Unsettling Entitlement and ‘Ginx’s Baby’

This story traces the many adventures of a title, from Edward Jenkins’s 1870 novel, Ginx’s Baby, through colonial resistance to imperial copyright law in Canada, to the photograph of a distressed baby that Charles Darwin featured in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals and that the art photographer Oscar Rejlander reproduced as popular cartes de visites. The reiterative use of the title across genres and oceans conjures an image of Victorian popular culture as an unregulated bazaar affording the surprising emergence of unintended creators. Copyright history, frame analysis, and name theory help explain how the title of a popular novel could lend itself to so many unrelated creative objects.