A Little History of Literature (11 page)

‘He for God only, she for God in him’ is the line modern readers most often gag on. Illustrators have followed Milton's cue and traditionally show the couple (with the obligatory fig leaves) with Adam looking up, reverently, to heaven, and Eve gazing, adoringly,
at his face as he does so. But later in the poem Eve rebels against this ‘absolute’ wifely submission. She insists on going off on her own to tend the Garden in Eden. Her domestic rebellion renders her vulnerable, of course, to the seductions of wily Satan (now in the form of a serpent) who persuades her, as a further act of independence, to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Another bone of contention is the ‘English’ that Milton created for his poem. It is heavily, at times overpoweringly, ‘Latinised’ – it's almost as if he never could shake off the intention of writing the poem in the antique language. The following, from Book VII, describing Eden's vegetation, is a good example of Miltonic diction:

This is not the terminology of
Gardener's Question Time
.

There are those, like the poet T.S. Eliot, who believe that Milton's Latinism in
Paradise Lost
throws up an off-putting ‘Chinese Wall’ around literature. Literary language should be closer to what the Romantic poet Wordsworth called ‘the language of men’, not the language of pedants and scholars who are thinking in Latin and translating their thought into English – as, one suspects, Milton sometimes did. But what really matters, for his poem and for English poetry generally, is that, by his choice, Milton established that the English language in the hands of a great poet like himself could create epic poetry to rival that of the ancients.

There are many other problems raised by
Paradise Lost
. Can a poem, for example, really explain the Bible better than it can explain itself? No easy answers are possible. Great literature never makes things simpler – it gives no easy answers to difficult questions. What it does is to help us see how infinitely un-simple things are for us.

Milton confidently declares in the first book of his twelve-book
poem that his purpose is to make his readers better Christians, or, at least, better-informed Christians. Who knows? He may have succeeded with some readers in his uplifting religious mission. But the central achievement of
Paradise Lost
has been very different, and wholly literary. It pointed to ways in which literature in English, and poets writing in English, could develop. It laid a foundation. And that foundation was a literature which, henceforth, would be independently English. English in subject and English in expression.

CHAPTER
11

Who ‘Owns’ Literature?

P
RINTING
, P
UBLISHING AND
C
OPYRIGHT

The book you are holding in your hand at the moment is not a work of literature, but let's take it as a handy example. I wrote it. My name is there on the title page, and in the copyright line. So it's ‘my’ (John Sutherland's) book. Does that mean, though, that I ‘own’ the book in your hand? No, it doesn't – the physical copies are not mine. If you bought it, it's yours. But suppose someone broke into my house while I was writing this book, stole my computer, found the text of what I was writing and published it under their own name. What would happen? Provided I could prove that the original work was mine, I could sue the thief for infringement of copyright – for copying my original work without my permission and passing it off as his own (an offence known as ‘plagiarism’).

From its beginning in the eighteenth century, modern copyright law has developed alongside the increasing availability of literary works in new formats. It has continually had to adapt to keep up with new technologies, including film adaptations in the twentieth century (Chapter 32) and, today, the challenge of e-books and the internet (Chapter 40). But in essence,
copyright
has always meant just that: ‘the right to copy’. As the copyright owner of what you are reading right now, I have granted Yale University Press the exclusive right to publish it in the form of this book.

We talk about a ‘work of literature’ because it is the result – in very real terms – of the author's toil. Then, publishers talk about each of the works in their catalogue as a ‘title’: the word ‘title’ means ownership. Finally, when the books have been produced for sale, they are individual ‘copies’: you have in your hand a copy of my work. Each party ‘owns’ the work in a different way. Imagine a party of book-lovers. The host, pointing to his groaning shelves, proudly exclaims, ‘Look at
my
books!’ An author, scanning the shelves, says jubilantly, ‘I see you've got one of
my
books – did you enjoy it?’ A publisher, also inspecting the books, says ‘I'm very glad to see you've got so many of
our
books on the shelf’. They are all right, in a sense: the host owns the physical objects, the publisher the particular format, and the author the original words. And it points to the many different people and processes involved in getting a book written, published and sold nowadays.

This little book's life began when I signed a contract with Yale University Press, granting them the right to publish my text as a book. Once my manuscript was delivered to them satisfactorily, they paid to have it edited, designed, typeset, printed, bound between hard covers, and stored, prior to sale, in a warehouse. The publishers paid for all those individual processes, and they now own the physical books. Next, the books are distributed, principally to various retailers – physical shops and electronic sellers – and libraries. The physical books now belong to them. Finally, you, the customer, bought this
Little History of Literature
and took it home. (Or if you borrowed it from the library you will have to return it there.) Today, the publishing of books is usually carried out by a company quite separate from the printers and the booksellers. But up until the nineteenth century, publishing and printing was mainly arranged by booksellers.

