Books and bidders

by A. S. W. Rosenbach

IV

SOME LITERARY FORGERIES

“I cast my bread upon the waters, and it came back to me after many days!”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked the tall white-haired man who sat opposite me in his luxurious library. The room was an enormous one, and thousands of fine books lined the walls from floor to ceiling. My friend seemed in a confidential mood, and I expected to hear something startling. This Gothic room, with its early Spanish religious sculptures, had the very atmosphere of a confessional. My companion had had a somewhat weird career, and as I watched him through the heavy smoke of our cigars I recalled many strange stories of his youth. Once he had been a lawyer’s clerk, but now he was a director in many banks, with financial interests all over the world. The variegated stages by which he had risen to such eminence, not only in business but as a collector of pictures and books, were not always clear to the friends of his later years.

He told me that he had been so poor as a boy he had often known hunger; that, as a scrivener in the lawyer’s office, he had eked out a most pitiable existence copying deeds and other legal documents. In 1885 he happened to read in the newspapers of famous auction sales of autographs in London, and of the first arrival in this country of representatives of the English book houses. For instance, Bernard Quaritch was holding his first exhibition in New York at the Hotel Astor. General Brayton Ives, Robert Hoe, and other great collectors of the glaring ‘80’s were beginning to form their libraries. My friend was fascinated, and as he had no capital to invest in great rarities himself, he thought he would make a few. He determined to try his hand at imitation.

Just about that period there was an awakened interest in the ill-fated Major André, who had suffered death as a British informer. In his grimy boarding house on Grand Street my friend practiced imitating André’s handwriting. He finally manufactured a splendid letter in which Major André wrote to General Washington requesting that he be shot as a soldier and not hanged as a spy. As he described his youthful fabrication his mouth lighted with a smile of pleasure, and he confessed that he had been very proud of this forgery; it had been a work of art! He finally actually sold this pseudo-André letter for $650! Those were the days when unpedigreed rarities were more easily disposed of, as there were not so many autograph sharks around as there are to-day.

Thirty years elapsed. My friend had grown in riches and in reputation. Now he was a noted collector; forgotten were the peccadillos of his youth. In 1915, during the Great War, he noticed the advertisement of a sale in London containing an André letter. He cabled an unlimited bid, as was now his custom. The letter was bought for him for £280. A few weeks later, upon opening the package which he received from the custom house, the inclosed autograph letter looked familiar to him. A closer scrutiny revealed the fact that he had bought back, at three times what he had received for it, his own fabrication!

Several years ago I had the remarkable good fortune to secure for my own library a letter written by Cervantes. It is the only one known in a private collection to-day. Other letters of his—and they are few—may be seen only in the Spanish National Library at Madrid. Cervantes’s autographs are so rare that the British Museum possesses no example of the handwriting of the author of Don Quixote, nor is there one in the library of the Hispanic Society in New York City, founded by that great collector, Mr. Archer M. Huntington. From this you may realize to some extent the desirability and scarcity of a letter of Cervantes. Written on two pages, and dated February 4, 1593, it is extremely legible, in a bold Castilian hand, and contains his signature in full: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, with a fanciful twirling flourish becoming to a great Spanish author. Many an expert eye has passed upon it gloatingly in years gone by, for it has been in the celebrated collections, first of Benjamin Fillon, in Paris, and later of Alfred Morrison, of London.

LAST PAGE OF THE ONLY LETTER IN THIS COUNTRY WRITTEN
BY CERVANTES

Some time after acquiring this celebrated autograph I was startled one day in New York, when an agent from a well-known English autograph house telephoned me and said he had a wonderful letter of Cervantes. He asked £3000 for it, which was certainly not too high, when you stop to consider that Cervantes’s place in literature is second only to that of Shakespeare. If a Shakespeare letter were found to-day many collectors would not consider $500,000 too much to pay for it. What, then, is a Cervantes letter worth? While I sat mulling over these mathematical problems, the doorbell rang and the dealer came in. His manner was important, almost condescending. His precious letter was inclosed in a fine morocco case, elaborately tooled. He removed it from its costly trappings, and after a moment of suspense, which was really most effective, he handed the letter to me. I could scarcely believe my eyes. I looked for the date—February 4, 1593. It was an excellently forged copy of the one in my possession.

“Where in the devil did you get this?”

His face turned the color of a carnation and his swanky manner of assurance wilted away.

“Just what do you mean?” he asked me slowly. I motioned him to follow, and took him into my book vault, where I laid his clever forgery next to mine the original. For a moment I thought he would crumple up and fall to the floor. I have never seen anyone so completely nonplussed. He had really believed his Cervantes letter to be the original, and had come in all good faith to sell it to me. I proved to him how some forger, after securing the sheets of old paper, had, through a process of photo-engraving, cleverly produced the letter which he had so exultingly shown to me.

