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Hoax: Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment
'Scintillating ... a thrill ride through the filthy streets and dank rooms of Georgian England where the lies and deceptions that fooled a nation were born' Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five
Here lies Fanny Lynes, whose whispers from beyond the grave set London alight with scandal.
Here swings Mary Bateman, who lived a life of lies - and died a prophetess and murderer.
Here stands Mary Willcocks. Or is it Anne Burgess? Or Princess Caraboo, from the distant island of Javasu?
A ghost. A witch. A princess. This is a story of those who lie. And of those who choose to believe them.
The discoveries of the Enlightenment unsettled as much as they excited. New truths challenged longstanding beliefs. Rationalism jarred with superstition. Which voices would be heard in this ferocious battle for certainty?
From the chaos, three women and their hoaxes rose as symbols of terror and fascination. But were the lies surrounding Fanny Lynes, Mary Bateman and Mary Willcocks entirely of their own making? Why were the public transfixed?
Questioning culpability and complicity, Pelling's engrossing history of this great age of the hoax reveals a veiled world of moral panic, tall tales and true crime, and holds a mirror to our own turbulent relationship with truth.
Here lies Fanny Lynes, whose whispers from beyond the grave set London alight with scandal.
Here swings Mary Bateman, who lived a life of lies - and died a prophetess and murderer.
Here stands Mary Willcocks. Or is it Anne Burgess? Or Princess Caraboo, from the distant island of Javasu?
A ghost. A witch. A princess. This is a story of those who lie. And of those who choose to believe them.
The discoveries of the Enlightenment unsettled as much as they excited. New truths challenged longstanding beliefs. Rationalism jarred with superstition. Which voices would be heard in this ferocious battle for certainty?
From the chaos, three women and their hoaxes rose as symbols of terror and fascination. But were the lies surrounding Fanny Lynes, Mary Bateman and Mary Willcocks entirely of their own making? Why were the public transfixed?
Questioning culpability and complicity, Pelling's engrossing history of this great age of the hoax reveals a veiled world of moral panic, tall tales and true crime, and holds a mirror to our own turbulent relationship with truth.
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Published May 7, 2026
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July 5, 2026
”It is no coincidence that it was in the eighteenth century – an era of supposed science and rationality to which we owe so much of our modern world – that the term hoax first appeared. For it is often in our most confident moments, when the loudest voices clamour to proclaim truth, that doubt and uncertainty creep in so effectively. And there among the laboratories and libraries of the so-called Enlightenment, that golden age of knowledge production and order, lies and half-truths thrived.”
Hoax traces the lives and misdeeds of three women living in the age of the so-called Enlightenment, a time of science, rationality, empire and learning. The stories of these women poke holes in the glossy veneer of this time period and expose its darker realities and its profound contradictions. Through these often bizarre tales, Madeleine Pelling explores the malleability of truth, the effects of industrialisation on the working class, gender norms and dynamics, the darker side of colonial and imperial expansion and what drives people to believe – or doubt – what they see, hear and are told.
Hoax is one of the best books I have read this year, and definitely one of my new favorite pieces of historical nonfiction. I enjoyed Pelling’s first book, but this one I loved. She is a truly talented author and she mesmerised me with her ability to describe the past, its people, its sounds and its complexities. In this book, her skills as a storyteller get to really shine – she recounts the lives of these women as if she is telling you a story (don’t mistake this to mean the book isn’t meticulously research and based on historical fact!), which made me always eager to turn the page and figure out what happens next. And boy did a lot happen. This book and its central women are wonderful testaments to just how bizarre and weird people have always been, and how history is often stranger than fiction. Another facet of the book and Pelling’s style of writing is that she doesn’t tell you who to bllame or who is innocent or who is the worst hoaxter of them all: she allows her readers to make up their own minds, to think for themselves, which, I think, shows a real respect for her audience and their ability to break down these stories on their own.
I found the central tenet of this book fascinating, and I really appreciated the way Pelling went about deconstructing this idea of ”enlightenment” and exposing it to be, on some level, just an ideal. With her focus on hoaxes, she reveals this to have been a time period during which superstition and belief in the supernatural still ran rampant, and a time period which saw people debating who gets to define truth in the first place. She also emphasises how hoaxes are intrinsically tied to the society and culture and time in which they are perpetrated, and how by looking at these hoaxes, the people behind them (who are hardly ever solitary ”other” people like to paint them as, but people just like anyone else), the people who believed in them and those who fought against them, we can learn so much about the culture that birthed them: "In their exploration, we find the hoax to be not a glitch in the system, but its clearest reflection – a crack through which we glimpse deeper tensions and inequalities." Pelling also points out that, unlike we might think, it wasn’t the rich and the powerful who were always the rational skeptics while the unlearned poor fell victim to conwomen and conmen – race, class, gender and wealth weren’t clear dividers between believers and nonbelievers, which is exactly why these hoaxes posed such a threat. As Pelling argues convincingly, these hoaxes frightened and delighted people because they revealed the human frailty and error of those in power, those deemed as the pillars of this enlightened era, and implicated everyone from lowly beggar to members of the royal family. They threatened the status quo on so many levels, and, obviously, became subjects of scandalous gossip, plays, songs and huge mediastorms (all of them became, in life or in death, tourist attractions and women people wanted to ogle at and be near, even if they despised them).
