Literature Compass 4/6 (2007): 1625–1649, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00485.x
Romanticism and Forgery
Nick Groom*
University of Exeter
Abstract
Several literary forgers emerged in the later eighteenth century: notably James
Macpherson (Ossian), Thomas Chatterton (Thomas Rowley) and William Henry
Ireland (the Shakespeare forger). These cases of literary forgery were highly
controversial at the time, and had a lasting impact on the Romantic movement,
particularly in the understanding of authenticity, inspiration and the figure of the
poet, although by this time plagiarism, hoaxing and impersonation had superseded forgery – most clearly in the cases of Princess Caraboo, Joanna Southcott
and the seduction of the Maid of Buttermere. Serious critical attention to both
forgers and impostors has dramatically increased in recent years, with feminist,
post-colonial and psychoanalytic readings. Cases of writers of ‘fakelit’ also have
serious implications for criticism today.
Background: Ossian and Rowley
Literary forgery was a perpetual concern in the second-half of the eighteenth century. Pamphlet wars raged over the authenticity of works by
Ossian (supposedly a third-century Celtic bard), Thomas Rowley (allegedly a fifteenth-century poet and dramatist) and newly discovered plays by
Shakespeare (Vortigern and Rowena and Henry II). In addition, fabricated
material was slipped into editions of Shakespeare by George Steevens, and
reputable editors such Thomas Percy (Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,
1765) were accused of falsifying their sources. Major scholars such as
Thomas Warton (Oxford Professor of Poetry, Camden Professor of History
and poet laureate) and in particular Samuel ‘Dictionary’ Johnson (editor of
the plays of Shakespeare, 1765) wrote and spoke extensively on the perceived threat of forged texts. And inevitably problematic writings became
a staple of fiction, especially of the Gothic novel, which obsessively returns
to themes such as the accuracy and authenticity of discovered manuscripts,
impersonation and imposture, and falsehood and deceit.
Broadly speaking, this fascination with the legitimacy of the past
emerged from the heightened need for a sense of national identity engendered by the Act of Union in 1707.1 Great Britain had shared its first
monarch in 1603 when James VI of Scotland succeeded to the throne of
England, but it took another century for the English (and Welsh) Parliament
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1626 Romanticism and Forgery
to combine with the Scottish. This secured the identity of Great Britain
as a single legislative, economic, and military power, and also accelerated
the declining importance of classical Greek and Roman culture. In the face
of a mass-print society with little access to the ‘ancients’, it was necessary
to find a common and indigenous heritage.
British history provided this opportunity. It was a history that covered
the same territory and the same peoples, but commanded radically different
perspectives north and south of the border. Hence it was possible to be
British as well as being Scottish or English or Welsh. Histories of Britain
proliferated and the past became hotly contested, rapidly moving into
areas of ethnic pride and tradition. In particular, all three nations were
hoping to uncover a British epic poet: a Homer or a Virgil who had
composed a cycle of national myths. In fact, the manuscript of the AngloSaxon epic poem Beowulf had already been collected by Sir Robert Cotton
in the seventeenth century and donated to the British Library in 1753,
but Anglo-Saxon studies was very much in its infancy and Beowulf lay
untranslated (and untranslatable) for the next fifty years.2 Yet the need for
a British epic poet was irresistible. In the absence of any obvious candidates, one had to be invented. Enter Ossian.
In 1760, James Macpherson published Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected
in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language.
These short prose pieces purported to be translations from the thirdcentury Celtic poet, Ossian – a Homerically blind bard whose verses had
been preserved by oral tradition. Over the next three years, Macpherson
expanded the original slim collection into two epics, Fingal (1762) and
Temora (1763), and a collected Works of Ossian appeared in two volumes
in 1765. The style is instantly recognizable:
By the side of a rock on the hill, beneath the aged trees, old Oscian [sic] sat
on the moss; the last of the race of Fingal. Sightless are his aged eyes, his beard
is waving in the wind. Dull through the leafless trees he heard the voice of the
north. Sorrow revived in his soul: he began and lamented the dead.
How hast thou fallen like an oak, with all thy branches round thee! Where
is Fingal the King? Where is Oscur my son? Where are all my race? Alas! in
the earth they lie. I feel their tombs with my hands. I hear the river below
murmuring hoarsely over the stones. What dost thou, O river, to me? Thou
bringest back the memory of the past. (‘Fragment VIII’, Poems 18)
This ‘poetry’ is a self-consciously remote translation, a derelict monument
to a lost age, a vast memento mori of the Celtic twilight. The characters
Ossian describes are already dead and appear as transient ghosts, the topography is elusive, the landscape is fading. The bard Ossian is gripped by a
fatal inertia and a compulsion to repeat, as if he is a symptom of an historical
dementia, or inhabiting an ‘enormous echo chamber’ (Trumpener 70).3
Ossian is a deceptively complex work. On the face of it, Macpherson is
a straightforward forger. Johnson, for example, famously savaged the work
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Romanticism and Forgery 1627
both in acerbic remarks in conversation and in his Journey to the Western
Islands of Scotland (1775). He was essentially accurate in his assessment:
He [Macpherson] has found names, and stories, and phrases – nay, passages in
old songs, and with them has blended his own compositions; and so made
what he gives to the world as the translation of an ancient poem. (Boswell
5:242)
Johnson concluded from this that Macpherson was basically a scoundrel,
and that judging a man to be a scoundrel was a legitimate way of condemning his literary work, his supporters and indeed his whole nation. For
Johnson, Ossian was a ‘Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood’ (Boswell
1:297). And although Johnson’s unbending moral position still finds
adherents today, it completely fails to explain the scintillating effect of
Ossian on readers. Thomas Gray, for instance, declared,
I am gone mad about them. . . . I was so struck, so extasié with their infinite
beauty, that I writ into Scotland to make a thousand enquiries . . . this Man is
the very Demon of Poetry, or he has lighted on a treasure hid for ages. (20
June 1760)
Gray was not alone. Another poet, Andrew Erskine, wrote of Ossian:
It is quite impossible to express my admiration of his Poems; at particular
passages I felt my whole frame trembling with ecstacy; but if I was to describe
all my thoughts, you would think me absolutely mad. The beautiful wildness
of his fancy is inexpressibly agreeable to the imagination. (qtd. in Groom,
Forger’s Shadow 129 –30)
The effect of these prose poems was electric. They generated massive
contemporary debate in the press and provoked an intermittent pamphlet
war that lasted for a quarter of a century.4 Ossian’s popularity encompassed
Europe, Napoleonic France and America, and continued well into the
next century.5 The abiding theme of Ossian for later writers was of
mourning and loss. Macpherson had described a tradition almost past,
deeply embedded in a desolate landscape haunted by omnipresent ghosts,
wild weather and ruin. He took his inspiration from genuine remains of
Gaelic verse, but also from Gray’s figure of the ‘Bard’, fashionably melancholic
graveyard poetry, and a dark version of nature poetry and the picturesque.
