From a clairvoyant chicken to a fake Shakespeare: 8 hoaxes that fooled Georgian Britain
The Enlightenment was an era of open-eyed progress, of the advance of science and reason – right? So why, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, did British people continue to be hoodwinked? Madeleine Pelling exposes eight frauds and forgeries from a golden age of hoaxes
1. The Bottle Conjurer doesn’t materialise
An elusive trickster exposes Britain’s ignorance
We tend to think of the Enlightenment as the threshold of the modern world. Yet in the 18th century – worryingly, much as today – the boundary between truth and falsehood was far from clear. And liars and impostors were quick to take full advantage.
Take the charlatan who, in January 1749, lured Londoners to the Haymarket Theatre to witness an impossible spectacle: a man who could fit himself into a wine bottle. The act, according to the newspapers, promised all kinds of wonders. The performer would sing from within the vessel, and afterwards tell the fortunes of all who attended. In a city already intoxicated by novelty – from mechanised automata to scientific experiments – the Bottle Conjurer was the next shiny attraction in a marketplace full of marvels.
On the appointed night, as the theatre filled up, an empty bottle stood waiting on the stage, the audience members held their breath – and nothing happened. No man appeared. So enraged were the crowd that they rioted, hurling anything they could handle and setting fire to the rest.
The performances of fairground conjurers and scientists in the city had, until now, been delivered with a knowing, consenting wink. Expectations had been clear, the boundaries of science and belief agreed upon. For attendees, being made to look foolish for believing felt like betrayal.
Aided by a willing press, knowingly or otherwise, the anonymous Bottle Conjurer exposed the fragility of Enlightenment assumptions about credibility and proof, laying bare the ignorance that still underpinned polite society. Though hardly the first such imposture, the absent man’s provocation – shocking, faceless – also revealed an increasingly uneasy relationship between media and deception that would shape the culture of the age.
So who was the mysterious prankster – and why did they plan this hoax? Some have suggested that it was John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu, who aimed to win a bet. But neither the identity nor the motive of the perpetrator have ever been conclusively revealed.
2. Swift’s revenge on a charlatan soothsayer
The satirical writer takes aim at the physician and self-proclaimed seer John Partridge
John Partridge came from humble beginnings. Originally a cobbler from Surrey, he taught himself languages and astrology and moved to Covent Garden in his thirties. Provocative and quarrelsome, Partridge had many enemies – among them the writer and cleric Jonathan Swift – and was routinely drawn into arguments about the legitimacy of his work. Each year, and not without controversy, he published a list of predictions, including the upcoming deaths of prominent figures.
So frustrated was Swift by Partridge’s apparent charlatanism that, in 1708, the writer sought a fitting revenge. Utilising the newly expanding print media, he published his own forecast: the death of Partridge on 29 March that year. When he followed it up with a second announcement, this time confirming Partridge’s demise, condolences poured in. Despite Partridge’s protestations that he was, in fact, alive, the whole affair caused him no end of bother. Mourners attended his house to weep beneath his windows, and one particularly opportunistic undertaker even reached out to his family in a bid for business.
That liars could be publicly exposed was a reassuring notion, but Swift’s weaponising of fresh untruths to do so only deepened the confusion. In a print-saturated world, satire and sincerity proved difficult to tell apart. Far from guaranteeing clarity, Enlightenment publicity made the task of discerning fact from fiction
more uncertain than ever.
3. An ‘original’ Armada account fools the British Museum
The ‘first English newspaper’ from the 16th century convinces experts
In an age of knowledge production, when plants, animals, artworks, antiquities and even people were routinely taxonomised and put into categories, a slew of cultural frauds undermined the gatekeepers of institutional authority.
Among the many fakes to make their way into supposedly learned hands was The English Mercurie. An apparently authentic newsbook dated to 1588 – which would have made it the earliest such publication – it contained a detailed account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada that year, and was bequeathed to the British Museum in 1766. But it was, in fact, a forgery wrought by Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, as a literary joke among friends, though it wasn’t exposed as such until 1839.
