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Lord Eldon's Censorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

Paul M. Zall
Paul M. Zall*
Affiliation:
Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y.
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Extract

It well-known that Byron's poetry was the center of a great deal of suspicious attention from the Tory government which was almost continually in office during his career. David V. Erdmann has proposed that the ministry's anxiety was grounded upon the fear of a potential insurrection to be led by Lord Byron; W. H. Wick war sees the official reaction to Byron's poems as of the whole cloth of the government's antipathy to a free and virulently outspoken press. But whatever the attitude of the ministry, the only official actions taken to punish Byron for his poetry were ostensibly the result of moral rather than of political trespasses on his part. Were Byron the only author subjected to punishment on these grounds, it would be obvious that the action was politically motivated, but Robert Southey, poet laureate, received identical treatment. The nature of the penalty—refusal by Chancery to recognize literary property rights—indicates that the fountainhead of the measures taken against Byron's Don Juan and Cain, Southey's Wat Tyler, Shelley's Queen Mab, and the works of several other authors, Whig, Tory, and apolitical, lay in the moral and legal principles of the Chancellor, Lord Eldon.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , June 1953 , pp. 436 - 443
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

page 436 note 1 “Byron and Revolt in England,” Science and Society, XI (1947), 234-248.

page 436 note 2 The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press (London, 1928), pp. 263-273.

page 436 note 3 Joseph Parkes, A History of the Court of Chancery (London, 1828), p. 438.

page 436 note 4 This summary relies heavily on John W. Draper, “Queen Anne's Act: A Note on Eng-lish Copyright,” MLN, XXXVI (1921), 146-154; Walter L. Pforzheimer, “Copyright and Scholarship,” English Institute Annual (New York, 1941), pp. 164-176; and Augustine Birrell, The Law and History of Copyright in Books (New York, 1899), pp. 99-141.

page 437 note 5 Birrell, p. 102, cites cases in which Chancellors granted injunctions on the basis of alleged ownership of the literary property in question.

page 437 note 6 This decision is the basis of modern copyright law, both English and American. See Pforzheimer, p. 174.

page 438 note 7 Walcot [sic] v. Walker, 7 Vesey 1. The decisions on this case and on Southey v. Sherwood are quoted from The English Reports. Walcot v. Walker, Southey v. Sherwood, Murray v. Benbow, and Lawrence v. Smith are partially reprinted in Quarterly Rev., XXVII (April-July 1821), 123-138.

page 438 note 8 Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols. (London, 1856), III,67.

page 438 note 9 Southey v Sherwood, 2 Merivale 435.

page 439 note 10 See Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, 2 vols. (London, 1891), I, 404 ff.

page 439 note 11 Murray v. Benbow in Quarterly Rev., pp. 128-130.

page 439 note 12 Lawrence v. Smith quoted from the Times in Quarterly Rev., pp. 131-132.

page 439 note 13 Wickwar, Struggle for Freedom of the Press, p. 262. See Edward Dowden, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1896), p. 493. A similar fate befell John Hunt in 1824 for publishing Byron's Vision of Judgement; see Examiner, 18 Jan. 1824, pp. 34-40.

page 440 note 14 Murray v. Dugdale reported in Examiner, 10 Aug. 1823, pp. 521-524.

page 440 note 15 See his remarks on the subject in Hansard, 1 s., XXXVII, 804-805. Lord Eldon's capacity to judge heterodoxy seems suspect from a remark he made on 3 June 1825 to the effect that Trinitarianism was the essence of Christianity sad Unitarianism was illegal at Com-mon Law (HanSard, 2 s., XIII, 1029). He refused to accept the spirit of the Unitarian Toleration Act of 1813.

page 441 note 16 Quarterly Km., XXVII, 136. The authorship is attributed to either Senior or Southey by Hill Shine and Helen Chadwick Shine, The Quarterly Review under Gifford (Chapel Hill, 1949), p. 78, but I do not think it can be by Souther. See S. Leon Levy, Nassau W. Senior (Boston, 1943), pp. 106-110.

page 441 note 17 XXXVIII (Feb.-May 1823), 314.

page 441 note 18 XIV (July-Dec. 1823), 633.

page 441 note 19 “The Middle Years,” The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1937), II, 783.

page 442 note 20 Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ear1 Leslie Griggs, 2 vols. (London, 1932), II, 194.

page 442 note 21 Examiner, 15 July 1821, p. 443.

page 442 note 22 “Letters and Journals,” Works, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 13 vols. (London and New York, 1901-05), V, 92. Cf. IV, 380 (Dec. 1819); V, 129 (Nov. 1820).

page 443 note 23 E.g., “Come what may, I never will flatter the million's canting in any shape ...” (rv, 327); cf. IV, 342, 402, 426-427.

page 443 note 24 See W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 10 vols. (London, 1903-38), VIII, 410-414.