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Robert Burns: forgery and ‘Antique Smith’

Written by Dr Ronnie Young, University of Glasgow

An old, handwritten manuscript on yellowing paper with a dark ink. Stamped across the top is the word Spurious, in purple ink.

Ronnie Young is Senior Lecturer in Scottish Literature and associate director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is part of a team researching forgery and authenticity.


Over the years, there have been a significant number of spurious claims about Burns’s authorship of work – from people misattributing poems to the poet through to new compositions supposedly communicated to spiritualists from beyond the grave, and even out-and-out forgery of manuscripts in Burns’s hand. Alongside its extensive collection of genuine Burns manuscripts, Robert Burns Birthplace Museum (RBBM) in Alloway holds some intriguing forgeries of Burns’s work, including a fake version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

The letter to the Reverend John McMath (1755–1825) pictured below, for example, might at first glance look like the genuine article. McMath was a known correspondent of Burns, to whom he sent a poetic epistle accompanying a copy of his Kirk satire ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’.

The archive catalogue description for this letter suggests that Burns also sent McMath a version of his newly composed ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’ in December 1785. The manuscript has some of the characteristic features of Burns’s letters, such as his confident cursive handwriting and signature, and evident signs of ‘letter locking’, whereby Burns has folded the letter to form an envelope, addressed it and sealed it with red wax. There’s even a fragment of paper stuck to the seal, suggesting the letter was torn when opened by McMath – something we often see in the manuscripts Burns posted to others.

However, none of this is genuine. The paper on which the letter is written is 19th-century paper, and even the wax seal and tear are faked. Although Burns corresponded with McMath, he is not known to have enclosed a copy of ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’. Moreover, the version of this poem ostensibly enclosed in the letter is also a fake, written on pages of 19th-century paper which have been stab-stitched together – not something we normally see in the poems Burns sent to others.

‘Antique Smith’

The letter and poem are in fact the handiwork of Alexander Howland Smith (1859–1913), or ‘Antique Smith’ as he came to be known, the prolific forger who created hundreds of fake literary manuscripts by Burns and other famous figures in the late 19th century. Smith was a young legal clerk from Edinburgh who at one point worked for the firm of Thomas Ferrier, Writer to the Signet, the grandson of Burns’s Edinburgh acquaintance James Ferrier, WS, and nephew of Jane Ferrier, the subject of Burns’s lines ‘To Miss Ferrier’.

After clearing out old documents from Ferrier’s firm and finding dealers willing to part with hard cash for some of the more valuable manuscripts in Ferrier’s possession, Smith was inspired to produce his own manuscripts for sale. He produced his forgeries in a small workshop off Hope Crescent, close to his home at 67 Brunswick Street, Edinburgh, and distributed them via local booksellers and pawnbrokers. From there, they reached a wide audience, duping collectors in other parts of the world and even a future Prime Minister.

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“THERE has been of late years, we are assured, a most systematic and wholesale forgery of letters purporting to be written by Scott and Burns.
These forgeries, which are said to be manufactured in Edinburgh, carry upon them such marks of genuineness as to have deceived many [ac]’cute collectors; they are executed with a skill compared with which the forgeries of Chatterton and Ireland were but infant’s efforts; they have been sold at public auctions, and by the hands of booksellers, to collectors of experience and rank – a well-known nobleman in the neighbourhood being included in the dupes – and the imposition has extended to books purporting to bear the signature of Robert Burns.”
Edinburgh Evening Dispatch
22 November 1892

The ‘well-known nobleman’ referred to here was Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, a Liberal peer and noted Burnsian, who purchased a collection of Smith’s forgeries from the Edinburgh bookseller James Stillie only a few years before becoming Prime Minister. Other victims of Smith’s fraud included John Stewart Kennedy (1830–1909), a major US financier originally from Scotland, who acquired some 202 manuscripts of Burns, Scott and others from Stillie for the Lenox Library in New York which turned out to be Smith forgeries. This collection still resides in the New York Public Library today.

