Forgery and Piracy

	Pirated and forged editions of early Ruskin poetry or prose derived primarily from two sources: American publishers, prior to international copyright agreements; and the forgers, Thomas J. Wise and H. Buxton Forman.

Wise and Forman Forgeries

	Of the hundred nineteenth-century literary pamphlets that have been identified as productions by T. J. Wise and Buxton Forman, eight capitalized on works by Ruskin, of which two were juvenile pieces, “Leoni” and “The Scythian Guest” (Barker and Collins, A Sequel, 368-75, esp. 371). For details about the latter two forged pamphlets, see the publication histories of those two works; and for biographical details about the forgers specifically relevant to Ruskin scholarship, see the notes on Thomas J. Wise and H. Buxton Forman. The present note is concerned with forgery of the juvenilia more broadly.

The Discovery of the Forgeries

	Like many other pamphlets exposed in 1934 by John Carter and Graham Pollard in An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets, the Ruskin juvenilia pamphlets represented an unprecedented kind of forgery. They were not spurious imitations of existing rarities but inventions of rarities. Exploiting genuine and accessible texts, the forgers created hitherto unknown editions, for which Wise prepared the appearance of legitimacy by listing them in his own scholarly bibliographies of authors, describing them in bibliographic articles for the Bookman, and, more loosely, by concocting and disseminating elaborate stories about their production and provenance.
	For some of the forged pamphlets, the claim for rarity was founded on their alleged priority, as in the case that finally undid Wise, the “1847 Reading” private printing of Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, which the author, according to Wise, entrusted to Mary Russell Mitford to see through press three years earlier than the sonnets’ known publication. Of the Ruskin forgeries, Wise claimed a similar case of prior publication for the pamphlet of Queen's [sic] Gardens, a printing of the lecture bearing the year and imprint of its original delivery—Manchester, 1864—a year earlier than its known first appearance as part of Sesame and Lilies in 1865.
	The claim for the juvenilia pamphlets was different, however. Wise explained the “1868” Leoni and the “1849” Scythian Guest pamphlets, not as previously unknown first editions, but as later, fugitive reprintings at the behest of unidentified friends. Ironically, as it turned out, concocting the juvenile pieces as alleged first editions might have been faked more safely. It was suspicion of these two pamphlets along with two other Ruskin pamphlets that initially prompted the systematic investigations by John Carter and Graham Pollard that fully exposed the forgeries in 1934—exposure aimed at first at Wise, as by far the more prominent public figure of the pair, and only gradually over the years having extended to Forman.
	Carter and Pollard were first alerted to possible forgeries by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. In volumes 1 and 2 (1903–4) of the Library Edition, Cook and Wedderburn declared the two juvenilia printings probable fakes, and, soon thereafter in volumes 12 and 18 (1904–5), condemned both the “1864” separate issue of the “Queens’ Gardens” lecture and an “1852” pamphlet, The National Gallery, which collected certain letters by Ruskin to the Times.
