The topic of literary forgery in the eighteenth century and Romantic period has become something of a boom industry in the last few decades.

Since I published my own studies on this theme in the 1980s (The Making of History and Faking It), scholarly interest in this area has burgeoned and has contributed much to the remapping and redefining of literary history in this period. One reason for this renaissance is undoubtedly that the eighteenth century is so rich in primary sources. The literary forgeries of the “big three” still continue to fascinate scholars: I refer here of course to James Macpherson, who invented an ancient Scottish epic poet called Ossian; Thomas Chatterton, the boy wonder of Bristol who fabricated a series of poems and other documents supposedly written in the fifteenth century; and William Henry Ireland, who “discovered” a new play by Shakespeare, Vortigern and Rowena. Some of the scholarly interest in these figures and other forgers has been motivated by nationalistic affiliations: the “Ossianic Celtic revival” has produced solid studies by, among others, Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill, while Mary Ann Constantine has recently championed the Welsh antiquarian scholar-forger Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams). Other work has perhaps been stimulated by post-Foucauldian concerns about the vexed yet intriguing relationship between creative authorship, originality, and authenticity. As Debbie Lee notes in her chapter on “Forgeries” in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (and this inclusion is itself symptomatic of the resurgence I am describing), “One of the things impostors and forgers make strikingly clear is the period’s idolatrous worship of authenticity and truth” (521). Chief among the iconoclasts determined to expose Romanticism’s “idolatrous worship of authenticity and truth” is Nick Groom, whose book The Forger’s Shadow (2002) represents the most sophisticated and searching re-evaluation of the impact of forgery on our conceptions of authorship and authenticity. Groom goes so far as to state that Romanticism “(for want of a better term) would have been very different without literary forgery—indeed it may not have recognisably existed at all” (Forger’s Shadow 15); hence the subtitle of his book, “How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature.”

On 25 February 1797, “a day which will long be remembered”, according to William Cobbett (149), Prime Minister William Pitt went to see the King for an emergency meeting. The country was in a state of national alarm, as news had just arrived of a French invasion at Fishguard. In fact this turned out to be easily repelled (Figure 1), but the incident forced Pitt to consider an option he had resisted for some time. Fearing that there would be a run on the Bank of England which would in turn damage the financing of the war against France, he persuaded the King to issue (what turned out to be) a momentous decree: starting immediately, the Bank would no longer issue specie (cash or metal currency) in exchange for paper banknotes. The Bank Restriction Act, as it later passed into law, is a somewhat misleading title, as it actually led to a massive expansion of paper money. Specifically, the Act authorized the mass production of new £1 and £2 banknotes to replace the withdrawn specie, and it was this literal cheapening of the currency which would prove to be so disastrous in its social consequences. The explosion of paper money was seized on immediately by James Gillray, the period’s leading caricaturist. In his wonderful print Midas, published just a few weeks after Restriction came into force (Figure 2), Pitt is shown as a colossus squatting over the Rotunda of the Bank of England which serves him like a toilet. From both his rear end and his mouth Pitt is showering the Bank with the new low denomination notes which also make up his paper crown. We will return to this image throughout this essay as it forms one of the most iconic responses to the credit crisis, matched only by George Cruikshank’s Bank Restriction Note which we will meet shortly. Note that Gillray foregrounds Pitt’s megalomania and plays down the culpability of the Bank: obviously, at this very early stage he could not have foreseen the Bank’s role in securing convictions for forgery and the ensuing public outrage this engendered. Originally, Restriction was meant to last only six months, but as the credit crisis persisted the Act was renewed continually until specie payment was eventually reintroduced in 1821, by which time the national debt was an astonishing £854 million, or 2.7 times the national income (O’Brien 179). During its 24-year reign (which dovetails quite neatly with a large slice of the Romantic period), Restriction provoked a storm of controversy which is still under-valued in Romantic studies. Though the topic is mentioned in a number of books on forgery, the issue of forgery remains marginal in the seminal studies of the role of credit in British culture.

But in light of the fact that, as Margot Finn notes, an “aversion to paper money” was “deeply rooted in Georgian England” (80) this theme clearly deserves more exploration.

