The Fraud

Cover of The Fraud

Author: Smith, Zadie

Tags: edifying, humor

  • The boy pulled off his cap. It was a hot September day, hard to think through. Shame to have to move a finger on such a day! But cunts like this were sent to try you, and September meant work, only work. ‘I’ll come in or I won’t come in?’ he muttered, into his cap.
  • “The Claimant had been found not to speak a word of French, although the real Roger Tichborne grew up speaking it. ” This tells us the era is 1860.

Setting

Tunbridge House

Characters

  • Eliza Touchet - housekeeper & cousin (?) Widow (husband, children dead of scarlet fever when she was 24 - shortly after husband abandoned her) age 69 (was 21 when WA 15)
  • Sarah Wells - mother “Sarah Wells, aged 26, of Stepney; maid.”
  • Clara Ainsworth - daughter (pre William)
  • William Ainsworth - writer, “That handsome young buck of the ’30s, hair slick with Macassar oil, had somehow become this whiskery, jowly, dejected, old man.” Apparently not a wonderful writer. William Harrison Ainsworth, aged 63, of Manchester; widower.”
  • Frances Ainsworth - RIP WA’s first wife. Lover of ET.
  • Fanny Ainsworth - adult daughter of WA
  • Emily Ainsworth - adult daughter of WA
  • Ann-Blanche Ainsworth - adult daughter of WA
  • Gilbert Ainsworth - brother of WA (who is suffering from effects of falling from a horse in his 20s)
  • James Touchet RIP - cousin of WA, ET’s dead husband (William tracks him down after he left - but JT had already gotten sick w/ scarlet fever) ET gets an annuity of 100 lbs a year

Vocabulary

  • baize: the cloth used as covering for billiard/pool tables - also possibly for a desk blotter.
  • loosestrife | ˈlo͞osˌstrīf | (noun) any of various tall plants that bear upright spikes of flowers., several plants of the genus Lythrum (family Lythraceae)
“Still, the one, true Roman Catholic sun was filtering through the dour and narrow Protestant windows, and this lent the space something holy, despite everything.”

  • chapter 7 - Eliza at WA’s wedding to Sarah W remembering another wedding.

  • OMG reading so carefully to keep track of our characters and relationships - also WA is a goofball: “I’m a writer and I’ve no intention of being anything else.”

  • now flashing back to 4/23/1830 at Elm Lodge where Eliza goes to work for the Ainsworth family.

  • Chap 14 seems to say Eliza is in love with Frances Ainsworth

  • “Were these two, perhaps, like those celebrated Ladies of Llangollen?”

  • “Can you die of a broken heart? In novels you did. You could also be ‘too good for this world’. These clichés Mrs Touchet abhorred, and yet here, in this dismal room, they rushed in to greet her, robed as truths. ”

  • “But she knew she lived in an age of things, no matter how out of step she felt in it, and whatever else hp was, Charles had been the poet of things. He had made animate and human the cold traffic and bitter worship of things. The only way she could make sense of the general mourning was to note that with his death an age of things now mourned itself.”

  • “She kept a person usefully tethered to the present, like the stays on a hot air balloon.”

  • It just dawned on me that the title is doubly relevant b/c the Tichbourn case and b/c WA is not a successful writer