It is hard to believe, and but for the irrefutable records of the Court, few would credit the fact that every one of these letters was in the French language! And the dupe a highly educated mathematician of European repute.
In the face of such incredible gullibility one is disposed to regard the sentence of two years' imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs as extravagantly severe, even despite the fact that Lucas received in all over 140,000 francs from M. Chasles.
The Chatterton and Ireland forgeries are familiar to all educated persons. These, however, hardly come under the head of the class of fraud with which the ordinary forger is associated. In each of these cases the motive of the deception was not so much to make money as a literary reputation. In both cases presumably competent judges were deceived. But the standard by which they gauged the genuineness of the productions was not caligraphic, but literary. In neither instance was there occasion or opportunity for the handwriting expert to exercise his skill, for the sufficient reason that there existed no material with which the writings could be compared. What the literary expert had to do was to examine and compare the style of the compositions—a test in which the idiosyncrasies and predilections of the judge played a leading part.
Probably the greatest, and for a short time the most successful autograph fraud perpetrated in Great Britain was that known as the case of the Rillbank MSS., the detection and exposure of which were mainly attributable to one of the authors of this work (Capt. W. W. Caddell).
Just before, and up till 1891, there was in Edinburgh a young man named Alexander Howland Smith, who claimed to be the son of a reputable Scottish law official, and a descendant of Sir Walter Scott.
On the strength of his presumed connection with the great novelist, he had no difficulty in disposing of, to an Edinburgh bookseller, for prices whose smallness alone should have excited suspicion, letters purporting to be in the handwriting of Sir Walter Scott. Emboldened by success, he embarked upon a wholesale manufacture of spurious letters bearing the signatures of Burns, Edmund Burke, Sir Walter Scott, Grattan and Thackeray. His principal victim was an Edinburgh chemist, Mr. James Mackenzie, who, when the fraud was not only suspected, but proved, distinguished himself by a stubborn and courageous defence of the genuineness of the documents.
Smith's modus operandi consisted in purchasing large-sized volumes of the period of the subjects of his forgeries, and using the blank leaves for the purpose of fabricating the letters. In May, 1891, a number of alleged Burns' letters were put up for sale by public auction at Edinburgh, fetching the surprising paltry price of from twenty to thirty shillings apiece.
It was a feature of all Smith's productions that the letters were extremely brief—a feature common to literary forgeries. The circumstance which first gave rise to suspicion was that the letters attributed to Scott, Burke, Burns, General Abercrombie, Grattan and Thackeray all began and ended with the same words. Those signed by Sir Walter Scott all began "I have your letter," and ended "I remain," a form of phraseology the reputed writer never used, but which, according to Smith, was common to all the distinguished men whose handwriting he had counterfeited with considerable success.
On the strength of the partial guarantee provided by the sale of some of these documents at a reputable auction room, Captain Caddell purchased a parcel of alleged Scott letters without prior inspection. A brief examination disclosed their fraudulent nature, and Smith was arrested. The Edinburgh police took the matter up, and the impostor was convicted in June, 1893, and sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment.
Thackeray and Dickens are favourite subjects with most literary forgers, Washington and Benjamin Franklin running them very close for favouriteship. American collectors are particularly keen on procuring specimens of the last two-named, and there is grave reason to believe that many fall easy victims.