Gifts of Scholarship

Richly embellished with trailing golden borders, the colours burning across each small frame on the sheaf of white pages, the manuscript of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience presented by E. M. Forster to King's College, Cambridge on 9 January 1959 was certainly a considerable gift. Arguably the most exquisite version of the Songs, it is deemed 'priceless'; other extant copies of the Songs were last sold at auction for around $1 million. The book's provenance offers a little study in the contested nature of gifts, sales, and reciprocity. Forster had willed it to the college, but he decided instead to give it in his lifetime, 'on the occasion of a luncheon given by the college in honour of his eightieth birthday'. He had received it from his aunt, Laura Mary Forster, who inherited it from her father, who was given it by Bishop Jebb of Limerick, who had given the widowed Catherine Blake 20 guineas. But whether this 20 guineas was payment for the book, or whether it was the inspiration of her grateful return 'gift' of the manuscript, said to be 'Blake's own', was a biographically debated point. Laura Mary Forster, for her part, remembering conversations from the 1880s, insisted that Mrs Blake had 'wished the Bishop to accept it not as a work of art, but as a token of gratitude', even adding the twining gold decorations to the pages herself, because 'her gratitude was so great.'¹

A certain French sociologist might have encouraged her to look at this contrariety differently. Around the same time that E. M. Forster's aunt sent this letter, Marcel Mauss set out his beguilingly simple thesis: that gifts are not free. At the start of his 'Essai sur le don' (1924) he declared that in many societies, 'exchanges and contracts take place in the form of presents; in theory these are voluntary, in reality they are given and reciprocated obligatorily' (p. 3).² His essay, a mere 100 pages in a modern edition, ranges from the practices of American Indians, Melanesians, and Polynesians to philological discussion of Scandinavian epic and Roman, Hindu, and German law. Mauss writes with a frank curiosity about his topic that remains compelling, even infectious: 'What rule of legality or self-interest ...compels the gift that has been received to be obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?' (p. 4). His answers are richly philosophical, touching on the nature of social relations and of capitalism: in summary, he argues that 'things' are imbued with the spirit of persons, and giving and returning occurs because of a deep sense of collective dependency – and interpersonal antagonism. Although his work has inevitably been criticised (for instance for being based on 'armchair' anthropology), anthropology as a discipline grew out of this text, and no modern ethnologist can avoid considering the meaning of gifts and exchanges in the societies she or he studies.

The Gift's canonical status in anthropology has not been matched with equal interest from literary studies, though there have been various points of engagement with Mauss's luminous essay, especially following Derrida's work on the gift in the 1990s. Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983), reissued with the subtitle Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (2007), helped bring Mauss's ideas to a broader literary audience, while monographs on the Romantic period drawing on Mauss have included Charles Rzepka's Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (1995), Simon Jarvis's Wordsworth's Philosophic Song (2009), and Matthew Rowlinson's Real Money and Romanticism (2010). Many literary scholars will have first encountered gift theory through French post-structuralism. Mauss's anthropology shaped much of the mid-twentieth-century work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Bataille, in turn inspiration and antagonism for Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida. In Outline of a Theory of Practice (trans...