Forgers Hall of Fame
A Brief History of Literary Fakes and Frauds
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This is a riff on a Bradford Morrow article of the same name on the Literary Hub from January 2025
Imagine waking up one morning and deciding to become William Shakespeare. You have fantasized about it for years, and now you’re taking the fateful step. Overcome by a heady mixture of zeal, naivete, and hubris, you’re freed from feelings of shame or guilt. Although you live in the late 18th rather than the early 17th Century, time won’t be an impediment for you because you’re gifted, studious, and even visionary in a deranged sort of way. Your father is a renowned collector of the original Shakespeare works, an authority in the field, so this transition is in your blood. Most important, when you present Dad with your handiwork, he will finally come to love you.
William Henry Ireland (1775-1835)
You find some period paper, mix the correct tone of iron gall ink, sharpen your quill. Then, you write a love letter to your wife, “Anne Hatherrewaye” and attach to it a lock of his—well, your—hair bound elegantly with pink and white silk thread you find in your mother’s sewing basket. Next, you scribe some hitherto unknown poems for Anne and, emboldened, fabricate passages of the original manuscripts of Hamlet and King Lear. You produce missives to Queen Elizabeth I. Careful not to create anachronisms, you autograph and annotate the margins of books printed before that other Shakespeare’s death in 1616.
Out of fear that one of the Elizabethan playwright’s legitimate descendants might step forward to lay claim to the growing sheaf of valuable artifacts you’ve so expertly forged, you counterfeit a genealogy that proves the trove is rightfully yours. You draft a legal document, and in it, your alter ego gives him this archive in 1613, because he was grateful to be rescued from the River Thames by one of your imaginary ancestors. You even manufacture a coat of arms that combines your family’s with his.
Your distinguished father is so proud of you for discovering these miraculous long-lost treasures, he publishes a book to memorialize your achievement. To your anxious delight, Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare [sic] becomes a bestselling cause célèbre in 1796, the same year Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk appears, a lurid Gothic novel that also relies upon deceits and masked identities. It isn’t long before your worst fears come true, and eagle-eyed critic Edmund Malone accuses you of fraud that same fraught year, destroying your reputation. Soon, you confess. Ireland is one of the more notorious con men in the history of literary forgery, as old as literature itself.
As soon as man set foot on the slopes of Parnassus, the shadow of the forger fell on the path behind him. The first historian records the first literary fraud.
E.K. Chambers, The History and Motives of Literary Forgeries, 1891
Chambers refers to Herodotus—heralded by Cicero as the “Father of History” and excoriated as the “Father of Lies” by Plutarch since he played fast and loose with historical facts, concocting events in his Histories whenever he didn’t have first-hand knowledge and it suited his purposes. The faker of history, however, told the truth when he fingered its first forger.
Onomacritus of Athens (c. 530–480 BC)
For reasons we can only guess, based on the motivations of later forgers, this devious chresmologue (compiler of oracles), started inventing his own prophecies and verses, interleaving them with those of poet-polymath Musaeus of Athens’s originals. Herodotus accurately states that when one Lasus of Hermione, a lyric poet, snitched, they inevitably caught Onomacritus, and exiled him to Persia, where he simply continued his faux-oracular shenanigans, even urging Xerxes the Great to invade Greece, which he did.
Eugene Field II (1887-1944)
The son of the 19th Century author of children’s verse like “Wynkyn, Blynken, and Nod” and “Little Boy Blue,” Field II specialized in faking Abraham Lincoln documents, forging the president’s ownership autograph in books from his uncle’s library. After the president’s assassination in 1865 and well into the next century, members of this cohort of Lincoln “specialists” were busy reinventing honest Abe’s life and work. Today, Field II is part of a large rogues’ gallery of Lincoln forgers.
Henry Woodhouse (1884-1970)
Born in Italy, Mario Terenzio Enrico Casalegno changed his name after being released from prison for manslaughter in upstate New York. Unbowed, he reinvented himself as a credible scientist, aeronautics expert, economist, historian and forger.
Woodhouse—or Colonel Woodhouse, or Dr. Woodhouse, as he styled himself while ascending into higher echelons of society—produced fake Lincoln documents and missives by the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He even forged letters by his newfound friends Teddy Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and Alexander Graham Bell, to name a few. At some point Woodhouse positioned his creations side by side with authentic materials—not unlike his ancient predecessor, Onomacritus—though he did so in order to sell them at Gimbels Department Store in Manhattan, not archive them in the repositories of the tyrant Pisistratus in Athens. And while he served time for killing a fellow cook (he was a professional cook, too) and his illicit expertise was sometimes called into question, the good doctor Woodhouse was, astonishingly, never exposed as a forger during his lifetime.
