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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Forger's Wife," John Lang intricately weaves a narrative that masterfully explores the intersections of identity, betrayal, and artistry. Set against the backdrop of 19th-century art forgery, this novel delves into the psychological dimensions of its characters with a keen eye for detail and a stylistic elegance that befits the period. Lang employs a rich, descriptive language that immerses the reader in the world of art, deception, and the moral dilemmas faced by those entangled in the nefarious underbelly of creativity. The interplay between authenticity and imitation serves as a central theme, compelling readers to question the very nature of art itself. John Lang, with a background in both literature and the visual arts, draws from his extensive knowledge of the art world to craft a narrative that resonates profoundly. His fascination with the lives of artists and forgers provides a unique lens through which the characters are explored and developed. Having lived in various artistic hubs throughout his life, Lang's insights into the struggles of authenticity versus commerciality bring a personal touch to the narrative, making it a compelling exploration of human relationships. This book is a recommended read for those who enjoy historical fiction rich with psychological depth and moral inquiry. Readers who appreciate complexities in character relationships and the ethical implications of creativity will find themselves captivated by Lang's masterful storytelling. "The Forger's Wife" promises to engage any lover of literature and art with its haunting narrative and thought-provoking themes. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Forger's Wife
Table of Contents
Introduction
When a woman’s marriage is bound to a crime, love, law, and survival collide on a frontier where justice is contested. John Lang’s The Forger’s Wife introduces readers to a world in which private vows carry public consequences, and the line between respectability and ruin is perilously thin. Framed by the rough beauty and dangers of the Australian bush, the story begins with domestic unease and unfolds into a broader confrontation with authority and outlawry. Without relying on sensational excess, Lang crafts a narrative that moves quickly, asks pointed moral questions, and keeps attention fixed on the costs of allegiance.
Written by the Australian-born author John Lang and first published in the 1850s, the novel blends crime, adventure, and colonial melodrama within a nineteenth-century popular-fiction tradition. Its setting ranges through colonial Australia, especially the bush, evoking a society defined by distance, transport routes, and the reach—often limited—of the law. Readers will recognize in its rhythms the hallmarks of early Australian storytelling: a concern with settlement, perilous travel, and the shadow of past offences. As a work of colonial-era fiction, it participates in the emergence of national literature while remaining firmly connected to transnational currents of sensation and crime writing.
At its premise, the book follows a wife whose life is imperiled by her husband’s involvement in forgery, drawing her into encounters with officials, opportunists, and the hazards of the road. Initial chapters set in more settled environs give way to movements through remote country, where news travels by rumor and allegiance can shift in an instant. Rather than centering intricate puzzles, the narrative builds tension through pursuit, reversal, and moral choice. The result is a story that feels both intimate and expansive: a marital drama entangled with public institutions, and a travel through landscapes that test the characters’ courage and resolve.
Lang writes in clear, direct prose that favors momentum, vivid incident, and sharply sketched scenes over extended introspection. Episodes are compact and purpose-driven, often closing on charged turns that propel the action forward. The bush appears not as mere backdrop but as an active pressure—its distances, silences, and sudden violences shaping what people dare and what they fear. Social spaces, too, are keenly observed: inns and encampments, way-stations and homesteads, where reputations are made or broken in a moment. Throughout, the book balances melodramatic energy with grounded detail, giving readers a lively, intelligible account of colonial life under the sign of the law.
Among its central themes are crime and punishment, the fragility of respectability, and the burdens that a woman bears when tethered to a man’s offence. The narrative probes how institutions assign guilt, how communities police belonging, and how individuals negotiate danger when legal protection is uncertain. Class and mobility figure prominently: the promise of a fresh start countered by the persistence of stigma. The bushranging tradition hovers at the edges as a measure of both resistance and predation, testing the limits of order. Above all, the novel asks what loyalty looks like when every choice carries risk and every refuge may be temporary.
Read today, The Forger’s Wife speaks to enduring fascinations with true crime and the ethics of complicity: how far one should go to stand by a loved one, and at what cost. Its colonial setting invites reflection on the making of law at the margins, the temptation to romanticize outlaws, and the uneven protections afforded by authority. For modern readers, the book also offers a window onto nineteenth-century attitudes—gendered expectations, ideas of character, and social surveillance—against which current debates about justice, reputation, and rehabilitation continue to resonate. It remains valuable as both cultural artifact and gripping narrative of peril and perseverance.
