Authorship, Ownership, and the Case for Charles Anderson Chester

In his 1955 bibliography for the Philadelphia writer George Lippard, Roger Butterfield mentions the little-known pamphlet novel Life and Adventures of Charles Anderson Chester (1849) as "an imitation by another hand"—which is to say, as the labor of an author other than Lippard, and in effect as lifted from Lippard's more fully realized 1850 novel The Killers.¹ Both narratives recount Philadelphia's election-night race riots of October 1849, and both do so in sensational fashion. Moreover, the two texts do indeed share, verbatim, extended passages that make comparisons between them inevitable and the charge of plagiarism compelling. Following the lead of Phil Lapsansky, Research Librarian at the Library Company of Philadelphia,² I nevertheless maintain that Lippard did in fact write Chester.

I contend further that the case in question is symptomatic of changing standards in literary production, and reception, at America's mid-nineteenth century. For not only do the circumstances informing Chester's printedness help clarify bibliographic matters of its attribution; they also reveal just how flexible were the categories of authorship, and thus ownership, and hence attribution, too, within the framework of an antebellum print culture in which collaborative composition had become the rule, and isolated acts of individual creation figured as exceptions. Quite simply, period literary practices transformed the creative act itself. At a vital, if volatile, time in the American past, "creation" ever more lost certain of its traditional romantic connotations, chief among them lingering ideals of original "inspiration," poetic invention, and the definitive, independent, and independently attributable utterance of a commanding seer-sayer.³ In their place emerged "creative" acts like those involving Chester.

Chester's appearance highlights a different aspect of romanticism. It was and is one that recommends the entire artistic process, rather than any finished literary product, as a legitimate work of art.⁴ Crucially, Chester reveals how this process continued all the way to, through, and past publication and, further, how the progress of this artisanal process relied foremost on an assembled team of "originators." Lippard, like so many others affiliated with the popular press, functioned within what Robert Darnton has called a "communications circuit." Central to that circuit was the mutual interdependence of an assorted group of writers, publishers, printers, readers, and merchandising middlemen—the virtual simultaneity of whose collective endeavors challenged the very notion of autonomous expression, let alone exclusive print-proprietorship.⁵Chester's back pages epitomize this shift from the romantically singular to the emphatically (and democratically) plural.

They demonstrate as well that the combined forces of Chester's varied participants invite an altered conception of what we mean by "originative." Surrounded from the start by a coterie of able abettors, Lippard did not so much initiate a literary act when he sat down to pen this particular pamphlet novel; he instead drew from a preexisting source of common subject matter that he happened upon after the fact, in more ways than one. A native Pennsylvanian, Lippard had moved to the metropolis in his youth, working when and where he could as an orphaned, often unemployed adolescent. He reached the formative age of fifteen in 1837 just as the country slipped into a severe economic recession, and just as many city laborers had begun to exchange more conventional modes of labor organizing for the kinds of radical street protests that would convert Lippard to the working man's cause. Time spent as a vagabond journalist followed, and it was a brief apprenticeship. Lippard progressed in a few years' time from being an able reporter-observer of municipal affairs with an abiding interest in the labor question, to standing tall as one of the era's leading authors of popular city-fiction—from which heights he deepened, rather than curtailed, his involvement in working-class advocacy.⁶

Chester, predictably, derives from a high-profile contemporary incident involving Philadelphia's disadvantaged classes, an incident that already had been much reported on by area newspapermen and much talked about by pedestrians on city streets for some days prior to the time when Lippard's own involvement in this socio...