>
> The lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 ended the tight pre-censorship
> of books that had been restored with the Stuarts. To curb the
> unauthorised production that followed, the government introduced the
> Copyright Act of 1710 'for the Encouragement of learned Men to compose
> and write useful Books'. The act gave the author of a book not yet
> published the sole right of printing it for a term of 14 years from
> first publication, while books that had already been printed were given
> protection for 21 years. While generally favourable to the London book
> industry, the time limit on its continued monopoly was a blow. The
> industry had hoped, as St Clair says, for a statutory right of permanent
> copyright. Instead, they got the first law against 'perpetuity' in
> intellectual rights.
>
> Yet oddly enough, the 1710 act made little difference except in
> Scotland. After the expiry of the 21 years, the English courts gave back
> to the London printing industry what statute had taken away. The court
> of Chancery went on granting to the original printers injunctions
> against competitors who had allegedly infringed their now non-existent
> copyrights. The 1710 act was reduced to a nullity, and from 1710 until
> 1774 the result was what St Clair calls 'the high monopoly period'. That
> monopoly was ended by the Scottish courts, which were not hidebound by
> previous decisions and thought that a statute meant what it said and
> that the courts should enforce statutes, not ignore them. The Scottish
> judges had the considerable advantage of being advised on monopolies by
> Adam Smith, their Edinburgh friend and neighbour.
>
> The Scottish publishers naturally followed the decisions of the Scottish
> courts and began to reprint English books that were no longer covered by
> copyright. The leader of the Edinburgh industry, Alexander Donaldson,
> even opened his own shop in London and there sold out-of-copyright books
> at prices about half those prevalent in England, whereupon the English
> publishers sued him in the English courts for 'piratically' reprinting a
> book. The legal chaos and the conflict between the English and Scottish
> courts were finally resolved in 1774. The House of Lords, the highest
> court in both countries, decided, as it had to, that the law of Great
> Britain was laid down by the statute of 1710. The unlawfulness of
> perpetual copyright was confirmed, and all injunctions were dissolved.
> Thus from then until 1808, when copyright was extended from 14 to 28
> years, what St Clair calls a 'brief copyright window' was opened.
>
> During the first three-quarters of the 18th century – St Clair's 'high
> monopoly period' – the British population and real incomes per head were
> rising, but the production of books increased only slightly. In other
> words, production declined in real terms, and the purchase of books
> became even more concentrated in the richer classes. Then, during the
> last quarter of the century, after the end of perpetual copyright in
> 1774, when the British reader temporarily escaped from the monopolising
> tyranny of greedy London publishers, that trend was reversed. Book
> production grew, and readership markedly increased.
>
> On the eve of the Romantic period and during it, the state was vigilant
> in suppressing the publication of any book that could be considered
> remotely subversive. From 1790, printing presses required a state
> licence, and many of the rich remained unconvinced of any benefit
> accruing from the less rich being able to read books other than the
> Bible, though even that compendium contained dangerous pages. Not
> surprisingly, therefore, a number of bishops in the days of the French
> Revolution were happy for even the Bible to remain out of bounds to the
> poor, fearing that to teach them to read would be like giving them guns.
> The bishops were instrumental in defeating, in the House of Lords,
> Samuel Whitbread's 1807 bill, which sought to establish a national
> system of education. Opposing that bill in the Commons, an MP maintained
> that giving education to the 'labouring classes of the poor' would be
> 'prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to
> despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in
> agriculture, and other laborious employments to which their rank in
> society had destined them; instead of teaching them subordination, it
> would . . . render them insolent to their superiors.'
>
> One of the leading figures in government, Lord Eldon, who was lord
> chancellor almost without a break from 1801 to 1827, made himself, a
> contemporary historian wrote in 1828, 'Licensor of the Press and
> Censor'. St Clair quotes Eldon in 1793, when he was only attorney
> general and called Sir John Scott, telling an author that he could
> continue to publish his reply to Burke in 'an octavo form so as to
> confine it probably to that class of readers who may consider it coolly'
> (that is, people who would be unlikely to approve of it), but that as
> soon as it was published more 'cheaply for dissemination among the
> populace' (that is, among people who would agree with it), he would be
> prosecuted. A year later, ignoring good legal advice to be content with
> a charge of sedition, Scott prosecuted Thomas Hardy for treason in the
> first of the 1794 trials. At a time when a treason trial normally took
> only one day, Scott opened the prosecution case with a speech that
> lasted nine hours. 'Nine hours,' the former lord chancellor Thurlow
> exclaimed, 'then there's no treason, by God.' After an eight-day trial,
> he was proved right: Hardy was acquitted. During his long years as lord
> chancellor, Eldon's efforts often had a similarly perverse effect.
