And then there’s this: “the sooner [Dickens] hangs up his fiddle, and himself with it, or jumps into the New River, the better it will be . . .”
Ouch. What the hell happened? Dickens’s sudden fall from American grace was reminiscent of the Beatles’ fall in 1966, when Lennon declared to a British daily, “We’re more popular than Jesus.” That went over in the American South about as well as anyone could expect. Dickens avoided making any comments about the god of Christianity, but he did say a few words about the god of America: Cold. Hard. Cash.
LIKE AUTHORSHIP, the idea of copyright as we understand it today has experienced an ongoing evolution. In 1842, America had no international copyright agreements. Copyright protection did exist (after the pattern established in England in the eighteenth century), but it was restricted to American citizens. This meant that writers from other countries, even the most celebrated, had no claim to the profits of any book printed and sold by American publishers. Nor did they have any means of stopping those publishers from producing them. Of course, the lack of reciprocal international copyright laws wasn’t doing any favors for American writers, either. It was to this more convincing point that Dickens first broached the subject of copyright, at the end of a speech in Boston about a week after he arrived. Initially, his comments were received with a flood of applause from the attendees. But within a few days, that sentiment had taken a decidedly worse turn.
With his first major hit in 1836, Charles Dickens achieved success right when literary celebrity was becoming popular. Dickens scholar Robert L. Patten explains that the author “thought of himself as a professional writer, an identity which an older generation deplored.” As scholar Florian Schweizer notes, “Due to the success of a few writers, a whole generation of readers started to believe that literature was the key to fame and fortune. Writing in 1837, the journalist James Grant confirmed that authorship had become a commonplace occupation: “‘You now meet with an author in every fifteenth or twentieth person you chance to encounter in the daily intercourse of life.’”
With the blossoming popularity of authors in the Romantic Age such as Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, publishers began to capitalize on the idea that customers would buy books simply because of a name. This was an important shift. An author’s name was part of the overall sale package, one more tool to move the product. Sooner or later, authors were bound to ask for a fair cut of that product.
In the first centuries of print, very few living authors wielded power by their name alone. Martin Luther was one; Shakespeare was another. Yet, as popular opinions of authorship changed, writers were able to use the expanding economy of print to seize more monetary rewards. This trend was part of a wider Enlightenment ideal that praised the right to property rather than regarding wealth as a source of depravity. Even ideas, by their very nature intangible, were slowly being accepted as property. That McDonald’s could own the word combination “I’m lovin’ it” would have been a revolutionary concept before the Enlightenment.
John Milton, for example, sold his manuscript of Paradise Lost, and his right to profit from any proceeds of the work, for five pounds in 1667. No matter how unfair this seems today, at the time it was business as usual. Authors produced and sold stories just as a farmer might raise a cow and sell the beef to McDonald’s, which then “processes” it for sale to a larger group of consumers at a profit. Because English protocopyright structures were built around literature as a single act of creation, laws protecting the rights to literature were often meant to protect those in charge of distribution, essentially the publishers of the day, not the original creator of the work.
As England’s philosophical and economic underpinnings shifted with the Enlightenment, so, too, did its view of copyright. A major breakthrough occurred in 1710. This was the year of the Statute of Anne, an English law entitled “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned” (hence why everyone agreed to call it the Statute of Anne). This act granted copyright holders rights to a work for a period of fourteen years. The protection could be extended one time, for another fourteen years, upon request. Boom. Problem solved. Before 1710 an author had legal recourse only in cases of “libel, blasphemy, or sedition” (where he was usually the criminal defendant, by the way). After the Statute of Anne, the author was now a legal entity who had ownership of his works. The full implications of this took a little time to sink in, but moving forward, reproductions could be printed only by permission of the author, or by someone to whom the author had sold the “rights” to his personal “copy.” Violate that, and an author finally had grounds to sue.
