About the Book

Bram Stoker wrote Famous Impostors in 1910, two years before his death — the author of Dracula turning from invented horrors to real ones: pretenders, false czars, witch-finders, hoaxers, and one queen who may not have been what she seemed.

His method, he says in the preface, was to deal with his material 'as with the material for a novel, except that all the facts given are real and authentic.' The result reads like fiction and documents like history.

The range is the pleasure of it: from Perkin Warbeck's doomed claim to the English throne, through Cagliostro and Mesmer, the Wandering Jew and the Witch-Finder General, to the Cotswold tradition of the Bisley Boy — the legend that the Virgin Queen was no queen at all.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1910 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.