Slavery, illusion and dead white men: Zadie Smith's The Fraud explodes the historical novel

Photographs published in 1876 designed to prove that Roger Tichborne (left) and the 'Claimant', (right) were one and the same, as per the central blended image. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Victorian England loved a juicy scandal and Zadie Smith situates The Fraud in one of the mid-19th century’s most toothsome cause célèbres: the Tichborne case.

Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a title and fortune, went missing when the ship he was travelling on sank en route to Jamaica. His distraught mother, Lady Tichborne, clinging to the idea her son had been plucked from the ocean by a ship bound for Australia, advertised widely in the newspapers. In 1864 a man came forward claiming to be the lost heir.