In his sweeping investigation of the practices and processes of reproduction, Hillel Schwartz declared that over the past three hundred years, Westerners have lived within a “culture of the copy.”Footnote ¹ From the daguerreotype to the ditto, from embalming to evil twins, techniques for multiplication, preoccupations with likeness, and copies themselves have proliferated. Schwartz identified a paradox within this regime. On the one hand, copying has become ever more common, necessary, and attractive. On the other, the very prevalence of copies has made originals more significant, valuable, and noteworthy. “Only in a culture of the copy,” Schwartz wrote, “do we assign such motive force to the original.” When he pointed to this contradiction, Schwartz offered a corrective to Walter Benjamin's oft-cited notion that works of art lose their authority, or their aura, in an age of mechanical reproduction.Footnote ² On the contrary, Schwartz maintained, “the more adept the West has become at the making of copies, the more we have exalted uniqueness.”Footnote ³

Between 1839 and 1843, an unlikely coalition of Britons addressed this paradox of original and copy within an age of mechanical reproduction. During those years Members of Parliament, merchants, and manufacturers whose loyalties crossed party and region campaigned to extend the copyright on designs for industrial wares. Led by Conservative M.P. for Belfast James Emerson Tennent, they pressed Parliament to lengthen the period of copyright protection from three to twelve months. They focused their attention on calicoes, cheaply printed cottons whose success lay at the heart of the consumer and industrial revolutions. Tennent and his allies maintained that a stronger copyright would halt “design piracy,” an activity that had plagued the print trade since the eighteenth century. Extension's advocates argued that piracy compromised a tradition of “original” production. As they pressed to eliminate design piracy, they generated a massive archive, enumerated afterward as “a pile of pamphlets, a heavy Parliamentary report, several heavier debates, a clever ‘Digest of Evidence,’” and “files of Lancashire papers.”Footnote ⁴ Here, they debated the merits of the copyright with their opponents, a feisty coalition of Lancashire printers, merchants, and M.P.s. Branded as “pirates,” these men questioned the necessity of extension and the very notion that copyright law might encourage original design.

As the Penny Magazine pointed out in 1843, the literature produced in the course of the debate rendered the calico trade visible to contemporaries in all its dynamism.Footnote ⁵ Historian David Greysmith showed the same in his skillful analysis of the campaign, which, he argued, brought design and the textile industry into sharp focus.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, the debate is rich on many levels. It demonstrates, for instance, that multiple types of copying were embedded in the calico manufacture. The mechanical reproduction made possible by innovation, the mimesis of the fashion system, the imitation that was part and parcel of imperialism, and, of course, the illicit duplication of piracy all played a part in calico's commodity history. As a debate over copies and originals, the copyright campaign was thus a commentary on the history of the very trade that it sought to govern. But the debate has a significance that extends beyond the calico trade itself. As we shall see, the copyright controversy was, at bottom, a debate about industrial modernity on material and cultural levels.

As a debate about modernity, the copyright campaign endorses Schwartz's premise that the paradox of the copy lies at the heart of contemporary life. It also adds historical freight to his somewhat ethereal analysis. Schwartz cast the copy as the product of a rootless and sweeping modernity marked by the triumph of boredom, ennui, or the “withering of our own liveliness.”Footnote ⁷ The copyright debate suggests, instead, that the problem of copying, in its licit and illicit forms, arose out of the contingencies of an industrial and trading marketplace.Footnote ⁸ The changing geography of the trade, its mechanization, the growth of the retail sector, and the very process of calico production all made copying of manifold varieties possible. The paradox of the copy was, therefore, not simply a problem of culture, but of the market as well. Within the context of the copyright debate, these two areas of inquiry overlap in myriad ways. The debate demonstrates, of course, that changes in the marketplace produced conundrums of culture. It also illustrates that cultural resources and rhetorics illuminated the marketplace. The copyright debate thus provides an ideal vessel for investigating the “reciprocal influence and interpenetration” of cultural practice and economic activity in nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote ⁹

As a study of market culture, this article follows up on the insights of historians of modern consumption. Over the past twenty years, a lively slew of articles, monographs, and anthologies has demonstrated that, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, new retail practices, commodities, and buyers generated distinct cultures of consumption.Footnote ¹⁰ To be sure, the copyright debate reveals a great deal about the making of consumer culture and the anxieties that accrued around it. At the same time, the copyright controversy throws light on the sphere of production.Footnote ¹¹ The debate provides an entry into the cultural world of those calico printers who sought to fashion themselves as the defenders of original production. It also illuminates the world of their opponents, the so-called pirates who questioned the hierarchies of original and copy. By revealing these domains, the debate enriches our understandings of productive culture and cultural production in nineteenth-century Britain.

The early history of calico in Britain provides the “embedded conflicts” that would resurface in the early Victorian campaign for extension.Footnote ¹² It is fitting that the efforts of Tennent and his allies would center on calico for, as Chandra Mukerji has shown, the history of the manufacture was predicated on manifold forms of copying.Footnote ¹³ This was the case from the seventeenth century, when the English and Dutch East India Companies began importing calicoes from the Indian subcontinent into England.Footnote ¹⁴ Along with goods like Chinese porcelain, calico transformed the visual and material culture of urban Britain, providing growing ranks of consumers with a “cornucopia of textiles, in colors, patterns, and qualities” hitherto unrivaled in Europe.Footnote ¹⁵ Beloved by women, these bright cloths sparked a fashion craze during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁶ At that time, ladies from the upper and middling ranks avidly sought out the imported cottons for clothing and for home furnishings.Footnote ¹⁷ Seeking to imitate their superiors, servants, too, joined in the calico craze. Their emulative pursuit of Indian cottons led eighteenth-century critics to lament the impossibility of distinguishing the mistress from the maid and so to suggest the disruptive potential of the calico trade.Footnote ¹⁸

It was with criticisms such as these, which Tennent and his allies would later echo, that eighteenth-century cultural critics castigated calico as the scourge of the marketplace. They branded the craze, and the essentially mimetic pursuit of fashion more generally, as deceptive, reprehensible, and dangerous.Footnote ¹⁹ Female consumption and feminine desire occupied a central place in their criticisms, but cultural commentators also looked with disdain to production.Footnote ²⁰ J. Roberts was just one eighteenth-century writer who forged a link between feminine consumption and oriental production. He derided the Indian products as “tawdry, bespotted, flabby, ragged … thing[s].” Their low price suggested the degraded state of their producers—in Roberts's words, “a parcel of Heathens and Pagans that worship the Devil and work for a half-penny a day.”Footnote ²¹ Though he was a strong advocate of a vigorous domestic marketplace, Daniel Defoe expressed a similar disdain when he portrayed calico as a foreign invasion. Like the plague, calicoes had “crept” into “houses,” “closets,” and bedchambers,” he noted, until “curtains, cushions, chairs, and at last beds themselves were nothing but calicoes or Indian stuffs.”Footnote ²²

