Copyright Law, Authorial Ownership, and Adaptation Between Novels and Plays in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This chapter traces continuities and changes in the laws governing authorship and ownership in adaptation. Writers had no legal or economic rights over intermedial adaptations of their work prior to the early twentieth century. Using case studies of popular authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Wilkie Collins, Marie Corelli, and Charles Dickens, the chapter documents their writings and actions taken in response to copyright laws and unauthorised adaptations of their work. As writers complained of copyright laws in fiction, letters, and the press, they began to change public and parliamentary opinion; they also banded together in author collectives to protest the laws and collectively strengthened momentum to change them. Most pertinent to this study of adaptation, the inequity of copyright laws spurred many authors to adapt their own work and claim their own adaptations as “authoritative,” even though doing so could not prevent others from adapting it and profiting from it as well.