The approach seems a variation (in modern times) of the one in Roald Dahl's story "The Bookseller": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bookseller_(short_story) which was very likely inspired by a 1935 story by James Gould Cozzens, "Clerical Error".

Though the stories above made leverage on the desire by widows to protect the memory of their recently departed husband, essentially it is the same.