Department of English

The term "literary hoax" implies certain assumptions about the creation and dissemination of what are labeled "authentic" works of literature: a piece of writing represents the personal effort of an identifiable author or group of authors who present their work as a product for which they alone are responsible and for which they alone should receive any praise or condemnation. Conversely, the hoaxer seeks to obscure his or her contribution to the work he or she has produced, offering it rather as the effort of a different person and often of a distant age and concocting elaborate schemes and smokescreens to keep this illusion of non-authorship alive. The prospect of financial gain motivates many of these authors to hide their creative role from their consumers, as a "newly discovered" play by Shakespeare or a cleverly forged historical document promises to be a far more lucrative sale than a work by an undiscovered modern author. However, two figures from the eighteenth century, James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton, created elaborate literary hoaxes with little prospect of receiving generous compensation for their work. Contemporary critics such as Samuel Johnson and David Hume vilified Macpherson for his "discovery" of a Gaelic epic that recounted the heroic history of his native Scotland. The enigmatic Chatterton "found" the poems of a fifteenth-century priest, whom he called Sir Thomas Rowley, and killed himself at age eighteen and in a state of utter poverty rather than admit his identity as the poet. These two men wrote during the age of satire, when authors such as Jonathan Swift produced an extensive body of literature that purported to be the productions of other authors within the literary community they mocked. Interestingly, only Macpherson and Chatterton have been tainted with an enduring legacy as frauds, whereas Swift and his fellow satirists have been celebrated by generations of students and critics as masters of a unique genre of literature. What distinguishes the type of work produced by the hoaxers from that of the satirists?

James Macpherson (1736-1796) worked first as a schoolmaster and an unsuccessful poet in Edinburgh before he burst upon the London literary and cultural scene with the publication of his 1760 Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Macpherson claimed that the collection of poems and the later epics Fingal and Temora were translations of ancient Gaelic poetry he compiled from the traditional oral verses of the bards of the Scottish Highlands, recording the heroic legacy of the Scots as Homer had done centuries earlier for the Greeks. The poems met immediate acclaim all over Europe, inspiring Goethe's early Romanticism in Germany and appealing to Napoleon Bonaparte, who kept a Italian translation of the ballads with him as he waged battle across the continent. Even as these verses met widespread acclaim, the authenticity of their source fueled a bitter controversy in literary circles, with Samuel Johnson lambasting Macpherson as little more than a forger who lifted characters from Highlands legend and placed them within tales that sprang wholesale from Macpherson's own imagination and eighteenth century perspective. Johnson's criticism proved in large part to be an accurate description of the patrimony of the Ossian poems. In the assessment of Paul J. DeGategno, "scholars [today] agree that Macpherson did collect a number of Gaelic Ossianic ballads, sometimes using original characters and ideas but more typically altering these, while adding modern, non-Gaelic characteristics of his own." (DeGategno, Paul J. James Macpherson. Boston: Twayne, 1989.) Macpherson compounded his fraud in response to his critics, producing forged Gaelic documents that purported to authenticate his source material but which merely served to reinforce his individual creative role in the Ossian saga.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), an impoverished attorney's apprentice from Bristol, England, began his creative career as a blatant forger, presenting his friends and employers with "medieval" poems, pedigrees, and historical documents. Chatterton primarily targeted pompous social climbers for his ruses, delighting in making fools of these members of the society that he felt unjustly denied a man of an intellect as great as his own the financial and social rewards he so richly deserved. The smug George Catcott, the law partner of Chatterton's employer Henry Burgum, served as the dupe who purchased the bulk of Chatterton's master body of work, a series of poems that he claimed to have found in stacks of old papers in the Church of St. Mary's Redcliff and which he attributed to Sir Thomas Rowley, a fictitious fifteenth century priest. Ironically, Chatterton also targeted Horace Walpole, who had published The Castle of Oranto, a Gothic novel he claimed to have translated from an old Italian manuscript, as a potential buyer for the Rowley poems. Later poets, most notably John Keats, William Wordsworth, and their fellow Romantics, extravagantly praised the Rowley poems, and many later critics consider these to be the earliest examples of the Romantic movement in poetry. Although Chatterton was able to sell a few poems in the conventional styles of the day to buyers in Bristol and to Town and Country Magazine in London, he remained desperately poor and could not support himself by writing. Rather than admit his role in the creation of the Rowley poems, Chatterton poisoned himself in his rented rooms in London, three months before his eighteenth birthday.

