| Philip V. Allingham , Faculty of Education, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario he first American "pirate" was probably Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) , who was, among other things, a Philadelphia printer who re-published the works of British authors in the eighteenth century without seeking their permission or offering remuneration. Novelists, of course, were not the only writers affected. The complaints of poet William Wordsworth , for example, which began quietly in 1808, grew louder and more eloquent over the course of the next three and a half decades; by 1837 the matter had begun to absorb large amounts of his time and energy. He went to London to lobby the House of Commons, enlisting the aid of the popular dramatist Thomas Noon Talford as his parliamentary champion. During both his North American reading tours of 1842 and Martin Chuzzlewit In publishing The Pickwick Papers The Mirror of Parliament and the True Sun The Morning Chronicle A Christmas Carol Young Charles Dickens, in the process of being lionized by his Yankee readers, dared to assert that, had American publishers paid Sir Walter Scott appropriate royalties for his works re-printed in the United States from Marmion in 1808 to Castle Dangerous Dickens was essentially using the plight of these authors to argue his own case, for as fast as he turned out | |
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