John Payne Collier. Three words sure to chill the heart of any scholar working on early-modern literary texts. Why? Because Collier was that most interesting of phenomena: a fine scholar who was also a first-class fraud. It is to posterity’s chagrin that he lived to the age of 94 – Collier died on 17 September 1883 – leaving a trail of confusion in his wake which is unlikely ever to be completely unpicked.
He was often quite brazen about his forgeries. “This part of the work will at least have the merit of novelty and originality”, he writes of the 34 ballads of his own invention he represented as Elizabethan survivals in his 1848-9 editions of Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers Company. He could not help, either, editorialising about the quality of his work. “The allegory is extremely well sustained, and the ballad must have been written by no inferior hand. It would be vain now to attempt to ascertain the authorship,” he wrote of one such effort.
On another occasion, Collier was challenged by NESA Hamilton, an expert at the British Museum, as to why his transcript of a damaged and incomplete letter to the actor Edward Alleyn contained a passage about Shakespeare missing from the document itself. At first, he was dismissive. “I may or may not have mis-read some utterly unimportant words,” he wrote. And then, noting the damage: “how can [Hamilton] tell whether it did or did not exist there?”
The extent of his forgeries and falsifications is breathtaking: the so-called ‘Perkins Folio’, in which he passed off his own emendations to Shakespeare as the work of a near contemporary, contains over 20,000 corrections. One problem is that he lived so long and was so prolific; his bibliography runs to nearly 300 pages.
Another problem is that he did much good work; in particular, in an era of high bardolatry he was a keen advocate of the non-Shakespearean. Collier had a life-long interest in popular culture: he was the first scholar to consider Punch and Judy a subject for serious study, and he oversaw the publication of countless obscure ballads and plays. Coleridge’s 1811-2 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton survive because Collier, who knew shorthand, was in the audience taking notes.
Born in 1789 into a formerly prosperous family, Collier’s early years were not easy. The children slept on the floor and drank water from a basin because they had no mugs. But it was a literary household always. As a young man Collier played billiards with Keats; Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and others were visitors. First admitted to the reading room at the British Museum when he was just 14, Collier aimed initially for a career as a barrister. His hopes were derailed, however, by a series of satiric portraits of senior members of the Bar which he published anonymously – but not, it seems, anonymously enough.
Connoisseurs of Collier’s forgeries can honestly disagree about which has been the most damaging. Aside from including deliberate fictions and falsehoods in printed records of archival material, he also introduced forgeries into the archives themselves, faking official documents, adding information to letters and diaries, falsifying registers and inventories, and more. But no-one can argue about the extent of these impostures. He tampered with at least 57 authentic manuscripts and rare printed material, although others certainly remain either unlocated or unidentified. To paraphrase Dryden on Jonson, Collier’s footprints are everywhere in the snow of early modern literature. (A contemporary, less kindly, called him “the great literary slug… What wonder if we shall still be able to trace his slime.”)
But who is to say Collier hasn’t had the last laugh? His ballads made their way into anthologies of folk song and out into the world. Recordings of a few, at least, aren’t hard to find. His legacy, precisely because it is so contested, is the subject of much more ongoing scholarship than that of his rivals. The authoritative account of his work as both a critic and forger, published in 2004, extends to some 1,483 pages. So many footprints. So much snow.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the September 2022 issue of History Today.
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Mathew Lyons 
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