There were two major problems with Restriction. The first was that it seemed to undermine the very system of credit which it was supposedly safeguarding. Charles James Fox called the stoppage of cash payments “the first day of our national bankruptcy” (Richard, 1: 84). But, as we shall see, the Restriction crisis actually exposed deeper contradictions which had bedevilled the British “financial revolution” from its inception in the Restoration period (Dickson, chapters 1-2). The second problem with Restriction was more visible and sensational: London (the primary zone within which the new low denomination Bank of England notes circulated) saw a massive increase in executions for forgery.

This catastrophe had three main causes. First, the vulnerability and gullibility of the lower classes who were unused to dealing with banknotes.

Before this time forgery had been largely a white-collar crime. The best-known eighteenth-century forger was probably the Reverend William Dodd, who was executed in June 1777 for forging the signature of his former pupil Lord Chesterfield on a banknote valued at £4,000. Despite Dr Johnson coming to his aid and writing his pleas for clemency, and despite a large petition of 30,000 signatures in his favour, Dodd went to the gallows. As Boswell puts it in his Life of Johnson, Dodd had committed “the most dangerous crime in a commercial country” (828).

The second contributing factor to the rise in Restriction forgery was the poor quality of the banknotes which made them easily counterfeited (Figure 3). The third factor was something which Gillray could not have foreseen: the ruthlessness of the Bank of England - the “head of all circulation” - in prosecuting offenders.

Indeed, the Bank employed a team of lawyers at great expense to ensure prosecutions. The statistics are dramatic: the period 1783-97 saw only four prosecutions for forgery, but 1797-1821 (the Restriction period) saw over 2000 prosecutions and over 300 executions. The Bank spent thousands of pounds to secure these executions, and in some years such as 1819 this amounted to more than was lost through forgery (McGowen para 4). Almost one third of all executions at this time were for forgery, but the vast majority of these were concentrated in the post-Napoleonic war period, when economic depression and demobilization of thousands of troops and sailors produced ever greater incentives for the forger (Handler, “Forging the Agenda” ). When the government reneged on the original promise to abolish Restriction after six months of peace (which eventually came in 1815), public hostility to the growing body count of convicted forgers and handlers (or “utterers”) became vitriolic. James Mackintosh spoke in parliament of the “course of guilt and blood which had followed the stoppage of cash payments”

while Henry Brougham railed at the “human sacrifices to the Moloch of Paper Credit.”

The resurgent radical press—perhaps drawing on memories of similar injustices against the plebeian body, such as the Waltham Black Acts against poaching, or the widespread practice of press-ganging and crimping - persistently and sensationally exposed the injustices of the forgery trials. Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf declaimed that “homicide has been legalized” to defend “the paper bubbles which are dignified with the name of currency” (2 [9 September 1818], 561). In 1818, when almost 30,000 fake banknotes were in circulation, public sympathy for the hapless plebeian forger led to numerous acquittals.

Doubts were also expressed about the competence of the Bank of England in recognising a fake from the real banknote. As early as 1814 an anonymous caricature called A Peep into the Rag Shop in Threadneedle Street highlighted this theme. The print shows a poor forger pleading with Bank of England directors who are examining a bank note. As the speech bubbles make clear, behind their callous bluster is dire ineptitude: ‘“Upon my soul I have my doubts but at all events—we had better declare it bad.”
“Take him out Thomas !!! he has a d----d hanging lok.”
“Away with the Vagabond! Do you think we sit here for nothing!”’ By the late 1810s, therefore, forgery was no longer, in Handler’s words, a “uniquely subversive” crime which undermined what William Wilberforce called the “vital principle of a commercial nation”, but a dramatic exposure of the eighteenth-century “bloody code” (Handler, “Forging the Agenda,” 264, 263). The response of both the Bank of England and the government to this barrage of criticism was characteristically insensitive: rather than campaigning for leniency, they both launched inquiries aimed at finding a foolproof or “inimitable” design for the banknote. However, the clamour of public opinion was proving to be a formidable force and in 1819 official moves began to review both Restriction and capital punishment.