Pelling’s book feels acutely timely despite it focusing on women of the long 18th century. As she puts it: ”And yet, in our own moment of fake news and artificial intelligence, anxious fact checking and unstable politics, truth has taken on many of the same slippery, uncertain qualities our eighteenth-century predecessors would recognize. Nor are we rid of the issues that many of these cases rested on: female bodily autonomy, domestic violence, war, the marginalisation of minorities, the denial of love and sex beyond establishment-approved parameters, the limits and dangers of scientific experiment and the ongoing effects of empire.” These stories feel, at times, strangely familiar and contemporary. Mary Bateman peddles fake cures for desperate people, which reminded me of scammers who sell all sorts of pills and powders that are supposed to help with terminal illnesses. The way Fanny Lynes’s sexual past was dissected, demonised and ballooned in the press after her ghost first appeared reminded me of the way modern media revels in judging the sexual and romantic lives of famous women. The way the British respond to Princess Caraboo reminds me of how so many, still, exoticise and romanticise Asian cultures and prefer to see them through their own racist, sexualised lense. Pelling does a great job showing how we are not so different from the people of the past – the hoaxes we face, fall for and condemn have just changed shape.
THE COCK LANE GHOST
The story of the Cock Lane ghost was the most familiar out of the three central hoaxes for me. It was cool seeing how the infamy of this story can still be seen in today’s modern ghost stories, and it was wonderful learning the actual truth behind the con that the Parson family whips up to make money in a time of financial difficulty. Pelling uses the story of Fanny Lynes – whose ghost is said to have haunted Cock Lane and young Betty Parson because she was – to explore gender expectations and the precarious lives of women in the 18th century. As she poignantly points out: ”Fanny's story of deceit and exploitation by men, many were forced to acknowledge, was one of hundreds. Few women, though, were granted a voice from beyond the grave." Like all the women in these stories, Fanny came from a really normal background, but ended up part of something decidedly abnormal after leaving her home to start an illicit life with her forbidden lover.
The haunting itself was fascinating to unpack and unravel. It’s hard to imagine just how many people flocked to Cock Lane (even a member of the royal family visited it) and how the crisis got so big that the mayor of London himself had to appoint a taskforce to parse out whether the ghost was real or not. The most fascinating person of this story for me, aside from Fanny herself, was Betty, the teenaged girl around whom the haunting narrative was built. As she left behind no testimony, we cannot know what she felt, wanted or how much she consented to any of this, which made her all the more intriguing. It was harrowing to read about the way she was exploited by her parents and how she was subjected to, by strangers, to really invasive ”tests” of authenticity. People flocked to watch her sleep, she was forced to share beds with strangers and so much more. The image of a 13-year-old exhausted, frightened girl suspended in air with her tied arms and legs akimbo so a rich man can decide whether she is a liar or not is truly haunting. What’s also really fascinating about her is that after she is
MARY BATEMAN
Mary Bateman was someone I had never heard of before picking up this book. Her story is, I’d say, the bleakest and darkest of all the three hoaxes in the book. I was captivated by her story from the beginning. It was fascinating trying to get a grip on Mary who was rumored to have been a thief and a trickster from a very young age (her first known crime was stealing a pair of red shoes), who was pushed into domestic service by her family at the age of 12, who constantly switched workplaces because of troubling behaviour and ended up running deadly scams on people and prophecising the end of the world via an egg on which the words ”Crist is coming” reportedly appeared. Reading about the way she becomes this local celebrity, someone many people, mostly women, turn to for magical aid, for medicine, for help in childbirth (or abortions), was fascinating, as was Pelling’s analysis of why women (who were dubbed by the media to be naive and silly for ever trusting this ”witch”) most of all sought her help. As Pelling points out, women found, in her, an answer to common difficulties they had and couldn’t do anything about because of their limited role and oppressed status in society: Mary helped them, supposedly, to stop their husbands from beating them or leaving them, and she helped them control their fertility. Mary was, for them, a way to assert control over their own life and as easy it is to judge them, we should see their faith in Mary Bateman’s magic as a sign of not their stupidity but the cruelty and injustice of their situation in life as women.
The story of Mary’s downfall was like something out of a novel. I mean, her being approached by a man with a dying wife, and her manipulating them to give her not just money but their valuables, clothes, furniture and food in exchange for her ”help” was just so insiduous, made even worse by how she in the end Mary’s execution and the horrid treatment of her body afterwards – anatomisation, flaying and the use of her skin to bind books – was a gruesome reminder of what justice looked like in this era, and how people who challenged laws and norms of the time were dehumanised and literally torn apart.
Pelling uses Mary’s story – the utterly un-unique tale of a young person leaving behind rural life to make a life for themselves in a rapidly industrialising city – to explore the state of industry, the horrors of early factories (shit pay, no breaks, constant injuries, no protections, child labour, long hours and so on) and how the beginning of the industrial revolution was a money-making gift for some and an oppressive, life-threatening force for others. Mary’s story is intrinsically tied to this tumultuous shift in culture.
