Notes

The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Notes

Introduction

1. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol 15, 28 Feb 1833, columns 1327, 1333. E. D. Steele cites this debate in Irish Land and British Politics 32.

2. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol 15, 28 Feb 1833, column 1338.

3. Scholars interested in “thing theory” have also noticed the poverty of an approach to objects that dwells only on an object’s status as a commodity. Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things might be seen as leading the charge to integrate an understanding of an object’s production and exchange into a larger field of cultural meaning that answers questions such as “What desires did objects organize? What fantasies did they provoke?” (12). Elaine Freedgood and John Plotz, whose work I discuss in the conclusion, both have done admirable work in that direction for the field of Victorian literature and culture. Their focus on the symbolic resonance of things, however, leads them away from the questions of how Victorians understood owned material to attach to owners. Claire Pettit’s highly original work in Patent Inventions focuses on how Victorians imagined owners and property to be attached and does so in a way that challenges commodification as the only available model of property. Pettit explores how developments in patents and licensing influenced Victorian authors’ conceptions of their intellectual property in their own literary creations. I hope to add to that work by focusing on property not intellectual in nature.

4. On this point, see Bigelow, Fiction, Famine 61. See also Fraser, John Bull’s Other Homes 4–5.

5. On the centralization of policing in Ireland, see Saville, Consolidation of the Capitalist State esp chapter 5. See also Crossman, Politics, Law, and Order esp chapters 1 and 2. On the centralization of the educational system, see Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment esp chapter 4.

6. Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s introduction to the Oxford Classics edition of Castle Rackrent sums up several of the ways scholars have thought about Edgeworth’s Irishness and her Anglo-Irishness.

7. See Frazier, George Moore.

8. See Jones, The Amazing Victorian 211.

9. See Kinzer England’s Disgrace? 90.

10. Neil McCaw has also edited a useful volume of essays on British perceptions of Irishness in the nineteenth century.

11. See especially “Adulteration and the Nation” and “Violence and the Constitution of the Novel” in Anomalous States (1993).

12. See Frey, British State Romanticism; Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State; and Morris, Imagining Inclusive Society. An overview of the late Foucauldian characterization of governmentality can be derived from his essays “Governmentality,” “Omnes et Singulatim,” and “The Subject and Power” in Power, and from the first three lectures in The Birth of Biopolitics.

13. For a full articulation of this idea, see Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim.”

CHAPTER ONE: Disowning to Own

1. Such self-abasement has been variously chalked up to Edgeworth’s susceptibility to self-doubt, to the false consciousness of patriarchal exploitation, and to Edgeworth’s awareness of the strategic advantages of identifying with the patriarchy. For the first interpretation, see Marilyn Butler’s Maria Edgeworth. For the second, see Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic. For the third, see Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters.

2. For the extent to which Walter Scott’s literary debt to Edgeworth went unacknowledged, see Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority 106. See also Connolly, “Irish Romanticism” 417.

3. On Edgeworth’s habit of treating the landed estate as a microcosm of society at large, see Ferris, “The Irish Novel” 239 and Burgess, “The National Tale” 48.

4. Paine’s critiques were especially well-known in Ireland, where cheap editions of Rights of Man circulated widely among the United Irishmen who would go on to organize the 1798 rebellion. On the influence of Thomas Paine on the United Irishmen, see McDowell, “Administration and Public Services” 353; see also Dickson, “Paine and Ireland” 135–50.

5. See Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority 106.

6. For a version of this tradition as it was promulgated among the Defenders, a Catholic secret society in prerebellion Ireland, see Elliott, “The Defenders in Ulster” 223 and Whelan, “United Irishmen” 274.

7. In Latin American national tales, Sommer notes a strategic bid for legitimacy on the part of the creoles, who, “without proper genealogy to root them in the land … had at least to establish conjugal, and then paternity rights, making a generative rather than genealogical claim” (15, emphasis in original). Yet such a strategy obviously does not eliminate the possibility of competing generative claims. Margot Gayle Backus has explored the affective implications of Anglo-Irish claims to inheritance. While she is interested in demonstrating that “the Anglo-Irish child is responsible for upholding an irrational belief in the legitimacy of the family’s claim to land and power in Ireland,” I am more interested in how the competing claims of inheritance might make legitimacy a less than useful category in post-Union Ireland (87).

