The literary forgeries of Thomas Chatterton and William Henry Ireland

Abstract

The article is focused on some significant aspects pertaining to ingenious literary mystifications of the two XVIII century masters, i.e., Thomas Chatterton, forger of genealogies, histories, deeds, treatises, letters, and the Rowley Poems supposedly originating from and describing medieval England, and James Macpherson, connoisseur of literary artifacts, and creator of Works of Ossian which he claimed to be his mere prose rendering of orally transmitted ancient Scottish lore of the Highlands and the Hebrides. Originality and novelty of the results of the research reveal a notion about the necessity for the intellectual history of literature to focus not only on traditional texts and literary sources, but also not to ignore the erroneous and fabricated ones.