There could have been no timelier a moment than January 1819, therefore, for the radical publisher William Hone and the leading Regency caricaturist George Cruikshank to issue their own “inimitable” contribution to the Restriction controversy. The Bank Restriction Note and its companion piece the Bank Restriction Barometer (Figures 4 and 5) were published just days after the Bank of England’s inquiry concluded that a forgery-proof design had to be robust enough to withstand the “formidable power of imitation” of the engraver (Times, 27 January 1819). Hone and Cruikshank undoubtedly appreciated this ironic tribute to their joint production, as the Bank Restriction Note takes the form of a mock-submission to the inquiry.

Unlike earlier satirical banknotes which resembled actual counterfeits (Figure 6), the Hone-Cruikshank caricature is more than just a “formidable” imitation which exposes the flimsy authenticity of the original. By using visceral and witty gallows symbolism, Hone and Cruikshank inscribed into the banknote the catastrophic social consequences of its circulation: what Black Dwarf called the “blood-cemented fabric of paper currency” (2 [14 October 1818], 611). Reminiscent of the “blood sugar” anti-slavery propaganda of the 1790s, the Bank Restriction Note defamiliarizes and demonizes everyday consumption, transforming banknotes into emblems of blood money: satirically, this is their true appearance and true value (the Bank’s role as surrogate executioner is evidenced by the replacement of its clerks’ signature with that of Jack Ketch, the notorious hangman of the 1680s).

The Hone-Cruikshank prints were an instant success and undoubtedly contributed to raising or inflaming public awareness about the evils of both paper money and capital punishment.

Significantly, it was in 1819 that Peel’s Act finally promised the restoration of specie payment by 1823 (though this was achieved by 1821, when Britain formally adopted the gold standard), and during the same year a parliamentary inquiry into capital punishment focused on forgery as one of the main reasons for reforming Britain’s harsh penal code. In his old age Cruikshank claimed that his print had single-handedly led to the abolition of the death penalty for forgery 13 years later, an exaggeration though a forgivable one.

The Restriction controversy was the breaking point of an ideological instability which lay at the heart of the paper money system. If the Romantic period was haunted by what Shelley in The Mask of Anarchy called the “ghost of gold”,

the earlier eighteenth century was haunted by the transubstantiation of paper. When Charles James Fox remarked that “the solidity of Notes consisted in their being convertible into cash” (Times, 1 March 1797), he identified that magical process of transformation which underpinned the credit economy and which could maintain the illusion that banknotes were “solid” rather than ephemeral and insubstantial. To its many critics, Pitt’s Restriction Act of 1797 jeopardised the nation by undermining the system of credit and national debt which it was supposedly trying to protect. It was this system of deferred payment which lay behind the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 and which allowed Britain to finance wars and imperial gains well beyond its actual stock of bullion—as Roy Porter puts it succinctly, “Britannia”s wars were won on credit” (132). The genius of the “financial revolution” was that it utilized the foundational economic metaphor of circulation to naturalize and anthropomorphize convertibility:

In this imaginary, paper money is the blood which periodically returns to the heart (the Bank’s bullion), to be then pumped out into further circulation, revitalized with “real” value. In the words of one of Thomas Love Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics:

The paper money goes about, by one, and two, and five,

A circulation like the blood, that keeps the land alive.

⁽¹⁵⁾

“A Mood of My Own Mind”, in Peacock, 16.

According to the circulatory or anatomical model, the body politic functions healthily so long as this flow of money is neither “restricted” nor inundated: if one nightmare is economic starvation (as seen in the stereotype of the emaciated French), the other danger—as Gillray imagines—is the inflationary overproduction of worthless and wasteful currency. Another way to read Gillray’s Midas is as a scatological parody of the famous cover illustration to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (Figure 9): instead of the monarch comprised of his people, Pitt’s body is a sack of secreted and hoarded gold; the literal and symbolic wealth of the nation becomes the tyrant’s booty, replacing citizens with financial chicanery (Pitt’s incontinent largesse also, unavoidably, brings the current dis-credited euphemism “quantitative easing” to mind). However, behind Gillray’s scatological effects lies a more acute point: by evoking the Midas legend, Gillray exposed the alchemical delusions and perils of the myth of convertibility—indeed, the critique was anticipated in a print of 1796 (Figure 10) which shows Pitt as a megalomaniac alchemist who is converting the national wealth into a throne for himself. As Gillray understood, it was the magical properties of paper money which mystified both economic and political power. Even political economists (whether supportive or not) invariably resorted to pre-enlightenment tropes of what Marx called “primitive economic superstition” (261): alchemy, allegory, magic, blind allegiance. Debacles like the South Sea Bubble and the John Law Mississippi scheme (both collapsed in 1720) fuelled the idea that paper credit was a powerful and potentially dangerous illusion.