8. See also T. O. McLoughlin’s comments that Rackrent “can be read as a rambling maudlin account of colonial-style living, or as a narrative which through irony becomes an anti-colonial critique of the way the English have subverted Ireland’s Catholic gentry” (194). Likewise, Daniel Hack comments that the novel “votes in favor of Union, but makes it inconceivable” (150). Susan Egenolf has noted that “the aim of the novel becomes to replace the monolithic traditional history with a dialogic narrative whose meaning the reader constructs” (55).

9. See Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland 113–14.

10. No consensus exists among twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish historians about the extent to which the British government’s widespread procurement of sinecures and blatant bribes for Irish members of Parliament in exchange for votes was business as usual for a government that considered borough seats the private property of the landed proprietor, nor do they agree as to what extent it was bald corruption for a British government already invested in eliminating patronage and jobbery. I mention this controversy only to underscore my point that Union passed in an environment in which it both was and was not a procedure along the lines of a buyout of property in exchange for political sovereignty. Patrick Geoghegan encapsulates this ambivalence in his explanation that “[w]hile it was generally accepted that seats were a form of personal property the [British] ministers were aware that compensating borough proprietors for their abolition would raise unwelcome allegations of corruption against them” (38). James Quinn argues that the British policy of borough compensation was business as usual, and he quotes Cornwallis on being sickened by the policy of bribery he carried out in the service of Union (see esp 104–5).

11. Along these lines, Gilbert and Gubar suggest that this substitution of colonizer’s voice for colonized might be a gesture of solidarity between the women and the tenants rendered equally helpless to an unfair patriarchal structure (150). Eagleton similarly muses that Edgeworth’s adoption of Thady’s voice acknowledges a shared and ambivalent subordination between upper-class woman and house servant (Heathcliff 161).

12. Such a tradition begins with Thomas Flanagan’s identification of Castle Rackrent as the first Irish novel (6–7). See also Cahalan, The Irish Novel 1, 7.

13. Critics read in Thady an intrinsic colonial duplicity that makes him both sycophantically stupid and uncannily sly as the family retainer. His exposure of his lords’ improvident idiocy demonstrates both his guileless loyalty and his flair for subtle sabotage. For a succinct summary of the debate on Thady’s intention, see Corbett, Allegories of Union 39–40.

14. David Lloyd contests this interpretation of Irish history as uniquely violent and thus uniquely resistant to novelization, pointing out that the French novel is considered to have reached its apex in the nineteenth century, in the midst of profound upheaval (127–30).

15. Indeed, the Rackrents were at one time a Catholic family, meaning that they arose from either Irish or Old English stock, and yet in the novel they come to stand for Anglo-Irish ascendancy at its worst.

16. See also Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth 368–69.

17. Edgeworth presents her father’s actions as an exchange “contributing to the melioration of the inhabitants of the country, from which [he] drew [his] subsistence,” and she notes the goal’s accomplishment: “Altogether, he was fit to live in Ireland and to accomplish his own wish of meliorating the condition of his own people” (Memoirs 1, 37).

18. Bhabha argues that colonial discourse hews to a white, Christian, rational identity that is always already compromised by its violent trespass into nonwhite, non-Christian countries. As an example, he cites V. S. Naipaul’s mimic men as natives who in their desire to embrace colonial culture emerge as “almost the same but not white” masqueraders, exposing the inauthenticity of colonial authority; the authority is revealed as arbitrary, independent of white Englishness since white Englishness can be learned by those who are neither white nor English (89). According to Bhabha, “The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (88, emphasis in original). Bhabha’s influential argument that colonial discourse always contains within it the seeds of its own disintegration requires an understanding of colonial discourse as relentlessly, explicitly, and unironically insisting upon its own authority, easily “stricken by an indeterminacy,” as if the advantages of ambivalence and irony were apparent only to the colonized (86).

19. In her 1812 Irish tale, The Absentee, which I do not discuss, Edgeworth arguably does craft a narrative in which an Irish landlord (or rather, landlord to-be) gains knowledge of Ireland and of estate management through careful study rather than through any sort of event of dispossession. However, that novel shares affinity with Edgeworth’s nonfictional and nationally unspecific Essays on Professional Education (1809). Her next novel, Patronage (1813), set in Britain, shares similar affinities with Essays and, before Edgeworth conceded to her father’s editing suggestions, had originally featured The Absentee’s plot-line as a subplot. The Absentee’s Irish setting, then, seems to be more an occasion for Edgeworth to develop a narrative of professional development than to comment specifically on Union.