>
> In 1817, Sherwood, a radical publisher, got hold of the manuscript of
> Wat Tyler, a previously unpublished play by Southey written in his
> radical days in the 1790s, and published it for the first time. Southey
> was horrified, thinking that his long discarded play would now incite
> revolution. Accordingly, he sued Sherwood for breach of copyright. But
> to win his case he had to show that his text was lawful, and as his own
> counsel spoke of its 'wickedness' and Southey himself thought it
> 'injurious', Eldon refused him an injunction. In consequence, not only
> Sherwood but a number of pirate publishers printed Wat Tyler, whose
> price fell dramatically so that it was able to reach a very wide
> audience. St Clair estimates that two or three times more copies of Wat
> Tyler were sold than all the other works of Southey combined.
>
> Again unintentionally, Eldon engineered much the same result with
> Shelley's Queen Mab. Initially, Shelley and Harriet, his wife, had
> believed that revolutionary, anti-Christian views could be rendered safe
> from prosecution by being expressed in verse. His publisher had no such
> illusions and was well aware that ordinary publication of the poem would
> undoubtedly lead to both author and publisher being fined and
> imprisoned. So Shelley merely printed privately 250 copies to be given
> away. Four years later, however, in a lawsuit over the custody of his
> two children, after his deserted wife had committed suicide, Harriet's
> family cited Queen Mab as evidence that Shelley would be an unsuitable
> guardian of his children, and Eldon agreed with them. There could,
> therefore, be no copyright protection for Queen Mab, and, as had
> happened with Wat Tyler, the pirates moved in. As its price fell, the
> sales of Queen Mab rose. So, whereas Shelley's other poems either had a
> minuscule sale or were not even published, the revolutionary Queen Mab
> was sold 'cheaply [enough] for dissemination among the populace'. It
> enjoyed a large sale, and was never out of print.
>
> A number of observers saw the absurdity of Eldon's position. By
> withholding intellectual property protection from books he considered
> pernicious, he was in theory penalising their authors. In practice,
> though, the chief effect of his rulings was to ensure that the books he
> disliked were given a huge circulation. The Edinburgh Review urged the
> chancellor to overrule himself. But Eldon was too pigheaded to do
> anything of the sort. And over Byron's Don Juan in 1823, by giving
> advice to his vice-chancellor, who tried the case, he struck his third
> unwitting blow for free speech and the spread of radical literature
> among the working classes, in whom, Southey wrote, Byron's 'poison would
> operate without mitigation.' As Don Juan was in the eyes of the law and
> of the chancellor plainly 'injurious', its publication too forfeited the
> usual protection of copyright.
>
> Byron himself had wanted Don Juan to be published not only in his
> publisher's usual manner but also in 'very small [i.e., small-sized
> pages] and cheap editions . . . to anticipate & neutralise' the pirates;
> not so his publisher, John Murray. But in 1823, Byron left Murray in
> favour of John Hunt, and the remaining cantos of Don Juan were published
> very cheaply in large numbers. After Byron's death the following year
> that quantity was enormously swelled by pirate editions. In consequence,
> St Clair concludes that in its first twenty years Don Juan was read by
> more people than any previous work of English literature.
>
> In contrast to Byron, Wordsworth was opposed to selling his books
> cheaply, and thus had small sales. Even Lyrical Ballads, written with
> Coleridge, which achieved considerable fame and was a short and fairly
> cheap book, did not have a large sale. It evidently did not occur to
> Wordsworth that his later, more expensive books would have reached a far
> larger audience if he had made them cheaper.
>
> Wordsworth temporarily became a high-price publisher himself when, in
> exchange for two-thirds of the net profits he financed two-thirds of the
> costs of The Excursion, which was published in 1814 and cost 42
> shillings. St Clair judges it to have been for its length 'perhaps the
> most expensive work of literature ever published in England'.
> Notwithstanding the two guineas it cost and despite being desperately
> short of money, Shelley bought it when he returned from his elopement
> with Mary Godwin. Byron also bought it, calling it in Don Juan 'a
> drowsy, frowzy poem'. Not many other people did the same. Of the 500
> copies printed in 1814, only 400 were sold in six years. By 1834, 36
> copies were still in stock. Wordsworth did not derive much benefit from
> his publishing experiment.
