Zadie Smith, ‘The Fraud’

 

 

Zadie Smith became fascinated by a couple of enormous legal cases in Victorian London which tested the claims of a man from Australia who said he was the rightful heir to an aristocratic estate. ‘The Tichborne Claimant’, as he was known, was at the centre of much more than an epic legal battle (which he lost). He became a rallying point for radical political movements, and – strangely – a symbol of the dominance of a Catholic elite in British society.

 

Smith has cleverly interlocked this history with that of the once-successful novelist W.H.Ainsworth, whose popularity was overtaken by Dickens, and with the enslavement at a younger age, of the Claimant’s supporter and a former faithful family servant, Andrew Bogle. She takes a few admitted liberties with timelines, but the key points of her story match the history. 

 

It’s quite a long novel, but not as long as the book looks because it is made up of many chapters which are mostly no more than about two pages long, which means there is an almost blank page every page or so.