Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (review)

Clare Pettitt finds an interesting link between the nineteenth-century debates about copyrights and patents: in both cases, she argues, the key issue is intellectual property, and she identifies important similarities between the constructed image of the author and that of the mechanical inventor. She also raises questions about how intellectual labor (whether literary or mechanical) should be compensated, noting that all intellectual-property legislation negotiates the often-vexed boundary between individual private rights and the public interest. Pettitt's concerns, then, quite explicitly link technology (mechanical invention) and culture (literature).

These are interesting and perhaps even important questions. Unfortunately, Pettitt provides few enlightening answers, and, her subtitle notwithstanding, she devotes comparatively little attention to Victorian novels, particularly in the first half of the book. Even more troubling is her treatment of novels in the final chapters, which is both scant and unconvincing.

In the first two chapters, Pettitt discusses the popular image of the author and of the inventor from 1818 through the 1840s, noting that such creative people were often cast as isolated heroic geniuses or as isolated victims, in both the radical and middle-class press. In the third chapter, she considers issues of intellectual property in the context of the Great Exhibition of 1851, pointing out that many inventors were leery of displaying their work in public, for fear their ideas might be appropriated.

Pettitt turns her attention to literature only in the last three of her six chapters. Many of the works she considers, including Wilkie Collins's Mr. Wray's Cash-Box, Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "Not So Bad as We Seem," Dickens's "A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent," George Eliot's Brother Jacob and The Lifted Veil, and Thomas Hardy's "The Fiddler of the Reels," are not properly novels at all. Two of the four novels she treats at any length—Dickens's Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Eliot's Silas Marner, and Elizabeth Gaskell's Cousin Phillis—might better be considered novellas. More to the point, these works have little to say about issues of intellectual property. (The inventor Daniel Doyce in Little Dorrit is an exception—but he is, finally, a very minor character.) As a consequence, Pettitt's arguments about literature often have little textual evidence to support them. She suggests that Doyce represents "a literary, as well as a mechanical, inventor" (p. 157), though he is certainly not the former; her claim that in Bleak House Dickens "finds a way of 'naturalizing' any anxiety he may feel in establishing his own written authority by performing his own presence" is unnecessarily opaque, and finally unconvincing (p. 178). Pettitt cites an alternative ending for Cousin Phillis that Gaskell sketched out in a letter, but then confuses this planned (but presumably unwritten) conclusion with the real thing, arguing that Phillis "ends the story by enunciating the future tense" (p. 234). And Pettitt sometimes seems to confuse an author with her fictional creations, presenting George Eliot as writing "bitterly about the alienation of her state" when she has her character Latimer say that his relations with other men are growing deadened (p. 243), and claiming that Eliot projects her "own sense of sexual transgression" onto her character Faux (p. 250, for example).

It is surprising to see the relatively low quality of the writing in this book; the Oxford University Press editors may have taken less than their customary care. Pettitt uses words like "pathologization," "trepidatiously," "reproductivity," and "corporealization," and makes occasional factual slips, as when she refers to Thackeray's lectures on eighteenth-century literature as his "lectures on the English humorists of the nineteenth century" (p. 170). One cannot depend on the accuracy of her quotations, either: she offers "pretty tiny weeny cottage" as a quotation from Bleak House (p. 176), but neither the Penguin paperback she cites nor the first edition reveals anything even close to this phrase, which certainly does not sound Dicken-sian. Furthermore, there are...