The beautiful thing about the book business is that you must be constantly on your guard. It makes the game exciting to know that there are beings who, like vultures, would pick your bones if you but gave them the chance. Thank heaven for them. The chase is more exhilarating on their account.

The atmosphere of Wall Street is that of a Quaker meetinghouse beside it.

ORIGINAL DRAWING BY DAUMIER OF DON QUIXOTE

Forgeries have been in existence as long as the collecting game itself. During the Renaissance forgers were very active in every field of creative art. Not only did they make imitations of great Greek and Latin classics, which were just beginning their popular vogue in Europe, but they very cleverly copied old medals, and fabricated old gems too. Of course, the collector himself is in a sense morally responsible for the forger. The collector’s overdeveloped sense of acquisitiveness leads him to pay extravagant prices for his favorites; he will search out and buy every available pen scratch of some great writer.

A poor wretch in an attic reads in the newspapers that a capitalist has just paid $2000 for an autograph letter of Robert Burns. He then begins to “discover” other letters and documents by the same author. This is the launching of a career that is usually full of excitement and gives full scope to the imagination. The forger is a picturesque figure until he, too, is discovered and publicly condemned. This class of men—I know of no women forgers—is responsible for the literary detective. There is real sport in tracking these fabrications. An ability to tell the original from the false, the genuine from the spurious, sometimes under the most trying circumstances, has developed almost into a fine art.

There are men who make literary detecting their profession. Their eyes are so well trained that they are seldom wrong when pronouncing judgment. They are as fully aware of the thousand and one tricks of the professional forger’s game as they are alert to the peculiarities of each author’s handwriting.

These experts could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. When you stop to consider that there are men even now in dark holes in London, in obscure garrets in Paris, in flats in Harlem, and in apartments in Atlantic City, making their livelihood forging autographs, it puts you pleasantly on your guard. These fellows are very often unsuccessful authors with a certain amount of erudition, broken-down booksellers, or other bits of riffraff from the literary world. I once knew a genial old college professor who turned from unlucrative teaching to make an honest penny, as he termed it, by forging.

My uncle Moses always told with a chuckle of his experience with an Englishman by the name of Robert Spring. He called at my uncle’s shop in Commerce Street one day in the 60’s and said he had an old document signed by Washington. In fact, it was a military pass issued to some Revolutionary worthy, permitting him to go through the lines. My uncle naturally pricked up his ears at the mention of his favorite character, General Washington, and immediately asked to see this interesting relic. The Englishman then held it up dramatically, and when Uncle Moses read it he felt like embracing his visitor. For, lo and behold, the pass was made out in the name of one of my uncle’s own ancestors!

It had every earmark of age, was written on old paper in faded ink, the creases were almost worn through, and the edges were frayed. To his covetous eyes the pass seemed much more desirable on account of its connection with his forbears. He asked the Englishman what he wanted for it and how it had come into his possession. He glibly explained he had found it in an old-fashioned hair trunk in the attic of a house in old Philadelphia. He wanted fifteen dollars for this pass—a large sum in those days, when one could buy a full autograph letter of Washington for that much money. Uncle Moses rose to this thin story as a trout strikes at a fly.

Some years later Ferdinand J. Dreer, of Philadelphia, a connoisseur, came to see him. Among other things, my uncle showed him the faded pass. Mr. Dreer looked at it for a moment, and then, according to Uncle Moses, turned to him and in that cheerfully disgusted tone which one collector uses to a brother who has made a foolish deal, said:—

“Mr. Polock, you, of all men, should know better! This thing is an arrant forgery, and worth less than nothing.”

It later appeared that Robert Spring was the first great forger of American documents. He had written many such military passes, all of them with spurious signatures of General Washington. But he was always foxy enough to look up the name of some ancestor of the man on whom he planned to prey. Uncle Moses, nevertheless, remained stoical, and said this outlay of fifteen dollars was one of the most profitable investments he had ever made. It placed him on his guard as nothing had before; was, in fact, an investment that would in time be worth thousands of dollars to him.

FROM A LETTER IN THE AUTOGRAPH OF GEORGE WASHINGTON,
SIGNED BY HIM FOR MARTHA WASHINGTON

Spring’s career as a forger lasted a surprisingly long time. He reached a point where he made no effort to conceal from his Philadelphia customers the almost made-to-order character of these documents of his. He salved their feelings by saying he would never think of offering them anything that was not genuine. Of course, he was an excellent penman. Washington was his favorite model, perhaps because he had greatest success in copying his handwriting. He sold most of his productions to persons who lived abroad, who were not regular collectors. He assumed various names when he wrote to members of the English nobility, representing himself sometimes as a widow in want, or as the needy daughter of Stonewall Jackson, thus feeding most lucratively upon the kind-heartedness of wealthy people thousands of miles away. He was arrested several times, but finally reformed. Before dying he grew to be a most proper and meticulously honest dealer in books and engravings, and, I suppose, rests comfortably now in the bookmen’s heaven.