Representatives of the domestic silk and woollen industries effectively harnessed these critiques of oriental production and feminine consumption. They deployed a patriotism based on protectionism as they sought to salvage their livelihoods in the face of the growing calico trade.Footnote ²³ Beginning in 1700, Parliament responded to their woes by passing a series of acts that prohibited importing fabrics that had been dyed, stained, or painted.Footnote ²⁴ Despite the threat of a £200 fine, eighteenth-century merchants persisted in smuggling calicoes into Britain, and customers continued to buy them.Footnote ²⁵ Parliament sought to discourage this practice wholesale in 1720, when it passed a stringent sumptuary law that prohibited the “use or wear of any printed or dyed calicoes.” It softened the law in 1736 but did not strike it from the books until 1774.Footnote ²⁶

In one of the many ironic turns in calico's commodity history, the acts passed to protect the domestic woollen and silk trades gave rise to a British cotton manufacture.Footnote ²⁷ An artisanal printing trade began near London with the express goal of copying the outlawed Indian productions.Footnote ²⁸ Thanks to the metropole's role as an import center, printers found ready examples of Indian wares. Working with wooden blocks and later with copper plates, printers imitated these goods and sold their high-end productions to consumers from the middling and upper ranks. The enterprise of copying Indian cottons would grow to industrial proportions in Lancashire, where the calico manufacture found a new home in 1764. There, and in Scotland, too, a mechanized trade devoted to large-scale production developed. It flourished thanks to innovations in spinning, dyeing, bleaching, and, most important, printing.Footnote ²⁹ The most crucial of these developments was the cylinder, or roller, which allowed printers to copy long, continuous pieces of cloth as never before.Footnote ³⁰ By the mid-nineteenth century, the block would print six pieces per day, while the roller could produce between two hundred and five hundred.Footnote ³¹

This fact was not lost on nineteenth-century commentators who marveled at the cylinder's productive capacities. The Penny Magazine reported, for instance, that the “cylinder machine” printed three-quarters of a mile of cloth per hour. “Few things,” it claimed, were “more extraordinary” than the “substitution of miles for yards.”Footnote ³² It was in 1843 that the Penny Magazine boasted the cylinder's prowess to a readership of laborers, whom it addressed as producers. This class of producers consumed calico, too. By the time of the debate, the laboring classes had become the chief consumers of calicoes in Britain. From the mid-eighteenth century, in fact, laboring women delighted in the dress prints, shawls, bandannas, and handkerchiefs produced by the provincial trade.Footnote ³³ Provincial manufacturers also sold similar, if bolder and more garishly colored, wares abroad. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the provincial trade would supply the markets of Africa, Asia, the United States, South America, and, in what D. A. Farnie once called a “gesture of supreme presumption,” even the Indian subcontinent.Footnote ³⁴

Taken together, these developments enabled the provincial calico manufacture to prosper and eventually to outstrip the metropolitan trade. By the end of the eighteenth century, provincial printers—especially those in Lancashire—presented a real threat to London.Footnote ³⁵ They produced more cottons, with greater rapidity and cheapness, than their metropolitan counterparts.Footnote ³⁶ The provincial trade easily surpassed that of London in sheer quantity, but it did not enjoy the same renown for tasteful designs.Footnote ³⁷ Ever the entrepreneurs, provincial printers sought to rectify this shortcoming by garnering inspiration from London. Printers from Lancashire, and from Scotland, too, took the practice of copying that had governed the trade's development to yet another level. In what was a widespread practice, they imitated the designs of their metropolitan counterparts, often copying these patterns wholesale.Footnote ³⁸

Metropolitan printers lashed out against the imitative practices of their provincial competitors, which they branded as piracy. Printer Charles O’Brien was one of the first to lambast the activities of provincial manufactures. He decried their “piratical practices” as “unwarrantable in intention, disgraceful in execution, and destructive in their tendency.” Inveighing against his provincial competitors, O’Brien conceived an imaginative geography of the trade that pitted the moral and tasteful London printer against the debased Lancashire manufacturer. His formulation elevated the so-called original designs of the metropole above the pirated wares of the provinces. As O’Brien saw it, London's productions surpassed Lancashire's on aesthetic, economic, and moral grounds. Along with other metropolitan printers, he maintained that piracy threatened this hierarchy because it deprived the original design of its value. O’Brien and his allies found sympathetic ears in Westminster. There, Parliament responded to their concerns by passing a two-month copyright on printed designs in 1787 and by extending this protection to three months in 1794.Footnote ³⁹

These acts were among the “fitful attempts” to improve the industrial arts in eighteenth-century Britain.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such efforts would attain new vigor and legitimacy in the nineteenth century, thanks to the labors of a House of Commons Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures. In 1835 and 1836, this committee collected evidence from countless witnesses whose ranks included aesthetes, academicians, craftsmen, and manufacturers; all attested to the lamentable state of “taste in design” in Britain. The committee's report elevated industrial design, hitherto the concern of aesthetic critics and special interests, to a national preoccupation. Although it is best known for inspiring the Government School of Design, it also spurred Parliament to revisit the matter of design copyright.

A new law of 1839 responded to the concerns of those iron founders, coach painters, silk manufacturers, and architects who had informed the 1835–36 committee that a stronger copyright was a requisite for improving the nation's arsenal of designs.Footnote ⁴¹ This statute established a central designs registry in London; it also extended the copyright to Ireland and Scotland. Although it answered the pleas of some witnesses, the 1839 act proved disappointing to representatives of the calico manufacture. The new law differentiated between woven fabrics, to which it extended a twelve-month copyright, and printed fabrics like calicoes, which only carried three months’ protection. Advocates of the calico manufacture inveighed against this distinction between printed and woven fabrics. In what may seem an ironic deployment of a contemporary language of popular radicalism, Tory M.P. Tennent held that it attested to the “impolicy” and “injustice” of Parliament.Footnote ⁴² Printers, politicians, and political economists united behind Tennent as they argued that calicoes should carry a twelve-month term of protection, just like woven goods. When they traced the changes in supply and demand within the trade, these participants in the campaign showed themselves to be shrewd analysts of a vibrant market. At bottom, they maintained that extension had become an exigency because of changes in production and consumption. These developments had conspired to blur the lines between copies and originals, while making the very distinction between the categories all the more critical.