As an introduction to early Australian popular fiction, Lang’s novel provides an accessible, fast-moving experience that rewards readers interested in frontier narratives and the origins of crime storytelling in the colonies. Its episodes can be savored for their immediacy and their sense of place, while its characters’ predicaments invite empathy without demanding foreknowledge of historical detail. Approached with awareness of the era’s limitations and assumptions, The Forger’s Wife offers not a tidy moral fable but a layered portrait of risk, resilience, and the social costs of wrongdoing. It is a compelling gateway to the landscapes and imaginations that shaped colonial literature.
Synopsis
A young English gentlewoman, raised to value respectability, marries a polished suitor whose easy manners and cultivated talk win swift approval. Soon after the wedding, small inconsistencies yield to a larger revelation: he is implicated in a sophisticated scheme of forgery. Exposure brings arrest, a public trial that strips away his social disguises, and a sentence of transportation to the antipodes. The shock leaves his wife balanced between disgrace at home and loyalty to her vows. Choosing resolve over retreat, she determines to follow him to New South Wales, hoping either to reclaim him to lawful living or, at least, to learn his true condition within the penal system.
The long voyage introduces the harsh mechanics of empire. Guarded convicts crowd the lower decks; officials, traders, and settlers mingle above; rumor and anecdote sketch a distant colony of raw opportunities and rough justice. The young wife studies the regulations that govern assigned labor and tickets-of-leave, gathering practical knowledge against fear. Sydney, when it rises from the water, is a jumble of government buildings, crowded lanes, and open bush at its fringes. She seeks an audience with colonial authorities and finds measured assistance in a conscientious magistrate, who recognizes both her vulnerability and her persistence, and offers guidance as she begins to trace her husband’s movements.
Her search proceeds through musters, ledgers, and the testimony of gaolers and overseers. Names shift with aliases; postings change with discipline and need. She learns the cadence of the convict system: chain gangs sent to roads, farm assignments to remote stations, and the distant hope of conditional liberty. A respectable household takes her in, lending shelter while she pursues petitions and letters of permission. Each step reveals contrasts between the rigidity of English reputation and the colony’s practical acceptance of mixed histories. Hints emerge that her husband’s education and penmanship have drawn notice, placing him near sensitive duties where temptation and opportunity might dangerously intersect.
Beyond the town, reports thicken of bushrangers operating along the western road and across the grazing districts. Coaches are bailed up, stations relieved of arms and horses, and the press speculates about a new leader whose manners and accent suggest a fallen gentleman. Whispered anecdotes connect this figure with an escaped convict whose past offense involved elegant deceptions rather than brute force. The wife’s inquiries point inland, and circumstances require her to travel with a small escort to a distant property where information may be found. The route crosses rugged country, where isolation magnifies danger and makes every campfire a potential meeting with lawlessness.
On the road, the threat ceases to be rumor. A hold-up stops a mail coach, managed with unsettling discipline. Passengers are searched, relieved of arms and watches, and warned against resistance; no needless violence occurs. To the wife, a brief exchange—an intonation, a word choice, a quickly written pass—feels unmistakably familiar, as if a private code had been voiced. A token changes hands that seems marked by her husband’s precise hand. The magistrate, apprised of these signs, gathers mounted troopers and a tracker, and begins a cautious pursuit, hoping to bring matters to a lawful end without turning the bush into a battleground.
The chase moves through ranges and river flats, past inns that serve as waypoints for both constables and outlaws. The tracker reads the ground—cut grass, turned stones, a scuffed creek bank—while the troopers keep pressure without forcing a reckless stand. Conversations during halts reveal the informal rules that govern bushranging: the value of fast horses, the exchange of news, and the curious prestige attached to a leader who can command obedience. The wife, kept safely to the rear, learns how quickly distance and scrub can hide or reveal a man. Hints multiply that the fugitives are circling toward familiar ground.
The pursuit narrows to a ravine and a tangle of scrub where a meeting feels inevitable. Night reduces shapes to silhouettes, and voices matter more than faces. A figure addresses the wife from cover, acknowledging a bond that law cannot erase. She answers plainly, offering a path that avoids ruin while refusing collusion. The magistrate holds his men, ready to accept a surrender yet prepared for resistance. In the hush that follows, choice confronts necessity. What is decided in that darkness fixes the course of events to come, though the precise cost and outcome remain withheld until the story’s final reckonings.
