Unintended Authors: Piracy, Plagiarism and Property in Victorian Popular Culture

The introduction to this special issue of the Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, “Unintended Authors,” argues that Victorian popular fictions crucially relied on incoherently regulated global artistic markets that made bargain-basement grabbing and reselling comme il faut. The absence of clear and uniform copyright statutes, case law, and trade practices across national, colonial, linguistic, and generic borders surprisingly did not obstruct nineteenth-century authorship; rather these conditions did the work of cultivating an extraordinary proliferation of scrappy innovators creatively reusing antecedents. A cast of rogue publishers, theatrical adaptors, and proto brand managers take centre stage here in an effort to recognize the collaborative, appropriative, and reiterative dimensions of nineteenth-century fictional entertainment.

Real and imagined Greek women in Victorian perceptions of ‘1821’

The article explores the reception of ‘1821’ in Victorian popular culture, focusing on the representation of Greek women in stories published in contemporary periodicals. The two dominant tropes of Greek womanhood that emerge in popular fiction and poetry published from the 1830s to the 1890s – the captive harem slave and the intrepid warrior – arouse sympathy for the enslaved women but also evoke liberal ideas on women’s national and social roles. These texts foreground the position of Greek women within a nineteenth-century social context and imbue in them virtues and conflicts such as radicalism, the enfranchisement of women and middle-class domesticity that concerned Britain as much as Greece. Greek women, as represented in these stories, construct a Victorian narrative of ‘1821’ and of the Greek nation that oscillates between familiarity and strangeness, freedom and enslavement, real and imaginary. These largely neglected texts challenge traditional definitions of philhellenism, which depended on the legacy of ancient Greece as justification for the cause of the country’s liberation, and instead construct new myths about Greece, participating in the discursive production of its national fantasy. They also provide the opportunity of reconsidering the cultural position of Modern Greece in the Victorian period beyond the division between Hellenism and Orientalism.

Unsettling Entitlement and ‘Ginx’s Baby’

This story traces the many adventures of a title, from Edward Jenkins’s 1870 novel, Ginx’s Baby, through colonial resistance to imperial copyright law in Canada, to the photograph of a distressed baby that Charles Darwin featured in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals and that the art photographer Oscar Rejlander reproduced as popular cartes de visites. The reiterative use of the title across genres and oceans conjures an image of Victorian popular culture as an unregulated bazaar affording the surprising emergence of unintended creators. Copyright history, frame analysis, and name theory help explain how the title of a popular novel could lend itself to so many unrelated creative objects.

Introduction

The Introduction surveys the divergent representations of babyhood in the nineteenth century. It situates the present study at the intersection of new work on the modern family and changing parenting realities, as well as historical childhood and child care. After a detailed discussion of the most influential or mainstream portrayals of infancy in Victorian popular culture, such as the sentimentalized baby, the baby as victim in social reform writing, and the commodified baby, the Introduction addresses the importance of unusual, yet culturally significant depictions, including comical or sensationalized babies in fiction. How did these portrayals transform cultural fantasies and genre developments? How did iconic depictions of babyhood reflect, distort, or endeavour to change the lived realities of young children in Victorian Britain? The texts selected for close reading in the subsequent chapters include material that reveals unexpected sides to Victorian infancy, as well as works that have had a catalysing function for changing representational strategies. Critical attention to the diverse and at times ambiguous depiction of infancy in Victorian culture thus also produces new readings of canonical works that have hitherto not been considered from this angle.

The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature

This book contends that, in Victorian literature, transgressive desires that cannot be openly acknowledged – whether these be homosexuality, pygmalionism, necrophilia, or paedophilia – are often embedded and encrypted in sculptures. The three-dimensionality of the sculptural body, its ubiquity in Victorian popular culture, its increasing visibility in public galleries, and the full or partial nudity of classical statues on display are some of the key reasons that underpin this phenomenon. It argues that, in such literature, sculpture often functions as a form of textual ‘Secretum’ in which forbidden love becomes available for recovery and circulation by those ‘in the know’, manifesting through sensory signification, through literal and metaphorical forms of tactility, and at the intersections between vision and touch.

Crowdsourced Dickens

Since the publication of Paul Schlicke’s ground-breaking Dickens and Popular Entertainment in 1985, Dickens’s relationship with popular culture has become an increasingly prominent area of Dickens studies. Work on Dickens and popular culture splinters into three sub-fields: Dickens’s relationship with Victorian popular culture, Dickensian ‘afterlives’ or posthumous remediations, and, in recent years, ‘global’ Dickens. Research on Dickensian afterlives has overwhelmingly tended to focus on Dickens’s posthumous relationship with the screen and on the re-presentation of versions of Dickens’s works since his death. The 2012 bicentenary celebration website was perhaps the first major attempt to map the myriad of local, amateur, and hitherto unregulated Dickensian afterlives online and in communities. It made manifest the fact that cultural analysis of ‘the Dickensian’ today cannot simply be a matter of analysing artistic texts or even screen adaptations. As Linda Hutcheon argues in the Preface to the First Edition of her influential A Theory of Adaptation (2006), ‘Adaptation has run amok. That’s why we can’t understand its appeal and even its nature if we only consider novels and films.’ This chapter offers a first attempt at theorizing this new adaptive landscape in relation to Dickens. It employs the idea of ‘crowdsourcing’ as an umbrella term to analyse a range of Dickensian appearances in new cultural space(s) which claim partnership, cooperation, or indeed a merging between cultural consumers and producers. While internet projects which define themselves as ‘crowdsourced’ are a main focus, the idea of crowdsourcing is also employed more elastically to examine a variety of self-proclaimed populist or participatory projects in order to revisit what we think we know about Dickens’s cultural reach in a new media era. The chapter tempers the optimism that characterizes so much new work which sees the internet as facilitating Dickens’s original utopian and inclusive vision of popular culture, breaking down cultural hierarchies and geographical boundaries to expand Dickens’s cultural impact and indeed the impact of literary culture. ‘Crowdsourced Dickens’ examines the evidence produced by a range of populist Dickensian ventures since the Bicentenary to argue that the internet has facilitated not an extension of Dickens’s audience or new ‘crowds’, but a reconfiguration of communication structures which allow ‘clubs’ to feel newly empowered. These clubs are literally and festively eccentric, the chapter argues, revelling in a celebratory sense of autonomous worldbuilding which rejects the tyranny of numbers and the cultural logic which associates value with larger cultural impact. The chapter draws analogies between postmodern and picaresque communication structures, implying that ‘new’ media theory would benefit from a sense of its own backstory. Finally, it calls for more interdisciplinary work on literary clubs, a topic largely neglected by both literary studies and new media theory which has yet to grapple seriously with the effect of the internet on the literary marketplace.