Fake It

Fictions of Forgery

Mark Osteen

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813946283
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How many layers of artifice can one artwork contain? How does forgery unsettle our notions of originality and creativity? Looking at both the literary and art worlds, Fake It investigates a set of fictional forgeries and hoaxes alongside their real-life inspirations and parallels. Mark Osteen shows how any forgery or hoax is only as good as its authenticating story—and demonstrates how forgeries foster fresh authorial identities while being deeply intertextual and frequently quite original.

From fakes of the late eighteenth century, such as Thomas Chatterton's Rowley poems and the notorious "Shakespearean" documents fabricated by William-Henry Ireland, to hoaxes of the modern period, such as Clifford Irving's fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, the infamous Ern Malley forgeries, and the audacious authorial masquerades of Percival Everett, Osteen lays bare provocative truths about the conflicts between aesthetic and economic value. In doing so he illuminates the process of artistic creation, which emerges as collaborative and imitative rather than individual and inspired, revealing that authorship is, to some degree, always forged.

Part I

Fake Lit

Mockeries

Yet sit and see / Minding true things by what their mockeries be.

—The Chorus, in Shakespeare, Henry V

1

Thomas Chatterton’s Ghosts

This is my formaunce which I now have wrytte

The best performaunce of my little Wytte.

—Thomas Chatterton, “To John Ladgate”

The young man is smiling. Facing us, he sprawls, his head lolling at the edge of the small bed. His tousled red hair on the left of the painting nearly matches the crimson corduroy coat tossed over a chair in the far right. Beside the boy’s head rests an open chest filled with papers; scraps litter the floor nearby. His light gray blouse, unbuttoned to his waist, opens to allow his left hand to lie upon his breast; his right hand, nearly lost in shadows, clutches rumpled paper as its knuckles touch the floor. Near that hand, in the center of the frame, an empty vial seems poised to roll. His violet breeches end below the knees, where pale yellow stockings stretch down to at least one black shoe. At the foot of the bed a dark, round table holds more stray paper and a doused candle. Wisps of smoke, perhaps symbolizing the boy’s spirit, waft upward from the candle. A half-open window bathes him in dawn’s misty light, as it does the spindly rose plant sitting on the sill. In the distance we see a church steeple, perhaps tolling its morning bells (fig. 1). But the boy hears nothing: he is dead. It is no accident that the painting resembles a Pietà, for this young man has been sacrificed for art. And yet the satisfied smile suggests consummation: the morning light transfigures him, as if he will soon rise and begin to write.

The painting I’ve described, Henry Wallis’s Chatterton (1856), does not depict the real Thomas Chatterton, a poetic prodigy and literary forger who died in 1770 at the age of seventeen, but twenty-seven-year-old poet/novelist George Meredith. This Chatterton—so serenely beautiful in death—is at least as famous as the real-life author who killed himself by ingesting a tincture of arsenic and opium. Indeed, as Ivan Phillips has pointed out, Chatterton’s “tragic corpse has become his most popular work of art” (25). Who was the real Chatterton? It is difficult to say, for countless Chattertons have existed over the two and a half centuries since his demise. Alive, he was a myriad-minded boy whose métier was metamorphoses as he disguised himself with a host of pseudonyms. One of them was that of Thomas Rowley, a fictional fifteenth-century monk and scholar to whom Chatterton attributed dozens of poems and historical documents that he himself had created. There were others: Dunhelmus Bristoliensus, a historian of Bristol, his hometown; Probus, a political satirist; a medieval scholar named Turgotus; a “fallen” woman called Maria Friendless; his own close friend, John Baker; a “sad dog” dubbed Harry Wildfire. As with William-Henry Ireland, who modeled himself after Chatterton two decades later, forgeries and false names brought a new self into being: Thomas Chatterton, author. As John Williams aptly notes, Chatterton and other literary fakers of the period adopted “forgery as a strategy forced upon them by their determination to assert their true identities” (37)—or to discover them.

