Romantic Forgery

Romanticism is not what it used to be. The Romanticism of thirty years ago—of Abrams and Hartman, De Man and Wasserman—has been thoroughly routed by a critical pincer movement. The “Big Six” were outflanked by women poets, Goths, and dramatists, while from the other side, pressure was exerted by “print culture,” which is to say, by traditional book history energized by theory, especially the sociological ones of Jürgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu. Print culture itself can be broken down into two camps, into those studies that begin with plagiarism and forgery, and those that start with numbers. As a result of the pioneering work of bibliographers and historians of the book, such as Peter Garside, James Raven, Rainer Schöwerling, and William St. Clair, numbers have been made to tell. ¹ In their magisterial The English Novel, 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (2000), Raven, Garside, and Schöwerling personally inspected, tested, and cataloged virtually every novel published in the period 1770–1829. With such reliable data, numbers could be crunched, thus facilitating a shift in analysis from the traditional concern with quality, to quantity, from a concern with persons—or “personality,” as the Romanticists themselves put it—to systems. Out go lyric and the pursuit of depth (in the behaviors of individuals) as the abiding concerns shaping the narrative of Romanticism, and in their place comes an interest in the fluctuations of genres and disciplines driven by the revolutionary consequences of publishing in industrial quantities. ²

Studies focusing on plagiarism and forgery take as their point of departure the long-term effects, largely ideological in nature, of the various copyright laws introduced or modified in the course of the eighteenth century. ³ Copyright placed a premium on originality as a commodity that could be identified, protected, and sold. As a consequence, a legal regime came into conflict with the facts of literary art. The very concept of genre implies the presence of a host of previous works that makes any individual exemplar possible. Driven by copyright laws, and coalescing around the ideal of “original genius,” emerging definitions of literary property suppressed the intertextual reality of writing. Conflicts naturally developed: between oral culture, with its easy and natural assumption of collective authorship, and an emerging literary marketplace outside coterie culture, where “originality” became the mark of marketable difference; between those profiting from this new literary marketplace, through “mechanical” reproduction, and those wishing to protect the cachet of the emerging category of the “literary” by insisting on the distinction the category conferred upon the initiated; and between those inside the market, whether high or low, and those outside, who exploited the conceptual instabilities of the new system through what became known as “forgery.” Naturally, in this last conflict, the market won. While literary forgery may seem a self-evident category to post-Romantic generations, to pre-Romantic ones, calling a piece of writing produced for the purposes of entertainment a “forgery” was to turn a conspicuous metaphor, one drawn from the fields of numismatics and law; to liken acts of fiction to the counterfeiting of coins or the imitating of signatures strained comparison. For those focusing on the topic, forgery is not so much the dirty secret of Romanticism, some repressed disgrace needing to be dragged out to face the light of day, but the natural and inevitable consequence of material changes to the literary marketplace. The real story of forgery was not that there was so much of it throughout the eighteenth century, a thickly populated “house of forgery,” but that there came to be comparatively little, later on, a development attesting to the final naturalization of the forgery metaphor and the completion of a particular form of cultural work. When Walpole quipped, apropos of Chatterton, that all in the house of forgery were one, he knew he was speaking figuratively; when W.H. Ireland was accused of forging Shakespeare, the metaphor was quite forgotten in the stampede to have him hanged.

Studies of...