This post was contributed by Dr. Adam Epp. Adam recently completed his PhD on Charles Dickens’s brand at the University of Saskatchewan. He is currently studying Dickens’s brand in Canada and is aiming to publish an article about Dickens and debtors’ prisons. Adam can be reached at adam.epp@usask.ca.

“Charles Dickens as he appears when reading.” Wood engraving from Harper’s Weekly, 7 December 1867 via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens#/media/File:Charles_Dickens,_public_reading,_1867.jpg

When Charles Dickens travelled back to the United States for his famous Public Reading tours, an unusual event occurred. Near the end of 1867, a group of pirate publishers in Boston decided to steal Dickens’s thunder by selling transcripts of his performances. The group’s attempt at literary theft was not the first, given that literary pirates hounded Dickens throughout his career. What makes this incident so unusual is that Dickens may not have been aware of the measures taken by his tour manager, George Dolby, to deal with these pirates.

For those unfamiliar with them, Dickens gave Public Readings of his works from the late 1850s to shortly before his death in 1870. In a reading, he’d perform abbreviated versions of his Christmas stories and excerpts from his longer novels. The fervor for Dickens’s readings was more akin to a rock concert than a modern book tour. Dickens sold out performances wherever he went, and the public raved about them. He was a one-man tour-de-force who eventually created unique voices for each character he performed. American fans learned about the Public Readings and clamored for Dickens to come back. In late 1867, Dickens obliged and returned to the United States, where he was pirated in Boston.

If Dickens’s awareness of these pirates can be questioned, Dickens’s dislike of being plagiarized cannot. Dickens hated everyone who pirated his literature, and being so popular, he was pirated often. In his announcement of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens threatened to hang pirates “on gibbets so lofty and enduring, that their remains shall be a monument of our just vengeance to all succeeding ages” (781). The threat didn’t work. Due to lax copyright laws, especially overseas, pirates could easily reprint Dickens’s works, sometimes doing little more than changing characters’ names; Adam Abraham has discussed knockoffs with near-identical names like Oliver Twiss (752). American and British theaters filled seats by quickly staging Dickens’s novels, and playwrights like William Thomas Moncrieff didn’t always wait for Dickens to finish writing his novels before adapting them. In 1839, Moncrieff added insult to injury with his Nicholas Nickleby and Poor Smike since his Nickleby adaptation correctly predicted some of Dickens’s plot twists before the latter could put them in print. Of course, Dickens received no compensation from any of these piracies.

Due to his hatred of pirates, Dickens relished any victories he had over them. In 1843, Dickens seemed to have some luck against London printers Richard Egan Lee and John Haddock, who hired the hack Henry Hewitt to write A Christmas Ghost Story (Hancher 814-5). Dickens thought they ripped him off so blatantly that he could charge Lee, Haddock, and Hewitt with plagiarism. The court agreed with Dickens, and he revelled in his victory to his friend John Forster: “The pirates are beaten flat. They are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone” (Letters 4.24). But Dickens’s victory was short-lived. The pirates escaped legal punishment by declaring themselves bankrupt, forcing Dickens to pay all the Chancery fees.

Dickens’s known dislike of pirates is why I find it so odd that he possibly didn’t know that his manager Dolby triumphed over the American pirates. Unlike his novels, Dickens’s Public Reading performances couldn’t be pirated easily. One of the main draws of Dickens’s tours was seeing him in person, and no one else could be Dickens. That’s why transcribing his performances was the best the group of Boston pirates could do. Dolby provides the only contemporary account I’ve found about this incident:

Before the announcement of the Readings in Boston, an intimation had reached me that the “pirates” had decided in sending shorthand writers to the Readings to “take them  down” as they progressed, with a view to their reproduction and sale—an intimation  which was conveyed to Messrs. Ticknor and Fields; and they promptly anticipated such a proceeding by at once issuing the Readings (taken from Mr. Dickens’s own reading books) in small volumes, and selling them at their store at such a price as made it impossible for the “pirates” to get anything out of their publication. (177)

Since Ticknor and Fields (Dickens’s official American publisher) had Dickens’s prompt copies, they could quickly produce their own edition and lower the market value of the pirates’ transcripts. Ticknor and Fields offered their version for 25 cents, which, according to Whitney Helms, was “a significantly cheaper cost” than the pirates’ product (145). The editors of Dickens’s letters say the strategy successfully “thwarted” the pirates’ objective (Letters 11.504), although it’s unclear to what degree. In his account, Dolby doesn’t elaborate on how the pirates were beaten; he doesn’t say if they gave up the enterprise or continued to peddle transcripts that sold worse than Ticknor and Fields’ official releases. Dickens’s American publisher, for their part, seemed to sell their copies throughout the author’s tour and later sold a volume collection with ten of his Public Readings.

