Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 (review)

"Crimes of writing" have always been part of the legalistic eighteenth century's sense of itself, but Romanticism, with its privileged sense of high inspirational authenticity, has seemed relatively devoid of frauds corresponding to Lauder's false allegations against Milton, Macpherson's Ossian, and Chatterton's Rowley archive. More recently, however, Romantic authorship has come to seem more fractured and multiple, more policed by anxiety, than its hieratic practitioners were quite ready to admit. Margaret Russett's rich and subtle book reminds us that imposture continued to resonate into the Romantic period: "hoax" and "fake" emerged from slang into literate discourse around 1800, and Russett aligns these pejorative demarcations, and others such as imposture, forgery, counterfeit, and imitation, with more licensed forms of delusion and romance. She finds considerable genealogical force in operation between the productions of Chatterton and writers such as Coleridge, who once planned an essay on literary forgery, and De Quincey, whose experimentations in selfhood haunt these pages.

To begin, Russett explores the relationship between "fictions of textual creation"—the myths of mysterious archives and deciphered alphabets exploited by Chatterton and others—and "the construction of Romantic subjectivity" (4). Transgressive literary acts help to define the lineaments of Romantic "authenticity," while the tropes of forgery and imposture become "naturalized" in legitimate and canonical narratives of development such as The Prelude. Chatterton's classic imposture fantasy and manuscript fetish owes much to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (with its "discovered text" motif and its oedipal battleground); Walpole was one of the father-figures to whom Chatterton (a posthumous son) devoted his fictions. Chatterton himself generated a series of imitations, answers, and incorporations in canonical Romanticism, as well as proving inspirational for W.H. Ireland's Shakespeare fabrications in the 1790s, and Russett demonstrates the depth and complex significance of these textual echoes and inscriptions shrewdly. Subsequent chapters are, loosely speaking, chronologically arranged, but the webs of connection work across a merely linear narrative. Coleridge's plagiarism anxiety is played out through the troubled history of Christabel, the unfinished and rather suspect poem of kidnapped bodies whose allegories of writing emerge in Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, published before Coleridge's poem but written in the wake of hearing it. This is less a question of "influence" in the juridical sense derived from the literary property debates of the late eighteenth century (which are carefully reviewed here) than of participation in a "drama of authorship that reifies call and response into mutually reinforcing canonical categories" (89). In chapter 4, Russett investigates the responses of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and De Quincey to the case of James Hatfield, the bigamist and impostor who married Mary Robinson, the "Maid of Buttermere," before being hanged for forgery in 1803. Coleridge was unintentionally instrumental in the process by which Hatfield's assumed aristocratic identity of "Hope" (a gift to Romantic punning) unravelled in the courts, and his retelling of the story of metropolitan deception and feminized landscape has a kind of uncanny closeness to his aesthetics of illusion and sense of the sufferings of the writer. In perhaps her most accessible chapter (certainly the one in which the fictions of Romanticist discourse are most knowingly aligned with the fictions of Romanticism itself), Russett recounts the "Caraboo hoax" by which Mary Baker, a servant from Bristol and Romanticism's answer to Psalmanazar, claimed in 1817 to be an oriental princess, producing a fantasy alphabet and script, at once obviously fake and romantically indecipherable. Her story of continual reinvention (including a "legitimate" redemption, Moll Flanders-style, in America) acts as a kind of running commentary on the Humean concept of identity as fiction, an allegory of subjectivity. There follows an analysis of John Clare's fantasticated identification with the figure of Lord Byron, on whose talismanic name and slippery reputation open season had been declared in a number of high-profile fakes. This Clare is no naive rustic...