A True Detective Story
By JOHN SPARROW
A MASTER of the art of fraud has, it seems, of late been at work among us : his name is not yet known, though his secret is now given to the public. The book* announcing this discovery is a detective story, but it differs in two ways from most stories of its kind ; it is true, and it is 'written by the detectives themselves. Its contents are .sensational: the public has for years been tricked into spending thousands of pounds by means of a series of forgeries. The objects forged were books, of a sort for which collectors are prepared to give high prices. The authors of this Enquiry reconstruct the conception and execution of the fraud so luckily and excitingly that even those who know nothing of book-auctions and bibliography will share the thrill with which their story must inspire the expert, and ask, as eagerly as he, " Who was the forger ? "
Ironically enough, it was the forger's chef d'oeuvre that led to the exposure—a private issue of the Sonnets from the Portuguese purporting to have been printed secretly three years before the Sonnets were given to the world in Mrs. Browning's Poems in 1850. This rare and romantic little book, since it first appeared at auction in 1901, has fetched prices averaging almost £100. The story of its origin—of how Mrs. Browning, in 1847, was persuaded by Browning to allow Miss Mitford to get the poems printed at Reading—was first told in print by Edmund Gosse in 1894, on the authority of an anonymous friend, who claimed to have it from Browning him- self. This is the first scent for the detective. If Gosse's inform- ant could be identified, the key to the whole imposture might be supplied ; his story now appears to be an invention made up in order to provide a historical origin for the forgery, and for it he is the sole first-hand authority.
Mr. Carter and Mr. Pollard describe how their suspicions of this story were sharpened by several matters connected with the book itself : though printed for distribution among friends, not a single presentation copy of it could be traced, and none containing marks of contemporary ownership or in contemporary binding ; the text of 1850 (virtually identical with that of 1847) was set up, it seems, from a MS. copy, and not from the 1847 edition, as would have been natural if the 1847 edition had existed ; there is no reference to the book in Miss Mitford's correspondence with Mrs. Browning ; finally, Browning himself (in a letter not printed till 1933) makes it plain that he did not see the Sonnets till 1849. The case against the genuineness of all known copies of the Reading Sonnets of 1847, and against such an edition ever having existed, could hardly be stronger, and the tale of how these suspicions were amassed and of the hunt for the evidence which verified them, is an enthralling one to read.
Next, the detectives had recourse to the modern methods of the microscope and the laboratory. Their tests involved technical research, but lucidly explained as they are in this Enquiry, the ordinary reader of detective fiction will follow them with ease. Inquiry into the history of paper-making showed that any book printed in England on paper con- taining a large proportion of " chemical wood " must have been printed after 1874. The microscope reveals a large proportion of chemical wood in the paper of the Reading
Sonnets. Next, by investigating the records of type- foundries, the authors prove that the type in which the book was printed was not manufactured till 1880, and that being a hybrid, made up by the chance mixture of two different founts, it must hive been peculiar to a single printing house—a particularly ingenious piece of detection.
• An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets. By John Carter and Graham Pollard. (Constable. 15s.) Thus the spuriousness of the Reading Sonnets was definitely, triumphantly, established : the book must have been printed more than thirty years after its purported date.
Further investigation produced still more startling results. Patient search in libraries, in auction-records, in directories, pointed a mass of suspicions of the kind which fell upon the Reading Sonnets towards some fifty similar pamphlets— private editions, " trial copies," " pre-first " issues, of works by Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, Thackeray, and others. Type and paper tests proved that more than half of these were forgeries, and the total body of evidence left little doubt of the spuriousness of the remainder. It was clear that a fraud on an unprecedented scale had imposed upon the book-collecting world for nearly half a century, and that behind the whole series of fabrications was a single brain.
The fraud was of an original kind. To counterfeit a book is well-nigh impossible : comparison with the genuine book is sure to bring detection. Our forger therefore hit upon a new idea : he did not imitate books, he invented them. He usually printed, in pamphlet form, pieces belonging to collected volumes, as if the author had had a private issue of the particular piece printed before the appearance of the book in which it was to be included. Such a spurious first edition did not have to fear comparison with a genuine copy, because no genuine copy ever existed.
Who then was the delinquent ? One obvious trail led to a dead end : Messrs. Clay, the printers to whom the forger's characteristic type-fount was traced (and who must in the 'eighties and 'nineties, in all innocence, have executed his orders), have no records of before 1911. The inquirers therefore turned to the provenance of the known copies 'of the forgeries : to what source could they be traced ? In the course of this investigation inquiry was made of a South London bookseller in whose catalogues they had been offered in surprising quantities. His own innocence was beyond question : for one thing, he was but ten years old when the forgeries began to appear. He had bought his copies, with other like pamphlets, before the War, cheaply in large quantities from Mr. T. J. Wise. Mr. Wise is the doyen of book-collectors. His Ashley Library is probably the forest private collection ever formed ; his experience, his generosity, his acuteness, his immense authority in bibliographical matters, are known over the whole world. His acceptance of the forgeries as genuine has had a wide effect, not least because they appeared, labelled as of varying degrees of rarity, in the magnificent catalogue of the Ashley Library and in his authoritative bibliographies of Swinburne, Browning, Tennyson and others. It is not too much to hope that when he recounts how he acquired his copies of the pamphlets we shall have is our hands material for identifying their forger.t Meanwhile collectors must begin to weed out their libraries. They will not welcome the knowledge which prevents from resting unsuspected on their shelves books for which they have paid high prices, and they may be forgiven if they consider the affair pre-eminently one in which ignorance is bliss.
t Since this was written Mr. Wise in a Press interview suggests that Richard Herne Shepherd may have been the forger. Shepherd, however, died before the series of epuria listed in the Enquiry was complete. Mr. Wise also indicates H. Buxton Forman as a source of his copies of the pamphlets. Forman's innocence seems to be proved by the fact that he questioned Gosse's story of the origin of the Sonnets and pressed for the name of his informant during Gosse's lifetime, which he could not conceivably have done if he told Geese the story himself. or even had been (as the forger must have been) a party to its invention.
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