Forgers and Fiction: How Forgery Developed the Novel, 1846-79
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Forgers and Fiction: How Forgery Developed the Novel, 1846-79 Paul Ellis University College London Doctor of Philosophy UMI Number: U602586 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U602586 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 2 Abstract This thesis argues that real-life forgery cases significantly shaped the form of Victorian fiction. Forgeries of bills of exchange, wills, parish registers or other documents were depicted in at least one hundred novels between 1846 and 1879. Many of these portrayals were inspired by celebrated real-life forgery cases. Forgeries are fictions, and Victorian fiction’s representations of forgery were often self- reflexive. Chapter one establishes the historical, legal and literary contexts for forgery in the Victorian period. Chapter two demonstrates how real-life forgers prompted Victorian fiction to explore its ambivalences about various conceptions of realist representation. Chapter three shows how real-life forgers enabled Victorian fiction to develop the genre of sensationalism. Chapter four investigates how real-life forgers influenced fiction’s questioning of its epistemological status in Victorian culture. The final chapter argues that the Tichbome Claimant case of 1872-74 was a forgery case in all but name, and that it took representations of forgery in fiction away from issues of writing (and into those of the body); in consequence, forgery’s importance to the Victorian novel decreased. The thesis considers the forgery cases of the Rev. Dr. William Bailey, John Sadleir, Henry Savery, Thomas Powell, Thomas Provis, Lady Ricketts, William Roupell, the Tichbome Claimant and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. At least one novel by each of the following authors is discussed in some detail: Bulwer-Lytton, Collins, Dickens, Gaskell, Richard Harris, G. P. R. James, John Lang, Le Fanu, Reade, Emma Robinson, Thackeray, Trollope and Wood. The thesis concludes that, by the mid-1850s, representations of forgery began to exhibit Victorian fiction’s confidence in its form rather than its anxiety about it; and that the reasons for this development related not only to the cultural production and consumption of Victorian fiction between 1846 and 1879, but also to the nature of the influential real-life forgery cases themselves. 4 Contents Preface 6 Acknowledgements 7 1. Introduction 9 1.1 Forgery in Victorian Fiction 9 1.2 Forgery, Legal Discourse, and the Novel 25 1.3 Literary Inspiration: the Legacy of Romanticism 55 1.4 Summary 64 2. Forgers and Realisms 79 2.1 Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, Lucretia, and the Forgeries of Mimesis 81 2.2 The Rev. Dr. William Bailey andThe Forgery'. Forged Bills and Forged Words 96 2.3 Bailey, Ruth, and the Reality of Deceit 114 2.4 Thomas Powell andDavid Copperfleld : Forging Time 121 2.5 Powell, Philip , and Misreadings 129 2.6 Conclusion 140 3. Forgers and Sensationalisms 152 3.1 Thomas Provis andGreat Expectations'. Forging Gothic 154 3.2 Lady Ricketts andOrley Farm'. Equivocating Over Sensationalism’s Eroticism 169 3.3 Fragments of Forgers: Wylder’s Hand's Supematuralising of 5 Sensationalism 181 3.4 The Knock-On Effect of Real-Life Forgery: Madeleine Graham's Rewriting of Madeleine Smith as a Forger 190 3.5 Conclusion 204 4. Forgers, Novels, and Discourses 217 4.1 Henry Savery, The Forger’s Wife , and the English Romance: Forging Discourse 223 4.2 Provis, The Woman in White , and the Insignificance of Discursive Illegitimacy 241 4.3 John Sadleir,Little Dorrit, andThe Way We Live Now : Merdle, Melmotte, and Mythologies of Forging Discourse 248 4.4 William Roupell andMayfair to Millbank : Is There an Issue Here? 264 4.5 Conclusion 273 5. Conclusion: the Tichborne Forger and the Tichborne Novels 284 5.1 How the Tichbome Trials Amplified Forgery for Victorian Fiction 287 5.2 The Wandering Heir , Is He Popenjoy?, andWithin the Maze : New Directions for Real-life Forgery 292 5.3 Conclusion 301 Works Cited 309 6 Preface Anyone with even a casual knowledge of Collins, Dickens and Trollope can probably recall several fictional forgers: Sir Percival Glyde, Uriah Heep, Mr. Merdle, Lady Mason, and perhaps Melmotte. Other Victorian fictional forgers might be less easy to name, such as Dick Bradshaw (in Gaskell’sRuth), Gabriel Varney (in Bulwer- Lytton’s Lucretia; or, The Children o f Night), Dr. George Brand Firmin (in Thackeray’s The Adventures o f Philip), or Captain Stanley Lake (in Le Fanu’s Wylder's Hand). A trawl of sensation fiction - the novels of Ellen Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, for instance - yields more examples. Most fictional forgers lay buried, however, in dusty volumes in the British Library or the Bodleian. Though well suited to sensation fiction (largely by their