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

Patent Inventions is a fascinating meditation on a largely overlooked, arguably repressed nineteenth-century discourse that analogized the inventor and the author. In order to develop a clear trajectory for the Romantic notion of authorship, which sought to remove aesthetics from any humbling association with labor, scholars have neglected this discourse, which emphasized continuity between mechanical or manual and aesthetic or intellectual production. Pettitt restores it to historical record and, in doing so, offers a considerably enriched sense of the complex rhetorical negotiations that went into developing the Victorian identities of "author" and "inventor."

Most previous accounts of authorship have traced a discourse from Kant to George Gissing bent on protecting aesthetics from the taint of the market, but Pettitt picks up another thread entirely in the debates over copyright and intellectual property rights. "The formation of a literary canon and the promulgation of an idea of literature as an elevated and 'special' form of writing did not happen in a vacuum, as so much of the recent criticism treating the history of copyright law implies," Pettitt writes, "but, in fact, took place as part of a much wider reconceptualization of labour, and particularly of mental labour" (2). In debates over copyright and patent law, the commonalities between mechanical and artistic production were sometimes minimized or denied, to be sure, but were at other times celebrated and embraced.

The first and most successful half of Patent Inventions focuses on two moments when the rhetorical identities of literary author and mechanical inventor most overlapped: the late 1830s and early 1850s. In the late 1830s, figures like Sergeant Talfourd struggled repeatedly to get a copyright bill through the Commons that would give authors rights vis-à-vis their publishers while, at the same time, others were attempting to reform the patent law so as to better protect the rights of mechanical inventors. Pettitt explains that, despite the differences between these two campaigners, "when a particular rhetorical strategy appeared successful for one group, the other lost no time in borrowing it" (38). Combing through Chambers', Saturday Magazine, Chartist Circular, Poor Man's Guardian, Mechanics' Magazine, Blackwood's, Penny Magazine, Frasers', as well as pamphlets and speeches from this period, Pettitt masterfully analyzes the twists and turns of a debate in which conservatives and liberals often drew on the same tropes to make opposing arguments. Carefully historicizing the debate, she gives literary scholars fresh insights into class politics.

The next two chapters on the 1850s, the first on the Great Exhibition and the second on the Indignities of Literature controversy, yield many original insights. The Exhibition chapter, for example, is an important corrective to Thomas Richards's influential account in Commodity Culture of Victorian England (1991). Richards argued that the Crystal Palace was an homage to consumption, but by "pausing to consider just what it was possible to learn from" the Exhibition, Pettitt reminds us that production processes—and not just their final products—were also showcased (91). The Palace was, in other words, as much a modern factory as a shopping mall. Pettitt demonstrates the degree to which both skilled artisans and artists were represented in the modern terms of the professional. The Exhibition, she explains, displayed a "shift in expertise from the consumer . . . to a professional expertise about production technologies that guaranteed consistent quality" (98).

In her discussion of the Exhibition Pettitt first makes claims about a tension between copies and originals that increasingly preoccupies her in the last half of Patent Inventions. While it makes sense that a book linking such disparate discourses as patent law for mechanical engineers and representations of weaving in Silas Marner (1861) might rely on such a tension as an organizing thread, this emphasis also tends to generate more predictable conclusions than those offered in the first half of the book. The book's second half makes a number of generalizations about "anxiety" in a "debased commodity culture" (110), and, too often, Pettitt's readings...