Daniel Defoe referred to paper money as a “chimera”; Thomas Mortimer called credit a “standing miracle in politics, which at once astonishes and over-awes the states of Europe” while later in the century Benjamin Franklin boasted that the “wonderful machine” of “paper currency” (in this case the dollar) had enabled America to defeat Britain.

Like its over-valued material form, the ideological “miracle” of paper credit required constant investment and re-investment. For all its glaring conceptual weaknesses, the financial revolution became an epistemological revolution: in Pocock’s words, the switch to deferred payment was a “momentous intellectual event.” By locating value in an endlessly receding future, credit changed the whole basis of the individual’s relationship with the state, replacing civic humanist duty with an “imagined” community of desiring individuals.

As Brantlinger has shown, this destabilization of what Marx called species being (though perhaps “specie being” is a more appropriate coinage in the current context) both afflicted and empowered the literary imagination (114-35). At the same time as the new monied interest became a regular target for satire, attempts to relocate value outside of the paper economy proved to be difficult and often equally reliant on cultural mythologies: Romanticism’s resort to primitivism (Wordsworth’s “natural” language of the lower classes), and radical nostalgia (Cobbett’s banknoteless past) are just two prominent examples.

Alchemical or transubstantiational delusions were not the only obstacles preventing the full assimilation of paper money into Enlightenment modernity. The “momentous” transition to the credit economy was also undermined by the spectre of forgery. This was both a literal and figurative threat. From its inception, paper money was shadowed by forgery: the first fake banknotes appeared in 1695 within months of the genuine issue.

But the greater damage was ideological, as forgery exposed the essentially imaginary or fictive status of the supposedly authentic original (and it is worth a reminder that a banknote is of course a simulacrum, a copy of a non-existent originating source; there is no such thing, except conceptually, as a unique, single banknote from which copies (legal or illegal) are taken). As Paul Baines notes, “The whole system could be typified by the forgery it naturally engendered” (14). Faced with this perplexing intimacy between financial good and evil, the difference between supporters and critics of the new “system” could only be theological: supporters believed the fiction (or refused to question it), critics exposed it.

By the revolutionary 1790s, the idea that “public credit” faced an imminent “Daedalian” disaster became a powerful rhetorical tool in anti-government writing. In The Rights of Man (1791-2), Thomas Paine noted that the “English system of funding” was close to bankruptcy; in order to finance overseas conflicts, Britain was “increasing paper till there is no money left” (133). As the war-torn decade progressed and the national debt grew, Paine realised that the principle of convertibility was about to collapse. From this point on, radical discourse configured paper and gold as class enemies. In his pamphlet Decline of the English System of Finance, published one year before Restriction in 1796, Paine predicted that gold and silver were about to “revolt against depreciation and separate from the value of paper”, in the process destroying the “popular delusion” of the credit system (Foner, 2: 661, 651-2).

The Restriction Act must have seemed to many a fulfilment of this prophecy and a major boost for the radical critique. The iconoclastic discourse of transparency penetrated so deep into radical thought that it can even be found in a fugitive document issued by the shadowy insurrectionary group the United Britons in 1799. The document calls the English political system as an enormous “Fraud” and adds that ‘Amidst mock Contentions for Liberty, and real ones for Plunder, [England] vainly imagined herself free, and was thereby induced to pay the Interest of a Debt of greater Amount than the Value of the whole landed Property of the Country, without reflecting that Bankruptcy, however late, must be the consequence of an overstretched Credit. That Bankruptcy has arrived. (Report of the Committee of Secrecy, 68)’

As the cases of forgery multiplied and Restriction became more and more unpopular, the lethal rift between “real” money and paper “delusion” became increasingly exposed in both radical polemic and the caricature imagination. The most successful single radical intervention was almost certainly William Cobbett’s bestseller Paper against Gold, first published in his newspaper the Weekly Register as a series of open letters, and subsequently issued in book form in 1815. Cobbett argued that only “real money” had “real value” (96), but in stating this he was only echoing the Bullion Committee report of 1810 which called cash payments the “natural and true control” against paper inflation.