I have collected letters and documents of Washington almost from the beginning of my career. To-day I own an interesting, authentic collection of more than two hundred, written between the years 1755 and 1799. He was a prolific correspondent. His handwriting is always legible; the writing of a sensitive, clear-thinking person whose nerves were under excellent control. Many of these letters are the charming messages which any leisured gentleman of that period might write. Others are on military matters of the utmost importance. Another series deals entirely with agriculture, and shows how well the masterly general could play the gentleman farmer.

The years which have passed since his death have seen the world flooded with Washington autographs. But it took a measure of daring and a fanatical spirit of patriotism to forge letters of his while he was still alive and fulfilling with vigor the now historical duties of his military career. It was in May or June of 1777 that a book appeared in London purporting to contain certain letters of Washington written in 1776 to friends and relatives of his in Virginia. These letters paint him as a man whose motives were questionable. The false lines in this book relate his pretended thoughts and feelings about the Revolution in which he was then engaged. They make him say he is tired of it all; that he wishes for peace at any price with the mother country. They reveal him as a military scapegrace with the soul, but not the courage, of a traitor! Despite the publisher’s preface explaining his possession of these intimate documents, it was soon proved that the letters were deliberate forgeries. Nevertheless, they were of grave importance at the time, for they served as a powerful propaganda against Washington, and therefore the colonies, and made a strong appeal to the ignorant and easily biased mind.

Forgers must have, above all, a keen sense of chronology. This is the first great requisite after their natural skill in imitating handwriting. For instance, they cannot refer to the discovery of America in a letter supposed to have been written before that event took place, or date a letter of Dickens, 1872, two years after his death, and expect to get away with it. Both these slips, strange to say, have occurred. In fact, forgers frequently make similar crude errors, alluding to incidents that hadn’t happened at the time the letter was dated.

It is plain, therefore, that the master forger must have his chronology at his finger tips. He should know not only the dates of history, which he can find in any textbook, but he must be familiar with the history of costume, of furnishings, and decorations also. I remember reading the invention of one gentleman’s brain and pen in which he alluded to hoop skirts ten years before they put in their dreadful appearance. The literary forger hoping for success should also acquire an almost endless knowledge of the colloquial language of the period in which he writes, and must be naturally a student of orthography and spelling. In fact, he has taken up the one career where he has literally to mind his P’s and Q’s!

It is fairly easy to imitate the writing of a distinguished character; the most difficult part is to interpret, as well, the thoughts of the equally distinguished mind. A forger of Thackeray wrote the name of the author of Vanity Fair in many volumes, together with a short comment about the text. He composed a pointed criticism of each work, or invented what he believed to be some smart phrase about the author. In this case the signature and the writing itself are so excellent that they almost defy detection, but the thoughts are no more those of the great Thackeray than are mine of Shakespeare.

PAGE FROM A LETTER OF THACKERAY TO MRS. BROOKFIELD

Not many are privileged to see presentation copies actually in the making. A friend of mine told me of an experience he had in London. One day he strolled into a little bookshop near the British Museum. He looked over some dusty volumes for a time, and finally found one which he wanted to buy. There was no clerk in the front of the shop, so he walked to the rear, where he discovered a little old man seated at a large table. Before him was a row of books all opened at the title pages. The busy old fellow was bent over another and so absorbed in his work that he heard nothing. My friend looked over his shoulder. He was committing a little quiet forgery! In other words he was caught in “fragrant delectation.” On the title page he was painstakingly forming Lewis Carroll’s autograph. Before my friend left he had an opportunity to see what was written. He found, much to his astonishment, that the old gentleman was inditing to long-deceased friends of Lewis Carroll, copies of Alice in Wonderland, each one with an appropriate inscription. When asked the reason for all this industry, he replied, “I am making them for the American market!”

Among the many bugaboos which the forger has to face are watermarks woven into paper. These are the manufacturer’s trade-marks, and often show the date the paper was made. You can see them if you hold the paper to the light. Quite recently I was offered three manuscripts supposed to be in the hand of Oscar Wilde. His exquisite though affected Greek style of handwriting was well enough imitated. But when I pointed out to the man who offered the manuscripts to me that they were written upon paper which bore the watermarks of a manufacturer who had made it during the Great War, he suddenly remembered an appointment and hurriedly made his departure.

