Zadie Smith Puts the Novel on Trial

The trial at the center of Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, has all the ingredients of a reckoning with Victorian Britain’s colonial wealth and the crimes upon which it rested. The year is 1869, and a butcher, Andrew Orton, purports to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to the Tichborne-Doughty fortune, who was long thought to be dead. The Tichborne Claimant is defended first by his mother, though she dies in the first few pages of The Fraud, and then by Andrew Bogle, former valet to another member of the Tichborne family and son of a former slave, who claims he recognizes the Claimant and in fact journeyed back with him to London on a ship.