Identity Theft & ID Fraud profile: Literature

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ID theft and fraud in literature

This page considers identity theft and identity fraud in literature.

It covers -

introduction
depictions
authors
ghosting and plagiarism

     introduction

As we have suggested in discussing authenticity in a separate profile on this site, imposture, appropriation and identity have been both a rich literary theme and something used by authors to pain their way out of corners.

     depictions

Three major works are Thomas Mann's The Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man (1954), Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) and William Gaddis' The Recognitions
(1955).

Mark Twain's The Prince & the Pauper: A Tale for Young People of All Ages (1881), Rafael Sabatini's The Lost King (1937), Wilkie Collins' Armadale (1866), Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal (1971), Ian Fleming's Moonraker (1955), Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake (2003), Alexandre Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask, Daphne Du Maurier's Scapegoat or Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) offer more romantic accounts. There is a mordant view in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (1947), Peter Lovesey's The False Inspector Dew (2001) and Simon Leys' superb The Death of Napoleon (1986).

For academic perspectives see Gary Lindberg's The Confidence-Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1982) and Susan Kuhlmann's Knave, Fool, Genius: The Confidence Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 1973).

     authors

Recent authorial shape-shifting is evident in controversies over Helen Darville/Demidenko's unlovely The Hand That Signed the Paper (1994) - discussed in Andrew Reimer's The Demidenko Affair (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1996), Corey China's 2004 Under the Influence of Prize Culture: Helen Demidenko & the Vogel, Miles Franklin, and ALS Gold Medal Awards and Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko & the Holocaust (Melbourne: Text 1996) - and Bruno Doessekker's supposed Holocaust memoir, considered in A Life in Pieces: the Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski (New York: Norton 2002) by Blake Eskin and The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth (New York: Schocken 2001) by Stefan Maechler.

They are an unpleasant echo of George Psalmanazar's imposture, discussed here.

Literary conspiracists have of course detected identity theft where there was none, perhaps most famously in denying Shakespeare's authorship. Ignatius Donnelly's zany 1888 The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s cipher in the so-called Shakespeare plays argued that the earl of Oxford was the author of Montaigne's Essays, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Marlowe's plays. Contemporary Edward Durning-Lawrence's 1910 Bacon is Shakespeare went even further, crediting Francis Bacon with the Authorized Version of the Bible.

Brian Vickers, in reviewing Scott McCrea's The Case For Shakespeare: The end of the authorship question (Westport: Praeger 2005), gently comments that

None of the Baconians was a literary scholar, none of them felt the need to acquire any knowledge of English literature, or the English language in the sixteenth century, and none bothered to read Bacon, although the magnificent fourteen-volume edition of James Spedding was completed in 1874. All they needed was the preconceived notion that Shakespeare could not have written the plays, while Bacon could.

One of the more deliciously wacky exposes sighted recently explains that both Bacon and the Earl of Essex were the unacknowledged children of Queen Elizabeth I, an individual who has also been credited with writing Shakespeare's plays.

ghosting and plagiarism

This site features a more detailed discussion of ghosting, essay mills and plagiarism (with a supplementary note on plagiarism incidents).

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