Ossian caught the mood for British antiquity and the mystery of the
archaic that would rapidly spawn the Gothic novel, medievalism and
ultimately the Romantic movement. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge, for
example, were influenced by Ossian’s verse, and Coleridge published
direct imitations (‘Imitated from Ossian’ and ‘The Complaint of Ninathoma’
in Poems on Various Subjects, 1796), considered writing an Ossianic opera,
‘Carthon’, and planned a ‘History of English Poetry’ to include a ‘Series
of true Heroic Ballads from Ossian’.6
Clearly for many contemporaries the question of Ossian’s authenticity
was a side-issue to its literary value – or rather the aesthetic impact that
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Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1628 Romanticism and Forgery
Ossian had on readers was a truer guarantee of its authentic literary value
than the precise provenance of the text. Ossian was supernatural indigenous verse, and as such was both about inspiration and composition and
was inspirational in itself. Consequently, Ossian can be seen as a ‘preRomantic’ or early Romantic text that breaks with the Augustan moral
pragmatism of indignant arbiters like Johnson with an intoxicating new
vision of the past. Indeed, Ossian is central to a crucial range of eighteenthcentury and Romantic period concerns, from theories of oral tradition to
attitudes to landscape and the ‘natural’ world and the place of the poet.7
Yet these areas remain under-explored.8 Rather than analyze the reputation
and influence of Ossian, the tendency of critics has either been to dismiss
the works airily without serious scrutiny, or tediously by rehashing the
debate over Macpherson’s treatment of his sources. The aim is to condemn
Macpherson as a forger – even, parroting Johnson, as a liar: what Dafydd
Moore has memorably christened the ‘Authenticity Myth’ (Ossian and
Ossianism 1:lxxii–lxxxi).
Against this deplorable prejudice there has been a gradual revival of
serious Ossianic criticism. This began in earnest with Fiona Stafford, who
in The Sublime Savage (1988) investigated Macpherson’s early poetry and
identified its influence on the first Ossianic works, Fragments and Fingal.
By treating Macpherson as a legitimate poet with an identifiable body of
writing (as opposed to a mere forger), Stafford showed that Ossian could
be read as a muted response to mid-eighteenth-century Scottish history –
the failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, the massacre at Culloden, and the
Highland Clearances – and to a desire to establish that ancient Celtic
culture was comparable to that of Greece or Rome:
[Macpherson] was acutely conscious of the steady integration of the Highlands
into the rest of Britain, seeing himself as witness to the final collapse of a
society which had remained uncorrupted for over two thousand years. . . . [It
was] a hopeless gesture towards the preservation of Celtic Scotland. (160)
Ossian and the politics of cultural memory have been further examined
by Katie Trumpener, who positions the work in debates about the origins
of national identity and British ethnicities (describing nationalism as a
‘species of fiction’, 22), and assesses its influence on the Romantic novel
and sentimental history. Jerome McGann too has claimed that Ossian’s
‘influence on the literary scene of the late eighteenth century eclipsed all
others’ and ‘set the literature of sentiment and sensibility on a whole new
footing’ (33). Trumpener relates how deeply indebted to Ossian postOssianic descriptions of landscape were, detailing the persistent ‘slippages
from landscape into text, from bardic reverie to antiquarian debate’ (105).
For Trumpener, the eighteenth-century novel internalized both Ossian
and Johnson’s scepticism: ‘In conceding the necessity and appropriateness
of Johnsonian skepticism, novelists free themselves and their readers to
indulge in Ossianic fantasies’ (107).
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Romanticism and Forgery 1629
These ‘Ossianic fantasies’ have far-reaching consequences. In poetry, Stafford
has argued that Macpherson followed Gray in elegizing the figure of the bard
that both freed the modern age ‘from a debilitating obsession with the past’
while at the same time offering a model for a modern poet ‘uninhibited
by libraries and burgeoning lists of new books’ (Last of the Race 93, 101).
Robert Crawford takes up the point with gusto, claiming that Ossian
‘initiated and brought to fruition a tonal shift in Western writing . . . invents
the Romantic vision of Scotland . . . [and] consecrates the Romantic landscape
in general . . . initiates a spatial change in the imagination’ and ultimately ‘in
its blend of primitivism and sophistication . . . creates the modern poet’ (44).
Dafydd Moore meanwhile has returned attention to the internal dynamics
of Macpherson’s Ossianic texts, placing them in the context of romance,
the sublime and elegy, and has also gathered together the varied Ossiana
of the period in the most convincing statement of Ossian’s titanic impact.
The Ossianic genre retained its currency in literary magazines for many
years as a fashionably primitivist style that recognizably played with conventions of authenticity, and among this tribe of Ossianists was the Bristolian teenage poet, Thomas Chatterton. Chatterton wrote a number of
‘Ossianics’, though he made no pretence that these were genuine remains.9
This was not however the case with his notorious Rowley forgeries – a
sprawling body of work by the fictitious Bristolian monk Thomas Rowley
and his fifteenth-century coterie that Chatterton produced in a prodigiously
creative period between the ages of about fifteen and seventeen.
Chatterton was a very different sort of writer – and forger – to Macpherson.
If Ossian was an oral phenomenon – and indeed helped to create the
concept of oral tradition10 – Rowley was literate and bookish, and his
writing ranged from poems and plays, to letters, memoirs, research notes
and translations from the Anglo-Saxon. Moreover to enhance his creation
Chatterton not only composed the Rowley poems but also produced
manuscripts of several of them: calligraphy, orthography, annotation and
provenance thus became part of the authenticating project. He claimed to
have discovered them in the muniment room of the Church of St Mary
Redcliffe, and fabricated ‘antiqued’ copies by transcribing verses in a
cod-medieval hand onto ancient parchment he then stained and distressed.
Consequently, the ‘Rowley Poems’ have a distinctive cadence and character
as physical remains, and this is in part discernible on the printed page.
One of the last texts Chatterton prepared, for example, was on King
Richard I sailing for the Crusades [footnotes are Chatterton’s own]:
Rycharde of Lyons harte, to Fyghte is gon,
Uponne the brede1 Sea doe the Banners gleme:2
The amenused3 Nationes be aston,4
To ken5 syke6 large a flete, syke fyne, syke breme:7
1
5
Broad. 2 Shine, glimmer. 3 Diminished, lessened [i.e. lesser].
See, discover, know. 6 Such, so. 7 Strong.
4
Astonished, confounded.
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The Barkis heafods8 coupe9 the lymed10 streme,
Oundes11 synkeynge Oundes upon the harde Ake12 riese;
The Water Slughornes13 wythe a swotye14 Cleme,15
Conteke16 the dynynge17 Ayre and reche the Skies.
Sprytes of the bleste! on gouldyn trones18 astedde,19
Powre owte yer pleausaunce onn mie Fadres hedde –
The Gule20 depeyncted21 Oares fro the black tyde,
Decorn22 wyth fonnes23 rare doe shemrynge24 ryse;
Upswalynge25 doe heie26 shewe ynn drierie Pryde,
Lyche Gore-red Estells27 in the Eve28-merk29 skyes;
The Nome-depeycted30 Shields: the Speres aryse,
Alyche31 talle roshes, on the Water Syde,
Alenge32 from Bark to Bark the bryghte sheene33 flyes,
Sweft-kerv’d34 Delyghtes doe on the Water glyde.
Sprites of the bleste! and everich Seyncte ydedde,
Poure owte youre Pleasaunce on mie Fadres hedde –
(‘Eclogue the Second’ 3 –22)
8
Heads. 9 Cutte. 10 Glassy, reflecting. 11 Waves, billows. 12 Oak. 13 A Musical Instrument not
unlike a Hautboy. 14 Swete. 15 Sound. 16 Confuse, contend with. 17 Sounding. 18 Thrones.
19
Seated. 20 Red. 21 Painted. 22 Carved. 23 Devices. 24 Glimmering. 25 Rising high,
swelling up. 26 They. 27 A Corruption of Estoile Fr: a Star. 28 Evening. 29 Dark.
30
Rebus’d Shields: a Herald term when the Charge of the Field implies the name of the
Bearer. 31 Lyke. 32 Alonge. 33 Shine. 34 Short-lived.
This is typical ‘Rowleyese’: a language derived from glossaries and dictionaries and Chatterton’s own playful spelling, and split into a text with
footnotes and other authenticating apparatus. Its peculiar charm has an
intoxicating quality, and the vocabulary, in which words from different
sources clash together and reverberate, seems to be perpetually on the
verge of fragmentation and collapse into nonsense.
