Arthur Orton (20 March 1834 – 1 April 1898) was an English man who has generally been identified by legal historians and commentators as the "Tichborne Claimant", who in two celebrated court cases both fascinated and shocked Victorian society in the 1860s and 1870s.

[5] While employed at one he was said to have written 'on a fly-leaf of one of the station novels' and this was later offered as evidence that Orton did not have the education that would have been expected of Tichborne: "This day i have received a letter from Donald MacDonald.

And that i will punish him according to the laws of, My Countrie.Sined Arthur Orton Dargo 11 March 1858"[6]In May 1856, he appears in a subscription list, donating £2, for 'the Patriotic Fund from the Upper District of Gippsland' as a stockman and 'one of the men' of 'Mewburn Park'.

[2] However a personal notice in a Hobart newspaper from May 1856 – 'If this should meet the eye of Arthur Orton, formerly of 69, Wapping, London, by applying on board the "Irene", he will hear of his friends.'

[9] In August 1865 advertisements appeared in Australian newspapers asking for information about the fate of Roger Charles Tichborne (born 1829), who had been on a vessel, Bella, which had disappeared at sea off the coast of South America in 1854.

According to author Bernard Falk, her religious sensibilities were offended by the great usage he and his invited guests made of alcohol and tobacco, so she moved out.

[12] The Scotland Yard detective Jack Whicher discovered that immediately on his arrival in England in December 1866 the Claimant visited Wapping and made enquiries about the Orton family.

[15] However, Lady Tichborne recognised him as her son with complete certainty;[16] he was likewise accepted as Roger by numerous family servants and professional advisers.

[17] In his analysis of the affair, Rohan McWilliam considers the extent of recognition remarkable, given the physical bulk and unrefined manners of the Claimant, as compared with the Roger Tichborne of 1854.

After a lengthy civil hearing the jury dismissed the Claimant's case to be Sir Roger; he was then arrested and tried for perjury under the name of Thomas Castro.

[20] This "generosity" is disputed by author Bernard Falk, who stated that "No legal means existed to prevent" a named coffin plate claiming the Baronet's title being attached.

[19] Woodruff argues the sheer improbability of anyone conceiving such an imposture from scratch and at such a distance: "[I]t was carrying effrontery beyond the bounds of sanity if Arthur Orton embarked with a wife and retinue and crossed the world, knowing that they would all be destitute if he did not succeed in convincing a woman he had never met and knew nothing about first-hand, that he was her son".

[2][clarification needed] He was fictionalized by Jorge Luis Borges in Tom Castro, The Implausible Impostor, written between 1933 and 1934 and published in A Universal History of Iniquity in 1935.