Fig. 1. George Meredith impersonates the young forger in Henry Wallis’s Chatterton (1856). Oil on canvas, 62.2 × 93.3 cm. (Tate Gallery, London © Tate)

I have begun with Chatterton’s death. But he did not stay dead: he became undead, resurrected by numerous writers who followed him, each one conjuring a Chatterton who served the later author’s needs. By 1856 Chatterton had begat numerous avatars: the prototype of tragic, misunderstood genius; a warning about how debauchery strangles talent; a Romantic bard slain by an unfeeling literary world; the greatest British poet since Shakespeare. If during his short life he was a ghostwriter—the author of friends’ love poems, the invisible creator of Rowley and his patron, William Canynge—in his afterlife he has become a ghost haunting English literature, influencing and inhabiting those who study his works, an “echo chamber, an imaginary location in which identities merge and voices scramble” (I. Phillips 24). Chatterton’s procedures, productions, and motives establish the paradigms for the forgeries discussed herein: the need for a convincing narrative of provenance; the way that forgeries engender further fictions; their intertextual nature; the dialectic between exposure and erasure; forgery’s playful and contested spirit; the persistence of belief against evidence; the kinship between forgery and parental legitimacy; their propensity to lay bare the shaky foundations of artistic culture.

Using Wallis’s painting as the point of departure, I investigate two of Chatterton’s hauntings: the triangular visitations upon Meredith, his wife Mary Ellen, and Wallis, who began an adulterous affair with Mary Ellen not long after the Chatterton painting was completed; and that of contemporary author Peter Ackroyd, whose novel Chatterton (1987) playfully portrays Chatterton’s legacy by means of a forged painting, a plagiarizing novelist, and a dramatization of Chatterton’s final hours. Before introducing these specters, however, we must scrutinize the life and works of this prodigious writer and tease out patterns in his astonishingly varied corpus. Doing so will enable us to trace the intertextual threads that stitch together the fabric of influence and the figures of inhabitation.

A “Boy of Learning and a Bard of Tropes”

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

—P. B. Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

Hands

Young Thomas was far from the only forger of his time. As several scholars have shown, eighteenth-century England was the “defining period for modern concepts of fraud” (Baines, House 2). Definitions of fraud are inextricably connected to concepts of value, which underwent a “profound transformation” during the eighteenth century (Thompson 1). Forgery became a threat in the financial realm when economic theory and practice abandoned metallism, in which value was thought to reside in the weight of bullion, in favor of cartalism, whereby money was understood as a social fiction founded on faith (Baines, House 12). With the emergence of a credit economy certified by handwriting instead of by gold and handshakes, signing a false name to a letter of credit or check became a serious offense. Forgeries undermine what Georg Simmel calls a “supra-theoretical” belief in the economic system and the nation that guarantees it (179); hence, forgery became a capital crime. This crisis of credit went hand in hand with a revolution in concepts of identity. As historian J. G. A. Pocock has argued, “Once property was seen to have symbolic value, expressed in coin or credit, the foundations of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best consensual: the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows” (464). The emergence of a credit economy cemented the idea of identity as a phenomenon confirmed by a signature. Because “the self circulated as a name on a document” (Baines, House 14), a forgery assailed the social contract itself.

In an age before fingerprinting, the hand, manifest in a signature, was the essential synecdoche of identity, linking intention and action, credit and remittance. A signature at once lengthens and limits the interval allowed for payment. In one sense, the time of signing, the time of reading, and the time of payment fuse because a signature, as I note in the prologue, presumes that the person signing and the person paying are identical, despite the passage of time. However, as Simmel points out, credit transactions open up “a distance whose poles are held together by trust” (480). Like all fictions, a signed document creates an alternate world in which the real person is replaced by a representation that depends on the suspension of disbelief. In other words, it is a narrative, and a forgery substitutes a false story for a factual one. Further, because in signing her name a person also becomes a witness, a cleavage occurs between the signer and the one who verifies the signature. That is, even as it stands for the signer, the signature proves that the payer is not the same as the signer, for if she were, she wouldn’t need a signature. A forgery both exposes and fills this temporal and ontological gap, thereby becoming a theft not just of one identity but of the very guarantee of stable identity that enables an economy, and hence a society, to function. The ramifications of these changes for literature seem obvious: the author’s name is, in effect, a signature pledging that the name on the manuscript (and, by extension, book) truthfully represents the hand of the person to whom it is ascribed. As Nick Groom points out, the eighteenth century was “obsessed with authenticity [and that fact] . . . created opportunities for experimental literature, some of which was called forgery” (Shadow 71).

