The story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is one of the most touching in literature. The eldest of Edward Moulton-Barrett’s twelve children, she taught herself the classics and published her own translations of Greek and Roman poetry. Forbidden by her father to marry, even in her adulthood, she fell ill—a broken blood vessel was blamed—and spent much of her life unwell and confined. When her eldest brother drowned at Torquay, she entered a long grief. At the age of thirty-nine she was still unwell, still grieving and still not allowed to marry when she began swapping letters with the poet Robert Browning. The pair met, a secret engagement followed, then a secret wedding. In 1846 they eloped to begin a new life in Italy. The lovers’ fifteen joyous years of marriage ended when Elizabeth died in Robert’s arms.
Recent literary historians have revised the story somewhat—Elizabeth’s illness was not so severe, her father not such a tyrant, her marriage not so sublime. But the Brownings’ love affair was demonstrably productive: during their courtship and marriage the pair wrote some of the most admired lines of English verse.
Shakespeare’s sonnets are said to have circulated in manuscript for many years before their 1609 publication. An exceptional rarity in Shakespeare’s day, the manuscript passed from reader to reader within Shakespeare’s closest circle of friends. Today, the manuscript’s whereabouts are unknown. It may not have survived the rise of Puritanism in the seventeenth century. One of the most magical missing books of all time, it would, if found, command a price well into the tens or even the hundreds of millions of dollars, and would be a prize perhaps second only to an autograph manuscript of Hamlet or King Lear.
Influenced by the 1609 Sonnets, and appreciating Shakespeare’s raw passion, Elizabeth chose the sonnet form to express her love for Robert. Giving her sonnet sequence the title ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ to distract from their intensely personal character, Elizabeth had them published in 1850 as part of a collection of her poetical works. In the 1890s, further details of the sonnets’ history came to light. The 1850 appearance was not, it seemed, the true first edition.
Literary heavyweight and occasional Shakespearean Edmund Gosse recounted in 1894 ‘a very pretty episode in literary history’.
[The young couple’s custom was] to write alone, and not to show each other what they had written…One day, early in 1847, their breakfast being over, Mrs Browning went upstairs, while her husband stood at the window watching the street till the table should be cleared. He was presently aware of someone behind him, though the servant was gone. It was Mrs Browning, who held him by the shoulder to prevent his turning to look at her, and at the same time pushed a packet of papers into the pocket of his coat. She told him to read that and to tear it up if he did not like it; and then she fled again to her own room.
Mr Browning seated himself at the table and unfolded the parcel. It contained the series of sonnets which have now become so illustrious. As he read, his emotion and delight may be conceived. Before he had finished it was impossible for him to restrain himself, and, regardless of his promise, he rushed upstairs and stormed that guarded citadel. He was early conscious that these were treasures not to be kept from the world; ‘I dared not reserve to myself,’ he said, ‘the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare’s.’ But Mrs Browning was very loth indeed to consent to the publication of what had been the very notes and chronicle of her betrothal.
At length she was persuaded to permit her friend, Miss Mary Russell Mitford, to whom they had originally been sent in manuscript, to pass them through the press…Accordingly, a small volume was printed, entitled Sonnets / by E.B.B. / Reading / Not for Publication / 1847 / an octavo of 47 pages.
That little pamphlet became one of the most sought-after modern rarities. Collectors in Britain and America climbed over each other to own a copy from an impression that numbered as few as thirty. When copies came on the market in the first decades of the twentieth century, they changed hands for high prices—as much as US$1250 at auction in America. In his 1918 work, A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the eminent bookman Thomas J. Wise confirmed the 1847 Sonnets’ status as the cornerstone of any Browning collection.
Wise included in the bibliography the story of how he himself came to own a copy of the rare pamphlet.
Dr W. C. Bennett, who had been Miss Mitford’s intimate friend…disposed of some ten or twelve copies of the Sonnets which he had received from her hands. In one of these copies, evidently the one dedicated by Miss Mitford to her own use, was inserted a manuscript of Future and Past…This copy, with the manuscript sonnet inserted, I purchased from Dr Bennett; it is one of my most valued possessions.