If Abraham Lincoln has the unhappy distinction of being among the most forged of historical figures—maybe the most frequently forged of all—at least he attracted the best of the worst. Others famous for their first-rate simulacra of Lincoln documents are Harry D. Sickles (Field II’s partner-in-crime), John Laffite (or Laflin—names are fluid in the forgers’ subculture), and the masterly if careless Charles Weisberg, who died in Lewisburg Prison in Pennsylvania, serving one of several sentences after being convicted on fraud charges. The ink he used in supposed Civil War documents was wrong for the era. He wrote lengthy Lincoln letters, though Lincoln himself tended toward brevity. His last gaffe was to write an authorial inscription in Katherine Mansfield’s posthumously published The Dove’s Nest. You can, as a wise man once said, always get it right most of the time.
Joseph Cosey (1887-1950)
Born Martin Coneely, Cosey ran away from home and led a solitary, shady existence as a small-time crook, living hand to mouth as he developed a taste for alcohol and phony Lincoln letters. Cosey produced many thousands of unsurpassed forgeries of Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe with legendary ease. If you bought him a drink at a bar, he would knock out a masterful forgery for you on the spot; buy him another, get another. An unknown but likely considerable number of his forgeries remain unidentified to this day, reposing in private collections and temperature-controlled archives of institutions around the world. Scholars even cited some of them unwittingly in biographies of Poe and others, perverting our knowledge of influential writers and historical figures, revising American history itself. The mere mention of Cosey can provoke an apoplectic response from otherwise refined, mannerly collectors of 19th-century Americana.
We can appreciate the exasperation of being deceived by Cosey even decades after his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1950. To buy unknowingly an immaculate fake for the same money that an original fetches, only to learn later that it’s by Cosey, not Jefferson or Twain, must be a vexing and expensive misstep. Forgers less skilled than Cosey have tricked even the most experienced collectors.
Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937)
Equal in skill to Cosey, but with an antithetical lifestyle and approach to forgery, Wise was the well-liked, esteemed dean of book collecting in his day and an illustrious bibliographer—president of the Bibliographical Society, no less. His Ashley Library was among England’s finest in private hands, subsidized by his shrewd dealings as a behind-the-scenes bookseller. He also covertly printed severely limited editions of pamphlets by the likes of Tennyson, Kipling, Rossetti, and Swinburne, editing them together from genuine published texts, then falsely dating them earlier than their first editions. Any serious, completist collector of one of his counterfeited writers really had to add these manufactured rarities to their holdings.
Given Wise’s impeccable reputation, together with the fact that he catalogued his fakes alongside genuine first editions in his erudite, elegant bibliographies, the scheme was, for a long time, a failsafe. Offering them a “newly discovered” Browning, Shelley, or Ruskin satisfied prospective buyers, and Wise usually received money. The British Museum was happy to pay the then-strong price of three guineas for a copy of his George Eliot pamphlet, Brother and Sister Sonnets, by Marian Lewes.
An intrepid pair of young rare book dealers, John W. Carter and Henry Graham Pollard, who published their shocking landmark bibliographic investigation, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, ran Wise to ground in 1934, three years before Wise died. While the authors never explicitly accused him of wrongdoing, controversy swirled around him, and he went to his grave denying any involvement.
Given what a precision craft forgery is, it’s intriguing that pride, precociousness, diffidence, depression, alcoholism, and a tendency to suicide feature in the lives of many of its finest practitioners.
While some are gregarious, like Wise, and others reclusive, like Cosey, most major forgers possessed the intellect, creativity, and energy to have pursued legitimate careers as historians, poets, professors, and the like, socially negotiable but for one countermanding trait. All forgers—even those who create fakes to make ends meet—share a compulsion to outwit experts and outmaneuver authorities.
The elite among them try to transcend accepted reality, nudge their bizarre way into the known, and be a player in history from a skewed and illegal angle. The forger’s own genius temporarily subsumes the genius of an authentic writer, which dovetails with it. With a defiant, willful, and full flowering of hubris, they aspire briefly to become the very person they forge. It is an intoxicating enterprise, this fusion of imagination and chicanery.
A white collar crime as sophisticated as it is deplorable.