About twenty years ago a celebrated French firm of book and autograph dealers cabled my brother Philip that they were offering for sale the original manuscript of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Wilde, who was a literary exhibitionist if ever there was one, gave Salomé to the world in French, and not such very good French at that. As I had an extensive collection of Wilde autographs even then, I was extremely eager to own the original of this famous work also. Before my reply could reach the firm in France, some luckier collector who was on the spot at the time bought it. I was very much annoyed, but concealed my chagrin as best I could, not even inquiring who the buyer was. I suspected it was some French author. The year before last, when on my annual pilgrimage to England, a French journalist came to see me one day at the Carlton Hotel in London, with the news that he knew the man who owned the Salomé manuscript, and was informed that he would part with it if paid a sufficiently high price.

PAGE FROM ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF OSCAR WILDE’S
“SALOMÉ”

Now, I am never frightened at high prices. I asked my friend to return to France and buy it for me. Two days passed. Then I received the news that I was again too late. It was plain that Salomé was playing hide and seek with me, and placing my head on a charger. After two months in England I went to Paris. I had hardly arrived before the collector who last purchased Salomé offered to sell it. I asked him to bring it immediately to my hotel. With my nerves on edge, I kept telling myself that this time she should not escape me. Now, the collector in question was supposed to be a judge of autographs. He arrived and took the manuscript from its case. I fairly grabbed it from him, fearing that the evil Salomé would sprout wings and fly out of the window. I opened the cover to the first page, looked at it, turned the second, then the third. Quickly I closed it and gave it back to him. A silence followed during which he regarded me in amazement.

“No, thank you,” I said; “I am looking for Salomé in the flesh, not a will-o’-the-wisp. Your manuscript is a forgery!”

It was plain this poor fellow had been deceived. He walked up and down my room, tearing at his hair in the best French manner, for he had given a good sum for this clever fabrication. I, too, was deeply disappointed, after tracking over Europe for it. Like the villain in the play, Salomé still evaded me.

DEDICATION OF OSCAR WILDE’S “THE SPHINX”
TO MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL

In Philadelphia a year later I received a cable from a firm of auctioneers in Paris, offering me the original manuscript of Salomé once more. I naturally paid no attention to the offer, thinking it another forgery. I was tired of the wiles of this wicked woman. I had come to the conclusion that this work was not, by some weaving of the fates, for the house of Rosenbach. No more fool’s errands for me.

A few weeks after, when dining with a well-known American collector in New York, he said to me:

“Doctor, I have something which will open even your eyes. I have Salomé!”

Naturally, I could not suppress a cynical laugh. “Another forgery?” I smilingly inquired.

After dinner we went to his library, and he pointed very proudly to two old copy books on the table. The moment I looked at the pages I knew that at last I held the original in my hands. How envious I was! But I now realized this manuscript could never be mine. I felt truly heartbroken. My friend, seeing I was not exactly elated over his treasure, but rather downcast, asked the reason. I related the whole story of my chase.

With great generosity he replied, with the air of a sultan presenting a favorite slave, “Doctor, I don’t want to stand in your way. If you want her, she is yours.” He told me its history as far as he knew it; the manuscript had been purchased by Pierre Louÿs, the eminent French poet. It was he who had bought it directly from the shop in Paris when I first tried to obtain it twenty years before. It is far more precious to-day than it was then. Not only is it the greatest work from the pen of Oscar Wilde but it is the one work of his that has been translated into all languages. It has also been used as the libretto by Richard Strauss for his startling and beautiful opera.

The up-to-date literary forger always keeps his eye upon the market. Genuine letters of certain famous, or infamous, men and women will always command high prices. Yet the styles in collecting change as in everything else. One decade there may be a sudden craze for Byron letters; the next, autograph letters or documents pertaining to Keats or Shelley are frantically sought.

So it goes. One cycle begins as another cycle ends. Therefore, forgers’ productions often swarm into the market when the popularity of an autograph is on the crest of the wave. There are certain historical characters whose autographs will always sell at top prices. With this in mind, one of the greatest hoaxes ever planned was, for a time, put over by a French forger a few years after the middle of the nineteenth century. Vrain Lucas was his name, and his guileless customer was a noted mathematician, Michel Chasles. I first knew of Lucas’s wretched forgeries through hearing my uncle Moses tell of them; in a way, it was rather humorous, for when he told me the story he became as enraged as though Lucas had taken him in, rather than Chasles.

Vrain Lucas was a middle-aged man of fair education and rather well read. By his own confession he had manufactured more than twenty-five thousand spurious autographs, many of which he sold to Chasles over a period of eight years. During that time Chasles had doubted his word only once. Lucas immediately offered to buy back everything he had sold him, and thus Chasles’s faith was restored.

