The “century” referenced by the title of this book is the 18th century (i.e., the 1700s), and the book is specifically about England during this time period. So think England around the time of the American Revolution, and some decades before and after that.
According to Ian Keable, this is the century in which the English acquired a reputation as a particularly gullible people. (That’s the first I’ve heard of that, by the way; I didn’t know of this stereotype.) The evidence purportedly justifying this reputation was that there were a number of highly publicized hoaxes over the course of the century that supposedly took in far more people than would have fallen for such hoaxes in other countries.
Is there anything to the claim? Well, broadly speaking, no. Or at least not provably yes. I mean, in order to be able to state with confidence that the English of the time were unusually gullible you’d need to be able to show that in other countries there were just as many opportunities to be taken in by hoaxes (equal number of hoaxes attempted, equally skillful hoaxes, equally publicized to where the same percentage of the population heard about them and had the potential to fall for them, etc.), but with significantly fewer people actually falling for them, and needless to say such comparative evidence doesn’t exist.
Keable himself ultimately doesn’t buy it, though you could also say that he offers considerations on both sides. On the one hand, he points out that those claiming that the English constantly fell for hoaxes during that century almost invariably cited the same two or three cases, which really isn’t very much for a century. On the other hand, he talks about ten hoaxes at some length in the book, and notes that there were considerably more that he could have included. So even if the people accusing the English of being particularly gullible typically didn’t offer much evidence, there was at least somewhat more such evidence available.
But anyway, it’s a pretty silly hypothesis in general. I seriously doubt that 18th century English people were significantly easier to fool than 18th century Spaniards or Japanese or whomever.
What does the author mean by a hoax in this context? Well, he says it’s not just any sort of scam, like, say, a pyramid scheme. He limits it to attempts to fool people that don’t have a crassly financial motive.
So the kind of hoax he has in mind would be perhaps a practical joke played on someone or some group of people that you wanted to embarrass, or maybe a ruse with no particular motive beyond seeing how many people you could take in (just like, say, an online troll today doesn’t always have some way to make money from his shenanigans but may just get some kind of ego boost from getting people to believe some outlandish shit he made up).
I’d say, though, that the line between financially motivated schemes and the narrower sort of hoax that he wants to carve out is not always so clear, or perhaps he’s not always strict himself in including only true hoaxes. For multiple of the ten main ones in the book had at least partly financial motives. There are others where exactly who did what and for what motive remain mysteries to some degree, and thus might or might not have been intended to make money.
I’ll just give a quick summary of the ten cases he talks about, without going into a great deal of detail.
George Psalmanazar (an alias he gave himself; his real name is not known) was a fabulist who, among other things, published extensively about his experiences on the island of Formosa (the modern day nation of Taiwan). The thing is, he never set foot on Formosa and knew nothing whatsoever about it. But, then again, the same was true of over 99% of his potential readers, so he let his imagination run wild and came up with plenty of entertaining tall tales about the Formosan natives, including that they practice polygamy, that they burn Christians alive if they refuse to convert to the Formosan religion, that they worship the sun, and that they sacrifice 18,000 young boys at the start of each year.
Astrology-based almanacs were quite popular and profitable during this time, and every bit as ludicrous as what astrologers come up with today to dupe the public. Jonathan Swift found an astrologer named John Partridge to be particularly galling in this regard. So, he published his own almanac (under an assumed name), which included various goofy astrology-based predictions, including that good Mr. Partridge would die during the coming year. He then followed up to claim that all his predictions had been successful, which met with vehement protests from Partridge that he was still very much alive. Swift stuck to his guns, using the same kind of convoluted arguments to claim truth for his predictions that Partridge himself and his ilk had always used, which further flustered poor Partridge and confused the public as to whether he was alive or dead and in what sense.
The case of Mary Toft is a particularly peculiar one (and one that I read a whole book about some years ago). She was a young woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits, not once but pretty regularly. Unfortunately it was never actual living baby rabbits that allegedly emerged from her, but just random dead rabbit parts—a skull, a couple of legs, a tuft of fur, etc. Of course, in reality she and an accomplice were just stuffing rabbit parts up her pussy, which she would then “give birth to” when the time came. It’s hard to believe anyone ever thought anything else was going on, but some of the “experts” who came to examine her, including some doctors and people with a scientific background, pronounced her legitimate. As far as the motive, apparently the plan was to charge people to see her and her rabbit offspring, the way people pay to see sideshow freaks. (If so, does that mean that it wasn’t a hoax in Keable’s sense after all?)
Many English and American newspapers in the 1740s carried an account, sometimes including a full transcript, of a statement supposedly given by a defendant in a New England court case, defending herself against criminal charges of immorality for giving birth to an illegitimate child (a Scarlet Letter type situation). Her name was said to be Polly Baker, and in her statement she gave a spirited defense of women, lamenting their unjust position in society and how they were doomed to pay the price for acts that involved a man as an equal participant. She stated that she had all the attributes of a good wife and would very much prefer to live an honorable life as one, but that she was unable to do so unless and until a man deigned to marry her. Finally one did propose to her, but it turned out to be a ruse to get her to loosen up and give up her virginity to him, after which he immediately absconded and left her holding the bag, so to speak. Surely she was no guiltier than him of wrongdoing in this scenario, she insisted, and indeed arguably less so given that he was blatantly deceptive in addition to their sexual immorality. Furthermore, she pointed out, she had never claimed any sort of public support for any child of hers but had taken full responsibility, financially and otherwise. Plus, in a largely empty, underpopulated new nation like the American colonies, surely procreation should be encouraged, not punished. The stories sometimes included the additional juicy tidbit that the magistrate was so impressed by her defense that he ended up marrying her himself, and they lived happily ever after. In reality, there was no such case, there was no Polly Baker, and the whole piece was written by none other than Benjamin Franklin, who routinely wrote such items during his Poor Richard’s Almanack days, in some cases as a lark and in some cases to make certain points about, say, societal hypocrisy on some issue such as sex or religion that was too volatile to write about under his own name.