Tennent effectively captured this sentiment when he maintained that, by 1840, the three-month period of protection had become a “dead letter.”Footnote ⁴³ Other advocates of extension expounded on this point by enumerating the myriad changes within the calico manufacture, most notably the acceleration of production. The increased productive capacity of Britain's manufacture presented designers with a paradox, one that Charles Babbage had discussed a few years before in his Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832). Presaging Schwartz, Babbage had noted that mechanical reproduction enhanced the value of original design.Footnote ⁴⁴ Proponents of extension took Babbage's understanding one step further, as they demonstrated that mechanization made original designs not simply more valuable, but also more vulnerable. It allowed for a proliferation of patterns that had dangerous consequences. Honest printers found themselves daily at the mercy of pirates who could foist designs on the market with staggering and unprecedented speed. A prototypical vignette produced in the course of the debate suggests as much. Seeking to shock his fellow M.P.s, Tennent declared in the House of Commons that he knew of a case where pirates “surreptitiously obtained” the new dress patterns of one eminent house and sold copies at a considerably lower cost just eight days later.Footnote ⁴⁵

To press the obsolescence of the three-month law, extension's advocates looked also to the continued expansion of Britain's export trade. It had become impossible for calico merchants to protect their stock in both the domestic and overseas markets, since sales at home and abroad occurred at different times of the year. As he spoke before the Select Committee, printer Salis Schwabe—who served clients in the Americas, the Mediterranean, the Levant, and Europe—bemoaned the impossibility of protecting his designs. He outlined the year-long trade cycle of one dress pattern. Schwabe designed the pattern in June, engraved it in September, sent it overseas in October, marketed it at home in January, and delivered it in February and March, for sales that extended to the following July.Footnote ⁴⁶ Such predicaments promised to become only more prevalent in the nineteenth century's globalizing marketplace, where the “tastes” of consumers from myriad nations, regarded as “so distinct” from one another in decades past, seemed yearly to be “growing more assimilated.”Footnote ⁴⁷

If the three-month copyright presented a problem for the garment trade, it proved an even more insurmountable obstacle for those who marketed calicoes for home furnishings. Here fashion did not fluctuate as rapidly as in the dress industry, where goods tended to “pass off with the season.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Furniture patterns remained “valuable” for at least four or five years, printer Edward Brooke explained to the Select Committee.Footnote ⁴⁹ Others followed Brooke by stressing the particular rhythms of the furniture trade. Thomas Clarkson, a high-end upholsterer, deemed the three-month copyright ludicrous in a market where it took him a full year merely to ascertain if a pattern might be successful. In response, Clarkson and others went so far as to advocate a two- or even three-year copyright.Footnote ⁵⁰

When they commented on the rhythms of the furniture trade, men like Clarkson and Brooke illuminated a dynamic consumer marketplace. The very rhythms of its retail culture necessitated a longer copyright. The same could be said for its practices of display. When they pressed for a stronger copyright, the advocates of extension pointed to the “general opening up of visual culture” that was so central to consumption practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Together, such developments as traveling merchants, illustrated periodicals, trade catalogs, and display techniques gave design a new and unparalleled visibility.Footnote ⁵¹ Of late, the very modernity of this retail culture has become a subject of contention among historians.Footnote ⁵² To be sure, the development of a culture of display was incremental in character. Given this fact, it is all the more intriguing that the proponents of extension brought a rhetoric of shock and awe to their discussions of retail culture, which they suggested to be an abrupt development. In the 1830s and 1840s, they noted, the products of calico printers filled the “shop windows of London.” Although intended to promote the wares of manufacturers and retailers, these displays left producers vulnerable to attack. One opponent of the bill, printer John Brooks, confessed before the Select Committee that he employed a pattern drawer to “look through the windows” in the City of London and the West End, where he would find designs worthy of reproduction. Men like Brooks's assistant devised an ingenious approach to pattern production. Instead of taking patterns wholesale, they pieced them together through accumulation, using “a little bit from one and from another.”Footnote ⁵³ For other eminent printers, this practice exemplified patterns’ insecurity as property. It was the very “immateriality” of a pattern on display that allowed it to be “stolen through a window, without cutting out a pane of glass,” or “carried off by the eye, without being traced, or found upon the person.”Footnote ⁵⁴

It was not just visual spectacle, but alienation, too, that marked the calico marketplace as distinctly modern. Witnesses who testified before the Select Committee made clear that alienation, like the culture of display, endangered the trade. Printers like Clarkson reported that they had fallen victim to the depersonalization wrought by commerce's expansion. Clarkson avowed before the Select Committee that his very customers had betrayed him, albeit unknowingly. The unwitting pawns of pirates, they had inadvertently passed Clarkson's designs to men of questionable character whom he deemed “mean enough to do anything.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The proponents of extension thus argued that the very developments that had enriched the calico trade posed a threat to original design. As they pressed for extension, Tennent and his allies cast the copyright as a shield against the depredations of a modern marketplace. Yet, they also maintained that a stronger copyright was essential to the trade's growth. Like so many aesthetic reformers of the day, they added geopolitical weight to their claim by looking across the English channel to France. Its recovery from the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars made a new law all the more imperative. To date, Britain had benefited from France's struggles, as its prowess as an exporter of goods and machinery suggested.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, the proponents of extension warned that French industrialization promised to challenge Britain's market dominance.Footnote ⁵⁷

This forecast proved alarming to James Thomson, a leading printer in the debate, an “indefatigable pamphleteer,” and a man touted as the “Duke of Wellington of calico-printers.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Thomson hit on a familiar refrain as he transposed the quality-quantity opposition wrought decades earlier by O’Brien to a national register. Although Britain excelled on the “useful” side of the trade, Thomson noted, France had achieved supremacy in the “ornamental” aspects of textile production. This notion of a productive, if philistine, Britain would fuel the patriotic fervor of some nineteenth-century aesthetic critics, though not the proponents of extension, who strategically deployed a version of Francophilia to advance their cause. Whereas the English regarded “taste in design” as “common-place and valueless,” the French had “nurtured” it with “all the tenderness bestowed upon a rare exotic.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Thomson and his allies cited several institutions that advanced taste, and presumably originality, in France, including the Catholic Church. Rather than the target for censure that it was in so much political debate of the day, the Catholic Church appeared as an institution worthy of emulation, at least when it came to its rich visual culture. A strong French tradition of design copyright law dating to the 1730s only strengthened this visual tradition. In France, extension's advocates noted, periods of protection ranged from one year to the life of the designer. Given these advantages, Thomson forecasted that Britain would stand “on a footing of equality” with France only when it granted a twelve-month period of protection to its calico printers.Footnote ⁶⁰

Katie Scott's work on copyright in France suggests that Thomson, Tennent, and their allies may have exaggerated the legal might of the copyright across the channel.Footnote ⁶¹ This idealization is just part and parcel of the striking brand of Francophilia deployed in the copyright campaign. In the name of safeguarding British design, extension's supporters mobilized a melange of French symbols. These ranged from the Catholic Church, an emblem of despotism, to the call for equality, so resonant with English radicals. The copyright campaign thus places the Franco-British opposition that so many scholars have discussed in a new light.Footnote ⁶² It suggests a certain pragmatism, not to mention a hybridity, to this discourse. Regardless of their political alignments, proponents of extension found in ancien régime institutions like “Papism” and protectionism mechanisms for redressing the disorder of a modern marketplace, and ostensibly for protecting originality.

When they outlined developments within the calico trade, Tennent and his allies demonstrated that a stronger law had become a requisite for their own livelihoods and for the national health alike. Yet, their arguments eclipsed the mere matters of supply and demand. As they pressed for a new law, the proponents of extension engaged in a process of “self-fashioning” wherein they styled themselves as the defenders of original production and its attendant virtues.Footnote ⁶³ This self fashioning relied on a motley repertoire of representational practices—among them, the rhetoric of imperiled masculinity, the nascent science of statistics, and the concerns of literary and political culture. The proponents of extension employed these discourses to press the virtues of original production and the vice involved with piracy. As they did so, they showed themselves to be the defenders of two broader institutions that they deemed inextricable from originality: artisanal production and property.

