Jacob Hege
Key Takeaways
- Literary conspiracy theories arise from the same impulse as other conspiracies — our desire to impose meaning and order over our ambiguous and chaotic reality.
- These theories lean on speculation, pattern-hunting, and confirmation bias rather than evidence.
- Literary conspiracies can be fun and offer satisfying answers to a mystery, but history shows that such hoaxes can distort cultural understanding and, in extreme cases, even fuel real-world hatred and violence.
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The literary world is no safe haven from wild conspiracy theories. It has its own supposed cover-ups, extraterrestrials, and cryptids lurking in the bookish backwoods. These conspiracy theories aren’t typically harmful and can even offer some fun lore to draw you into the reading. Like all conspiracy theories, though, they distort our understanding of reality and history, and they can sometimes extend beyond the page to have far-reaching consequences.
A rose by any other name
Perhaps the most common literary conspiracies involve questions of authorship: the belief that a writer didn’t actually create the works credited to them. And it’s understandable why readers sometimes doubt the authenticity of the name on the cover.
For one, many authors use pseudonyms. Mary Ann Evans adopted the pen name “George Eliot” because she believed male novelists were taken more seriously; Stephen King became “Richard Bachman” because he was too prolific for the standard publishing cycle; and Benjamin Franklin pretended to be the dowager “Silence Dogood” to prank his brother James.
For another, some attributions are more a matter of convention than provable reality. Scholars can’t say with certainty that Homer existed, and even if he did, it remains an open question how much of The Iliad and The Odyssey can be attributed to him or the oral tradition that followed. Similar questions can be raised about the Chinese philosophers Lao Tzu and Sun Tzu. (No relation. Tzu is an honorific roughly translating to “master.”)
These facts leave plenty of space for wild speculation, even about modern authors with well-documented lives. Rumors claim that Thomas Pynchon is a pseudonym for the reclusive J.D. Salinger, or that Truman Capote wrote To Kill a Mockingbird while using his childhood friend Harper Lee as an authorial front. Both claims are false.
But without question, the most sweeping conspiracies over authorship surround none other than the Bard himself.
“There is an extraordinary — seemingly an insatiable — urge on the part of quite a number of people to believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare,” the journalist and author Bill Bryson writes in his book on the playwright. “The number of published books suggesting — or more often insisting — as much is estimated now to be well over five thousand.”
Doubts over Shakespeare’s authorship gained traction in the mid-19th century with Delia Bacon. Like many before and after, Delia praised Shakespeare’s plays for their insights and rich language, but this adoration led her to believe that such artistry could not have been achieved by a man of such modest beginnings. She reasoned that the plays must have been written by an educated, world-traveled elite who then credited them to a lowly actor and theater manager — likely to distance himself from their true, subversive intent.
To prove her theory, Delia sailed to England, but instead of sifting through archives or reading primary sources like a historian, she combed the plays for “hidden meanings” and sought inspiration by “absorbing [the] atmospheres” of notable sites. Vibes scholarship, basically.
A 1618 portrait of Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban. Bacon served as the Lord Chancellor under King James I, was a natural philosopher, and developed a system for cataloging books in libraries. With all that, some still think he also wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Where did he find the time? (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
She came to believe that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon — again, no relation — with the help of a cadre of co-conspirators, including the poet Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh. While Delia enjoyed fleeting support from literary figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, her unsubstantiated claims were largely ridiculed.
That didn’t stop others from advancing their own anti-Stratfordian theories. Suspects have included James I, William Stanley, Anne Hathaway, Edward de Vere, and Christopher Marlowe — never mind that the last two died years before all of Shakespeare’s plays were finished.
The inconvenience for all of these lay theories is the same that plagued Delia’s guesswork: They lack truly credible evidence. Meanwhile, scholars and historians have uncovered ample evidence to vouch for Shakespeare’s claim to the quill, including official court records that attribute specific plays to him.
Bryson sums it up nicely: “These people must have been incredibly gifted — to create, in their spare time, the greatest literature ever produced in English, in a voice patently not their own, in a manner so cunning that they fooled virtually everyone during their own lifetimes and for four hundred years afterward.”
