The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain

204 Pages·2020·37.097 MB·English

by  Paul Baines

THE HOUSE OF FORGERY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN
To my parents
The House of Forgery in
Eighteenth-Century Britain
PAUL BAINES
First published 1999 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2019 by Routledge
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Copyright © Paul Baines, 1999
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Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number:
ISBN 13: 978-0-367-19545-8 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-429-20307-7 (ebk)
Contents
Preface vii
Short Titles viii
Introduction 1
1 An Age of Forgery 7
2 Script and Scripture 29
3 Ward, Crook and Company 61
4 ‘Man’s First Disobedience’: Lauder, Johnson, and Literary
Crime 81
5 Johnson, Ossian and the Highland Tour 103
6 The Many Lives of Doctor Dodd 125
7 ‘All of the House of Forgery’: Chatterton, Walpole and
Antiquarian Commerce 151
Epilogue: The Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare 177
Appendix: Tables and Graphs 187
Index 191
V
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Preface
The research for this book was begun while I was a postgraduate student at
the University of Bristol; it was continued during my tenure of a Junior
Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford, and during periods of
study leave and teaching remission at the Department of English Language and
Literature, University of Liverpool. To all those who have made that time
possible I am deeply grateful. The research has been conducted in the British
Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Public
Record Office, the Institute of Historical Research, Bristol Central Library and
the University Libraries of Cambridge, Bristol, Liverpool, Edinburgh and
London. The Libraries of the Universities of Michigan and Cincinnati, and
the Huntington Library, have provided xeroxes of otherwise unavailable
material. I am pleased to acknowledge the generous professional assistance I
have received from members of staff in all these institutions.
Exploratory versions of several chapters have appeared in various
journals, sometimes in longer form: Literature and History, Durham
University Journal, Poetica, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies,
and Angelaki. References to these earlier incarnations are given in the
appropriate chapters; thanks are due to the editors and publishers of the
journals for permission to recast the material here. Further documentation of
the historical material can be found in my doctoral thesis, ‘Authenticity and
Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, University of Bristol, 1988. To the
immensely knowledgeable supervisor of that thesis, Professor Pat Rogers,
now of the University of South Florida, I owe a special debt of gratitude. I
would also like to thank Dr Penny Wilson of the University of Cambridge for
her encouragement of the embryonic project which has slowly led to this
book. Others who have freely given of their time and expertise, sometimes
without noticing it, are Professor John Burrow, Professor Howard Erskine-
Hill, Dr Nick Groom, Professor Brean Hammond, Dr David Hopkins,
Professor Roger Lonsdale and Professor Rosamund McGuinness. Heather
Larmour prepared the statistical appendix. My wife Katy Hooper has advised
me in many professional capacities: rare books librarian, archivist, and copy-
editor; she has also been an unfailing support in the various sloughs of
despond into which a project of this kind is liable to precipitate its author.
vii
Short Titles
The following short titles and abbreviations are used throughout:
Commons Journals: Journals of the House of Commons (in progress, 1804-)
Correspondence of Pope: The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, edited by
George Sherbum, 5 vols (Oxford, 1956)
English Reports: The English Reports, 176 vols (1900-1930)
Johnsonian Miscellanies: Johnsonian Miscellanies, edited by George
Birkbeck Hill, 2 vols (Oxford, 1897)
Letters of Johnson: The Letters of Samuel Johnson, with Mrs. Thrale’s
Genuine Letters to him, edited by R. W. Chapman, 3 vols (Oxford,
1952)
Life of Johnson: James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, edited by
George Birkbeck Hill, revised by L. F. Powell, 6 vols (1934-1951)
Lives of the English Poets: Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets,
edited by George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols (Oxford, 1905)
Lords Journals: Journals of the House of Lords (in progress, 1767-)
Nichols, Anecdotes: John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth
Century, 9 vols (1812-1815)
Nichols, Illustrations: John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of
the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols (1817-1858)
OBSP: The Proceedings on the King’s Commission of the Peace, Oyer and
Terminer, and Gaol-Delivery of Newgate, Held for the City of London
and county of Middlesex at Justice-hall, in the Old Bailey, published eight
times a year after each sessions, and referenced in this book by date.
OED: The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 20 vols (Oxford, 1989)
Twickenham Edition: The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander
Pope, general editor John Butt, 11 vols (1939-1969)
Walpole’s Correspondence: The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s
Correspondence, edited by W. S. Lewis and others, 48 vols (New
Haven, 1937-1983)
In notes and references, place of publication is London unless otherwise
stated.
viii
Introduction
In 1990 the British Museum mounted an exhibition called Fake? The Art of
Deception, which drew together relevant objects from a huge range of artistic
and ethnological collections - sculptures, paintings, enamels, metalwork;
manuscripts, printed books, newspapers; brand-name imitations, medieval
relics, political propaganda and tourist spuriosa - ‘the material evidence of the
myriad deceptions practised by men upon their fellows over three millennia’,
as the editor of the accompanying book put it.1 Visitors to the exhibition were
swamped by the sheer proliferation of objects; from this plethoric evidence of
misdemeanour, one might have concluded that forgery was a constant feature
across history, that the forger has always been with us. All human cultures
seemed in this arrangement to be permeated by a spirit of fraudulence.
On the other hand, we can tell the genuine from the false; we know what a
forgery is, and once detected, it can be utilized as a kind of unconscious index
to the cultural needs and perceptual grammars of its true period and place of
origin.2 This reassuring detective alchemy renders the subversive forgery a
festive diversion; the world is only tilted, not turned upside down, and the act
of confessional piety by which the museum reviews its errors becomes a
testimony to improved skills. In general, narratives of forgery customarily
adopt a comic tone and manner towards the perpetrators and their dupes, as if
in confirmation of the view that this constant cultural threat is always
inevitably defeated; there is even a children’s book on the subject.3
A more powerful assertion of that essential position is to be found in
Anthony Grafton’s Forgers and Critics (1990). Grafton’s theme is forgeries
and their detection in the field of classical humanistic scholarship and his main
purpose is to discover an archetypal pattern to which both forgeries and the
techniques which lead to their discovery conform. The paradigm does not
shift:
The basic techniques and topoi by which forgers evoke belief, the basic
willingness of many readers and even experts to be deceived, and the basic
fact that apparently firm documents are often deeply dubious have
remained unchanged. So has the rhythm by which criticism develops,
demand-driven, as new ways of forging require new methods of detection.4
But actually it does not develop much, in Grafton’s own account, since the
scholars he cites are discovered to use the same basic techniques as their
forbears. The chronology ranges from the 4th century B.C. up to 1950, but
though there are minor modifications to the uniformity of the diagram, these
are subjugated to an endless dialectical regression by which each seemingly
individual case of forgery or detection turns out to resemble some previous
deployment of technique. Though the listing is based in history, the actual
effect of the argument is to dissolve the conditions in which forgeries were
perpetrated and discovered into a transhistorical blur. Forgery conforms to a
recurrent pattern across the centuries, independent of any cultural or linguistic