Extension's advocates imagined themselves as “creative and conscientious printers,” “enterprising men,” risk takers, and “speculators or adventurers in goods.”Footnote ⁶⁴ When they sold original designs, they braved an uncertain marketplace. Those who pioneered new styles never knew which designs would “take the public taste,” “strike the public,” or “hit” the market. The odds of success, printer Edmund Potter lamented, were slim to none in a trade where only one in five hundred designs flourished.Footnote ⁶⁵ Its likelihood appeared all the more bleak in a market fraught with piracy. To press this point, printer and merchant Augustus Applegath deployed the language of speculation so prevalent in the debates; he likened the current marketplace to a rigged lottery. It was useless, Applegath mourned, to design new patterns in a market where a pirate was likely to run away with his “prize.” Ruined men, printers like Applegath “suffered” at the hands of copyists who “entirely destroyed” their designs. Hurt by the “untoward events” of the piratical marketplace, their trades had deteriorated “to a very great extent,” sometimes “beyond telling.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Applegath's rhetoric of imperiled masculinity bears a close resemblance to that employed among risk-taking merchants in colonial America. This continuity is telling. It indicates that those on both sides of the Atlantic were bound in a common culture of trade. Even more appositely, it suggests that crises of masculinity were part and parcel of the upheavals of commodity capitalism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁶⁷

More than injuring the livelihoods of individual men, design piracy denigrated a tradition of artisanal production. Leading figures in the debate emphasized as much when they contrasted the firms that produced so-called originals with those that pirated. Thomson and Potter, two of the foremost supporters of extension, described the differences between the two groups at length. Among the first they counted “houses of the first magnitude,” firms such as their own, which represented the vestiges of an honorable, but vanishing trade. Men of “small capital,” they ran modest enterprises that allegedly retained the structure of artisanal workshops.Footnote ⁶⁸ They catered to high-end constituencies that purported to print by the block rather than the roller.Footnote ⁶⁹ Friendly to aesthetic improvement, Thomson and Potter employed their own designers. They did not rely on products from the outside, whether bought or stolen. In stark contrast stood the businesses of the “notorious pirates,” which served Britain's lower classes and the export market. The men of “large capital” who operated them preyed on the designs of Thomson, Potter and their ilk. Favoring the rolling machine over the block, they also challenged a venerated tradition of hand labor.Footnote ⁷⁰

When they discussed the trade, Thomson and Potter recalled the image sketched by O’Brien nearly fifty years before. Building on his conception, they portrayed the artisanal printer as the guardian of taste and originality and the industrialist as his pirating foe. They did not, however, render this opposition in stark regional terms that pitted London against Lancashire. It is noteworthy that Thomson and Potter hailed from Clitheroe and Dinting Vale, respectively, both in Lancashire.Footnote ⁷¹ They counted among their rivals many producers who resided nearby and went so far as to call Manchester the “hotbed” or “nest and nursery of piracy.”Footnote ⁷² As they fashioned themselves in opposition to their competitors, they described a struggle that pitted Lancashire printers against one another. By so doing, they produced a more diversified image of Lancashire than O’Brien had. There, industrial and artisanal firms stood side by side, and the former preyed on the latter. London, by contrast, remained in the background of the nineteenth-century debate, a vestigial presence whose fine trade had been nearly “swallowed up” by the provincial manufacture.Footnote ⁷³

Potter's and Thomson's discussions also differed from O’Brien's in their use of numeric data. By employing figures from the trade, Potter and Thomson hoped to bolster the image of a Lancashire divided. They also aimed to hone an image of themselves—one that would turn out to be none too ingenious—as the carriers of an artisanal tradition. In 1839, Potter's firm printed 83,000 pieces, and Thomson's produced 168,181. Potter employed 380 hands, and Thomson 930 hands.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to Thomson and Potter, these figures suggested the great credence they gave to design and to the labor that produced it. These numbers were especially striking in comparison to those provided by James Kershaw, a Mancunian branded as the consummate pirate. One of the bill's foremost opponents, Kershaw boasted that his firm was the “largest” in Britain and that he produced “in very large quantities”: between 1834 and 1836, for instance, he printed over 880,000 pieces per year. In the face of these numbers, Thomson and Potter were quick to point out that Kershaw was no friend to the trade's artisanal traditions. Though he produced staggering amounts, Kershaw employed only two hundred men.Footnote ⁷⁵

Thomson and Potter introduced these figures in order to illuminate the productive geography of Lancashire, but numbers would remain anecdotal and not particularly compelling evidence. They were a precarious form of knowledge at a moment when the question of how to represent industrial Britain, and Manchester especially, was up for discussion. The pioneering social scientific studies of men like James Philips Kay and Edwin Chadwick, performed contemporaneously with the copyright debate, wove “figures of arithmetic” together with “figures of speech” to accomplish this representational work.Footnote ⁷⁶ Potter followed on Kay and Chadwick when he presented his own “statistical account” to the Select Committee. He had surveyed eighty-eight firms in Lancashire, with 410 machines and 8,601 tables for block printing. Twenty-six firms, with 133 machines and 3,940 tables, supported the bill. In opposition stood thirty-two firms, with 155 machines and 2,661 tables.Footnote ⁷⁷ Despite his intentions, Potter showed the division between the small, artisanal firms and the large, mechanized ones to be murky. His numbers attested to the persistence of block printing across the board. Already muddled in its purpose, Potter's evidence would encounter a further challenge from a statistician hired by the opposition who maintained that he could find only twelve firms that supported extension.Footnote ⁷⁸ This dispute over numbers reveals that one of the matters at stake in the campaign was the very definition of originality.

When they styled themselves as the protectors of originality, the advocates of extension produced a multipronged case. One line of argument had them as the bearers of an artisanal tradition. A second entailed casting themselves as the protectors of property. These two strands came together in the notion of “property of skill.” Artisans had put forth this idea in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially following the parliamentary repeal of statutory apprenticeship in 1814. When they invoked this notion, artisans grasped for a measure of security in the face of a deregulated marketplace. As John Rule has demonstrated, the concept of property of skill provided a rallying point for the nascent working classes.Footnote ⁷⁹ The design copyright debate attests to its portability. When they made their case, the middle-class proponents of extension deployed property of skill strategically, if implicitly. Like the artisans who had preceded them, they grasped for a measure of political capital as they confronted the upheavals wrought by mechanization, consumption, and global trade.