A short and gouty Honorary Fellow of Oxford’s Worcester College, Wise had climbed from humble origins to stand at the very top of the book world. Bibliographer of Ruskin, Swinburne, Tennyson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, the Brontës, Conrad, Keats and both Brownings. Collector of and dealer in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Member of the Roxburghe Club; Friend of the Bodleian; President of the Bibliographical Society; Secretary of the Shelley Society; devotee of the Browning Society.
Wise assembled a spectacular collection of books and called it the Ashley Library. With a scope that stretched back to Elizabethan times, the collection was widely regarded as the best library of English literature in non-institutional hands. Gosse called it ‘the finest private library in the kingdom’. It was remarkably strong in literary manuscripts and the rarest printed editions. For people in the book world, Wise was a force to be reckoned with. Under the Ashley Library imprint he issued bibliographies and ‘private printings of choice unpublished things’ for connoisseurs and bibliophiles. His bibliographies were monoliths: unshakeably authoritative and eminently reliable. Ever-ready to call out bibliographical deceptions—‘“fakes” are to him what rats are to a terrier’, Gosse wrote—he jumped hard and fast on any upstarts who dared disagree with his bibliographical pronouncements and methods.
There was something fishy, though, about the 1847 Sonnets. Despite the personal content and the romantic backstory, not one of the copies was inscribed by the author. All the copies looked remarkably crisp, and recent. Supposedly circulating since the middle of the century, they lacked any kind of sale record before the 1890s. And they bore a family resemblance to other first-edition pamphlets in recent circulation, all of them with early dates, none with the expected inscriptions or bookplates or signs of age. Those pamphlets included works by other respected nineteenth-century authors: Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Ruskin, Lord Alfred Tennyson. Even though Wise had endorsed the 1847 Sonnets by including them in his Barrett Browning bibliography, the young bookseller John Carter heard rumours that cast doubt on the Sonnets’ credibility. He asked about the volume at Quaritch’s bookshop, and received the reply: ‘It is a book we don’t much care for.’
With his bookseller colleague Graham Pollard, and using Malone-like rigour and methods, Carter embarked on a thorough investigation of the 1847 Sonnets. Carter and Pollard studied the book’s typography, paper, provenance, contents, publication history and sale history. In 1934 the booksellers published their electrifying findings under a consciously Malonite title: An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets. The 1847 edition of the Sonnets, they discovered, was just one part of an audacious program of forgeries.
The method of production was ingenious. Using unsuspecting mainstream printers such as Richard Clay & Sons, the forger or forgers selected well-known texts, then re-set and re-printed them with falsely dated title pages and with bogus publishing imprints. The false dates created ‘pre-firsts’ that cashed in on the Dibdin-inspired appetite for first editions. The scam was more sophisticated than Ireland’s, and much harder to detect, though easier to repeat. The falsely dated new editions could not be compared to ‘genuine’ examples, because there were none. To help legitimise the books, the forgers placed them in major institutional collections such as the British Museum, the Cambridge University Library and the Bodleian.
The Enquiry ignited an explosive exposure. Not only were the books forgeries, but the perpetrator was none other than the great bibliographer himself, the Ashley Librarian, the doyen of literary society, Thomas Wise. Seemingly respectable Wise was in fact as much a thief as Barrington. The Marquess of Blandford would not be the only Roxburghe member to bring disgrace on the Club.
Wise had perpetrated the fraud with a co-conspirator, Harry Buxton Forman, the author of another Barrett Browning bibliography, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Her Scarcer Books (privately printed, 1896). At the beginning of their fraud, the forgers experimented with a variety of scams and formats before settling on their method. Their very first forgery—Galatea Secunda, by the manqué poet and Shakespeare editor Richard Hengist Horne—was a broadside with a fake Melbourne imprint. Up to a hundred Wise–Forman forgeries followed, many with equally false imprints. The forgery of Matthew Arnold’s St Brandan, for example, identifies its publisher as ‘E. W. & A. Skipwith’ and its printer as ‘J. S. Seaton & Co.’ Both firms were entirely made up. Statements of rarity were also falsified. The editions were not so small as claimed; copies of the ‘rarest’ Wisean pamphlets turn up surprisingly often.