20. For a broad overview of these developments, see S. J. Connolly, “Union Government” and R. B. McDowell, “Administration and the Public Services.”

21. Flanagan bases this pronouncement on Edgeworth’s 1834 comment “It is now impossible to draw Ireland as she now is in a book of fiction.” Eagleton uses this same comment to explain Edgeworth’s failure to produce any more Irish novels, although she makes the comment seventeen years after the publication of Ormond, her last Irish novel (176).

22. For Edgeworth’s late-life disappointment in the failure of her own tenants to be deferential to landlord rule, see Butler, Maria Edgeworth 452–53.

CHAPTER TWO: The Forbearance of the State

1. Mark Tunick (587, 588) rounds up recent criticisms of Mill’s imperialist thinking, including his “championing” of despotism, his willingness to “impose the individualist liberal values of his England on the rest of the world,” his advocacy of cultural assimilation, and a general undercurrent of racism in his writing.

2. While she is not interested in attributing to Mill the notion that character operated as a form of property in her later work, Hadley also takes the notion as a given of Victorian culture in her later work Living Liberalism (see 98, 238).

3. In addition to Carlisle’s work, which pays attention to Mill’s newspaper writing on Ireland, E. D. Steele’s two seminal articles on “J. S. Mill and the Irish Question” are interested primarily in discussing Mill’s engagement as part of a larger Irish history. Lynn Zastoupil’s “Moral Government: J. S. Mill on Ireland” explores Mill’s engagement with Ireland as a part of his more general attitudes toward empire, and especially toward India. Mary Jean Corbett’s Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870 provides a narrative of Mill’s engagement with Ireland as a counterpoint to Matthew Arnold’s. Bruce Kinzer’s England’s Disgrace? provides the most exhaustive treatment of John Stuart Mill’s thinking on Ireland but devotes more attention to how Ireland affected Mill’s economic thinking than to how it might have influenced his most canonical political work.

4. See my discussion of this concept in the introduction.

5. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy (1817), and J. R. McCulloch’s Principles of Political Economy (1825), all earlier standard texts of classical political economy, focused on questions of profit and value, assuming a Lockean view of property without ever addressing the concept with its own chapter.

6. For an account of the sources feeding Mill’s overview of propertied relationships to land, see Dewey, “Rehabilitation of the Peasant Proprietor.” See also Kinzer, England’s Disgrace? chap 3.

7. Mill made this maxim from Young so integral to almost all his arguments about property in land that by 1876 J. A. Froude referred to it as Mill’s own particular gospel: “The magic of property, as Mr. Mill long since pointed out, will turn an arid waste into a garden” (“Landed Gentry” 680). So closely does Mill continue to be associated with the idea that one need look no further than Google to find copious misattributions of the slogan to Mill rather than to Young.

8. For an extended reading of the instabilities Mill generates in trying to argue for the existence of an Irish character produced by historical circumstances, see Carlisle, John Stuart Mill esp 145–56.

9. See Kinzer, England’s Disgrace? 86 and Steele, “Reform” esp 423, 431. Lynn Zastoupil rounds up several arguments on the radicalism of “England and Ireland” in “Moral Government.”

10. The Irish nationalist rhetoric of a prior history of communal property thrived both before and after Maine’s initial work was written. Paul Bew quotes Parnell in 1881 stating that British holdings had been confiscated of the whole of the Irish people since all “held the land in joint ownership with the chieftains” (20). Charles Gavan Duffy, in The League of North and South (1886), also repeats as conventional wisdom the idea that “the peasantry had a living claim as the descendants of those who had owned the land in common with the Celtic chiefs and had been wrongfully deprived of their property” (qtd in Steele, Irish Land 19). Likewise, the Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association declares “The Tanistry laws of Ireland, embodied in the Brehon code, made every member of the sept joint owner of the land during his lifetime” (qtd in Bull 70). The National Land League of Mayo’s “Declaration of Principles” included a quote from Mill’s “England and Ireland” (Davitt 160).

CHAPTER THREE: Native Property

1. Clare Pettit quotes this to nice effect in Patent Inventions 22. She is among the critics who see this paradox as alarming the Victorians. However, she suggests that some Victorians looked to the model of patent licensing for a much more flexible, less contradictory way to think about intellectual property.

