Wordsworth, Galignani, and the Aesthetics of Piracy

This article examines the complicated production history of Galignani's 1828 pirated edition of Wordsworth's Works. It demonstrates, with particular reference to two forms of the work held in the Bodleian library, Oxford, that the 1828 edition was in fact reissued several times up until c.1850, and considers the aesthetic and authorial anxieties that this sale engenders in Wordsworth. Weaving together the concerns of pirate and poet, it considers the ways in which Galignani's democratisation of Wordsworth forces the poet to respond in new ways to the burgeoning nineteenth-century reading public, and explores how this affects the physical make up of his own one volume edition of his Poems (1845).