Performing Ownership: Dickens, Twain, and Copyright on the Transatlantic Stage

In December 1867, a public reading from the novel Martin Chuzzlewit occurred on the stage of Steinway Hall in New York City. The next day, a reviewer wrote that the novel was “faithfully and delightfully reproduced in the reader’s interpretation.” That “the reader’s interpretation” was “faithful” is hardly remarkable because the reader that night was none other than the author, Charles Dickens. On another night, a reviewer compared Dickens’ performance favorably with a recent performance by an actress, saying that while she “did but interpret the inspiration of others, he presents to us, in all their charming freshness, his own.”¹ That the audience in New York, which included Mark Twain, couldn’t decide whether Dickens at the height of his celebrity was the embodiment of his literary inspiration or just another interpreter of that inspiration suggests that to nineteenth-century audiences the nature and extent of an author’s authority over his own work was uncertain.

The legal and economic realities of the time period as well as the international context encouraged such ambiguity. Until 1891, there was no Anglo-American copyright protection and the transatlantic reprinting of books without the author’s approval or benefit—often more cheaply than the authorized edition—was unregulated and rampant. As their books traveled the Atlantic as cargo by the thousands, authors felt waning economic and legal connection to their work, a fact many of them explicitly deplored. Feeling the need to assert control and inspired by a world which by mid-century was easier to traverse, authors began to travel the same course as their books. Some, such as Frances Trollope and Harriet Martineau, presented themselves as observing tourists, often writing books about the visited country upon return home. These visits also allowed authors to meet with foreign publishers in the hopes of securing compensation. A smaller number moved from being the observer to the observed and performed for their transatlantic audiences. As a supplement to their private meetings with foreign publishers, public performances presented the author in person, face-to-face with readers, enacting a symbolically important connection between authors and their peripatetic books.²

In the cases of Dickens and Twain, whose performances in 1867–68 and 1873–74 this essay takes as its subject, public performances played a crucial role in managing each author’s conflicted relationship with their reading public. They were both immensely popular celebrities and both lost a great deal of potential revenue from pirated editions of their books. Through their work and especially their performances, Dickens and Twain each fashioned an authorial persona that was decidedly “popular,” and most studies of their lecture or reading tours have understood the phenomenon of public performances as a means of marketing the authorial persona to an even larger public.³ Yet both of them resented the popular appropriation of their works in unauthorized foreign editions, and this essay treats their performances as, at least in part, tools of resistance to such appropriation. I argue that Dickens and Twain struggled to make up ground in what they saw as the fight for ownership by performing that ownership in the public arena.

Dickens and Twain differed from most touring transatlantic lecturers in that they performed fictional narratives, never speaking as “themselves” but rather through the medium of one or more characters from their published work. This approach to lecturing—which involved performing or inhabiting the text—worked to close the gap between an author and an author’s work, if only for an hour, in a way that paralleled their more explicit fight for intellectual property. In these public performances, Dickens and Twain worked to establish their authority over and, more importantly, their ownership of the texts they performed by striking an important balance that reflected the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debate over intellectual property. On the one hand, they performed an authorial persona that stressed the author-as-source; on the other, they achieved an embodied intimacy with the published work from which the reading came. In other words, the particular nature of these performances allowed each of them to perform...