2. For one account of this ideal of property ownership, see Klein, “Property and Politeness.” See also Fulford, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority, and Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History esp chapter 3.

3. See Simpson esp chapter 5 for an account of the long history of this tendency in English legal thought. For an account of Blackstone’s specific tendency to reify property rights, see Kennedy esp 317–46. See also Gordon esp 100–101. Mark Rose offers a discussion of how the reification of property shapes the copyright debates in Authors and Owners esp 90–92. For a discussion of how Blackstone’s sense of the thingness of property translated into a popular preoccupation with the visible boundaries of land, see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common esp 97–184.

4. On Blackstone’s marriage of liberal theories of property with the deep history of English law, see Boorstin, Mysterious Science of Law.

5. Qtd in Underkuffler 131. Underkuffler also cites Charles Reich’s article “The New Property” for his assertion that “[p]roperty draws a circle around the activities of each private individual. … Within that circle, the owner has a greater degree of freedom than without. Outside, he must justify or explain his actions, and show his authority. Within, he is master, and the state must explain and justify any interference” (n 31).

6. Drawing on the moral philosophy of the time, scholars of eighteenth-century literature have since the 1990s made a case for the existence of a commercial pattern of personhood that was more about circulation than any stable experience of property or personhood. See Gallagher, Nobody’s Story; Lynch, The Economy of Character; and Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion.

7. Here I am telling the story of one moment in which the idea of property as the vessel of a communal heritage emerged, for specific historical reasons, as a plausible way to think about ownership. I do not mean to imply that the Romantic era in England saw the first and only shift of this sort in thinking about property, nor do I mean to imply that only the Victorians were troubled by conflicting narratives of property. Wolfram Schmidgen’s rich Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, for instance, makes the case for an eighteenth-century tradition of property proceeding from “a communal imagination that closely aligns persons and things” (1). This would mean that even during the eighteenth-century in which Republican landownership was celebrated as allowing for a unique form of individual independence, a counter-tradition existed that did not so sharply distinguish controlling owner from the inanimate material that was his property.

8. See Easby, “Myth of Merrie England,” and Mandler, Fall and Rise of the Stately Home.

9. Elizabeth Helsinger suggests that both Clare’s and Constable’s representations suggested ways out of an atomizing vision of possessive individualism. See Rural Scenes and National Representations esp chapters 1 and 4.

10. These visions were quite specifically English, and no equivalent representations of the Scottish land circulated as a reminder of a landed tradition that might be considered not just Scottish but British. However, Scotland’s increasing profile as a tourist destination for the English—and ultimately the summer home of the royal family—did establish it in the popular mind as land that was available for the enjoyment of a British subject at large. That Scottish tourism was associated with hunting made it the literal site of customary communal property, given game’s status as exceptional property, both exclusive to the aristocracy but available to them regardless on whose estate the quarry might be found. See Colley, Britons 158–72.

11. See Poovey, Uneven Developments esp chapter 4.

12. No laws made the entail of an estate compulsory. The laws enforcing primogeniture only made it compulsory in the case of an owner dying without a will. There were almost no cases of major landholders dying intestate.

13. This notion of property was not labeled as a “bundle of rights” when it emerged. U.S. legal scholar Wesley Hohfield is credited with creating the paradigm through his legal work separating out the meanings of rights, privileges, powers, and immunities, which he argued could be paired with their opposites—duties, disabilities, and liabilities. Subsequent theorists on property law sometimes applied Hohfield’s vocabulary when they broke down the idea of property into separate attributes, such as the right to exchange or the right to occupy. Other theorists used his framework to argue that “property” as a concept had no intrinsic qualities that made it separate from any set of rights created by contract. The debate over whether property marks out specific types of rights or whether it is now simply an anachronistic category that should be subsumed under contract law continues among legal scholars. A. M. Honore’s essay “Ownership” is considered the classical defense of property’s stable attributes: he enumerates eleven key ingredients that are featured in the overwhelming majority of cases of ownership. In a similar vein, Thomas Merrill and Henry E. Smith argue that property always denotes rights that can be said to be good against all the world—not just particular people. Arianna Pretto-Sakmann assembles a strikingly Blackstonian argument that even the modern law of property applies only to “rights in corporeal things enlarged to include those few ideational things capable of spatial identification” (vii). Kevin Gray argues that while no real set of attributes unifies property law, it is nonetheless useful to identify what falls under the category of “property” in order to be able to identify what is not propertizable under the law. On the other side of the debate, Thomas Grey’s article “The Disintegration of Property” is considered the canonical assertion that property as a category is essentially anachronistic and meaningless. For an account of Hohfield’s role in developing the idea of property as a bundle of rights, see Vandevelde, “The New Property of the Nineteenth Century,” and Heller, “Boundaries of Private Property.”