PRINCESS CARABOO
The story of the so-called Princess Caraboo of Javasu was utterly bizarre and, as such, utterly captivating. The woman behind the character of Caraboo was, in so many ways, like countless other poor women of the time – she was – but, at the same time, something utterly unique, someone who became more myth than actual woman. Many twists in this story were so wild to the point of feeling almost made-up. I mean, how on earth does a girl from The story of Caraboo is fascinating because we don’t know exactly why the woman behind it all went along with it as long as she did, or why she
Pelling illustrates wonderfully how the Caraboo hoax challenged the imperial and colonial ideals of Britain. Learned and powerful people, including the famous scientist Charles Wilkinson, were utterly fooled by her, which revealed a lack of true understanding of their own empire by those benefitting most from it. Wilkinson went as far as to declare in the press that he had discovered a new island and language – how embarrasing was that?! And what a testament to how even the cleverest of rational scientists could be duped. Caraboo also transgressed racial divides, and forced people to reckon with how malleable those lines were, how the clear categorisation of races (alongside many other things) advocated by enlightenment thinkers could be manipulated. The image of Caraboo in her turban and her strange customs also shows wonderfully what the European image of Asian culture was. Caraboo danced in little clothing, allowed people to watch her swim naked, pretended to not understand what a bed was for and did everything ”weirdly” – she played into every stereotype of the time, which is why so many fell for her lies. She behaved as people expected a woman from ”Javasu” to behave. Pelling uses her story to illustrate the racist misconceptions and assumptions of the much-exoticised East.
I would recommend this book happily, with my whole heart, to anyone interested in the history of hoaxes and scams, of the flexibility of truth, of the enlightenment era (especially those interested in dismantling the idea of this time period as something inherently noble, rational and science-driven) and of normal women who end up becoming cautionary tales, horor stories, tragedies and near-mythical. I will read whatever Pelling publishes next.
Interesting facts I learned:
- The 1735 Witchcraft Act made it illegal to accuse anyone of magic and witchcraft.
- Around 5000 people gathered to watch Mary Bateman’s execution and countless accompanied it back to Leeds where her body was anatomised for three days publicly (so many came to watch that the hospital raised 80 pounds).
- In the Victorian era, the sites of all the hoaxes in this book attracted visitors.
- Journalist Guth, pretending to be the governor of St. Helena, where Napoleon was kept, wrote a letter saying that Princess Caraboo’s ship never made it to America but was, in fact, shipwrecked at St. Helena where she became Napoleon’s mistress.
- Mary Bateman’s skeleton was on show from 1997 to 2015.
- A statue of Mary Willcocks, in her Caraboo attire, appeared suddenly by her grave in 2022. The sculpture was made by an artist known as Getting Up To Stuff.
- The Cock Lane ghost story helped cement many still common tropes of haunted house stories into literature, art and culture: strange knocking, a haunted child, scratching sounds, the spirit of a murdered person haunting the site of their demise.
- Fanny’s relationship with her former brother-in-law (which was, in ecclesiastical law, considered incest) was dissected in the media, and her story became so associated with her immoral sexuality that one journalist depicted her fhost as a folded cloth which resembled a vulva.
- Bateman grew up in a little village marked by stories of the supernatural – there was a local story of a 137-year-old man who had once been married to Oliver Cromwell’s illegitimate daughter, and of a maid who was killed when lightning travelled through the chimney of the house she worked at and struck her. During the yearly fair, plenty of fortune-tellers also flocked to the village.
- Bateman’s husband walked free and it is still unknown how much he did or didn’t know about his wife’s dealings. I am sure he must’ve had at least an inkling.
- In America ”carabooing” became a synonym for tricking people and pretending to be someone you were not. Though Mary Willcocks faded into obscurity, the persona of Princess Caraboo lived on.
- In the early 1800s, after the loss of the American colonies and the abolishment of slave trade, the British Empire had to recreate itself: they set their sights, more firmly than ever before, on the east, which made Asian cultures, art and so on a subject of fascination.
-When the story of Mary Willcocks tricking the Brits reached US press, the Americans had a field day making fun of the gullible British (who were, at this point, their rivals and enemies).
Hoax traces the lives and misdeeds of three women living in the age of the so-called Enlightenment, a time of science, rationality, empire and learning. The stories of these women poke holes in the glossy veneer of this time period and expose its darker realities and its profound contradictions. Through these often bizarre tales, Madeleine Pelling explores the malleability of truth, the effects of industrialisation on the working class, gender norms and dynamics, the darker side of colonial and imperial expansion and what drives people to believe – or doubt – what they see, hear and are told.
Hoax is one of the best books I have read this year, and definitely one of my new favorite pieces of historical nonfiction. I enjoyed Pelling’s first book, but this one I loved. She is a truly talented author and she mesmerised me with her ability to describe the past, its people, its sounds and its complexities. In this book, her skills as a storyteller get to really shine – she recounts the lives of these women as if she is telling you a story (don’t mistake this to mean the book isn’t meticulously research and based on historical fact!), which made me always eager to turn the page and figure out what happens next. And boy did a lot happen. This book and its central women are wonderful testaments to just how bizarre and weird people have always been, and how history is often stranger than fiction. Another facet of the book and Pelling’s style of writing is that she doesn’t tell you who to bllame or who is innocent or who is the worst hoaxter of them all: she allows her readers to make up their own minds, to think for themselves, which, I think, shows a real respect for her audience and their ability to break down these stories on their own.
