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Laying the Machinery of Detection Bare: The History of Literary Forgery, 1760-1930
🕑 Added 2025-07-26 20:11:54 +0000 UTCGreetings, welcome back. Here is a new episode, of a new chapter, or era of this show. It's been a long time, but if you've been following me sporadically on twitter, you know I've been still working over the past couple of years a lot of in depth research on forgery. It's taken us a while to get back together, but Ed and I are initiating version 2.0 of pseudcast, with an introduction to a new series, a five part episode covering five great literary forgers from 1760-1930.
- James Macpherson - Scottish forger of Highland ballads of the mythical bard Ossian published between 1760-1763
- Thomas Chatterton - Tragic fabricator of Medieval Bristol poetry who influenced the Romantics and killed himself at a young age in 1770.
- William Henry Ireland - Pathetic (though clever) young figure who forged Shakespeare autograph manuscript material that was widely ridiculed in the press during the 1790s
- John Payne Collier - Prolific, and brilliant scholar-forger who corrupted the historical record on a large scale during the Victorian era, 1830-1883.
- Thomas J. Wise - A shrewd, and calculating commercial forger and rare book collector, who manufactured forgeries of 19th century authors, en masse. Producing a corpus of entire print runs of entire fake editions of around one hundred different works.
This series has grown out of the last episodes, which was on Voynich, and since then I've continued on, doing much wider reading and research on the topic and critical theory of forgery. How are forgeries detected? What is a forgery? What makes something a fake? What role does forgery play in the creation of historical understanding? How widespread is forgery? I've searched out, and settled on these five above figures as offering exemplary case studies that will allow us to discuss these questions in depth.
Parapolitical discourse these days feels a bit moribund. It's not a completely satisfying method to discovering the ways small groups of individuals can work across time to shape our institutions and ideas. And so this episode is the result of more sustained sociological and bibliographic approach to a transhistorical conspiracy theory--of forgers working together across time to falsify and direct historical consciousness. We'll do a careful comparison of the different techniques and motivations of forgery, and see how, underneath motives of financial gain or vanity, forgery is usually compelled by contemporary problems in textual criticism and histography.
The first three parts will revolve around the era of Samuel Johnson and his cronies. Johnson ran a critical empire, and was the king taste-maker of his time. His era was one of rampant forgery however, and several important critical controversies transpired during his tenure over the successive forgeries of Macpherson and Chatterton. It was then his greatest of his critical followers, the Irish lawyer Edmond Malone, who played the decisive role in exposing the Ireland forgeries of the 1790s. Critical theory during this period was not an isolated field, but had connections to history and politics. The textual criticism of Malone's Shakespeare editions developed in tandem with the historiography of Gibbon and the politics of Burke. Textual criticism, editing, historiography, philology, bibliography, legal history, archival science; these are all closely related subjects. Between Macpherson in 1760 and Ireland in 1795, criticism developed and advanced a great deal, and so we'll not just be studying these forgeries in isolation, but as charting the progress of English historical criticism and scholarship during the age of Johnson. Malone, Thomas Tyrwhitt, Bishop Percy, Horace Walpole, Thomas Warton, Boswell, Isaac Reed, George Steevens, Gibbon, Burke, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Hugh Blair, Adam Smith, Walter Scott and others will all figure in the discussion.
John Payne Collier, of the Victorian era, lived in the aftermath of Malone's reign. He was the last of an older style of amateur Antiquarian scholar and forger. At his height, around 1850, he was one of the top public experts on Shakespeare and the history of English theater generally. He introduced hundreds of disputed and fabricated pieces of data into the historical record, and he was only ousted through several successive controversies that drew in the expertise of an increasingly professionalized corps of institutional experts. Collier is a sympathetic figure, who, through his own endless scholarly industry, dominated popular scholarship of English literary history in the middle of the 19th century. He worked, for limited financial reward, outside the scholarly establishment that was taking shape in institutions like the British Museum Library and Public Records Office. He dined with Dickens and for a time owned Shakespeare's birthplace house. He's a fascinating figure, and one hard not to admire. The episode focusing on him will also cover the development during his time of Shakespeare scholarship, post-Malone (ha), highlighting his contemporaries like Joseph Hunter, James Orchard Halliwell, Alexander Dyce, and others. Collier's dealings with the growing and professionalizing Government archival bureaucracy will also get some attention, as Collier often implanted his creations into official repositories of the public records. More broadly we'll look at the culture of Victorian letters, and the many colorful characters that populated its stage.