14. John Plotz (xv) also notes that these items’ status lie somewhere between fungible commodity and irreducibly unique artifact.

15. See Robbins, Upward Mobility esp 75–84. Robbins offers an earlier version of this same argument in “How to Be a Benefactor.”

16. Qtd in Jones, “Rethinking Chartism” 109; see also 110, 126–35. On the Chartists’ dependence on both constitutional and natural rights arguments, see Epstein, “The Constitutional Idiom.” See also Finn, After Chartism esp 61–104.

17. See Perkin, “Land Reform and Class Conflict.” See also Readman, Land and Nation.

18. Qtd in Tierney 371. For the broad background on O’Connell’s utilitarian nationalism, see also McGraw and Whelan, “Daniel O’Connell.”

19. It is one of the ironic features of this rhetoric of recovering old communal customary rights that the Ulster Custom, a practice cultivated among a group of Scottish-descended Presbyterians, was effortlessly grafted on to talk of ancient Irish septs and their communal property.

20. Parliament’s passage of the First Land Act marked an abrupt departure from almost a century of legislation designed to bring Irish land practices more into line with those in England—and which ultimately resulted in making land in Ireland more freely alienable than it was in Britain. In the 1840s the Devon commission, designed to inquire into the condition of Irish estates, dismissed Ulster Custom out of hand as an anomalous infringement on property rights that should be abolished. The commission’s recommendations resulted in the Unencumbered Estates Act of 1849, which aimed to break up the aristocratic monopoly by freeing impoverished landlords from a shared ownership across time. The act voided Irish entail, allowing estates to be liquidated to repay debts and ostensibly to be transferred to more responsible landlords. It was followed in 1860 by the Cardwell Act and Deasy’s Act, both of which were explicitly formulated to stave off shared synchronous ownership. The Cardwell Act emphasized the landlord’s ultimate control over the property, providing compensation on a tenant’s improvements only if the landlord had initially given consent for such improvement. Deasy’s Act reaffirmed the landlord’s absolute power over the land, emphasizing the purely contractual nature of his relationship to the tenant, by strengthening his power to eject for nonpayment. Cumulatively, the effect of legislation up until the First Land Act had been to make land more easily transferred than English estates. In England, absolute individual property in land finally won out over hereditary dictates in the 1882 Settled Land Acts. For an account of the Irish legislation, see Bull, Land, Politics, and Nationalism 44–46 and appendix, or Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War 175–77.

21. Significantly, Gladstone consulted with no Irish leaders, not even Irish members of parliament, in deciding on the content of either Land Act.

22. See Maine, Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (1874).

23. I do not mean to suggest that if we discard Maine’s explanatory framework, we need to dismiss any notion that tradition informed an Irish sense of land ownership. I am persuaded by historian Philip Bull’s more moderate position that there were indeed two competing views: the British view, committed to a rather static laissez-faire economics, and the Irish approach, “less anchored in historical structures” than nationalist rhetoric suggested “and more a product of reactions and responses to the impositions of landlord and government expectations.” Bull suggests that traditional forms of Irish property did indeed inform rural practices but that such influences were only one among many strands making up the “interplay of traditional practice, historical perception, myth, and the impact of contemporary and social forces” that shaped the Irish understanding of their relationship to property (10).

CHAPTER FOUR: The Wife of State

1. Castle Richmond 345. Most scholars’ interest in the novel has been to demonstrate the extent to which its mimetic content unsettles this pronouncement. See, for instance, Morash, Writing the Irish Famine 40–50; Corbett, Allegories 137–47; Nardin, “Castle Richmond” 88–89; and Matthews-Kane, “Love’s Labour Lost.”

2. Trollope’s tactics also depart from the ornate period details of Walter Scott and, to a lesser extent, Benjamin Disraeli’s odd mix of national and international ethnography.