This charlatan, Lucas, must have had a certain hypnotic influence over Chasles, plus the assurance and the courage of Old Nick himself. Chasles’s belief in him, however, proved Lucas’s undoing. For when he sold him two letters from Charles V to Rabelais, Chasles, in his excitement and delight, presented them to the Academy of Belgium. The letters for a time were believed to be genuine. Then Lucas came again to Chasles, this time with letters from Pascal to Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton, in which the writer proved that he, and not Newton, had discovered the law of gravitation.

You can imagine how deeply moved was Chasles, the naïve mathematician. He rushed with them to the French Academy of Science, and at once the scientific world was stirred into a commotion. At the height of this agitation Sir David Brewster came forward and announced that the letters must be from the pen of an impostor, proving conclusively at the same time that Newton was a mere child of ten when these pretended messages of Pascal were written. Thus began the beginning of the end for the forger.

Certain testimony given by Chasles at Lucas’s trial before a tribunal of the Seine, in 1870, is almost unbelievable. It seems ridiculous to me that any man, especially a collector, could have been so simple and gullible as was Chasles. He spent 140,000 francs, a lot of money in those days, for a list of autograph letters that is too good to pass over lightly. Although Monsieur Lucas supplied his customer with the important names of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, including Boccaccio, Cervantes, Dante, Racine, Shakespeare, and Spinoza, he likewise delved into the remote past and produced letters from Abélard, Alcibiades, Attila, Julius Cæsar, Charlemagne, Ovid, Pliny, Plutarch, and Pompey!

Lucas was careful enough to mix an ink for his forgeries which, when dry, gave the appearance of age. Then he treated the completed masterpieces in such a way as to make them look worn and of great age. But his cleverness was only half-witted! He had the audacity not only to write these ancient epistles on paper from local mills, which showed the watermarks of Angoulême, but most daringly inscribed them in modern French!

The late Simon Gratz, in his delightful and authoritative volume, A Book about Autographs, gives translations of several of these shameless fabrications. Here is the letter which Chasles believed Cleopatra wrote to Julius Cæsar:—

Cleopatra, Queen, to her very beloved Julius Cæsar, Emperor.

My very beloved:—

Our son Cæsarion is well. I hope that he will soon be able to support the travel from here to Marseilles, where I need to send him to study, as much for the good air one breathes there as for the fine things which are taught. I beg you will tell me how long you will still remain in that country, for I want myself to take our son there and see you on this occasion. This is to tell you, my very beloved, the pleasure I feel when I am near you, and meanwhile I pray the gods to have you in their guard.

The XI March year of Rome VCCIX

Cleopatra

Think with what pious glee Monsieur Chasles read the following priceless letter from Lazarus, the resuscitated, to Saint Peter!

My dear friend Petrus:—

You tell me you have noticed in the writings of Cæsar and in those of Cicero that one of the most important parts of the Druids’ religion consists in sacrificing savage men. It is true they take in an erroneous sense this principle, that men can only appreciate the life God gave them by offering Him the life of a man. They have continued that inhuman and bloody practice until the time of Cicero. This is why he says they soil and profane their temple and altars by offering there human victims, and here Cicero is right in insulting a worship so barbarous, saying it is a strange thing that to satisfy for what they owe to their religion they must first dishonor it by some murder. They cannot be religious without being homicides. The infamy of this horrible maxim has reflected on all the Gauls, even if it has been practiced only in some places. But the arms and the conquest of the Romans have wiped out this infamy and I do not believe that it is practiced anywhere now. Amen.

This X August XLVII

Lazarus

Lucas’s interpretation of Biblical characters was rather unusual. Perhaps it was this quality, which so fascinated his generous customer, that caused him to be blind to obvious discrepancies. Here is rather a quaint letter purporting to be from Mary Magdalene to Lazarus:—

My very beloved brother:—

That which you tell us of Petrus, the Apostle of our meek Jesus, gives us hope that soon we shall see him here and I dispose myself to receive him well. Our sister Martha also rejoices of it. Her health is very tottering and I fear her passing away. This is why I recommend her to your good prayers. The good girls who have come to place themselves under our guidance are admirable for us and make us the most amiable caresses. It is enough said, my very beloved brother, that our sojourn in these countries of the Gaul pleases us much, that we have no desire to leave it, also none of our friends suggest it. Do you not think that those Gauls who were thought barbarian nations are not at all so, and judging only by what we have learned it must be from these that the light of science started. I have a great desire to see you and beg our Lord may have you in favor.

This X June XLVI

Magdalene

In this fourth epistle, written by Alexander the Great, Lucas, the true Frenchman, does not forget once more to let words of flattery for France—Gaul—drip from the pen of the King of Macedonia. This letter follows:—

Alexander Rex to his very beloved Aristotle, Greeting.

