The Fraud

Image source: Penguin Random House

Not all historical fiction cosplays its era, and an exploration of the past need not be a slavish imitation of it.

—Zadie Smith, "On Killing Charles Dickens," The New Yorker, 10 & 17 July, 2023

The danger in writing a historical novel entitled The Fraud is that parallels to present-day political pageants are all too obvious. Fortunately Zadie Smith doesn't belabor the connections, although of course they are unavoidable. Instead, she explores the idea of fraudulence as it relates to multiple characters, on stages both public and private. If you're wondering which character the title refers to, the answer is pretty much all of them.

The inspiration for the novel seems to have been twofold: first, in 2012 Smith came across the case of the Tichborne Claimant, a spectacle that consumed the British public for almost a decade between 1866 and 1874. Roger Tichborne, the 25-year-old heir to the vast Doughty-Tichborne estate, was believed drowned in a shipwreck off South America in 1854, although his body was never found. His mother, Lady Henriette Tichborne, consulted a clairvoyant, who—in the first of many instances of deception in this story—told her that her son was still alive. Lady Tichborne then advertised in newspapers in Britain, and later in Australia, offering a reward for news of her son.

The Dowager Lady Tichborne and Roger Charles Tichborne. Photo credit: The London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company. Image source: State Library, New South Wales

In 1866 an Australian man arrived in England claiming to be Roger Tichborne. Tichborne had been raised in Paris and spoke French fluently; the Claimant could not speak a word. Tichborne had "distinctive tattoos," while the Claimant had none. Tichborne was slender and had a thin face and long nose; the Claimant was corpulent, with a round face and a shorter nose. Most probably the Claimant was really Arthur Orton, a butcher's son from Wapping, a working-class neighborhood about half a mile east of the Tower of London on the north bank of the Thames. Orton had gone to sea, settled in Australia, and there had adopted his father's profession (and gone bankrupt).

The Tichborne Claimant, c. 1872. Photo credit: Maull & Co. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, Australia

Despite the pronounced differences between the Claimant and the man he pretended to be, he won the support of Lady Tichborne as well as many members of the public. The interesting question, then and now, is why so many people would accept such an obviously false story. The mother's refusal to accept her son's death, and her embrace of a surrogate as a means of coping with her grief, perhaps require no explanation. But why would the Claimant get so much public support for his incredible story? In her New Yorker essay Smith writes,

. . .the Claimant’s star witness and stoutest defender turned out to be a Jamaican ex-slave called Andrew Bogle, who had worked for the Tichbornes and insisted that he recognized Sir Roger. Now, one might imagine that the court testimony of a poor black man in 1873 would be met with widespread skepticism, but the British Public—like its cousin, the American People—is full of surprises, and having seen so many working-class defendants mistreated by bourgeois juries, Etonian lawyers, and aristocratic judges, the people were more than ready to support a poor man’s claim to be a rich one. Huge crowds filled the courtroom, eager to see one of their own win, for once. . .Bogle and his butcher became national heroes.

Andrew Bogle, c. 1873. Photo credit: Maull & Co. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London NPG Ax28455

The second inspiration for the novel was Smith's discovery of the forgotten Victorian writer William Harrison Ainsworth and his longtime housekeeper, a woman by the name of Eliza Touchet (pronounced either "touché" or "touch it"). Eliza Touchet and Andrew Bogle, a housekeeper and an ex-slave, became the central characters of The Fraud, and it is largely Eliza's perspective and thoughts that are shared with the reader.

William Harrison Ainsworth and Jack Sheppard

William Harrison Ainsworth by Daniel Maclise, c. 1834. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London NPG 3655

Ainsworth was a Victorian novelist whose books are largely forgotten today. (Although if you've heard of "Dick Turpin's Ride," it's a fictional incident from Ainsworth's 1834 best-seller Rookwood; the real highwayman Dick Turpin never rode overnight from London to York to establish an alibi.) In The Fraud Ainsworth is portrayed as living in Willesden—described in his novel Jack Sheppard as "the most charming and secluded village in the neighbourhood of the metropolis," and Smith's longtime London residence—in a domestic and sexual ménage with his second wife and Eliza. (Smith also imagines that Eliza and Ainsworth's first wife were lovers, a situation that, as Anne Lister's diaries suggest, must have been more common than we generally assume among women in Victorian households.) I don't know whether Ainsworth's longtime affair with Eliza is based on any historical evidence Smith uncovered in her research for the novel, but it does resemble the situation of another Victorian novelist: Charles Dickens.