Going down a killer rabbit hole
While some conspiracy theories deny that certain authors lived the writerly life, others insist they led a double life in the shadows. No, we’re not talking about a pedestrian affair or unpopular political affiliation. These conjectures aim to add chapters of secret identities and deadly rendezvous to an author’s biography.
Again, it’s understandable as some authors have, in fact, led double lives. To research his first novel, Harlan Ellison went undercover as a member of a street gang. George Orwell was outed as an informant for the Foreign Office’s covert propaganda unit, providing the department with a list of potential communists he called his “fellow-travellers.” And during World War II, children’s author Roald Dahl engaged in espionage while serving as a diplomat to the U.S.
Christopher Marlowe may also have been recruited into the spy game by Sir Francis Walsingham around 1585. Scholars can’t say for certain one way or the other — unless you’re Dahl, spying typically works that way — but the idea did inspire a well-reviewed mystery, “A Tip for the Hangman.”
But the wildest double life attributed to an author belongs to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. You may know him better as Lewis Carroll or, in the case of this conspiracy theory, Jack the Ripper.
Despite leaving a bloody trail of carnage throughout London’s Whitechapel district in 1888 and taunting authorities with letters full of bravado, Jack the Ripper has never been identified. A lineup of doctors, lawyers, butchers, and criminals has been floated as culprits, but who better to throw off the police than a former deacon who excelled at the sciences, entertained children, and worked as a university lecturer?
A satirical cartoon from a Sept. 1888 issue of Punch magazine. The cartoon makes fun of the police’s incompetence in catching Jack the Ripper. If only they were as into anagrams as Richard Wallace was. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
That must have been what Richard Wallace thought when he accused Carroll and Thomas Vere Bayne of being the true Whitechapel murderers in his books The Agony of Lewis Carroll (1990) and Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend (1996).
Wallace’s theory hinges on the author’s love of riddles and wordplay. According to it, Carroll hid confessions of his foul deeds inside his work as anagrams. For instance, Wallace claims that the famous opening lines of Carroll’s poem “The Jabberwocky” conceal a sneaky confession. Here’s Carroll’s poem:
“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.”
And here’s Wallace’s decrypted version:
“Bet I beat my glands til, With hand-sword I slay the evil gender. A slimey theme; borrow gloves, And masturbate the hog more!”
If you think that’s a stretch, so did Karoline Leach, author of In the Shadow of the Dreamchild (1999). The book aims to dispel the many myths surrounding Carroll, and in it, Leach analyzes Wallace’s theory. She concludes that Carroll perpetrating such messy wordplay is more unbelievable than the idea of him moonlighting as a Victorian Dexter. She specifically notes that in one instance, Wallace had to substitute letters to make his anagrams work at all.
Leach went on to demonstrate the ridiculousness of Wallace’s evidence by applying his methodology to the opening line of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. Here’s Milne:
“Here is Edward Bear coming downstairs now.”
And here’s Leach’s “decryption”:
“Stab red red women! CR is downing whores AA.” (“CR” obviously being a deranged Christopher Robin.)
Wallace’s theories fall apart without the anagrams, as well. In the Retrospect Journal, Kayla Greer points out that physical evidence of Carroll and Vere Bayne’s involvement is nonexistent, and Carroll was only in the right part of London for a few of the murders.
“By Wallace’s methodology,” Greer adds, “one could equally ‘prove’ that Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, or any prolific Victorian author was Jack the Ripper.”
A cold case (and nothing more?)
When a death is sudden, unexpected, and high-profile, it opens the doors to conspiratorial thinking. And literary history has plenty of mysterious deaths for theorists to choose from.
Some speculate that Albert Camus’s death in a car accident in 1960 was no accident, but a KGB hit in response to his criticisms of the Soviet government. Geoffrey Chaucer died of unknown causes in 1400, but that lack of evidence hasn’t stopped people from suspecting murder by order of King Henry IV. And Christopher Marlowe pops up again to secure the conspiracy hat trick. Marlowe was stabbed to death during a bar fight over a game of backgammon, but some claim the brawl covered up an assassination aimed at silencing him and protecting high members of the government. (Remember, he might have been a spy.) Others say it was faked to help him escape his enemies.