A key part of Wise and Forman’s M.O. was to include the forgeries in their bibliographies. Reading them now, and seeing how prominently the forgeries appear there, it is hard not to think that the bibliographies were produced for the sole purpose of furthering the scam.
Typographical analysis played a large part in the exposure. Carter and Pollard noticed that many of the circulating modern pamphlets had been printed in the same typeface, and that one piece of type was a misfit: a broken-backed ‘f’, which showed that the different volumes, supposedly produced by different printers over a span of decades, had actually been made at the one printery. The crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers suggested an alternative title for the Enquiry: ‘The Case of the Crook-backed F’. To the typographical evidence Carter and Pollard added a forensic analysis of the pamphlets’ paper; it contained esparto grass and ‘chemical wood’, not used in papermaking at the purported dates of many of the pamphlets.
Wise tried to defend himself in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement. He also changed his story about the 1847 Sonnets, in an attempt to shift blame towards Buxton Forman, who had died in 1917, and away from Dr Bennett, whose family were close to the formidable bookman Sydney Cockerell.
I will now consider the theory of unauthorised printing. With whom could this have originated? One name must be cleared out of the way at once:…In the introduction to ‘A Browning Library,’ 1929, writing forty-three years after the event, I told the story of a visit to W. C. Bennett in 1886, and said that I acquired my two copies of the 1847 book from him… What I actually brought away with me was his own sonnets, ‘My Sonnets,’ privately printed at Greenwich in 1843. The confusion of two such books may seem incredible, even after thirty-six years. It is to be explained by the subjects of our conversation: his friendship with Mary Russell Mitford, our common interest in the Brownings, Mrs Browning’s association with Miss Mitford and the presence among his poems of two sonnets, one on Robert and the other on E. B. Browning, and the mention of both of them in yet another sonnet. In size and outward appearance the two books are almost identical.
My two copies came to me not from W. C. Bennett but from Harry Buxton Forman. From whom did he obtain them? Neither I nor his son Mr Maurice Buxton Forman can tell with any certainty.
Wise’s squirming revision drew ridicule. Writing as ‘Richard Gullible’, Richard Jennings produced new versions of Wise’s account and retraction.
I had agreed, one memorable evening, to dine with my dear old friend, Clem Stunter, whom you may remember as the author of Banjo Ditties and Odes for Bargees. Clem, I well remember, lived on the banks of Thames Reach near Rotherhithe. So, immediately after the opening of the pork shops in Whitechapel Highway, I picked up Clem not far from Clink Street and we made our way merrily enough—for the gin palaces were then not closed at fixed hours—to my old friend’s neat villa down Wapping Stairs. After a savoury meal of tripe and onions, washed down with a mug of double Bass, I saw Mrs Clem, who was bending over the washer, taking something out of her hair. ‘Curl papers, mother?’ said my dear old pal laughingly. And in high good humour his faithful wife untwisted from her head this very poem which I now transcribe…‘Why, Clem,’ I remember saying, ‘this may be Browning.’ ‘It might be blacking for all I care,’ he jovially answered, and added: ‘How much?’ He had no bank account, hadn’t Clem; so, placing a sovereign on the kitchen dresser—we were of course on the gold standard in those days—I came away the proud possessor of what I am convinced is an unpublished poem by the Mark Tapley of English verse.
Jennings added a Wisean postscript:
Since I communicated the poem to Mr Carter I have become increasingly uncertain whether I did, in fact or fiction, receive this most interesting copy of verses from the late Mr Stunter. More and more vividly, as I sit thinking of it, it comes over me that all I bought of my good friend Clem, in those days or nights, was a limited issue—an issue limited, I think he told me, to 10,500 copies—of my dear pal’s lively volume Crumpets for Crimps. This was a sizeable tome illustrated with colour plates by my aged Chum’s ‘Old Dutch’ as he used to call her…I had much difficulty in squeezing the volume into the capacious pocket of my Macfarlane, as I made my way home to tell my fellow-collectors the good news. From whom then—you may ask—did I receive the poem by R. B.? It was (if an old man’s memory may be trusted) from a friend of a friend of the late Sir Edmund Gosse’s friend of the Poet. His name escapes me. But in those jolly days we were all friends together.
