Born in 1776, Abigail Kimball of Johnston Rhode Island inscribed the inside cover of English Liberties, or the Free-born Subject’s Inheritance when she was just 9 years old, noting that she was “A Studying in order to learn the law.” This edition of English Liberties was printed in Providence in 1774 by John Carter (other side of John Carter Brown’s family). Abigail’s mother Sarah also inscribed it on the front flyleaf. And someone, it looks like Abigail, wrote the Kimball’s family record into the back pages.
I was in Princeton this past week to celebrate the great Sid Lapidus, a rare book collector who has always cared deeply about the scholarship those wonderful books can generate. Sid donated his collection to important institutions, including Princeton and the Schomberg Center, but also when I was at the Omohundro Institute, to William & Mary’s Law School. Princeton gathered some of Sid’s donated books from these various institutions and mounted an exhibit on the major themes he’d been interested in collecting, since he first bought an early copy of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man for 5 pounds in London in 1959 (I’m pretty sure it was the summer after he graduated from Princeton). “The Most Formidable Weapon Against Errors: The Sid Lapidus ’59 Collection & the Age of Reason” includes a really marvelous selection in a well designed and illustrated space.
But because I can never visit a library without out stopping in Special Collections, I also spent some time (never enough) with other materials, including this very important book that was part of Sid’s collection. Last month the brilliant Eric Slauter gave a presentation at the John Carter Brown Library where he mentioned this remarkable volume and of course it caught my attention right away.
English Liberties is a particularly interesting text. A host of proto-lawyer’s/ layman’s guides to the law circulated in British America, from how-to books on writing contracts and wills to more specialized treatises. They were often marketed to and bought by Justices of the Peace and other local officials. English Liberties is distinctive distinctive among casual law books in that it was much more of a source reader. First published in London in the 1680s, this was the second American edition (there was a Boston one in 1721) and was aimed squarely at an American market during the pre-Revolutionary period political conflicts. The content of the volume in every edition was significant, though. It included plenty of English legal and governmental materials: the Magna Carta, “other statutes” and an account of monarchy vs Parliamentary rights–as well as practical info per the genre. The JCB’s copy is digitized here, with the explanation of the American adaptation (in 1721 but newly urgent in 1774) on page vii.
Plenty of women were working the law in this period. You only have to read the court records to see how many women (obviously in the minority but still) were present in a host of court actions. Still, Abigail’s claim as a young reader is notable.
As ever, I am attentive to the many places that people rested family records; meaningful texts were one–and Bibles, as I’ve said often, were only one of those. The family records in the Kimballs’ English Liberties look to be penned by several different family members, including Abigail. Family records were, in different media, a didactic genre; in girls’ schools family record samplers were regular but became even more popular later in the 18th century, for example. So perhaps Abigail wrote some of these as part of being tutored at home or at school. Perhaps she was working alongside another family member. One of the interesting questions with family records like these is what was written when. Often we can tell from the pen as well as the penmanship and in this case it looks just on these first two pages that there are four periods of inscription, with the first beginning with Abigail’s birth.
As I argue in Lineage, which by the way is now on most bookseller sites as well as OUP, the structure of family history in British America was deeply rooted in the Protestant Bible, the monarchy, and the law. This lovely volume is a wonderful illustration of that tight entwining.