In tracts and in testimony, extension's advocates sought to make the claim for property in design “as clear as the sun at noonday.”Footnote ⁸⁰ This was no small challenge at a moment when the legal category of intellectual property was in its infancy.Footnote ⁸¹ To press their case, Tennent and his allies thus likened design to myriad varieties of property. Property of skill was just one of these. Far more explicitly, extension's advocates looked to literary copyright. In literary copyright law they found an effective and timely vehicle for framing design as intellectual property. Literary copyright had been the subject of great debate in the eighteenth century in the face of technological advances in printing, the growth of a literary marketplace, and the development of Romantic notions of the author. When they looked back to the eighteenth-century copyright debates, Tennent and his allies saw market circumstances that resembled their own. They also found cultural capital and moral authority in the ideal of the heroic author.Footnote ⁸² Renowned printers like Thomson and Potter harnessed this notion for their own purposes by translating it into the figure of the original printer. The literary copyright debates thus offered the proponents of extension an apposite rhetorical strategy. They also provided a claim to relevance. Thanks to the continued growth of book consumption, both at home and abroad, literary copyright had surfaced once again as an issue of domestic and international concern at the very moment of the design copyright debate.Footnote ⁸³ Its foremost champion, Charles Dickens—who would, incidentally, later dedicate Our Mutual Friend to Tennent—had raised the issue of international copyright law in his American Notes (1839).Footnote ⁸⁴ It was Tennent, a published author himself, who used the comparison between literature and design most effectively in his Treatise on the Copyright of Designs.Footnote ⁸⁵ There he ridiculed a regime where a worthless literary trifle, whether a farce, a ballad, or a waltz, enjoyed a twenty-year copyright, while designs for calicoes held only three months’ protection.Footnote ⁸⁶

Tennent's allies followed by likening patterns to long-standing forms of property, such as “merchant's capital” and land. To fashion themselves as property's guardians, several printers looked especially to agrarian metaphors. Applegath was just one printer who portrayed himself as a yeoman farmer to argue that the copyright would render the market more predictable. If granted a longer period of protection, Applegath envisioned, “the more I sowed, the more I should reap.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The resort to the language of agriculture was savvy, for it allowed the proponents of extension to carve out an advantageous political space. By emphasizing the sanctity of land as property, extension's advocates curried favor with a landed Parliament. This was particularly attractive to men like Potter. A committed Lancashire liberal, Potter had lobbied for the repeal of the calico duty; he was also a supporter of the Anti–Corn Law League.Footnote ⁸⁸ Potter's endorsement of laissez faire, which he and others abandoned to advocate for the copyright, alienated him from more conservative members of Parliament like Tennent. By upholding property in land, Potter and his allies found a way to bridge the ideological gap that separated them from the Tories. This process of framing themselves as property's guardians had other political uses as well. As they aligned themselves with Tory England, the advocates of extension distanced themselves from the radical causes of the industrial north. Thomson went so far as to liken his opponents to Chartists, who disputed the sacredness of “property in land,” and socialists, who attacked the private ownership of “goods and chattels.” When he framed the pirates as property's enemies, Thomson placed them at not one but two political extremes. By drawing on a popular variety of Orientalism, Thomson compared the bill's challengers to unyielding tyrants. In their oppressive universe, the “insecurity of property” produced a “withering effect.” It was detrimental to market progress, regardless of whether the “spoiler” was a “Turkish Pacha in the despotic East” or an “English Pirate” in a “land of liberty and law.”Footnote ⁸⁹

As the foregoing discussion suggests, the process of “self fashioning” undertaken by Thomson and other printers was a complex one. The proponents of extension marshaled a set of associations that traversed the domains of the economic, political, and literary as they sought to portray themselves as the guardians of original production. As we shall see, the project of describing the bill's opponents proved just as essential to this endeavor. Literary critic Stephen Greenblatt contended as much in his seminal discussion of self-fashioning. He noted that self-fashioning necessarily occurs “in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The tracts and testimony produced by extension's supporters bear this out. When they depicted their challengers, Thomson and other printers invented foils who preyed on them, and also the national economy, in a moral drama of the marketplace. In the process, they sought to place their opponents at the boundaries of the political and economic nation. To do as much, the proponents of extension mobilized a theatrical rhetoric, circulated didactic marketplace narratives, and deployed the notion of the pirate in strategic ways. For the opponents, these aspersions would prove harmful in the political arena. For contemporary historians, however, the slurs cast by extension's advocates are instructive, because they provide another window onto the market culture of early Victorian Britain.

Extension's supporters employed a melodramatic rhetoric as they described the heated contest over copyright. According to Thomson, the struggle pitted a group that exhibited “high principle, correct taste, and refined execution” against a set of opponents who acted with “avarice,” “impunity,” and “unscrupulous morality.” The bill's opponents were “servile copyists” who showed no respect for originality. Parasites, they sat “lying in wait” to assail their more virtuous competitors.Footnote ⁹¹ When he testified before the Select Committee, Charles Warwick embroidered Thomson's portrayal of the bill's opponents. Warwick characterized them as “persons of very little character, who did not like to be seen in daylight.”Footnote ⁹² Others followed Warwick and Thomson. When they did so, they also sustained Roberts's association of the quality of goods with the morality of their producers. According to extension's advocates, the very copies wrought by piracy were themselves “deceptive and delusive,” “evil,” “immoral,” “mean,” and “servile.”Footnote ⁹³

These character traits had consequences that were deleterious in aesthetic and economic terms alike. In the pages of the Art Union, W. Cooke Taylor alleged that the piratical practices of the bill's opponents tended to “produce sameness” and “retard the march of improvement in art.” Taylor fleshed out the metaphor of piracy when he sought to defame the bill's challengers as lawless renegades and marginal Englishmen. He hearkened back to the plunderers of centuries before. Taylor argued that patterns were “careless and hasty productions” for the same reason that the coasts of England and France remained uncultivated in the “times of Northmen”: “People will not expend labor, time, and money for the benefit of pirates.”Footnote ⁹⁴

High-seas piracy of the sort that Taylor described was once the officially sanctioned practice of states and later the province of bands of renegade marauders. By the moment of the copyright debate, however, it had long been an antiquated practice. The stuff of legend and didactic tales, piracy carried indeterminate meanings. On the one hand, it recalled the masculine vigor of an earlier era. Often practiced by the dispossessed, piracy was a form of ingenious, and even heroic, adaptation to inhospitable environments.Footnote ⁹⁵ On the other hand, piracy connoted parasitism, degeneration, and marginality.Footnote ⁹⁶ A denigrated practice, piracy was not restricted to trade by the nineteenth century. If latter-day pirates did not transgress the boundaries of polite trade, they challenged the limits of respectability. A serially published tale called “Social Piracy,” which appeared in the New Monthly Magazine in 1844, suggests as much. “Social Piracy” told the story of a parasitical family, the Hawkes, who lived off of the hospitality of their friends and relatives. Piracy, the New Monthly Magazine declared, was not just a practice of the high seas; it could occur on land, even in the “squares of London.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The tale's pervasive moral inflection seems to foreclose a radical interpretation of the Hawkes, and of piracy more generally, which suggests that it was a form of creative accommodation by disenfranchised figures. Rather than an adaptive strategy, the New Monthly Magazine showed piracy to be a destructive practice.

