A Swindler's Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (review)

Kirsten McKenzie's A Swindler's Progress kicks off with an 1835 forgery trial in Sydney, Australia. What was remarkable about the trial was not the worthless promissory note issued by the defendant but a claim he made about himself: "I have sworn before my God that I am Edward, Lord Viscount Lascelles, the eldest son of the Earl of Harewood, and heir apparent to that illustrious name" (qtd. in McKenzie 6). Had an English nobleman been living a secret life on the other side of the world?

He was not Lascelles but a man we have to call "John Dow" (6), though this was also not his real name. Interested in far more than unmasking an impostor, McKenzie's real task is tracing a web of connections in order to write a genuine transnational history. She explores that web by taking us from New South Wales to Yorkshire and Barbados to make sense of colonisation; she also has much to say about exile, hierarchy, social climbing, identity, and the meaning of liberty. At the same time the book is a product of the rediscovery by historians of the art of narrative in the wake of Simon Schama's work.

McKenzie writes with immense aplomb, carried along by her infectious delight in uncovering a linked set of episodes. The book tells us not one story but at least three. The first concerns the Lascelles family, who bulldozed their way into the peerage in 1790 using a fortune built up through trade with the West Indies. This included government contracts to provision the military, but also slave-trading and plantation-owning. They built a magnificent stately home, Harewood House, and became bulwarks of the Tory party. Henry Lascelles became MP for Yorkshire in 1796, as did William Wilberforce. Relations between the great abolitionist and the scion of a slave-owning family were apparently cordial. The 1807 election, however, fought in the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade, led to a rupture that McKenzie interprets in postcolonial terms. The two candidates were challenged by a Whig candidate, Charles William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam. McKenzie recreates this rumbustious electoral contest where the Whigs drove a wedge between Lascelles and Wilberforce by emphasising Lascelles's slave connections. Wilberforce was returned, but Wentworth-Fitzwilliam managed to defeat Lascelles.

The second episode concerns Lascelles's eldest son, Edward, who later would be so dramatically impersonated in an Australian courtroom. Never cut out to be the scion of a noble family, Edward secretly married the daughter of a local publican in 1818. An outraged Lascelles threatened to disinherit his son unless the marriage ended. Edward immediately agreed to a divorce and, disgraced, decided it was better for his younger brother to inherit the earldom. As far as the world was concerned, he disappeared. In fact he moved to the continent, taking up with a widowed Bavarian baroness, whom he married despite his father's objections. He was a casualty of the aristocratic need for property and primogeniture and therefore could not marry whomever he liked.

Halfway through the book we arrive at its central episode: the defendant whom we initially encounter in Scotland in 1825, now in Sydney affecting to be the son of Sir James Colquhoun. As with so many of these impostors, he claimed to have foolishly misspent his inheritance and, being estranged from his family, to be in need of credit. Rumours circulated that he was really a coal miner's son. McKenzie explores the way Scottish coal mining amounted to a form of bonded labour analogous to the slaves who had built the Lascelles fortune. In court, Colquhoun was given the name John Dow, which he refused, and we will likely never know who he actually was. He was transported to Van Diemen's Land for running up credit by employing false claims about himself.

By the time he ended up in the antipodes...