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Victorian Self-Making, or Self-Unmaking?: The Tichborne Claimant Revisited

On Christmas day, 1866, there arrived in London a man who claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long lost eleventh baronet and head of an ancient English county family.1 He had long been presumed dead, shipwrecked off the coast of Brazil twelve years previously. At the time of his presumed death in 1854 he was not yet Sir Roger, for his father did not die until 1862, whereupon the inheritance that would have been his passed to his dissipated and reckless younger brother, who managed to spend himself twice into bankruptcy before dying in February, 1866, passing the baronetcy to a posthumous son who would be born that summer. Meanwhile the dowager Lady Tichborne had never reconciled herself to her eldest son1 s presumed death. Fortified by the assurances of a clairvoyant, who said he was still alive, she advertised in the agony column of The Times and contacted a missing persons agency. In due course, from the wild Australian outback there emerged a claimant to the identity, title, and fortune of the lost Sir Roger. Even on so little information, anyone unfamiliar with the story will have begun to develop expectations. It is all so redolent of the commonplaces of the sensation novel, which was enjoying its moment of greatest notoriety at this very time. The claimant would surely be either the true Sir Roger, still bearing, despite all his vicissitudes, the unmistakeable lineaments of an English gentleman, or else some smooth talking, presentable and plausible rogue?a clever con man, bearing a physical resemblance to the lost baronet, who had carefully researched and memorized details of his family and background. What he surely would not be was the fat, uncouth, ill-spoken and quintessentially vulgar ex-butcher from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, who in fact presented himself to claim what he preposterously called his birthright. The only surviving member of Roger's immediate family was his mother, the dowager, who immediately acknowledged the Claimant as her