Meanwhile, Edgar Allan Poe’s death was not unlike something you’d find in one of his stories. On October 3, 1849, Poe was found in a gutter near a tavern after having been missing for five days. He was delirious and wearing someone else’s haggard clothes. After four incoherent days in the hospital, where he called out for a “Reynolds” who was never identified, he died at the age of 40.
Adding to the mystery, Poe’s death certificate and none of his medical records still exist. We only know that the attending physician, John Moran, said the cause of death was phrenitis (swelling of the brain). This generic diagnosis and the mysterious circumstances have led to many conjectures over the true cause. These have included rabies, substance abuse, carbon monoxide poisoning, heavy metal poisoning, a brain tumor, and murder.
A headstone marking the original burial place of Edgar Allan Poe. The truth of Poe’s death is probably lost to history. The only things we can say for certain are that there was no autopsy, no medical records survive, and there are ample hinky elements. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The assumption that Poe died due to his love of the bottle has since been proven unlikely. While Poe had a reputation as a substance abuser who often became belligerent, this popular opinion was largely shaped by a slanderous obituary in the New York Tribune. Its writer, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, held a grudge against Poe and, despite becoming Poe’s literary executor, slandered the author’s name for years after his death.
It didn’t help that Joseph E. Snodgrass, an editor with medical training who helped with Poe after he was found, was a member of the temperance movement and used Poe as a strawman during lectures to highlight the dangers of drinking.
In actuality, Poe swore off alcohol after overcoming an illness and being told by his doctor that another drink would likely kill him. While it isn’t unheard of for an alcoholic to fall off the wagon, samples of Poe’s hair were tested in 2006 and showed low levels of lead (back in the day, the toxic metal made its way into wines and other alcoholic beverages as a sweetener or through contact with leaded glassware). While Poe’s hair showed levels many times higher than what is normal today, the results suggest he wasn’t drinking heavily toward the end of his life.
A hoax of meager genius
Books can also exude a fog of mystery, and literary hoaxes are penned to take advantage of this fact. While such hoaxes alone don’t often reach the heights of a full-blown conspiracy theory — more on that below — they can nonetheless misguide readers into accepting them as evidence of deep-state deception.
Examples include The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, which claim to be lost books of the Hebrew Bible containing magical incantations, but which first appeared in anonymous pamphlets in the 1800s. A century later, the West German magazine Stern purchased what its editors believed were 60 volumes of Adolf Hitler’s personal diaries; they were actually forgeries created by the conman Konrad Kujau.
Yet one of the oddest literary hoaxes in recent memory has to be the Simon Necronomicon. Odd because it’s no secret that the Necronomicon is made-up. The author H.P. Lovecraft devised the book as a plot device in his famous Cthulhu Mythos. In these horror stories, this magic tome is said to contain the history of the Old Ones — powerful, often evil cosmic beings — as well as unspeakable, arcane knowledge.
Lovecraft wrote his stories with an eye toward verisimilitude, and those featuring the Necronomicon are no different. He composed a centuries-long history for the book, even including a list of the academic institutions said to house extant copies. He would also reference it alongside “real” grimoires and alchemical texts, such as The Book of Dzyan (circa 1900) and Turba Philosophorum (circa 900).
The cover of Simon Necronomicon. When you buy a mass market paperback with that cover, how can you not expect to summon eldritch beings to do your bidding? (Credit: William Morrow Paperbacks)
His efforts were convincing enough that some readers came to believe the book actually existed. Libraries known for their collections of ancient manuscripts, including the Vatican Library, have received information requests for it, and after Lovecraft’s death, books sporting the name began appearing in occult bookstores. Many of these are obvious and playful homages to Lovecraft’s work, but others claim to be the real deal. The Simon Necronomicon stands with the latter.
Originally published in 1977, this Necronomicon is attributed simply to a “Simon,” though the actual author is likely the occultist Peter Levenda. In the introduction, Simon claims to have been given a Greek translation of a real Necronomicon by a mysterious monk and later verified its curses, incantations, and spells to predate most known religions.
But according to Gabriel McKee, librarian for collections and services at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, the book is actually “a mishmash of recontextualized Sumerian and Babylonian texts peppered with added references to fictional deities created by Lovecraft and the orientalist magical system of Aleister Crowley.” The translations aren’t even original. Simon plagiarized them from academic sources, throwing in a handful of Cthulhus and Yog-Sothoths for good measure.
