The Author in Public: Literary Scandals, Legal Regulation, and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain

My project focuses on the intersection of authorship, law, and popular culture to examine how later eighteenth-century literary scandals provided a public arena for mediating problems in national identity. While addressing the roles regional origin and gender played in imagining versions of the British nation, I respond to claims that Benedict Anderson's emphasis on print as essential to national formation ignores the participation of all but the literate elite. Early modern literary scandals embraced aspects of both print and popular culture, originating in literary and legal efforts to construct national identity, but finding a popular voice in the spectacles of caricatures, ballad-operas, and theatrical productions. Comparing constructions of authorship and work in both "high" and "popular" cultural settings thus provides a powerful means of examining the relationship among various constructions of author, text, and national identity. I examine three disputes over literary property, each implicated in the formation of national identity, beginning with Samuel Richardson's 1750 battle with the Irish book pirates over the right to print Sir Charles Grandison, proceeding to the conflict between Samuel Johnson and James Macpherson over the Ossian works and concluding with a discussion of how the theft of Catharine Macaulay's private correspondence worked to undermine her efforts to represent Englishness in both her life and her History of England. The three literary scandals I address reveal the highly politicized origins of a literary property system often thought to be apolitical, defined by judges and authors alike as the mere expression of "the law of nature and truth." As England, Scotland, and Ireland struggled to assert individual identities in the face of increasing amalgamation, disputes over literary property were successfully deployed as markers of difference. Both critical discussions and popular representations of literary scandals emphasized regional difference as part of a larger effort to consolidate national identity. The manipulation of "high" and "popular" images worked not only to maintain regional difference but also to assist in the effort to associate Englishness with--as many authors both male and female put it--the "masculine pen."