Samuel Ireland's Culpability
The culpability of Samuel Ireland remained a controversial topic for years to come. Although his son's Confessions (1805) did a great deal to establish his innocence, not everybody was convinced. Accounts by Clement Mansfield Ingleby in 1859 and George Dawson in 1888 took the position that the father was responsible for the forgeries and the son's Confession was a tissue of lies. The acquisition of Samuel Ireland's papers by the British Museum in 1876, however, provided a wealth of evidence that Samuel was the victim rather than the perpetrator of the fraud, and Ingleby changed his position in his 1881 paper on the Ireland Affair.
Read more about this topic: Ireland Shakespeare Forgeries
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“I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.”
—Anonymous. quoted in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, Feb. 1776 (1791)
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“A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.”
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