Culture and the copy: Calico, capitalism, and design copyright in early Victorian Britain

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 43, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 233-265

  Kriegel, Lara ^a  

^a FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 45749103073     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/380951     Document Type: Article

References (147)

1. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York, 1996)
2. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), pp 217-52
3. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, pp. 211, 140
4. W. Cooke Taylor, "Copyright in Design," Art Union 27 (April 1841): 59-60
5. "A Day at a Lancashire Print-Work," Penny Magazine 12 (July 1843): 289-96, esp. 292
6. David Greysmith, "Patterns, Piracy and Protection in the Textile Printing Industry, 1787-1850," Textile History 14, no. 2 (1983): 165-94, esp. 165
7. These words are used in the introduction to The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, ed. Thomas Haskell and Richard Teichgraeber (New York, 1993), pp. 1-39, esp. p. 2
8. See also Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, 1986)
9. Influential works include the following: John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993)
10. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, 1996)
11. Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, N.J., 2000)
12. Mary Louise Roberts, "Gender, Consumption, and Community Culture," American Historical Review 103 (June 1998): 817-44
13. Lisa Tiersten, "Redefining Consumer Culture: Recent Literature on Consumption and the Bourgeoisie in Western Europe," Radical History Review 57 (Fall 1993): 116-59
14. and Judith R. Walkowitz, "Going Public: Shopping, Street Walking, and Street Harassment in Late-Victorian London," Representations 62 (Spring 1998): 1-30
15. For an important discussion of this schism and its effects, see Margot Finn, "Working-Class Women and the Contest for Consumer Control in Victorian County Courts," Past and Present, no. 161 (1998): 116-54
16. This phrase is Tim Burke's. See his Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, N.C., 1996), pp. 1-15, esp. p. 3, 116
17. Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York, 1983), chaps. 1, 5-6
18. See also Maxine Berg, "From Imitation to invention: Creating Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Britain," Economic History: Review 55 (Winter 2002): 1-30
19. The literature on the transformation of Europe's material landscape because of interaction with the East is vast. See, e.g., Maxine Berg, "New Commodities, Luxuries, and Their Consumers in Eighteenth-Century England," in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester, 1999), pp. 63-85
20. Nancy Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing (Aldershot, England, 2000), chap. 7
21. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997)
22. John E. Wills, Jr., "European Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods, pp. 133-47
23. Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture, and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660-1800 (New York, 1997), pp. 6-7
24. and Fashion's Favorite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1991), chaps. 1, 3
25. This fashion craze figures centrally in many discussions of the eighteenth century's consumer revolution. The past twenty years have witnessed a lively historiographical debate over the origins of and motivations for the rise of consumption. Influential discussions include Jean-Christophe Agnew, "Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective," in Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods, pp. 19-39
26. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, "Introduction," in Berg and Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850, pp. 1-16
27. Berg, "New Commodities, Luxuries, and their Consumers"
28. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, 1987)
29. Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold, "Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution," Social History 15 (May 1990): 151-79
30. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, Ind., 1982)
31. Cox, The Complete Tradesman, chap. 7, esp. pp. 198-202
32. See McKendrick, "The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England," pp. 9-33
33. and "The Commercialization of Fashion," pp. 34-99
34. Erin Mackie notes that the "discourse of fashion" took shape around the tum of the eighteenth century. This, incidentally, coincides with the calico craze. See her Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity and Gender in "The Toiler" and "The Spectator " (Baltimore, 1997), pp. 4, 13, 15,41,45
35. On anxiety about feminine consumption during this period, see Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects
36. From J. Roberts, The Spinster