I found the central tenet of this book fascinating, and I really appreciated the way Pelling went about deconstructing this idea of ”enlightenment” and exposing it to be, on some level, just an ideal. With her focus on hoaxes, she reveals this to have been a time period during which superstition and belief in the supernatural still ran rampant, and a time period which saw people debating who gets to define truth in the first place. She also emphasises how hoaxes are intrinsically tied to the society and culture and time in which they are perpetrated, and how by looking at these hoaxes, the people behind them (who are hardly ever solitary ”other” people like to paint them as, but people just like anyone else), the people who believed in them and those who fought against them, we can learn so much about the culture that birthed them: "In their exploration, we find the hoax to be not a glitch in the system, but its clearest reflection – a crack through which we glimpse deeper tensions and inequalities." Pelling also points out that, unlike we might think, it wasn’t the rich and the powerful who were always the rational skeptics while the unlearned poor fell victim to conwomen and conmen – race, class, gender and wealth weren’t clear dividers between believers and nonbelievers, which is exactly why these hoaxes posed such a threat. As Pelling argues convincingly, these hoaxes frightened and delighted people because they revealed the human frailty and error of those in power, those deemed as the pillars of this enlightened era, and implicated everyone from lowly beggar to members of the royal family. They threatened the status quo on so many levels, and, obviously, became subjects of scandalous gossip, plays, songs and huge mediastorms (all of them became, in life or in death, tourist attractions and women people wanted to ogle at and be near, even if they despised them).
Pelling’s book feels acutely timely despite it focusing on women of the long 18th century. As she puts it: ”And yet, in our own moment of fake news and artificial intelligence, anxious fact checking and unstable politics, truth has taken on many of the same slippery, uncertain qualities our eighteenth-century predecessors would recognize. Nor are we rid of the issues that many of these cases rested on: female bodily autonomy, domestic violence, war, the marginalisation of minorities, the denial of love and sex beyond establishment-approved parameters, the limits and dangers of scientific experiment and the ongoing effects of empire.” These stories feel, at times, strangely familiar and contemporary. Mary Bateman peddles fake cures for desperate people, which reminded me of scammers who sell all sorts of pills and powders that are supposed to help with terminal illnesses. The way Fanny Lynes’s sexual past was dissected, demonised and ballooned in the press after her ghost first appeared reminded me of the way modern media revels in judging the sexual and romantic lives of famous women. The way the British respond to Princess Caraboo reminds me of how so many, still, exoticise and romanticise Asian cultures and prefer to see them through their own racist, sexualised lense. Pelling does a great job showing how we are not so different from the people of the past – the hoaxes we face, fall for and condemn have just changed shape.
THE COCK LANE GHOST
The story of the Cock Lane ghost was the most familiar out of the three central hoaxes for me. It was cool seeing how the infamy of this story can still be seen in today’s modern ghost stories, and it was wonderful learning the actual truth behind the con that the Parson family whips up to make money in a time of financial difficulty. Pelling uses the story of Fanny Lynes – whose ghost is said to have haunted Cock Lane and young Betty Parson because she was – to explore gender expectations and the precarious lives of women in the 18th century. As she poignantly points out: ”Fanny's story of deceit and exploitation by men, many were forced to acknowledge, was one of hundreds. Few women, though, were granted a voice from beyond the grave." Like all the women in these stories, Fanny came from a really normal background, but ended up part of something decidedly abnormal after leaving her home to start an illicit life with her forbidden lover.
The haunting itself was fascinating to unpack and unravel. It’s hard to imagine just how many people flocked to Cock Lane (even a member of the royal family visited it) and how the crisis got so big that the mayor of London himself had to appoint a taskforce to parse out whether the ghost was real or not. The most fascinating person of this story for me, aside from Fanny herself, was Betty, the teenaged girl around whom the haunting narrative was built. As she left behind no testimony, we cannot know what she felt, wanted or how much she consented to any of this, which made her all the more intriguing. It was harrowing to read about the way she was exploited by her parents and how she was subjected to, by strangers, to really invasive ”tests” of authenticity. People flocked to watch her sleep, she was forced to share beds with strangers and so much more. The image of a 13-year-old exhausted, frightened girl suspended in air with her tied arms and legs akimbo so a rich man can decide whether she is a liar or not is truly haunting. What’s also really fascinating about her is that after she is
MARY BATEMAN
Mary Bateman was someone I had never heard of before picking up this book. Her story is, I’d say, the bleakest and darkest of all the three hoaxes in the book. I was captivated by her story from the beginning. It was fascinating trying to get a grip on Mary who was rumored to have been a thief and a trickster from a very young age (her first known crime was stealing a pair of red shoes), who was pushed into domestic service by her family at the age of 12, who constantly switched workplaces because of troubling behaviour and ended up running deadly scams on people and prophecising the end of the world via an egg on which the words ”Crist is coming” reportedly appeared. Reading about the way she becomes this local celebrity, someone many people, mostly women, turn to for magical aid, for medicine, for help in childbirth (or abortions), was fascinating, as was Pelling’s analysis of why women (who were dubbed by the media to be naive and silly for ever trusting this ”witch”) most of all sought her help. As Pelling points out, women found, in her, an answer to common difficulties they had and couldn’t do anything about because of their limited role and oppressed status in society: Mary helped them, supposedly, to stop their husbands from beating them or leaving them, and she helped them control their fertility. Mary was, for them, a way to assert control over their own life and as easy it is to judge them, we should see their faith in Mary Bateman’s magic as a sign of not their stupidity but the cruelty and injustice of their situation in life as women.
The story of Mary’s downfall was like something out of a novel. I mean, her being approached by a man with a dying wife, and her manipulating them to give her not just money but their valuables, clothes, furniture and food in exchange for her ”help” was just so insiduous, made even worse by how she in the end Mary’s execution and the horrid treatment of her body afterwards – anatomisation, flaying and the use of her skin to bind books – was a gruesome reminder of what justice looked like in this era, and how people who challenged laws and norms of the time were dehumanised and literally torn apart.
