The Production of a Female Pen: Anna Larpent's Account of the Duchess of Kingston's Bigamy Trial of 1776

Larpent, Anna Margaretta & Kinservik, Matthew J.

ISBN 10: 0845731548 / ISBN 13: 9780845731543

Published by Lewis Walpole Library, United Kingdom, 2004

About this Item

hardback, quarto, 11 1/2" x 9", a near fine facsimile copy of the 1776 original in a near fine pictorial dust jacket. Notes and Introduction, transcribed by Matthew Kinservik.

Seller Inventory # 272865

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Production of a Female Pen: Anna Larpent's Account of the Duchess of Kingston's Bigamy Trial of 1776
• Publisher: Lewis Walpole Library, United Kingdom
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0845731548
• ISBN 13: 9780845731543
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

On 15 April 1776 the House of Lords convened as a jury in Westminster Hall to try the Duchess of Kingston for bigamy. The hall was transformed into a theater-in-the-round for the four thousand spectators, making the five-day trial a notorious event of that London season. The diarist Anna Larpent, then an unmarried girl of eighteen, was among the crowd. She wrote thirty-eight pages recording her informed observations with immediacy and in vibrant detail. Recently rediscovered at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, her manuscript is reproduced here in its entirety. The text is introduced and transcribed by Matthew J. Kinservik and illustrated with works from the Lewis Walpole Library.

Long before Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis gave his library to Yale, he revived Horace Walpole's short-lived series, Miscellaneous Antiquities, or, A Collection of Curious Papers. Walpole had published two numbers in 1772, and in 1927 Lewis resumed the series with Number III through XVI, the last appearing in 1940, before he was called to Washington for wartime service in the OSS. Now, with this account of the Duchess of Kingston's trial, the Lewis Walpole Library re-launches Miscellaneous Antiquities to continue a happy tradition.

About the Author

MATTHEW J. KINSERVIK is associate professor of English at the University of Delaware and author of Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage (2002).