What follows returns the story to town institutions: depositions taken, identities fixed, and the courts engaged. Newspaper columns weigh facts with moral judgment and appetite for sensation. The wife’s testimony, careful and restrained, sets out what she knows without excusing wrong. Officials consider whether cooperation or disclosure might temper punishment, and how necessity coexists with principle. Social repercussions ripple outward: acquaintances choose sides; some extend protection, others withdraw. Through this, the wife’s position clarifies. She is not an ornament or a passive sufferer, but a steady agent whose fidelity is measured in public, even as the ultimate legal outcome is deferred to later pages.
The Forger’s Wife charts a passage from genteel England to a colony where standing is remade by conduct rather than pedigree. It follows the interplay of law, loyalty, and opportunity, showing how an elegant crime adapts to rough terrain and how institutions answer it. Without disclosing final turns, the book stresses endurance and clear choice: a woman’s steady persistence, a magistrate’s balance of mercy and order, and a wrongdoer’s meeting with consequence. Its message is sober yet not hopeless: identity is proved in action, and the new world tests every claim—of love, of honor, and of reform—more sharply than the old.
Historical Context
John Lang’s The Forger’s Wife (first published 1855) moves between metropolitan Britain and colonial New South Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century. It begins in an England of crowded courts and paper money, then follows imperial routes to Sydney, Parramatta, and the road over the Blue Mountains toward Bathurst. The temporal horizon largely spans the 1820s–1830s penal era, when transported convicts, emancipists, military officers, and free migrants rubbed shoulders in a volatile society. Coaching inns, stock routes, and scattered homesteads define space; magistrates’ benches, gaols, and bush encampments define power. The novel’s crimes and pursuits unfold within this expanding, yet precariously governed, settler world.
Between the Bank Restriction of 1797 and the resumption of cash payments in 1821, Britain saw an unprecedented spread of paper currency and a wave of banknote forgery. Parliament answered with severe statutes, making many forgery offenses capital; executions for forgery crowded the 1810s–1820s calendars. Reform then narrowed punishments: the Forgery Act 1832 began abolishing the death penalty for most forgery, and by 1837 capital punishment for forgery had ended. The Forger’s Wife anchors its inciting crime in this milieu, depicting the metropolitan investigation, trial, and sentencing that carried offenders from London courtrooms to transports, binding a domestic marriage plot to the fiscal anxieties of industrial Britain.
Transportation to Australia structured British penal policy from 1788 to 1868, with New South Wales receiving convicts until 1840, Van Diemen’s Land until 1853, and Western Australia until 1868. Around 162,000 men and women were shipped across the world, processed through musters, assigned to masters, and regulated by tickets-of-leave. Secondary punishment loomed at Norfolk Island, Port Macquarie (from 1821), and Moreton Bay (from 1824). Local benches imposed summary discipline; the Colonial Secretary’s Office tracked permissions to marry and move. The Forger’s Wife plots the human costs inside this machinery: a convicted forger’s sentence, a spouse’s perilous pursuit to the colony, and the fraught negotiations with clerks, captains, and magistrates that such journeys required.
Bushranging—armed robbery by escaped convicts or desperadoes—spiked on the Great Western Road after the interior opened. To counter it, the New South Wales Mounted Police was created in 1825, and the Bushrangers Act (1830) empowered constables to demand passes and search without warrant. Figures like Jack Donohoe, shot by troopers in 1830 near Bringelly, became bywords for defiance as escorts, mail coaches, and stations were bailed up. Lang’s novel mirrors this climate of pursuit and evasion. Its chases through scrub and over ranges, and its attention to warrants, passes, and patrols, reflect a colony where mobility was suspect and the boundary between survival and felony could be crossed in a night.
In 1813 Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson, and William Wentworth crossed the Blue Mountains; William Cox’s road (1814–1815) enabled Governor Macquarie to proclaim Bathurst in 1815. Pastoral expansion then pressed into Wiradjuri country, sparking the Bathurst War: in 1824 Governor Brisbane declared martial law as clashes escalated, while Wiradjuri leader Windradyne’s resistance became emblematic. Frontier violence persisted; the Myall Creek massacre on 10 June 1838 in the Gwydir district, and the unprecedented hanging of seven perpetrators that December, exposed the law’s halting reach. The novel’s interior settings—isolated homesteads, stock camps, lonely roads—carry this history’s imprint, invoking a tense frontier where authority, vengeance, and vulnerability patterned everyday movement.
