The prank that grew to giant proportions

The story has been told dozens of times already, but never gets dull, and until the 1996 McDonald’s libel case there had not been a longer saga played out in any English court. From 1867 the Tichborne claimant dominated conversation for years, and people openly despaired they might die before a verdict was reached. Photographs of the claimant outsold those of the royal family, and such was the hypnotic fascination of the case that even they fell victim to it, the Prince and Princess of Wales sitting next to the judge on the bench on one occasion (on another, George Eliot was in the public gallery). The whole country was gripped by a tale so preposterous, it was either a wicked wrong which needed to be repaired, or, in the words of prosecuting counsel, ‘a detestable imposture’.

The facts of the case have not changed much since the admirable entry in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.