| Product: |
The Great Pretenders: The True Stories Behind Famous Historical Mysteries - Jan Bondeson |
| Date: |
29.03.05 (622 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: True stories of fakes, frauds and imposters throughout, history - good stuff!
Disadvantages: Perhaps spoils the fun, by solving mysteries that, are better unsolved
This is a book about people throughout history who've pretended to be other people (almost always wealthy other people). It's written by Jan Bondeson, a Belgian doctor, who's written quite a few books on unusual historical trivia, and who is rarely less than entertaining. (I highly recommend his book The London Monster, about some odd sexual assaults that took place in late eighteenth century London and the astounding mass hysteria that accompanied them.) He's straying away from his normal territory here (he tends to write about people with unusual medical conditions and how they were interpreted by their less-knowledgeable peers), but in seven interesting chapters he presents various frauds, pretenders and wannabes for our delectation.
They tend to be taken from recent history (nothing before the eighteenth century), and he only covers cases where there's still some doubt as to whether the pretender might have been genuine. So there's nothing about Perkin Warbeck or other similarly shady characters. I was mildly disappointed that the Man in the Iron Mask doesn't get a chapter, as I'm always up for a bit of idle speculation about him, but what the heck, I learnt a lot of new stuff here.
The only two cases the book covers that I'd heard of are the Tichborne Claimant and Kaspar Hauser. The Claimant was a fat man from Australia who claimed to be the missing heir of the very wealthy English Tichborne family. He convinced a surprising number of people, including the missing man's own mother, despite looking nothing like the man he was pretending to be and not knowing several important details about his supposed past life. The main mystery here is how on earth he managed to fool so many people, and who his accomplices were. But still, he became a bona fide Victorian sensation for a while, and it's always enjoyable to read the details of his case again. (Did you know that the slang word 'Tich', referring to someone small, derives in a slightly roundabout way from the Tichborne Claimant? Well you do now. Assuming you believe me.)
Kaspar Hauser is an entirely different nature of character. A German youth who claimed to have been locked up in a small dungeon since his early childhood who appeared in Nuremberg one day, apparently unable to speak, use cutlery or interact with other people in any kind of meaningful way. Speculation was rife that he was the heir to some great noble family, and his murder a few years later has fuelled conspiracy theorists ever since. Bondeson, rather disappointingly, isn't having any of it, claiming that it would be impossible for a child to survive in the conditions Hauser described, and that he must have been some kind of fraud (although given how elaborate his hoax was, and how small the rewards he got from it, one has to wonder). Still, I'm not too worried who Kaspar Hauser really was - I just like the story for its undeniably uncanny elements (Werner Herzog made a brilliant film about Hauser, also heartily recommended).
But herein perhaps lies the main problem with this book - Bondeson ruthlessly applies his contemporary medical knowledge to each case, and manages to disprove most of them (although he has to shoehorn it in pretty ruthlessly in some chapters). There's lots of talk of DNA evidence, which normally proves that the various pretenders can't possibly have been who they claimed to be. This rather spoils the fun. I like a good historical mystery, especially an unsolved one, and this book presents plausible solutions to rather too many. (Actually, thinking about it, a historical mystery has to be unsolved, doesn't it, otherwise it wouldn't be a mystery any more.) There's something curiously satisfying about knowing that we'll never know some things. We'll never know who Jack the Ripper was, we'll never know who or what Spring-Heeled Jack was, we'll never know what the angel actually told John Dee - this is how I like it. A mystery that gets solved is always anti-climactic. An unsolved mystery is like an endlessly delayed orgasm - frustrating in some ways, but highly enjoyable in others (something Edgar Allen Poe clearly understood - it's the mystery that's important, not the solution).
Anyway, apart from those two we also get chapters about: Louis XIV's doomed son and the French scallywags who claimed to be him (there were several); claims that an ageing Russian holy man was really the long-dead Tsar Alexander I; and the completely bonkers fifth Duke of Portland, who may have disguised himself as a humble London shopkeeper. The best chapter details the various stories that George III secretly married a woman of low birth and had a daughter by her; Georgian antics are usually good for a laugh. A final chapter rattles through a whole bunch of lesser imposters, most of them blatantly fraudulant, including the women who claimed to be Anastasia, daughter of the last Russian Tsar. Bondeson also takes a page or two to thoroughly condemn Patricia Cornwell's idiotic attempts to solve the Jack the Ripper case through deeply flawed DNA testing (although to be fair that's one of the less idiotic things about her entirely incorrect theory- I may not care who Jack the Ripper *was*, but I sure as hell know who he *wasn't*).
So I recommend this book as an entertaining look at some of history's more entertaining impostures, sometimes funny, sometimes mildly gruesome. While Jan Bondeson may have spoiled the fun in a few cases, his re-telling of the facts is enjoyable enough if you don't know about them already (and I didn't in the majority of cases). OK, so it doesn't look like did a great deal of original research in writing it, but his writing is enjoyable.
Only available in hardback at the moment (I got it second hand, it should be easy enough to find a cheap copy on one of Amazon's various second-hand dealers).
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