Eventually, experts identify and expose most forgeries, just like most deceits unravel. Examples abound. In one recent case, a Galileo document dating from 1610, with historically groundbreaking sketches and notes depicting the orbits of Jupiter’s moons, stored at the University of Michigan Library for a century before being outed in August 2022 as the work of the infamous 20th Century Italian forger, Tobia Nicotra. Following extensive research into the document, focusing on a telltale watermark of the paper used by Nicotra, the library announced that their once-priceless “jewel” was a fake and, as a result, the revisionist history of Galileo prompted by this manuscript required yet another revision.
One might reasonably assume that all such proven forgeries would instantly lose their value and become worthless curiosities, but this is not always the case.
Indeed, some counterfeits and forgeries are collectible in themselves and even boast values similar to the originals. In the Sotheby’s October 18, 2024 sale of books from the magnificent Renaissance library of T. Kimball Brooker, an authentic 1502 copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy—one of eight known copies printed on vellum in Venice at the Aldine press, beautifully illuminated, brought $165,100. Several lots later, the Gabiano-Trot forgery of the same book printed on vellum just a year after in Lyon, France—the first edition of Dante ever printed outside Italy—sold at auction for a competitive $158,750. The intrigue behind Lyoness Aldine counterfeits is the stuff of legend, and in the history of intellectual property theft it is hardly surpassable for prowess, guts, and mendacity.
Were there a Forgers Hall of Fame—or, Infamy—influential sleight-of-handwriting artists would certainly include the precocious, deeply troubled
Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770)
As a boy, Chatterton brilliantly forged the spurious, inspired “Rowley” poems that would have a major impact on the Romantic poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. Precoious and deeply troubled, Chatterton killed himself in London at just 17.
James MacPherson (1736-1796)
The Scottish poet, politician, and collector claimed to have discovered and translated a Scottish/Gaelic epic from the third century by a Bard named Ossian. Though the subject of withering attacks from critics like Samuel Johnson, who claimed the “Ossian cycle” was a fraud, MacPherson’s forgery proved popular and is credited, for worse or better, with helping to fashion Scotland’s national self-image.
Robert Spring (1813-1876)
Spring migrated from England to America, erased his past, and set up an antiquarian bookshop in Philadelphia, where he began forging payment orders and letters by George Washington and others. Authorities arrested him, and he fled to Canada, but he returned to America, leaving a trail of fake documents before they apprehended him again. Like Cosey and Wise, Spring has the distinction of being collected in his own right as an upmarket forger whose work, whether identified as fake, is no doubt held in the archives of prestigious collections. Many, if not most, university or public libraries of any size could mount an exhibit of literary forgeries.
Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
Pablo Picasso
Forgers do both. And whether we think of them as twisted imitators, diabolical artificers, antiauthoritarian heroes, or whatever else, it is reasonable to believe that they will continue to cast shadows where legitimate writers tread. As E.K. Chambers long ago suggested, those of us who value originals over fakes will ever owe gratitude to the Lasus of Hermione, Edmund Malones, Carter and Pollards of the world for revealing the truth. After all, the history of literary forgery is still actively being made. More than one bookseller friend of mine is even now involved in exposing brazen forgeries of iconic modern writers.
This kind of ongoing work represents just the kind of erudite, diligent, passionate investigation that will bring forgers to heel at least most of the time. For as long as writers write and forgers forge, there will be astute, idealistic book sleuths—often book dealers, auction houses, and librarians—shining a true light into devious shadows.
The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas
The Truxton Archive at New England’s Crest University is a trove of over 20,000 documents, with an unclear provenance. Some of those documents could upend our view of America’s past, but may also be forgeries. How to tell the difference?
Curtis Durand walks us through the painstaking process of detecting fakes, showing us how our history books are written.
And Finally...
On 11 April:
1814: Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, signs the Treaty of Fontainebleau, abdicating his throne and ending the War of the Sixth Coalition, which had been raging for two years. Though stripped of his power, he kept the title and sailed off to his first exile on the island of Elba.
2007: Kurt Vonnegut dies in Manhattan, age 84, of complications from a fall when he hit his head. The author of Cat’s Cradle, Sirens of Titan and other absurdist novels, he is best known for his semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse Five, or, The Children’s Crusade, partly based on his experience in Schlachthof fünf, where he sheltered from the British bombing of Dresden in January 1945.
And today is NATIONAL SUBMARINE DAY, commemorating this date in 1900 when the US Navy accepted its first true submarine, Holland IV, from her builders at Newport, Rhode Island.