37. as quoted in Geoffrey Turnbull, A History of the Calico Printing Industry of Great Britain, ed. John G. Turnbull (Altrincham, England, 1951), p. 21
38. Daniel Defoe, Weekly Review
39. as quoted in L. S. Wood and A. Wilmore, The Romance of the Cotton Industry in England (London, 1927), p. 46
40. Greysmith, "Patterns, Piracy and Protection," p. 165
41. Domestic woollen manufacturers engaged in a similar rhetorical maneuver when they contrasted "sturdy English woollen cloth" to "effeminate French silk." See John Styles, "Manufacturing, Consumption, and Design in Eighteenth-Century England," in Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods, pp. 527-54, esp. p. 541
42. Lemire, Fashion's Favourite, chaps. 1-2
43. A Calico Printer, A Letter to the Rt. Hon. Lord Althorp (London, 1831), p. 11
44. On the inefficacy of the laws, see Wills, "European Consumption and Asian Production," p. 137
45. Wood and Wilmore, Romance of the Cotton Industry, p. 48
46. Edmund Potter, Calico Printing as an Art Manufacture (London, 1852), p. 7
47. Sydney J. Chapman, The Lancashire Cotton Industry: A Study in Economic Development (Manchester, 1904), pp. 49-52
48. Turnbull, History of the Calico Printing Industry, p. 21
49. George O'Brien, The British Manufacturer's Companion, and Callico Printer's Assistant (London, 1795), n.p
50. On the cylinder, see A Person Concerned in the Trade, A Complete History of the Cotton Trade (Manchester, 1823), pp. 162-65
51. For a sense ofthe inventive activity around the printing trade, see the notices of patents in W. Newton, London Journal of Arts and Sciences; and Repertory of Patent Inventions (London, 1839-43)
52. See also John Styles, "What Was New? Georgian Britain, 1714-1837," in Design and the Decorative Arts: Britain, 1500-1900, ed. Michael Snodin and John Styles (London, 2001), pp. 281-307, esp. p. 301
53. Potter, Calico Printing as an Art Manufacture, pp. 13-14
54. James Thomson, A Letter to the Rt. Hon. Sir Richard Lahr Sheil, on Copyright in Original Designs and Patterns for Printing (Clitheroe, England, 1841), p. 6
55. On mechanical developments, see also Stanley D. Chapman, "Quantity versus Quality in the British Industrial Revolution: The Case of Printed Textiles," Northern History 21 (1985): 175-92
56. and The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution, 2d ed. (London, 1987)
57. Hazel Clark, "The Design and Designing of Lancashire Printed Calicoes during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," Textile History 15, no. 1 (1984): 101-18
58. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750 (London, 1986), chap. 3
59. "A Day at a Lancashire Print-Work," p. 295
60. Stanley D. Chapman and Serge Chassagne, European Textile Printers of the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Peel and Oberkampf (London, 1981), p. 78
61. D. A. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market (Oxford, 1979), p. 97
62. Clark, "Design and Designing of Lancashire Printed Calicoes"
63. James Thomson, Notes on the Present State of Calico Printing in Belgium (Clitheroe, England, 1841), p. 21
64. On the pervasiveness of this practice, see Berg, "From Imitation to Invention," p. 24
65. O'Brien, British Manufacturer's Companion, n.p
66. James Thomson, Letter to the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Peel, Bart, on Copyright in Original Designs and Patterns for Printing (Clitheroe, England, 1841), pp. 6-7
67. Michael Snodin, "Who Led Taste? Victorian Britain, 1837-1901," in Snodin and Styles, eds., Design and the Decorative Arts, pp. 369-97, esp. p. 369
68. James Emerson Tennent, A Treatise on the Copyright of Designs for Printed Fabrics (London, 1841), p. 18
69. For a detailed description of the 1839 act, see "Copyrights of Designs," London Journal of Arts and Sciences and Patent Register 15, no. 92 (1840): 106-16
70. "Copyright of Designs," London Journal of Arts and Sciences and Patent Register 16, no. 99 (1840): 95-98
71. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 61 (1842), col. 675
72. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1835; reprint, London, 1993), p. 69
73. See also Forty, Objects of Desire, p. 55
74. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 51 (1839), col. 1263
75. Tennent, Treatise on the Copyright of Designs, pp. xiv-xv, 1-17, chap. 5
76. Snodin, "Who Led Taste? Georgian Britain, 1714-1837," pp. 217-46, esp. pp. 228, 238
77. Helen Clifford, "The Printed Illustrated Catalogue," pp. 288-89, both in Snodin and Styles, eds., Design and the Decorative Arts
78. Toshio Kusamitsu, "British Industrialization and Design before the Great Exhibition," Textile History 12 (1981): 77-95, esp. 85
