British Romantic literature descends from a line of impostors, forgers and frauds. Beginning with the golden age of forgery in the late eighteenth century and continuing through canonical Romanticism and its aftermath, Margaret Russett demonstrates how Romantic writers distinguished their fictions from the fakes surrounding them. The book includes works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Walter Scott, John Clare, and James Hogg, as well as chapters on impostors in popular culture. Russett's interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study offers a major reinterpretation of Romanticism and its continuing influence in the present.