Held on the first Thursday of the month, the Folger’s virtual book club is free and open to all. To spark discussion, speakers provide historical context, throw in trivia, and speak to relevant items from the library collection in a brief presentation to participants before small-group discussion begins.
Here, we revisit the presentation by Erica Haugtvedt, Associate Professor of English at South Dakota School of Mines. Discussion questions for the novel can be found here.
We would like to thank the Junior League of Washington for its generous support of this program.
“But what else is honesty—as the new Mrs Ainsworth liked to say—but a face what reads like an open book?” (113), Eliza Touchet observes in Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (2023), Smith’s first historical fiction novel featuring the historic Tichborne identity trial . The new Mrs Ainsworth is Sarah Wells, a former maid now married to William Harrison Ainsworth, writer and Eliza Touchet’s cousin. The irony of Mrs Ainsworth’s sanguine confidence in reading character is that she puts her faith in the claimant to Sir Roger Tichborne’s estate, the same claimant who was eventually found guilty of perjury and imprisoned at Newgate prison in 1872. Was Mrs Ainsworth’s belief in “Sir Roger” genuine? Or was it an expression of working-class solidarity, supporting the claimant (later found to be a butcher from Wapping) against the broader injustices of the nobility, represented by the Tichborne family?
Similar questions can be asked of Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved man from Jamaica known for his quiet dignity and reliability, who unwaveringly supports the claimant’s case despite so much evidence to the contrary. Why? The novel never answers definitively, but one suspects that Andrew Bogle and Sarah Ainsworth’s loyalties belong to higher values, although those values are unique to each, rather than the legal and economic integrity of ill-begotten Tichborne wealth. Smith takes the theme of fraudulence and asks ultimately, “What can we know of other people? How much of the mystery of another person could one’s own perspicacity divine?” (144). It is a question that novelists have been asking since novels were first written.
While on its surface The Fraud’s title seems to refer to the Tichborne case, these questions of knowledge and honesty are larger themes. Moreover, the novel repeatedly demonstrates how British economic prosperity is shown to be its own type of fraud, dependent as it is on enslaved labor.
Smith pulls her historical characters from the William Harrison Ainsworth household. Her choice to focus on Ainsworth shifts the locus of the novel from the solidly middle-class and respectable canonized authors Smith might have focused on to the populist authors that history has since neglected. As depicted in the novel, Ainsworth really was once a good friend of Charles Dickens and later one of his rivals; it is indeed true that his Newgate novel, Jack Sheppard (1839-40), outsold Oliver Twist (1837-1839).
Ainsworth’s literary rise and demise is connected to Jack Sheppard, which kicked off a mania and a moral panic over the influence of fiction.
The novel was adapted widely in theaters, illustrations sold in broadsheets, spin-off novels marketed in the penny press, and associated songs sung all over the streets. Jack Sheppard was an actual eighteenth-century criminal famous mostly for having escaped from Newgate repeatedly. Victorian critics felt that Ainsworth’s novelization of Jack Sheppard ennobled Sheppard too much and encouraged Ainsworth’s audience of novice readers, mostly from the laboring classes, to admire a criminal. It came to head in 1840 when the murder of a member of parliament was blamed on the influence of Ainsworth’s novel. Ainsworth’s reputation never recovered from this scandal, though it is doubtful that his novel can reasonably be blamed. Nonetheless, the Lord Chamberlain outlawed new licenses for performances of plays entitled “Jack Sheppard” after the murderer’s confession. One exception, J.B. Buckstone’s Jack Sheppard, was allowed to continue at the Adelphi Theatre, presumably because Buckstone amended the ending to teach a moral lesson that would comply with the Lord Chamberlain’s preferences.
As I write about in my open-access article, “Class and Complex Transmedia Character in Jack Sheppard (1839-1840),” some of adaptations that surged onto the marketplace during the Jack Sheppard mania, including early versions of Buckstone, rewrote Ainsworth’s ending and depicted Jack’s survival as a way of reclaiming meaning-making from the cultural elite.
John Moore’s prompter’s copy of Buckstone’s play, which was first produced at the Adelphi on October 28, 1839, is in the Folger’s collection. Moore’s notes indicate that Jack Sheppard dies embracing the body of Blueskin, his accomplice, after proclaiming “Here ends my life, my short, my wretched life.” [Photos and link to digital assets ]. However, an alternate ending where the final curtain falls while Sheppard’s associates cheer at the destruction of thief-catcher Jonathan Wild’s house, while Jack is merely pinioned, has also been recorded for early stagings of Buckstone (see Taylor 1996 and Meisel 1983 citations in Haugtvedt 2021 article linked above).
