The nineteenth century, as readers of the Victorian Periodicals Review will be well aware, was a time of huge expansion in the publication of reviews, magazines and other periodical works. Less well known, however, is the fact that, during the same period, UK copyright law developed special rules regulating the authorship and ownership of copyright in these genres, balancing the rights of contributors against those of the work's overall "proprietor, projector, publisher or conductor." 1 These rules, enacted by section 18 of the Copyright Act 1842, but which had some precedent in early nineteenth century judicial authority, were also subsequently debated in the latter half of the nineteenth century. To date, these legal developments have received scant attention in the existing literature: specialists of periodicals have largely ignored copyright issues and scholars of nineteenth century literary copyright have focussed on copyright in books in tracing copyright's expanding duration, scope and subject matter as well as international developments 2 The history of copyright for periodicals in the nineteenth century invites detailed archival work interrogating a number of questions which cannot be addressed by this short article: the relation between the law and publishing practice, the dynamics of author-publisher relations, and the economics of publishing. This essay instead uncovers the views of periodical works revealed in the legislative consideration of section 18 (from a review of nineteenth century parliamentary papers, including Select Committee reports, and parliamentary debates) in addition to key nineteenth century cases. In a bid to instigate discussion between law and the humanities, I draw attention to the manner in which copyright rules intersected with particular views of the social importance of certain genres, and the different ways in which they each were understood to contribute to the dissemination of knowledge. Introducing Section 18 Copyright Act 1842 What were the rules contained in section 18, and what ideas underpinned their enactment? The Copyright Act 1842 (which repealed the first copyright Act-the Statute of Anne 1710) was a major development in the legislative reform of literary copyright in the nineteenth century. 3 As Catherine Seville has shown, the 1842 Act How can the general rule in section 18 be explained? The legislative debate of this provision was premised on the assumption that contributors to all these genres were generally well remunerated. As the House of Commons heard in the debates on the Copyright Bill in 1838 (a forerunner to the Bill that became the 1842 Act), many authors "received more for ephemeral works... which had appeared in the reviews and other periodicals" than for their "enduring publications" in the form of books. 11 Similarly, the copyright debates concerning encyclopaedias were all based on the assumption that the contributors were well paid. A statement issued by the publisher Longman & Co in 1838 (published in The Times) asserted that contributors to ...
