The decade of the 1820s abounds in literature that blends fact and fiction. With more and more writers publishing in magazines and other periodicals, current events easily make their way into fiction, and prose of the 1820s often crosses over – in one direction or the other – from immediate real-world reference to imaginative fantasy. Writers sometimes elide this distinction entirely; at other times they call attention to it by making insistent truth-claims within forms and genres that are patently fictitious. Other chapters in this volume address problematic truth-claims in the experiential environment of the 1820s: Lindsay Middleton discusses concerns over the authenticity and adulteration of food and Phillip Roberts examines the different articulations of truth made possible by visual media such as the magic lantern. In the realm of print culture, truth in the sense of fidelity to real-world experience is further complicated by authors who write imaginative fiction and poetry, but at the same time produce non-fictional media such as daily and weekly newspapers. As Gerard McKeever shows in his chapter, this convergence of roles results in newspapers with aesthetic motivations and a distinctly literary texture.

At the nexus of these developments was Theodore Hook (1788–1841), a political journalist, novelist, satirist and improviser of verses who manifested a provocative attitude towards truth in both the widely read metropolitan newspaper and the bestselling fiction that he launched in the early 1820s. During the same era, a grandiose speculation that was perpetrated around the colonial settlement of Poyais in central America highlighted issues of fact and fiction by making the truthfulness of descriptive texts into a matter of stark socio-economic reality, and even of life and death. Hook responded explicitly to the Poyais affair in his journalism; it also made its way more subtly into his fiction, which reflects the ‘experience-near’ quality of the era's popular literature with its rich texture of allusions to current events. In this chapter, I will examine the intersection of Hook's writing with the Poyais affair in order to show how genres of writing in the 1820s hybridised facticity and fictionality, and how the decade's media created expectations of truth out of speculation and performance.

By the time he began writing and editing a London newspaper in 1820, Theodore Hook already had a colourful background in theatre and colonial governance, as well as important connections in political and literary spheres.