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and inveterate collector was one such man, and the success of his collections of sketches of places such as the Avon valley were what enabled him to buy the house in Norfolk Street.
    The chief obsession of the day, however, was Shakespeare. The emerging cult of bardolatory was sweeping the land, thanks largely to the irrepressible actor-manager David Garrick. In 1769 this famous Shakespeare-lover had staged an exuberant jubilee celebration at his hero’s birthplace in the Midlands. Statues were erected, encomia were written, celebrities were invited to attend balls in remembrance of the playwright and, as an offshoot of this grand affair, a crooked industry sprang up selling spurious bits of tat to tourists. The Irelands themselves were duped by one such tradesman when they made a trip to Stratford and came away with a chair said to have been sat in by Shakespeare as he wooed his wife.
    Unsurprisingly, then, the one thing that William’s father lusted after but could never get his hands on was something written in Shakespeare’s hand. A whole play would be too much to hope for, of course, but even a single signature or scribbled note, he was fond of saying, would be worth exchanging his whole library for. His son was listening. And some time between the family holiday to Stratford in 1793 and the autumn of 1794, he came up with a perfect way to win the respect of the bardolatrous Samuel.
    William had sense enough to begin with a dry run. From one of the many local booksellers near his house he bought an old book of prayers, written by a member of Lincoln’s Inn, which bore the stamp of Queen Elizabeth. By faking a note from the author to the queen, he would be able to say it was a rare presentation copy rather than merely one which had been bought for the royal library. He did so, trying his best to imitate the spidery handwriting of the sixteenth century, and took the results to a bookbinder in New Inn Passage for approval. To this man, a Mr Laurie, he quipped that he was planning to play a trick on his father and wanted to know if his creation looked authentic enough to pass muster. Laurie and his assistant agreed that it did, but recommended he rewrite it using a special ink preparation, well known to scribes of the day, which would make it look more genuinely aged. The solution was sold to him in a vial and he was instructed to hold the written sheet up to the fire to make the antique-looking writing come up a satisfyingly dark mottled brown. He did as he was told, and his father was fooled and delighted.
    William swiftly followed this with another mini-hoax, a forged letter pertaining to a bust of Cromwell. Typically of his lack of thoroughness, he had not bothered to find out that the correspondent claiming to be giving this fine portrait-sculpture to Cromwell was in fact one of the man’s arch rivals and so very unlikely to be wishing him anything but ill luck. Fortunately, Ireland Senior was also oblivious to the fact and accepted the new addition to his collection with glee.
    Now the stage was set for William’s hoaxing operation to launch in earnest. He stocked up on old paper by buying the unused end-pages of folios from a bookseller in St Martin’s Lane. He bought a collection of antique seals and doctored them according to his limited knowledge of Elizabethan heraldry. He even tore a piece of cloth from a wall-hanging in the House of Lords, when he visited to hear the king speak, and pulled it apart to make the string with which he had heard old documents were customarily tied together. Finally, he laid in a good supply of the magic ink from the man in New Inn Passage and set about practising the signature he had seen in facsimile in his father’s copy of Dr Johnson’s
Shakespeare
. Then he went back to Norfolk Street and told an astonished Samuel that he had found the bard’s signature on a mortgage deed.
    At that moment, after nearly twenty years of effective parental abandonment, William had the full