Old forgeries

 Forgeries are despised today. In 1800, they were common in journalism. You might have been disappointed if your newspaper or magazine didn’t produce one occasionally.

Some of Charles Lamb’s earliest journalism was in the forgery genre. 

Lamb turned to journalism when he was young and needed cash. He was working as a junior bookkeeper in a great trading house by day and was supporting a family of elderly invalids and a sister with mental health problems.

Forgeries were a different thing when Lamb, 26, got his first freelance job at a newspaper in 1801.

A friend had made some money with a sample of the alleged letters of Falstaff, Shakespeare’s character. The objection to forgeries is the deception, of course, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being deceived. A forgery was like TV wrestling today. Of course it’s fake. Everyone knows that. It’s just entertainment — and not exactly high-brow.

When Lamb tried it, he imitated the letters of Robert Burton, whose Anatomy of Melancholy he admired. Lamb’s efforts didn’t set the publishing world on fire, but he found that he liked writing in the voice of another person. He liked pretending to be someone else.

Lamb wrote his great essays in the voice of another character, Elia. “Elia” is pronounced “a liar,” with the Runpronounced, as is the way of people who live in quaint places like England and Georgia.

A scholar could point out that literature designed to deceive people is a bit like literature designed to scare people. Scaring readers might be nice, but horror is still a viable genre.

But I’m not the person to write a defense of forgeries. Deception is such a destructive part of American life, especially political and economic life, that I became an unlikable puritan railing against it.

I do see the value of teaching students to write in a different voice. In an earlier day, children were taught to write in the voices of other people. Schoolboys had to write in the voices of mature women. Children had to imagine what it was like to be a person of another sex, another culture, another income bracket.

Some of the results might be appalling. Some might be funny. But I don’t know how else anyone might teach empathy — or give a student a glimpse of it.

• Sources and notes: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022. Several posts mention Wilson’s book. The first was “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

Scott Newstok  argues that requiring students to write in other voices was once common and the practice helped playwrights develop characters. His book How to Think like Shakespeare; Princeton University Press, 2020, is excellent. For more, see “Thinking about The Progymnasmata,” June 24, 2024. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/06/thinking-about-progymnasmata.html