That the Mercurie could deceive scholars for many years was deeply unsettling. In a culture increasingly confident in its archives and collections, and in their reliability in telling national and historical stories, The English Mercurie showed how easily that faith could be misplaced.
4. The disappearance of Elizabeth Canning
An eminent champion of justice is outwitted
Among the most shocking and mysterious hoaxes of the period was that of Elizabeth Canning, a maidservant who disappeared on New Year’s Day 1753, only to reappear four weeks later with a terrible tale to tell.
After visiting her family for New Year’s Eve – traditionally a holiday for servants – Canning claimed to have been set upon by robbers, and soon found herself held captive in the company of a notorious brothel keeper and her accomplice. Together, the women imprisoned Canning in an attic room, sustaining her on little more than bread and water until she agreed to join them in a life of sin. Holding fast, Canning was eventually able to escape.
The accused women were caught and prosecuted by the celebrated magistrate Henry Fielding. The story might have ended there, had new evidence not emerged in the days that followed.
The brothel keeper’s accomplice, it transpired, had been hundreds of miles from London during Canning’s disappearance. With no other proof to offer, the maidservant’s account soon fell apart. Fielding, that great champion of justice and order, was humiliated – and forced to confront a new possibility: that he himself had been duped.
The realities of Canning’s mysterious absence were never fully explained. Yet the embarrassing pall of the case – coloured by vice, gender and the apparent outwitting of a senior magistrate by a lowly servant woman – casts long shadows over the legitimacy of the legal system, the requirements for proof, and the unsavoury realities of city life.
5. Shipwreck, servitude, survival... sham!
Robert Drury’s account of enslavement on Madagascar captivates – or, perhaps, hoodwinks – readers
The boundaries of the known world were routinely tested during the Enlightenment. For those in Britain, much of this exploration took place on the page: accounts of travel, shipwreck and survival became staples, consumed eagerly by readers who would never leave home.
In 1729, readers across the country were enthralled by Madagascar; or Robert Drury’s Journal, During 15 Years’ Captivity on that Island. The book described shipwrecks and hostile encounters, the enslavement of its protagonist and his eventual escape back to England, and was presented as a true account. Audiences marvelled at its exotic descriptions of an unfamiliar world.
Its afterlives proved more complex. In the late 19th century, the text was widely understood to be a work of fiction based on earlier accounts and attributed by some to novelist and government spy Daniel Defoe. But in the early 2000s, archaeologists unearthed a wreck site believed to contain the remains of Drury’s ship, the Degrave, off Madagascar.
Accounts such as this fed anxieties about Britain’s place in the world, its provincial ignorance on the edge of a rapidly expanding and unruly empire, and the instability of the categories through which distant peoples and places were understood. Whether real or imagined, the Drury episode exposed the fact that those who benefited most from imperial expansion need have only a tenuous grasp of the realities beyond their own front doors – and an enduring willingness to believe fantasies sold to them.
6. Commodore Byron’s Patagonian giants
Brits lap up outlandish tales of oversized South Americans
In 1766, HMS Dolphin, a 24-gun frigate fresh from its first circumnavigation of the globe, docked in the Thames with a remarkable story to tell. Its crew and commander, the notorious Commodore John Byron – known as ‘Foul Weather Jack’, and grandfather to the poet Lord Byron – returned to London eager to share their tale.
Accounts quickly passed from whispered rumour to the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Chronicle. While in South America, Byron’s crew reported, they had encountered a tribe of giants, some of them said to stand more than 9 feet (nearly 3 metres) tall.
This was not the first time the giants of Patagonia had appeared in European accounts. Reports had circulated since the 16th century, and many of Byron’s readers were eager to trust the words of the navy’s finest. Coming from imperial eyewitnesses, the testimony carried weight.
Not everyone was convinced, though. The satirist and wit Horace Walpole, who had weighed in on earlier hoaxes, published a mocking response. He suggested that Byron might have brought back a Patagonian woman or two to improve England’s short and unappealing stock.
More serious doubt followed soon afterwards when the French explorer Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville, offered his own account of travels in South America. The people he encountered were no taller than men elsewhere, he reported.