At the same time as Chatterton was reinventing the Middle Ages, he was
also composing an impressive range of non-Rowley work: mock-heroic
satires, love poetry, songs, a burletta, political and comic journalism, the
aforementioned Ossianics and a short series of ‘African Eclogues’ that
dramatized colonialism from the perspective of African culture. This
extraordinary range is another reason he has proved so challenging for
critics to assess. And this is the same Chatterton who on the morning of
25 August 1770 was found dead in a London garret. He was not yet eighteen.
The legend that has gone down in literary history is that Chatterton
committed suicide through neglect, lack of recognition, pride and starvation, and this is the image later immortalized in the iconic Pre-Raphalite
painting by Henry Wallis (1856). Although it is more likely that Chatterton
died of an accidental drug overdose, the myth of self-destruction was to
prove as influential to Romantic period poets as his poetry.11
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Romanticism and Forgery 1631
By the time that two posthumous volumes of Chatterton’s work were
published in 1777 (the Rowley Poems) and 1778 (Miscellaneous Pieces in Verse
and Prose), the authenticity or otherwise of Chatterton’s fifteenth-century
discoveries – or forgeries – was being ferociously debated. The ‘Rowley
Controversy’ continued for another five years. The consensus of opinion
by then was that, unlikely as it seemed, Chatterton had forged the entire
Rowley corpus, and consequently he was revered as a tragic, wayward
genius: moving from literary history into Romantic myth. It is difficult
even today to separate the meteoric life and tragic death of Chatterton
from his work, and for his contemporaries it was all but impossible. The
mystery of a brilliant yet poverty-stricken young life suddenly cut short
continues to give a posthumous allure to his writings, as if they are an
extended suicide note, or a metaphysical riddle – a riddle that is itself
wrapped in the enigma of forgery.
Chatterton’s life and death helped to set the parameters of the Romantic
figure of the poet. He seemed to offer a fatal model of the young poet,
and many of the next generation of writers were obsessed by him.
Southey edited Chatterton’s works, Coleridge’s first published poem was
on Chatterton, De Quincey described him as his favourite poet, Clare
made eager notes from Chatterton’s verses, Keats described him as ‘the purest
writer in the English Language’ and dedicated Endymion to his memory
(Letters 384). And yet all of these writers tangled up Chatterton’s life with
his works and were also riven with doubts. Southey, for example,
preferred his fantasy of Chatterton to the real thing: he dismissed Chatterton’s political and local satires as ‘wit and genius wasted’, but could still
dream of him and lament, ‘Poor Chatterton! often do I think upon him
and sometimes indulge the idea that had he been living he might perhaps
have been my friend’ (New Letters 1:273, 18). Coleridge was literally
haunted by Chatterton and incorporated him in some of his most startling
poetry, but doubted the success of Southey’s edition with the sad observation, ‘Chatterton’s or Rowley’s poems were never popular. The very
circumstance which made them so much talked of, their ancientness,
prevented them from being generally read’ (Collected Letters 1:331–2.).
Chatterton is an unnerving and spectral presence in the London of De
Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, where he is imagined as
an early avatar of drug use (some versions of the suicide myth have
Chatterton overdosing on opium, though he may have simply been
taking it for medicinal reasons). Keats too found menacing and morbid
qualities in the Chattertonian associations of dying young – for him
Chatterton came in the voice of the nightingale – while Clare feared he
was in the same fatal line of impoverished provincial poets, condemned
to neglect and madness.
Despite the significant differences with Macpherson and Ossian, Chatterton has until recently been similarly condemned as a forger and placed
in a comparably marginal position in the canon. His own rehabilitation
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1632 Romanticism and Forgery
started with Donald Taylor’s edition (1971) and monograph (Thomas
Chatterton’s Art, 1978), although with notable exceptions, critics have
tended to focus on Chatterton’s ‘afterlife’ or reception, and when they
have examined his writing have done so in ways which tend to focus on
his life.12 The most extreme example of this biographical school is a
psychological profile that argues that Chatterton was the victim of a
bi-polar manic disorder, caused by the premature death of his father
(Chatterton was a posthumous child). This clinical depression provoked
fits of ‘impostorousness’ and ended in him forging poetry (Kaplan 227–
31). There have, however, been rather more subtle psychoanalytic readers
such as Susan Stewart, who for instance sees Chatterton in an Oedipal
drama in which the absence of paternal authority generates a fantasy of
patronage. Chatterton is not content to write poetry in Rowley’s archaic
voice, but needs supporting paraphernalia ‘to serve as a genealogy for
[his] own situation’; in other words, ‘Chatterton is in the anxious position
of inventing his own inheritance’ (149). Stewart also refers to Chatterton’s
activities as an ‘imposture’ (148).
Margaret Russet too presents a genealogical account of Chatterton’s
Rowley forgeries as a succession of inheritances from symbolic fathers to
symbolic sons, in which the only significant feminine figure is the Church
of St Mary Redcliffe, mischievously and suggestively described by Chatterton in ‘Craishes Herauldry’ as ‘the Chirche of oure Ladye of the
Redde Clefte’ – although such a psychoanalytic reading perhaps misses
Chatterton’s bawdy sense of humour (he was responsible for some scurrilous sexual verses in addition to everything else he produced). The main
point here is in Chatterton’s approach to antiquarian history, which Russett
argues was more influential than anything he particularly wrote: she
regards him less as a ‘major poet’ (her emphasis), and more as a pioneering
‘Romanticizer’ of literary history (50). If Chatterton’s writings are not
exactly secondary to his life in Russett’s reading, neither are they central,
suggesting that his rehabilitation as a poet still has some way to go.
Work continues in this area in part by considering how Chatterton
inspired later writers. As in Ossian, ghosts and spirits (or ‘Sprytes’)
abound and much of Chatterton’s poetry is about inspiration and where
poetry comes from. But his writing is really ‘anti-inspirational’. Inspiration
for him is a degraded and satirized concept and Chatterton deliberately
mixes different orders of the supernatural in order both to undermine
and transcend ghostlinesses. And yet this is itself defensive, as if Chatterton’s poetry is ‘actively haunted by a fear of its own potential, as if it
thirsts for a physical embodiment of the spirit of poetry as a way of
binding it – which itself might explain the material manuscripts of Rowley’ (Groom, Forger’s Shadow 164). Moreover, it is ironic that Chatterton
himself was ‘spectrified’, becoming a guiding, inspirational spirit – a
dæmon – for Coleridge, Keats and others. He was not only quoted by later
writers, but sometimes actually appeared to them as an otherwordly figure.13
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Important contextual work has also helped to return Chatterton to the
eighteenth century. Paul Baines takes up Horace Walpole’s comment in
the Letter to the Editor of the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton (1779),
which deliberately merges literary forgery with legal forgery: ‘[Chatterton’s] ingenuity in counterfeiting styles, and I believe, hands, might easily
have led him to those more facile imitations of prose, promissory notes’
(24). Although Walpole immediately declares that Chatterton ‘never
attempted to defraud, cheat, rob, unpoetically’, Baines examines just how
the literary and the economic could be so easily yoked together in
Walpole’s denunciation by considering criminal and literary forgery
alongside each other and demonstrating that two competing claims are
embodied in the half-cultural, half-legal phrase ‘literary forgery’.