Unlike earlier literary hoaxers (the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch alludes to Thomas Chatterton’s fabrication of poems supposedly by 15th-century monk Thomas Rowley and William Henry Ireland’s infamous forgery of Shakespeare), Antique Smith was a new kind of forger, one with an ‘industrial’ level of production fitted to an age of mass print. Contemporary newspaper reports noted how forgery was being driven by the Victorian craze for autographs, and the increasing publication of facsimiles of handwritten manuscripts by Burns and other major historical and literary figures gave the would-be forger ample material to copy. Smith, who had access to facsimiles of famous people’s handwriting through subscription publications such as The Autographic Mirror, was able to forge and distribute hundreds of forgeries and the work of a vast array of writers, statesmen and historical figures. These included Allan Ramsay, Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Mary, Queen of Scots, Rob Roy, Oliver Cromwell, the Duke of Wellington, and far many more besides. But Smith’s particular favourite was Burns and he produced numerous fake manuscripts in the poet’s hand.

Papers fly from an old writing desk towards a plough, in Robert Burns Birthplace Museum

Antique Smith was eventually caught by what might be seen as an early example of investigative journalism and the diligence of newspaper readers, who not only called into question the authenticity of some of the new Burns manuscripts that had come to light but also helped identify Smith as prime suspect. In 1891, the Cumnock Express published a newly unearthed letter from Burns to ‘Mr John Hill, weaver, Cumnock’ in the possession of James Mackenzie, FSA, a noted Edinburgh collector. One astute reader wrote in to express doubts about the Hill letter and asked for it to be submitted to the British Museum for expert analysis, a call echoed by other experts such as H D Colvill-Scott. A heated exchange in the press with Mackenzie – who attested to the authenticity of the Burns material in his possession – was followed by regular articles and correspondence, which brought to light further fabrications and shone a public spotlight on some of the main figures who had dealt in Smith’s handiwork, including ‘reputable’ booksellers such as James Stillie.

The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch also printed facsimiles of Smith’s forgeries, from which one reader noticed the similarity between the notes written to accompany the forged manuscripts and the handwriting of a young legal clerk he had hired for casual work, namely the unassuming and ‘mildly-mannered’ Alexander Howland Smith. Smith was apprehended, charged with fabricating and disposing of manuscripts, and eventually tried in 1893 in the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, Scotland’s supreme criminal court. The jury quickly found Smith guilty of all charges. However, despite the serious nature of the charge, the jury successfully petitioned the judge to exercise leniency in this ‘unusual case’ on the grounds of the ‘easy facility of disposing of the spurious documents afforded him’. Smith was only sentenced to 12 months in prison.

Detecting a fake

There are numerous approaches one might take when deciding whether a Burns manuscript is genuine or not. Naturally, when thinking about literary forgery, we might think first and foremost about handwriting, which is after all one of the more prominent markers of the forger’s skill. Antique Smith does really quite well in reproducing the elegant cursive script of Burns, yet closer inspection can reveal some of the tell-tale signs of the forger’s hand. Take Burns’s underlining, for example, which tends to start heavy and end light; whereas the signatures forged by Smith, who would have written with a steel-nibbed pen, tend to have consistently heavy underlining.

Paper analysis

Analysis of paper can also help gauge authenticity. Burns wrote on 18th-century ‘laid’ paper, which was handmade from a solution of pulped textiles (rather than wood) in a ‘deckle’, or mould, criss-crossed with wires. If you hold a genuine Burns manuscript up to the light, you expect to see the impression left by these wires as a pattern of parallel ‘chain’ and ‘laid’ lines. In some cases, Smith produced forgeries on 19th-century paper, as in the letter to McMath; when viewed on a lightbox, they do not reveal the same pattern as a genuine letter by Burns.

To artificially age paper, Smith would stain it with weak tea and other materials, yet, despite such efforts, the wrong period paper remains a glaringly obvious mark of the manuscript’s inauthenticity. The forged version of ’Auld Lang Syne’ held by the National Trust for Scotland is clearly another example of Smith using the wrong period paper.