	In hindsight, one can see the happy convergence of talents that enabled Cook and Wedderburn to detect the frauds: Cook possessed outstandingly thorough knowledge of Ruskin, and, as a journalist, he would have known his way around London publishers and printers; Wedderburn was an experienced Ruskin bibliographer—in particular, as editor of Arrows of the Chace, a collection of Ruskin’s letters to newspapers, he would have been especially keen to sniff out the doubtfulness of the National Gallery pamphlet—and by profession he was a barrister. They spied signs of forgery in the fact that independent records of the pamphlets’ existence bore only recent dates, long after their supposed publication. For example, the juvenilia pamphlets were not mentioned in R. H. Shepherd, Bibliography of Ruskin, first published in 1878, whereas they were conspicuous in Thomas J. Wise and James P. Smart, Complete Bibliography of . . . Ruskin (1889–93). Likewise of recent date was the pamphlets’ emergence on the rare book market—and at high prices.
	Concerning the other two pamphlets suspected by Cook and Wedderburn, the evidence was even surer. Collation of the “1852” National Gallery pamphlet with the original 1847 and 1852 letters to the Times and with their later reprinting in Arrows of the Chase (1880), which Wedderburn had edited, revealed that the alleged “first edition” was based impossibly on the text of three decades later (Works, 12:396). Similarly, by collating the “1864” Queen's [sic] Garden pamphlet with versions of the lecture that appeared in Sesame and Lilies, the editors concluded that “the person who put [the pamphlet] upon the market, not knowing that Ruskin had revised the lecture in 1871, had his ‘original edition of the utmost scarcity,’ set up from the later editions,” while clumsily and unconvincingly deleting portions of the text to make the pamphlet appear to be a transcript of the lecture as originally delivered (Works, 18:15).  Their suspicions aroused by internal bibliographic evidence, Cook and Wedderburn followed up with factual inquiries, such as making inquiries of the alleged printer of the Leoni pamphlet, whose records revealed no such job (Works, 1:288, 2:101–2).
	Early in their investigations, if Cook and Wedderburn connected the recent appearances of the juvenilia pamphlets in the sale rooms with their timely listings in Wise and Smart’s Bibliography to draw damaging conclusions about the bibliographers’ honesty, the editors kept their own counsel publicly. (Nowadays, it is assumed that James P. Smart was duped by Wise.) Later, when Cook and Wedderburn questioned the authenticity of the National Gallery pamphlet, their language grew blunter: “the reprint ‘of extreme scarcity’”—tartly quoting the Bibliography, although without attribution--“is what is known in the trade as a ‘fake’” (Works, 12:396). Finally, it would appear that the editors all but accused Wise of a role in faking the Queen’s [sic] Gardens pamphlet, since they pointedly referred to an “elaborately described” account of the alleged rarity in the Bookman (February 1893) as being signed “W.,” and they noticed that facsimiles of the title page were given both in that article and in Wise and Smart’s Bibliography. Such remarks, at the very least, mocked a famous bibliographer for incompetence. Nonetheless, as late as the 1920s, Dearden points out, Joan Severn trusted Wise enough to consult with him about the sale of one of Ruskin’s Scott manuscripts (Dearden, “Wise and Ruskin I,” 45), for, as Wise’s biographers point out, he had built up tremendous authority as a bibliographer.
	Whatever the Brantwood circle may have believed privately, Wise escaped exposure for three decades after Cook and Wedderburn’s discoveries, and Forman’s involvement was not proved until later still. Perhaps, as Wilfred Partington suggests, Cook and Wedderburn’s condemnations were too deeply buried in the vast bulk of the Library Edition, and the minutiae of bibliographical notes were all the likelier to have been ignored at the turn of the century, when interest in Ruskin was declining among collectors, except by the devoted few (Partington, Forging Ahead, 134–38; Partington, Thomas J. Wise in the Original Cloth, 151–54).
	
