Zadie Smith’s sixth novel is set in 1870s Kilburn, home to William Ainsworth, a real-life novelist of questionable talent, and his Scottish cousin and housekeeper Eliza Touchet. The Fraud moves between Eliza’s time as a young widow, when, on moving in with the Ainsworths, she falls for William’s first wife, Frances, and her later years spent looking down her nose at Sarah, the second Mrs Ainsworth, and obsessing over a court case that gripped Victorian London.
The case is that of the “Tichborne claimant”, a butcher from Wapping who professed to be the lost heir to a Hampshire estate, claiming his inheritance after being shipwrecked on a boat bound for Jamaica. Many thought the claimant an impostor, though he had a defender in Andrew Bogle, an elderly ex-slave from Jamaica who had worked on the family plantation.