My beloved:—

I am not satisfied because you have made public certain of your books which you had to keep under the seal of secrecy, for it is a profanation of their value; and no more render them public without my consent. As to what you asked of me, to travel to the country of the Gauls in order to learn the sciences of the Druids, of whom Pythagoras made so fine a eulogy, not only do I permit you but I entreat you to go for the good of my people, as you are not ignorant in what esteem I hold the nation which I consider as the one that carries the light in the world. I salute you.

This XX of the Kalends of May, year of the CV Olympiad

Alexander

Old Chasles got all that was coming to him, and the 140,000 francs that he spent on the Lucas inventions were as nothing compared with the great joy the world in general, and antiquarians in particular, have experienced in reading these altogether amusing epistles.

Being sometimes called a pirate myself, I have always been interested in reading about them. I remember reveling in Treasure Island, soon after it appeared in 1883. But instead of the pieces of eight and flashing gems which Stevenson conjured up for the boyish mind, I substituted, in my youthful imagination, rare books. This seems far-fetched, yet it is absolutely true. Instead of Long John Silver’s doubloons and sequins, I put in their place first editions and manuscripts. They were more to me, then and now, than all the treasure of the Indies. And yet, in the first years of my passion for them, I rarely gave thought to forgeries. I had that superb reliance upon instinct which is a part and parcel of youth. I felt that if there were forgeries about I could sniff them as a dog follows a scent. So I was not really interested in forgers and their works until I read in a book for the first time an account of William Henry Ireland, the greatest fabricator of them all.

Ireland was a youthful scamp, less than eighteen years old, who in 1795 pulled the leg of almost the entire literary world with his “discovery” of many Shakespearean manuscripts. He was the son of an engraver in London, and doubtless inherited the facile fingers which brought him his peculiar fame. Ireland senior reverenced all relics of antiquity, and especially those which were connected with the memory of Shakespeare. He was almost a fanatic on this subject and gave his son to understand that his greatest desire would be satisfied the day that he was lucky enough to find an autograph manuscript of the Bard of Avon. I’ve had that feeling myself. After being dragged hither and yon by his father, who searched every nook and cranny where Shakespeare was supposed to have stayed, the filial William Henry decided upon a course of his own to make his father completely happy.

FORGERY OF SHAKESPEARE MANUSCRIPT
BY WILLIAM HENRY IRELAND

He was apprenticed at the time to an attorney, and it was a part of his daily work to study ancient documents, such as leases and wills. He sometimes read in books the histories of various estates in Great Britain, and occasionally a facsimile of Shakespeare’s signature was printed in them. One day he came across some unused parchment at the end of an old rent roll. His imagination began to work, I suppose, as he studied the Shakespeare facsimile before him, and the echoes of old deeds, with their quaint phrases, doubtless rang in his ears. Thus he set about practising the penmanship of an earlier era. Finding that he wrote with amazing ease, he immediately made up a lease between William Shakespeare and John Heminge, with one Michael Fraser and Elizabeth, his wife. When the ink was sufficiently dried he took it home to his father, who at the sight of it nearly dropped dead with joy. And so began young Ireland’s notorious performances.

After finding further facsimiles of signatures of the Elizabethan period, he invented, with the most appalling facility, all sorts of letters and poems. Naturally, his father and others asked where he had found these remarkable manuscripts, whereupon he made up a more or less logical story. He said he had met a gentleman of fortune, whose name he had sworn not to tell, in a coffeehouse in London, and that in the course of conversation they had discovered each other’s love for things antique. The new acquaintance then mentioned having in his possession a collection of old deeds and papers tied in bundles. The boy told of his delight at being asked to inspect them; and how he had gone to his friend’s house and searched through them. Much to their mutual joy, he had discovered one old paper which clearly established his friend’s right to a certain property which had been the subject of litigation for a long time. This friend, he went on to explain, first swore him to secrecy, then presented him with as many of these ancient manuscripts as he wished to have.

It is not difficult to understand why William Henry’s father accepted his boy’s story so easily. Remember, those were the days of stern virtues. A son brought up to respect his parents was expected to tell the truth. When the elder Ireland, being a man of substantial reputation, showed the manuscripts to his friends and repeated his son’s story, it was accepted. Spurred on by his apparent success in deceiving his father and many visitors, the young forger began to lose his head and daily grew more daring. Under cover of secrecy, in a lonely room where he was apprenticed, he had the temerity not only to forge Shakespeare’s signature to documents but to invent an autograph confession of faith for him. This met with success, and he proceeded to compose love lyrics in the form of letters to Anne Hathaway, signed with the name of the great poet.

