A World of Impostures

As anyone who has delved into the history of forgery can testify, the sheer number of examples is positively breathtaking. Forgeries are ubiquitous. Yet it has also been noted, and in fact noted by many eighteenth-century commentators themselves, that the Age of Reason produced an unusually large number of famous fakers: Thomas Chatterton, James Macpherson, George Psalmanazar, William Henry Ireland—to name just four, and just four in England. It is also striking the degree to which period accounts of these forgeries routinely list other cases by way of comparison, many of which have been all but lost to us. A review of the French edition of Psalmanazar’s phony Description of Formosa, for example, published in 1705, compares him to “a false Princess of China” that had come to Paris a few years earlier. Some of her story has been preserved in the memoirs of French Jesuit Louis Le Comte, who had spent considerable time in China and who had been called in to unmask her. He reports that she had been welcomed into the most elite circles of the Parisian aristocracy (and that she continued to play her role even after she had been “exposed”). We would certainly like to know more about her adventures.¹

A century later another East Asian impostor turned up in Bristol known as Princess Caraboo, who claimed to be from the island of “Javasu.” Her story, like Psalmanazar’s, is relatively well documented, and yet upon the publication of the full history of this “female Psalmanazar” in 1817, its author pauses to remind us of other cases such as the fasting woman of Tetbury, Johanna South-cote, and “the famous cheats and disguises of Bampfield More Carew.”² A 1764 review of Psalmanazar’s memoirs lists Elizabeth Canning, “Ashley and the Jew,” and the Cock Lane Ghost.³ Subsequent writers such as William Hazlitt, Vita Sackville-West, and Ernest Hemingway all mention Psalmanazar along with additional cases from their own day.⁴

The realm of literary forgery (including piracy) is even more densely populated, and not simply with famous examples like Chatterton, Macpherson, or William Lauder. Who remembers Richard Rolt, Alexander Innes, John Eccles, or William Douglas, M.D.—all of whom are listed in an aside on literary fraud in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791)?⁵ A full list would be endless, and the proliferation of fakes of every imaginable sort (counterfeits, frauds, impostures, hoaxes, art forgeries, pirated books) is matched only by our seemingly insatiable interest in finding out everything we can about them. Thus the list of books about forgery is also dauntingly lengthy, both at the macro and micro levels, both scholarly and popular, in all languages, fields, and periods. Do we really need another book on (eighteenth-century) forgery?

It is into this minefield that Jack Lynch’s new book, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate, 2008), bravely treads—and succeeds admirably. What is different about the book is the term detection, which is to say the means by which eighteenth-century people actually went about trying to prove the veracity (or lack thereof) of any particular claim. The real focus is not those who did the faking but instead those who argued about it: “How were these cases actually debated and discussed by eighteenth-century inquirers, and what do they tell us about eighteenth-century conceptions of the world?” (vii).

The process of how a forgery could be proved or disproved was indeed undergoing major changes between the time of Psalmanazar (1704) and Ireland (1795), in arenas such as the conception of personal identity and its consistency over time, of the ownership of texts and copyright, of plagiarism and pirating, and of the value and status of various kinds of legal evidence. Rather than organizing the book according to individual examples and how each of them played itself out—a common technique that usually ends up just repeating the stories themselves, entertaining as that might be—Lynch chooses to arrange the material thematically. He is also insistent on citing period material itself rather than later or more theoretical accounts, and along the...