contemporaries) is to pick out those who were influenced by Swedenborg. He discussesJoseph Johnson, the printer, who did not bring out Blake’s The French Revolution, andthe printer Robert Hindmarsh, who established the Theosophical Society in 1783

(Swedenborgianism being a society before it became a church). There is reference tothe landscape painter Philip James de Loutherbourg, and the miniaturist RichardCosway, and Flaxman, and William Sharp, an engraver like Blake, and like him, avisionary (p.76). William Hayley, the poet who became, briefly, Blake’s patron, isdiscussed, and we learn of Coleridge’s interest in Swedenborg, and Southey’s. There isdiscussion of Charles Augustus Tulk, friend of Blake and reformist MP, and work onSharpe’s friend, Richard Brothers, the Radical towards whom Sharp turned afterdisillusionment with Swedenborgian conservatism, and Brothers’ visions of the fall ofLondon: this follows from John Barrell’s Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason,Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-1796 (Oxford University Press, 2000). Brothers’ Descriptionof Jerusalem: Its Houses and Streets (1802) is discussed; Brothers being one of thoseconfined as mad, a reminder of The Marriage plate 6: ‘I was walking among the fires ofhell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment andinsanity’. Rix parallels this by Swedenborg saying that ‘devils are insane in spiritualthings’ (p.130). Doing this opens the question of the relationship of this radicalculture, political and religious together – but which takes priority? – to madness,a relationship which Swedenborgianism, like other movements more politicallyconformist than they thought, wished to contain by not taking it seriously: ultimatelythis was Blake’s fate in his lifetime.

Jeremy TamblingUniversity of Manchester

NOTE1. David Worrall reads The Book of Thel as anti-Swedenborgian on the subject of conjugal love,

and as anti the colonialism implicit in this venture: his reading, not discussed here, in Blake,Nation, Empire, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (Palgrave, 2006) is worth consulting.

Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period. Tilar J. Mazzeo.Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. xiv + 236 pp. £36 hb. 978-0-8122-3967-6.

Tilar Mazzeo’s book makes an important contribution to the expanding field ofplagiarism studies, linking recent work by scholars such as Paulina Kewes and BreanHammond in relation to the early modern period with that by Robert Macfarlane onthe nineteenth century. The book offers a particular fascination as being addressed tothe Romantic era, a period whose own self-image ostensibly privileges what Mazzeocalls ‘autogenous originality’. Indeed, her study explicitly joins with the larger literaryhistorical project, instigated by Jerome McGann’s Romantic Ideology (1983), ofstripping away the layers of Romantic self-representation. What Mazzeo uncovers is aculture in which forms of appropriation were more endemic within creative practicethan retrospective constructions of the Romantic aesthetic have led us to believe.

In keeping with recent work on literary plagiarism, Mazzeo is not so muchinterested in sleuthing around for unnoticed thefts as in explicating what plagiarism

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entailed as a concept, the types of metaphoric association it attracted, and the moralattitude adopted towards it. What her study discovers is a surprisingly high degree ofpermissiveness towards plagiarism as a moral trespass, though this is offset bycensoriousness towards the aesthetic failure that such practices were agreed toconstitute. She is at particular pains to point out the various grounds on which anostensible literary theft could be exculpated: as on account of being committedunconsciously; or including a reference to the original source; or being drawn froma source so familiar as to render impossible covert theft; or being deemed to have somanifestly improved on the original source as to silence any censure. The bookmounts a persuasive general argument that, whereas in the mid-eighteenth centuryoriginality equated with an absence of overt borrowing, this being understood asmost likely to occur at the level of phraseology, in the Romantic era it resides ina mental and stylistic uniqueness. As she remarks, where an author seems tomanifest a ‘unique textual subjectivity that dominated his or her borrowedmaterials, extensive unacknowledged appropriations, even verbatim, werepermitted’ (p.183).

Mazzeo’s study centres on, without being restricted to, four canonical poets:Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. Amongst these, Coleridge is the one whoseappearance here is perhaps the most predictable. Mazzeo, in keeping with her generalpractice, is less interested in the merits of the charges made against Coleridge than inthe poet’s own defence and in the way that issues of appropriation and ventriloquismare dramatised in his poetry, especially in Christabel. The Romantic poet whoseplagiarising misdemeanours attracted most comment in his own day, however, wasByron, and in another chapter, Mazzeo records the indignation of the Lake poets atwhat they saw as his depredations against them, and tries to reconstruct the Byronicaesthetic as one ‘that posits appropriation, adoption, digestion, and even plagiarism asthe conditions of invention and self-expression’ (p.120). The chapter on Shelley, anauthor not in fact subject to charges of plagiarism in his own day, is more muted,concluding somewhat hesitantly that the uncontroversial nature of Shelley’sborrowings can still help us understand the ‘constructions of literary property’during the period.

A contention across Mazzeo’s chapters is that the culpability of a particularborrowing depends not just on the degree of scruple with which it is carried out butalso on the category of material from which it is drawn. An interesting test-case isWordsworth’s and Coleridge’s plundering of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals,borrowings that do not seem to have aroused particular resentment, probablybecause the source material was accepted by all concerned as being in itself, as Mazzeoslightly uncharitably puts it, ‘subliterary’. Yet the issue, as Mazzeo herself recognises,is not just one of generic category, for the entitlement to exert public ownership overtexts, in a way that might deter acts of plagiarism against them, remained to someextent a gendered one. It is ‘extremely rare’ in the Romantic period, as she states, formale authors to be ‘persuasively charged’ with plagiarism from female ones, a factthat tells us less about styles of composition than about the gender politics ofauthorship. In her treatment of such issues Mazzeo invariably convinces andilluminates. Her investigation of Romantic uncreativity should prove invaluable forstudents of Romanticism and of plagiarism alike.

Richard TerryUniversity of Sunderland

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