As they sought to tarnish the reputations of their opponents, the proponents of extension built on the understandings of piracy expressed in the New Monthly Magazine. To emphasize the depredations of piracy and to frame themselves as the stewards of originality, extension's advocates used marketplace narratives that resembled the New Monthly Magazine's tale in their didacticism. Potter deployed vignettes from the trade to illustrate the workings of “piratical economy.” “It is always the low that copies the first-class printer,” he claimed. Potter proposed a scenario where printer A lost his trade to pirates B, C, and D, each of whom executed in shoddier colors than his predecessor. By the time D got a hold of the pattern, A's “first-class” design had degenerated into something “servile” and “low.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Others similarly brought the analogy of class to bear on design's deterioration. According to Clarkson, piracy compromised the “patrician character” of originals, rendering them “common” or “plebeian.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Applegath also emphasized the market deterioration wrought by piracy. “I do not buy my patterns with any confidence,” Applegath bemoaned, as he staged himself as a subject at risk. “The draper who employs me does not order with any confidence; the retail draper does not buy with any confidence; the lady who buys the dress buys it almost with the impression that it is hardly worth while to buy it.” As if to confirm that impression, the lady's servant managed to acquire a pirated copy almost immediately after her employer's purchase. “How we manage to get a trade, I hardly know,” mused Applegath.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Applegath's narrative is remarkable on two fronts. To begin, it brings consumption into the discussion of copyright. Furthermore, it incorporates two classes of women—“ladies” and “servants”—into the debate. Although these two maneuvers were rare, they were not singular. Merchant Leo Schuster addressed women's consumption in a related vignette. Schuster told the story of two ladies living abroad who found themselves caught in a rainstorm. When one discovered that her dress had run and faded, her companion explained, “Aye, you bought an English print; that is the cause.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

If consumption was a dominant preoccupation among eighteenth-century critics, it was less so in the nineteenth-century debate, where advocates of extension concentrated on supply-side concerns. Applegath's and Schuster's anecdotes are valuable, for they remind us that women's consumption remained a concern for market critics in the nineteenth century. Yet, for all that they raise, Applegath's and Schuster's tales do not provide a comprehensive picture of calico consumption. At the moment of the debate, and, in fact, from the mid-eighteenth century onward, it was working-class women who were the chief consumers of calicoes within Britain.Footnote ¹⁰² This reality may not have come through in the didactic tales offered by Applegath and Schuster, but proponents of extension were well aware of it all the same. Implied in their arguments, in fact, was the understanding that the copyright promised to protect these untutored consumers from the marketplace, just as it guaranteed to safeguard the marketplace from the consumers themselves.Footnote ¹⁰³ This is evident in the pleas for extension, where supporters maintained that the copyright promised to guard “true taste” from the plagues of the modern market: “fashion,” “the passion for novelty,” and “the tinsel of fancy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Such words recall those of eighteenth-century critics who were quick to pinpoint female excess as the scourge of the market. If foreign producers and fashionable women threatened the marketplace in the eighteenth century, another unholy alliance—working-class women and the pirates who abetted them—did the same a century later. When they linked pirates and working-class women, extension's supporters suggested that their challengers were both debased and feminine. If we look to the work of David Kuchta, we recognize this as a canny political strategy—one that mobilized gender and class in order to draw lines of exclusion in the marketplace and the political area alike.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ According to extension's supporters, only a strong law could protect the nation from the excesses of piratical economy and its practitioners.

The proponents of extension tried to discredit their opponents through the melodramatic rhetoric and marketplace vignettes that they deployed in their own tracts and testimony. Partial to Thomson and his allies from the outset, the Select Committee also sought to vilify the so-called pirates. As Greysmith explains, extension's opponents found themselves “reduced to petulance” when they testified before a body that had come to a foregone conclusion.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ If we sustain the metaphor of piracy, we might consider the Select Committee a latter-day bureaucratic counterpart to those punitive spectacles designed to condemn high-seas piracy in earlier centuries. This parallel was not lost on James Emerson Tennent, who relied on the committee's evidence to produce two anonymously published tracts, Argument Made Easy and The Policy of Piracy.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Here, Tennent strategically excerpted the Select Committee testimony of two of his most vociferous opponents, Manchester printers Daniel Lee and James Kershaw. By circulating the words of his adversaries, Tennent sought to portray them to the reading public as rogues and even cuckolds.

A close analysis of Tennent's tracts reveals that he was not successful in this effort. Rather than coming off as idiots or schemers, the opponents of the bill showed themselves to be adherents to a different industrial logic. When they spoke before the Select Committee, the boisterous constituency of Lancashire printers and M.P.s who challenged the bill marshaled their own arguments about originals and copies. In strategic terms, they may have been defeated and disorganized, bulldozed as they were by the partisan committee. Yet, their responses did not want for logic or “discipline.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Instead, they reveal that the so-called pirates disagreed with the proponents on significant matters—matters that exceeded the bureaucratic question of copyright. With their plaintive protestations, Lee, Kershaw, and their ilk challenged the premises that informed the case for extension. Their arguments demonstrate ultimately that the very “policy of piracy,” and the notion of copying entailed therein, was itself a market strategy.

Like the bill's supporters, the challengers of the copyright addressed the issues of market expediency and foreign competition. They advocated what they touted as a theoretically pure, unadulterated version of laissez faire. In what might seem an echo of contemporary campaigns against the Corn Laws and the East India Company, the so-called pirates accused the advocates of extension of fostering “monopoly.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As they saw it, it was not copying, but the copyright itself that harmed market health. Its extension would raise prices, increase litigation, and generally stymie the printing trade, not to mention the spinning and dyeing industries connected to it.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The Select Committee testimony of Louis Lucas, a merchant who opposed the bill, exemplified this view. Lucas warned that extension would prove more debilitating to the nation's commerce than any amount of copying. He envisioned a trade ground to a standstill because of the multitude of legal “scrapes” that would result from the new law.Footnote ¹¹¹

Just as the bill's supporters had, the so-called pirates looked overseas to make their case. They warned that the proposed law would place the English manufacturer on an unequal footing with foreign competitors. Mocking the deployment of the notion of piracy by Tennent and his allies, William Ross shrewdly cautioned that the copyright would present foreigners with a “bounty” that was off-limits to English printers.Footnote ¹¹² While the proposed legislation punished British printers for copying, it contained no provisions for disciplining foreign firms. This was no small concern, given the industrialization of continental Europe, which was aided in large part by the importation of British machinery. With this in mind, the bill's opponents looked with great concern to Germany, Switzerland, and even Belgium. As he surveyed the trade across the Channel, the liberal M.P. for Manchester, Mark Philips, a member of the Select Committee and a staunch opponent of the copyright, claimed that he could not shake the “bug bear” of foreign competition.Footnote ¹¹³ Some foreign manufacturers went so far as to attack Britain's trade from within its very borders. Engraver John Royle reported that it was customary for U.S. firms to employ agents in Britain, especially in Manchester. Charged with obtaining swatches of British patterns, these agents provided an aesthetic lifeline to the United States. Royle deemed this practice a variety of design piracy that had gone unpunished, and one that was certain to grow more viable under the proposed law. As they fleshed out Royle's image of a Lancashire teeming with foreigners, others noted that “native Germans” threatened to do the same.Footnote ¹¹⁴

