How The Fraud Unpicks the Victorian Novel

Earlier this year, Richard Bell’s installation Pay the Rent displayed at the Tate Modern in London. A rapidly accelerating counter, the digital figure showed rent owed to Indigenous peoples in Australia tailored to Britain’s specific years of occupation between the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 and Federation in 1901. The figure doesn’t take compensation or reparations into account. Because there’s yet to be any recourse, the speed at which the number increased with interest is overwhelming, sitting in the eighteen digits in press images, north of a quadrillion dollars. Pay the Rent was the first artwork visitors were confronted with as they entered the main hall of the gallery. A member of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang communities, Bell’s powerful exhibition talks back to empire.

It’s hard to underestimate the significance of this work in a country that actively avoids its colonial past. I’m thinking here of the UK national curriculum, which makes the teaching of the British Empire optional while mandating the study of the Roman Empire and its consequences on Britain. Pay the Rent is the kind of agitprop art that challenges Britain’s historical amnesia through provocation. The installation is a commentary on Australia’s settler colonialism too, particularly the fantasy of white innocence fabricated through values like the ‘rule of law’ and ‘fair go’, obscuring efforts for truth-telling and land rights. In a similar fashion, Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, unsettles the nation’s delusions about race, imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

At first, The Fraud seems a conventional narrative of William Ainsworth, a forgotten Victorian novelist, and his Scottish cousin Eliza Touchet. It isn’t too different from other Victorian stories I’d watched and read over the years growing up in London (think factory workers, workhouses, repressed women). Dickensian stories of crime and poverty (like A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations) are taught across primary and secondary school, while Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George Eliot’s Middlemarch are popular literature study choices for their depiction of class, sex and love in a high-minded society. These stories continue to be deeply embedded in contemporary British culture, reflective of the country’s nostalgia for 19th-century history and literature.

Zadie Smith’s new novel unsettles the nation’s delusions about race, imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

Though The Fraud opens with a predictable scene between Eliza and a chimneysweep, Smith soon diverges from these tropes. Eliza critiques novelists of her time for indulging in ‘moralising’ narratives—Smith’s nod to an obsession with ethical behaviour in a time of collective panic over social and political upheaval. In the midst of the Industrial Revolution, the abolitionist movement and an accelerated colonial expansion into Asia and Africa­, England was reinventing itself. Across culture, a national myth-making project bound together by religious, legal and philosophical values was taking place. Maybe it was this historical flex point that drew a contemporary writer of race and identity to the Victorian literary tradition—for Smith to investigate the foundation of England’s colonial character.

As the engine room for industry and political power, a lot of Victorian literature was set in London. And though her eleven-book oeuvre is varied, what remains a preoccupation for Smith is her detailed love of North West London: Willesden, Kensal Green, Kilburn. Her debut novel, White Teeth, was set in the Willesden of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and explores tensions as immigrants arrived from former British colonies. In her campus novel, On Beauty, the American–English Belsey family travels from the USA to Willesden, the former home of the English professor Howard Belsey. Swing Time is set in London too, while the polyvocal, experimental NW is specifically located in North West London’s social housing. And though Smith’s first historical fiction novel moves across England between 1826 to 1877, it is when Eliza Touchet returns to London later in Iife, where North and West London combined, ‘that she felt most at home’.

During this visit, Eliza finds herself in the centre of a people’s protest for land and freedom in East London, and she’s shocked by the ‘daily battle of life’. But this reality check doesn’t hit immediately. Smith builds up to this by entwining middle-class white lives, the abolition movement and slave trade with an identity-theft criminal case. A real-life court case and national scandal, the Tichborne case caught the population’s imagination in the 1860s; against all evidence and reason, the case’s working-class defendant Arthur Orton was believed to be patrician Sir Roger Doughty Tichborne by his supporters until death. Much of the book’s plot is centred around the drama surrounding this court case.

Though her eleven-book oeuvre is varied, what remains a preoccupation for Smith is her detailed love of North West London.

While the novel’s central voice is Eliza’s, her primary inquiry is into William Ainsworth’s life—his overlooked novels and his rivalry with Dickens is key, but his self-absorption, a kind of stand-in for the ‘mediocre white male writer’ and his ego, is interrogated as well. When William moves to Italy early in his marriage so he can pursue writing, he leaves behind his wife Ann and young daughters. At the request of Ann, Eliza moves in to support the family. Eliza herself is a widow who over time becomes the Ainsworth’s housekeeper when Ann prematurely dies. She also coordinates William’s literary salons and becomes an informal editor and critic of his novels which she can’t bear to read (‘How could it be that everything he had ever written was nonsense?’). In his sixties, William goes on to remarry the ‘new Mrs. Ainsworth’, Sarah, a former housemaid. An enthusiastic follower of the Tichborne case, Sarah and Eliza attend court over several months to watch the drama unfold.

This case is a successful example of deception, ideal for ongoing interrogation: Orton’s lies become true over time, enough for a whole nation to believe him. It’s a microcosm of Britain’s myth-making project; arguments about the country’s superiority are repeated enough times for them to become embedded into the nation’s psyche. As Dickens writes so impotently of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which showcased ‘exotic bays’ of ‘everything the British had ever done’ on display:

We are moving in a right direction towards some superior condition of society—politically, morally, intellectually and religiously.

Fictionalising this identity search leads Smith to connect many different threads across The Fraud. By interrogating the idea of ‘truth’, she reveals that the real thief and fraud in fact is Britain itself. And though there are no easy answers to settler-colonial realities today, it’s clear from works like Bell’s Pay the Rent that compensation isn’t enough. And while the debt cannot ever be repaid, Bogle’s words are a reminder that ‘Parliament hands down the laws that govern us, yes. It cannot bestow freedom itself.’ The Fraud offers a new angle to unmask these colonial delusions—by having a laugh but also continuing to ask questions.