Kellet Alexander (1 results)

First edition, second issue, of this uncommon miscellany, often cited by Americana scholars for containing two intricately woven captivity narratives. Blending journalism and science fiction, the captivity narratives are told alongside stories of ghosts, the Lancashire witches, and a dream voyage to the moon, "a scorious surface, broken with immense caverns, that had all the appearance of a ruined world" (p. 277). The volume contains three pieces on Native Americans: "A Letter from North America, Concerning the Indians" (pp. 1-33) and the captivity stories "The Innocent Suicide" (pp. 216-23) and "A true Relation of the unheard-of Sufferings of David Menzies" (pp. 197-204). Field describes the latter as "the most surprising narrative of captivity, and sufferings among them ever printed" and shares Sabin's opinion that it is likely a genuine account. Modern scholars view the David Menzies story as a carefully and comedically written satire on anti-Native American tropes. It adds considerably to our understanding of the development of the captivity narrative genre by showing that "the conventions of the form were well understood as early as 1760" (Pitcher, p. 313). The tale originally appeared in The Royal Magazine issue of June 1761. The British writer Alexander Kellet heightened the realism of his stories by drawing from his experiences as Georgia's provost marshal. He was appointed to the role in 1754, the same year the state became fully established as a royal colony under the governor John Reynolds, whom Kellet later deposed in 1756. Among Reynolds's first duties was curtailing the threat of Native American, Spanish, and French forces; it is these anxieties Kellet exploits in his captivity narratives, their convincingness bolstered by references to real events such as the 1740 Siege of St Augustine. Kellet died in Bath, England, in 1788; his obituary emphasizes his skill in "humbugging the public" and notes his deft intermixing of fact and fiction led the enlightenment writer Guillaume Thomas François Raynal to reprint the David Menzies case as factual. In the story, the French surgeon David Menzies is captured by Cherokees shortly before the Cherokee War, while en route to a slave plantation in Georgia. To replicate larded venison seen in a white settlement in South Carolina, the Cherokees lard their prisoner's flesh before falling asleep. Fleeing to the wilderness, Menzies resorts to eating the bacon of his own skin and survives to tell the narration, which is written in the first person. His method of torture conjured great public fascination by presenting "something new to readers worn out with stale reports of conventional mistreatment" (Hatley, p. 151). In the second captivity story, "The Innocent Suicide", a Scottish soldier contrives his own beheading to spare himself from the worse fate of torture. He offers his Native American wardens a supposed elixir of immortality to repel the armies of Europe and demands they test his invulnerability with a swift lethal blow. The man thereby receives a relatively painless death and his subterfuge leaves the crowd astonished. The miscellany presents Native Americans similarly to witches in that both are portrayed as fantastical threats to social order. In the piece on the Lancashire witches (pp. 156-64), a Scottish pedlar escapes captivity from a lascivious witch and subsequently dreams of her cutting his throat. The next day, it is revealed a magical sponge had sealed his fatal wound; the sponge falls to the ground, and his corpse follows after it. The narrative criticises the 1736 Act which repealed witchcraft laws in Britain and warns that witches may act with impunity upon a disbelieving public that rejects "equitable trial by water-ordeal" (p. 157). This copy is from the second issue, with a cancel title page. It was first issued as A Pocket of Prose and Verse in 1778. We have traced around a dozen institutional locations worldwide in either issue, and the last appearance at auction was in 1948. Collecting Kellet's various contributions to magazines, the miscellany represents the sole published book of this inventive satirist and influential politician in early colonial Georgia. Ayer 169 (first issue); Cox, II, p. 153 (first issue); ESTC T124425; Field, p. 200; not in Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon; Sabin 37252; Summers, p. 412; Vail, pp. 306 & 314. M. Thomas Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution, 1993; Kellet's obituary in Stamford Mercury, 27 June 1788; E. W. Pitcher, "The Un-American Fiction of 'The American Moral & Sentimental Magazine', with a Comment on the 'Captivity Narrative'", Early American Literature, vol. 14, no. 3, Winter 1979/80, pp. 312-15. Octavo (157 x 93 mm). Initial leaves printed out of sequence. Binder's blanks bound in. Contemporary speckled calf, red spine label, raised bands with twin gilt rules, blind milled roll on board edges. Faint ownership inscription on front pastedown; remnant of shelf label on spine foot. Spine darkened, joints and corners professionally repaired, contents generally clean, small paper flaw to pp. 273/4 losing a couple of letters. A very good copy.…