Richard Terry

Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

This book arises out of a major research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, on depression in the eighteenth century. It discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and in terms of individual attempts to describe and live with suffering. Different chapters, each by an authority in the field, look at depression, or, in the terms of the time, melancholy, spleen and hypochondria, as it is reflected in medical writing, philosophical writing, poetry, in the novel and in autobiographical writing, this last based on material which is currently unpublished. The book concludes by comparing eighteenth-century medical practice with contemporary structures for treating the depressed, and by asking what present-day society can learn about depression and its treatment from the experience of this previous era.

Pope and Plagiarism

Oliver Goldsmith, in his biography of Thomas Parnell, relates a practical joke played by the poet on his friend Pope. Parnell had happened to be around when Pope was reading out parts of a new, unfinished poem, The Rape of the Lock, to Jonathan Swift. Finding reason to leave the room, though not before committing to memory Pope’s description of Belinda’s toilette, Parnell then set about translating it into Latin verse. The next day, when Pope was reading the poem to another group of friends, Parnell publicly rebuked him for stealing the episode and produced his Latin version as evidence of a prior source. Pope was startled at this public revelation of a detail about the poem’s composition so darkly secret as to have escaped the notice even of the author. After a teasing pause, he was put out of his confusion, but the incident is a curious earnest of an issue that was to impact both on Pope’s career and on his literary posterity.1

Sentimental Doubling in Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets

ments of Taylor’s works and thus are additional indications that Taylor is the author of The Authoress. Further, Taylor and Hessey published Taylor’s Display (1815) and Essays in Rhyme (1816), as well as other works by the Taylor family. 3. Despite her admonitions to her daughters, Ann Taylor eventually became an author herself. A Correspondence between a Mother and Her Daughter at School (1817, coauthored with Jane) is, like The Authoress, a book of writing pedagogy: it presents exemplary letters in which the proper sentiments and styles of motherdaughter communication are illustrated.

Plagiarism, Imitation and Originality

The debate between the rival claims of imitation and original invention has been formative for English literature since the fourteenth century. The terms of the debate are to some degree unchanging. The rebuke that original creativity levels against imitation is that of servility, of reducing the act of writing to an unambitious repetition of what has gone before. That which is lodged in turn by imitation against originality has to do with indifference to the past, and with brashness and wilfulness of a kind likely to lead to idiosyncrasy. Occasionally, the argument pivots around some particular historical notion such as ‘sufficiency’, which informs discussions of originality between about 1690 and 1710. This was the idea, transient in its relation to English literature, that creative self-subsistence, relying on one’s own inner resources, makes for an unhealthy model of writing. It is associated in Swift’s familiar fable with a spider morosely spinning its web from its own body and compared unfavourably with the activity of bees, who garner their creative nutrition liberally from the blooms of the field.1

Sterne: The Plagiarist as Genius

Leo Braudy has described Laurence Sterne as ‘the first English author who can be called a celebrity’: other earlier writers had certainly been more widely revered, some may have sought more actively to manipulate or groom their reputations, as Pope did when he took the unprecedented step of arranging for the publication of his literary correspondence, but no writer before Sterne seems to have been so much beguiled by the very idea of celebrity or to have measured success in quite such explicit terms.1 ‘I wrote not [to] be fed, but to be famous’, he confided to a friend.2 Of course, many writers before Sterne might have said the same thing, though perhaps intending something different by it. Before the eighteenth century, fame had generally meant an imperishable renown, outlasting the death of the worthy person, but the sort of fame that Sterne seems to have craved was of the secular sort, which could be enjoyed, and indeed sucked dry, on this side of the grave.3 Fortunately, Tristram Shandy, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1759, was to surpass in this respect even what he might have dared hope for. It came out of the sky like a flaming meteor and Sterne almost immediately found himself warmed by the adulation of fashionable literary society. Few backwater rural parsons can have experienced so sudden and dramatic an apotheosis.

The Plagiarism Allegation and the Female Author

Laura Rosenthal argues in her Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England (1996) that the lowest common denominator in all charges of plagiarism is the alleger’s attempt to divest an author of the right to be considered as the legitimate custodian of his or her own literary property. To accuse authors of plagiarism is to deny publicly their literary agency, to impeach their entitlement to exercise ownership over the works associated with their names. Rosenthal’s study joins with those published around the same time by Paulina Kewes and Brean Hammond in believing that plagiarism emerges as a concept, or at least fully institutes itself, only in the post-Restoration era, as literature in general (though especially dramatic literature) becomes commodified and increasingly understood as a form of property.