Pelling uses Mary’s story – the utterly un-unique tale of a young person leaving behind rural life to make a life for themselves in a rapidly industrialising city – to explore the state of industry, the horrors of early factories (shit pay, no breaks, constant injuries, no protections, child labour, long hours and so on) and how the beginning of the industrial revolution was a money-making gift for some and an oppressive, life-threatening force for others. Mary’s story is intrinsically tied to this tumultuous shift in culture.
PRINCESS CARABOO
The story of the so-called Princess Caraboo of Javasu was utterly bizarre and, as such, utterly captivating. The woman behind the character of Caraboo was, in so many ways, like countless other poor women of the time – she was – but, at the same time, something utterly unique, someone who became more myth than actual woman. Many twists in this story were so wild to the point of feeling almost made-up. I mean, how on earth does a girl from The story of Caraboo is fascinating because we don’t know exactly why the woman behind it all went along with it as long as she did, or why she
Pelling illustrates wonderfully how the Caraboo hoax challenged the imperial and colonial ideals of Britain. Learned and powerful people, including the famous scientist Charles Wilkinson, were utterly fooled by her, which revealed a lack of true understanding of their own empire by those benefitting most from it. Wilkinson went as far as to declare in the press that he had discovered a new island and language – how embarrasing was that?! And what a testament to how even the cleverest of rational scientists could be duped. Caraboo also transgressed racial divides, and forced people to reckon with how malleable those lines were, how the clear categorisation of races (alongside many other things) advocated by enlightenment thinkers could be manipulated. The image of Caraboo in her turban and her strange customs also shows wonderfully what the European image of Asian culture was. Caraboo danced in little clothing, allowed people to watch her swim naked, pretended to not understand what a bed was for and did everything ”weirdly” – she played into every stereotype of the time, which is why so many fell for her lies. She behaved as people expected a woman from ”Javasu” to behave. Pelling uses her story to illustrate the racist misconceptions and assumptions of the much-exoticised East.
I would recommend this book happily, with my whole heart, to anyone interested in the history of hoaxes and scams, of the flexibility of truth, of the enlightenment era (especially those interested in dismantling the idea of this time period as something inherently noble, rational and science-driven) and of normal women who end up becoming cautionary tales, horor stories, tragedies and near-mythical. I will read whatever Pelling publishes next.
Interesting facts I learned:
- The 1735 Witchcraft Act made it illegal to accuse anyone of magic and witchcraft.
- Around 5000 people gathered to watch Mary Bateman’s execution and countless accompanied it back to Leeds where her body was anatomised for three days publicly (so many came to watch that the hospital raised 80 pounds).
- In the Victorian era, the sites of all the hoaxes in this book attracted visitors.
- Journalist Guth, pretending to be the governor of St. Helena, where Napoleon was kept, wrote a letter saying that Princess Caraboo’s ship never made it to America but was, in fact, shipwrecked at St. Helena where she became Napoleon’s mistress.
- Mary Bateman’s skeleton was on show from 1997 to 2015.
- A statue of Mary Willcocks, in her Caraboo attire, appeared suddenly by her grave in 2022. The sculpture was made by an artist known as Getting Up To Stuff.
- The Cock Lane ghost story helped cement many still common tropes of haunted house stories into literature, art and culture: strange knocking, a haunted child, scratching sounds, the spirit of a murdered person haunting the site of their demise.
- Fanny’s relationship with her former brother-in-law (which was, in ecclesiastical law, considered incest) was dissected in the media, and her story became so associated with her immoral sexuality that one journalist depicted her fhost as a folded cloth which resembled a vulva.
- Bateman grew up in a little village marked by stories of the supernatural – there was a local story of a 137-year-old man who had once been married to Oliver Cromwell’s illegitimate daughter, and of a maid who was killed when lightning travelled through the chimney of the house she worked at and struck her. During the yearly fair, plenty of fortune-tellers also flocked to the village.
- Bateman’s husband walked free and it is still unknown how much he did or didn’t know about his wife’s dealings. I am sure he must’ve had at least an inkling.
- In America ”carabooing” became a synonym for tricking people and pretending to be someone you were not. Though Mary Willcocks faded into obscurity, the persona of Princess Caraboo lived on.
- In the early 1800s, after the loss of the American colonies and the abolishment of slave trade, the British Empire had to recreate itself: they set their sights, more firmly than ever before, on the east, which made Asian cultures, art and so on a subject of fascination.
-When the story of Mary Willcocks tricking the Brits reached US press, the Americans had a field day making fun of the gullible British (who were, at this point, their rivals and enemies).
May 9, 2026
This book completely captivated me from start to finish. It was unlike anything I have read before, and it opened up a world I knew almost nothing about in the best way possible.
What makes this book so compelling is the way Pelling explores the lives of three very different women connected through deception, performance, and reinvention. Rather than simply recounting famous hoaxes, she digs into why these women created them and what those fabrications revealed about the societies they lived in.
Pelling writes with such intelligence and empathy that each woman feels vivid and deeply human, even when their actions are questionable. I found myself constantly torn between disbelief, admiration, sympathy, and curiosity. The research is incredibly rich, but it reads almost like a novel at times, so it never feels dry.
If you enjoy unusual hidden histories, complex women, and stories that challenge assumptions, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
Thank you so much Profile Books for sending this to me!