From the earliest period of known history, it took thousands of years, and an awful lot of literature, before any laws were devised to
regulate what went on, and to protect the various parties' interests. And it was only when those laws came into being that a coherent industry – with machinery and ways of commercially distributing literary products – could be developed and that ‘literature’ – as opposed to a miscellaneous bundle of texts, oral tales and ballads – could be fully and properly developed.

The framework of laws and commerce within which literature is now created depended on a number of earlier things happening. Writing, literacy and educational institutions were necessary to create a market. Another necessary prior event was the shift from scrolls – which great ancient libraries such as the one at Alexandria contained – to what is called the ‘codex’, a book with cut, numbered pages, like the one you're reading. (
Caudex
is Latin for a block of wood; the plural is
codices
.)

The manuscript, or handwritten codex, originated in classical Rome, like the word itself. It's thought that it was invented because persecuted Christians, whose faith (unlike that of the pagan Romans) had a sacred book – the gospels – at its centre, needed texts they could keep hidden from prying eyes. A codex was smaller and easier to secrete than a large scroll.

Creating an early manuscript codex required huge manual labour – taking years, in some cases, if it was illustrated, or illuminated, or handsomely bound – by highly skilled copyists who were often artists rather than craftsmen. Many of those codices which have survived in our great libraries were manufactured as single luxury items, commissioned by a rich owner or institution (the monarch, the church, monasteries, noblemen). The workshops in which they were produced were called scriptoria, writing factories. It's estimated that the total number of works of literature that were readily available to the educated bookworm up to the fifteenth century, was less than a thousand or two. Chaucer's Clerk in
The Canterbury Tales
, for example, is regarded by his fellow pilgrims as phenomenally well read, yet he owns only half a dozen books.

This book scarcity meant that many more people had books read to them than they read, or possessed, themselves. A famous nineteenth-century painting shows Chaucer, fifty years before the
arrival of the printing press, reading his great poem to an audience from a lectern, or ‘reading stand’. (The lectern still survives in university lecture halls – originally they were designed for reading aloud from a text of which there was only one copy. The word ‘lecture’ is derived from the Latin word
lector
, a reader.)

One of the other preconditions for the production of books for a mass market was the discovery, introduced to England from the East around the thirteenth century, of the process for making paper. Before this, writing of any importance was done on parchment or vellum (cleaned and dried animal skin), or was carved on wood. Cheap paper laid the way for the major revolution in the late fifteenth century: printing.

We think of printing as a European thing, with its famous pioneers Johannes Gutenberg in Germany, William Caxton in England, and Aldus Manutius in Italy (inventor of ‘italic’ type). In fact it had long been practised in China. But the Chinese had a huge problem. The Chinese written language was based on thousands of pictorial ‘characters’. Each of them was inscribed on a block the size of a small brick. The short paragraph you are reading would require sixty of them, and be the size of a small wall.

The Western phonetic alphabet (‘phonetic’ means being based on sound, not image) was a mere twenty-six letters and a dozen or so punctuation symbols. It was wonderfully convenient for the printer. You could create the necessary ‘type’ by pouring molten lead into what were called ‘fonts’ and store it when cooled in ‘cases’. (Capitals were stored in the upper case – we still use the term.) Many of the pioneer printers were goldsmiths, like Gutenberg, and so used to working with hot metal. The type could be set in lines, in a page-shaped ‘form’ and inked. The ‘press’ could then be pulled down to run off as many copies of the page that were required. The press itself could be quite small – about twice the size of a modern trouser press (which worked on the same principle) if smallness were a consideration.

The first printed books looked very like manuscript codices, with elaborately styled letters. If this was a fifteenth-century Gutenberg
Bible in your hand you would be hard put to say whether it was written or printed. The difference was that Gutenberg's workshop, in Mainz, Germany, could turn out a thousand bibles in the time it took a scriptorium to produce one.

It was a breakthrough but it brought with it a new set of problems – the most urgent being our old friend, ownership. One of the first books printed in England was Caxton's 1476 edition of Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
(good choice) which he sold from his little stall outside St Paul's Cathedral. The great poet was no longer around to give his permission, but even if he had still been alive, Caxton would not have had to pay Geoffrey Chaucer a penny out of the profits of his printing enterprise.

For the next 200 years it was copycat heaven in the book trade. Some legal mechanism to control the ‘right to copy’ was required, particularly in London which was swelling with large numbers of consumers: a ‘reading public’. It was the London booksellers (as mentioned above, they also often doubled as publishers, with printing machinery in the back of the shop) who brought pressure to bear on Parliament to frame laws that would regulate the book business.

In 1710 Parliament came up with a wonderfully sophisticated piece of legislation – known as the ‘Statute of Anne’ – which had the clear intention of ‘the Encouragement of Learning’. The preamble reads: