PUBLICATION OF LECTURES. (Hansard, 24 August 1835)

§ Mr. Wakley
said, he knew very little of this Bill, which had passed the House of Lords without discussion, and had reached the second reading without observation in that House. If the Bill was intended to apply generally to England unless proper Amendments were introduced he should divide the House against the Motion, for it seemed to him that it was intended not only to prevent the publication of lectures but of criticisms on lectures. Again, if it were intended to apply only to private lectures it would be a proper protection, but if it were meant to shield public as well as private from public inspection he should consider that it ought not to receive the sanction of the House. In the present state of the law no such protection was needed; for it was laid down by Lord Eldon, that private lectures could be protected if it were proved there was a breach of implied contract between the lecturer and the individual hearers. In the case of Abernethy v. Hutchinson, an injunction was granted to restrain the publication of a lecture, even without any means of discovering whether it were an original or not. Subsequently, however, it was proved in the Court of Chancery that it was a public lecture delivered on a public occasion and the plaintiff in the suit thus finding he could not sustain his cause abandoned it altogether. This was 954 a distinction most worthy of attention for every public lecturer ought to allow the means of exhibiting the instruction which he dispensed, whenever the interests of the public required it; would it not be very improper, for instance, when a public lecturer delivered what was injurious to the peace, the health, or the morals of society, that he should be shielded from public observation? By such a law as that lecturing would be ten times more easy than it was at present; as it was, a great part of the public lectures were a mere farce, for it was absurd to suppose that any art could be taught by a lecture, when the great organ of information, the eye, was shut, not called into exercise. How much worse would they be if by such a law as this they were rendered secure from observation and animadversion. It was preposterous to see such a Bill as this passing the Lords without a word of discussion, and unless the Lord Advocate assured him that public lecturers were not to be shielded from public notice he should divide the House against the Bill.

The Lord Advocate
said, the principle of the Bill was this, that every man had as much right to claim security for his lectures, as for his books, or any other fruit of his labours or his ingenuity. And that no man coming merely with the professed object of gaining instruction, should have the right of publishing those lectures which were (or ought to be) the lecturer's own property; some of them perhaps the result of the studies or the labour of a whole life, and worth often upwards of a 1,000l. to their author.

§ Mr. Warburton
knew of no abstract right of property in those cases, the public good was the only test by which they could decide. The case of lectures was not the same as that of copyright in books for there was no monopoly exercised so as to exclude the publication of unpublished writings, but in lectures those who attended the professors in the different sciences had no option, in many cases pupils must attend the lectures, and if they failed in obtaining that information which they required, surely they ought not to be precluded from holding the lecturer up to public censure.