Here is one of them, in which he inclosed a lock of “thye Willys” hair. It is addressed to Anna Hatherrewaye, and reads as follows:—

Dearesste Anna:—

As thou haste alwaye founde mee toe mye Worde moste trewe soe thou shalt see I have stryctlye kepte mye promyse I praye you perfume thys mye poore Locke withe thye balmye Eysses forre thenne indeede shalle Kynges themmeselves bowe ande pay homage toe itte I doe assure thee no rude hande hathe knottedde itte thye Willys alone hathe done the worke Neytherre the gyldedde bawble thatte envyronnes the heade of Majestye noe norre honourres moste weyghtye wulde give mee halfe the joye as didde thysse mye lyttle worke forre thee The feelinge thatte dydde neareste approache untoe itte was thatte whiche commethe nygheste untoe God meeke and Gentle Charytye forre thatte Virrtue O Anna doe I love doe I cheryshe thee inne mye hearte forre thou arte ass a talle Cedarre stretchynge forthe its branches ande succourynge smaller Plants fromme nyppynge Winneterre orr the boysterouse Wyndes Farewelle toe Morrowe bye tymes I wille see thee tille thenne Adewe sweete Love

Thyne everre

Wm Shakspeare

Anna Hatherrewaye

Sometime later he made an almost entire transcript of Lear, and a few leaves from Hamlet, too! In Hamblette, as he quaintly called it, he boldly introduced variations in the text, which many of the most learned men of the time read without doubting their authenticity. Boswell, Doctor Johnson’s famous biographer, called at the Ireland home one day, inspected the manuscripts, then knelt down before them, enthusiastically kissing a paper here and there as he thanked God for letting him live to see them.

BOOK BELONGING TO THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN, OF WHOSE
COMPANY SHAKESPEARE WAS A MEMBER

However, there was one doubting Thomas, who refused to believe, almost from the beginning of the “discoveries,” that there was an iota of truth concerning their origin. His name was Edmund Malone. He was the one literary critic who did not make a fool of himself at any time during a controversy which later developed to a furious pitch, and resulted in a full published confession from Ireland.

Young Ireland’s final burst of inspiration led him to write a pretended play of Shakespeare, entitled Vortigern and Rowena. This was the straw which eventually broke the camel’s back, but not until Sheridan had produced it, with two of the foremost players of the day, John Philip Kemble and Mrs. Jordan, appearing in the leading rôles.

Ireland appealed to me, not because he was a forger but because of a certain further cleverness. When he was discovered and his misdeeds revealed to a curious world, there suddenly sprang up a great demand to behold the handiwork of this delectable young villain. People in England, and collectors and curio seekers everywhere, wanted to own specimens of his fraudulent but interesting papers. They were so much in demand that he was kept busy from morning to night making forgeries of his own forgeries.

The sudden demand was not for Shakespeare’s own letter to Anne Hathaway but for Ireland’s original imaginary manuscript. What, then, could the poor fellow do? He just had to sit himself down and ply his trade as long as his supply of old paper and precious ink held out.

It was these humorous and at the same time dramatic facts which touched my imagination as a collector. I wanted Ireland’s original forgeries, not his double and triple fabrications. I naturally wanted the original manuscript of Vortigern, the one the lovely Mrs. Jordan had reverently held in her adoring—and adorable—hands. I thought I knew where they were—in the collection of the Marquis of Blandford, to whom they were sold many years ago. Imagine my surprise when I purchased the library of Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, to discover in his world-famed collection the actual forgeries not only of Vortigern but of King Lear and Hamlet as well. Here were the original documents which had deceived some of the choicest minds in England. Looking further, I also found the first draft of Ireland’s confession. I have the actual drafts with which Richard Brinsley Sheridan was so delighted; the very pages from which Kemble studied the part of Vortigern, and before which Boswell knelt, “a tumbler of warm brandy and water” at his side.

Ireland was not the first spectacular forger of tender years. In his confession he speaks of having been influenced by reading of Thomas Chatterton’s career. Chatterton was an English youth who kept the literary world titillating twenty-five years earlier. It is a strange thing, this psychologic kink which sometimes forms in the brains of very young men. Why they should risk bringing the world about their ears through impersonating the famous dead, when they have brains and originality of their own, no one knows.

Poor Chatterton! His is the only great genius which has come to light through the art of forgery. He began writing when he was sixteen, and almost from the beginning produced some of the finest poetry in the history of eighteenth-century literature. Perhaps he was unhappily shy, as boys often are at that age; or he may have suffered from some gloomy mental obsession. His manner of screening his identity when these remarkable poems first appeared has caused many a student to pause and wonder.

