Forgeries and the Romantics
Major Byron : The Incredible Career of a Literary Forger. By Theodore G. Ehrsam. (Murray. ;Ss.) THE discovery of T. J. Wise's literary forgeries caused astonishment because of his standing as a gentlemanly bibliophile. Yet the harm he did was limited, and much of his cataloguing retains its value. The notorious Major Byron is another kettle of fish. He has prac- tically rotted the nineteenth-century manuscript market and com- pelled scholars and collectors to turn from an excess of trust to a possible excess of suspicion. Unlike Wise, Major Byron was never gentlemanly. He was the complete adventurer, putting out faked goods for sale, wangling free Atlantic passages through plausible impostures, and in general—having plundered Byron and Shelley for his raw material—living on his wits. When he had selected his career and parentage, he became an adept at glimpsing and copying genuine letters, piecing them up with other men's compositions, and shaping his handwriting to emulate the poets'.
Dr. Ehrsam has been studying the forgeries for several years, in the course of which he has faced some argument on this side of the Atlantic, and escaped from a big booby-trap on the other. There he had allowed himself to be mixed up in a tendentious composite publication called The Shelley Legend. Freed from its false pre- mises he has now produced a piece of sound, unbiased research. Shelley, Byron and even Keats enthusiasts will need to consult it, whether or not they agree with all its findings. It give& as full an account as documents will yield of Major Byron's active career, and examines the principal forgeries. His portrait still lacks a label ; for if the Major was not—as he was not—the son of Byron and the Spanish Countess de Luna, whose son was he ? Major, Colonel, alias de Gibler, he arrived in England from the Continent and America in the 'forties complete with his chosen identity, begged documents and loans from the unwary, tricked the publishers Murray and Moxon, hoodwinked the Shelleys, and pushed off to the States with his projected Byron book when Britain grew sceptical.
The New York Press gave him and the " Inedited Works " a mixed reception. The Evening Mirror found him a sham and a humbug with the look of a sneak, and was sued for libel. But the American Review believed and praised. It was due to the forger's cunning that- there was always someone to accept the letters as genuine, because so many authentic texts and manuscripts were included.
So it continues. For ove; a hundred years those who should-have known their Shelley and Byron have been tricked repeatedly. Dr. Ehrsam points out several instances where the forger has added a signature to a genuine unsigned manuscript to increase its market value. This he now believes to be the case with the endlessly- discussed letter of Shelley to Mary after Harriet's death. His con- clusions rest on a technical scrutiny of ink and paper ; concerning the tone of the letter he suggests that, if the signature had not been so patently spurious and T. J. Wise had not been the poiSessor, the tone would have passed unquestioned. In fact it was questioned while T. J. Wise was sacrosanct—but let the argUment 'rest !
Dr. Ehrsam notes two significant factors in the confusion over Shelley's letters. First, Mary Shelley was so anxious to obtain texts of missing letters that she was ready to buy anything, whether copy or original. Yet Mary had her strictures when she rightly suspected that the (unknown) seller was out for money. Secondly, the poet's daughter-in-law, Lady Shelley, was no judge of his handwriting and frequently treasured a forgery while rejecting an original. A glance at some of the copies—too poor for forgeries—she enshrined in the Bodleian amply bears this out? At his best, though, as shown in the facsimiles and comparisons reproduced here, the Major's skill is alarming ; alarming since so much-remains unchecked.
SYLVA NORMAN.
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