What do epic poems by an ancient Scottish bard and a woman who gave birth to seventeen rabbits have in common? They were both hoaxes perpetrated in eighteenth-century Britain that challenged the leading precepts of the day. James Macpherson and Mary Toth, two of the deceptive individuals featured in Jack Lynch's meticulously researched book, troubled literary critics, the public, and sometimes the legal establishment during the age of reason, an anxious time characterized by a reliance on the truthfulness of knowledge. This eighteenth-century world was one in which disciplines from law and history to religion and philosophy were working to establish order and authority, devising ways to authenticate methods to distinguish truth from falsehood.

The book focuses on debates surrounding James Macpherson's Ossian poems, William Henry Ireland's Shakespeare, Thomas Chatterton's poetry, Mary Toth's alleged birthing of rabbits, and Elizabeth Canning's abduction while mentioning others such as that surrounding George Psalmanazar, who successfully assumed an East Asian identity. Lynch advises readers against imposing contemporary notions of deception onto this period, and he proceeds, through nine chapters, to explain debates over authenticity—a subject that obsessed the eighteenth-century British public. With great objectivity and skill, Lynch dissects the arguments surrounding what constituted a fake, carefully documenting both well-known and obscure sources. Lynch crafts each section around concepts that shaped how eighteenth-century Britain conceptualized truth. Close inspection, circumstantial evidence, internal and external consistency, inner motivation, anachronisms, and memory were the tools used to build arguments for and against a case.

How did critics of the day “test” suspected literary frauds for originality? Macpherson claimed he assembled Ossian's poems from originals but could not produce old manuscripts that testified to this fact. However, as Lynch highlights, originality did not prove to be the most important aspect in the poems’ authenticity. Instead, critics questioned their appearance as a seamless epic. For Samuel Johnson and others, no significant body of poetry could survive oral transmission intact. However, given that historicism was one of the most important intellectual currents in eighteenth-century Britain, critics viewed Macpherson's poetry as a historical resource on third-century Scotland.

Concepts such as mathematics’ new language of probability influenced methods of establishing consistency, especially in the practice of law. Locating consistency in legal documents and in accounts (such as that of Elizabeth Canning, who claimed she was abducted and locked away in a second-story room for nearly a month with few provisions) began to rely heavily on circumstantial evidence. In the case of Macpherson, his mere refusal to provide evidence was enough to label his works inauthentic.

Internal and external consistency underpinned many arguments against fakes. Forgers had to outsmart critics, who they knew pored over details to spot irregularities. A fairly simple idea guided them: “An account is internally consistent when it never contradicts itself; it is externally consistent when it does not contradict our knowledge of the large world that produced it” (64). Because suspect works were often awkwardly constructed, they might gain legitimacy if critics felt they were consistently good. Because epic poems like Ossian's required great effort, some believed that Macpherson was not talented enough to have written them himself and that therefore they must be authentic. In addition, deception could be made visible at first glance; either the initial feeling the works produced could authenticate them or, perhaps, the author's name or character.

Questioning the notion of genius may be commonplace now, but it was not so in eighteenth-century Britain. In fact, it was during this time that the idea that a work of genius contained the proof within itself was legitimized. It was believed that the author's mind had a unique character that shaped the work, one that could not be imitated and gave the work its mark of genius. As Lynch observes, this made debates over literary hoaxes more urgent; they would not have created a stir had they not “presumed to tell us something about the towering genius at the heart of the canon” (89).

Does authenticity preoccupy the minds of critics and the public today? The contemporary writer who embellishes details in a memoir no longer shakes our confidence in knowledge and truth. Some eighteenth-century literature danced between fact and fiction. Lynch avoids the topic altogether: “However worthwhile it may be to examine the problematic borderline between novels and histories, fiction need not concern us here” (7). What about fictions of memory? In eighteenth-century Britain, memory was gradually viewed as less dependable, because other methods of authentication took precedence. As Lynch notes, historically testimony had served as “the utmost” form of evidence. As the usefulness and reliability of memory decreased, the ability to comb documents for evidence increased, with guidelines for the systematic study of documents introduced by Jean Mabillon in 1681.

After examining the discourses surrounding issues of fakery, Lynch's reader is left with the question: why did they do it? Lynch explains several motivations for concocting a fake, although the process of producing one, executing a cover-up, then risking one's reputation seemed like entirely too much work. There was money, of course. Fame, perhaps the reclaiming of national pride (Macpherson), and, oddly, the earning of affection and approval of family (William Henry Ireland) were other key motivators. After all the unnerving cases outlined in Lynch's book, his most unsettling assertion may be that we are aware of only the forgeries and fabrications weak enough for exposure—the best of them are still unknown to us.