Hidden Not Lost: Victorian hoax storytelling

Hoax storytelling has a long history.  The Victorian era apparently saw a boom in this sub-subgenre, associated with the late nineteenth century's newspaper boom.  For a while several newspapers used hoax stories to win market share.  Several involved treasure hunts:

[Tit-Bits'] June 20, 1903, issue carried the first instalment of Hidden Not Lost, a detective story featuring two characters endlessly discussing the clues they had uncovered to finding a £500 bag of gold sovereigns hidden somewhere in Britain. 

Each weekly issue contained another instalment of the story, packed with more clues. Anyone solving them would be guided to a real location, where a real £500 bag of sovereigns was hidden. That prize was found at the end of August, and Tit-Bits immediately launched a sequel. 

That sequel went further:

Gold in Waiting... had a Holmes-and-Watson duo called Pike and Meggs chasing round the country trying to prevent a royal murder plot. The dastardly villain, Count Tabritz, had selected ten spots around England where his intended victim might be vulnerable. At each of these spots, he buried £100 in gold sovereigns to pay the hired assassin he planned to use. Pike and Meggs uncovered clues to each location in turn, which readers were invited to solve in their search for one of the ten prizes. In an ingenious twist, Tit-Bits' man concealed each real £100 stash by packing the sovereigns into a pointed metal tube and banging it into the ground with a mallet. 

Other newspapers in Britain, Australia, and the United States launched similar story-hunts, apparently.  And a London one went especially bonkers.

Comments

[Stein]

Thanks for posting this--very cool stuff, and I just know there are some excellent Victorian mystery novels begging to be squeezed out of this motif.

BTW, I discovered Paul Slade's pages on murder ballads and broadsides via your trailing link--both of peripheral literary interest to me!

[Bryan Alexander]

I think you're right, Jared. Lots of potential here.

And welcome to Infocult!