ABSTRACT

Ramsay was writing about Elizabeth Canning, whose case fascinated London through 1753-54-a case that shows better than most of the episodes in this book how the varieties of contradiction could be used in debates over fraud. Through this year-and-a-half consistency was at the center of many of the debates. Londoners worked to sort out the “Multitude of very uncommon Circumstances, some of them directly contradictory to each other,” wrote one contributor, and by the end many “different Opinions” were “formed from separate Parts of this Story.”2 But almost all of them came down to questions of consistency and inconsistency: those who found Canning’s story to be consistent tended to believe her; those who found her story inconsistent sided against her.