Certain times and places are undoubtedly more hospitable than others to the activities surveyed in this book. Britain in the 1760s must have been one such chronotope, when Thomas Percy was tampering with the texts of the ballads he was to publish as Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. That appeared a year after someone called ‘William Marshall’ translated as The Castle of Otranto a book allegedly written by an equally imaginary Italian, ‘Onuphrio Muralto’, and given the fictive imprint of ‘Naples, 1529’. Marketed as ‘a Gothic story’ in its second edition of 1765, it turned out to be the inaugural manifestation of a literary genre characterised by its ‘ghostings of the already spectral’ and ‘recounterfeiting of the already counterfeit’. Its actual author was Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Oxford, who transformed his Strawberry Hill residence into a pseudo-Gothic castle. In 1768 a fifteen-year-old called Thomas Chatterton began to retro-fashion himself as ‘Thomas Rowley’ in order to compose fifteenth-century poetry and other literary muniments. After Walpole had indicated that he was ‘by no means satisfied with the authenticity’ of Chatterton's ‘supposed mss’, Chatterton accused Walpole of having himself ‘indulge[d] in such Deceit’. The real foundation of Walpole's double standard, he alleged, was economic: those with ‘the Gifts of Wealth & Lux'ry’ could get away with literary practices for which the ‘poor & Mean’ were castigated.