What makes this book so compelling is the way Pelling explores the lives of three very different women connected through deception, performance, and reinvention. Rather than simply recounting famous hoaxes, she digs into why these women created them and what those fabrications revealed about the societies they lived in.
Pelling writes with such intelligence and empathy that each woman feels vivid and deeply human, even when their actions are questionable. I found myself constantly torn between disbelief, admiration, sympathy, and curiosity. The research is incredibly rich, but it reads almost like a novel at times, so it never feels dry.
If you enjoy unusual hidden histories, complex women, and stories that challenge assumptions, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
Thank you so much Profile Books for sending this to me!
June 19, 2026
A highly entertaining and enlightening (no pun intended) into the world of Georgian England and the lies which shaped the world around them.
The narrator is also the author, and she has a wonderful soothing voice that captures your attention and helps keep you focused throughout the long and sometimes confusing backstories to these wonderous events - crimes? The book explores both possibilities, trying to work out where the lie caused harm and if anything could actually be done. Some of the actions within these pages are clearly hurtful, but are they all illegal?
This book is about the nature of truth and how it can be changed and warped by not only the actions of people but the way in which those actions are viewed. This is a world shaped by news and like a series of mirrors, the events reflect and distort, shaped by themselves.
The three stories within this book are all very different. You have a ghost story, a witch and a lost princess. They are all in differing ways, hoaxes and they are all utterly enthralling to learn about.
If I had to nit pick, there is perhaps a little too much emphasis on the author imagining what the people *might* have said and thought. It's a fine act to balance, so much is lost, even from this relatively recent period of history, so much that was never recorded, but there was such an focus on humanising these people and giving them voices that we do not know they had. It bordered into historical fiction at some points, in the way in which their internal lives were discussed.
There was also no clear explanation as to why these three hoaxes were picked over all others. Don't get me wrong, they were utterly fascinating (I'd only heard of one of them, the Yorkshire Witch) but there were so many fascinating and headline inducing cases across the age, its not clear, beyond the general theme of lies and the unremarked theme of them all being women, why they were the subjects.
All in all however, this is a book anyone with an interest in the past, in the lies we tell each other and the way in which society thinks and reacts to events. Highly recommended.
~Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in return for an honest review~
The narrator is also the author, and she has a wonderful soothing voice that captures your attention and helps keep you focused throughout the long and sometimes confusing backstories to these wonderous events - crimes? The book explores both possibilities, trying to work out where the lie caused harm and if anything could actually be done. Some of the actions within these pages are clearly hurtful, but are they all illegal?
This book is about the nature of truth and how it can be changed and warped by not only the actions of people but the way in which those actions are viewed. This is a world shaped by news and like a series of mirrors, the events reflect and distort, shaped by themselves.
The three stories within this book are all very different. You have a ghost story, a witch and a lost princess. They are all in differing ways, hoaxes and they are all utterly enthralling to learn about.
If I had to nit pick, there is perhaps a little too much emphasis on the author imagining what the people *might* have said and thought. It's a fine act to balance, so much is lost, even from this relatively recent period of history, so much that was never recorded, but there was such an focus on humanising these people and giving them voices that we do not know they had. It bordered into historical fiction at some points, in the way in which their internal lives were discussed.
There was also no clear explanation as to why these three hoaxes were picked over all others. Don't get me wrong, they were utterly fascinating (I'd only heard of one of them, the Yorkshire Witch) but there were so many fascinating and headline inducing cases across the age, its not clear, beyond the general theme of lies and the unremarked theme of them all being women, why they were the subjects.
All in all however, this is a book anyone with an interest in the past, in the lies we tell each other and the way in which society thinks and reacts to events. Highly recommended.
~Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in return for an honest review~
September 5, 2026
Hoax was such a fascinating read because it takes stories that could easily feel like strange little pieces of the past and makes them feel surprisingly close to the world we live in now. I loved how the book kept making me question who was actually lying and who was simply telling the story that people wanted to believe. The cases of Mary Toft Elizabeth Canning and Princess Caraboo were especially memorable because behind the deception there were real people dealing with power money gender class and the desperate need to be heard. What I enjoyed most was that the author never made the hoaxers feel like simple villains. Their stories are messy and sometimes sad and that made me far more interested in understanding why they did what they did. The opening with the Bottle Conjurer immediately pulled me in and the atmosphere of eighteenth century London made these events feel almost like scenes unfolding right in front of me. I also loved how the book slowly connects those old stories with our own world of fake news misinformation politics and artificial intelligence. By the end I found myself thinking much more carefully about how easily people can believe something when the story is good enough and how quickly a lie can become something bigger than the person who started it. This is history that feels alive curious and full of surprises and I honestly found myself wanting to know what strange story would appear next. It left me entertained but also a little more suspicious of certainty itself which I think is exactly what a book called Hoax should do.
August 29, 2026
Wow, can Madeleine Pelling write a beautiful sentence! Moreover, she can slowly build the tension in her narrative to tell stories with detail and pathos. To me, her writing and storytelling are gorgeous things to behold. And I listened to the audiobook version, so Pelling gets extra points for having a beautiful voice and great pacing/cadence as she reads her book.
All these praises for her technical skills aside, Hoax is also a interesting deep dive into a trio of cases in the 18th century of individuals who tricked larger society. Pelling insightfully calls these and other hoaxers both "disrupters" and mirrors of the larger society, and her storytelling is accompanied by thoughtful analysis of how these cases provide a way to interrogate society's participation and complicity. In an age of fake news, it's interesting to consider how hoaxes have existed in one form or another for centuries, and how they have served the interests of specific people at each point in time.
