Discussions of copyright in eighteenth-century England have largely omitted discussion of women, and scholars have generally assumed that women writersâ chief interaction with the copyright of their works was on the moment of sale to a publisher, who then had full control over future profits and reprints. The Statute of Anne established the first time-limited copyright of the modern sort in 1710, but as many scholars have shown, it was open to much interpretation and often not fully followed. It did not apply to booksellers in Ireland or places outside the United Kingdom, allowing for flagrant piracy of copyrighted material in Dublin, the American colonies, and Europe. The London publishers who dominated the book trade at its English center continued to treat copyright as perpetual until the 1770s, with shares in bestselling books bought and sold like property for decades and even centuries after their first publication. The narrative of how this happened and its wider effects has been told by a number of scholars who have shown how a small cartel of booksellers controlled much of the publishing trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.1 This oligarchy was almost entirely men, and the Stationersâ Company that controlled it did not allow women to serve as officers.
Yet scholars have acknowledged, here and there, the emergence of particular women in the book trade, usually as widows of prominent male publishers. Not infrequently, women stepped in to take over a business when the owner died, and the competency with which they did so suggests that they had a larger part in the book publishing business than the archive might at first appear to show. Scholars such as Maureen Bell, Paula McDowell, and Helen Smith have uncovered the work of women printers and publishers.2 But copyright remains an area where the scholarly discussion has focused on the male publishers who organized the trade and who had easy access to legal counsel and the right to own property regardless of their marital status and other circumstances. In light of this gap, I have examined a wide range of archival evidence, including the internal papers of the Stationersâ Company, lawsuits and other documents in the National Archives, annotated trade sale catalogues, comments in published books and letters, and private records of bookseller accounts
Based on these archival findings, I argue that women copyright proprietors were more important and prominent in their own time than they have been so far credited and that both authors and publishers profited from literary property in production and printing. Women can be found in every type of archival source and in every type of copyright transaction, even in exclusive spaces such as the invitation-only trade sales where members of the London inner circle bought and sold copyrights with each other. Their participation also shows that copyright was an important if nebulous form of property that could be inherited, bought, and sold. Unlike real estate, copyright was not as obviously a form of property subject to patriarchal property law, and women inheritors often had to expend a great deal of labor to capitalize an unpublished manuscript. The most successful copyright proprietors were those who were embedded in the print trade already or had connections with those who were, but there were many instances of women who were able to retain and profit from their copyright despite being otherwise outsiders to the business of publishing. This study therefore adds to a growing body of scholarship that emphasizes womenâs economic participation and importance in the public world of Restoration and eighteenth-century England.
Finally, a word is needed about the dates of this study: I have tried to encompass the range of archival evidence that I found, and my earliest examples are from the 1670s and the bulk of my examples go into the mid-century, with the latest examples into the 1770s. But there is not an implied boundary here: nothing remarkable happened in 1675 or 1775 to change the parameters of how women interacted with copyright. Indeed, the earliest era studied here shows many ad hoc arrangements such as were typical of the 1650s and 1660s, when the book trade appeared tightly regulated but was in fact a trade that included
See Rose, Authors and Owners; Deazley, Origin; Johns, Piracy; Blagden, Stationersâ Company; Siebert, Freedom of the Press, 244â49; Raven, Business of Books, 127â129; St Clair, Reading Nation, 84â102.
Maureen Bell, âWomen in the English Book Trade 1557â1700â; Smith, âGrossly Material Thingsâ; McDowell, Women of Grub Street.
Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 34.