LITERARY IMPOSTOR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 May 1941, Page 6

LITERARY IMPOSTOR

SO-CALLED VALUABLE MANUSCRIPT. I If you cannot win a little fame I honestly, why in the world hesitate to j win it dishonestly? ' Consider, if you please, the method I adopted by my dear friend Charles. He preferred, in point of fact, to sign himself Charles Julius, though in the open he was commonly known as Charles Bertram. The world received him in 1723. and it is a pity the world did not see through him soon after. One of the cleverest and most successful of all literary impostors of modern times, Charles (a Londoner) was brought up in Copenhagen, and when only 24 he had the notion of bringing himself into the limelight by a remarkable fraud. He wrote to the celebrated Dr Stukeley, famous as an antiquarian, and in the course of a letter mentioned quite casually that a friend of his had the manuscript of considerable interest —the work of a monk of some 400 years earlier (that. is. about the 14th 1 century) which gave a detailed account of Great Britain. The MS, he said, was in Latin. Dr Stukeley. a wise antiquarian but not an astute man of the world, swallowed the bait —hook and line with it. He persuaded Charles to let him see copies of the MS, and. after much investigation it was found that the work was from the pch of a fabled Richard of Cirencester. Thus the forgery went on. and grew. In 1756 Stukeley read a learned paper before the Society of Antiquarians in which he brought this hitherto unknown and marvellously valuable MS to their notice. It was found to give light and information of an altogether unprecedented kind. It became the talk of scholars. Bertram published an account of the “discovered” MS. together with his own learned notes, and Europe held its breath. Not till 1866 was the forgery exposed—loo years after Charles Bertram had been laid to rest, chuckling to the last to think how cleverly ’:o had bamboozled everyone.