This re-naturalization of gold and demonization of paper gave an additional force to Hone and Cruikshank’s debunking of the official iconography of the nation state in their Restriction Bank Note. Instead of depicting Britannia staring at a beehive, a symbol of industriousness which replaced the earlier pile of gold, the satirical Britannia is shown as an unnatural mother eating her children, an apt illustration of the state’s dereliction of duty (Figure 12). Reminiscent of the liberticidal monsters of anti-Jacobin caricatures, this grotesque figure reveals that such symbols of authority are now (in Cobbett’s words) a mere “paper promise” of “real value” (98). As Gillray’s successor, Cruikshank was able to see the Restriction narrative through to its grisly end: the cannibalistic Britannia is the tragic climax to the paper assault on John Bullion. The bloated Midas has transmuted into the vampiric mother, and forgery executions are both a literal and symbolic destruction of the democratic body of the nation.

A more optimistic note is struck in another caricature which Cruikshank issued in January 1819. Johnny Bull and his Forged Notes!! or Rags and Ruin in the Paper Currency shows John Bull as a small tradesman rather than a plebeian or yokel (Figure 13). He is about to be arrested in his impoverished home for hoarding forged banknotes, but as he says to the foppish inspector, “I took all these notes in the way of Trade—I can’t tell Bad Good ones from Good Bad ones. Even those who issue them are frequently mistaken & have been deceived by Forgeries.” The debunking of paper money is wittily conceived by reducing the bank notes to combustible paper—this is now their only value. But the most important feature of this print is its portrayal of the Bull family. Far from being abject, Johnny Bull is defiant, sturdy, patriarchal and ruggedly masculine. He is the personification of the moral gold standard, the “real value” of the national character, and he is protecting his “little platoon” against a cowardly and intrusive government. His defiance reflects the resurgent mass radicalism of the post-war years which later in 1819 will confront the repressive state apparatus at Peterloo. His self-belief is a striking riposte to the more familiar caricature figure of a disempowered John Bullion who is constantly duped, plundered and violated by a paper system of taxes, bills and cheap banknotes. The most striking examples of this extreme exploitation of John Bullion are probably Richard Newton’s The New Paper Mill and The Inexhaustible Mine, both published in 1797 as a response to Restriction (Figures 14 and 15). In The New Paper Mill Bull is being minced by Pitt into paper notes (presumably having been stripped of his gold first, though allegorically Bull himself represents “real” money); in the brutal Restriction age, Pitt’s mincer is the modern state’s industrially efficient yet banal replacement for the alchemical bravura of convertibility. The Inexhaustible Mine is an eye-catching, quasi-pornographic inversion of Gillray’s Midas. John Bull’s spouting orifices are not scatologically rendered: they are the result of a violation which conflates a gang-rape, a mugging and a strip search. The image captures the repressive authoritarianism of counter-revolutionary policy in the 1790s, a period in which “the spirit of despotism” led to “invasions of privacy” (Barrell). With these images (and many others) in mind,

Restriction and the ensuing prosecutions for forgery can be understood as the latest components of a wider, interlocking system of mystification, oppression and exploitation which relied on the state’s monopoly of “paper” power.

The state’s rationale for such infringements of civil liberty was that some personal freedoms had to be surrendered if the nation was to be protected against invasion and conquest. Unless John Bullion surrendered his specie and allowed more paper money to circulate, Britain faced an unthinkable fate. If Britons found cheap banknotes unpalatable, they should consider the Jacobin alternative: the rule of the revolutionary French assignat (Figure 16). The assignat was the paper currency which the French Assembly introduced in 1790 out of the proceeds of confiscated Church property.

The policy quickly led to hyperinflation, and by the time the plates which printed the assignat were publicly burned in February 1796, its value had depreciated by an astonishing 95% (compared to about 30% for the pound in the Restriction period).