Faced with incompatible yet authoritative eyewitnesses, readers were left to choose whom to believe. They were also faced with the unsettling recognition that empire did not deliver any certainty against which Britain and its inhabitants could measure themselves – but, rather, further confusion.
At the very moment Britain congratulated itself on having learned how to tell reality from fiction, the Enlightenment made deception easier than ever. Print, science and empire demanded faith in witnesses, documents and distant worlds that few could ever test for themselves.
7. Shakespeare’s lost words unearthed
William Henry Ireland’s fake manuscripts spark a dramatic brouhaha
Perhaps the most audacious literary forgery of the age was a series of supposedly long-lost papers attributed to William Shakespeare.
By the end of the 18th century, the bard had already undergone a major revival in Britain, thanks largely to the efforts of actor and playwright David Garrick, who championed the writer as a figure of national importance. So popular were his works that when, in the 1790s, the young legal clerk William Henry Ireland and his engraver father Samuel announced the discovery of an enormous cache of previously unknown material – including an entirely new play, Vortigern and Rowena – the public was captivated. Playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan hastily acquired the rights to stage the work at Drury Lane, and the Irelands published a lavish illustrated guide to the supposed finds.
It was only after critics began to point out glaring discrepancies in the documents that William was forced to publish a confession. The scandal was made all the more uncomfortable when, in a desperate attempt to salvage both his own reputation and his son’s, Samuel mounted an ill-advised public defence. He declared that William was too stupid to have carried out the deception alone – a claim that provoked widespread ridicule, and only deepened condemnation.
8. The Yorkshire Witch and the second coming
A magic chicken produces astonishing predictions
In industrial Leeds in the early years of the 19th century, something miraculous was occurring – apparently. In the yard behind a worker’s cottage, in the shadows of grimy, looming factories, a chicken was laying an extraordinary egg. According to the crowds jostling for a better look – each credulous attendee having paid a penny – the same chicken had produced such treasures on previous occasions. Each was, onlookers discovered to their amazement, inscribed with the same line of text: ‘Crist is Coming’. Despite the misspelling, little convincing was required. The end of the world and the second coming of the messiah was, surely, nigh.
The miraculous chicken’s owner was a wheelwright’s wife named Mary Bateman. And those eggs helped add to her reputation – built over the course of a long and nefarious career – as a healer, a seller of charms and a breaker of curses. She claimed to free her neighbours from ill spells and to cast enchantments to remedy everything from unrequited love to poverty and illness. By the time that she was arrested in 1808, she was widely known as the Yorkshire Witch.
The crime for which she was eventually hanged, however, was neither fraud nor the spreading of false prophecies about an impending apocalypse. It was murder. After becoming embroiled in the lives of downtrodden clothiers William and Rebecca Perigo – who’d been pushed to the edges of the growing city as mechanised production obliterated their small cottage workshop – Bateman turned parasitic. She offered false hope through her supposed magical practices, which included taking money that she supposedly made into charms to be sewn into Rebecca’s mattress.
When the couple began to struggle to meet her increasingly unaffordable demands, Bateman poisoned them, giving them powder containing a corrosive substance to mix into a pudding. William barely escaped with his life; his wife died in agony. It was only when he opened one of the charms and found only pennies and scrap paper that he recognised the con.
Leeds was no provincial backwater but a metropolis woven into an imperial web of exchange. Yet as workers migrated from rural communities to make their fortunes in fast-growing cities, their superstitions followed them. What the Yorkshire Witch offered her clients – and there were hundreds – was a hopeful counterpoint to long factory hours, dangerous conditions and shortened lives. Progress may have been booming, but so was the human cost – and those willing to exploit it.
Madeleine Pelling is a cultural historian, author and broadcaster. Her new book, Hoax: Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment, is published by Profile in May
Authors
Dr Madeleine Pelling is a historian, writer and podcast host, specialising in early modern Britain. Her books include Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Profile Books, 2024) and Pop Enlightenments: The Eighteenth-Century Now (co-edited with Dr Emrys Jones, forthcoming)