Asking what defined plagiarism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain is another way of asking what defined Romanticism. The central claim of this study is that the relationship was constitutive. The stakes in Romantic-period charges of plagiarism were aesthetic, and the contemporary debates regarding the legitimacy or illegitimacy of particular literary obligations masked a larger contest about how to come to critical judgment. But what did plagiarism mean for readers and writers in Georgian Britain? And what defined the success or failure of a literary work in the period that we have come to call Romanticism?...

The critical tradition surrounding Romantic-period plagiarism has been almost exclusively focused on the transgressions of a single poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and one of the claims of this book is the contention that such silent literary appropriations were far more widespread and common among writers of the period and were viewed according to historically distinct standards of intellectual property. However, it is worth considering at the outset why Coleridge’s particular borrowings have sparked such controversy and sustained interest. That Coleridge’s debts to other writers are substantial is undeniable. They were catalogued piecemeal for readers as early as the nineteenth century,...

The idea of literary property in the Romantic period, as in the present moment, depends upon a legal and rhetorical principle that is essentially a contradiction. At the heart of both plagiarism and copyright is the belief that a text is simultaneously public and private or, more precisely, is simultaneously offered to the public on the condition of continued private ownership. This concurrency was resolved as a matter of copyright law early in the eighteenth century and was, for obvious reasons, welcomed by authors and booksellers as a means of circulating their productions while retaining title to them. However, this...

Although the critical tradition has focused primarily on the plagiarisms of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron was the Romantic figure whose intellectual debts were most familiar to his contemporaries. Over the course of his career, Byron was publicly or semi-publicly charged with plagiarism on numerous occasions, and, as with Coleridge, his friends and intimates uncovered for the popular press additional obligations in the decades after his death. The scandal surrounding Byron’s plagiarisms was perpetuated vigorously by the periodical press as part of a sustained literary attack on his reputation as a poet, and this history reveals the extent to which...

This chapter focuses primarily on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s relationship to plagiarism and issues of literary property, and his inclusion in this study perhaps merits some particular attention because Shelley’s borrowings, unlike those of his contemporaries, were not the subject of sustained public controversy. He did borrow, often extensively, from the language of other writers, and the possibility of being accused of illegitimate appropriation was a source of concern for him as a writer, especially in the later years of his career. However, while scholars have identified and occasionally labeled as plagiarisms his borrowings in texts such as the juvenile Original...

In an 1817 letter, William Wordsworth wrote to his correspondent Henry Crabb Robinson that Lord Byron “ha[d] been poaching on my Manor” in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (LWDW 3: 394), and Wordsworth’s metaphor merits further consideration for what it implies about the relationship among literary property, professional authorship, and social class. The class inversion Wordsworth’s statement performs is striking: here the professional Wordsworth casts himself as the lord of the literary estate and charges the aristocratic Byron with crass appropriations that are figuratively beyond the pale. While Wordsworth intended his remark dismissively and even sardonically, it nevertheless encapsulates significant elements of...

Throughout the course of this study, I have argued that writers of the British Romantic period were invested deeply in models of appropriation, assimilation, and narrative or lyric mastery over the text of another, despite their conventional critical association with the values of autogenous originality and with what Paul K. Saint-Amour calls, in a typical formulation, “the Romantic cult of the individual genius” (6). My approach has been to read the history of plagiarism in the late eighteenth and, especially, early nineteenth centuries for what it tells us about how these authors engaged with the processes of literary borrowing and...