Foreigners were another story, however, and in the nineteenth century, that story began to change. International agreements were emerging among various developing nations, but one country that bucked that trend was the good ole U.S. of A. “Inasmuch as [Dickens] received 40,000 guineas per annum for his works in England . . . he had no right to ask Americans ‘to double the sum out of [their] own pockets.’” This was Boston’s response, in American Traveller, to Dickens’s calls for copyright reform.
First off, 40,000 guineas seems a bit high, even for Mr. Dickens. This staggering annual income would be roughly equivalent to £1.7 million in modern currency. Thinking Dickens had access to that extreme amount of capital was mistake number one. Yet, with that error firmly planted in their minds, it became pretty easy for people to slam the door in his face when he came asking for money. It would seem a little like Ebenezer Scrooge holding out Oliver Twist’s bowl and saying, “Please, sir, I want some more—money, that is.”
Publishers in America who were pirating Dickens’s books shared that indignation. Why should Dickens get paid twice? He’d already gotten his guineas back in England. Why should we Americans give him money in exchange for products that we consume? Sure, that’s the basic definition of capitalism, but you can just bugger off, capitalism, Dickens has enough money.
In the 1840s, America was the literary equivalent of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and the printers, publishers, and booksellers of this country were the ship’s captain, Edward “Blackbeard” Thatch. We were pirates, and what’s worse, we were proud of it—really, really proud of it. To deprive foreign authors of royalties was the American way. We were so famous for it that a new phrase was coined in the history of print just for us.
“No sooner is a literary venture of Bulwer[-Lytton], Thackeray, or Dickens afloat, than a whole baracoon of ‘bookaneers,’ as Hood called them, rushes forth to seize it.”
Bookaneers. Oh my, that’s clever. It makes you think of a whole fleet of well-read pirates mounting raids on libraries to pore over the treasured works of Jonathan Swift, Goethe, and William Wordsworth. And, in fact, American publishers liked to make similar claims as their motivation for piracy. See, books are cheaper when they’re stolen. Publishers claimed that pirating works allowed their prices to remain low, which in turn made the works more accessible to the public at large. So piracy = educating the masses. It’s an Enlightenment ideal. American printers were proud to be pirates because they pictured themselves as taking part in the education of the infant nation, just as they had taken part in its infant democracy.
Whether Dickens went to America with the express purpose of advocating for international copyright has been a matter of intense speculation and debate from the moment he arrived in Boston. Whatever his intentions may have been, he appears to have stumbled naïvely into a very awkward situation with the United States. It was like a first date. Both people have lofty expectations and dress to look as sharp as possible. They smile and say all the right things, but after a while they begin to realize that something’s off. It becomes clear that one of you isn’t as wealthy as you said you were, and things get really weird when he starts asking you for money. Then you get offended when he visits Richmond, Virginia, and hates all your slave plantations. Classic first-date hiccups.
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nbsp; Awkward or not, Dickens’s 1842 visit shone a light on the problem of American copyright. As straightforward as the solutions seem today, pirates controlled the vast majority of the printing presses in nineteenth-century America. As a result, literary boarding planks became symbols of patriotism.
I HAVE MADE UP MY MIND . . . TO GO TO AMERICA,” Charles Dickens cap-shouted to a friend in a letter dated September 1841.
Why did he want to go? Who knows? He never told anyone. A few historians have claimed that, from the very beginning, he planned to proselytize for copyright reform. American newspapers would claim that Dickens was a “mercenary,” a hired thug sent out by a cabal of British authors from some Literary Legion of Doom, which, let’s be honest, is the nerdiest of doom legions. Maybe he just wanted to pay a visit to his pen pal Washington Irving, or find out what a hushpuppy was, or see the PIGS on Broadway. (Sorry, that made it seem like there was a show called The Pigs on Broadway in 1841. We were just caps-shouting about the roaming passels of hogs that regularly foraged along Broadway—something Dickens found amusing enough to write home about.)
Whatever initially carried Dickens to the United States, one thing is for certain, he got here in style, on a fancy steamer, christened the SS Britannia, that could make the transatlantic crossing in just fourteen days. This leads us to gaffe number one on Dickens’s first date with America. We thought he had money, but he did not.