“The Simon Necronomicon reads its ancient sources through a combination of medieval demonology, 19th-century Theosophy, and 20th-century pulp fiction,” McKee writes.
The book didn’t gain much traction beyond occult enthusiasts and edgy teenager cliques, but it did attract some popular attention during the trial of Rod Ferrell. In 1996, Ferrell and a group of friends murdered the parents of Heather Wendorf and then stole the family’s Ford Explorer. When the police apprehended the teens, they found copies of the Simon Necronomicon and The Witches’ Bible in the car.
Testimony at the trial revealed that Ferrell believed he was a vampire and his friends had formed a small cultish group named the “Vampire Clan.” His elaborate fantasy world, likely a mental escape from his otherwise harsh life, was constructed from extensive reading of not only occult works but also ancient prophetic and apocalyptic literature.
“The general public knows just enough about the history of the ancient Near East for it to view it as a place of mystery and strangeness,” McKee writes. “We actually know quite a lot about ancient Near Eastern cultures and their religious practices […], but historical fabrications expect and depend on ignorance. The more we learn, and the better we communicate that knowledge, the more tools we will have for opposing misconstructed history.”
A hoax with an unrivaled toll
While hoaxes and literary conspiracies can be provocative, they seldom have consequences more far-reaching than filling online listicles or breaking awkward silences at parties. But much like inspiring a vampire cult, they can sometimes motivate violent action. The Turner Diaries — a novel depicting an apocalyptic race war that has gained a reputation as the “bible of the racist right” — inspired Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
Hoaxes and lay theories can also be actively weaponized to inspire violent action and conspiratorial worldviews. Hate propaganda can manipulate emotions, twist facts, and propagate outright lies, and as far as this use of writing goes, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has to take the cake. It’s a bloody, disgusting cake, but it takes it.
The Protocols is a fake document purporting to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders. During this fictitious meeting, members plan how they will take over the world and bring down Christianity. (Hot tip: Don’t take down the minutes of your global criminal conspiracies. The paper trail always comes back on you.)
While the origin of The Protocols is unknown, a Czarist official in Moscow named Sergei Nilus was one of the first to publish the hoax in 1905. He edited and released several versions afterward, each time adding a new account of how he happened upon it.
Title page of the 1905 edition of The Great within the Small by the Russian mystic Sergei Nilus. The book contains The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its appendix, one of the earliest publications of hate propaganda. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Since its initial dissemination, the document has been used to “prove” that a group of Jewish elites is conspiring for world domination. For instance, after the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Bolshevik Party’s rise to power, it was used to explain how “International Jewry” was to blame for communism, hence the term “Judeo-Bolshevism.” In fact, one reason there are so many variations of The Protocols is that they were adopted and adapted over the years by different antisemitic groups and narratives — each time being tweaked to fit that particular group’s grievances.
The Protocols spread like wildfire during the first half of the 20th century, circulating worldwide and inspiring other books and hateful rhetoric. The role it played in the rise of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s own writing is well-documented. Henry Ford’s antisemitic volumes, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (1920), were based on and included elements from it.
For more than 100 years, The Protocols has been used as a way to scapegoat, slander, and justify the murder of Jews, all despite being disproven as early as the 1920s. In his book The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs (1921), British diplomat and journalist Lucien Wolf debunked the hate propaganda, even noting how parts of The Protocols were plagiarized from a German novel in which the literal devil supports the Jews.
In the preface to his book, Wolf calls out his fellow Englishmen for spreading such disinformation:
“I confess to a feeling of shame at having to write this pamphlet at all. That reputable newspapers in this country should be seeking to transplant here the seeds of Prussian anti-Semitism, and that they should employ for this purpose devices so questionable and a literature so melodramatically silly, cannot but cause a sense of humiliation to any self-respecting Englishman.”
Like Delia Bacon’s unwillingness to accept the simple answer that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays, adherents of The Protocols allow their pre-existing biases to shape their worldview. Rather than letting the evidence influence their belief, the belief bends and distorts reality to a point where all evidence must fit within it or be discarded. Unlike Bacon’s story, however, The Protocols show that literary conspiracy theories aren’t guaranteed to remain on the fringe.
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