79. The history of retail culture in this period presents something of a chasm, situated as it is between the eighteenth-century consumer revolution and the later nineteenth-century birth of department stores. Nancy Cox's The Complete Tradesman does a fine job of encapsulating the historiography for the earlier period. On the development of visual practices of display in the eighteenth century and before, see chap. 3 of Cox, coauthored with Clare Walsh, entitled "Shop Design and Sale Techniques." See also Walsh's "Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London," Journal of Design History 8, no. 5 (1995): 157-76
80. Two notable works for the later period, when the department store epitomized consuming modernity, include Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, and Walkowitz, "Going Public." The testimony produced in the design copyright debate suggests that this middle period is one of both continuities and changes in retail culture. On this historiography and its effects, see Margot Finn, "Sex and the City: Metropolitan Modernities in English History," Victorian Studies 44 (Autumn 2001): 25-32
81. Thomson, Letter to Peel, p. 12
82. On Britain as an exporter of machinery, see, e.g., "Machine for Block Printing," Manchester Guardian (30 January 1841)
83. "'Speech of James Emerson Tennent," Morning Post (30 January 1843), as found in Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), James Emerson Tennent Papers, D2922/C/9/5
84. "Obituaries of Eminent Manufacturers: Memoir of the Late James Thomson, F.R.S., of Clitheroe," Journal of Design and Manufactures 4 (November 1850): 65-72, esp. 65
85. "Speech of James Emerson Tennent." See also George Brace, Observations on Extension of Protection of Copyright of Designs (London, 1842), p. 3
86. For discussions of the formation of French national definition around the category of taste, see Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, 1996)
87. Whitney Walton, France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1992)
88. Letter to Sheil, pp. 21-23
89. See also Nassau William Senior, Samuel Jones Lloyd, William E. Jackson, and John Leslie, From the Report of the Commissioners of Hand-Loom Weaving on Improvement of Designs and Patterns and Extension of Copyright (London, 1841)
90. Katie Scott, "Art and Industry: A Contradictory Union: Authors, Rights and Copyrights during the Consulat," Journal of Design History 13, no. 1 (2000): 1-21
91. Most notable here is Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992)
92. Thanks to Timothy Albom for suggesting that the advocates of extension were engaged in a process of "self-fashioning." Stephen Greenblatt developed this notion at length in Renaissance Self Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), pp. 1, 6, 9. Greenblatt's arguments that self-fashioning is a "manipulable artful process"; that it engages figures in "their own acts of selection and shaping"; that it happens "in language"; and that it "is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile" have been especially helpful
93. Edmund Potter, A Letter to Mark Philips, Esq., in Reply to His Speech in the House of Commons on the Design Copyright Bill (Manchester, 1841), p. 18
94. Augustus Applegath to James Emerson Tennent, 26 January 1843, PRONI, James Emerson Tennent Papers, D2922/C/9/4; SCCD, pp. 106, 161-63, 184-87
95. Toby L. Ditz, "Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (1994): 51-80
96. This line of argument on Potter's behalf is puzzling, for according to David Greysmith, "Potter was one of the first to dispense with block printers altogether" ("Patterns, Piracy and Protection," p. 183)
97. James Thomson to James Emerson Tennent, 20 May 1840, as printed in SCCD, pp. 493-94
98. On the persistence of hand labor, see Raphael Samuel's "The Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain," History Workshop Journal 3 (Spring 1977): 6-72
99. Potter's life and affiliations are well documented in J. G. Hurst, Edmund Potter and Dinting Vale (Manchester, 1948). See esp. chaps. 3, 5
100. Thomson, Letter to Sheil, p. i
101. see also Famie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market, chap. 2
102. These phrases are taken from Mary Poovey's " 'Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech': The Discourse of Statistics in the 1830s," Critical Inquiry 19 (Winter 1993): 256-76
103. See also Poovey's Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (Chicago, 1995), esp. chaps. 1, 3, 6
104. Timothy Albom provocatively suggested that I examine the debate in light of Rule's work. See John Rule, "The Property of Skill in the Period of Manufacture," in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 99-118
105. Moureen Coulter, Property in Ideas: The Patent Question in Mid-Victorian Britain (Kirksville, Mo., 1991 )
106. Christine Macleod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660-1800 (Cambridge, 1988)
107. Louise Purbrick, "Knowledge Is Property: Looking at Exhibits and Patents in 1851," Oxford Art Journal 20 (1997): 53-60
108. This literature is vast. Some of the most important expositions are Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 446-64