Dickens lived for many years with his wife Catherine and another woman who took on most of the domestic responsibilities: his wife's sister Georgina. As I wrote in Six Victorian marriages, part 4, "There was speculation, both at the time and since, that Georgina had replaced Catherine in the marital bed as well as in the roles of mother and mistress of the house." Perhaps Smith borrowed and altered some details from Dickens' life when imagining Ainsworth's.

Portrait of Charles Dickens by Samuel Laurence, 1837. Image source: Charles Dickens Museum

In "On Killing Charles Dickens," Smith talks about her reluctance to write a historical novel under Dickens' "long shadow":

My pride rested now on one principle: no Dickens. This meant—at the very least—no orphans, no lengthy Dickensian descriptions, and absolutely no mean women called Mrs. Spitely or cowards called Mr. Fearfaint, or what have you. . .But one of the lessons of writing fiction is that truth is stranger than it. The fact that a real person I was writing about was called Eliza Touchet—and that this same woman was beginning to bloom in my mind, until she dwarfed all the other characters—meant that I now had to face the prospect of my novel strongly featuring a woman whose name even Dickens would have considered a bit too on the nose. Touché, Mrs. Touchet!

Another problem: when writing about the literary world of Victorian England, Dickens is inescapable.

. . .it became clear to me that in order to tell the whole of my true story there was really no way to entirely avoid Mr. Charles Dickens making an actual appearance in my actual pages. For several years, he was a regular dinner guest of Ainsworth’s. He was involved in a debate about the future of Jamaica. (He was on the wrong side of the debate.) Most mind-bogglingly, Doughty Street—where Dickens once lived—is in that corner of South East Bloomsbury which belongs to the Doughty-Tichborne estate. Which meant that Dickens’s former home was a piece of what my Claimant was trying to claim. Dickens was everywhere, like weather.

Ainsworth and Dickens were good friends, at least for a time. At the start of their careers Ainsworth, seven years older than Dickens, was the more popular and successful writer. As Sheldon Goldfarb reports in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Ainsworth, he was responsible for  "introducing the younger novelist to his future biographer ([John] Forster), his first illustrator (George Cruikshank), and his first publisher (John Macrone)." 

One of Ainsworth's most successful titles was a novel about the 18th-century thief Jack Sheppard, who escaped four times from Newgate Prison over the course of a single year. It was published as a monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany beginning in January 1839, just as the final installments of Dickens' Oliver Twist were appearing in the same journal.

"Jack Sheppard in company with Edgeworth Bess, escaping from Clerkenwell Prison." Illustration by George Cruikshank for William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard (Richard Bentley, 1839), v. 2, following p. 164. Image source: HathiTrust.org

Jack Sheppard became so popular that nine different stage adaptations had appeared in London by the end of the year, including a ballad opera composed by G. Herbert Rodwell to lyrics by Ainsworth and others, with a book by John Baldwin Buckstone. The opera included a song that became a popular hit: "Nix My Dolly, Pals, Fake Away," whose lyrics, taken from a song in Ainsworth's Rookwood, were filled with criminal slang:

https://youtu.be/9yn9z-pb12M

Performed by Simon Butteriss, Charli Baptie, Peter Benedict, Daniel Huttlestone, Emily Vine, and Valerie Langfield, accompanied by Stephen Higgins, piano, from Retrospective Opera RO010.

Broadsheet of "Nix my dolly, pals, fake away," by William Harrison Ainsworth. For a translation of the slang, see Rookwood at HathiTrust.org. The line "No knuckler'ss deftly could fake a'ely" is garbled; the original is "No knuckler so deftly could fake a cly." A knuckler is a pickpocket, and to fake a cly is to rob a mark. Image source: National Library of Scotland

As depicted in The Fraud, despite his early success—Jack Sheppard is said to have outsold Oliver Twist—Ainsworth's popularity began a long decline from the 1840s onward, while Dickens became the most famous writer in the world. In the ODNB entry on Ainsworth, Goldfarb quotes John Sutherland's Victorian novelists and publishers (1976): "Many would have backed Ainsworth's talent against Dickens's in 1840. In the 1860s Dickens was earning £10,000 a novel, Ainsworth a hundredth of that sum; Dickens was buying Gadshill, Ainsworth was forced to sell his property piecemeal." Ainsworth died in 1882, never having recovered his popularity. The historical novelist sank into an obscurity lasting 140 years, until his appearance as character in Smith's historical novel.

The Fraud is almost compulsively readable. Its short chapters of, at most, a few pages—very un-Victorian—jump back and forth in time over the nineteenth century, and take place in both England and Jamaica. As expected and hoped-for from Zadie Smith, the novel is very much alive to the class, racial, and sexual dynamics of that time, and ours.