It is telling that the pirates looked with seemingly prophetic concern to the United States and Germany, rather than to France. When they did so, the opponents of the bill espoused a distinct industrial strategy. While Tennent and his allies prized a quality trade as the key to Britain's market health, the bill's challengers favored bulk production or, as they put it, the trade in “medium goods” rather than “fine ones.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ And when they pointed to the likelihood of foreign theft, the opponents of extension portrayed the English calico manufacture differently than the bill's supporters had. The pirates imagined Manchester as a fertile design field, while Tennent and his allies had envisioned the city as an aesthetic wasteland. This is all too evident in the dismissive responses to the concerns about foreign competition offered by Tennent and his allies. Why would continental printers copy English designs, one supporter of extension had asked, when they regarded these prints with the “greatest contempt” from the outset?Footnote ¹¹⁶

These differences informed the contrasting degrees of significance that those on opposing sides of the issue accorded to design. The proponents of extension had pressed the importance of originals by likening them to different sorts of property, whether literature, land, or capital. The pirates attacked this understanding when they argued that patterns carried “very little value,” especially in comparison with books or paintings. In the minds of the pirates, patterns did not fall within the domain of “art.” Instead, they were “common” things—commodities of “insignificant character” with “no talent in them,” the residue of casual labor to be hawked about on the street. Hasty creations, a designer could produce between six and eight patterns during a day's work.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This understanding, expressed so often by the opponents of the bill, reflected a general debasement of design in an industrializing Britain. Instead of a “liberal art” practiced by “gentlemen,” design had been “degraded to a mechanical employment.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Tennent and his allies raised this point time and again in their campaign. Even as they sought to restore dignity to the trade, however, the proponents of extension could not help but mimic the rhetoric of the bill's opponents by pointing to patterns’ ephemerality. Thomson had compared patterns to “soap-bubbles blown in the sunshine.” “Glittering and iridescent,” they tended to “burst” just as they came into being.Footnote ¹¹⁹

When they testified that patterns were things of a “trifling” nature, the pirates were not being cavalier.Footnote ¹²⁰ Rather, they were challenging the hierarchy of original and copy as laid out by extension's supporters and, incidentally, by Hillel Schwartz. As he brought the labor theory of value to bear on the process of copying, printer Daniel Lee interrogated one of the orthodoxies held by extension's advocates.Footnote ¹²¹ Tennent and his allies had repeatedly noted that designing an original required more time, labor, and creativity than making a copy. They based their claim on the fact that the process of translating an original design from pattern to roller—called “making out” within the trade—was a time-consuming one.Footnote ¹²² Lee argued, instead, that tracing a copy was “more tedious and unpleasant” than designing an original.Footnote ¹²³ It was, perhaps, a skill in its own right.Footnote ¹²⁴ Elsewhere, printer John Brooks posed an alternate hierarchy of original and copy by drawing on the logic of fashion: the mimetic enterprise to which calico had been linked since its entry into Britain. He invited printers like Thomson to copy his patterns outright. “It exalts my name,” Brooks proclaimed. “We thrive better under people copying us than otherwise.”Footnote ¹²⁵ As he suggested that it was the copy, and not the original, that conferred value within the marketplace, Brooks came closer to the heart of the fashion system than his opponents.

The pirates further challenged the orthodoxies presented by the bill's supporters as they confounded the distinction between original and copy. As they saw it, the bill was sure to present substantial bureaucratic problems. When he spoke against the bill in the Commons, M.P. Philips pointed to the problem that magistrates might face in judging cases of piracy. They would meet a tremendous obstacle, he warned, for it was “difficult, if not utterly impossible, to decide when originality in design ended, and copying commenced.”Footnote ¹²⁶ John Heathcoat, another liberal M.P., expressed a similar concern. In another rare moment where women entered the debate, Heathcoat suggested that “ladies” be the judges in copyright disputes.Footnote ¹²⁷ His sarcastic aside points once again to the long-standing potency of the association between women, calico, and fashion. When confronted with these charges, the proponents of the copyright ventured that, rather than the special talent of ladies, the matter of distinguishing patterns was one of professional—or perhaps, more accurately, of artisanal—expertise. While members of the lay public might find themselves unable to differentiate originals from copies, those “conversant” with patterns could certainly do so. Like other advocates of extension, Joseph Lockett valorized originality, and the ability to distinguish it, as a virtue that hearkened to a preindustrial past. To do as much, he looked to a pastoral metaphor. While sheep might resemble one another, Lockett contended, a shepherd could easily distinguish his own from his “neighbor's flock.”Footnote ¹²⁸

In querying the distinction between original and copy, the opponents of extension also employed the politics of region deployed first by O’Brien and subsequently reworked by the bill's supporters. They reframed this imaginative geography in politically advantageous ways. Lee dismissed the distinction as a metropolitan concern. He sarcastically drew on the geographical oppositions that had organized the trade since the later eighteenth century. “I have heard very little of copying, never so much as I have heard since I came to London on this business,” he maintained. Lee confessed that he did not know exactly what a copy was. Even after consulting with an eminent Manchester merchant, and with Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, too, he remained at a loss. He presented two patterns to the committee and informed its members that he could not tell which was the copy and which the original. “We want enlightening on the subject, to make things work in Manchester, and in the trade generally, as they ought to do,” Lee jestingly claimed.Footnote ¹²⁹

Finally, the pirates confounded the distinction between original and copy as they constructed a layman's aesthetic philosophy. When he testified before the Select Committee, Kershaw challenged the very categories of original and copy. Asked if he “copied patterns,” Kershaw replied: “No further than as every man is a copier, by taking the ideas which various patterns present to his mind, and endeavouring to adapt them anew, to constitute what is termed a new pattern, but which I contend, nevertheless, is not an original pattern. Violations of the law of copyright I endeavour studiously to avoid; and my invariable instructions to our pattern designers are to copy no man's patterns, but to improve upon other men's ideas.”Footnote ¹³⁰

In Kershaw's testimony, we find a popular iteration of the words of eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists for whom imitation was an organizing principle. For instance, Sir Joshua Reynolds had asserted that “originality” and “variety” were produced “by imitation only.”Footnote ¹³¹ Maxine Berg has noted that such notions get to the heart of the “tension between imitation and innovation” that was so central to product development and design in the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹³² This was not lost on the pirates, who maintained that calico prints were, at heart, derivative. Men who had spent thirty years in the trade asserted that they had only seen two so-called original designs in their careers. Lee sought to delimit the category by claiming that originality was not a matter of rearranging “old objects”; as he saw it, a pattern could not count as original unless it contained elements that were themselves original.Footnote ¹³³ In the end, the opponents of extension deemed originality so elusive that it only occurred as the result of “pure accident.” Such had been the case with the “diorama,” a geometrical pattern produced due to mechanical error that, famously, had sold 25,000 pieces in one day.Footnote ¹³⁴ As they pressed the precariousness of originality, Kershaw and his allies engaged the issue of everyday commerce in philosophical terms. Their discussion indicates that the copyright debate opened up a rhetorical space in which printers and manufacturers could fashion themselves as critics, philosophers, and arbiters of culture.

