Well done, you forgers

John Sutherland

• The Two Forgers: A Biography of Harry Buxton Forman and Thomas James Wise by John Collins
  Scolar, 317 pp, £27.50, May 1992, ISBN 0 85967 754 0
• Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship by Anthony Grafton
  Princeton, 157 pp, £10.75, May 1990, ISBN 0 691 05544 0

It is difficult to talk sensibly about literary forgery when one has to call it that. The term carries heavy legal baggage. Criminal forgery – in the form of counterfeit money or altered wills – is a major felony. Like poisoning, or arson, it receives sentences of medieval harshness. Literary forgery is much hazier. Meum and Tuum are routinely confused in creative writing. Many of literature’s conventions – the ‘found’ manuscript, the ‘true history’, pseudonymy – originate in primitive forgery, or mimic it. It is not clear that even an arch literary forger like Thomas J. Wise actually committed a criminal act for which he could be prosecuted by the DPP. It would be sensible to replace the term ‘literary forgery’ with Anthony Grafton’s neologism, ‘pseudepigrapha’. This blanket description would cover everything from Chatterton’s fake poems to George MacDonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman’ spoofs without any automatic presumptions of wrong-doing.