Happy New Year!
If portrait photography and historical fiction are among your interests, a recently-published novel by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton/£20) might be worth further investigation.
As I am about to start reading The Fraud, you’ll be pleased to hear that this first Pressphotoman blogpost of 2024 does not contain any spoilers.
But like me, you might wish to do a little research if tempted to dive into its 454 pages.
The novel’s plot centres on a celebrated 19th century English court case known as “The Tichborne Trial.”
At the heart of the case was a portrait photograph that featured a man with a contested claim to a family fortune.
Was or was he not the aristocrat he claimed to be, and did the photograph support or invalidate his true identity?
Thanks to the BBC Radio 3 series The Essay, you can learn all about the intriguing case of Arthur Orton (1834-1898), who became known as the “Tichborne Claimant” in a 13-minute podcast.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b052gzjr
Presented by Professor Jennifer Tucker of Wesleyan University, Connecticut, it featured in the series “A photograph that (you didn’t know) changed everything” first broadcast in 2015.
Since then, Prof. Tucker has presented further research on the Tichborne case, exploring the rising use and circulation of photographs for gathering evidence and witness testimony during the 1860s and 1870s.
Her latest research featured in “Moving Beyond the ‘Mug Shot,’” the bi-annual Hurter and Driffield Memorial Lecture for the Royal Photographic Society presented in 2022.
Such was Victorian public’s fascination with the Tichborne case that Arthur Orton became a celebrity figure and featured in a range of best-selling carte-de-visite and cabinet cards.
Among them was this cdv produced by W. & D. Downey, a photographic firm who regular readers of this blog will be familiar with.
If all this background has whetted your appetite to learn more, you might also enjoy listening to a recent episode of the chart-topping podcast The Rest Is History.
In it, the novelist Zadie Smith can be heard in conversation about The Fraud with historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.
Pressphotoman 
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