Redemption?
In the later twentieth century, some scholars attempted a re-evaluation of Collier, defending him against the charge of forgery. The main effort was by Dewey Ganzel, in his 1982 study Fortune and Men's Eyes. In Ganzel's view, Collier's accusers were motivated largely by envy and class bias; they were upper-class dilettantes determined to put down a lower-class but ferociously hard-working and talented striver. The case for Collier has relied on the fact that not all of the accusations of forgery against Collier have stood up to critical examination. (The American psychiatrist Samuel A. Tannenbaum accused Collier of forging all the accounts of the Master of the Revels, an accusation that went much too far.)
The consensus of scholarly opinion has remained convinced of Collier's guilt. Samuel Schoenbaum, in his discussion of the Collier case, mentions a damning incident omitted by Ganzel. In his old age in 1875, more than thirty years after the Perkins folio, Collier claimed in a letter to possess a John Milton folio "full of Milton's brief notes and references; 1500 of them." By this time his reputation was so tarnished that he was not able to launch another campaign of forgery, and while the "Milton" folio indeed exists (New York Public Library), the annotations are not by Milton. A two-volume study by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, published in 2004, re-examines the evidence and concludes yet again that Collier was a forger.
Ganzel has written in response to the Freemans' study, "He (Freeman) assumes Collier's guilt and that leads to looking at Collier's work with the expectation of finding fraud....my study revealed what was the irrefutable evidence that he was a victim of a conspiracy of which Frederick Madden was a part...Freeman starts with a criminal; I tried to end up with a man. Freeman says that in 'suspending judgement' of Collier's guilt 'one forfeits the opportunity to explain him at all'. That confusion leads to only one kind of explanation of the events he describes, and, for me, not a very satisfactory one. The point is, the crimes are not 'unproven'; the perpetrators are."
Perhaps Schoenbaum is correct in leaving the final word to Collier himself. In the last few years of his long life, Collier expressed moments of remorse in his diary. On 19 February 1881 he wrote, "I have done many base things in my time—some that I knew to be base at the moment, and many that I deeply regretted afterwards and up to this very day." And on 14 May 1882: "I am bitterly sad and most sincerely grieved that in every way I am such a despicable offender I am ashamed of almost every act of my life...My repentance is bitter and sincere"
Frank Kermode maintains that Collier's "repentance would have been more useful if he had identified his fabrications and forgeries."
An article in the March, 2010 edition of 'Family History Monthly' by Richard J. Westall, Collier's great-great-grandson, entitled 'To forge or not to forge?' summarises Collier's supposed forgeries and quotes the note dictated by Collier to his daughter shortly before his death: 'I have written much in verse and prose, but can confidently say that I never produced a line, either in verse or prose that was calculated to be injurious either to morality or religion'. Ganzel suggest Collier's so-called 'confession' was in reference to the fact that he had not accepted certain Christian beliefs. Arthur Freeman maintained in a letter to Westall that 'we never presume JPC guilty until the evidence is sifted', which, Westall remarks, 'hardly squares with the disparagement made in their (the Freemans') biography of those who 'high-mindedly' suspend judgement, stating such an approach 'forfeits the opportunity to explain him at all'.
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