Charles Dickens’s Fight with Copyright in the United States: the First Foray
Author : David Decker
Keywords : ante-bellum, American history, American literature, American revolution, British literature, book piracy, copyright, democracy, Dickens, Charles, publishers, United Kingdom, United States of America, Victorian novel, Wordsworth, William
DOI :
By late 1841 Charles Dickens had conquered most of the
English-reading public on both sides of the Atlantic.
Not very long after the news of Little Nell’s death in arrived
to an eagerly awaiting public on American shores, Dickens
himself made a pilgrimage to the Great Transatlantic Republic in
the hope of viewing first-hand the improvement in an
English-speaking country which had thrown off the shackles of Britain's class system, industrial poverty, and religious intolerance.
He was largely disappointed.
Dickens’ views on America are largely deductible from his
novel Martin Chuzzlewit, and in his American Notes for General
Circulation. The “for general circulation” tag already implies an
ironic criticism of Dickens’ response to the American view that
his works, and those of all British authors, were public property
in America and that Dickens and his countrymen should be
proud to be read in the United States on any terms.
This was the American attitude until roughly this century.
America’s own literary development suffered disastrousiy from
the determined absence of copyright laws. One of the obvious
results of the turn-of-the-century changes in America’s copyright
law has been the emergence in this century of plentiful,
vigorous, world-class American writing: This paper connects Dickens’ experience with the changes that have occurred in Taiwan over the past decade in regard to copyright law, points to similarities and differences between the two cases, and argues for a sane and reasonable copyright policy.