secretive and white- collar criminality), fictional forgers may be found in any genre. The subject matter of Victorian fiction is essentially Victorian society.1 And fictional forgers are society J criminals, illegally manipulating the documentation of life processes or the intricate workings of finance and commerce. Outwardly respectable, they personify Victorian society’s doubts about the trustworthiness of its complex and growing systems of records and paper credit. Victorian newspapers regularly impressed upon their readers the notion that forgery was a real and ever-present threat to business and home. Fictional forgers were firmly rooted in Victorian reality. So who were the real-life forgers who inspired Victorian authors to introduce fictional forgers into their novels? How exactly did Victorian fiction engage with these causes celebresl To which literary purposes did Victorian fiction put real-life forgery and why? How, and to what extent, did real-life forgers determine the linguistic fabric of literary texts? These are the kinds of questions I set out to explore 7 in my thesis. Some of them call for historical scholarship; others demand a theoretical perspective that has faith in the self-reflexivity of novels. I consequently draw on approaches from both ends of the critical spectrum (and view this endeavour less as a dark art than simply as an effective way of illuminating my topic). To investigate how real-life forgery developed the Victorian novel is to travel on two interconnected routes: style (chiefly, realisms and sensationalisms) and epistemology (how fiction relates, as a source of knowledge, to the world it represents). The journey is through Victorian forgery’s cultural hinterland, parts of which - the crises of criminality and credit exchange in the 1840s, for example - can easily be anticipated. Much of the terrain, however, was annexed to the concept of forgery by Victorian fiction itself. A representation of forgery in a Victorian novel might be located in any number of surprising socio-political contexts: changes in conceptions of time in the 1840s, the rhetorical positioning of the fallen woman in the early 1850s, or parliamentary politics around the time of the 1867 Reform Act. This is a landscape peopled by outlaws or outsiders: impostors, illegitimate offspring, financial swindlers, and poisoners. All committhe crime of writing: forgery: a criminalized version of the sign system that constitutes Victorian fiction’s own being. How could Victorian fiction fail to be fascinated by forgery? Real-life forgery was Victorian fiction’s illegitimate kin, a dark double that could disclose much about Victorian fiction’s own identities. Acknowledgements I should like to thank the following people: my supervisors at University College London, Professor John Sutherland and Dr. Charlotte Mitchell, whose guidance and advice have been invaluable; my partner, Samantha Peters, for her unstinting support and keen interest in Victorian fiction; all those who taught me on the Victorian Studies M.A. course at Birkbeck College, for providing me with a sure stepping stone to Ph.D. research in Victorian literature; Professor Karl Miller, for over thirteen years of encouragement in my various endeavours; my past and present pupils at University College School, whose enthusiasm for English has continually reinforced my own; my colleagues there, without whose intellectual companionship I would be significantly poorer; the Principal and Fellows of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, for offering me a Schoolteacher Fellowship between April and August 2003; and the Headmaster of University College School, Mr. Kenneth Durham, for granting me sabbatical leave to take up this award. I am also very grateful to the AHRB for funding my research. Finally, I should like to thank the library staff at the following institutions: Birkbeck College Library; the Bodleian Library; the British Library at Colindale and St. Pancras; Hertfordshire Archives and Records Office, Hertford; the Maughan Library, King’s College, London; St. Hugh’s College Library, Oxford; University College London Library; the University of London Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library; the University of London Library, Senate House. 9 1. Introduction 1.1 Forgery in Victorian Fiction Of all crimes, forgery is the one most obviously connected to the invention, distribution and reception of fiction. For the Victorian novel, forgery is almost invariably about writing (passing off one person’s script or signature as another’s), very occasionally about counterfeiting (the illegal craft of creating false currency), sometimes about putting a forged bill or banknote into circulation (the felony of uttering), and nearly always about credibility (whether the forgery will be accepted as the genuine). Forgeries are fictions and, more problematically, vice versa.