Because Dickens was “the most photographically famous person in Britain outside of the royal family,” everyone knew what he looked like. “[Dickens] was instantly recognizable on the streets, furiously walking, in flamboyant clothes.” If you closed your eyes and pictured Charles Dickens, this is what you saw: “a middle-sized person, in a brown frock coat, a red figured vest . . . a fancy scarf cravat, . . . [a] dickey . . . a double pin and chain . . . a gold watch . . . a shaggy coat of bear or buffalo skin that would excite the admiration of a Kentucky huntsman.”
His fashion style has been described as “graphic fancy.” On one leg of his American journey, he was actually mistaken for a riverboat gambler. That’s right, in comparison to the people in his immediate vicinity, Dickens looked like some fancy Dan trying to stroll off the pages of a Mark Twain novel.
When Dickens traveled, he did so in style. He boarded in the stateroom of the SS Britannia. Once on land, he stayed in presidential accommodations such as the Tremont House (America’s “pioneer first-class hotel”) and the Clifton House Hotel (where his “bedroom and sitting room windows looked straight down upon [Niagara] Falls”).
Wherever Dickens went he exuded fame and fortune. Still, fortune is not the inevitable successor to fame. Just ask any flash-in-the-pan YouTube celebrity. In reality, Charles Dickens was broke. Worse than broke, he was £5,019 in debt. The only way he was even able to raise the capital for the American excursion in the first place was to take a loan out on his next novel. On New Year’s Day 1842, he acknowledged receipt from his publishers of £885, and three weeks later pushed off for Boston.
When Dickens and his English publishers issued what turned out to be his breakout success, The Pickwick Papers, in serial parts (1836–37), they sold for a shilling a piece. (A complete set in parts now sells for thousands of dollars, but that’s beside the point, especially for Dickens.) This method of selling and distribution created a huge potential for profit, “transform[ing] Dickens, Chapman and Hall [his publishers] from minor figures in Victorian letters to titans.” Yet the author-publisher relationship as we know it today was still maturing, and Dickens saw exceptionally less personal profit from his early successes than a modern-day author would. Even with his unprecedented sales numbers, he wasn’t financially secure until 1847. That’s ten years after Oliver Twist (now worth tens of thousands of dollars), and three years after A Christmas Carol (now worth as much as thirty-five thousand). When Dickens, arguably the most famous author in the Western world, landed in Boston in 1842, financial security was still half a decade away.
Despite writing five runaway hits and almost single-handedly revolutionizing the way books were sold, Dickens had only ever received about three hundred fifty pounds from American publishers. Compare that to the quite modest two thousand pounds he made in England from The Pickwick Papers. With IOUs bursting out of his buffalo-skin coat pockets, it’s not hard to see how he might have felt compelled at least to mention copyright reform when a soapbox was presented to him. If Americans really were being expected to “double the sum” of forty thousand guineas annually “from their own pockets,” as the American Traveller complained, we were kind of admitting to fleecing Mr. Dickens out of two hundred thousand dollars a year in lost copyright revenues—and that sum of money was more than enough to wage a small war over.
“Before I sit down,” Dickens said at the tail end of a banquet thrown by the Young Men of Boston on February 1, “there is one topic on which I am desirous to lay particular stress.” His speech up to this point had focused on things like Little Nell, the thirteen-year-old protagonist of one of his latest novels, The Old Curiosity Shop. A pure and gentle soul, Nell (nineteenth-century spoiler alert) doesn’t fare too well by the end of her story. Dickens wasn’t quite at the level of George “Serial Killer of Everyone You Ever Loved” R. R. Martin, but Nell’s passing was a bitter pill for Dickens’s readers. He’d been touched by letters regarding her demise from “dwellers in log-houses among the morasses, and swamps, and densest forests, and deepest solitudes of the Far West.” That’s sweet. Round of applause . . . oh, wait, there’s more.
