The Fraud

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and enslavement, including explicitly racist ideas from the 19th century.

The Fraud is about fraudulent behavior and fraudulent people, with the Tichborne trial at its center embodying the complexities of determining authenticity and which narrative is the true one. Authenticity is also frequently linked to the idea of crafting and sharing narratives, especially regarding who gets to tell what story.

Arthur Orton’s claim to be Sir Roger Tichborne captures the nation’s attention because the case echoes society’s class anxieties. If it is possible for a commoner—a regular butcher from Australia—to gain access to the elite through spinning a false narrative, then access to the upper-class realm is no longer about lineage and wealth, but about who can present themselves as a nobleman most convincingly. At stake here is the loss of the upper class’s power over the lower classes, a caste system that has existed for centuries and which ensures that the wealthy stay wealthy while the poor have no upward mobility. Also notable in this fraud case is the discussion about authentic displays of identity markers: For example, Arthur Orton’s inability to speak French is an indication that he was not educated in the types of schools the English elite attend, calling his authenticity into question. The Tichborne Claimant case asks England to confront its stereotypes of what it means to be rich or poor, and why it matters.

William also falls into this theme because he uses his novels as a way of traveling into spaces and places that are not authentic to him. The farther away William’s subject is from his lived experience, the worse his novel is. William’s writing is windy and overwrought precisely because he doesn’t have anything authentic to say about the people he is writing about. For example, when he writes about Jamaica, a country he’s never been to, he uses elaborate and dramatic styling to describe a setting based solely on an image he’s seen, a book he's read, and some stereotypical images he has of what the Caribbean must be like. This lends inauthenticity to William’s novels, destroying his authenticity as a writer and resulting in narratives that ring hollow and false.

Most significantly of all, Eliza becomes a type of fraud all of her own making. Eliza replicates William’s out-of-touch cycles that make him (and her) believe they have the right to write about someone else’s story. When Eliza becomes interested in Andrew Bogle as a subject, she dehumanizes him further. Bogle has already lived an entire life as the projection of what white people want him to be: enslaved person, servant, amiable, never angry, subservient, calm, honest. Eliza replicates this dehumanization by wanting to use Bogle for her own literary project. Rather than help Bogle find a platform to tell his own story and be compensated for it, Eliza uses the story of his life to write her own book—openly denying him any payment for doing so. Bogle’s narrative is constantly being co-opted by white people who believe they mean well but are actually only perpetuating racist abuse by other means. The Fraud thus exposes the complexities surrounding which narratives and identities are or are not authentic, questioning why some voices—white, elite, English—are elevated while others—Black, poor, marginalized—are systematically oppressed.