Review of The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth- Century England by Ian Keable

BY MICHELLE AINSWORTH

What do a haunted house, a woman who gave birth to rabbits, and a man climbing into a regularly sized wine bottle have in common? All are hoaxes birthed in the 1700s and clearly examined by Ian Keable in his new book The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth Century England. Keable devotes each of ten chapters to one hoax, which he introduces, presents, and then carefully analyzes. There is a 67-page PDF of notes at centuryofdeception.com, but the book itself includes a chapter-by-chapter bibliography on recent scholarship, as well as some references to primary sources in-text.

Keable says that he selected the ten hoaxes from among many others of the century because they were the most well-known at the time (though his chapters suggest that two of them may not have been widely viewed as such at the time). For comparison, I checked the index of seven recent or common books on hoaxes. (Two are commonly reprinted classic texts, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by MacKay (1841, 1932) and Hoaxes by MacDougall (1940, 1958); two are reference books published in 1993: Hoaxes and Scams by Sifakis and Encyclopedia of Hoaxes, edited by Stein; and three are relatively recent popular books, A Treasury of Deception by Farquar (2005), Bunk by Young (2017) and Hoax by Tattersall and Nevraumont (2018). I reviewed the latter two in SKEPTIC 24.1 in 2019.

Of the ten hoaxes examined by Keable, all of the comparison books discussed at least one hoax that he detailed, and most books discussed several.

Keable is a professional magician, and in the book’s introduction he says that he once had a theater show that he publicized by advertising that he would climb, contortionist-like, into a common wine or liquor bottle. Before the first chapter, Keable reveals that he has lied to the reader, but that that claim really was made, a theater rented and tickets sold, to such a performance in 1749. This hoax is the subject of Chapter 5, and it is one of the hoaxes I was most familiar with before reading Keable’s book, though I am intrigued by his original research into the hoax’s perpetrator.