3. On British women abolitionists, see Ferguson, “British Women Writers.”

4. Can You 2:362. Of course, the narrator qualifies this description of Palliser’s generous sentiment toward Glencora in the next sentence, explaining, “But when she asked for a favour, he was always afraid of an imprudence. Very possibly she might want to drink beer in an open garden” (2:362–63). Such a qualification suggests Palliser’s trepidation that what Glencora might actually enjoy has nothing at all to do with his property.

5. See also Griffin, “Class, Gender, and Liberalism” 80. For an account of the sorts of lawsuits to which women’s inability to contract subjected husbands, see Finn, “Women, Consumption, and Coverture.”

6. Such occasions include the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which made divorce available without an act of Parliament; John Stuart Mill’s 1866 presentation of the Women’s Suffrage Bill to Parliament; the 1869 Municipal Corporations Act, which allowed single, property-owning women to vote in local elections; the First Married Women’s Property Act (1870), the Amendment to Married Women’s Property Act (1874); and the Married Women’s Property Act (1882). All these controversies involved prolonged discussion about how exactly women would or would not conduct themselves if accorded new political privileges.

7. For a discussion of the gendered aspects of the Union-as-marriage analogy, see Corbett, Allegories of Union. On the trope in Trollope’s Palliser novels particularly, see also Dougherty, “An Angel in the House,” and Frank, “Trial Separations.”

8. Phineas Finn’s imprisonment provides another example of Trollope’s vision of government as a vicarious experience that can be just as confining as wifehood. The problem of how Finn will support himself while he is in Parliament is solved by his imprisonment. Hoping that a paid government position will solve his financial straits, he no longer has to worry about his living expenses once he is incarcerated—either option leaves him bound and dependent on the state.

9. Annie Besant points out in her 1879 pamphlet on marriage reform that “[i]n Austria … wives retain their rights over their own property” (29).

CHAPTER FIVE: At Home in the Public Domain

1. On the historicist underpinnings of the final Crofters legislation, see Dewey, “Celtic Agrarian Legislation.” See also Shaw, “Land, People, and Nation.”

2. Bailkin rounds up this list of groups in The Culture of Property, 11. Paul Redman’s Land and Nation in England does an excellent job providing the intertwined histories of these groups, whose particular moment in the history of thinking about property made them an unpredictable blend of historicism and abstract principle, free market liberalism, socialism, and “pure squire Conservatism” (11).

3. A. Arnold 189, 185. See also G. S. Woods’s entry on Arthur Arnold in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

4. Shaw-Lefevre esp 187, 230. Shaw-Lefevre registers his impatience with historicist thinking on 224–25.

5. For an overview of the 1842 Copyright Act, see Vanden Bossche, “The Value of Literature.” For an overview of the 1876–78 commission, see Saint-Amour, The Copywrights esp chapter 2. Brad Sherman and Lionel Bentley’s The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law also provides a valuable overview of how the developments in copyright dovetail with developments in patent law during the nineteenth century.

6. Alongside Grant Allen, the author Charles Reade was a vociferous defender of the natural right of an author to perpetual property in his creation. See Dicey, “The Copyright Question” esp 126, 133.

7. Frazier 115. For Moore’s relationship to Zola’s work, see esp chapters 3 and 4.

8. W. H. Smith was also a lending library of significant size. They purchased only twenty-five copies of A Modern Lover. Moore’s outrage, however, was aimed almost exclusively at Mudie’s, the bigger library.

9. His labeling of Mudie’s as “nursemaid” happens in his pamphlet “Literature at Nurse?” published months before A Drama in Muslin began to appear in serial form. Moore categorizes the Land League as “political parasites” sustained by “nursemaids in America” in Parnell and His Island (56), which he wrote immediately after Drama in Muslin.

10. See Dolin, Mistress of the House; see also Marcus “Clio in Calliope.”

11. See Elam, “We Pray to Be Defended.” Meredith began writing the novel as a serial in 1883, publishing it in its full form only in 1885. The preceding fifteen years had seen the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, which allowed wives to retain property in earnings, investments, and willed legacies under 200 pounds. The 1882 Married Women’s Property Act allowed women to contract for their own property, although not, significantly, for their own persons. See Shanley esp 105–29. The Third Reform Act, which passed in 1884, ensured that anyone who held land worth over 10 pounds or rented a household for 10 pounds a year could vote. This still left some of of the male population disenfranchised. Since the Municipal Corporations Act of 1869 had given propertied women the right to vote in local elections, this means that women might even exercise some of the privileges of property that a large portion of the male population did not have.