Giving a false account of Sonnets from the Portuguese was one of several ways in which Edmund Gosse became embroiled in the Wise affair. He was entangled to such an extent that American writers would accuse him of being a primary co-conspirator with Wise and Forman in the forgeries.
Some years after the Enquiry was published, a letter came to light that supplied the final, definitive proof of Wise and Forman’s guilt. Now referred to as the Pforzheimer Document, the letter captures an argument in which Forman accuses Wise of being dishonestly vague about the number of copies of his semi-legitimate Ashley Library publications. Wise answers, ‘Quite so. And we print “Last Tournament” in 1896, and want “someone to think” it was printed in 1871! The moral position is exactly the same!’
Wise’s deception seems shocking in its scale, and even more so against his respectable veneer. But Wise was just the latest version of a criminal type. He was the latest update of John Payne Collier.
In 1806, at the age of seventeen, Collier bought a Third Folio in Baldwin’s Gardens. ‘I fancied it the First Edition and a great prize,’ he later wrote. In 1808 he joined his father as a reporter at The Times. A friend of John Keats and other famous poets and authors, Collier was doing well at The Times until he misreported a parliamentary speech. This and other missteps led him to move to the Morning Chronicle. A law reporter by day, in the evenings he pursued his love of books.
Inspired by Drake’s Shakespeare and His Times, Collier published Poetical Decameron (1820) in which he opined on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, including Shakespeare’s sources; he analysed Barnaby Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession as a source for Twelfth Night, for example. The public largely neglected his writings until, in 1831, he issued The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare. Collier’s ambition, like Steevens’, was to outdo Malone. The History was well received; the Duke of Devonshire liked it so much he gave its author a hundred pounds and appointed him paid curator and adviser to the library at Devonshire House.
Collier was now respectable. He joined the Garrick Club and the Society of Antiquaries, and co-founded the Shakespeare Society. He met a legion of aristocratic bibliophiles. The Earl of Ellesmere gave him unfettered access to the collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean papers at Bridgewater House. Some of the papers were still in bundles last tied up in the seventeenth century. For Collier, equipped with such new friends and new income and old documents, Shakespearean discoveries were inevitable. In 1835 he published New Facts Regarding the Life of Shakespeare, in which he thanked the Earl for having ‘laid open the manuscript stores of his noble family with a liberality worthy of his rank and race’.
The revelations in New Facts were many: precise details of Shakespeare’s first decade in the theatre, even details of his wardrobe and shareholdings; a letter from Henry Wriothesley to an Ellesmere ancestor; a royal patent for a children’s theatre. Further Collier publications would follow, some of them auspiced by the Shakespeare Society and all containing new insights and titbits.
By now, the pattern is sounding appallingly familiar, echoing not just Wise but also William-Henry Ireland. Collier was of course a fraud, more competent than Ireland but no less devious. The Shakespeare Society was a legitimate-seeming front for sundry criminal enterprises. Small and large falsehoods filled Collier’s History, New Facts and subsequent editorial efforts. Frustrated, like Ireland, by the lack of Shakespearean documentary evidence, he had manufactured it. There were multiple strings to his forger’s bow. The children’s patent and some of the letters were written from scratch on leaves removed from old books. (Hugh Junor Browne was one of the dupes taken in by Collier’s Wriothesley–Ellesmere letter.) Other letters were original but with new interlineations.
James Halliwell issued his Observations on the Shaksperian Forgeries at Bridgewater House in 1853. This denounced Collier’s discoveries but stopped short of accusing Collier of forgery. The end for Collier’s credibility came when people looked more closely at the Perkins Second Folio.
Supposedly bought for thirty shillings from a country library sale, the book contained thousands of annotations that looked to have been made at an early date. The book was incomplete, dog-eared and dirty; stained by ‘wine, beer and other liquids’; burned here and there by ‘the lighted snuff of a candle, or by the ashes of tobacco’. Speculating that the book had been owned by a careless descendant of Richard Perkins, who acted in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in 1632, Collier suggested that the many annotations were made by someone with access to early, ‘purer’ versions of Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps manuscripts prepared for performances in the Bard’s lifetime. Here, then, was a hint as to the use and perhaps even the whereabouts of Shakespeare’s library.