For Edmund Burke, the assignat was the epitome of Jacobin mischief and the arch enemy of the gold standard. In Pocock’s opinion, it was the introduction of the assignat, and not the invasion of the Queen’s bedchamber, which was for Burke “the central, the absolute and the unforgivable crime of the Revolutionaries” (197). Throughout his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke rails against the revolutionaries’ decision “to force a currency of their own fiction in the place of that which is real” (261). He declaims that “So violent an outrage upon credit, property, and liberty, as this compulsory paper money currency, has seldom been exhibited” (226). Overall: ‘everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence; and to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power, the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud, and beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized species [gold and silver] that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of property, whose creatures and representatives they are, was systematically subverted. (126) 

’ Burke castigated English republicans and revolutionary sympathizers who believed that England should follow the French example and worship the “idol of public credit.” These misguided supporters of paper currency ‘forget that, in England, not one shilling of paper money of any description is received but of choice; that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited; and that it is convertible, at pleasure, in an instant, and without the smallest loss, into cash again. (357-8)’ But as Tom Furniss notes, Burke’s method of “projecting a negative aspect of Britain’s own financial revolution which had haunted it from the beginning onto a radical ‘other’ across the channel” simply reproduced those endemic anxieties about an economy based on what Furniss calls “imagination” (241). So it is both ironic and poignant that Burke died in the year in which Pitt introduced the English equivalent of the assignat (Gillray’s Midas illustrates this irony in the way in which the tiny Jacobin demons swarming round Pitt’s head merge into banknotes). In Burke’s own terms, paper money was no longer “convertible, at pleasure, in an instant, and without the smallest loss, into cash again.”

Yet by freeing paper money from convertibility and the gold standard, it could be argued that Restriction was an unconscious act of modernization, as there was no longer a pretence (or “delusion”) that paper and gold were related (this is surely the case today in so far as no one believes the “promise” on British banknotes to “pay the bearer” the equivalent in gold). By converting currency into “imagination” rather than “real value”, the idea of value migrated into the aesthetic realm, the realm of symbolic circulation. But if Romantic writers remained troubled by the loss of the real, this was not the case for caricaturists, whose work was premised on converting political events into an alternative, parallel and usually controversial fantasy. In this sense, caricature’s generically maverick and ungovernable aesthetics were more in tune with a system of “fabricated pieces of paper”.

This contradiction has a wider bearing on the fraught relations between Romanticism and popularity. On the one hand, as already surmised, the loss of “real” currency and the hike in forgery executions made many thinkers mistrustful of the paper money system and for writers and artists these doubts may have extended to the signifying power of “paper” more generally. Simon During describes the post-Restriction mood for Romantic writers as a strange cocktail of “fearfulness, unpredictability, opportunity and weightlessness” (339), perhaps unintentionally echoing Adam Smith’s trope of credit’s perilous “Daedalian” sublimity. Despite clinging to the secure “weight” of bullion, Romantic writers were also impelled to explore new, relatively autonomous and self-authorizing imaginative paradigms which could keep the vexed issue of the tainted paper economy of print circulation and popularity at arm’s length. Though Shelley ventured into Heavy Metal performances in his satires Oedipus Tyrannus; Or Swellfoot the Tyrant (which has a character called “Banknotina”), Peter Bell the Third (which characterises paper money as expropriated bee-honey), and The Mask of Anarchy (which memorably styles the credit economy the “ghost of gold”), such incursions into popular culture were rare.

On the other hand, radical authors like Paine and Cobbett saw the teeming popularity of print circulation as an opportunity for ideological subversion rather than state control. Despite all the government’s efforts to suppress, regulate and neutralize radical writing in the 1790s, Paine was still able to claim (with typical bravado) that Restriction had been precipitated not by the alarm of a French invasion but by the panicky response to cheap editions of his pamphlet Decline of the English System of Finance (Foner, 2: 1387-8). For Paine, cheap radical literature operated like a phoney currency of economic espionage, overloading the system to breaking point. Paper was a medium to be appropriated and carnivalized rather than repressed, displaced or sublimated. When Cobbett asked his readers to flood the market with fake banknotes, he recalled wryly that Pitt had considered deluging France with fake assignats (Black Dwarf, 2 [21 October 1818], 658-9); Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 22 August 1818). Like Paine, Cobbett’s phenomenal success cocked a snoop at the new paper economy from within its own ranks: Paper against Gold sold around 150,000 copies, making it, according to Spater, “probably the most widely read book ever written purely on monetary questions” (1: 315). By converting currency into “imagination”, the Restriction Act released its own critique and sowed the seed of its own destruction.

