Above, from top: Karl Marx; hand-loom weavers; a coin with Queen Anne’s likeness, 1708.
British literary historian N.N. Feltes has said that “Readers are made by what makes the book.” Meaning, the system that produces a text also produces the readers who read it. In Charles Dickens’s case, that system was serial publication. But, in Dickens’s case, that system was also the nascent industrial revolution, which involved the shift from what Feltes describes as the “petty-commodity production of books,” in which books were produced in small quantities by artisans, to the “capitalist production of texts,” in which books were produced in mass quantities by professional printers and publishers. In a very short time, the system that produced a book went from something like that which produced a homespun quilt to something like that which produced bolts of industrially-woven fabric. While the machines made the fabric cheaper and easier to make, its weavers owned nothing but their labor in making it. And while presses made books cheaper and easier to make, their authors in turn owned nothing but their power to conceive them.
The comparison of writing to weaving is not lost on Feltes, who uses it to recall Marx: “While the condition of early 19th century writers could never decline to that of their wretched contemporaries, the hand-loom weavers, nevertheless Marx’s comment on the weavers’ predicament in the face of the new relations of industrial production is illuminating.” Marx noticed that workers in a capitalist system are estranged from the work they make. Since their work is no longer their own, the concept of labor arrives to take its place. This yields, as Marx says, “the conditions of labor and the product of labor.” The book, which was once the work, is now the product; its text, which was also once the book, is now the labor. Its author’s right is not to the product but to his or her individual labor. In one stroke, the “professional author,” and the “commodity text” were born, along with the mass-consuming public to support them.
With the serial, all three were perfected. “Rarely has a literary form been so driven by the dictates of economics,” explains writer Shawn Crawford in his essay No time to be idle: the serial novel and popular imagination. And Dickens’s success became the gold standard. Crawford:
Along with his writing talents Dickens possessed an acute business sense that made him a ruthless bargainer. He recognized the power an author could wield if used wisely. He often negotiated royalties of up to 75 percent of the profits, received [large] advances, and commanded an allowance whenever in the midst of publishing a new work. In addition, he ran or owned other serial magazines during his career and received both a salary as editor and a share of the profits.
Dickens, in other words, was a savvy capitalist as well as a crusading journalist and writer. Along with his compassion for the poverty and workers’ rights, he possessed a uniquely Victorian attitude for bootstrapping and achievement. “Personal development became something of an obsession for the Victorians,” writes Crawford, “and serials mirrored the belief that personal and cultural progress was gradual, positive, and inevitable.”
Piracy, then, was not progress: it was rampant, adverse to cultural interests, and, eventually, criminal. It was also a byproduct of industrial capitalism: before Gutenberg, the amount of time required to copy a text in any sizable quantity was comparable to the amount of time required to produce the original. Once copies are easier to make, however, more of them get made, and this has an effect: because more books mean more literacy, and more literacy means more readers from one generation to the next, most of whom want cheaper and cheaper books.
But piracy and copyright are a chicken-and-egg problem. Which came first? Because in order to restrict piracy, as copyright does, you must first have pirates to restrict. But in order to have pirates, you must first believe that some have a right to copy a work and others (namely, pirates) do not. In a way, one creates the other: piracy creates copyright and copyright creates pirates. In another, perhaps more accurate way, a disruptive technology, the printing press, created them both.
25 years after the publishing of René Decartes’s Discourse on Method had signaled the start of the Enlightenment, the Licensing Act of 1662 required printers in good legal standing to notify a trade association called the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, or Stationers’ Company, of their intent to set up a printing press. Once they had, the Act legislated the printing of “seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets” by requiring licensed printers to deposit copies of their printed materials with the Stationers’ Company for review. Printers who did not conform to these rules were subject to fines and potential imprisonment. Though the Licensing Act of 1662 law made censorship by the government easier and more centralized, it also established certain types of printing as legitimate and other types as illegitimate. The Stationers’ Company had an official monopoly on the copying of text. Having sold a work to the Company, an author relinquished any claim to it in perpetuity.
When the Statute of Anne passed in 1709, things changed. First, the idea of a “copyright” was expanded from narrowly applying to the Company to broadly applying to the public. Second, and critically, the monopoly on a work resided now with the author of a text rather than its printer. Third, that monopoly was now finite: 21 years for books in print, 14 for books not yet published, with an option for 14 more as an enticement to prospective authors by a society hungry for new texts. With the Statute of Anne, as Feltes has observed, “For the first time in statutory law there came to exist a property right in the text itself and that right was alienable,” meaning it could be transferred from one person to another. He continues, “If the publisher is to profit, he must be able to acquire from the author an exclusive right—and so the author must be able to grant it.” For writers like Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Isaac Newton, all of whom published works soon after the Statute had passed, this meant that getting a text printed no longer meant relinquishing their legal claim to it. But for writers like Jonathan Swift, the future was more ambiguous. The Statute protected England, Scotland, and Wales, but it did not extend to Swift in Ireland or to the British Colonies in North America. In both places, pirates flourished.
Serial Series is a six-part meditation on the production of text from the text’s point-of-view. It was written serially and published serially during the three-week run of Dexter Sinister’s The First/Last Newspaper, a project for Performa 09. The third broadsheet, including this piece (titled NEW LEGISLATION COMBATS CHICKEN-EGG PROBLEM) can be downloaded here. New installments will be posted each Tuesday through 5 January 2010.
