Tom Jones and the Economies of Copyright

Tom Jones and the Economies of CopyrightSimon Stem Despite the extraordinary outpouring of research in recent years on the interrelations of literature and law, literary critics have had little to say about what is, perhaps, the most forceful pronouncement on imaginative power in the history of English law, Blackstone's assertion that "nothing ... so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe."1 Not the least notable feature of this sweeping declaration is its inaccuracy: as Robert Gordon has observed, the legal doctrine of the time affords "very few plausible instances of absolute dominion rights."2 Blackstone's vision of autocratic control at once rationalizes and illuminates the remarkably captivating force of the property right, implicitly deriving its powerful effects—its ability to "strike" and "engage" the human mind—from the despotic power it confers on 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765-1769, ed. Stanley N. Katz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 2:2. In his discussion of Tom Jones in Models ofValue: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and theNovel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), James Thompson quotes almost the entire paragraph that contains this passage (pp. 152-53), but his argument focuses on its implications for the inheritance plot rather than on the rhetorical relationship between property and the imagination. In his useful article "Authorship and Imagination in Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law of England," Eighteenth-Century Ufe 16 (1992), 111-26, Michael Meehan describes this passage as an exemplary instance of Blackstone's tendency to treat "the aesthetic instincts ... as the most appropriate and most elevated locus of legal response" (p. 1 16), but again, he does not dwell on the nexus between imagination and property in particular. 2 Robert W. Gordon, "Paradoxical Property," Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 96. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 4, July 1997 430 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION the owner, while evidently producing that despotism itself as a hallucinatory effect of the right in question. Whatever this passage tells us about the scope of property rights, it suggests that property is so inextricably bound up with imagination, so thoroughly shrouded in its nimbus, that even the logic of doctrinal analysis may grow hazy under its irresistible sway. The right of property, it seems, may convert the legal commentator into a writer of fiction. As it happens, this disquisition in the Commentaries was not Blackstone 's first engagement with the beguiling effects of property. In 1762, four years before the second volume of the Commentaries appeared, Blackstone represented Jacob Tonson in court, insisting that the bookseller 's copyright in the Spectator was still valid even though the statutory term of protection had expired some twenty years earlier.3 Striving to demonstrate that copyright derives from the common law and consequently lasts in perpetuity, Blackstone proceeds as if he were speaking not for Tonson but for Addison himself. By the 1760s, it had become conventional among proponents of copyright to emphasize the author's foundational property claim rather than the bookseller's derivative right to print copies of the text; in adhering to the convention, Blackstone diminishes the force of one of his central arguments, seeking to clarify the exclusive nature of copyright by way of an analogy that comports perfectly with the bookseller's position, but hardly suits the authorial role that he prefers to elaborate. A book is "a gift to the public," Blackstone insists, only "where the author conceals himself"; otherwise, the act of reading "is ... like making a way through a man's own private grounds, which he may stop at pleasure; he may give out a number of keys, by publishing a number of copies; but no man, who receives a key, has thereby a right to forge others, and sell them to other people."4 It is Tonson , of course, who claims the exclusive right to give...