Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, And The Missing - An Extraordinary Edwardian Case Of Deception And Intrigue

At the close of the Victorian era, as now, privacy was power. The extraordinarily
wealthy 5th Duke of Portland had a mania for it, hiding in his carriage
and building tunnels between buildings to avoid being seen. In 1897,
an elderly widow asked the court to exhume the grave of her late father-in-law, T. C.
Druce, under the suspicion that he'd led a double life as the 5th Duke. The eccentric
duke, Anna Maria contended, had faked his death as Druce, and her son should inherit
the Portland millions. Revealing a dark underbelly of Victorian society, Piu Marie
Eatwell evokes an era when the rise of sensationalist media blurred every fact into fiction
and when family secrets and fluid identities pushed class anxieties to new heights.