Thomas Greenwood’s Jack Sheppard premiered at Sadler’s Wells in the East End on the same date as Buckstone’s at the Adelphi. The last scene of Greenwood’s play has Blueskin descending from the gallows with Jack on his shoulder; the curtain falls on a tableau of the mob in uproar. Parts of Greenwood’s play were plagiarized by the publisher George Purkess; Purkess’s anonymous Jack Sheppard, a Drama in Three Acts was likely the one staged in 1845 at the City of London Theatre. This version contains Jack’s clearest survival, as Jack and Blueskin triumph over Wild’s death in the final scene. This play was shut down in 1845 due to violating the licensing ban. Buckstone was allowed to continue for decades, although in 1852 Buckstone’s playbills contained a notice explaining that the Lord Chamberlain licensed the play because “all objectionable passages are carefully expunged” (qtd. in Ellis 108).
Jack’s ambiguous ending, and even his escape and survival in some representations, tell a lie to tell the truth. Of course, the historical Jack Sheppard did not really survive. But Jack Sheppard’s fictionalized self can be made, and was made, to serve symbolic functions regarding rebellion, freedom, and the injustice of the law on behalf of his audiences in the laboring classes.
In Smith’s novel, Ainsworth’s circle of literary colleagues derides what they call copying and stealing in the press and theater, but these practices of repetition, evolution, and expansion drove a vibrant marketplace of creative adaptations and extensions throughout the nineteenth century, and that creativity deserves to be celebrated instead of sneered at.
Smith’s fictionalized Ainsworth quips about Jack Sheppard mania and the cut-throat literary marketplace in a convivial conversation with illustrator George Cruikshank and Dickens. “. . . any Tom, Dick or Harry may slice up a novel as he likes, strip out the speaking parts, and call it a play!” the authors complain, with Ainsworth lamenting, “all of which earns me not a brass farthing, by the way…” (117). Dickens, who is just then beginning his literary career as Boz, observes that publishing is a “rum business” where
“Good Chapman here binds my book and sells it: very good. Now what’s to stop any Soho sneak from copying any section of it and selling it on his own account? Or slicing out Cruikshank’s pictures, framing ‘em, and making a pretty penny? [. . .] I tell you, this is the only business in this world where any man may take the fruits of another man’s labour—his sweat and his tears—and pay him not a damn penny for it!—all the while getting rich himself!”
To this, Dickens’s peers cheer, “Hear! Hear! Purest slavery! Let’s form a charter! Now what about that port?” (118).
The classism cuts, as the men jokingly call for a charter at a time when working class men were struggling to attain a political voice. These authors complain about piracies for which they were not remunerated, but at the date of this fictional conversation in 1834, the intellectual property of print novels was not protected when adapted to the theatre. This didn’t occur until the 1842 Copyright Act governing both dramatic works and novels. The piracies Dickens lampoons are also those that would increase his own fame and establish his vaunted career, and they were not clearly illegal; verdicts varied during the period. Dickens would become one of the most outspoken advocates for copyright reform during the century, a fact that tends to underwrite his priggishness in Smith’s novel.
Looking closer, the irony drips in this scene where, as Colin Burrow notes, these privileged men complain about writing as “‘purest slavery’ while consuming the products of literal slavery.” They are blind to the grossest injustices and think only of their own inconvenience. Such turns where things are not what they seem happen often in The Fraud.
Ultimately, The Fraud labors to show that enslavement and capitalism, Jamaica and England, were “in reality, two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined, and that this was a truth that did not have to be sought out or hunted down, it was not hidden behind a veil or screen or any kind of door. It was and had always been everywhere, like weather” (334). The literary elite who structured the respectability politics underlying Victorian novels worked hard to obfuscate this conclusion. Ainsworth’s “failed” career is a unique vantage point to unmask the carefully constructed disguises of the century because, while Ainsworth’s target market was a bit lower than Dickens’s, he, like Eliza Touchet, is not actually all that poor and ultimately not all that neglected. After all, he is remembered, which we can’t say for most people in history.
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