The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (review)

We are in the midst of a rising historical trend: the efflorescence of the microstoria of the singular event, or, if we prefer a Franco-centric to an Italianized genealogy, the histoire totale des causes célèbres. The genre of course is not new: remember Martin Guerre. But recently, whether because of the shift from social to cultural history, the postmodern suspicion of grand narratives, the pull of an expanding market for broad-appeal books of historical narrative, or probably all of the above, we encounter more and more studies of singular episodes, previously sidelined in traditional historical narratives but unusually rich, that in their multiple meanings, connections, and ramifications are claimed to illuminate a whole period or culture.

Thus, in modern British history alone, we have recently been treated to accounts of the 1743 murder of a local magistrate in Rye, the 1770s forgeries of Mrs Rudd, the 1779 crime of passion that killed Martha Ray, the 1810s imposture of Princess Caraboo, and the 1856 trial of the poisoner William Palmer. Similarly, microhistories of singular persons have brought us the magician Cagliostro in the age of reason; the escaped Barbary captive Elizabeth Marsh in the age of global connections; and the compulsive Arthur Munby, socio-sexually obsessed with his servant Hannah Cullwick, in the age of Victorian values. In each case an event or a figure that scholars had previously confined to passing references becomes a key to unlock the broadest possible understanding of their respective periods. Now, with Rohan McWilliam's rich book we can add the Tichborne imposture case to this (partial) list of episodes rescued from the indifference of posterity. But what makes this addition especially remarkable is the fact that the Tichborne story, unlike most others in this genre, is not simply an unnoticed backdoor key to the bigger picture. Rather, as McWilliam persuasively shows, it is itself the bigger picture.

The bare bones of the story consist of the 1854 disappearance at sea of Sir Roger Tichborne, an heir to the Tichborne estate, while adventuring between Chile and Mexico; the subsequent reappearance in 1866 of a man claiming to be the long-lost Tichborne, having spent the previous twelve years in Australia in poverty under an assumed name; and two interminable trials in the early 1870s, one civil and the other criminal, devoted to proving or disproving the Tichborne Claimant's claim to his identity and his inheritance, which ended in disgrace and with the protagonist in prison.

This summary, to be sure, does not do justice to this striking story, replete with comic and even absurd moments that McWilliam narrates with great relish. More importantly, it does not do justice to the significant public aspects of this episode. The Tichborne trials, McWilliam asserts, were the most talked about trials of the whole nineteenth century, and when they ended, they further gave birth to a viable political movement, led by a demagogical lawyer named Edward Vaughan Kenealy. (Kenealy should be remembered, if for no other reason, for Lewis Carroll's delicious discovery that his name was an anagram of "Ah! We dread an ugly knave.") The movement had its own weekly newspaper, public meetings, fund raising, mass petitions, and it even managed to get Kenealy elected as a one-term MP—no mean feats for what at the beginning had been little more than an expression of popular support for the claim of one allegedly wronged man to an aristocratic title.

All of this leads McWilliam to the central puzzle posed by this Victorian episode: the incongruity of the fact that the cause of an uncouth man fighting for recognition as an aristocrat produced one of the greatest outbursts of popular energy in Britain between the collapse of Chartism in 1848 and the emergence of socialism in the 1880s. Occasionally McWilliam offers this case as evidence for "a considerable continuity of radicalism from the early Victorian generation into the 1870s" (232), a period of supposed lull in...