109. Mary Poovey, "The Man-of-Letters Hero: David Copperfield and the Professional Writer," in her Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988), pp. 89-125
110. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, 1993)
111. Trevor Ross, "Copyright and the Invention of Tradition," Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (Fall 1992): 1-27
112. David Saunders and Ian Hunter, "Lessons from the 'Literatory': How to Historicize Authorship," Critical Inquiry 17 (Spring 1991): 479-509
113. Martha Woodmansee, "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author,'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (Summer 1984): 425-48
114. See Chris R. Vanden Bossche, "The Value of Literature: Representations of Print Culture in the Copyright Debate of 1837-1842," Victorian Studies 38 (Autumn 1994): 41-68
115. James Spedding, "Dickens' American Notes," Edinburgh Review 76 (January 1843): 497-522, esp. 497, 500
116. Tennent is known to posterity as the author of Ceylon: An Account of the Island, Physical, Historical, and Topographical (London, 1859)
117. Tennent, A Treatise on the Copyright of Designs, pp. 20-21
118. See Hurst, Edmund Potter of Dinting Vale
119. See also Taylor, "Copyright in Design"
120. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 9
121. Brace, Observations on the Extension of Protection of Copyright of Designs, p. 11
122. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 51 (1840), cols. 1262, 1265
123. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 56 (1841), col. 490
124. Christopher Hill, "Radical Pirates," in Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, vol. 3, People, and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst, Mass., 1986), 161-87
125. Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge, 1986), chaps. 1, 10
126. Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York, 1999), introduction, chaps. 1-2
127. On English piracy in its seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century heyday, see Christopher Hill, Radical Politics, Religion, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1990), chap. 1
128. C. M. Senior, A Nation of Pirates: English Piracy in its Heyday (Newton Abbott, England, 1976)
129. "Sigma," "Social Piracy, or the Rovings, Roamings, Motions, Locomotions, Peregrinations, Pouncings, Maneuvers, and Maraudings, Great Larcenies and Petty Larcenies, of Mr. and Mrs. Hawke," New Monthly Magazine 72 (September 1844): 1-17
130. Potter, Letter to Philips, pp. 14, 17, 22
131. See Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain (1835; New York, 1966), pp. 284-85
132. This understanding is enabled by Martin Daunton's "The Material Politics of Natural Monopoly: Consuming Gas in Victorian Britain," in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, ed. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (Oxford, 2001), pp. 69-88
133. David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550-1850 (Berkeley, 2002)
134. On masculinity and craft production, see Keith McClelland, "Some Thoughts on Masculinity and the 'Representative Artisan' in Britain, 1850-1880," Gender and History 1, no. 2 (1989): 164-77
135. [James Emerson Tennent], Argument Made Easy; or the Whole Art of Answering Yourself: Expounded and Illustrated in the Evidence of James Kershaw (London, 1840), and The Policy of Piracy as a Branch of National Industry, and a Source of Commercial Wealth: Expounded in the Evidence of Daniel Lee (London, 1840)
136. Senior et al., From the Report of the Handloom Weavers, p. 33
137. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d sen, vol. 65 (1842), col. 965
138. [Tennent], Argument Made Easy, p. 6
139. See Schwartz on Reynolds in Culture of the Copy, p. 249
140. Rule, "Property of Skill," p. 111
141. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain, pp. 7-9
142. Baines's rhetorical maneuvers are particularly striking in light of an assertion made by Edward Young in 1757. Young had claimed that originals "grew," while imitations were "made" or produced by "manufacture." See Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759; reprint, London, 1918), p. 7
143. David Ramsay Hay, An Essav on Ornamental Design (London, 1844), pp. 2,4
144. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989)
145. See also Edmund Potter, A Letter to One of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1853)
146. For a provocative attempt to grapple with the legacies of the explosion of consumer histoiy, see also Matthew Hilton and Martin Daunton, "Material Politics: An Introduction," in Daunton and Hilton, eds., The Politics of Consumption, pp. 1-32
147. Design history provides an ideal vehicle for integrating production and consumption into the same field of analysis. See Forty, Objects of Desire. For the U.S. case, see Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore, 2000)