In the same historical period as the writings of Macpherson and Chatterton, the satirical works of authors such as Jonathan Swift dominated the literary scene. These satirists obscured their identities as well, with the general acceptance of Swift's Bickerstaff Papers wreaking havoc in the life of an actual publisher of almanacs by purporting to predict the date of the publisher's demise. The literary theory of New Criticism implies that any distinction in these two groups of writers, the hoaxers and the satirists, offers no valuable paradigm for the analysis and distinction of the bodies of their work. Insisting on the autonomy of a work of literature and its absolute independence from its creator as a matter of linguistic fact, New Criticism argues that the identity or motive of the author offers no additional insight into the significance of a work. This theory evaluates the Bickerstaff Papers with the same standards as The Poems of Ossian or any other writing, minimizing the role of the author and analyzing the work as an organic whole that succeeds or fails solely on the basis of the words that compose it.

The theoretical framework provided by New Historicism directs the reviewer away from the wholly text-centered analysis of New Criticism to an approach that encompasses a myriad of social and cultural influences on the development of a literary work. This critical theory explores the political,, economic, and personal factors that lead an author to create a specific work and enables the reviewer to consider the various influences that direct different authors within the same cultural context to develop divergent voices. The literary institutions of the eighteenth century gave rise both to the satires of Swift and to the frauds of Macpherson and Chatterton, and each of these forms of literature in turn reflects on the prevailing literary culture, its values, and its aspirations. New Historicism can provide a method for explaining why these authors developed the works that they did and why these same literary institutions have passed such different judgment on the different types of writing based on their perception of "authenticity." Both New Criticism and New Historicism offer necessary critical perspectives on the issue of literary hoaxes and their role in the literary culture of the eighteenth century, and the contribution of each to the understanding of this subject can also be analyzed through Metacritical theory, addressing the fundamental issue of the relationship of an author to the text that he or she produces.

Through this thesis, I hope to answer the following questions:

1. What characteristics define a "literary hoax?" What distinguishes a hoax from an "authentic" piece of writing?

2. How do Macpherson/Ossian and Chatterton/Rowley fit into the paradigm of the literary hoax?

3. What motivates an author to conceal his/her identity as the creator of a literary work?

4. How does such an author's concealment impact the character of the works he or she produces?

5. How were these frauds detected, and by whom?

6. Why were literary frauds so prevalent in the eighteenth century? What does this reveal about the literature and British society in that era?

7. What distinguishes these eighteenth century literary hoaxes from contemporary satires, such as Jonathan Swift's Bickerstaff Papers, in which the authors concealed their identities?

8. How did these eighteenth century. frauds impact contemporary figures, such as Goethe and Napoleon, and later writers, such as the nineteenth century Romantic poets? How did these works affect the emerging notions of nationalism and national heritage emerging at that period?

9. How do these frauds and the issues of authenticity that they raise alter later literary developments and scandals, such as the recent uproar over the "anonymous" author of Primary Colors.

10. Why is the theory of New Criticism inadequate to address the issue of literary hoaxes?

11. How can the critical frameworks of New Historicism and metacriticism help to answer the question of the relationship of the author to a text raised by literary hoaxes? How can these theories explain the role of hoaxes in the literary heritage of the eighteenth century?

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Browning, Robert. Browning's Essay on Chatterton. Ed. and Intro. Donald Smalley. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1948. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970.

The critical opinion of Romantic poet Robert Browning on the works and importance of Thomas Chatterton indicates the lasting impact of this seemingly minor, f raudulent poet on one of the central literary movements of the nineteenth century. Browning's perspective on the poet whom Samuel Taylor Coleridge labeled "the marvelous boy," reveals the "legitimate" value of the Rowley poems despite the subterfuge surrounding their creation. Browning's stylistic modification of the form of the biographical essay mirrors Chatterton's own variations on the genre of historical fiction and further indicates the influence of the eighteenth- century fraud on later writers and thinkers.