Literary detective Andrew Brae was unconvinced, and he said so, naming Collier in an 1855 public letter entitled ‘On Literary Cookery’. Collier sued for libel, swearing that he had not inserted ‘a single word, stop, sign, note, correction, alteration or emendation’ that had not been added soon after the Second Folio’s publication. The legal action petered out but further problems soon arrived. Sir Frederic Madden, the foremost palaeographer of the era, took a look at the Folio. For Madden, the chicanery was obvious immediately. Not only was the handwriting wrong, but he could see, partly erased, the modern pencil marks that the forger had laid down to guide his pen. Chemical testing by a mineralogist confirmed that the pencil marks were beneath the ink notes, and that the ink was not ink at all but a modern watercolour formulation.
Madden and his assistant, Nicholas Hamilton, were now sure that Collier had written both the pencil notes, which were clearly in his handwriting, and the final annotations. Collier’s jig was up. In another homage to Edmond Malone, Hamilton published the results of his and Madden’s research as the 1860 Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr J. Payne Collier’s Annotated Shakespeare, Folio, 1632; and of Certain Shakespearian Documents Likewise Published by Mr Collier.
Unlike Carter and Pollard, Hamilton named the forger in his Inquiry. Collier’s conduct after his exposure followed a pattern painfully similar to Wise’s. Make hopeless counterblows. Issue ridiculous and elaborate defences. Call on a dwindling number of influential friends for support. Fire barbs at deserting former friends. Do not repent.
Just as some of Shakespeare’s earliest books suffer from the Barrington Problem, so, too, some suffer from the Wise Problem.
In 1619, three years after Shakespeare’s death and just four years before the First Folio, William Jaggard printed a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Only ten plays were included: Henry V; King Lear; The Merchant of Venice; The Merry Wives of Windsor; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Sir John Oldcastle; A Yorkshire Tragedy; and The Whole Contention Between the Two Famous Houses, Lancaster and York—the latter a joining of two playtexts, the early versions of II Henry VI and III Henry VI.
Not all of the plays are strictly Shakespearean. Sir John Oldcastle appeared in the second printing of the Shakespeare Third Folio but is currently thought to be a collaborative work, executed by several authors, none of whom was Shakespeare. A Yorkshire Tragedy, too, belongs to the ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’; as already noted, it is thought to have been written by Thomas Middleton. Pericles, Prince of Tyre is now regarded as at least partly Shakespearean, though it was excluded from the First Folio. George Wilkins was probably the play’s principal co-author.
In the production of the 1619 edition, Jaggard seems to have collaborated with the stationer Thomas Pavier to print the plays in a large quarto format. This seemingly benign project was actually an extremely curious one. In a mysterious Wisean move, Jaggard and Pavier printed six of the ten plays with false title-page dates: not 1619 but 1600, 1608 or 1609. Jaggard and Pavier also used false imprints: four of the plays were falsely attributed to other named stationers. For these reasons, the 1619 collected edition is known as the ‘False Folio’. (At least one edition of Venus and Adonis also appeared with a false title-page date. Burton’s copy, now in the Bodleian, purports to be an edition from 1602, but was in fact printed in 1607 or 1608.)
What were Jaggard and Pavier up to? Falsely dating the plays may have been a way to more safely print content that the publishers did not own. It may have been a ruse to make the plays seem more authoritative, more antiquarian, closer to the author—perhaps in a pre-Dibdinian exercise in first-edition mongering. The false imprints may have been an attempt to make the new quartos look more like the originals. Or the whole thing could have been a stunt to stoke interest in the forthcoming First Folio, which Jaggard would soon print and publish. (Jaggard had already printed the allonymous, Barringtonian The Passionate Pilgrim as Shakespeare’s in 1599 and again in 1612, and had printed at least one genuinely Shakespearean quarto play.)
Today, only two complete copies of the False Folio are known to have survived; they are held by the Folger and the Special Collections of Texas Christian University. Other libraries, including the British Library, hold individual Jaggard–Pavier quartos. At the start of the twentieth century, Shakespeare scholar and Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum Alfred William Pollard was the first to analyse the False Folio in any detail. He, like everyone since, could not provide a satisfactory answer as to what was going on.