However, detecting a fake by paper alone isn’t always straightforward because Smith was known to source period-appropriate paper for some of his forgeries. Only a few years after Smith’s death, William Roughead gave this account of the forger’s methods of procurement:

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“A familiar old-book shop in George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, had been for some years the happy hunting-ground of an eccentric customer. His concern was mainly with ancient folios having fair and ample fly-leaves, while books bound in vellum had also for him an attraction quite irrespective of the quality of their contents.
Though his purchases were necessarily bulky it was his homely habit, after paying for them on the spot, to carry them off himself ; no persuasion of the obliging shopman could induce him to have them sent to an address in the ordinary way.”
William Roughead

Indeed, there are two Antique Smith fakes of the Solemn League and Covenant written on vellum (animal skin) held in the National Library of Scotland today – a testament to Smith’s ability to source the right substrate for his counterfeits. But even the use of older materials can give the game away. As Roughead recounts, the collection purchased by industrialist John Kennedy was revealed as largely fake when analysis by the British Museum found that ‘the historical MSS. that Mary, Queen of Scots, Rob Roy and Claverhouse all used the same make of paper.’ Similarly, contemporary accounts of the forgeries also noticed that manuscripts supposedly written by historical figures from different periods had evidently used the same ink.

Provenance

Another method used to authenticate Burns manuscripts is to look at provenance, something which Smith’s newly forged manuscripts would of course lack. Smith would compensate for the absence of any kind of history of ownership by faking endorsements and sales history. Many of his counterfeits of Burns, for example, featured false endorsements by poet James Hogg in the margins. Although perhaps enough to dupe the incurious dealer or buyer, these fabrications don’t withstand closer scrutiny. In 1890, a collection of manuscripts by Burns, Cromwell, Scott and others obtained by an Edinburgh bookseller were listed as having been part of the Whitefoord-Mackenzie collection, a major collection auctioned in 1886. Yet, careful comparison with the auction catalogue showed that these particular manuscripts – more of Smith’s fakes – had not been lots in the sale.

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“To a degree, Smith was a skilled forger, but his handiwork reveals various inconsistencies when subjected to closer analysis.”

He sometimes invents recipients, such as the aforementioned weaver John Hill, or John Laurie of Ayr to whom forgeries in the Trust’s collection are addressed, and other individuals who aren’t known to have been part of Burns’s personal networks.

Moreover, some of the details in the verse faked by Smith just don’t add up. When attempting to defend his collection as genuine, James Mackenzie sent a couple of previously unpublished Burns poems to the press, including one called the ‘The Poor Man’s Prayer’. Unfortunately for Mackenzie (and by extension Smith), this poem was found to have been published in the London Magazine of 1766, when Burns was only seven years old. Another poem, ‘On the Death of a Pet Owl belonging to a Lady’, which Burns supposedly sent to Maria Riddell, had actually been published the year before Burns was born. The poem – which was in reality the work of minor poet Moses Mendez (c.1690–1758) – would hardly have been up to the usual standards of the bard’s verse had it been a genuine Burns:

The Owl expires, death gave the dreadful word
And lovely Anna weeps her favo’rite bird,___

Antique Smith’s forgeries still turn up for sale today and can be quite collectable in their own right, though nowhere near as valuable as a genuine manuscript by Burns. The great cultural, as well as monetary, value of a genuine Burns gives us greater reason to continue developing methods to help spot fakes, and in recent years the Centre for Robert Burns Studies has even worked with scientists on the use of mass spectrometry to detect the chemical ‘signature’ of ink.

Further reading

Spurious Documents 18871893, together with A Series of Articles from the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch 22 November 1892 to 28 June 1893 (Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland, n.d.), National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, NLS MS.2209

Gerry Carruthers and George Smith, ‘Bard Behaviour: Imitating, Mistaking and Faking Burns’, in The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns, ed. by G Carruthers (Oxford: OUP, 2024), pp.324–27

David Fergus, ‘“Antique Smith” the Affable Forger’, Textualities

John DeLancey Ferguson, ‘“Antique” Smith and His Forgeries of Robert Burns’, Colophon 13 (1933)

William Roughead, Riddle of the Ruthvens (Edinburgh: William Green & Sons, 1919), pp.145–70

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