The final episode will bring us up until the more modern period of criticism. Thomas J. Wise was a smart and shrewd business man, who shaped the tastes of contemporary collectors from 1880 on. By day he was a wholesaler of essential oils, and in true pseudcast fashion, this will take us into the realm of commodity brokerage, as Wise was not a corner store pharmacist, but a very successful broker whose business concerns developed an international scope. He brought that same business acumen to the social world of contemporary book collecting. He established himself as an expert in the bibliographies of modern authors like Swinburne, and Browning. He printed his own lavish bibliographic reference works on this authors, illustrated by William Morris and Walter Crane. His own collection, the Ashley Library (named for the street he lived on), is now in the British Museum, and is notable for the perfection of its copies and its bibliographic completion. He acted as the book buying agent for wealthy American collectors from the worlds of finance and business. Following John Payne Collier, it may be seen that forgers retreated from areas of literature that had become the more exclusive province of professional experts. Anglo-Saxon and older English literature, before the Restoration, became increasingly encased in the archives. But the dialectic of forgery and criticism that drove the development of medieval, Tudor, and Stuart literature, in its own way, begins over anew as the 19th century poets themselves begin to be collected and studied. Thomas Wise though embodies a new kind of commercial ethos, a new type, that supplants and transforms the older species of antiquarian.
The episode being posted now, offers an overview of some of the material to be covered, and outlines the overall structure that this series will take. We'll go chronologically through these examples, and discuss them in a comparative way, relating them to a meta-history of literary forgery as a genre of English criticism. Beyond these main figures however, we'll also touch on many other lesser lights of forgery, like Constantine Simonides, the eccentric Greek forger of New Testament papyrus. There'll be many other weird and colorful characters who will also show up, like Howard Staunton, the world chess grandmaster who turned to exposing Shakespeare forgeries. Or Henry Cole, the designed of the 1850 Great Exhibition, who began his very successful career as a liberal reformer and political favorite of Prince Albert as an archivist and reformer of the Public Records bureaucracy. The historical development of Shakespeare biography and scholarship will form an important thread of the story as well, and we'll have opportunity to talk about authorship theories in relation to the progression of biographical scholarship.
Version 2.0 of the show will attempt to draw on the much deeper research Ed and I have done into criticism, histography, legal history, and sociology, in order to advance our methods. And I think the ideas we'll be discussing will be broadly useful to other areas of study into deep history, or parapolitics, or whatever you want to call it. But our hope is to raise the standard of research further, to increase the level detail, and explore new more sophisticated structures for arranging so much historical information into a coherent and entertaining form. Beyond everything discussed above, I think these are also just entertaining stories. Our five subject figures are all endlessly fascinating characters in their own right, who have each inspired a lot of speculation and argument. The Freemasons show up. There's a Highland clan of Scottish forgers taking over East India Company control over India using secret messages written in Gaelic. By the end, with Thomas J. Wise, we'll find that we've circled back to the world of Wilfred Voynich, and be able to see things in a totally new light.
In the next month the first episode proper will come out, dealing with James Macpherson, and we'll aim for a weekly release of the subsequent parts. After that we have several other topics to cover, and I think the history of Freemasonry will be one of them, as I've looked in a lot more detail on the subject as well. Ed also wants to do one on Bureaucracy and Law generally, as we've both been looking a lot into those topics, reading Weber and Marx. That episode will involve going back into the 17th century and investigating the entire historical development of the English administration, including the archival offices, as well as record keeping across the government from the time of the Norman Conquest down into the 19th century. But these episodes will come later. I think the current one, on forgery, will be a very interesting series to listen to, and I hope it satisfies everyone tuning in. It's the fruit of a lot of deep reading, and I think that will be apparent as we go on, and people will appreciate the level of detail and analysis that we've achieved.
Full notes and a bibliography for each part will be provided. But if you want an accessible, general introduction to theoretical aspects of literary forgery, I recommend Anthony Grafton's Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. That may be a good book to start with if you'd like to prepare to follow along with these episodes.
Comments
MalachiConstant
What about the book of mormón and the pittsburgh crew
Lojban Chauvinist
It's wonderful to have you back!
Mr.E (Yahya)
So great to be back gentlemen.
