pumpkinstrokemarrow

There was a longish piece in a recent issue of the TLS about all the places from which R. L. Stevenson borrowed material for 'Treasure Island', first published in a boys' magazine. He, that is RLS, freely admitted borrowing lots of material in what he claimed had originally been intended for family consumption only, but omitted to acknowledge borrowing some more from a story in a sample of the magazine which he had been sent to show him the sort of thing that they wanted. Perhaps like others, he liked to dress up the nativity of his first popular book a bit; a bit of family fun rather than a first attempt to break into the lucrative magazine market.

That being as it may, I then got to wondering, against a background of plagiarism being a big issue in parts of academia, whether one should care or worry that 'Treasure Island' was a patchwork of other peoples' material, nicely packaged up for a magazine? First thought was no: RLS was the chap that forged the material into a popular story and got it out there, into the wide world; he deserves the credit. The other chaps might have contributed a bit of the scaffolding but they did not build the building.

That line, I think, runs when we are talking about one writer recycling the published material of other writers. It might be polite to acknowledge the contribution that those other writers have made, but I see no objection to using the material. Famous composers of yesteryear did it all the time.

Unpublished material a bit different. So if an established author gets a bit lazy and pinches some material from an unpublished manuscript sent him by some starving debutant for comment, he is doing wrong. At the very least the first author ought to ask permission of the second author and offer to share the swag.

Or if an established academic gets a bit careless and uses original material worked up by his research assistant, struggling to get a grip on the greasy pole, without acknowledgement, he is clearly doing wrong.

But for that same academic to have to load the back of his paper with reams of references to published material which contributed ever so slightly to the medium and context in which his paper was written, seems a bit OTT. It could also be quite hard: how is one supposed to remember how all the bits and pieces populating the grey cells came to be there? They have been taken into one's own mind set and their origin is of secondary interest.

One needs a sense of proportion and not to get too stroppy if you think someone might have given you an honourable mention but decided not to. And one should always remember, as Caleb Colton almost pointed out ever so many years ago, that plagiarism is a most sincere form of flattery. The flattered should rest content with that! Failing that, there are always the correspondence columns of the TLS, often game for bad tempered exchanges about this sort of thing.