Fake first editions were not Thomas Wise’s only scam. Unlike Ireland, Wise never tried to forge a Jacobean play; instead, he tore out leaves from genuine editions.
After Wise died in 1937, the British Museum purchased the Ashley Library from his widow for £66,000. The Museum had for many years been aware of thefts from its holdings of seventeenth-century plays—plays such as Middleton’s Family of Love (1608), Jonson’s The Case Is Alter’d (1609) and John Webster’s The Devils Law-case (1623). The Ashley copy of The Case Is Alter’d gave the game away. Four leaves at the end had been inlaid and repaired. One of the two Museum copies lacked precisely those four leaves, and had been cropped precisely where the Ashley copy was restored. A title leaf in the Museum copy had also been stolen; that leaf, with the same pattern of restoration, was also found in the Ashley copy.
This discovery was the catalyst for a wider search of the Ashley acquisitions. In 1956 bibliographer D. F. Foxon announced the results of the search: a substantial number of leaves stolen from early seventeenth-century plays in the British Museum had been found in the Ashley Library copies of the same plays.
For this part of his scam, Wise’s method was crudely simple. Alfred W. Pollard was Wise’s friend and fellow bookman. Pollard authored an introduction for a volume of Wise’s magnum opus, the eleven-volume Ashley Library Catalogue (1922–36). The following year he wrote to Wise, praising him as the ‘One Provident Man who has been buying and buying the right things’. In his role as Keeper of Printed Books, Pollard accepted Wise’s forged modern pamphlets into the British Museum’s collections, thereby helping to legitimise them. He also gave Wise privileged access to the same collections. ‘Trusted readers’ of Wise’s apparent standing were allowed to keep books out on a reserved desk; no one checked to see if Wise took the books home overnight. Overawed junior members of the Museum’s staff left him alone in the alcoved ‘Large Room’.
Using these privileges, Wise stole leaves and added them to plays he already owned. Some of the stolen leaves enlarged and improved the Ashley Library’s holdings; some helped to make up copies for sale to Wise’s main American customer, John Henry Wrenn; and other thefts enhanced copies for sale to other collectors. Thus engaged in a commercial operation, Wise mistreated his customers as much as he mistreated the books. The most inferior leaves—those that were stained, creased, cropped, wormed or worn—ended up in the Wrenn copies, while the cleaner and crisper leaves were used in the Ashley copies. The wreckage was devastating. Pristine, complete and exceptionally rare copies were cut up and blended together to make mongrel editions. Wise added, for example, a third-edition title page to a rare first-edition play because the later title page was cleaner. In this way, he destroyed the books’ bibliographical integrity.
Today, retracing and unravelling Wise’s vandalism requires a delicate effort of matching: lining up torn pages like a seventeenth-century jigsaw puzzle; matching stains; matching ‘stab holes’ from where pamphlet pages were sewn together with thread; matching ancient worm-holes, an infallible method due to the idiosyncrasy of the holes. Different plays were printed on different paper, as evidenced by watermarks and ‘chain lines’. When making up composite volumes, Wise did not attempt to match paper. Today, mismatched watermarks and lines are another giveaway of Wise’s handiwork, and another guide for the curators who try to make restorative matches. Mixed feelings confront those curators: each mating is a happy reunion, but also painful proof of the scale of Wise’s crimes.
Of the 206 leaves first discovered as stolen from the Museum’s early quartos, eighty-nine were found in Ashley copies and sixty in Wrenn copies. These numbers have continued to rise as more of Wise’s thefts have come to light.
Just as Wise had antecedents as a forger, he also had them as a thief.
James Halliwell was an accomplished Shakespearean scholar and antiquarian. In 1848 he published a Life of Shakespeare. Other projects included his limited folio edition (150 copies) of Shakespeare’s works; his Descriptive Calendar of the Ancient Manuscripts and Records in the Possession of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon; a History of New Place; and his campaign to buy Shakespeare’s ‘home’ (a nineteenth-century counterfeit of the sixteenth-century original) for the Stratford municipality. A bit-part player in Collier’s exposure, Halliwell made an appalling return to the stage when he himself was exposed as England’s most deplorable nineteenth-century thief of valuable books and manuscripts.
