In 1841, a crowd gathered at the New York docks anxious for news of a young girl in England who was terminally ill. ‘Is little Nell dead?’ the passengers who had just arrived from England were asked as they disembarked. The concern was real, but the child was not. She was a character in Charles Dickens’s novel The Old Curiosity Shop, which at the time was being published serially in monthly instalments.
Few deaths in fiction have provoked such an outpouring of emotion among readers—understandable in an age when the infant mortality rate was much higher in the West than it is now—though subsequent critics of the novel poured scorn on what they viewed as cheap sentimentality.
Aldous Huxley cited Little Nell as a prime example of ‘vulgarity in literature’, with the death scene of the child being a crude appeal to bathos rather than furthering a serious artistic purpose. Oscar Wilde is said to have commented: ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.’
Absurd or not, the effect achieved by Dickens is not unique nor entirely unknown in our time. We all know about the supposedly true books that turn out to be fakes—the Norma Khouri hoax last year is just the most recent example—but perhaps even more remarkable is the way fiction can somehow become fact.
The difference between true fakes and false ones was illustrated within the space of one week in January this year with the controversies surrounding J. T. LeRoy and James Frey. Frey is a real person accused of fabricating the details of his autobiography and would thus be considered a straightforward hoaxer, or true fake. On the other hand, LeRoy, supposedly a former street kid who wrote fiction heavily based on his personal experience with drugs and prostitution, is himself a fiction. The experience depicted in LeRoy’s books may be real for some people but the figure of the author was invented by a middle-aged couple and impersonated in public by the sister of one of its creators.
The news that the film rights to Gregory Roberts’s Shantaram have been snapped up by Hollywood star Johnny Depp after huge sales here and overseas is proof of the success of what could be called the reverse hoax. Shantaram is a novel, but it is no secret that the story is based very heavily on the colourful life