Gullible Georgians: hoaxes in the Enlightenment period

The Age of Enlightenment was one of rationality and scientific exploration, but people still fell for lies and deceit. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Madeline Pelling speaks to Isabel King about the fascinating world of hoaxes in the long 18th century, from the dangerous to the downright bizarre. Welcome back to the podcast, Maddy. We're here to discuss your new book, Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment. We're going to be delving into lots of fascinating stories, but before we do, could you kick us off with some clarification of what a hoax actually is?

How are you defining hoax in your book and how would people living in the Enlightenment period have defined it? So really interesting and actually quite complex question off the bat as well. Thank you. There's a little bit of a gap between how we might understand hoax today and how people in the Georgian period might understand it. For us today, we think of a hoax as possibly perpetrated by a single individual or a small group of people, and it's very much an anomaly.

It's something that we discover is happening, maybe it's an imposter, maybe it's a financial scam, something like that. We discover it, we bring those responsible to justice, and we move on. We don't consider it necessarily a symptom of our society, but rather a strange occurrence that we can forget about. Now, for the Georgians, that was slightly different. And the long 18th century is really the golden age of the hoax.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (46 minutes, 8,296 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.