Going Viral: Fraud, Personation, and Sensationalism in the Victorian Period and Today

Drawing on Zadie Smith’s suggestion in her novel, The Fraud (2023), that we share Victorians’ interest in fraudulent figures, this essay argues that we have much in common with Victorians when it comes to anxieties around personation and fraud. Beginning with a discussion of the Tichborne case, the Cleveland Street Scandal, and W. T. Stead’s “Maiden Tribute,” this essay theorizes the ways that anxieties around personation and new forms of reporting operated in a circuit of sensationalized response. In a post-internet iteration of Victorian experience, such circuits are used by multiple actors not necessarily to reveal personation, fraud, and crime, but to distract from and even create it.