The trigger for this exhilarating romp through literary Victoriana was a sale at the auction house of Sotheby’s. A first edition of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol sold for a record sum. The inscription was to a Mrs Touchet. Meet Eliza.

Mrs Touchet herself is less than impressed by Mr Dickens, smarting at his usual jibe of touché, Mrs Touchet, a joke no one else laughs at. Her affections are for rival author, less well known today although you can find him for 99p on Amazon as Harrison William Ainsworth.

Perhaps the set up, the number of pages, 454, suggests a soporific Victorian melodrama, but that is one part of the conceit, the joke. Mrs Touchet does not do the melodramatic.

We are in London from 1830 onwards. You can almost taste the flavor of the old city. Gentlemen ride on Willesden Green, Kensal Rise is home to this literary salon.

Zadie Smith beams her heroine into this fusty salon of port sloshing tyros. She is the Mrs Touchet, aka Eliza, aka the Targe, depending on her company.

“She thought of herself as having several faces on show at different times to different people…”

She has modern sensibilities. She is housekeeper, muse, amour, dominant, flirt, but mostly a woman of little means in a society where men have all the means.

The shape shifting of fortunes cloud the background like the weather. Every short chapter-ette is change. It is news. The story shuffles slyly, leaping from one decade to another and back, from private to public, from scandalous to sedate.

The Fake of the title applies to more than just the main court case. Eliza is something of a social detective picking over the dilemmas of the time. The humour is Dickensian:

“They found Crossley and his sizeable belly in a quiet corner, wedged between the wall and table, already encircled by half a dozen dishes.”

We have the creaking, litigious, greedy machinations of old money, of inheritance, the passing of power. Slavery has just been disenfranchised itself, a few Africans arrive in London, there is civil war in America, the cotton mills of Manchester are grinding to a halt in protest. The empire is decaying.

And so is the house – the library floor has collapsed under the weight of books, Eliza is

abandoned by her husband, she pleads with cousin Ainsworth to take her in, he has married well but her father is now bankrupt. The good natured Ainsworth is furiously writing the next novel to keep them all afloat.

And then we have the Claimant of the title, the fraud although many of the people are frauds in their own ways, but The Tichbourne case is the cause of the moment – the heir to the estate thought lost at sea reappears to claim his inheritance. But is he real or a charlatan? A noble lord or a butcher from Wapping?  The Old Bailey is convened to decide, which becomes a riotous vaudeville.

Eliza bears witness, sharing her intimate thoughts, she confides, she whispers, she chides…

The second wives are voracious, hungry to spend the fortunes of empire:

“In mercantile matters – as in all others – the two women proved ill-matched. Eliza had a sharp eye for shoddy craftsmanship, political sympathy for the working man… Sarah had no sense of housekeeping in particular, not of money in general.”

Like some Greek chorus, the public voices intrude on Eliza’s private thoughts – the suffragettes, the mob and then even the handsome Andrew Bogle, the Claimant’s African man, descended likewise from tribal elders, disenfranchised likewise, to slavery in Jamaica, and now to speak for his master, their fates bound together, Jamaica itself abandoned while the lawyers decided who can run the farm, who owns the crop, who wields the whip, who inherits. No slavery, just dissolution.