Bullitt, John M. Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire: A Study of Satiric Technique. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953.

-Bullitt examines the technical elements of Swift's creation of satire and the characteristics that define the genre of satire. This study provides a necessary basis for comparison in its definition of the mechanics of satire, in contrast to the factors that characterize Chatterton's and Macpherson's works as frauds. It also embodies the divergent critical responses to the celebrated writings of "legitimate" satirists and the generally maligned or ignored works of the hoaxers.

Chatterton, Thomas. The Rowley Poems 1794. Oxford: Woodstock, 1990.

-This edition of the Chatterton.primary source material reprints the Rowley poems as they appeared in the 1794 edition printed in Cambridge by B. Flower. The edition includes recognition of the poems, fraudulent source, and the prefaces to the edition that discuss the intellectual debate surrounding the controversy provide a key insight into the reaction of Chatterton's contemporaries to his work.

DeGategno, Paul J. James Macpherson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.

-This study of the Ossianic controversy provides a critical perspective on both the literary aspects of James Macpherson's ossian poems and the historical context of the works. The collection also explores the influence of the Ossian epic on contemporary European thought and on later writers and genres of literature, especially the Romantic poets. This examination of later opinions on the significance of ossian provides an important perspective on the possible interpretations of the work's authorship, particularly in comparison with the interpretation of the writings of Macpherson's contemporaries.

Ewald, William Bragg. The Masks of Jonathan Swift. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953.

-Ewald examines Jonathan Swift's work from the perspective of the author's shifting portrayal of his identity in his various satires. The study devotes a chapter specifically to issues surrounding Swift's identity in the creation of the Bickerstaff Papers and the practical effects of his concealment of his role as the as the author of the Bickerstaff "almanac."

Finley, W. "James Macpherson and the Poetry of Ossian." James Macphe.rsonHomepage. http://www.highalaska.com/ossian/ (21 Oct. 1997).

-This electronic resource provides a chronology of Macpherson's life and of the controversy surrounding the publication of the ossian poems. The web page includes the primary source material of "Temora," one of the texts in the epic ossian collection. It also provides extensive links to other sites on the World Wide Web dealing with Macpherson's work, Scottish heritage, and eighteenth- century literature and culture.

Gaskill, Howard, ed. Ossian Revisited. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991. -Scholars from fields as diverse as English literature, philosophy, history, German, and Celtic have contributed to this collection of essays examining various aspects of the Ossianic phenomenon. Each of the contributors falls solidly in the pro- Macpherson camp, and their perspective on Ossian as a significant and influential work of literature challenges the conventional notion of the work and the author as subversive fakes. The contributors also examine the impact of Ossian, its language, and its imagery on the work and thought of authors both contemporary to Macpherson and later in the development of European literature.

Haywood, Ian. The Making of History: A Study of the Literarv Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth Century Ideas of History and Fiction. Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1986. -The title of this book indicates its relevance to this undertaking: the study explores the central issues surrounding Macpherson's and Chatterton's creation of their forged works and their subsequent denial of their role in the poems, invention. Haywood examines the poems of Macpherson and Chatterton as "complex and unique forms of historical fiction" (11) and, theoretically most important, as reflections of the nascent forms of historiography and historical fiction in the eighteenth century. The study presents Ossian and the Rowley poems as some of the earliest examples of historical fiction and argues that they ironically served to promote the later acceptance of this genre as a legitimate form of literature.

Hudson, Nicholas. "'Oral Tradition': The Evolution of an Eighteenth-Century Concept." Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon. Ed. Alvaro F. V. Ribeiro, SJ and James G. Basker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 161-176.

-Hudson's essay examines another aspect of the widespread impact of the Ossian controversy on the categorization of different forms of literature through considering the now-accepted concept of oral tradition and its impact on issues of authorship and legitimacy. The current respect for oral tradition and acceptance of the notion that non-literate cultures may nonetheless produce a body of literature did not enjoy such scholarly esteem in the eighteenth century. The shift in the scholarly approach to oral tradition since rejection of Ossian as legitimate literature by such eighteenth-century critics as Samuel Johnson helps to explain the changing perception of its authorship and "authenticity" by current scholars. This conception of oral tradition provides another set of tools for interpreting the status of Ossian's authorship and whether the work can truly be considered a "fake" in light of that definition.

