This book examines the shared rhetoric surrounding the creation of the "inventor" and the "author" in the 1830s, and the challenge of the emerging technologies of mass production to traditional ideas of art and industry. Patent Inventions argues that Victorian writers used the novel not just to reflect, but also to challenge received notions of intellectual ownership and responsibility, using close readings of work by Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Eliot, and Hardy.