12. Critics both contemporary and Victorian wax irritable over this discrepancy in Meredith’s novel. An unsigned review in the June 1, 1885, edition of the Times notes that Meredith’s treatment of Diana’s control over the Crossways gives the novel a “distinctly modern” tone even though it is supposed to be set fifty years in the past. Gillian Beer accuses Meredith of being carelessly anachronistic with his treatment of property in the novel (145).

13. He mentioned to several people during the course of the novel’s composition that it was based on Caroline Norton, a resemblance contemporary critics picked up on. In later editions of the book in the 1890s, however, at the behest of friends of the late Norton, who objected to the perpetuation of the rumor that she was responsible for leaking Prime Minister Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws to the press, Meredith inserted a disclaimer at the opening of the book disavowing the resemblance: “A lady of high distinction for wit and beauty, the daughter of an illustrious Irish House, came under the shadow of a calumny. It has latterly been examined and exposed as baseless. The story of Diana of the Crossways is to be read as fiction.”

14. Chapter 3 of Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments documents the contradictory tactics used by Norton in calling attention to the injustice of the divorce laws at the time. Elaine Hadley uses Norton as an extended example of the melodramatic tactics that the marginalized used to gain a hearing in Victorian England (Melodramatic Tactics esp 140–77).

15. Diana 285. The mechanism that would make this possible—the establishment of the property in trust for Diana, under the laws of equity—was almost never used for a property of the small size that the Crossways seems to be.

16. Meredith met Katherine O’Shea while he worked reading aloud for her aunt, Mrs. Wood. As a good friend of several leading liberal MPs, he would have been familiar with the affair, although it was not widespread public knowledge. See Marcus, “Clio in Calliope” 22, and Dolin, Mistress of the House 122 n 4.

17. See Stone, George Meredith’s Politics 109–10.

18. One of Prime Minister Robert Peel’s justifications for finally repealing the Corn Laws in 1846 was that it would allow for the cheap importation of food into an Ireland already feeling the first effects of the potato crop failure. See Hilton on the sacrificial rhetoric that structured anti–Corn Law arguments.

19. Egeria, in Roman mythology, was the nymph or goddess who acted as adviser to Numa Pompilius, one of the first Roman kings.

20. While Cain and Hopkin argue that manufacturing power never gained the political power attributed to it in nineteenth-century England, Howe and Hilton still make a convincing case that the rise of industry was the story the nineteenth century told itself about the transformation of its own economy.

21. The addition of this vocabulary seems quite calculated on Meredith’s part. Comparing the serialization of the tale in the 1883 Fortnightly Review to the significantly revised 1885 novel version, Meredith bibliographer Michael Collie observes that the late revisions “reduce the importance of the topical allusions to the repeal of the Corn Laws” (54). J. S. Stone speculates the revisions were made to enhance the book’s modern appeal: “Corn Law Repeal was practically a forgotten issue in 1885, whereas Irish agitations were very much a current political problem” (100). But it would be inaccurate to describe the novel as reducing allusions to the Corn Laws in order to foreground Ireland. In adapting his serial into a novel, Meredith makes considerably more references to both repeal of the Corn Laws and Ireland, references that often appear together. In the novel, Diana studies economic questions surrounding the Corn Laws in chapter 4, an undertaking never mentioned in the serial. Diana and Dacier discuss both the Corn Laws and Ireland in the novel long before repeal comes into view. In the couple’s first conversation alone together at Lugano, the novel details political content to their conversation while the serial includes only a personal exchange (chapter 14 in the serial, chapter 15 in the novel). Chapter 22 in the novel contains an encounter between the pair that never takes place in the serial, an encounter where the twin specters of Irish distress and Corn Law agitation are invoked. Chapter 21 in the novel (which contains much of the material from Chapter 17 in the serial version) contains details of Diana’s advice to both Redworth and Dacier on the subject of Ireland that were not included in the serial.

22. For Meredith’s belief in his Celtic roots, see Jones, The Amazing Victorian 211.

23. So far as biographers can determine, Meredith visited Wales only once in his lifetime. See Stevenson, The Ordeal of George Meredith 281, and Jones, The Amazing Victorian 211.