In the final blog post of this series, PhD student Ellesse Patterson reveals how Thomas J. Wise’s pirating of Robert Louis Stevenson threatened to unravel his web of deception. 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.
In my previous post, I investigated how the literary forger, Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937), printed fraudulent first editions and other rarities by authors who could not contradict him. I focused on his bid to reshape Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s legacy by including his fabricated booklets in his bibliography of her writings.
Although Wise’s scheme to defraud the legacies of deceased authors initially succeeded, his decision to forge an autobiographical essay by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) threatened to unravel a web of lies.
Stevenson’s Some College Memories
By 1888, the memories of those who knew Elizabeth Barrett Browning had faded enough for Wise’s forgery to be accepted as authentic. Wise even deceived her widower, Robert Browning. But Wise was not so lucky with his pirated edition of Stevenson’s Some College Memories.
Robert Louis Stevenson is better known as the author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Treasure Island (1882). He originally wrote Some College Memories for the University of Edinburgh. It was published in 1886 in The New Amphion, a booklet printed by T & A Constable to raise funds for the University’s Student Union.
Carter and Pollard’s An Enquiry indicates that Wise’s forgery of Some College Memories appeared at auction at Puttick’s in 1897, three years after Stevenson’s death. Enriqueta Rylands, a proud supporter of British universities and a fan of Stevenson, bought a copy and had it tastefully bound.
But in January 1898, T & A Constable, the original publisher, wrote to The Athenaeum, denouncing the booklet as a piracy. The journal editor dismissed the accusation upon the word of a certain “bibliographer of note” – perhaps Wise himself. However, Constable argued that it was “impossible to believe” that Stevenson would secretly commission this printing for the University Union Committee without telling them or giving them a copy (Constable, ‘Some College Memories’, p. 121).
The argument raged on until February, when the bookseller Frank Sabin envisioned a satirical interrogation of Stevenson’s ghost. When questioned if he had arranged the suspect printing, Stevenson’s spirit states:
“My object in producing this private issue, without informing any of my Edinburgh friends, or taking any notice of Messrs. Constable’s copyright interest, must remain an undiscoverable secret. […] Purposely avoiding everything that was easy, natural, and inexpensive, I have entirely succeeded in the attainment of my object to create a mystery and confuse and puzzle everybody.”
F T Sabin, ‘Some College Memories’, p 280
In Stevenson’s voice, Sabin pointedly concludes: “These are questions I leave to be answered by the wiseacre bibliographers.”
Carter and Pollard’s Enquiry
These accusations of piracy fizzled out. But in 1934, Carter and Pollard published An enquiry into the nature of certain nineteenth century pamphlets. They revived the spectre of suspicion and backed up their theories with a wealth of evidence.
Carter and Pollard’s remarkable debunking was published in the UK by Constable & Co. Ltd, a later imprint of the firm that had caused Wise so much trouble in 1898: T & A Constable. Barrett Browning’s The Runaway Slave and Stevenson’s Some College Memories were both among the forty-six forgeries that unmasked Wise’s extensive frauds.
Wise’s own words came back to haunt him when Carter and Pollard quoted him in the epigraph of their book. They quoted Wise’s 1919 bibliography of works by Algernon Swinburne, in which he debunked a fabricated first edition of the poet’s short story Dead Love. As the edition was based upon Wise’s own forgery, he was in a good position to spot the fake, and breezily stated:
The whole thing proves once more that, easy as it appears to be to fabricate reprints of rare books, it is in actual practice absolutely impossible to do so in such a manner that detection cannot follow the result.
TJ Wise, A Bibliography of the Writings and Verse of Algernon Swinburne, p 73 (mistakenly cited as p 93 in An Enquiry).
To his own detriment, Carter and Pollard would prove Wise right.
Mythologising Wise
The discovery of Wise’s forgeries repaired some of the damage and misconceptions woven into the bibliographical afterlives of those he targeted, but Wise took many of his secrets to the grave. In a final twist, the uncertainty that surrounds Wise’s motivations, possible co-conspirators and the number of forgeries leaves his own legacy subject to speculation and supposition. With all who knew him dead, the forger himself is now at risk of being posthumously rewritten and reinterpreted.
After Carter and Pollard’s An Enquiry was published, Wise’s crimes became fodder for detective mysteries of the era. Dorothy L. Sayers, in Gaudy Night (1934), alludes to a recent scandal about a “Nineteenth-Century Pamphlet” in the same breath as other significant historical forgeries, while Margery Allingham’s Flowers for the Judge (1936) features the crucial discovery of a forgery at a publishing house.
If Thomas J. Wise’s forgeries proved anything, it was that the line between fact and fiction is indeed a thin one.
Find out more
Thomas J. Wise’s Book Hospital | Bibliographical Society | YouTube
Thomas J. Wise: Centenary Studies | Internet Archive
Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama | Internet Archive
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