Colonial governance shifted under the Bigge Reports (1819–1821), which criticized Governor Macquarie and reoriented penal policy toward harsher discipline and privatized assignment. Institutional change followed: the Supreme Court of New South Wales opened in 1824 under Chief Justice Francis Forbes; trial by jury expanded during the 1830s; Governor Richard Bourke’s measures (1831–1837), including the 1836 Church Act and curbs on magistrates’ excesses, sought to temper oligarchic power. Society polarized between “exclusives” (officials and large settlers) and “emancipists.” The Forger’s Wife repeatedly stages hearings, petitions, and patronage, dramatizing how outcomes hinged on status, reputation, and access to officials—an implicit map of law as both shield and instrument of class.
In 1851 Edward Hargraves announced payable gold at Ophir, near Bathurst, helping trigger rushes across New South Wales and Victoria. Populations exploded—Victoria leapt from about 77,000 (1851) to over 500,000 (1861)—and new licensing regimes, troopers, and summary courts emerged to control mobility and vice. The Eureka rising at Ballarat in 1854 epitomized tensions between authority and itinerant diggers. Although The Forger’s Wife is set earlier, its 1855 publication framed readers’ responses: stories of sudden wealth, forged identities, and predatory crime resonated with goldfields anxieties about who belonged, who prospered, and how paper credentials—passes, warrants, tickets—could make or unmake a life on the colonial edge.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the asymmetries of Britain’s penal-capitalist world and its colonial extensions. It indicts a system that punished paper crimes with exile while tolerating patronage and class privilege; it shows wives and dependents navigating bureaucracies designed for control, not care; and it demystifies colonial security by revealing policing as improvisation backed by draconian statute. The depiction of frontier travel underscores how distance magnified discretionary power and peril. By entwining domestic jeopardy with legal process, Lang’s narrative critiques the moral economy of the period: respectability masking coercion, law serving order before justice, and ambition enabled or crushed by access to documents.
The Forger's Wife
CHAPTER I.
IN one of the midland counties, some years ago, there lived a gentleman of ancient family and large estate—a Mr. Orford, who had married, early in life, a young lady of great personal attractions, the daughter of a distinguished general officer in the British army.
The issue of this marriage was numerous, but one child only was reared—a girl. Some had died very young, others had lingered on till they were six or seven years of age, and two had been taken away—a boy and a girl—when the former was fifteen and the latter fourteen.
With what anxiety did Mr. and Mrs. Orford watch Emily, their only child! Her every look was studied, every whim gratified, want anticipated; and year by year did their anxiety become more intense.
When Emily had completed her thirteenth year, Mr. Orford, who represented his county, resigned his seat in Parliament, and removed his family to the Continent. For four years and upwards the Orfords remained abroad, travelling; and when they returned to England, Emily was seventeen years of age.
Emily was very pretty, and had remarkably pleasing manners. Her form was slight, her figure well-shaped and graceful. The sweetness of her disposition might be seen in her soft hazel eyes, the expression of her delicately-formed mouth, and the intonations of her musical and unaffected voice. She was the beau ideal of a girl of gentle blood, and heiress to all her father possessed—a very considerable fortune, not less than fifteen thousand a-year.
Amongst the many eligible suitors who visited at Orford Hall was a handsome, manly person—one Charles Everest, the second son of a baronet whose estate joined that of Emily's father.
For a year Charles Everest continued to pay Miss Orford the most "marked" attention, which she received seemingly with delight. At length he proposed to her; but, to the disappointment of all who were interested in the matter, she refused to become his wife, though she acknowledged she liked him extremely. Charles Everest, dejected and abashed, removed himself from Emily's vicinity, and proceeded to London, where his father's interest soon procured for him an appointment—that of private secretary to a Cabinet Minister.
The next person whose attentions seemed far from disagreeable to Miss Orford, was a Mr. Hastings, a young barrister, in whose "circuit" Mr. Orford's estate was situated. Mr. Hastings was "a very rising man," and Mr. Orford, who was chairman of the Quarter Sessions, would frequently invite him to the Hall.
Mr. Orford was about to stand once more for the county, which he had formerly represented in Parliament, and his friend the barrister volunteered to canvass for him. The offer was accepted, and on this occasion the barrister remained for a fortnight under the same roof with Emily, with whom he became passionately in love.
Through the exertions of Mr. Hastings, Mr. Orford was returned by a very large majority; and Emily naturally shared her father's joy on this event. Her lover observing this, made a declaration of his attachment in the most eloquent terms. But it is one thing to move a jury or a mob by figures of speech and impassioned discourse—it is another thing to create that strange mysterious feeling, called "love," in a maiden's breast. Emily owned that she liked Mr. Hastings, just as she had liked Charles Everest; but then she added, "I could never think of marrying him, because I do not love him."
