John Clare out of Copyright

‘It was not very manly of you to evade telling me what you had been up to when we met today,’ the late Eric Robinson wrote to me on 10 July 1999. What I’d ‘been up to’ was editing and publishing a paperback edition of John Clare’s Love Poems with a small outfit in Bangkok. I presented it on a table at the John Clare Society Festival in Helpston, where Robinson cast me withering looks, not least because I had prodded Boyd Tonkin, then at the Independent, to write a column about my book the day before. The headline said: ‘The people’s poet must be set free.’

Clare died in 1864. Selections of his work were published by Norman Gale (1901), Arthur Symons (1908), Edmund Blunden (1920, 1924 and 1931), J.W. and Anne Tibble (1935 and 1951) and Geoffrey Grigson (1949 and 1950). These editors drew on the collections of Clare’s papers held by public libraries in Peterborough and Northampton, with other manuscripts in the New York Public Library. In 1965, however, things changed, when Robinson bought what he claimed was the copyright to everything Clare had written except the four books published in his lifetime.

Robinson’s proof of ownership was a receipt from Whitaker’s, who sold him ‘all rights whatsoever possessed by the Company in the published and unpublished work’. Joseph Whitaker, the Victorian publisher and founder of Whitaker’s Almanack, had bought the copyright to Clare’s unpublished work along with manuscript materials from his widow, Patty. Peterborough Museum bought all of Whitaker’s Clare manuscripts in 1893, and believed itself to be in possession of the copyright, too. Whitaker’s original purchase surfaced in 1932 but was destroyed along with the rest of the firm’s archive in the Blitz – but by that time no one claimed or considered any copyright to the publicly held unpublished work. The cost of Robinson’s purchase in 1965 was £1. As he told the THES, it was a ‘brilliant piece of entrepreneurial effort’.

Robinson, who taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston, was a pioneering editor, cutting a new path through the mass of complex papers. His nine-volume edition of Clare’s works appeared between 1984 and 2003 from the Clarendon Press. But he compounded that dedicated scholarly work with his scheme of private copyright ownership, which he asserted with ruthless vigour. He stopped other people publishing Clare, or made them pay him, and he required final approval of the way Clare’s texts were to be presented. If anyone wanted access to the manuscripts for publishing purposes, the libraries would direct them to Robinson as copyright holder.

Some people paid. George Deacon gave Robinson a substantial amount for the rights to Clare’s musical manuscripts (Clare wrote music and played the fiddle) so that he could publish transcriptions of them in his book John Clare and the Folk Tradition in 1983. Deacon still holds that copyright, as the composer Julian Philips and I found out a couple of years ago, when we were working on an album of recordings of Philips’s reworkings of Clare’s folk songs, interlaced with readings by the actor Toby Jones. To clear the publishing rights we had to give Deacon a share of the royalties.

I published my selection of Clare’s poems in 1999 deliberately to challenge Robinson’s copyright claim. I wanted to get the case into court. A legal spat over a dead poet is usually something to avoid: the stakes are small but the risks are considerable. I was lucky to have the backing of a publisher who had been in a Thai prison for libel – Michael Gorman, the former editor of the Bangkok Post – and he wanted to push our case all the way.

Many of us who worked on Clare found it unacceptable that one person claimed to ‘own’ the poet. Not only had Robinson appointed himself gatekeeper to Clare’s work, but his copyright claim was used to defend one version of the work – the politics of editing Clare’s non-standard English is contested ground – and it prevented other scholars from presenting alternative selections and editorial versions of Clare. If it turned out the law supported Robinson’s claim, then we would push for the law to be changed.

And so I published my selection, and received the letter from Robinson telling me I was ‘not very manly’ a few days later. Would it have been more ‘manly’ to ask his permission? I didn’t understand. But I knew what was coming, and in November 1999 I received a formal threat of legal action from Robinson’s lawyers, seeking damages and a declaration that I would not infringe his copyright. We replied asking Robinson to prove his ownership. The response was slow and, to our eyes, proved nothing. We waited, and went public again. There was a fierce exchange of letters in the TLS in the summer of 2000, followed by silence – and no legal action.

So we published another small selection, of Clare’s Flower Poems, in 2001. Again the legal threats arrived, again we asked for proof. Robinson complained publicly at the abuse and disrespect he said we were guilty of, and campaigned to get me kicked out of the Clare Society. The Society’s president, the late Ronald Blythe, rebuffed the attempt. Robinson’s last public word on the copyright issue was in 2003 in the Guardian: in ‘respect of these [unpublished] works’, he asserted, ‘only I can lawfully publish them.’ He died in 2019, and things became more confusing for the libraries housing the manuscripts, as they had no idea to whom they should direct people seeking to publish Clare’s work.

So it is with some relief that I have recently learned that neither Victoria Robinson, Eric’s widow, nor his literary agent, Curtis Brown, are maintaining his claim to own the copyright in Clare’s works. Robinson’s legacy is secure: his rigorous scholarly editions, born of a lifetime’s dedication to the poet, are the bedrock of contemporary Clare scholarship. But now that the long saga of the disputed copyright claim is finally over, a new generation of editors can get to work on Clare’s poems, and freely so.