The same was, of course, true for the proponents of extension, who responded with aesthetic notions of their own. To salvage the category of original design, Thomson advanced what he called the “doctrine of Permutation”—a rule which dictated that, by using as few as six lines, a printer could produce an “infinite” number of designs. According to Thomson, it was the combination of materials alone that gave designs the quality of originality that entitled them to protection. Others rallied behind Thomson as they claimed a pattern could be considered “new” even if it contained “all the objects of another.”Footnote ¹³⁵ As they saw it, such building blocks of design as flowers, leaves, lines, and curves were common property out of which printers could fashion original patterns. To suggest the cumulative and collective nature of design, the proponents of extension looked once again to the pastoral. Like the agriculturalist who learned his “best modes of tillage” from prior custom, the designer produced good patterns only by drawing on the work of others.Footnote ¹³⁶ This point is especially provocative in light of John Rule's contention that those artisans who appealed to property of skill regarded this notion as an essentially collective one: the provenance of trades rather than of individuals.Footnote ¹³⁷ Ultimately, such an argument shows that the notions of property that informed the design debate relied on rich, sedimented political traditions.

As they pressed for extension, Tennent and his allies sought to delimit the domains of artisanal production and piracy. In the process, they outlined a hierarchy of production, consumption, and aesthetics that venerated the original rather than the copy. The opponents of extension refused to take these distinctions at face value, choosing instead to challenge the categories of original and copy around which the proponents of extension had produced their arguments. To use the words of Schwartz, they sought to show the distinction between “fair copy” and “forged copy” to be a tenuous one.Footnote ¹³⁸ As they examined the workings of the marketplace, and especially of fashion, some went so far as to valorize the copy in lieu of the original.

When they debated the period of protection for calicoes, the protagonists in the copyright campaign discussed myriad forms of copying—the licit copying made possible by mechanization, the supposedly illicit copying by the pirates, and the feminine copying associated with fashion, to name just some. One final concern about copying informed the debate. This had to do with the material history of calico in Britain and the larger enterprise to which it was connected: the industrial revolution itself. It was the very desire to imitate, or to copy, Indian cottons that had given rise to the English calico manufacture, not to mention to much of the machinery that drove Britain's industrialization. The fact of this indebtedness rarely surfaced within the debate, but historians of the cotton industry like Edward Baines who wrote contemporaneously were well aware of it all the same. Baines grappled with this historical legacy in his 1832 History of the Cotton Trade in Great Britain. Through a series of rhetorical maneuvers, he sought to naturalize the industry as an unmistakably English one. The historian described India as the “birthplace” of the cotton manufacture, and England as the “second birthplace” of the art. According to Baines, this did not mean that the English trade was opprobrious in the way that the forged copy might be. England had revived the trade, giving it new life with those mechanical innovations that would allow the industrial nation to “surpass” its Oriental forebears.Footnote ¹³⁹

Despite the fact that England had eclipsed India's productive capacities by the moment of the debate—as the phenomenon of reverse export indicated so well—the advocates could not erase their indebtedness to the subcontinent. When they reckoned with this material history, they looked to the copyright as a measure for redressing their debt, albeit in a somewhat convoluted fashion. As part of their philosophical defense of copyright's viability, the proponents of extension had distinguished between patterns and styles. Patterns, they had claimed, should be entitled to copyright protection, while styles, as more general aesthetic expressions, should not.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Yet, the proponents of extension saw the copyright as a way to improve style, and they imbued the category of style with national significance. It was Scottish M.P. William Morison who made the connection most explicit when he expressed a hope that a stronger copyright would engender an “English style.” Under the present regime, he bemoaned, there was “no English art of design.” As he pointed out Britain's aesthetic debts to India and, more recently, to France, Morison noted that all English prints were “wholly or in part foreign.”Footnote ¹⁴¹

Others followed by linking the categories of the “original” and the “national.”Footnote ¹⁴² This is evident in pattern designer Thomas Barker Holdway's discussion of the pine pattern, so popular in ladies’ wares such as shawls and scarves. The pine, Holdway had claimed, was not “original.” Instead, it was “Indian.” In the copyright Holdway saw a mechanism that would foster a national tradition of design. Like Holdway, Potter looked nostalgically to India and even more expressly to Africa as locations whose artisanal crafts epitomized so-called national styles. Potter mobilized long-standing historical fictions surrounding material culture as he evoked an Africa that was an original culture and a blank slate.Footnote ¹⁴³ When he meditated on the so-called Negro print, Potter noted what he took to be a paradox. It was the “lowest specimen” of manufacture on the globe, yet it was also original in every regard: untouched by “machinery, steam, or artificial heat” and unadulterated by other styles.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It is ironic that the celebration of the African print as the epitome of originality came from one of the foremost supporters of the copyright. Potter's veneration points to the impossibility of originality in an industrial and trading nation such as Britain, whose cosmopolitan commercialism reigned supreme. Still, it is not surprising. In his longing for a preindustrial past, Potter underscored the anxieties about industrial modernity that motivated the campaign for extension and the call for original design from the outset.

In August of 1842, Parliament extended the copyright for industrial designs from three to nine months, rather than the twelve that Tennent and his allies had sought. Still, at a banquet celebrating the bill's passage held at Manchester's Albion Hotel in January 1843, Tennent would call the triumph the “most gratifying” of his “public life,” in large part because a constituency whose interests often opposed his own had embraced his efforts. He predicted improvements in the marketplace and in the aesthetic domain. Tennent noted that a sixfold increase in the registration of printed fabrics at the Designs Office on the Strand augured as much.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The stacks of pattern books from this establishment now held at the Public Record Office are the most material legacy of Tennent's campaign.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ At least as important, though, are the voices of the debate's participants. They illuminate the local, contested, and contingent nature of the original and the copy within an industrial regime of production. They also point to the inseparability of the categories of culture and the marketplace by demonstrating, among other things, that changes in the regime of calico production gave rise to cultural uncertainties. By showing as much, they engage and refine the contradictions pointed out by Schwartz. More significantly, the design copyright debate might suggest a new research agenda for historians of modern Britain, especially those involved in the enterprise of cultural history. Over the past decade or more, cultural historians have looked to consumption as the activity that has generated meaning, created value, manufactured identity, molded space, and even heralded modernity.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The design copyright campaign should encourage historians to subject production to the same cultural lens. By so doing, we can see that distinct cultures, with their own anxieties, dangers, and representational practices, accrued around modes of production. We also learn that the very enterprise of production shapes the cultural terrain—whether by shoring up moral geographies, posing aesthetic questions, challenging national identities, or providing avenues for self fashioning.

When they assessed the virtues of original and copy, the participants in the design debate addressed a full circuit of manufacture, trade, distribution, and consumption.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ As they did so, they illuminated the cultural logic of production at a pivotal juncture in Britain's industrial history. They also demonstrated the role of production in the making of culture, and especially in the culture of the copy.