June 6, 1918 
Land & Water 
15 
Life and Letters Qj J. C Squire 
Literary Hoaxes 
LAST week the Times printed some atrociously silly 
verses signed "Rudyard Kipling." Next morning 
, it had to apologise to Mr. Kipling and its readers. 
^Somebody, anxious apparently to hit both the 
• Times and Mr. Kipling with one stone, had hoaxed 
it. His ingenious plan is, I believe, a new one. But it has 
obvious limitations. Few papers would print such thorough 
rubbish without inquiry, and the sending of a proof would 
frustrate any such fraud. Moreover, where authors are 
alive it can only take a day or two for an imposture to be 
exposed. The forger who wants a nm for his money must 
either invent non-existent authors or ascribe his forgeries 
to the dead. 
****** 
Such frauds have been known in many ages, in many 
departments of literature, and for many motives. Late 
Greeks perpetrated them for modern scholars to detect. 
A French nobleman (de Surville), a hundred years ago, 
invented a mediteval ancestress and wrote a large body of 
poetry which he ascribed to her. In Germany the prolonged 
discussion about the origins of printing has been sprinkled 
all over with .forgeries by archivists and genealogists, the 
fellow-townsmen of Gutenberg and the would-be descendants 
of Fiist. We in England had a thick crop between 1760 
and i860. First came Chatterton's production, while still at 
an age which should be unfamiliar with guile, of ancient 
manuscripts found in a muniment room at Bristol. Then 
came Macpherson's Ossian, and later two important series of 
Shakespeare forgeries. Payne Collier's entries in registers 
and marginal annotations in old books were the work of a 
sound sciiolar, who, presumably, found that the career of a 
Shakespearian specialist did not in the ordinary way produce 
enough for him in the way of excitement. He wanted to 
make a sensation and his mark by large discoveries ; so he 
first manufactured the discoveries and then found them. 
The other forger, William Henry Ireland, was at once far less 
eminent as a scholar and far more enterprising as a forger. 
He was a bookseller's son. When seventeen he went to 
Stratford with his father. Meeting a man there who had 
done a little in the way of a Shakespeare forgery, and seeing 
that I his poor old father was tremendously interested, he 
argued that supply ought to meet demand. He began at 
once faking leases, letters, contracts, and (charming touch) 
a love-letter to Anne Hathaway, with a lock of hair inside 
— Mary Fitton, at that time, not having been heard of. His 
father was delighted; the learned world was curious; so, 
with the assistance of an ancestor to whom Shakespeare had 
left his MSS., he next found a play "Vortigem," the first of 
a new historical seoes, covering those kings who are ignored 
in the plays we have. Sheridan actually produced this 
drama at Drury Lane. The house Vas crowded ; but 
Ireland's powers of composition did not equal his gift for 
archaic handwriting and the simulation of aged ink and 
paper, and "Vortigem" went down as a roaring farce. At 
this stage the young man was nineteen, and he got no further 
He lived until 1835, when he died in great poverty — an 
example to youth of the results of divagation from the nar- 
row path in general and of literary forgery in particular. 
The example might be more salutary were it not for the 
equally indisputable facts, which an honest man must not 
suppress, that Payne Collier died at the age of ninety-four 
in receipt of a Civil List Pension and that Ossian Macpherson 
was buried in Westminster Abbey. 
■\ * * * * * 
These frauds were mostly done for selfish motives. There 
is, however, one kind of literary fraud which may be regarded 
as performing a valuable function. That is the imposture 
which is intended to take in, and expose, impostors. The 
world is full of persons who pretend to authority on subjects 
they know nothing about, and others who vitiate public 
taste by puffing rubbish which they consider "advanced." 
Any hoax which may make these people look fools the 
moralist may excuse, the serious student must welcome, and 
the humorist will thoroughly enjoy. I may illustrate what 
I mean by one or two examples, and may be pardoned for 
drawing on my personal experience. About eight years ago 
we were being flooded with new and strange philosophers, 
mostly from Germany, who were being acclaimed and adver- 
tised by many who did not understand and some who did not 
even read them. I therefore took the liberty of inventing 
another. I gave in a contemporary an account of his philo- 
sophy which was partly composed of sentiments taken out 
of Mr. Bottomley's weekly organ and partly of an utterly 
nonsensical mixture of mathematical formulse and physio- 
logical speculation. Nevertheless, the name of Wiertz was 
good enough, and I was deluged with letters both from 
supporters of the philosopher and from those who feared that 
his influence was dangerous. Shortly afterwards — though 
here the game was very easy — I butted into the Baconian 
controversy, then being conducted with great vigour by the 
late Sir Edwih Durning-Lawrence. That amiable man, it 
will be remembered, did his best to popularise Bacon by a 
wholesale circulation of penny pamphlets. He called in the 
evidence of the editor of the Tailor and Cutter to show that 
the portrait in the first folio had two left sleeves, thus proving, 
in some mysterious way, that Shakespeare's arms were really 
haunches of bacon ; and he clinched his case by finding 
that three successive lives in Shakespeare began with the 
letters "P," "I," and "G," the bearing of which on Lord 
Venilam.'s authorship is obvious. Sir Edwin used to quote 
freely from Elizabethan writers. Anxious to demonstrate 
that he had no sense of the value of evidence and that his 
metfiods were reckless, I invented a quite conclusive quota- 
•tion from Greene, and sent it to a paper over the signature 
"P. O. R. Ker," in which anybody but this kind of enthusiast 
might have smelt a rat, not to say a pig. He tumbled straight 
in. He had an immense library, including, no doubt, all 
Greene's works. Here was an utterly crushing testimony. 
But did he trouble to verify the quotation ? Not he. He 
wrote to the paper at once, saying that the fact that the 
' Shakespearians had ignored Mr. Ker's quotation demon- 
strated their incorrigible prejudice. My subsequent letter 
of explanation was not printed, the editor wishing to spare 
Sir Edwin's feelings. Still, it would have made no difference. 
Bacon may be cured, but no one has ever cured a Baconian. 
****** 
There has just been perpetrated in America a salutary 
hoax to the inventors of which we must take off our hats. 
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