Coda: Anthony Trollope's Is He Popenjoy?

First installment of Anthony Trollope's Is He Popenjoy? in All the Year Round, New Series v. 19, 13 October 1877, Charles Dickens, Jr., Editor. Image source: HathiTrust.org

The Fraud is not the first novelistic response to the Tichborne case. A few years after the Claimant's cases were tried, Anthony Trollope published Is He Popenjoy? (1877–78), his 35th novel, in which legal questions are raised about the legitimacy of the heir to the aristocratic title of Lord Popenjoy. (While the familiar meaning of "popinjay" is a vain, conceited, and pretentious person, the less-well-known meaning of a target for archery or shooting seems to be the sense that pertains.) The novel was actually written in 1874–75—the Claimant's final trial concluded in 1874—but was held back from publication for three years.

The Marquis of Brotherton returns to England with a previously unannounced Italian wife and a "swarthy" infant son. Questions are immediately raised about the validity of the marriage and the legitimacy of the son. Trollope, in his usual brilliant way, ratchets up the dramatic tension with familial rivalries, power plays, and misalliances. The Marquis' younger brother, Lord George Germain—reluctant to interfere, but trapped by circumstances—is spurred on by his wife's father to lead the inquiry into the circumstances of the marriage and birth. Meanwhile the staid, dull, and conventional Lord George must also contend with his restive, pleasure-loving young wife Mary (shades of Plantagenet Palliser and Lady Glencora). His sense of righteousness is undermined, however, by his own ongoing emotional affair with the first woman he proposed to, now married to another man.

Is He Popenjoy? is notorious for Trollope's treatment of the women's suffrage movement, which is embodied by Lady Selina Protest (perhaps a swipe at Emmeline Pankhurst), Dr. Olivia Q. Fleabody (Elizabeth Peabody?) and the Baroness Banmann. And suffragist meetings are held at hall referred to as the "Disabilities":

The real and full name of the college, as some ladies delighted to call it, was, though somewhat lengthy, placarded in big letters on a long black board on the front of the building, and was as follows, "Rights of Women Institute; Established for the Relief of the Disabilities of Females." By friendly tongues to friendly ears "The College" or "the Institute" was the pleasant name used; but the irreverent public was apt to speak of the building generally as the "Female Disabilities." And the title was made even shorter. Omnibuses were desired to stop at the "Disabilities;" and it had become notorious that it was just a mile from King's Cross to the "Disabilities." There had been serious thoughts among those who were dominant in the Institute of taking down the big board and dropping the word. But then a change of a name implies such a confession of failure! It had on the whole been thought better to maintain the courage of the opinion which had first made the mistake. (Is He Popenjoy?, Ch. XVII)

The Institute is played for comedy (although her inadvertent involvement causes Mary some distress), and is portrayed as a scene of fierce rivalries among the strong-willed leaders. We're a fair distance from the Tichborne Claimant, although of course there are parallels with the central plot about an heir's legitimacy. I'm currently halfway through Is He Popenjoy?, and while I wouldn't consider it one of the best of his novels, even those Trollope novels that aren't among the first rank offer many rewards—despite his, or at least his characters', Victorian prejudices (anti-feminism was and is by no means limited to men). 

Before her marriage Mary's father delivers a homily about proper wifely behavior:

A wife should provide that a man's dinner was such as he liked to eat, his bed such as he liked to lie on, his clothes arranged as he liked to wear them, and the household hours fixed to suit his convenience. She should learn and indulge his habits, should suit herself to him in external things of life, and could thus win from him a liking and a reverence which would wear better than the feeling generally called love, and would at last give the woman her proper influence. The Dean had meant to teach his child how she was to rule her husband, but of course had been too wise to speak of dominion. Mary, declaring to herself that the feeling generally called love should exist as well as the liking and the reverence, had laboured hard to win it all from her husband in accordance with her father's teaching; but it had seemed to her that her labour was wasted. (Is He Popenjoy?, Ch. XXVIII)

This passage may raise a smile, or a grimace, today. However, the power balance in this relationship actually favors Mary. The couple are living on her money—Lord George is a second son, with an allowance barely large enough to supply his own wants—and their marriage is governed by a contract which gives her ownership of a London townhome separate from her husband's living arrangements in Brotherton. Trollope excels at setting up conflicts and misunderstandings between two characters, each of whom is sympathetic but neither of whom is without flaw. We are rarely allowed to make simple judgments.