Property in Ideas

The controversial nature of patent laws in mid 19th-century Britain has been largely overlooked by scholars, even though the patents themselves have not. This study of the patent question in mid-Victorian Britain sheds new light on aspects of government as well as economic growth; indeed the origins of the modern British patent system are traced to the intersection of the industrial revolution and the so-called Victorian revolution in government. This work offers the historian the opportunity to observe close up the way pressure groups operated in Victorian British society, and to assess their place in Victorian political life. The author traces the patent question from its origins through 1851, and then turns her attention to issues such as the influence of industrialization of the evolution of statute law, the passage of the Patent Law Ammendment Act and its consequences, the redefinition of the patent question in the mid-Victorian years, the individuals and interest groups who advocated reform, and the parliamentary struggle that culminated in passage of new domestic and international patent legislation in the 1880s.