Full disclosure: when I listened to this audiobook, I was already a very enthusiastic fan of After Dark, the History Hit podcast written and hosted by Pelling and her co-host Anthony Delaney. I encourage you to check out the pod, where you can hear more of Pelling's excellent storytelling.
All these praises for her technical skills aside, Hoax is also a interesting deep dive into a trio of cases in the 18th century of individuals who tricked larger society. Pelling insightfully calls these and other hoaxers both "disrupters" and mirrors of the larger society, and her storytelling is accompanied by thoughtful analysis of how these cases provide a way to interrogate society's participation and complicity. In an age of fake news, it's interesting to consider how hoaxes have existed in one form or another for centuries, and how they have served the interests of specific people at each point in time.
Full disclosure: when I listened to this audiobook, I was already a very enthusiastic fan of After Dark, the History Hit podcast written and hosted by Pelling and her co-host Anthony Delaney. I encourage you to check out the pod, where you can hear more of Pelling's excellent storytelling.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
On the surface Hoax is three, separate stories of three infamous stories that transfixed and hoodwinked Georgian society. But what this book is really about is a society on the brink of change; people wanting to hold on to old rural superstitions while the age of enlightenment started to place focus on facts.
Pelling is a natural storyteller and does a brilliant job of weaving together well researched information and making it sound as engaging as a work of fiction.
Occasionally there felt like there is a little too much detail, but the author always seems to pull all these threads back together to help add context to the era and place each woman was living.
My only negative point is, for a non-fiction, it felt like there was sometimes too much emphasis on *what* a person might have felt but it does help make the story fascinating to read.
Thank you to Netgalley and Profile Books Audio for providing me with an advanced review copy for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily and all opinions are my own.
Pelling is a natural storyteller and does a brilliant job of weaving together well researched information and making it sound as engaging as a work of fiction.
Occasionally there felt like there is a little too much detail, but the author always seems to pull all these threads back together to help add context to the era and place each woman was living.
My only negative point is, for a non-fiction, it felt like there was sometimes too much emphasis on *what* a person might have felt but it does help make the story fascinating to read.
Thank you to Netgalley and Profile Books Audio for providing me with an advanced review copy for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily and all opinions are my own.
August 11, 2026
an absolute triumph of a book! ‘hoax’ delves deep into the obscure nature of truth within the 17th century period of the so-called Enlightenment, looking specifically at the hands that work to upkeep such complex pretences of both magic and reality.
i loved how this followed three quite individual and hidden stories, all of which have women’s lives at their centre, who have in some way tricked or deceived the societies that surround them. madeline pelling takes into account the varying reasons why one might feel unable to commit themselves to reason and strict social expectations, and the reclamation of power that enacting performances of untruth might allow these people. she also starkly demonstrates that the world of the ‘hoax’ is actually the crux of our social fabric, and gives us the ability to believe in that which is odd or bizarre, but also sets a trap for us to fall into credulity.
the prose itself is incredibly engaging, and immerses you so fully in these bewitching histories. and i also love all of the theatrical references and imagery within this!
i loved how this followed three quite individual and hidden stories, all of which have women’s lives at their centre, who have in some way tricked or deceived the societies that surround them. madeline pelling takes into account the varying reasons why one might feel unable to commit themselves to reason and strict social expectations, and the reclamation of power that enacting performances of untruth might allow these people. she also starkly demonstrates that the world of the ‘hoax’ is actually the crux of our social fabric, and gives us the ability to believe in that which is odd or bizarre, but also sets a trap for us to fall into credulity.
the prose itself is incredibly engaging, and immerses you so fully in these bewitching histories. and i also love all of the theatrical references and imagery within this!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This book is incredibly well researched, and Pelling deserves real credit for the depth she goes into when exploring the individuals at the centre of these stories.
I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by the author, and she does a great job bringing it to life.
At times it did feel a little slow. Some sections go into such fine detail that it became a bit of a struggle to get through, but overall the concept of exploring hoaxes is fascinating, and the book delivers on what it sets out to do.
I hadn’t come across any of the individuals Pelling investigates before, so it was really interesting to learn not just about the hoaxes themselves, but also the circumstances leading up to them and what happened afterwards.
Thanks to the author, publishers and NetGalley for the ALC. This review is my own.
I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by the author, and she does a great job bringing it to life.
At times it did feel a little slow. Some sections go into such fine detail that it became a bit of a struggle to get through, but overall the concept of exploring hoaxes is fascinating, and the book delivers on what it sets out to do.
I hadn’t come across any of the individuals Pelling investigates before, so it was really interesting to learn not just about the hoaxes themselves, but also the circumstances leading up to them and what happened afterwards.
Thanks to the author, publishers and NetGalley for the ALC. This review is my own.
August 25, 2026
Hands down one of my favourite reads of the year. What an absolute triumph of a novel.
Pelling is so very good at selecting her case studies. Each figure is informed by the world around them - London, Yorkshire, Bath, Bristol and finally America. Pelling navigates the shifting identities of each hoax expertly whilst keeping them rooted in their social and political contexts.
As opposed to other reviews, I really enjoyed the 'what ifs?' Pelling uses to make her cast of characters more readable and human. She rarely makes an assertion without reminding the reader that this is her storyteller's voice embellishing rather than her historian's voice analysing.