>
> In 1832, his Poetical Works were issued at 24 shillings in an edition of
> 2000. The next year 1600 copies were still unsold, which Wordsworth
> found 'wholly inexplicable'. He lamented that not a single copy of his
> poems had been sold by one of Cumberland's leading booksellers, though
> Cumberland was his 'native county'. He also noted that Byron and Scott
> were the 'only popular writers in that line'. He was certainly right
> about that. St Clair estimates that during the Romantic period, Scott
> sold more novels than all the other novelists combined, while John
> Murray in two years sold 13,000 copies of the first two cantos of Childe
> Harold's Pilgrimage. The Corsair was even more popular, selling 25,000
> copies. Scott and Byron would anyway have been more popular than
> Wordsworth, but had he lowered his prices he might have narrowed the gap.
>
> Foreign publishers were not affected by English copyright laws or
> intellectual rights, and in Paris Galignani published cheap editions of
> English authors, thereby benefiting English travellers on the continent
> and also, as his books were imported illegally into England, many
> Britons who stayed at home. Wordsworth resented Galignani's excellent
> 1828 'pirate' edition, which contained all his poems and cost a mere 20
> francs, remarking that 'everybody goes to Paris nowadays.' But that
> didn't stop him owning the Galignani edition of Coleridge, Shelley and
> Keats.
>
> Towards the end of his life, Wordsworth, worried about the financial
> position of his sons after his death, became concerned to extend
> authorial copyright beyond the author's death. In 1836, he supported a
> bill extending copyright to 60 years. The bill failed. But six years
> later another bill extending it to 42 years from publication or
> throughout the life of the author became law. Writing in support of the
> bill, Wordsworth maintained that he 'knew of no work of imagination of
> the very highest class that was ever, in any age or country, produced by
> a man under 35'. He thus dismissed not only the best poems of his old
> friend and collaborator, Coleridge, but also all the poetry of Keats and
> Shelley and almost the entire oeuvre of Byron. Even more absurdly, he
> also relegated to the second division his Lyrical Ballads, the 1805
> edition of The Prelude and some other of his finest poems. Despite
> Wordsworth's almost lifelong devotion to lengthy copyrights, all the
> great Romantic poets he implicitly denigrated were not, as St Clair
> points out, deterred from writing poetry, even though the copyright
> regime of their time was relatively short.
>
> In an illuminating conclusion, St Clair stresses the importance of three
> structures in influencing or determining what many people read and,
> consequently, their outlook and mentality. These were 'private
> intellectual property in the hands of the text-copying industry,
> cartelisation within the industry, and a close alliance between the
> state and the industry in which the industry delivered textual policing
> and self-censorship in exchange for economic privileges', and their
> consequence was that much of the reading public between 1600 and 1780,
> who could not afford the inflated prices of new books charged by the
> cartel, were confined to texts that were increasingly obsolescent and
> gave misleading information on almost everything from religion to birth
> control.
>
> Any analysis which draws attention to the immense importance of economic
> factors in determining the cultural consciousness of 18th-century
> society will have obvious echoes of Karl Marx. But, just as Popper
> pointed out that while Beethoven was affected by such social
> developments as the enlargement of the orchestra, no theory of
> metaphysical or materialist determinism could explain a single bar of
> his music, St Clair is clear that the economic base of the English
> publishing industry cannot explain any of the great poems or novels of
> the Romantic era. He does not wish to resurrect Marxism, but he does
> stress the importance of the economic processes of the publishing and
> printing industry in influencing the minds of readers.
>
> A book containing a vast amount of new information, based on massive
> investigation, could not, one would have thought, fail to contain a lot
> of errors, some of them serious. But the errors I spotted in St Clair's
> book are few and unimportant. Perhaps one of them is worth a mention.
> The Leveller leader, John Lilburne, is described as a 'regicide'.
> 'Honest John' Lilburne was indeed asked to join the Special High Court
> of Justice which was set up to try Charles I, but as he wanted the king
> to be tried by the general law of England he refused the invitation. Had
> he sat on the court, he would probably have voted for the king's
> execution and become a regicide, but one cannot be sure even of that.
> Lilburne was so unpredictable and opposition-minded it was said of him
> that 'if there were none other living but himself, John would be against
> Lilburne and Lilburne against John.' The Reading Nation is a work of
> formidable scholarship and accuracy.
>
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