A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent
A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent is a short story by Charles Dickens . The story first appeared in the Household Words on October 19, 1850 .
The story essentially describes the numerous bureaucratic obstacles that an inventor had to face in order to obtain a patent. Dickens tells the story from a first-person perspective of poor blacksmith John, who traveled to London to apply for a patent. The inventor has to have a total of 35 different administrative acts, some of which are costly, some absurd and some labor-intensive, even though nobody questions his patent or questions the value of his invention.
The story is closely related to Dickens' own patent reform activities; In terms of content, it is largely based on the descriptions of Dickens' friend Henry Cole . Presumably she was the model for the later detailed description of the efforts of the inventor Daniel Doyce in Dickens' novel Little Dorrit . British patent law itself was extensively modernized two years after the Poor Man's was first published with the Patent Law Reform Act .
literature
- Jeremy Phillips: Charles Dickens and the “Poor man's tale of a patent” . ESC Publishing, Oxford 1984, ISBN 0-906214-30-0 .
Web links
Remarks
- ^ Gilbert Ashville Pierce: The Dickens Dictionary . Facsimile, BiblioBazaar, 2008, ISBN 0559470991 , p. 530.
- ^ Charles Dickens, David Pascoe: Selected journalism, 1850-1870 . Penguin Classics, 1997, ISBN 0140435808 , p. 408.