Chatterton’s first writings appeared with an accompanying explanation. He said his father had found them years before in an ancient chest belonging to the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol. The verses were supposed to have been composed by Thomas Rowley, a monk who had lived in that neighborhood during the fifteenth century. Chatterton, according to his story, had merely copied them. At first, this story was accepted, while critics praised the undeniable beauty of the lines. Then some contemporary littérateur called attention to the incorrect usage of Anglo-Saxon words of Rowley’s day, and suspicion hovered over Chatterton. It was soon charged that Chatterton had written the poems of Rowley, using a certain dictionary from which he chose Anglo-Saxon words in order to create the atmosphere and flavor of antiquity.

Among his critics were Horace Walpole and his two poet friends, Mason and Gray. The boy was accused of downright forgery when it was further noted that the poem which Chatterton brought out as the “Battle of Hastings wrote by Turgot the Monk, in the tenth century, and translated by Thomas Rowlie,” was wrongly dated. This bit of carelessness on Chatterton’s part increased the hue and cry of ridicule. The Battle of Hastings, as every English schoolboy knew, did not take place until the eleventh century! And here the poetic Turgot was relating its history one century before it happened. The goading of Walpole and his acolytes finally drove Chatterton to commit suicide when he was only eighteen years of age.

What a loss it was to England!

Walpole, seated in his comfortable library at Strawberry Hill, surrounded by his precious books and his precious ladies, recognized Chatterton’s works as forgeries, but did not recognize his superb genius. A few of the inspired lines of Chatterton’s poems are worth all the famous letters which Walpole so elegantly wrote for a large public, including himself. Although we wade with zest in the delightful mud stream that, with its scandal and veiled allusions, runs so naughtily through Walpole’s correspondence, we can never forgive his treatment of poor Chatterton.

Not quite in the same class as a forgery, a quaint and equally difficult sister art has gradually sprung into existence, called the facsimile page. Not that I mean to imply that the making of such pages is always done with an intent to deceive. There is a concern in London which supplies missing pages on order for any book you may have—a business that is done quite openly. Suppose you own a copy of the first edition of one of Shakespeare’s folios, in which either the title or last leaf is missing. If you don’t happen to be too fastidious and have merely the collector’s love for the complete, without his obsession for the perfect as well, you could take your first folio to this firm and in a short time receive a perfect page made to match the others of your book. Only the connoisseur and you yourself would know the difference.

Owing to the assistance of the camera to-day and the modern processes of engraving, it is not difficult to reproduce the printed word as it first appeared several centuries ago. The snag comes, however, in finding a paper that is exactly contemporaneous with the book itself. This London house happens to have a large and wonderful collection of old papers, taken chiefly from the flyleaves of early volumes. There are many unscrupulous dealers in the world, even in New York, who do not acknowledge to their customers that a book which they offer as genuine is made up in this manner. Any reputable firm would immediately call attention to it. One not quite so particular, with the naïveté of a child, always pleads, when caught, that he was ignorant of the guilty leaf, not being an expert himself. And yet he had ordered the damning page from the London house of facsimiles.

But sometimes it is almost impossible to tell which leaves in a book are facsimile. About seventy-five years ago there was an expert in this line in England by the name of Harris. With the greatest dexterity and cunning, he made leaves for incomplete books, which exactly duplicated the original ones. In those days such work was tedious and had to be accomplished entirely by hand, as it was long before the era of modern photographs. Harris’s work was in constant demand. An amusing story is told among booksellers of an order Harris executed for a celebrated collector whose copy of Caxton’s History of Troy had two leaves missing. Five years later the collector called on Harris. He took this Caxton from his pocket and showed it to him. It was with the greatest difficulty that Harris himself could determine which two leaves were his. In fact, he had to verify them by his records.

If there are great holes or tears in old pages they can be filled in in such a marvelous manner as almost to defy detection. Here again the literary detective enters to discover a clew and solve the mystery. The fellow must have a specialized sense for this sort of thing, just as a born newspaperman has a nose for news. The true literary detective will tell you at a glance if anything is wrong with a printed page. This is a rare faculty, and in the book business amounts almost to genius. Some booksellers are never able to tell, during their entire careers, which are facsimile leaves and which aren’t. Only a few are adept at it.

Another trick is to supply original covers when they are missing from old and precious volumes. Sometimes a copy of an English classic appears in the auction room minus its blue or gray or yellow paper wrappers. In the twinkling of an eye brand-new ones are supplied, aged by the miraculous antiquer, and offered as being in pristine, immaculate state, “very rare in its original paper binding.”

Then, to enhance the illusion, an old signature is added to the cover and perhaps the price, “tuppence,” written in an old hand. It takes Sherlock Holmes himself to detect these impostures.

I know a gentleman in London who is so expert in detecting forgeries that he goes on a scent like a setter after a bird. But the real safeguard for the collector is to buy his books, not from the transient individual who has two or three bargains to offer, but from the man who is known first of all for his reputable dealing. Then collecting is sheer delight.