In the case of Chatterton, there is indeed a remarkable congruence
of the aesthetic and the criminal: the day before the Rowley Poems was
published, the ‘unfortunate’ Dr Dodd – an acquaintance of Samuel Johnson
– was arrested for forging a promissory note. The two forgery debates
ran concurrently in the press. The case of Dodd followed just a year after
the execution of the Perreau brothers for financial forgery, and Baines
argues that the comparatively small number of forgery prosecutions
meant that each successive case was guaranteed a degree of celebrity. Public
interest was further whetted by the spectacle of the middle-class in the
dock (a forger had to be competently literate and so usually came from
the rising part of society) and by the probability of execution. By 1729,
forgery carried the death penalty, and although the indictment rate never
rose above that for murder during the period, there was a comparable
and at one point an even greater likelihood of hanging: between 1749
and 1771, three-quarters of convicted forgers swung – including Dr Dodd,
despite Johnson’s advocacy. Baines argues that the conjunction of Dodd
and the Rowley controversy encouraged commentators to read the figure
of Chatterton on the pattern of Dodd: both were potentially ‘saint and
genius, . . . hypocrite and adventurer’ (168), and hence the anti-Rowleians
took on the role (and language) of legal prosecutors.
Fakelit
Enough issues are raised by the cases of Ossian and Chatterton that
before discussing the Romantic period in more detail, it is worth pausing
to establish precisely what constitutes literary forgery and, more
generally, ‘crimes of writing’ or ‘fakelit’, not least because critics and
commentators tend to conflate very different terms. The most crucial
distinctions are those that need to be made between ‘counterfeit’, ‘forgery’,
‘plagiarism’ and ‘hoax’. The word ‘counterfeit’ should be reserved for
facsimile copies: banknotes, paintings, designer merchandize, and so forth
usually passed or ‘uttered’ as if genuine, and usually for reasons of pecuniary
advantage. By contrast, a ‘forgery’ is an original work or document
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1634 Romanticism and Forgery
attributed by the author to another artist or writer (allonymity). Hence,
a counterfeit Leonardo would be a copy of, say, the ‘Mona Lisa’, presented
as if the original, whereas a forged Leonardo would be the creation of
a lost work, such as ‘Leda and the Swan’, or something entirely new,
such as Leonardo’s plans for a wind-up phonograph and wax cylinders.
Of course, a counterfeit ‘Mona Lisa’ would be virtually impossible to
authenticate as the unique original has hung in the Louvre for years; if,
however the painting were stolen and only briefly taken out of circulation – thereby disrupting the provenance – counterfeit ‘Mona Lisa’s
would be able to circulate with some freedom.
Clearly, Macpherson and Chatterton were forgers as opposed to
counterfeiters. But as later eighteenth-century writers, they were also
arguably writing in a literary tradition of imitation or classical mimesis.
This was essentially a legitimate form of copying, in which the spirit of
an earlier writer could infuse a composition and guarantee its aesthetic
value – although of course neither Ossian nor Rowley had actually
existed. Macpherson, however, certainly claimed to be inspired by the
spirit of his ancient bard, and also provided copious annotation drawing
parallels with Homer and Virgil, the classical models of imitation. Significantly, however, imitation was by the late eighteenth century becoming
associated with plagiarism – it was subservient, derivative and lacked a
distinguishing individual voice.
Plagiarism itself is sometimes oddly confused with counterfeiting
and forgery but has a quite different meaning: rather than passing off
one’s own work as the work of another, the plagiarist passes off the
work of others as his or her own. Plagiarism is direct theft, whereas
counterfeiting and forgery are more subtle forms of transgression. Both
Macpherson and Chatterton were accused of plagiarism as well as forgery,
and in the case of Chatterton, dozens of supposed plagiarisms were
traced. It was a way of undermining Chatterton’s originality and credibility as an author, as well as an attempt to explain how he could have
composed his forgeries with such ease and rapidity.
Finally, Macpherson and Chatterton were both accused of ‘imposition’, ‘imposture’ and later, ‘hoaxing’. These terms for literary trickery
reduce the activity to mischief-making: a hoax may be a counterfeit, a
forgery or any other form of fakelit, but it is one that deliberately
contains certain inherent flaws, contradictions, even sly, slow-burning
jokes. Hoaxes have palpable intentions behind them – usually to embarrass
individuals or institutions by debunking spurious expertise; they are
time-bombs that last just long enough to be taken seriously before
blowing up in an expert’s face. Russett has suggested that the word
‘hoax’ appeared rather conveniently around 1800 in order to distinguish
criminal from literary deception, and so helped clear up the problematic
relationship between fictions and lies that characterized novels and
histories in the eighteenth century. In fact, it appears in a play published
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in 1772 (attributed to Henry Fielding, so possibly even earlier) as well
as in coterie verse of the 1780s, suggesting that it may have been a
hunting halloo (‘Hoax him there!’) and/or school slang (‘how you hoax
us, if we blunder’), and in these contexts, the word means to tease.14
The range of fakelit is immense, ranging in the two instances so far
discussed from authorship to pseudo-biography to regional and national
mythmaking and, as we shall see, it also includes performance. And yet
all these manifestations tend to be treated very similarly: primarily, in
non-cultural ways designed to marginalize and relegate them to the
realm of anecdote. Rather than receive the sustained critical attention
afforded to ‘legitimate’ works, fakes are subject to forensic scrutiny and/or
psychoanalytic analysis as evidence of abnormal intentions against
which those ‘proper’ works can be identified, classified and scrutinized.
The cases of Macpherson and Chatterton both demonstrate how even
today, fakelit is legalized or medicalized, treated as criminal or as the
symptom of a sick mind. The most notorious literary forgers of the
Romantic period exemplify the status of the forger as a marginal creature – by turns spectral, mad, illegitimate and elusive; vilified, criminalized, excluded from the canon – if ultimately (and ironically)
embraced as a model of otherness and inspiration.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this discrimination also extends to any
criticism and analysis of fakes that doesn’t endorse the tendency to
exclude and marginalize, retreating to the position that literary forgeries
can only ever be entertaining little anecdotes. Such dismissive readings
claim that critics engaged in researching fakes are liable to become
tainted (or perhaps even corrupted or possessed) if they remain too long
in the proximity of dangerous and contagious fakery. This defensiveness –
often combined with other strategies of ressentiment such as distracting
attention from the argument by focusing on marginal material, or making spurious ad hominem attacks in order to confine the work to the body
of the critic – accounts for the relative neglect of the field until recently.15
It should hardly need to be said (although unfortunately it does) that
zero tolerance of fakery is absolutely crucial in cases outside culture.
In the sciences, in historical studies, or in court, it is essential to keep
to the straight road of reality rather than be tempted by the vagaries of
the imagination. The Piltdown Man affair, or Lord Archer of WestonSuper-Mare’s perjury are of an entirely different order than Thomas
Chatterton inventing medieval poetry in the eighteenth century. But in
the creative arts – in certain cases – a dogmatic insistence on facts is
symptomatic only of that ‘man of realities’, Thomas Gradgrind: the utilitarian
ogre who presides over Dickens’s novel of the industrial north, Hard Times
(1854). For Gradgrind, a horse is less a ‘milk-white steed’ than a
Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four
eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries,
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1636 Romanticism and Forgery
sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known
by marks in mouth. (Dickens, Hard Times 50)
Literature does not need to stick to ‘the Facts’. It is rooted in tales and
stories, myths and legends, in which the imagination makes credible
the incredible. Whether King Arthur really existed or not is hardly the
point when reading Idylls of the King, any more than the verifiable
historical existence of Frodo Baggins is essential to an enjoyment of
The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, J. R. R. Tolkien’s popular epic makes an
interesting case in point, as it flamboyantly deploys many of the mechanisms of scholarly authentication – maps, glossaries, appendices, linguistic
disquisitions and explanatory notes – for a literary project that is patently
untrue. And yet no one would call it fakelit. The nature of the contract
the book made makes with its readers is that of the Romantic standby,
a willing suspension of disbelief. As Howard Jacobson has suggested,
The allure of the true tragical adventure of Whoever is ancient and universal;
we like to delude ourselves that what we read is real while we are reading it,
and the better the writer, the easier we find it to entertain the delusion; but no
self-aware reader has any business mistaking the artifice for reality, or attaching the slightest artistic consequence to the vagaries of the ‘genuine’. (15)
Although the border between fiction and non-fiction is tenuous,
disputed, and ever-shifting, a story does become something different
if it is entirely genuine: arguably, it stops being a story, being literature
and becomes non-fiction history or biography. Or, to put it another
way, the reader’s acceptance of the fictitiousness of fiction defines
literature. The problem with fakelit, however, is precisely that it
stretches this fiction beyond the literary work into biography, history
and often indeed economic remuneration. This may be disturbing, or
in K. K. Ruthven’s terms ‘anarchic’, ‘carnivalesque’, ‘abnormal’ and/or
‘repressed’ – but surely to be valued precisely for being so. And breaking the rules in this way at least indicates that for many there are rules
in literature, and implies what those rules might be. Despite fatuous
accusations that by taking forgeries and other ‘crimes of writing’
seriously engages one in some sort of relativist ‘postmodernist theory’,
it is clear that if fakelit lies at the border of legit. lit., it can then go
some way towards mapping commonsense assumptions about mainstream culture. Good fakes have been called snapshots of the Zeitgeist
– and in their very exposure demonstrate that cultural contexts are
always on the move, and that ‘commonsense assumptions’ are actually
contingent on those contexts (qtd. in Jacobson 14).
