A Theft

Since I know that I will contribute more to this blog if I write short posts, let me attempt something in fewer than five paragraphs.

As a professor, I kept a sharp eye out for instances of plagiarism in the thousands of expository papers, theses, and dissertations I read. In a student’s writing, offering up the work of another scholar as one’s own is rightly seen as a serious wrong. But is that so true in creative writing? Where would Shakespeare have been without Holinshed’s chronicles or Boccaccio’s tales? Scores of imitations followed the publications of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, and no one was jailed. Dickens wrote a story about a murderer who gave himself away under interrogation when he mistook his own loudly beating heart for that of his victim’s. It is known that a young Poe sent the more established Englishman some stories to review, so it is probable that Poe is the inventor here, Dickens the thief. Yet surely Poe won this encounter by writing the justly more well known version of the story.

But what about one line? One joke? A few days ago, in reading Sheridan’s The Rivals, I came across this line by Captain Absolute: “Though one eye may be very agreeable, yet as the prejudice has always run in favour of two, I would not wish to affect a singularity in that article.” I immediately thought of Dickens’s description of Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby: “He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two.” Dickens certainly knew of Sheridan’s work; whether he remembered reading or hearing the joke in Sheridan or believed he had created it himself is debatable. One thing I know: Dickens’s use of the joke in the description of one of the most entertaining of his loathsome characters vastly improves upon Sheridan’s invocation in the service of a man describing what he looks for in a wife.

Now that I think about it, grading those university papers created another weird habit in reading that, I happily realize now, has disappeared from my private reading, as well. I used to enter every student’s sentence more on the lookout for errors in grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation than I did for content, and I found that my extracurricular reading slowed down from this cautious habit. It occurs to me now that I no longer waste time internally scolding published authors for lack of an Oxfordian comma or idiomatic use of pronoun case.