* * * * * * *
Miss Orford's third suitor was an officer in the Coldstream Guards, Captain Deesing. He first saw Emily at a county ball, to which he had escorted his sisters. Deesing was a man for whom half the girls in London were breaking their hearts, contrary to the wishes of their mothers, for Deesing was in debt, and had no "expectations." Deesing's address was peculiarly captivating, and he had always at command a stock of fresh and entertaining pleasantries wherewith to amuse those with whom he entered into conversation. He could not only engage the affections of the fair sex with wonderful facility, but even men who had once spoken to him, long after thirsted for his society. Witty, clever, shrewd, good-tempered, frank, generous, unaffected, Deesing's smiles were courted by persons of all ranks. He had never thought of marriage; at least, he had thought that matrimony was not exactly suited to him, and therefore he had no idea of contracting it.
Captain Deesing was no sooner introduced to Miss Orford than he conceived for her a regard which he had never felt for any other woman; and the morning after the ball he communicated to his eldest sister that he was in love with her friend.
* * * * * * *
Although Captain Deesing saw Emily Orford almost every day for three weeks,—although he had played in a charade with her, wherein they were ardent lovers,—although his sisters had been loud in his praises,—although he had escorted her in her morning rides, had walked with her alone in the shrubberies, had read poetry to her, had sang to her the tenderest songs; although he had striven hard, by exercising all his powers of fascination, to win her love;—still, when he proposed to her, she told him what she had told the others, she "liked him very much, but she could never think of marrying him."
This was a severe blow to Captain Deesing. He went to town; rejoined his regiment in disgust; shortly afterwards married a rich widow, and exchanged into a regiment of the line.
CHAPTER II.
MRS. ORFORD was induced to visit a watering-place in Devonshire. Mr. Orford's parliamentary duties required his presence in town.
At this watering-place, Mrs. Orford and Emily met in society a person of gentlemanlike appearance, called "Captain Harcourt[1]." His manners were prepossessing, his address unaffected and easy. He was very good-looking, amusing, and clever, though superficial. He was a great favourite with the little society, and the young ladies used to speak of him as "that charming man."
Captain Harcourt did not pay Miss Orford the attention she had been accustomed to receive; he seemed to prefer others who had less pretensions to beauty. He had never once asked Miss Orford to dance, though he had been introduced to her, and had met her at several evening parties. He appeared to hold aloof from Emily, though he occasionally condescended to converse with her mother.
Mrs. Orford invited Captain Harcourt to dine at her house, albeit he had never called upon her. The Captain accepted the invitation, and after dinner, over the dessert, culled for Mrs. Orford that bouquet of compliments for which she had been pining all day long.
At the request of her mother, Emily played and sang; and Captain Harcourt bestowed that languid applause which men of fashion frequently affect. His ears were enchanted by her voice, but he skilfully kept his raptures under control. Emily's sketches, too, were also exhibited for Captain Harcourt's inspection and criticism, and he was pleased to speak of them as "rather good—not at all bad."
On taking leave of Mrs. Orford and her daughter, the Captain shook the former's hand very graciously, but gave Emily only two fingers and a very low bow.
On the following day Captain Harcourt met Mrs. Orford and her daughter on the beach. As he approached, Emily blushed, and involuntarily trembled. She knew not why, but she felt ill, and could scarcely refrain from bursting into tears. Captain Harcourt spoke to Emily in a patronising tone of voice, and with the air of a man who feels that his words are valuable. Emily was annoyed; but she could not hate the man. She had now an interest in him. And why? He had piqued her, provoked her.
It is hard to say at what age folly is likely to end in women who have been greatly admired in their youthful days. Mrs. Orford was actually proud that Captain Harcourt preferred her conversation to that of her daughter, and had she been a widow, she would have accepted him as a second husband, had he proposed to her.
On taking leave that evening on the beach, Captain Harcourt bestowed upon Emily a warmer shake of the hand than he had given her on the previous night, and smiled upon her. Emily was not prepared for this. It took her by surprise; and the gentle pressure she experienced thrilled through every vein, and made her heart beat violently.
Emily could not sleep that night; she lay awake thinking of Captain Harcourt. She could now feel for poor Charles Everest, for Mr. Hastings, and for Captain Deesing, since she had conceived a love for a man who regarded her with indifference, or who was only civil to her, out of mere charity. More than once she summoned all her pride, and tried to laugh at herself for thinking of Captain Harcourt; but that luscious poison of love had entered into her blood, and in vain did she attempt to eject it.
