Copyright and Censorship – Robert Southey and his ‘Seditious’ Wat Tyler | Megan Richardson

Summary: To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Megan Richardson Robert Southey, fondly remembered as the author of ‘The Three Bears’, was in 1817 English Poet Laureate and outspoken conservative when he learnt that the publishing firm Sherwood, Neely and Jones proposed to publish his play Wat Tyler without his authority. The play had a curious history. Composed twenty-three years earlier in Southey’s radical student days and left with the publisher James Ridgway (who was at the time residing in Newgate prison), it was never published by Ridgeway and later forgotten by Southey – or so he claimed. Since it celebrated the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, it was considered seditious in some quarters in a year in which tempers were running high during the war with France and Habeas Corpus had been suspended. But there was to be no prosecution of Southey for sedition, although questions were raised in Parliament about his role in Wat Tyler‘s ensuing publicity. Rather, Southey himself sought to seek to prevent Sherwood’s publication of Wat Tyler through legal action of his own. The resulting scandal in which ‘politicians, newspapers, reviews and literary men lined up for battle’ (as said by Hoadley, ‘The Controversy over Southey’s “Wat Tyler”’, 1941, 38 Studies in Philology 81 at 96) meant that the interest in this relatively minor literary work remained alive for centuries to come. This paper considers Southey’s attempt to rely on his ‘property’ right in the manuscript to obtain an injunction to stop publication of Wat Tyler, which failed before Lord Eldon in Southey v Sherwood (1817) 2 Mer 435, and speculates about how copyright law may be used as an instrument of free speech and censorship.