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