Fleeced

—The Question of Copyright—

Speaking of copyright, as I was in my recent post about The Sarony Case reminds me that the 1880s was a vexed period for authorship rights, and matters could get a little fraught.

A case in point occurred in 1886 as newspapers were becoming increasingly aware of literary protection. Indeed, just a few months earlier, a work by Oscar Wilde had appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune for the first time accompanied by a claim to copyright. ¹

If publishers were beginning to feel self-conscious about how writers had been plagiarized for years, this is perhaps why on Jan. 15, 1886 Harper and Brothers sent a letter to W.S. Gilbert, the famous versifier of the partnership Gilbert and Sullivan:

Dear Sir,--We enclose herewith draft on Mr. Sampson Low, at one day's sight, for £10 in acknowledgment for reprinting "Original Comic Operas" in our Franklin-square Library. Please to advise us of the receipt of the draft.

"We send you by mail a few copies of our edition of the book."

Respectfully yours
HARPER AND BROTHERS.

Of course, the long-suffering recipient, Mr. W.S. Gilbert, Esq. of 39, Harrington-gardens, South Kensington, thought the gesture was beneath him. He replied sardonically by return:

Gentlemen,--You have been good enough to forward me a donation of £10. Notwithstanding that for many years I have been pillaged, right and left, by such of your countrymen as are engaged in publishing and theatrical ventures, I am not yet reduced to such a state of absolute penury as would justify me in taking advantage of the charitable impulse which prompted your gift. But the Victoria Hospital for Children stands sorely in needs of funds, and I have therefore taken the liberty of handing your cheque to the secretary of that institution.

You are quite at liberty to make any public use of this letter.

Your obedient servant,
W.S. GILBERT

There were some in New York society circles who thought Gilbert’s response was ill-mannered, and thus was the rebuke enjoined. The press ran stories of Gilbert’s “anger”, and his claim to have been “pillaged right and left” did the rounds. Older hacks recalled the more conciliatory and amusing tone Gilbert had taken on the subject seven years earlier in a talk at the Lotus Club. One paper noted how interesting it was “to compare this ebullition of temper with the much more moderate, yes, even self-reproachful, words”, of yore, ²

Enter the creative sense of humor of the Anglo-American illustrator and wit Oliver Herford (1863-1935). The allusion to pillaging was just the sort of thing his fertile mind thrived upon. For Herford, it was a short step from pillaging to the idea of being “fleeced”; and considering the now stormier seas, an even shorter step from being “fleeced” to Jason and the Argonauts.

The golden Pillaging

Adopting the Greek legend of Jason setting sail to Colchis in quest of the Golden Fleece, Herford conjured up a crew of transatlantic argonauts crowded into an ancient vessel atop bags of plundered gold. The question being that if Gilbert wasn’t exactly in penury, who was being fleeced by whom? The caption reads: ‘Respectfully dedicated to W.S. Gilbert and others who “have been pillaged right and left” by Americans’—the inverted commas no doubt reinforcing the cartoon’s skepticism based on the fact that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Our belittled librettist Mr Gilbert can be seen in the depths of the boat swamped by moneybags one of which bears the name of his hugely popular Mikado, with the zeros in the dollar amount seeming to stretch ad infinitum. ³

Recognizably thrown into the boat for good measure are other period claimants including Matthew Arnold, clergyman Frederic Farrar, Henry Irving, and probably Lillie Langtry. Naturally, our modern little argonaut Oscar was on board, too, looking, it must be said, a little less disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean.

© John Cooper, 2023

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Related:
Oscar Wilde On Dress
I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean

Cartoon credit:
HathiTrust

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Footnotes:

1. Wilde’s copyrighted work was his essay The Philosophy of Dress, which I rediscovered in 2012. It was subsequently published for the first time in book form in Oscar Wilde On Dress (2103), and was the only previously unrecognized work that Wilde intended for publication to have been released since he died in 1900. ↩︎
2. Boston Evening Transcript, Feb. 10, 1886, 6 ↩︎
3. The Mikado opened on 14 March 1885, in London, where it ran at the Savoy Theatre for 672 performances, the second-longest run for any work of musical theatre and one of the longest runs of any theatre piece up to that time. By the end of 1885, it was estimated that, in Europe and America, at least 150 companies were producing the opera. (Wikipedia) ↩︎

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