But it was the caricaturists, above all, who could have their Restriction cake and eat it: caricature thrived in a cultural environment in which the boundaries between the “real” and the phoney or fake were being so sensationally and publicly challenged, eroded, undermined and continually flouted. Caricature had a productively contradictory relation to Restriction forgery. To begin with, Horace Walpole’s oft-quoted comment that “all the house of forgery are relations” was much truer of engravers than writers. Walpole made this comment to rebut accusations that his rejection of Chatterton’s request for patronage had led to the latter’s suicide, but he was not alone in seeing a slippage from literary to financial forgery. Joseph Ritson, for example, remarked that “a man who will forge a poem, a line or even a word will not hesitate, when the temptation is greater and the impunity equal, to forge a note or steal a guinea” (Ruthven, 57-9). In fact there was little if no evidence to support this claim, whereas there was abundant evidence that engravers were playing both sides of the law. As noted earlier, the state both relied on and feared the “formidable power of imitation” of the engraver. Ironically, the Bank of England subjected all submitted designs for “inimitable” banknotes to a counterfeiting test by its own engravers: not one design passed the test.

Equally revealing is the fact that one of the eventual solutions to this problem, the use of lithography, was first proposed by the well-known caricature print seller Rudolph Ackermann, yet his suggestion was rejected as “a discovery as applied to the subject of Forgery, infinitely more to be dreaded than encouraged” (cited in Mackenzie, 61).

This takes us the second aspect of caricature’s cultural power. Ackermann undoubtedly knew that the single print caricature functioned like an alternative currency, shadowing and transforming “official” history.

Moreover, society seemed to be imitating art. For critics of the unreformed political system, Regency England had become a caricature of itself, consuming rather than protecting its own children. No event showed this more clearly than the Peterloo massacre of August 1819, an incident which lies at the heart of that extraordinarily productive few years of Romantic literary output which James Chandler (borrowing from Shelley) calls “England in 1819.” But what Chandler fails to note is that these years also represent the crowning achievement of caricature. It is surely no coincidence that the title page of Hone and Cruikshank”s bestselling satire The Political House that Jack Built (1819) shows a pair of scales in which the pen of radicalism outweighs not just Wellington’s sword but a bundle of unjust laws topped by “Bank Restriction” (Figure 24). The image implies that radical critique is the antithesis of Old Corruption’s mystifications, but there could also be an allusion to the Bank Restriction Note of earlier that year. In other words, Cruikshank could be complimenting his own “formidable” imitation of the forged banknotes which (in Baines’ words) were “naturally engendered” by the paper money system and which functioned as an emblem or synecdoche of unreformed political and social structures. This ability to satirically copy a discredited copy of a discredited copy (caricature—forged banknote—original banknote) is a paradigm of the way caricature used its distinctive “imagination” and the medium of paper to critique the “real.”

Relatively untouched by legal prosecutions, unburdened by the aesthetics of originality, masterful in creating allegorical fantasies of politics and culture, firmly embedded in reportage and print culture, the single print caricature circulated like a shadow economy of symbolic representation, pumping out “phantom” versions of political leaders, authority figures and celebrities.

Again, there is a useful parallel here with Marx’s theory of the quasi-divine, transformative power of money which “turns real human and natural powers into purely abstract representations, and therefore imperfections and tormenting phantoms, just as it turns real imperfections and phantoms—truly impotent powers which exist only in the individual’s fantasy—into real essential powers and abilities” (378). Perhaps the final irony of the relationship between caricature and forgery is that the restoration of “real value” in 1821 (which in practice meant a return to convertibility and the abolition of the lethal £1 and £2 notes) also marked the decline of the golden age of British caricature. After the success of the campaign to support Queen Caroline, Cruikshank took a huge bribe from the state and retired from the scene.