The rapid references to other events around the hoaxes were relevant, interesting and offered a wealth of rabbit holes to go down.
Seriously very very happy with this book!!
Pelling is so very good at selecting her case studies. Each figure is informed by the world around them - London, Yorkshire, Bath, Bristol and finally America. Pelling navigates the shifting identities of each hoax expertly whilst keeping them rooted in their social and political contexts.
As opposed to other reviews, I really enjoyed the 'what ifs?' Pelling uses to make her cast of characters more readable and human. She rarely makes an assertion without reminding the reader that this is her storyteller's voice embellishing rather than her historian's voice analysing.
The rapid references to other events around the hoaxes were relevant, interesting and offered a wealth of rabbit holes to go down.
Seriously very very happy with this book!!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Maddie Pelling is one of my favourite podcasters and I really enjoyed her previous book 'The Writing on the Wall' so I was excited to listen to Hoax. The author has a good voice for narration, she speaks steadily and the narrative flows well. The book is about three famous 18th century hoaxers and it puts each person in the context of their time and place, follows their lives and the effects their actions have on society and the people around them.
I hadn't heard of any of these individuals and found their stories fascinating. The particular circumstances of each shows certain aspects of their society and times in a century of advancing change, and the influence the media of the day had on the spread of the hoaxes. I found this an enjoyable and informative listen.
I hadn't heard of any of these individuals and found their stories fascinating. The particular circumstances of each shows certain aspects of their society and times in a century of advancing change, and the influence the media of the day had on the spread of the hoaxes. I found this an enjoyable and informative listen.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
A non fiction with three stories based in the 1800s, this features the ghost of Cock Lane, The witch and The Princess. All of which were early hoaxes, it explained how the hoaxes came about, what happened to the innocent people caught in the middle, the not so innocent people who concocted these stories and everyone else in-between. It covered the hoaxes themselves as well as the circumstances leading up to them and what happened after.
What I particularly loved about this book was the way these stories were told, this is non fiction but it's told in a way that is more like a thriller, some non fiction can be so dry however this is anything but. I liked the writing style and the format with an easy layout and some illustrations to depict some of the explanations.
What I particularly loved about this book was the way these stories were told, this is non fiction but it's told in a way that is more like a thriller, some non fiction can be so dry however this is anything but. I liked the writing style and the format with an easy layout and some illustrations to depict some of the explanations.
June 6, 2026
Hoax tells the stories of three remarkable scams from the 18th and 19th centuries, examining not only the frauds themselves but the opportunists who created them, the believers who amplified them, and the unfortunate people whose lives were upended along the way.
What sets this book apart is its pacing. Rather than reading like an academic history text, it unfolds like a mystery novel, with each revelation pulling you deeper into the story. Pelling does an excellent job of placing these hoaxes within their broader cultural moment, showing how fear, ambition, and public fascination helped turn fiction into accepted truth.
A fascinating look at the long history of misinformation that proves people haven't changed nearly as much as we'd like to think.
What sets this book apart is its pacing. Rather than reading like an academic history text, it unfolds like a mystery novel, with each revelation pulling you deeper into the story. Pelling does an excellent job of placing these hoaxes within their broader cultural moment, showing how fear, ambition, and public fascination helped turn fiction into accepted truth.
A fascinating look at the long history of misinformation that proves people haven't changed nearly as much as we'd like to think.
June 20, 2026
Hoax is the stories of three women during the Georgian period and their individual hoaxes. Pelling explores how society shaped these women and their circumstances. The writing was brilliant and I loved learning about these individual cases they were all equally interesting and I was invested in all of their stories. I think the most interesting thing I realised while reading was how similar things still are when it comes to things such as hoaxes, the public obsession, and both celebrations and demonisations of the people in the centre of these cases. I can't wait to read more from Pelling in the future!
June 2, 2026
A fascinating dive into eighteenth and nineteenth century ‘hoaxers’ - told through the stories of three women who became infamous for deceptive stories and manipulation. Madeleine Pelling examines each in depth and poses the question of whether prejudices and societal fears of the supernatural amplified each case. Drawing parallels with today’s debate over ‘truth’ this is a well researched and accessible study of credulity and culpability.
June 27, 2026
Such a good listen! Having Maddy read it on Audible makes it even that much better! The three stories are well written and very engaging! Her writing is really quite remarkable- I was interested every moment!
She brought the situations and the people to life, wove in history, and explained the situations that made the hoax possible in the first place- all with such color and life, you are right there with it!
She brought the situations and the people to life, wove in history, and explained the situations that made the hoax possible in the first place- all with such color and life, you are right there with it!
May 27, 2026
This book is fantastic.
As a fan of the Podcast After Dark I was excited to see Madeleine herself narrates the audiobook.
She paints such an immersive picture that at times it felt like I was watching a film. It was interesting to learn about the historys that I think are often overlooked.
As a fan of the Podcast After Dark I was excited to see Madeleine herself narrates the audiobook.
She paints such an immersive picture that at times it felt like I was watching a film. It was interesting to learn about the historys that I think are often overlooked.
September 7, 2026
The author is the co-host of After Dark, a history podcast that I love. I enjoyed her look at historical hoaxes! The only one I’d really heard of previously was Princess Caraboo.
August 14, 2026
Incredibly well-researched and narrated. Maddy has such a knack for storytelling and made history come alive throughout these pages.
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