Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Book excerpt: In Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Sara Malton insists that we fully account for the prominence of forgery in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination. Examining a range of works from Dickens to Wilde, she considers how social and legal contexts inform the shifting representation of the crime and its varied perpetrators throughout the nineteenth century. Distinct in its historical attentiveness, Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture illuminates the breadth of cultural issues to which this “crime of the first magnitude” is linked.