The Dead Tell No Tales: The Afterlives of Thomas J. Wise’s Forgeries

In the second of three posts, PhD student Ellesse Patterson reveals the impact of Thomas J. Wise’s forgeries on the legacies of the authors whose work he forged. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities.

For decades, Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937) stood at the forefront of the book world as one of Britain’s most influential and respected bibliographers. The purpose of a good bibliographer was to list an author’s works, accurately describing when a manuscript was published, who printed it (and where), as well as any other useful details the reader may wish to know. Unfortunately, Wise was not a good bibliographer.

Towards the end of his life, Wise was unmasked as a literary forger by John Carter and Graham Pollard’s 1934 An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets. As detailed in my previous blog post, The Moriarty of the Book World, The John Rylands Library holds a number of Wise forgeries, including “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim Point” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861).

Wise used his extensive bibliographical knowledge of book production and publishing history to manufacture first editions and rare books. To explain why a forgery appeared for the first time decades after its apparent publication date, Wise often framed his booklets as rediscovered private printings commissioned by the author.

For this deception to pass muster, Wise pirated authors who were geographically distant, unwell, or dead, and so they could not disown the “first edition” booklets appearing at auction and in bookseller’s catalogues under their names.

Forging Ahead: “The Runaway Slave”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning had died twenty years before Wise’s forgeries started to appear in the 1880s. This forgery of Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave” was one of his early productions. Originally part of Enriqueta Rylands’s private library, the forged booklet (R20410) was bequeathed to The John Rylands Library in 1908.

The poem was originally published in the 1848 edition of Boston’s abolitionist annual gift book, The Liberty Bell. In 1850, “The Runaway Slave” was released in the UK for the first time in the second edition of Barrett Browning’s Poems.

The Legacy of Wise’s Forgeries: The Brownings

Robert Browning initially denounced Wise’s booklet as a “fabricated affair” in a letter that Wise later immortalised his 1895 publication, Letters from Robert Browning to Various Correspondents. Unfortunately, Browning, who was now in his 70s, was ultimately taken in by the forger when Wise responded to this dismissal by sending Browning one of the booklets. To Browning, Wise’s forgery looked authentic. 

With Barrett Browning long dead and Browning also passing away in 1889, Wise’s role as a bibliographer gave him the perfect opportunity to rewrite their legacies to his own benefit.

To add legitimacy to his fabricated booklets, Wise included these false publications in his bibliographies. His bibliography of Barrett Browning’s work included the 1849 “Runaway Slave” reprinting and his forged 1847 printing of Barrett Browning’s famous Sonnets from the Portuguese (also first printed in the 1850 Poems collection).

In his entry for his “Runaway Slave” printing, Wise remarks:

“How very little information Robert Browning possessed regarding the bibliography of his wife’s poetical works.”

T.J. Wise, A Bibliography of the writings in prose and verse of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1918

Why, Browning even doubted Wise’s ‘discovery’ of the 1849 “Runaway Slave” booklets until Wise, of course, taught him better. In an instant, Browning is reimaged as a negligent husband rather than a grieving widower deceived by Wise in the final year of his life.

Wise’s bibliography also promotes Edmund Gosse’s (1849-1928) embellished account of an exchange between husband and wife in Pisa in 1847. Barrett Browning (so the story goes) shyly slipped an early copy of Sonnets in her husband’s coat pocket. Astonished, Browning persuaded his wife to arrange a private printing through her close friend and novelist, Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855). With such a romantic tale behind it, Wise’s Sonnets forgery became as bulletproof as his “Runaway Slave”. After Gosse’s death, American librarian Fannie E. Ratchford (1887–1974) accused him of being Wise’s conspirator. While Wise was assisted in his crimes by fellow bibliographer Harry Buxton Forman (1842–1917), the case against Gosse is less credible. As with the Brownings, proximity to Wise cast a shadow on both of these men (deservedly or not).

Through his bibliographical work, it becomes clear that Wise was as willing to reshape the memory of an author as he was their work. He was not always so successful.

In the third and final blog post in this series, Wise’s forgery of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Some College Memories plants the seeds of his downfall.