<here>Partington's popular exposé, like Carter and Pollard's scientific one, was focused on Wise, but the forgeries gradually came to be understood as the products of a partnership between Wise and Harry Buxton Forman. Partington was reluctant to accuse Forman in the 1939 biography of Wise, Forging Ahead (e.g., 74-76, 158); and he wrote even more defensively on Forman's behalf in the 1946 revised version of the biography, Thomas J. Wise in the Original Cloth (84-92), by which time various conspiracy theories were afloat. More recently, Nicolas Barker and John Collins have extended the arguments of Carter and Pollard and established both Forman's complicity and a more extensive crime than formerly suspected. Respecting Forman's involvement, Barker and Collins "conclude . . . that the partnership was an equal one. One partner might originate, manufacture and distribute one title more than another, even to all appearances exclusively; but the weight of the evidence suggests that the vast majority of the pamphlets were jointly manufactured and may be presumed to have been sold for joint profit" (A Sequel, 181). Nonetheless, a useful inquiry remains, which may require separating the forgers, respecting their motives and methods in faking Ruskin publications.

Another question concerns the extent and nature of the crime. In terms of simple numbers of forgeries, whereas Carter and Pollard were able definitively to condemn thirty of the nineteenth-century pamphlets they examined, Barker and Collins have raised the tally to nearly a hundred. This more than tripled effort that the forgers are now known to have devoted to manufacture and dissemination of the fakes bears on the question of motive, which can now be understood more clearly in terms of crude gain (see Barker and Collins, A Sequel, 122). Interestingly, however, Barker and Collins also pursue the nature of the crime itself into "a range of activities that also included piracy and the adaptation of legitimate publications in a number of ways, whose object was to deceive the collector of modern writers (and also to cheat the author)" (A Sequel, 121). This complexity affects how the crime is perceived.

In Partington's exposé, his liveliness of tone relies on an assumption that the legitimate can be sharply distinguished from the illegitimate, the learned bibliographer and honest bookseller from the charlatan and cheat (distinctions that often involve Partington's writing in a great deal of special pleading). The biographer accordingly treated Forman as a member of the "conclave of ardent bookmen" whom Wise merely imitated and exploited--Forman's mind being set on higher things, Partington assumes, whereas Wise grubbed for "hard cash" (Forging Ahead, 177-78; Thomas J. Wise in the Original Cloth, 196). Carter pronounced Partington's book "vulgarly written," but he praised its research and appears to have been no more alert than Partington to the ambiguities of context that gave rise to the forgers ("Wise in Perspective," 8n.). In contrast, Barker and Collins's keynote is that "forgery thrives on ambiguity" (A Sequel, 127). This observation deserves exploration here specifically with respect to why the forgers were frequently drawn to forging juvenilia, Ruskin's in particular.

<head2>The Lure of Ruskin and the Progress of the Forgery
One obvious answer to the question of why Wise and Forman were drawn to forging Ruskin, whether to his early writing or late, is that he appeared to present an easy target for Wise's combination of duplicity and sycophancy. Wise attempted to gain a footing at Brantwood, writing to W. G. Collingwood . . . and sending gifts of his "Ashley Library" publications to Collingwood and the Severns (Dearden, "Wise and Ruskin" I, 47). The overture repeated earlier strategies of gaining access to the London literary and scholarly scene by way of societies--the Browning Society and Shelley Society, for example--with the ambition of meeting the great men themselves, which he succeeded in doing with Browning and Swinburne. Forman. . . . 

Whatever the compound of duplicitous aims with reverence of literary celebrity in Wise's and Forman's individual makeups, they must have known enough about Ruskin's mental health to gamble fairly cynically that the writer's memory would pose a weak obstacle to the forgers' impostures. Nonetheless, if the forgers relied on Ruskin's frail memory to accept the invented pamphlets as plausible, an opposite approach was taken (with what deliberation can never be known) in the vehicle of these impostures, Wise and Smart's Bibliography of Ruskin (initially published in eighteen parts [September 1889-May 1893], plus an additional part of illustrations [October 1893]). Here, oversight and contributions by learned Ruskinians were sought and acknowledged, brazenly lending credibility to the forgeries planted among the legitimate (and highly accurate) listings.

The Wise and Smart Bibliography was apparently the first publication in which the forgers used the technique of preparing the way for a forgery by announcing it in print: part 2 (November 1889) described the bogus National Gallery pamphlet as "probably printed only for private distribution" since Smith, Elder & Co. showed no record of copies for sale (vol. 1 [1893], p. 44); part 3 (date????) recorded the Catalogue of the Turner Sketches, of which Wise and Forman produced a binary forgery (ibid., p. 72); part 5 (May 1890) contained descriptions of three more forgeries, The Future of England (ibid., pp. 138-39), Leoni (ibid., pp. 147-48), and Samuel Prout (ibid., p. 154); and part 7 (December 1890), The Nature and Authority of Miracle (ibid., p. 211) (Barker and Collins, A Sequel, 135, 138; Dearden, "Wise and Ruskin II," 174). The illustrations supplied in part 19 of the Bibliography (October 1893) showed photographs of six forgeries, including Leoni and Scythian Guest. 