“I hope the time is not distant,” Dickens continued, “when [authors], in America, will receive of right some substantial profit and return in England from their labors; and when we, in England, shall receive some substantial profit and return for ours.”
He then ended with “I would rather have the affectionate regard of my fellow men than I would have heaps and mines of gold. But the two things do not seem to me incompatible.”
Essentially he was saying, Hey, guys, all I need is your love and support. I don’t actually need gold chains and bear coats and silk scarves and dickeys, but . . . I mean . . . there’s no reason I can’t have both, right?
Dickens closed to “tumultuous” applause from the audience. Maybe the tumult was for Little Nell, or maybe the Young Men of Boston really loved speeches about intellectual property rights. Either way, Dickens brought up an important point, one that he believed would resonate with American audiences: just as he was receiving almost nothing from the American sales of his novels, without a strong international copyright agreement, American authors were also being shortchanged abroad.
That should do it, right? If you want to rouse Americans, kick them where it counts—right in the coin purse.
He clearly hadn’t spent enough time with Americans. As one scholar summarizes, “[Dickens] mistook piracy for the result of administrative oversight, which could easily be rectified by a single piece of legislation.” This is probably how he pictured things going in his head:
Pardon me, people of America, it appears you have forgotten to pay me.
We’ll just look into that for you, Mr. Dickens. Good Lord, man, you’re right! Please accept our humblest apologies. And also this mountain of dollars.
Here’s how it actually went, in the New York’s Morning Post: “[It was] bad taste in Mr. Dickens to allude to the copyright business in his speech here.”
Such “pecuniary considerations” . . . “smells of the shop—rank,” railed the Boston Morning Post and the Courier and Enquirer.
Dickens was uncouth to “intrude his business upon those who assemble to pay homage to his genius,” tsk’d the New York Courier.
“[W]e want no advice on this matter, and it will be better for Mr. Dickens, if he refrains from introducing the matter hereafter,” threatened the Hartford Times.
Dickens either didn’t get those threats or didn’t care, because a week after his Boston speech, he brought the subject up again at a public dinner in Connecticut
, with his most winning Victorian graces: “I would beg leave to whisper in your ear two words, International Copyright.”
Seeing as the economic tack hadn’t worked, Dickens retreated to his specialty: emotional appeal. What if withholding royalties from an author were enough to kill him? Could American stinginess murder an author as thoroughly as the cruelties of life murdered Little Nell?
Dickens’s predecessor, the revered novelist, playwright, and poet Sir Walter Scott, had died near penniless in 1832, never receiving so much as “one grateful dollar” from his American fans. He perished tragically, broke and in debt, without enough money “to buy a garland for his grave.” (Today, first editions of his best-loved work, Ivanhoe, sell in the healthy mid-thousands of dollars.) If Americans hadn’t been so greedy, Dickens not so gently alluded, Scott “might not have sunk beneath the mighty pressure on his brain.” In other words, America, you killed Walter Scott.
Calling us moneygrubbers is one thing, but blaming us for the death of Sir Walter Scott? Aw, hell no.
“Mr. DICKENS has been honored with two public dinners since his arrival in the United States; and on both occasions he has made an appeal to . . . dollars and cents for his writings. We are . . . mortified and grieved that he should have been guilty of such a great indelicacy and gross impropriety . . . by urging upon those assembled to do honor to his genius, to look after his purse also!”
Indelicacy! Impropriety! Mortification and bereavement! It’s bizarre to think that a country built on capitalism would feel so importuned by Dickens’s request to be compensated for his work in “dollars and cents,” rather than hugs and kisses and unicorn smiles. But the state of copyright in the United States was a quagmire whose depths Dickens seemed genuinely ignorant of. Four days after his Hartford speech, the New World commented with unusual insight that “time, place, and occasion taken into consideration, [Dickens’s copyright remarks] seem to have been made in the worst taste possible.” Some of that American pushback can be explained by delicate events unfolding between the United States and Britain at the time. The rest can be explained by our printing presses. In particular, our publishers, who had “indelicate” aspirations of their own.
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