Like Wise, Halliwell had enjoyed privileged access to the best libraries—until people started noticing things going missing. Invited at the age of twenty-one to visit the wonderful library of the great bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps, Halliwell was as impressed by the library as he was by Phillipps’s daughter Henrietta. Or perhaps Halliwell thought marriage to Henrietta would be a way to win both prizes.
An engagement quickly followed. But when Phillipps learned that Halliwell had been accused of stealing manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge, the horrified bibliophile refused to bless the marriage. (An anonymous letter challenged Phillipps to ask Halliwell ‘where those valuable books came from that were sold by Sotheby two years ago, to save him from a prison’.) The couple eloped; Henrietta was cut off irrevocably; and Phillipps launched a sadistic public campaign to destroy what remained of Halliwell’s reputation. Halliwell, though, had a mad streak as well, and did much to darken his own name. On the way out of Sir Thomas’s mansion he seems to have taken away not just the knight’s daughter but also his most valuable book—a first printing of Hamlet (1603), one of only two known copies. Halliwell sold the Hamlet to the British Museum, but not before mutilating it by removing its title page. In Halliwell’s career as a thief, he stole thousands of books and manuscripts.
In 1932 E. V. Lucas recalled how Halliwell, in a candid moment at the age of about sixty, elucidated his attitude to rare books and documents: ‘If he ever chanced to see anything in anyone else’s house or in a museum that he thought he was more worthy to possess…he had no scruples about taking it.’ Halliwell also had a grievous habit of cutting up seventeenth-century books and pasting their dismembered parts into scrapbooks. He did this hundreds of times. For librarians and curators and scholars, Halliwell’s crimes pose a reunion challenge that is even more dispiriting than Wise’s.
The book world struggles with the Wise case. In some circles, an interest in Wise’s productions is frowned upon. They make bibliographers and booksellers nervous. They are difficult to catalogue. Booksellers feel leery about knowingly selling forgeries. Uncomfortable reminders of a dark episode, the books show how frothy and precarious the book market can be, especially the market for ‘first editions’. They also show up the fallibility, even the gullibility, of ‘experts’. Some booksellers refuse to deal with the books at all. The book trade’s convulsions and conniptions about Wise and his forgeries are a small taste of how the trade would react to proof that Shakespeare’s works were a colossal hoax.
A surprisingly high number of booksellers, though, still approach the Wise pamphlets naively, buying and selling them on the basis that they are what they say they are. This presents an opportunity for book dealers because, perversely, the forgeries are now worth much more than the real thing. Who wants to pay good money these days for a Matthew Arnold first edition, for example, or a Ruskin? But a Wise forgery, now that’s interesting. When I was a graduate student, that wrinkle in the market was very welcome. Wise’s creation of bogus imprints is a boon on the internet, where books can be searched by publisher or printer. Worth more than ten times the books they purport to be, bargain-priced forgeries are only a keyword search away.
In their early decades, the forgeries conspicuously lacked a sale record. They certainly have one now. In 2005 John Carter’s own copy of the 1847 Sonnets sold at Christie’s for US$19,200 against an estimate of US$5000 to US$7000.
For the search for Shakespeare’s library, the lessons from the Wise case are salutary. Don’t take at face value any book’s cover, endpapers, dedication, title page, imprint page, preliminary matter, contents, endmatter or provenance. Beware of book-world bullies and blowhards. Scoundrels like Wise, Forman, Collier and Halliwell set back the search for Shakespeare’s library, but also equipped us with new tools and sharper eyes. The outing of Wise as a fraudster enabled a new generation of book detectives to take Edmond Malone’s investigative methods to a whole new level.
Editor Wilfred Partington called Wise the ‘Emperor and Grand Lama of Forgers’. Collier, Halliwell and Wise vie for the title of Most Audacious Nineteenth-Century Book Fraudster. If Shakespearean authorship is a hoax, men such as these, and those behind the Barrington fraud, reveal the possible mentality of the hoaxsters, and hint at how the fraud might have been executed. The Pforzheimer Document set a new benchmark of proof for all bibliomysteries, including the Shakespeare Authorship Question and the mystery of his missing library. Will someone one day come forward with a succinct and authoritative document that gives away a Shakespearean conspiracy? Brenda James and Bill Rubinstein believe they have done just that.