The first publication to exploit a scholarly context to lend legitimacy to forgery, the Bibliography of Ruskin was also the first of Wise's privately printed scholarly bibliographies. It has always been assumed that <Smart>, who as secretary of the Ruskin Society of London is likelier to have possessed the requisite knowledge, performed the lion's share of compiling and writing the bibliography, with Wise serving merely as publisher while also conveniently filling gaps in Smart's scholarship with alleged finds of fugitive Ruskin pamphlets from his own collection. In the unsigned May 1893 preface to the completed bibliography, it is presumably Wise's hand that inserted falsehoods in Ruskin's bibliographic history, asserting that the lectures of the 1860s were "sometimes printed" separately prior to revision and publication in their now familiar form, a claim supported by citation of the Queen's [sic] Gardens pamphlet, unknown "until February of the present year" (p. xxii).

A decade prior to editing the Library Edition, the unsuspecting Brantwood circle rose to the bait of Wise's bibliographic "research." As Collingwood remarked in his "Preliminary Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems" in Poems (1891), "[f]ull account of the published poems [as opposed to the manuscripts surveyed in the "Note"] has been given by Mr. Thomas J. Wise in his 'Bibliography of the Writings, &c., of John Ruskin,' part I, Sept. 1889 (printed for subscribers only); of which I have gladly availed myself" (1:268). This acknowledgment--omitted from Cook and Wedderburn's later reprinting of Collingwood'd "Note" in volume 2 of the Library Edition, and one wonders whether omitted pointedly--is significant for indicating, first, Wise's persuasiveness, since Collingwood neglected even to mention Smart, who as secretary of the London Ruskin Society, one would think, would have been deserving of as much regard as a book collector (not yet the famed and authoritarian bibliographer with his "Ashley Library"), but Wise already had a way of impressing people with their indebtedness to him. (It was at this time, in 1889, that F. J. Furnivall, for example, discharged a debt for Wise's gifts of "privately-printed rarities" by allowing Wise to reprint the Ruskin/Maurice correspondence [Partington, Thomas J. Wise in the Original Cloth, 111; Dearden, "Wise and Ruskin III," 318].) The date of Collingwood's note, moreover, is significant for possibly indicating Wise's wariness of the Brantwood circle. While he had described the (forged) prose juvenilia, Leoni, in the Bibliography by 1890 and possibly by 1889, he withheld identification of the (forged) verse juvenilia, Scythian Guest, until December 1892, in the "Omissions" section of appendix 1 (part ?) of the Bibliography, where it was listed along with the spurious Queen's Gardens pamphlet (vol. 2 [1893], pp. 227-28). The late addition to the Bibliography of a published Ruskin poem, too late for use in Collingwood's edition of the Poems (1891), seems to mock the editor's graceful acknowledgment of his reliance on Wise and Smart's scholarship; and the knife is twisted by the same appendix that advertises the (forged) edition also itemizing the contents of Collingwood's Poems, which of course, as Dearden comments, contains no mention of the pamphlet ("Wise and Ruskin II," 177).

Was it mockery, or even spite? (Collingwood had kept Wise at a distance from Brantwood.) Certainly, there was caution shown in the timing. Dearden ("Wise and Ruskin II," 177) cites a letter in which Collingwood thanks Wise for the collation of the Scythian Guest pamphlet with earlier appearances??? of the poem. This was on 13 September 1892, three months prior to the published description in the Bibliography, but still too late for the Poems (1891), and noticeably without permitting Collingwood examination of the physical pamphlet itself???????

<head2>Juvenilia in a Culture of Forgery
Partington represents Wise as entering the fin de siècle London literary scene as the demonic other among legitimate bibliophiles and members of literary societies. According to Parkington, if to idealists like James Dykes Campbell "literature was more than Mammon," Wise "never lost the true shopman's" taint; if Stopford Brooke rated "love of poetry" above "bibliographical curiosities," "the truth" about Wise was "that he was generally more captivated by the story behind the story than by the work itself" (Forging Ahead, 14, 112, 49, 20).

In contrast to this determination to demonize Wise (and save Forman for the elect), Barker and Collins point out that "forgery thrives on ambiguity." The forgers characteristically covered their trail by confusion, and even the physical forged object gained more credibility by aiming at resemblance than at exact imitation. Bibliographic culture in late-century London permitted these ambiguities because good printing was cheap, copyright loose, and the market ripe for small-run collectors' publications. This publishing culture provided "the source and base" of the forgers' work "as well as its inspiration" (A Sequel, 127, 128).