The cover of one of Ticknor and Fields’s published prompt copies via https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2008/NYR/2008_NYR_01981_0181_000(033324).jpg?mode=max

However, Dickens doesn’t seem to mention this incident anywhere, suggesting he didn’t even know about it. In his letters, he never refers to the Boston pirates or his victory over them. Instead, in December 1867, when Dickens mentions Dolby in a letter to his daughter Mamie, he comments on the “untidy heap of paper money” from his profits that Dolby carried around (Letters 11.508). Elsewhere, Dickens complains of scalpers. He wrote to his All the Year Round editor W. H. Wills: “Tickets at a premium, and we cannot by any means keep out the speculators or prevent their making large profits” (Letters 11.506). Since Dickens wanted to sell tickets to his Public Readings at fair prices, these “speculators” infuriated him. The Boston pirates should have angered Dickens, too, given how he exulted in defeating pirates. That’s why I think it’s possible that Dickens simply didn’t know about the Boston pirates or Dolby’s strategy. On his American tour, Dickens was incredibly busy, performing Public Readings most evenings and travelling often. Dolby might have taken it upon himself to deal with the pirates to make life easier for Dickens, although I’d imagine Dolby would have happily told Dickens about this victory. Or it could be that in the middle of the hectic American reading tour, fighting pirates just wasn’t important enough to draw Dickens’s attention for once, so he didn’t bother writing about what happened to any of his friends.

“Cartoon in American Newspaper” (April, 1868). Dickens (left) with George Dolby (right) before a heap of Dickens’s paper money via https://spartacus-educational.com/DICdolby.htm

While I’m not sure whether Dickens knew of Dolby’s actions, I’m confident that this counter-publishing strategy was unnecessary. Normally, anything Dickens published sold extremely well, but his prompt copies were an exception, something Dolby doesn’t mention. As Robert L. Patten says, “the format of the readings was essentially theatrical and oral; the publications issued in connection with various engagements in England and America never amounted to much” (255). The prompt copies were like the screenplay to a film. Just as we’d rather watch a movie than read its screenplay today, Dickens’s Victorian audiences would rather watch his Public Readings than read their transcripts. If they wanted to read Dickens, they could read the published versions of his novels, instead. The same problem applied to the pirates’ transcripts, which weren’t as good as seeing Dickens or reading one of his novels. These pirates posed no threat to Dickens’s tour, and I doubt thwarting the pirates boosted ticket sales for Dickens’s Public Readings, seeing as how his performances already sold out everywhere.

In terms of results, Dolby’s counter-publishing reduced the pirates’ sales, even if the pirates’ endeavor was unlikely to be a success. Ticknor and Fields probably didn’t earn much from the transcripts they published. Dickens, meanwhile, enjoyed large and enthusiastic crowds everywhere he went on his tour while Dolby saved him the trouble of thinking about the pirates, so Dickens ended up benefitting the most. This incident was mostly a victory of principle against literary pirates, a victory that Dickens seldom earned during an era of rampant copyright infringement, and he may not have even known that he won.

Works Cited

Abraham, Adam. “Dickens, ‘Dickensian’, and the Pseudo-Dickens Industry.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 57, no. 4, 2017, pp. 751-770. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu.cyber.usask.ca/article/678907.

Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens: The Pilgrim Edition, Volume 4:1844-1846. Edited by Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis, Clarendon, 1977.

—. The Letters of Charles Dickens: The Pilgrim Edition, Volume 11:1865-1867. Edited by Graham Storey, Margaret Brown, and Kathleen Tillotson, Clarendon, 1999.

—. Nicholas Nickleby. Edited by Mark Ford, Penguin, 2003.

Dolby, George. Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America (1866-1870). Haskell House, 1970.

Hancher, Michael. “Grafting A Christmas Carol.” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 48, no. 4, 2008, pp. 813-827. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40071367.

Helms, Whitney. “Performing Authorship in the Celebrity Sphere: Dickens and the Reading Tours.” Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 50, no. 2, 2014, pp. 115-151.

Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Clarendon Press, 2017.