A museum has paid out for a book of letters linked to one of history's greatest poets - despite them being the work of a forger.
Horsham Museum Society has used its scant resources to buy a faked book purportedly containing writings by the town's most famous son, the English Romantic poet Shelley.
The museum is nevertheless celebrating its £450 purchase, and will this week add it to its world-renowned Shelley collection, now one of Horsham's key tourist attractions.
The book, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, was printed in 1852. When the publishers realised they had been duped it was withdrawn and pulped. Surviving copies are rare.
Museum curator Jeremy Knight believes the book to be of significant historical interest and said it might help explain why the achievements of a man gifted with genius were only recognised by his own community 170 years after his premature death.
Shelley, who was born into an aristocratic family in 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham, rebelled against English politics and conservative values.
His work reflected the revolutionary optimism of the time but scandalised society, including his father, a Sussex squire and a Member of Parliament.
Scandal followed him. He was expelled from Oxford for publishing The Necessity Of Atheism. By 1814, he had abandoned his first wife, Harriet, for Mary Wollstonecraft, who would become his second wife - and the author of Frankenstein.
They moved to Italy but he drowned in 1822 when his boat sank in a storm.
Tired of scandal, his father forbade his widow from publishing anything to do with her husband or his poetry.
In this vacuum, others tried to profit from the growing interest in the poet.
Mr Knight said: "In the years after his death, there were a number of pirated or fake letters purporting to be written by or about Shelley that cast him in a bad light. Mary started collecting as much of this material as possible to destroy it."
The publisher, Moxon, heard about some unpublished letters, snapped them up and asked writer Robert Browning to write a foreword which tried to explain Shelley's actions to the society he had scandalised.
The book was published after Mary's death in 1851.
Mr Knight said: "Moxon never revealed who the forger was but in his own way the forger was a Shelley expert."
The book will be on display from Friday. Admission is free.
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