Copyright and Collaboration: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Debate over Literary Property

Abstract

In his argument for the protection of literary properties, Southey here quite explicitly draws upon the previous century’s legal analogies between literary and landed property put forward by literary aesthetes such as Edward Young and William Duff, as well as prominent legal figures such as William Blackstone and Francis Hargrave. The work of the latter group represented a forceful public challenge to the eighteenth century’s more multifaceted Renaissance and neo-Classical conceptions of the author as either a ‘craftsman’ or ‘inspired’ and both equally dependent on religious and spiritual muses. Imitation as a valuable compositional technique and the importance of tradition began to give way under this discourse to the myth and privilege of raw literary originality. The late eighteenthand nineteenth-century departure from the former style of compositional practice thus pointedly diminished the element of craftsmanship in favour of the inspired individual, but more significantly it also modified the source of this inspiration. As contemporary legal-literary theorists have repeatedly noted, this had broader implications not only for aesthetic definitions of authorship but also for the development of English copyright law and the legal classification of an author’s relationship with their work. Martha Woodmansee convincingly argues that ‘inspiration came to be regarded as emanating not from outside or above, but from within the writer himself . . . the inspired work was made peculiarly and distinctively the property . . . of the writer’ (427). Southey’s confident assertion of his legal rights over his own work emphatically derives from this notion of the inspired individual and further relies on copyright law’s absorption of the same idea in its definition of authorship. Southey’s comments are also notably made within the context of the long and heated debate over literary properties and copyright law which dominated the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This debate eventually culminated in the revised Copyright Act of 1842 and the dramatic extension of authors’