--juvenilia is itself ambiguous and an imitation of others;
--it's by nature rare;
--paradoxical value, scorned yet sought.

A part of that inspiration was the lure of forging famous authors' juvenilia. As an explanation of how Wise started on his career of forgery, Partington points to the young collector's excitement over the rarity of Browning's early Pauline and his subsequent facsimile of the poem, a "page-for-page" type imitation, for the Browning Society. This along with his facsimiles of first editions for the Shelley Society "started Wise on his remarkable series of typographical forgeries"; Partington is confident that "the idea [for the future forgeries and piracies] was in Wise's mind" (Forging Ahead, 30).

Of course, the most obvious temptation, whether of legitimate collecting or forging, is the genuine scarcity of juvenile publications. Browning himself was unaware of the existence of Elizabeth Barrett's Battle of Marathon (), until Wise escorted the elderly poet to a bookseller to examine a copy that had recently surfaced. Browning remained skeptical, until seeing the autograph inscription, which he authenticated as Barrett's hand. Such scarceness was sufficient temptation to forgery, which Wise and Forman proceeded to carry out with Matthew Arnold's Alaric at Rome, Algernon Swinburne's . . . .

The paradox of these values is their accompaniment by expressions of contempt for the artifacts themselves. (Browning's distaste; Partington's mockery of Swinburne as if the poet were a child.) 

Similarly, when Wise and Smart sent Ruskin the prospectus for their Bibliography of Ruskin, Joan Severn communicated Ruskin's thanks to Smart while also passing along his scorn for the bibliographers taking "so much trouble over a lot of worthless stuff!" What Ruskin deemed worthless must have been the subject of the specimen sheets, which, as Dearden has shown, exhibited (along with "Ruskiniana") entries on the <Poems (1850)>, the collection of Ruskin's early poems edited by his father and his first editor, W. H. Harrison. A second possible prospectus, of which a portion survives, unearthed by Dearden, presented a sample based on Poems and on the "1868" Leoni (Dearden, "Wise and Ruskin I," 48; "Wise and Ruskin II," 170). If the now fragmentary prospectus was issued, thrusting the Leoni forgery under the noses of the experts at Brantwood, it was a bold move. The genuineness of the Leoni pamphlet aside, the focus on such a boyhood production along with the early poems was also controversial, since Ruskin had so recently ridiculed these works in Praeterita.

Doesn't it gesture at the erotic while seeming its opposite?

Wise's biographer, Wilfred Partington--who, as editor of the Bookman between the wars, had insufficient distance from this culture to see its implication in Wise and Forman's activities--suppresses ambiguity by. Partington most scornfully banishes Wise from the true believers by branding him a pornographer who, refusing to concede to appeals to decency, hinted publicly at Swinburne's "naughty" manuscripts (Forging Ahead, 79). But...

The forgers had a policy of aiming deceptions especially at the American market since distance discouraged collectors from doubting authenticity or from haggling over the price of items that had never before been offered for sale; moreover, the American market tended to more rapid turnover, which benefited the forgers (Barker and Collins, A Sequel, 122, 147, 148). That the collecting of juvenilia tended also to be concentrated there, as argued in ..., is probably a coincidence....

Barker and Collins point out that private sales offered the safest way to trickle forgeries into the market, but public sales, while risking exposure, presented the most convenient way to establish a price (A Sequel, 147-48). In 1897, when the forgers grew bolder in allowing their work into the showroom, Ruskin juvenilia made its first appearance among other Ruskin pamphlets, and it is interesting to note that Leoni fetched three times or more the price of alleged mature pamphlets (£6. 15s compared to between  £1. 18s and £2. 12s

Leoni
£6. 15s (12 May 1897)
$16.00 (31 Mar 1898)
£2. 6s (20 Jul 1898)
£6. 15s (27 Feb 1899)

Dearden, "Wise and Ruskin I," "Wise and Ruskin II," and "Wise and Ruskin III."