Forgery

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets John Carter and Graham Pollard: Second Edition with an Epilogue by the Authors, and new material by Nicolas Barker and John Collins (Scolar Press, 2 vols £65)

T n 1934 a book was published which 'astonished — revolutionised would not

be too strong — the world of bibliography, bibliophily and book-collecting in this country and in the United States. Its

authors were two young men both then working as antiquarian booksellers. A con- trasted pair: John Carter (1905-75), genial, Etonian and Kingsman, dandyish or at least dapper, Americophil, famous among other things as the man who taught the barman at the Garrick how to make an authentic dry martini; and Graham Pollard (1903-76), shaggy, Salopian, bohemian — in Evelyn Waugh's autobiography he has an anonymous walk-on part at Oxford as 'a tousled, corduroyed cousin [of Terence Greenidge's] in Jesus who combined com- munism with bibliography'. They went on to other careers, both working in the public service for a time, and to further bibliographical achievements. But nothing either did subsequently was more important or famous than An Enquiry.

The pamphlets to which their splendidly meiotic title referred were several dozen slim volumes by Victorian authors which had been circulating for some time, in each case containing an established work poems or maybe an essay — but ostensibly, from the date on the title-page, predating other editions, 'thus creating a first edition'. Examples were Tennyson The falcon '1879' (in fact first printed in trial form in 1882, first published 1884), Swin- burne Dead Love '1864' (published in a magazine in 1862, not otherwise in the author's lifetime), and the best-known of all, EBB Sonnets (that is, Mrs Browning's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese') '1847'. Both men had separately nurtured suspi- cions about these pamphlets; as with all discovery or detection they started from a green-fingered hunch. The next stage was Proof. They subjected the pamphlets to a series of tests to demonstrate that they had not been printed when they purported to have been. The forger had occasionally made an elementary textual mistake, as with Tennyson's Ode for the Opening of the International Exhibition '1862', which used a text later than and amended from

that of the genuine first edition. But their forger was on the whole a most accomplish- ed man. It was necessary to nail him by what was then the advanced technical pro- cess of microscopic analysis of the paper to show that it contained esparto grass, the use of which only began in English paper mills in 1861, and close typographical examina-

tion. An Enquiry, as has been observed before, came out in the heyday of the

English detective story; 'The Case of the Kernless "j" ' could have been the title of another kind of book. (The 'j' was a par- ticular sort, a piece of type, cut and cast after most of the pamphlets' ostensible dates.) The crime was established. Who was the culprit? No-one who read the book could have doubted that he was Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937). Carter and Pollard had carefully traced the, not so much flood, as steady stream of these pamphlets on to the market over a long period of time beginning several decades before: the source was Wise. They built up the case against him in wonderful deadpan manner (beginning with an epigraph from Wise himself: 'Easy as it appears to be to fabricate reprints of rare books, it is in actual practice absolutely im- possible to do so in such a manner that detection cannot follow the result').

Although there was no accusation direct — and to begin with the 'young cads', as Wise called them, had not been certain that he was the forger as well as the middleman — the book was plainly defamatory under our ridiculous libel laws and might not have been published but for the fortitude of J. P. R. Lyell, a famous book-collector as well as a distinguished solicitor, and of Michael Sadleir at Constable. In the event, Wise spluttered, enlisted the support of his many powerful allies, some of whose conduct did more credit to their hearts than their heads, but took no action. And less than three years later he died.

To understand the explosive impact which An Enquiry had in 1934, it is necessary,

though it is not easy, to recapture the remarkable eminence which Wise then oc- cupied. This was no obscure crook against whom the finger of suspicion was levelled, but the GOM of bibliophily. It was as if Sir Lawrence Gowing rather than Mr Tom Keating had been caught forging Palmers. Wise, then 74, was universally respected and deferred to, a selfmade man who had become a friend of the great and an Honorary Fellow of Worcester. He had published numberless books, including author-bibliographies, which form he had helped to pioneer and in many of which he touted his own fraudulent wares while marketing them discreetly in the salesrooms.

He had clearly had accomplices. Not long after the book was published, Carter and Pollard twigged for sure who the chief ac- complice, maybe even instigator, had been, Harry Buxton Forman (1842-1917), another very eminent bibliographer. They pursued this and other trails, and spent decades on and off working towards a new edition of An Enquiry which seems rather to have become a Penelope's loom for them. They published several working papers, and ac- cumulated larger quantities of new material. When they died they left their work in progress to Mr Barker of the Book Collector and the British Museum. He

originally intended to complete a new edi- tion of the book as Carter and Pollard had wished but he found that his own researches veered further and further away from the original line of enquiry and abandoned the attempt.

What is now published is a facsimile reprint of the first edition with corrections and new Preface and Epilogue, and a com- panion volume in which the latest research is set out. This, it must be said, makes for a cumbrous read. To have made a recension of the original and all new material would no doubt have been a difficult task. It

would have been a lengthy business and the resulting book could not have been cheap, but then the volumes under review are not quite being given away.

The recent discoveries are as fascinating in their way as the initial Enquiry was. They

deal thoroughly with the partnership bet- ween Wise and Forman, analysing further spurious pamphlets by means of techniques unavailable 50 years ago, and setting out a startling picture of 'a wider campaign of fraud and deceit'. Wise was a very cunning fraudsman, not only in the mixture of deviousness, bullying and bluster he employed but also in the way in which he prepared his ground.

It is hard now also to recapture the climate of the book-collecting world in the generation of Wise's operations. The climate was one which he did not create single-handed but which he did much to stimulate: a mania for first editions quite unknown to bibliophily before the late 19th century, a mania — a gullibility — which John Carter elsewhere described with some scorn (sv 'Chronological obsession' in An ABC for Book Collectors). In that fetid at- mosphere, deluded collectors scrambled frantically for any pamphlet which might be a rarity or a 'first'. Not that others' gullibility even begins to mitigate Wise's crime — or crimes, for the forgeries do not, surely, rank in the same league of wickedness as his systematic mutilation of, and theft from, books in the British Museum now come to light.

And as well as crime and culprits, the motive is finally made plain. 1 used to wonder whether there had not been a com- plicated obscure psychological impulse behind the forgeries, as so often with forgers (or plagiarists). Might not the plebeian Wise have been wreaking some obscure revenge on the toffs of the Rox- burghe Club (who eventually admitted him to their number) and on the world of books as a whole? Maybe so, but he had another and simpler motive: it is now clear that he made at the very least £10,000 from his forgeries and frauds, possibly much more; this at a time, remember, when £1,000 a year was a high professional or business salary.

It is an ever-enthralling story, a sobering tract on the sins of greed and pride, and the ideal post-Christmas present for the book- lover.