Crimes of Writing
Through Ossian and Chatterton, literary forgery pervaded the Romantic
period, and thereby helped to define it. The Romantic enthusiasm for
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Romanticism and Forgery 1637
both Ossian and Chatterton challenged, as Ruthven puts it, the ‘commonsense assumption that “originality” and “authenticity” are polar
opposites of the fake’ (16). It was precisely the figure of the Romantic
poet – the figure of the inspired, solitary, creative, original genius that
remains so tenacious in models of authorship today – that is fundamentally
challenged by literary forgery, and yet ironically this figure grew out of
an infatuation with fakelit in the same period, through inspiration,
impersonation and accusations of false writings.
The Romantic period did not have a Macpherson or a Chatterton;
instead, it had William Henry Ireland. Styling himself the ‘second
Chatterton’, Ireland was a living embodiment of the anxiety of influence.
He was young (though not so young as he pretended to be) and his
forgeries duped prominent members of the literati – including Joseph
Warton, brother of Thomas and headmaster of Winchester College,
and Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell. But Ireland’s life did not have
the tragic arc of his predecessor’s: he survived his affair with forgery by
some forty years and made a rollercoaster living as a hack writer,
publishing some 70 books in his lifetime.
Ireland’s activities were inspired by the Shakespearomania or ‘bardolatry’
that gradually gripped the eighteenth-century imagination. In the
absence of an English Homer or Virgil, and in response to the Ossian furore,
the plays and later the poems of William Shakespeare had received
increasing interest and attention – not least because some of the most
successful and influential writers of the eighteenth century (such as
Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson) were commissioned to edit his
plays. Shakespeare was quoted extensively by writers, and appeared, for
example, more often than any other writer in the illustrative citations
that characterized Johnson’s Dictionary. His plays remained crowd-pullers
on the stage (admittedly in revised versions) and in other popular
entertainments such as the jubilee of 1769. But the one thing that
Shakespeare lacked in an age that celebrated the almost supernatural
figure of the poet were copies of his works in his own hand.
The dearth of such cultural relics had two contrasting effects. By
amplifying the lack of manuscript papers into a wholesale lack of
authorial evidence meant that for the first time some cranks doubted
that Shakespeare had really composed the works attributed to him at
all. An absurd cottage industry was launched to identify the ‘real’
author. This ridiculous charade continues to this day, with different
factions variously proposing Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe,
Edward de Vere and several others as the ‘true’ Shakespeare.16 Against
this tendency, however, was a Stratford-based tourist trade in authenticity: knick-knacks such as souvenirs carved from the wood of a
mulberry tree supposedly planted by Shakespeare, evergreen local
anecdotes and legends, and even fresh documentary evidence that
culminated in the ‘discoveries’ of William Henry Ireland. Ireland pro© 2007 The Author
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1638 Romanticism and Forgery
duced legal deeds, letters, drafts of Hamlet and King Lear, and even
love poems to Anne Hathaway that enclosed an actual lock of Shakespeare’s own hair. His audacity culminated in the staging of a hitherto
lost play, Vortigern and Rowena, that caused a one-night sensation at
Drury Lane on 2 April 1796, before it was eventually booed offstage.
Ireland’s Shakespearean language was a version of ‘Rowleyese’ that
toppled into absurdity. Shakespeare’s ‘Profession of Faith’, for instance,
was given by Ireland as:
O cherishe usse like the sweete Chickenne thatte under the coverte offe
herre spreadynge Wings Receyves herre lyttle Broode ande hoevynge oerre
themme keepes themme harmlesse ande in safetye. [O cherish us like the
sweet chicken that under the cover of her spreading wings receives her
little brood and heaving over them keeps them harmless and in safety.] (qtd.
in Groom, Forger’s Shadow 234)
By writing in this way, Ireland adapted the dæmonic mode of Chattertonian inspiration into composition through ‘possession’. In one way,
whether as ‘Shakespeare’ or any other of his sixteen-plus pseudonyms,
Ireland was challenging emergent notions of authorship through multifariousness. As well as being a poet, satirist, playwright and autobiographer, Ireland published as a children’s writer (Youth’s Polar Star or The
Beacon of Science), Gothic novelist (Gondez the Monk), historian, editor
of The Universal Chronologist and translator (Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orléans).
He also claimed to be the second Byron (writing ‘Johannes Taurus, the
Don Juan of England by Byronus Secundus’), and gained employment
as a royal impresario providing a pantomime for Frogmore Fete. It was a
radical response to the Wordsworthian figure of ‘the Poet’ that was
beginning to dominate Romantic models of authorship and confer
proprietorial rights: Ireland adopted a ‘defeatist form of egotism’ and
dissolved himself as an author-function into a babble of different voices
(Groom, Forger’s Shadow 252). Motifs of forgery, craft and illegitimacy
run through much of this erratic range, and he was also partial to recording
the activities of one William Henry Ireland in some of his guises as
historian and chronicler.
After years of neglect and, it must be said, ongoing scorn, Ireland
has received considerable attention in recent years – though little of it
sympathetic. Jeffrey Kahan, for example, contends that Ireland was
effectively a ‘master criminal’ (41). Ireland claimed in his elaborated
memoirs that he had forged to please his father and then became
ensnared in a net of deceit; Kahan argues that he had planned it all
from the outset as a money-making scheme. He implicates Ireland’s
father, Samuel, his sisters as complicit secretaries, and a crooked lawyer,
Albany Wallis, as a collaborator. The entire Ireland household was
involved in rewriting Ireland’s new discoveries, and among the more
major changes to Vortigern were cutting an incest scene and rewriting
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Romanticism and Forgery 1639
the regicide so that it happened offstage. Interestingly, this made the
text a process of collaborative authorship rather than being the sacrosanct
vision of a single genius.
Kahan’s reading of Ireland turns literary forgery into a criminal narrative
of accomplices, plots, conspiracies, lies and deceit – echoing the legal
rhetoric of contemporaries who likewise attacked the discoveries. In this
way, literary forgery became more criminal. Authorship was gaining a
definable legal status, and although many writers adopted pseudonyms,
they cultivated these as distinct poetic voices or identities. After the
Ireland fiasco, then, there are no major literary forgers in the period.
