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Printing like a post-colonialist: The Irish piracy of Sir Charles Grandison
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2000 by Temple, Kathryn
As if to challenge this sanguine view, in 1753 the novel was spirited away to "the world's end" by Richardson's own employees who quickly turned it over to Irish printers. Richardson's response to the piracy was far from Grandisonian; his reaction undermined the connection between Englishness and tolerance that he had spent the entire novel constructing. He wrote two vitriolic tracts in response to the piracy, the first emphasizing his right to the "pirated" property and the second focusing on the perfidy of the Dublin printers. In the first he argued that "never was work more the property of any man, than this is his. The copy never was in any other hand; he borrows not from any author: the paper, the printing, entirely at his own expence.... the work, copies of which have been so immorally obtained is a moral work" ("The Case" 2). That such claims to authorship should arise in the context of colonial book piracy suggests the stakes involved in binding an author's name to his work. The author's name (or a general understanding of the author's identity if the work was published without the name) connected not only the author to the work, but also the work to the nation. Works printed outside the regulatory system of the London book trade created the possibility that an author's identity might be forgotten, or even worse, appropriated by the Irish. As Boswell complained, "The Filiation of a literary performance is difficult of proof; seldom is there any witness present at its birth.... The true authour, in many cases, may not be able to make his title clear" (255). In the face of potential cultural blurring, Richardson's claims to individualized authorship-expressed most powerfully when this most collaborative of authors argued rather misleadingly "I borrow not from any author"-reasserted what Foucault has called the "fundamental critical category of the 'man and the work'" and put that unit to work in constructing the nation (115). Authorial identity helped contain possible textual interpretations within a nationally permissible range. By asserting the connection between authorship and ownership in the English-Irish context Richardson clarified that what was at stake transcended economics (his Irish publication of Clarissa had earned him very little) to assert English identity.
At the end of the second tract, Richardson imagined himself as a one-man anti-piracy squad, summarizing his position vividly: "[E]very man in Mr. R's station has not the spirit, the will, the independence to hand out the lights to his Cotemporaries, to enable them to avoid Savages, who hold themselves in readiness to plunder a vessel even before it becomes a wreck" ("An Address"). Demonstrating the "spirit, the will, the independence" of a Grandison but not his tolerance, he referred here to the common pirate practice of plundering ships accidentally wrecked along rocky coasts in order to contrast the enlightened English book industry with the "savagery" of the Irish book pirates. Such intensified rhetoric was not unique to Richardson. Samuel Johnson compared book pirates to prostitutes, while one of Richardson's friends suggested that rather than pirate Sir Charles Grandison, the Irish printers were better "hanged in their own country."12 Indeed, many of the diatribes against Dublin printers seem excessive when compared with their legislative objective: regulation of the book trade. Their very excess points to the national stakes involved in printing a nation into being.