Lindop, Grevel. Thomas Chatterton. Salisbury: Fyfield Books, 1972. -This book provides both the primary source material of Chatterton's poems, including those he claimed as his own and those he presented as the work of other authors, and Lindop's critical interpretation of the body of Chatterton's writings. It also includes detailed information on Chatterton's biography and the literary and historical time period in which he lived and worked. The historical context and the comparison of Chattertons acknowledged poems and the Rowley poems provide important insight into the personal and societal factors that motivated Chatterton to undertake such an ambitious project of forgery while continuing to produce some works he claimed as his own.

Lynch, Jack. "Authorizing Ossian." http://dept.english.upenn.edu/- jlynch/Papers/ossian/html (21 October 1997).

-Lynch, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered this paper on the theoretical implications of the Ossian phenomenon on October 5, 1995. The paper offers interesting insights into the applicability of Foucault's literary theory to the Ossian forgery and to the issue of literary forgery in general. Lynch also provides some links to other electronic media focusing on eighteenth-century literature.

Morton, A. Q. Literary Detection: How to Prove. Authorship and Fraud in Literature and Documents. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.

-While this book does not focus specifically on the two eighteenth-century frauds that form the basis of this paper, it supports the theory of stylometry, a method of identification and recognition used to determine the authenticity of texts. The theory asserts that certain unchangeable elements of how a person speaks and writes cannot be eliminated from any piece of writing, thus making it possible for an examiner to detect fraudulent or altered texts. The theory of stylometry provides an interesting framework for examining issues of authorship and the irrevocable connection of the writer to the work that he or she creates.

Saunders, Bailey. The Life and Letters of James Macpherson. New York: Haskell House, 1968.

-This study, which is organized along the chronology of Macpherson's life, examines the intellectual differences between Macpherson and Samuel Johnson, the most respected literary critic of the day, over the authenticity of the Ossian poems. it chronicles the reception of the Ossian epic in the literary circles of Edinburgh and London and the further impact of the poems as they were translated into various European languages and circulated about the continent. Saunders particularly explores ossian and Macpherson in the context of their distinctly Scottish identity in an era of the growing significance of national identity. The issue of nationalism and the source of national culture and pride raises significant theoretical questions about the authenticity of Ossian not only as a work of literature, but as a reflection of the Scottish national character as well.

Smart, J. S. James Macpherson: An Episode in Literature. London: David Nutt, Long Acre, 1905.

- This book provides excerpts of the Macpherson primary source material and considers Macpherson and Ossian within the Scottish- Celtic context romantically portrayed in the epic. As one of the first writers to espouse a romantic vision of Scottish national identity, Macpherson served to impact the perception of f oreign thinkers on his homeland, Smart argues that the reaction of critics in England, particularly Samuel Johnson,, immediately to label the Ossian epic a forgery reflects their lack of knowledge about Gaelic culture of the Middle Ages, ostensibly the source material for Macpherson's writings. He examines these criticisms in the context of more recent studies about the nature of Scottish oral tradition unavailable to eighteenth-century scholars, offering later theories and viewpoints on the authenticity of the epic.

Stafford, Fiona J. The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1988.

-Stafford examines Macpherson's biography and the research that he did in his attempt to craft a body of "authentic" Scottish epic verse from the Middle Ages in her study of the ossian poems as a reflection of early stirrings of nationalism in the Scottish highlands. She also provides educational data on Macpherson and an analysis of his translations of his material between English and Gaelic.

Swift, Jonathan. Bickerstaffiana and Other Early Materials on Swift 1708-1714. New York: Garland, 1975.

-This facsim le of the original published editions of Swift's work, including the Bickerstaff Papers, provides an important element for the analysis of the satires under the parameters of New Historicism. The study of these works as they originally appeared to readers in the eighteenth century can help to reveal how readers and critics may have responded to the writings in context with other contemporary cultural factors.

Whitehead, John. This Solemn Mockery: The Art of Literary Forgery. London: Arlington Books, 1973.