The Ambitious Anachronism of ‘The Fraud’
In 2009, a first edition of Charles Dickens’s The Christmas Carol was sold at auction for $290,500. The book had been inscribed by Dickens himself to one “Mrs Touchet.” This Eliza Touchet was cousin by marriage to a novelist named William Harrison Ainsworth, and served as his housekeeper and as a witty hostess for literary parties at his home in Kensal Green, many of which Dickens attended. Touchet is also the central figure of Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, The Fraud.
Nearly unread now, William Harrison Ainsworth was in his time a commercial success with a series of historical and sometimes Gothic novels. includes much of this literary background, but its main action is connected to the Tichborne case, a legal cause célèbre of the 1860s and 1870s. living in Wagga Wagga, Australia, who claimed to be the disappeared and presumed dead , heir to the Tichborne baronetcy and a significant fortune. Along with Ainsworth’s second wife , Eliza becomes intrigued by the Tichborne case, attending many days of the trial in London. Sarah, formerly Ainsworth’s maid, actually believes that the claimant is indeed “poor Sir Roger,” up against the Lord Chief Justice, the secret societies, the Hebrews and Papists, and his own family who say they don’t recognize him. Eliza is more interested in a key witness named , who grew up enslaved on a sugar plantation in Jamaica, then became Roger’s uncle’s butler, and now vouches that this claimant is that same Roger.
