W. H. Ireland

William Henry Ireland (1775–1835) was an English forger of would-be Shakespearean documents and plays. He is less well known as a poet, writer of gothic novels and histories. Although he was apparently christened William-Henry, he was known as Samuel through much of his life (apparently after a brother who died in childhood), and many sources list his name as Samuel William Henry Ireland.

Early life

Although Ireland claimed throughout his life that he was born in London in 1777, the Ireland family Bible puts his birth two years earlier, on 2 August 1775. His father, Samuel Ireland, was a successful publisher of travelogues, collector of antiquities and collector of Shakespearian plays and "relics". There was at the time, and still is, a great scarcity of writing in the hand of Shakespeare. Of his 37 plays, there is not one copy in his own writing, not a scrap of correspondence from Shakespeare to a friend, fellow writer, patron, producer or publisher. Forgery would fill this void.

William Henry also became a collector of books. In many later recollections Ireland described his fascination with the works and the glorious death of the forger Thomas Chatterton, and probably knew the Ossian poems of James Macpherson. He was strongly influenced by the 1780 novel Love and Madness by Herbert Croft, which was often read aloud in the Ireland house, and which contained large sections on Chatterton and Macpherson. When he was apprenticed to a mortgage lawyer, Ireland began to experiment with blank, genuinely old papers and forged signatures on them. Eventually he forged several documents until he was ready to present them to his father.