Credit, Copyright, and the Circulation of Scientific Knowledge: The Royal Society in the Long Nineteenth Century (original) (raw)

Victorian Periodicals Review

In 1803, Charles Hutton, the mathematician, author, and fellow of the Royal Society, sent a note to its president, Sir Joseph Banks, announcing "his intention to undertake the care of arranging and printing a new abridgement of the Philos[ophical] Transactions." 1 The Philosophical Transactions had been founded in 1665 and had been under the direct financial and editorial control of the Royal Society since 1752. 2 Chunky quarto parts of varying lengths appeared roughly at six-month intervals, carrying extensive (and often illustrated) accounts of new scientific observations, discoveries, and experiments. It was the most prestigious research periodical in the English-speaking world. By 1803, its back issues contained many significant contributions to natural knowledge (as well as much that had been disproved or superseded). Hutton proposed to select, abridge, and index the contents of the past 135 years, "trusting that the President and Council would please to countenance this undertaking." 3 This was a lot to take on trust, in two respects. First, Hutton proposed to exploit publications subsidised by the Royal Society for his own gain, and second, his relationship with Banks had not been cordial for twenty years. 4 It is unsurprising, therefore, that the initial response to Hutton's 1803 note was non-committal; only a record of its communication was noted. Yet Hutton and his associates proceeded with the venture and in 1809 applied for and received permission to dedicate the first volume of the Transactions to the "President, Council and Fellows of the Royal Society." 5 Regardless of what personal animosity Banks still felt or what material loss the Royal Society had feared, no one tried to prevent the abridgement from going ahead. And there was material loss to be anticipated: Hutton's Authors' Accepted Manuscript. This paper will appear in a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review in December 2018. project was intended to supersede an earlier abridgement by John Lowthorp, which had found sufficient customers to justify five editions and three successive expansions between 1703 and 1749. Later accounts of Hutton's life published in the town of his birth suggest that he received £6,000 for his work on the abridgement. 6 Whether the Royal Society had any legal power under the copyright statutes in force at the beginning of the nineteenth century to prevent an undertaking of this kind is doubtful. Periodicals were not yet explicitly included in copyright legislation in the United Kingdom; the act of abridgement could be represented as the creation of a new work; and most (though not all) of the material Hutton proposed to use was old enough that it would have been out of copyright anyway. Yet Hutton asked permission from the Royal Society. This is a strong indication that the society had a moral and customary claim to the Transactions which had little or nothing to do with copyright legislation.