One of these experiments was the disreputable new genre called the English novel. Many early novels came clothed in the garb of history or (auto)biography (Haywood, Making 18). Defoe’s fictions, for example, posed as factual stories, and novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) used the “shaggy-dog tale of the found parchment” as authentication (Russett, Fictions 24). Like some novels (and human impostors), a forgery is a text that lies about its origins. Hence, as Russett has shown, the notion of forgery became the “conceptual measure against which the epistemological experiment of the novel could be understood” (14). But the measurement was inexact for, Radnóti notes, the fact that a story is untrue may be either a literary device or “an act of fraud” or “both of these simultaneously” (186). The line between fiction and fraud was blurry and permeable. Chatterton’s Rowley documents exploited these inconsistencies and incoherencies (Haywood, Making 72; Russett, Fictions 17). Groom is thus right to ask, “Were they really forgeries? Or were they a new form of fiction?” (Introduction 3). Like all forgeries, they were acts of cultural criticism—of the patronage system, of the class system, of the current state of literary scholarship. Thus, comments Susan Stewart, “we see the emergence of imitations, forgeries, and scholarship in a complex interrelation. Imitation arises as a scandal, forgery as a style of genius, scholarship as a cure” (108). Chatterton was skilled in all three modes.

Reliques

Within the Garret’s spacious dome

There lies a well stor’d wealthy room.

—Chatterton, “Sly Dick” (composed at age 12)

Thomas Chatterton died before Thomas Chatterton was born: young Tom was a posthumous child, for his father, also named Thomas, passed away three months before November 20, 1752, when his namesake was born. A chorister and writing master, Thomas Senior was deemed eccentric (Kaplan 39). His son, considered dull by teachers, nevertheless manifested from an early age what his doting mother, Sarah, called a “thurst for preheminence” (Croft 143). Encouraged by her and by his older sister, Mary, Tom entertained grandiose notions of his destiny. At eight he became a charity pupil at the Colston’s Hospital School, where students’ blue robes and orange stockings were capped with priest-like tonsured heads, a uniform that would “abet the invention” of Rowley (S. Stewart 115). In July 1767 fourteen-year-old Tom was indentured as a clerk to the lawyer John Lambert. Although the prospects of future greatness seem to have dimmed, Mary reports that he had only a couple of hours of legal business to complete each day, leaving him largely free to “pursue his genius” (Croft 145).

Employed at St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Thomas Senior had explored its muniments room, finding scraps of ancient parchments to use as book covers. Young Tom was fascinated by these materials and later claimed that he had found a trove of papers in a large chest in that room, most of them written by Thomas Rowley, a “secular priest” who lived in mid-fifteenth-century Bristol under the patronage of William Canynge (1399–1474), an actual person who served five terms as Bristol’s mayor. Chatterton composed the earliest Rowley works in the summer of 1768. The first to see print was “Bridge Narrative,” an imagined account of the construction of the old Bristol bridge, which the shrewd youth sent to Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal when the new bridge was being dedicated that October.1 Two local antiquarians, the pewterer George Catcott and the surgeon William Barrett, requested more relics. Chatterton quickly produced two long verse narratives (including “The Battle of Hastings II”) and a “vast cargo of antiquarian documents” designed to plug holes in Barrett’s projected history of Bristol (D. Taylor xxxvii). Many of the later Rowleys, as I show below, also targeted specific potential patrons. Hence, like the Ireland and Ern Malley frauds discussed later, Chatterton’s forgeries engendered a symbiotic relationship between perpetrator and dupes.

Chatterton’s output was both prolific and generically promiscuous (I. Phillips 33). The Rowley material includes prose historical documents, lengthy battle verses, dramatic works, journalistic pieces, lyric poems, songs, and ballads as well as drawings and charts. All, of course, were hand-written. The voluminous non-Rowley works include the love poems he ghostwrote for friends, along with the eclogues, dialogues, broadsides, satires, and prose tales to which he devoted most of his ink after mid-1769. For the Rowley works, his major source was Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), along with samples from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Spenser, and others, through which he fashioned a pastiche of Middle English, presenting himself (under various guises) as editor. The pastiches do not bear much scrutiny. For example, although his orthography adds certain letters—usually a final “e” and extra consonants—he was not aware that fifteenth-century readers would have pronounced the vowels differently, nor that when read as Middle English the poems do not scan. Many of Rowley’s poems employ rhyme royal with an alexandrine final line—a form that had not been invented in the fifteenth century. Moreover, the boy’s attempts to age the documents by brushing them with ochre and soot were far from foolproof, as the smudges smeared when wet. Chatterton biographer E. H. W. Meyerstein dismisses these efforts as “childish b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Genuine Articles
• Part I. Fake Lit: Mockeries
• Part II. Fake Art: Masks
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index