[Knight, Sarah Kemble, and John Buckingham]:

$2,250 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

THE JOURNALS OF MADAM KNIGHT, AND REV. MR. BUCKINGHAM. FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS, WRITTEN IN 1704 & 1710. The scarce first printing of the journal of Sarah Kemble Knight (1666–1727) describing a journey taken from Boston to New York in 1704. George Parker Winship (in the introduction to the 1920 edition of Knight's journal) remarked that Mrs. Knight's journal offered "the truest picture left to us of provincial New England."Sarah Knight was a significant colonial Boston businesswoman whose various occupations included running a boarding house, a shop, tavern, and inn, developing real estate, and teaching (including such illustrious pupils as Ben Franklin and the Mather family - indeed, Increase Mather officiated her daughter's wedding). Knight's charming travel journal, preserved by her descendants since 1704 but not published until this printing in 1825, describes a five-month journey taken alone on horseback and is considered one of the most authentic pictures of colonial New England at the turn of the 18th century. The journal itself had been all but destroyed by 1858, and published editions remain the only example of Knight's writing (which is by all accounts considered excellent). "During the pauses of her horseback journey, she kept a journal, which records events in a most amusing fashion and comments entertainingly upon the rough roads, river crossings, intolerable inns, and the manners of speech of the inland rustics" - THE OXFORD COMPANION to AMERICAN LITERATURE

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