Text-based definitions of authorship and copyright protection had
significant implications for oral traditions and the whole concept of
voice. Russett has examined this shift in authorship and the importance of ‘original composition’ (72) by investigating the authenticity
of the poetic voice in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Scott’s ‘The Lay of
the Last Minstrel’, arguing that the ‘personality’ of Romantic authorship can be equated with metre (82). Moreover, ‘Christabel’, as Tilar
Mazzeo points out, is itself about ventriloquism and enchantment, and
‘enacts the drama of the plagiarism’ (32); Christabel imitates Geraldine,
she is possessed, is inhabited by ‘the voice of another’ (34).
After Ireland, then, the cultural logic of forgery shifts, and the most
extreme case of Romantic-period forgery is probably that of the aesthetic
absolutist Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Wainewright had edited
Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1820) and, among other things,
had contributed to the London Magazine under a series of preposterous
pseudonyms – ‘Janus Weathercock’, ‘Cornelius Van Vinkbooms’,
‘Bevil Seymour’ and ‘Senex’. He subsequently practiced economic
forgery in an artistic context by falsifying attributions to paintings, before
pursuing this criminal career into insurance fraud and eventually
multiple murder. As Oscar Wilde later scandalously remarked, Wainewright was an artist in ‘pen, pencil, and poison’.
But Wainewright’s activities were also symptomatic – if not typical
– of a widespread crisis in identity. His pathetic statement on being
arrested was ‘I am nothing’; he was eventually transported – made to
disappear. In response to the legalization of textual identity in copyright legislation, attention focused on the fear of losing one’s literary
property and even one’s actual identity to an impostor. In other words,
the eighteenth-century’s preoccupation with literary forgery developed
into a broad cultural anxiety over intangible property and how it could
be guarded, and the main foci of this cultural anxiety were plagiarism
and impersonation.17
Mazzeo has investigated the vast field of plagiarism in the Romantic
period. Literature began to be figured as a thing of value, being
compared to everything from a mere trinket to a protected estate.
Wordsworth, for example, a keen supporter of extending copyright
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1640 Romanticism and Forgery
protection, told Henry Crabb Robinson in 1817 that in Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage Lord Byron ‘has been poaching on my Manor’ (qtd. in
Mazzeo 144).18 As far back as Martial, plagiarists were considered to be
the kidnappers of other men’s brains and poetry was imagined as property that could be appropriated and disfigured – or indeed improved.
Literature was also thought of as territory that could be enclosed (as
the Enclosure Acts were reshaping the landscape) and to which access
was restricted – or could be trespassed upon. Some writers – Wordsworth
clearly included – argued that the very act of literary composition
should grant rights that were almost feudal in conception. Moreover,
writers were anxious and hypersensitive in the face of persistent accusations of plagiarism, and such accusations implied theories of textual
inspiration and protocols of influence.
Earlier work on plagiarism has focused on particular forensic cases
of intertextuality, influence and theft (most notably on Coleridge’s
borrowings), or on the place of plagiarism in the development of
intellectual property and copyright laws. Coleridge was, according to
Mazzeo, a victim of the closer attention being paid to ‘the particular
relationship between questions of consciousness and intellectual property in the period’ (18), and he defended himself by arguing that
influence could be both deliberate and unconscious, in the form of the
‘ocular spectra’ (a sort of trance, 35), ‘genial coincidence’ (used to
explain his borrowings from Schelling in Biographia Literaria) and the
figure of the ‘divine Ventriloquist’ (26). By considering Coleridge’s own
arguments, Mazzeo’s aim is to distinguish Romantic-period plagiarism
from modern conceptions of the activity: ‘Authors in early nineteenthcentury Britain . . . were neither postmodern nor traditionalist, and
they did not understand plagiarism primarily in modern terms’ (7).
She identifies two forms of plagiarism in the period: poetical copying
and culpable copying – the latter being the unacknowledged use of
unimproved and often unfamiliar material, in which a conscious effort
is made to disguise the borrowing.
Consequently, ‘accusations of plagiarism represented a mode of
criticism’ (86). Both Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example, made
‘unacknowledged assimilation’ of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals
(65), but unpublished journals were not recognized as inherently
literary and taking material from Dorothy was considered to be a just
‘improvement’ – as William famously did with ‘The Leech-gatherer’
(‘Resolution and Independence’) by removing the economic complications of the encounter.19 Women had limited property rights, and
this extended to intellectual property rights; furthermore, there were
issues of propriety in a woman making a private text public.
Plagiarism was evidently an abiding topic of conversation and correspondence in the Romantic period, and although there was no
direct legal recourse for the infringement of intellectual property and
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Romanticism and Forgery 1641
copyright law was in its infancy it evidently had a thrilling proximity
to criminal activity. A writer’s best defence was probably with Byron.
As a writer frequently charged with plagiarism, he claimed that the
interdependence of authors was inevitable: all were plagiarists.
[W]ho is the author that is not, intentionally or unintentionally, a plagiarist? Many more, I am persuaded, are the latter than the former; for if
one has read much, it is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid adopting, not
only the thoughts, but the expressions of others, which, after they have
been some time stored in our minds, appear to us to come forth ready
formed, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter. . . . To be perfectly
original . . . one should think much and read little; and this is impossible,
as one must have read so much before one learns to think. (qtd. in Mazzeo
120)
Performing Forgery
Scholars and critics of literary forgery and plagiarism have lately
turned their attention to investigating the world of impostors. The
Romantic period has no shortage of such characters, figures such as
Joanna Southcott, ‘Princess Caraboo’ and John Hatfield hold an
enduring interest, and the field also encompasses medical hoaxes and
spurious travel writing.20 Imposture is transgressive because, like forgeries that blur literature and history, fiction and non-fiction, it crosses
boundaries. By doing so, imposture draws attention to the existence and
restrictions of such boundaries and to the ideologies that naturalize
and govern them: whether of sex and gender, class, or race and ethnicity.
Imposture is also policed much more aggressively than literary forgery,
and in some cases it has led to the gallows.
The fascination with impostors in the period begins with the eighteenth-century Formosan, George Psalmanazar. In 1704, Psalmanazar
arrived in London and published An Historical and Geographical
Description of Formosa, claiming to be a native thereof and making
extraordinary and sensational claims about that distant place (modern
Taiwan). He was lionized, provoking much speculation as to whether
he really was an authentic Formosan or not. Psalmanazar spoke an
outlandish language (as well as fluent English, French, German, Latin
and Greek) and wrote in a strange alphabet; he also related scintillatingly gruesome details of everyday life in Formosa, where cannibalism
flourished and where women were treated with savage brutality –
being forced to abort babies until they were in their late thirties, lest
their husbands punish them by ripping out and eating their hearts.
Despite this information – and his claim to have dined upon human
flesh himself – Psalmanazar was popular among the ladies of eighteenthcentury London. He created quite a stir before settling down as a
Grub Street scholar as chief contributor to the immense Universal
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1642 Romanticism and Forgery
History (which by 1754 had reached twenty volumes). Johnson
professed his admiration of Psalmanazar (he is mentioned in Boswell’s
Life) who eventually confessed his imposture in Memoirs of ****,
Commonly known by the Name of George Psalmanazar (1764).
This split-life of Psalmanazar is so odd and overwhelming that, like
other impostors (or indeed literary forgers of the period), it tends to
eclipse everything else – not least the writing. Michael Keevak has
recently suggested that Psalmanazar was a prime example of the earlyeighteenth-century encounter with otherness: ‘a time when the very
concept of race had not been invented, and in a social context that
is so far removed from our self-described racial, cultural, sexual, or
other identities in the twenty-first century’ (16). Despite much first-hand
eyewitness information, Formosa remained almost entirely unknown,
and Keevak describes how this ‘blindness or know-nothingness about
the “real” Formosa’ made it almost impossible for Europeans to ‘know’
anything about an alien culture (20).
