Forgery

Genuine (1804)
The forged letter of Lord Nelson is very crude, but the forger has tried to cash in on the fact that Nelson's hand was naturally rather unsteady immediately after he had lost his right arm. By the date of this letter (1802) his left-handed writing had become perfectly fluent. Incidentally, forgers prefer to imitate the left handed writing rather than the more 'copper-plate' right. A further trick is to place an 'authentication' in a seemingly different hand vertically in the margin. The genuine letter shows that oddities can occur in the real as well as the fake. Nelson has run out of space for his signature so he puts it at the top of the page upside down.



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