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From picturesque anecdote to viral story: the many lives of the “Sculptor of Bruges” (1837–1886)

What makes a story a “strong” story? Why are some stories more likely than others to be picked up internationally and to circulate in ever-changing forms both within and across language boundaries? In the past decade, these questions have drawn increasing interest among scholars of nineteenth-century literature in particular. The nineteenth century was arguably the first in history that provided the technological underpinnings for literary texts to go viral, thanks to steady advances in the paper and printing industry as well as in communication and transportation. In addition, the lack of international copyright legislation until the 1886 Berne Convention meant that for most of the century texts could be copied and disseminated freely, without the author’s permission. If Meredith McGill’s (2003) ground-breaking archival work revealed the “culture of reprinting” thriving under these conditions in antebellum America, more recent projects such as The Viral Texts Project and Oceanic Exchanges use the latest digital research methods to trace the circulation of texts on a much larger scale than manual browsing could ever allow. While these methods still present important limitations to do with, for instance, digitisation policies, OCR quality, and the availability and granularity of metadata, they have already yielded surprising results as to what texts were most often reprinted: the busiest, longest afterlives were sometimes led by texts that are now almost completely forgotten or no longer classified among an author’s major works (Cordell and Mullen 2017; Van Remoortel 2013). In this article, we build on this earlier scholarship by presenting a case study of such a forgotten text: a Flemish story written by Joseph Octave Delepierre (1802–1879) about a Bruges sculptor, first published in French in 1837. As our research reveals, the story subsequently circulated widely in Western Europe and across the Atlantic. In addition to numerous reprints, translations, and summaries, a number of authors expanded the characters and plot into full-length novellas and children’s books; others turned the story into a play or a poem. We argue that, while technological innovations and legal circumstances created the settings in which the story could go viral, what made it so attractive for reuse was its thematic diversity. As we will demonstrate, the story contains at least three thematic strands, a legal, an art-historical, and a gender one, which later versions accentuated, modified, built on, or left out, depending on their authors’ agendas and new target audiences.