The “bottle conjuror” hoax is the one that Keable identifies as his favorite, and perhaps the one that was most often cited by those claiming that the English of the time were especially gullible. Which is interesting, because to me it seems like one of the less interesting or sensational ones (compared to, say, a woman giving birth to rabbit parts). Someone (exactly who still isn’t known for certain, though the probable culprit eventually was identified) reserved a night in a London theater and placed advertisements in multiple publications that there would be an extraordinary magic show that night, the marvels of which would include a man climbing inside an ordinary wine bottle. A crowd of people showed up to the theater. (Keable points out that it’s doubtful that many if any of them thought the feat would be performed as described, any more than one thinks a magician will literally saw a woman in half or make the Statue of Liberty disappear; surely they were just interested in seeing how an illusion of such a thing would be created.) But no performer ever showed up. Faced with nothing but an empty stage to satisfy their curiosity, eventually the people grew impatient enough to engage in a mini-riot. So that was the whole hoax: Pretend there will be a public demonstration of something bizarre, fail to follow through, and watch how people make fools of themselves in response.
The Elizabeth Canning hoax is one that Keable admits there is still uncertainty over whether it was in fact a hoax (a criminal victimization hoax, like Tawana Brawley, Jussie Smollett, etc.) or not. Canning, a teenage girl, claimed that she had been forcibly abducted, kept confined in a small room for a month with nothing to eat or drink except a quarter loaf of bread and a single broken jug of water, and threatened with having to work as a prostitute, until she managed to escape. She offered a lot of specifics in her account—where she had been held, the identity of at least some of her captors—that were enough to lead to multiple arrests and convictions. In time, though, the holes in the story became more apparent. Some of the alleged perpetrators of crimes against her had at least pretty good alibis. The whole subsisting on one container of water and a fraction of a loaf of bread for a month strained credulity. What’s still not certain is whether she was in fact abducted and held captive but remembered some of the details wrong in her story and exaggerated others, or whether she made the whole thing up.
The Cock Lane ghost purportedly was the ghost of Fanny Lynes, who claimed “from beyond the grave” that she had been poisoned by her widower brother-in-law and common law husband William Kent. Her messages were conveyed via mysterious knocks and scratches to one Elizabeth Parsons, a young girl who claimed to be a medium. Seances at the supposedly haunted site became highly popular. But a formal investigative commission that included Samuel Johnson concluded that it was all a fake that Parsons had been pressured into by her father, who had lost a bitter legal case to Kent.
The Stockwell Hoax involved a family in the Stockwell District of London named Golding who experienced much poltergeist activity (though the term “poltergeist” wasn’t coined until later). The very first newspaper reports of the incidents identified the maid as having faked it all, but subsequent accounts cast doubt on this, on the grounds that there were just too many incidents witnessed by too many people for it to be plausible that the maid alone, and without supernatural assistance, could have managed them all. But as Keable points out, the later accounts drifted further into exaggeration and embellishment; the original allegations were more modest. Furthermore, the maid eventually confessed that she was in fact responsible, and even provided explanations for how she had performed various specific feats that might seem especially difficult to get away with.
In the early days of ballooning, before any manned balloon flights had yet taken place in Britain, Chevalier de Moret announced that he would ascend in an enormous 65 foot high balloon in the shape of a magnificent “Chinese Temple.” After multiple delays, de Moret made his attempt in his balloon and failed completely, to the disappointment of the large assembled crowd. It appears, though, that this wasn’t really a hoax, in that de Moret was probably sincere and thought he’d be able to do what he claimed. It just turned out he was far more skilled at promotion and monetization than at balloon engineering.
The final hoax in the book is a Shakespeare forgery, so outlandish that it’s a wonder anyone ever fell for it. Samuel Ireland was a Shakespeare scholar and fanatic, an eager collector of Shakespeare memorabilia. One day his young son William-Henry Ireland told him that he had been fortunate enough to stumble upon a dealer in various rarities and collectibles who had some interesting Shakespeare items. Rather than take his father to this (fictitious) dealer, he insisted on serving as a middleman, obtaining items from the dealer and bringing them back to his father. After practicing his forgery skills on lesser items such as a prayer book with a fake inscription written to supposed recipient Queen Elizabeth I, and a bust of Oliver Cromwell supposedly signed by Cromwell himself, which his father accepted as genuine with no hesitation, he moved on to Shakespeare memorabilia. First was a lease agreement signed by Shakespeare, and eventually there were whole previously undiscovered plays. The father remained completely credulous, and the supposed experts he showed the material to for confirmation tended to agree with his assessment. It helped that people, including the father, regarded William-Henry as basically an idiot, who would never be able to pull off any kind of skilled hoax, for which he’d have had no motive anyway. They even staged one of the plays, which bombed completely, ridiculed not only by those who regarded it as a fake, but even by those who thought it was or might be genuine Shakespeare.
In the end, I thought the accounts of the hoaxes were at least modestly entertaining, but I can’t say the book won me over in a big way. The hoaxes on the whole mostly seem quite mild and not all that impressive, especially if you compare them with the crazy shit people can be manipulated into believing nowadays—the conspiracy theories, the Q-Anon stuff, etc.
Philo on Books 