Subjects
Thomas Dunckerley and English Freemasonry
Susan Mitchell Sommers
978 1 84893 358 3: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 78144 005 6
Thomas Dunckerley is a late eighteenth century icon of British Freemasonry; his story is a fascinating morality tale of self-invention and self-deception. Climbing to the highest echelons of the order, and long-accepted as something of a hero, the reality of Dunckerley’s life is very different from the version recorded by his nineteenth-century biographers.
Sommers reveals Dunckerley’s widely accepted claim to be an illegitimate son of George II to be untrue. But alongside a very real success as a Freemason, his true story includes the Royal Navy, travel, a career in law and the ‘scandalous Worsley affair’. In one of the first books to provide a scholarly study of English Freemasonry, Sommers uses Dunckerley’s case to examine the changeable nature of personal identity in the eighteenth century and the evolving methodology and expectations of biography.
Readership
Eighteenth-Century History, Freemasonry and Biography
Contents
Foreword
Prologue
1 The Making of a Myth
2 Those He Left Behind
3 Dunckerley All at Sea
4 Dunckerley Ashore
5 The Trappings of Royalty
6 Making a Mason
7 The Provincial Grand Master of England
8 Appendant Orders and Higher Degrees
9 Apotheosis
Epilogue
Appendix I
Appendix II
Reviews
'Sommers has revealed a stunning story of self-deception and re-invention. In a shrewd re-examination of the hagiographic accounts she shows the sleights of hand underlying our understanding of the past, its many twists of fate, and what enthusiastic biographers do with them. A must-read for modern historians and their students.' James Allen, Southern Illinois University
‘The intricate historical detective work involved in Sommers’s exposure of Dunkerley’s invention of his own past is fascinating and compelling’ David Stevenson, University of St Andrews
'Sommers’s revelatory and revisionist biography of Thomas Dunckerley offers an entertaining and insightful entrance into the demimonde of royal patronage, institutional instability, and status anxiety which surrounded eighteenth-century English Freemasonry. This work destabilizes stodgy fraternal histories while demonstrating how ‘the Craft’ assumed its modern shape through the sincere efforts of imperfect men.' William D Moore, Boston University
Related titles