‘Plagiarism’: The Emergence of a Literary Concept

It would be hard to imagine any culture in which authors were not inclined to feel some chagrin at seeing the credit for their writings being appropriated by others. As long ago as classical Greece, we can find lively discussion of the practical distinction between acceptable and culpable forms of literary borrowing, and writers who were discovered to have gained unjustifiable help from the creativity of others were liable for public exposure.1 The trespass of illegitimate literary borrowing posed itself then, as it does now, as both a moral and an aesthetic issue: literary theft constitutes a moral infringement, but derivative writing has also been vulnerable (at least in Western cultures) to being criticized as a failure of craft, as bad art. The word that nowadays labels literary borrowing of this morally or aesthetically questionable kind is ‘plagiarism’, and the purpose of this opening chapter is to consider the shifting semantic ground that was occupied by this term from its importation into England at the end of the sixteenth century through to the final quarter of the eighteenth century.2 The process will inevitably involve some discussion of general attitudes towards literary theft and derivativeness, but these will be pursued in the current chapter only insofar as they arise from invocations of the actual word ‘plagiarism’ or in relation to the very specific ideas that were associated with the term at the moment of its coinage.

Plagiarism and Sufficiency in the English ‘Battle of the Books’

It was his former secretary and literary executor, Jonathan Swift, who said of Sir William Temple’s prose style that it ‘has advanced our English Tongue, to as great a Perfection as it can well bear’.1 The compliment is notably handsome but is also in keeping with the general admiration in which Temple’s mellifluous and stately writing style was held. Henry Felton, for example, in a work of educational instruction addressed to the young Marquis of Granby, held up Temple as ‘the most perfect Pattern of good Writing and good Breeding this Nation hath produced’.2 Some observers of the prose, however, noted something other than just its refined cadences: this was Temple’s penchant for coining new words. ‘Rapport’ used to mean ‘proportion’, ‘defense of commerse’ for ‘prohibition of trade’ and ‘surintendance’ for ‘superintendence’ were all spotted, as well as numerous gallicisms. William Wotton, an opponent of Temple’s in the dispute between the ancients and moderns, mentions these neologisms rather disparagingly as unlikely to ‘be commonly received among us in hast’, but even he could not deny that one in particular of Temple’s verbal inventions had rapidly become influential.3

Johnson and the Lauder Affair

In spite of being the author of two distinguished Juvenalian Imitation poems, Johnson seems to have taken a dim view of imitation in its general sense of literary borrowing. While conceding that overlap between the works of different authors was perhaps inevitable, his attitude is for the most part disdainful towards writers who fail to get beyond mere dependence on others; indeed, this point of view lies behind his famous intolerance of pastoral poetry, a genre that he believed to be uniquely founded on mechanical duplication.1 He was wont to discount the prospect of any author of a derivative bent, such as Gray, ever achieving greatness, believing that ‘to copy is less than to invent’ and that the highest qualification of a genius must always remain ‘original invention’.2 Such general principles are borne out with a high degree of consistency in Johnson’s pronouncements on individual writers, as in the critical summations at the end of each of his ‘Lives’, which nearly always raise questions of derivativeness and originality. His ‘Life of Swift’, for example, rounds off with the glowing recommendation that ‘perhaps no writer can easily be found that has borrowed so little, or that in all his excellences and all his defects has so well maintained his claim to be considered as original’, while that of ‘Young’ concludes with the compliment that the author’s ‘versification is his own, neither his blank nor his rhyming lines have any resemblance to those of former writers’.3

Plagiarism and the Burden of Tradition in Dryden and Others

Dryden’s dedicatory epistle ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’ appeared in 1694, prefixed to the first quarto edition of The Double-Dealer. It was composed six years before Dryden’s death, an event itself anticipated in the poem. Congreve is tasked with protecting the older poet’s posthumous reputation, charged to ‘Let not th’insulting foe my fame pursue’ (line 74).1 However, the responsibility conferred on him goes further than this, for the poem is essentially one of filial anointment: ‘For only you are lineal to the throne’ (line 44). Dryden nominates Congreve as his poetic heir, the one true successor qualified for ascent to the ‘throne of wit’ after his own death. The two burdens imposed on Congreve, of protecting Dryden’s fame and succeeding him in the literary pantheon, were noted by contemporaries. In the same year, Addison predicts that ‘Congreve shall still preserve thy fame alive/And Dryden’s muse shall in his friend survive’.2