Asian visitors to Europe were a rarity, so Psalmanazar’s blonde and
fair-skinned appearance did not undermine his racial claims: by the
first decade of the eighteenth century there had possibly been just two
Chinese visitors to Paris. Rather, manners, or behaviour – performance
– rather than physical appearance were more significant for contemporaries, and the imposture thrived on a challenging audience. Sceptics
made a crucial contribution to Psalmanazar’s incessant performance of
otherness purely by being sceptical: they themselves were performing
scepticism much as Psalmanazar was performing Formosan, while his
believers performed belief. As with Macpherson and Chatterton, deceit
on such a scale was unthinkable, and Psalmanazar claimed in his preface
to a later edition of An Historical and Geographical Description that it was
beyond human genius to forge the Description – ‘he must be a Man of
prodigious parts, who can invent the Description of a Country, contrive
a Religion, frame Laws and Customs, make a Language, and Letters, &c.’
The Formosan alphabet and language, for example, was a game or
shared activity in which readers could participate, and in this respect
it was an important precedent for later literary forgeries, notably
Chatterton’s ‘Rowleyese’. It also had a life independent of its creator,
and bizarrely survived in reference books long after Psalmanazar himself
had confessed and died. So, much as Ossian and Chatterton lie behind
the question of literary forgery in the Romantic period, so Psalmanazar
lies behind the burgeoning culture of impersonation. This is perhaps
most evident in Mary Baker’s exotic reinvention of herself as ‘Princess
Caraboo’, but is also apparent in the radical prophetess Joanna Southcott, John Hatfield (who as ‘Alexander Augustus Hope’ seduced the
famous beauty, the Maid of Buttermere), and even the poet John Clare,
who while incarcerated in an asylum periodically claimed to be Lord
Byron.
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Romanticism and Forgery 1643
Both Margaret Russett and Debbie Lee have recently investigated
Mary Baker, née Willcocks, a.k.a. Princess Caraboo of Javasu, who
in her wanderings took on many roles, from virgin whore to gypsy
to anorexic. Russett reads Caraboo as a figure from the pages of
‘romance’ – both ‘Romantic’ and ‘romantic’ – who suggested
the role of acknowledged fictions in constituting both the national and
the individual narratives of transformation that were canonized in the later
nineteenth century. By mirroring this cultural imaginary, Baker’s hoax
allegorized the subjectivity, or internal mobility, of which it constituted
both evidence and condition. (136)
Lee’s approach is to contrast Caraboo with an establishment figure
who experienced a particularly perplexing encounter with otherness:
Sir Stamford Raffles, governor of Java and author of The History of
Java (1817), a text that emerged from the confusion of his Javan
sources and research and that was contradictory and often the victim
of fakery. Caraboo’s adoption of the character of a princess of Javasu
was derived from Raffles’s book: ‘even though it was based on insincerity
and double-dealing . . . [Raffles’s Java] gave Mary Baker the Englishwoman an authentic identity for the first time in her life’ (193).
Lee’s account of Mary Baker’s life usefully sums up the issues of
female emancipation and empowerment in her book Romantic Liars.
Almost all of Lee’s impostors are women who disguised themselves to
create social opportunities, which they lacked through gender and
class prejudice. Disguise – in many different guises – gave the chance
of upward mobility, money and independence. In other words,
although impostors are in one sense mythic types (the trickster tradition
is as old as Western literature), imposture is a particularly viable role
for impoverished labouring class or rural women. It allows them to cross
social boundaries. This adaptability not only challenges cultural myths
of power, but perhaps more importantly is a way of reclaiming storytelling, of narrating the self. Imposture read in this way is a language
(or rather, a performative symptom) of female psychological trauma.
Mary Anne Talbot, for example, was forced into a masculine identity by her guardian (Capt. Essex Bowen). On his death, she remained
a male, passing as a French soldier (‘playing both the gender boundary
and the national one’, 4). As John Taylor, s/he was given up to the
British navy, then captured by the French, and spent 18 months
imprisoned. Going back to the British navy, Talbot/Taylor served on
a merchantman carrying, appropriately enough, textiles (‘fabric made
fabrication possible’, 5), and was promoted to a commission. In a
bizarre twist, s/he was then press-ganged while on leave in London
and obliged to reveal her sex to secure her release. She determined
to settle down as a woman – training herself to feminine behaviour
– but without success. Talbot/Taylor reverted to a masculine identity
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1644 Romanticism and Forgery
and consequently a life of beggary. By now, s/he was a sort of
celebrity. Talbot/Taylor discovered that a potted account of his/her
life had been printed, and then discovered another woman who
claimed to be Mary Anne Talbot and John Taylor. As Lee succinctly
puts it, ‘She had so effectively internalized her dual selves, male and
female, that they formed a single character that was compelling, and
surprisingly stable, enough to be the subject of identity theft’ (9).
Despite this, s/he continued a downward spiral until being rescued
by the printer Robert Kirby (publisher of Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific
Museum, 1802–20), who employed Talbot/Taylor as a domestic servant.
Kirby published his/her memoir after she died – a life that itself has
since been disputed as a hoax or delusion itself: a hoax of a hoax.
Talbot/Taylor’s self-reinvention looks decidedly modest beside that
of the false prophetess Joanna Southcott, who claimed to be pregnant
with the second messiah. Lee reads Southcott’s familiar career (or
plight) as a performance of female trauma – a form of displaced sexual
fixation that helped to construct ‘one of history’s most authentic
impostors’ (78). Southcott’s mystical language of female psychology
was one she wove from folk superstition and religious radicalism, and
this presents Southcott in a curiously generous light. In particular,
Lee’s reading gains considerable momentum from the experience of
Ann Moore, a disciple of Southcott who became a renowned fasting
woman – or what today might be more sympathetically thought of
today as an abject victim of anorexia nervosa and Munchausen’s syndrome. Attempts to make sense of Moore’s self-starvation at the time
went from the spectacular (making a waxwork of her) to the cruelly
voyeuristic: she was placed under close surveillance and denied any
form of nutrition – including fluids, with which she was covertly
refreshing herself. She almost died, and was saved only by confessing
that she had ‘occasionally taken sustenance for the last six years’ (65).
Finally, the pitiable story of Ann Moore indicates the gravity of
Lee’s cases: imposture was a life-or-death affair. Mary Bateman, the
Witch of Leeds, was a monster, exploiting lower class women through
the language of female psychology initiated by Southcott (indeed, her
crimes were used to try and discredit Southcottians). Bateman’s chilling strategy was to identify powerless women, and appear to offer
them some form of empowerment, through such non-patriarchal traditions as folk medicine, superstition, and witchcraft. In practice, this
meant that she blackmailed for charms and threatened with curses.
In the course of her despicable activities, Bateman’s acquisitiveness reached
quite astonishing levels. In addition to a considerable sum of money,
the inventory of goods she acquired from one poor couple included
a goose, two pairs of men’s shoes, a goose pie, a tea caddy, several shirts, a
counterpane, a piece of woolen cloth, a silk handkerchief, a silk shawl,
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a light colored gown skirt, two pillow slips, a new waistcoat, six pounds
of butter, seven strokes of meal, six strokes of malt, varying amounts of
tea and sugar, two hundred or three hundred eggs, a pair of worsted
stockings, a pair of black silk stockings, three yards of knaresbro’ linen, a piece
of beef, three bottles of spirit, two table cloths, two barrels, and two napkins
– all this allegedly to assuage heart problems (125). Behind such a
simple trust placed in the Witch of Leeds lies real human pain – the
desperation of the disenfranchised. And much worse was to come than
mere penury. Mary Bateman laced her charms and curses with arsenic:
her victims would assuredly perish if they broke the diabolical pact
they had made with this nightmarish serial killer. When William
Perigo began to question the goods sent to Mary Bateman just listed,
she poisoned him and his wife; William survived to press charges, his
wife Rebecca did not.
