An 1822 London fortune-telling book claimed to be Napoleon's, but its author invented nearly all of it

odditiesanalysisThe Public Domain Review1822 · London, England

An 1822 London fortune-telling book claimed to be Napoleon's, but its author invented nearly all of it

the gist

The Book of Fate appeared in London bookshops in July 1822, during a craze for Egypt and Napoleon. It claimed to be an ancient Egyptian manuscript that had once belonged to Napoleon, and it offered 32 oracular questions answered through a chart of symbols. Its author, William Henry Ireland, invented the translator, the provenance and the tomb account, copying much of it from other books. The chart's symbols were crude versions of Freemason signs, and the questions came from French card-divination games. It sold widely and has been reprinted under new titles ever since.

so what

The hoax shows how the 19th-century fascination with Egypt and Napoleon could make an invented object look authentic and sell well. Ireland was already known as a forger, having confessed to faking Shakespeare documents as a teenager.

fun fact

William Henry Ireland was nicknamed Shakespeare Ireland after he confessed to forging Shakespeare works, including the play Vortigern and Rowena.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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