The story of Bateman’s vile crimes cast a macabre light on the
seduction of Mary Robinson by John Hatfield. Mary Robinson’s
authenticity was intimately connected with her place in the ‘natural’
landscape of Cumbria. Her first admirer, Capt. Budworth, described
Mary as ‘the Maid of Buttermere’ in his travelogue of the region and
turned her into a local attraction – which ultimately brought about
her downfall. Hatfield was an engaging conman who had been in and
out of different identities and different gaols. He was certainly popular
among the villagers of the Lake District, to whom in the character of
the Honourable Alexander Augustus Hope MP he seemed to represent
a ‘hope’ of serious ruling class attention. But his fake largesse literally
destroyed him. Apart from bigamy with Mary Robinson and a series of
bad debts, he had also been forging letter franks by using the real Hope’s
parliamentary privilege. That was enough to get him hanged, and like
Mary Bateman, he ended his life on the gallows. It was an unsettling
climax to a tawdry affair. Coleridge, for instance, had reported on
Hatfield’s activities in the Morning Post, and the unravelling of the case
questioned the integrity of his whole pilgrimage to the Lake District.
As Lee puts it, he had gone there ‘to discover his own inner truth,
and ended up exposing Hatfield’s outer falseness’ (‘Forgeries’ 535).
What had begun as literary forgery in the eighteenth century ended
on the gallows in the nineteenth. The cultural had become criminal
– or at least parts of impersonation overlapped with criminal activity.
Impersonation is effectively a performative mode of literary forgery, but
one in which the threats voiced by Walpole – ‘All of the house of forgery
are relations’ (24) – become all the more acute. The impersonator is
potentially as transgressive a figure as the forger – disturbing or mad or
supernatural or criminal, yet also a celebrity and a walking example of the
contradictions of Romantic subjectivity and its sinister possibilities. It is
no surprise that this period saw the composition of uncanny works of
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1646 Romanticism and Forgery
doppelgänger fiction such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and
James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).
***
It should be clear from this survey of literary forgery and impersonation that these activities are profoundly contextual. Literary forgery
emerged from issues of national identity that in the following fifty years
became questions of personal identity and authenticity. Treating cases
of forgery and imposture as transhistorical and universal (as Anthony
Grafton does in his brief but influential Forgers and Critics) fails to
appreciate the precise nature of the challenge offered by such work,
and consequently fails to explain what they tell us about a culture and
a society when they succeed. A much more recent case considered by
Ruthven in Faking Literature should put this into perspective. In 1987
one Rahila Khan, supposedly an Asian woman of colour and published
by Virago Press, was revealed to be a white English vicar called Toby
Forward. His book was pulped by Virago.
Ruthven argues that this episode questions the cultural validity of
‘identity politics’ and the aesthetic implications of positive discrimination.
Concepts of value and merit in literature are, according to Ruthven,
being replaced with political agendas enforced through cultural institutions such as publishers and prizes. This has obvious implications for
the canon and for the next generation of writers. Virago required the
presence of an authenticating Romantic author, and Forward was
accused of appropriating the voice of young Asian women and textually
oppressing them. However, reading the case with an awareness of how
literary forgery can challenge cultural assumptions suggests that the
impact of Forward’s writing was in exposing the ‘crypto-politics’ of Virago’s
so-called ‘literary’ objections to it (189). In the further case of Wanda
Koolmatrie, a prize-winning Aboriginal woman writer revealed in
turn to be Leon Carmen, a white man who could not get published,
this indicates ‘a highly politicised but ultimately patronising literary
awards system that wilfully misrecognises white mediocrity as black
excellence’ (191). For Ruthven, our current literary scene is in danger
of becoming an invidious yet culturally endorsed form of discrimination
and oppression, which is where a cultural obsession with the authenticity
of the Romantic subject has finally led us.
Short Biography
Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter (Cornwall
Campus). He holds an M.A. and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford,
and before his current position was Reader in English and Director of
the Centre of Romantic Studies at the University of Bristol. His research
examines issues of authenticity and constructions of national identity
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Romanticism and Forgery 1647
in books that include The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford, 1999),
Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (ed., Macmillan, 1999), The
Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (Picador,
2002) and The Union Jack: The Story of the British Flag (Atlantic, 2006).
He has also published many essays and articles across a wide range of
academic and popular topics, and is currently writing a book on
representations of the British environment.
Acknowledgement
I have taken some material from work I have already published in ‘Fakelit’
(Fakes and Forgeries, ed. Peter Knight and Jonathan Long (Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004), vii–xiii) and from reviews of books by Paul
Baines (The House of Forgery, in Review of English Studies 54 (2003), 258–60),
Michael Keevak (The Pretended Asian, in RES 56 (2005), 325 –7), Tilar
Mazzeo (Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period, in European
Romantic Review, forthcoming), Debbie Lee (Romantic Liars, in Romanticism
on the Net 45 (2007)), Margaret Russett (Fictions and Fakes, in BARS Bulletin,
forthcoming), and K. K. Ruthven (Faking Literature, in Notes & Queries
n.s. 50 (2003), 248–9).
Notes
* Correspondence address: University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Penryn, Cornwall,
United Kingdom, TR10 9EZ. Email: [email protected].
1
See Kidd.
Beowulf was first translated into Latin by Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin in 1815, and extracts
appeared in Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons, 6th edn (1836).
3
See Groom, Forger’s Shadow ch. 3.
4
See Moore (ed.), Ossian and Ossianism.
5
See Gaskill (ed.), Ossian Revisited; Stafford and Gaskill (eds), From Gaelic to Romantic;
and Gaskill (ed.), Reception of Ossian in Europe.
6
See Stafford, ‘ “Dangerous Success” ’ .
7
See Curley and ensuing response.
8
See Moore, Enlightenment and Romance 170–1.
9
‘Ethelgar’, ‘Kenrick’, ‘Cerdick’, ‘Godred Crovan’ and ‘The Hirlas’ I and II.
10
See Hudson; Groom, ‘Celts and Goths’.
11
See Groom, ‘Death of Chatterton’.
12
Hayward is an exception to the psycho-biographical criticism; there are also three
collections of essays: the theoretical journal Angelaki (1993/4) 1.2, the literary historical
Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (ed. Groom), and the interestingly interdisciplinary
From Gothic to Romantic: Thomas Chatterton’s Bristol (ed. Heys).
13
Groom, Forger’s Shadow 186ff.
14
For more detailed discussions see Groom, Forger’s Shadow 16–50; Kewes passim. Ruthven
also suggests the more exotic – and less immediately pejorative – terms ‘spuriosities’ and
‘supercheries’ (3, 36).
15
See for example Terry Eagleton’s scrupulous attention to cover blurbs and Acknowledgements pages in Figures of Dissent 238–45.
16
See http://shakespeareauthorship.com/.
2
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1648 Romanticism and Forgery
17
Interestingly, Andrew Motion’s book on Wainewright, Wainewright the Poisoner, is an
extended feat of impersonation.
18
Copyright legislation protecting authors’ work for a period of 14 years had been passed as
early as 1709, but was contested by the booksellers until 1774 (Donaldson v. Beckett). In 1814,
that protection was extended to 28 years or, if the author was still alive at the end of the term,
to life. The 1842 Copyright Act further extended this term to 42 years, or seven years after
the author’s death.
19
For an account of the sources and composition of this poem, see Wordsworth, ed. Gill
528–41.
20
See Lee, ‘Forgeries’ 524–30.
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