Abstract
On an April day in 1956, an all-night disc jockey, Jean Shepherd, went in search of a book containing the old radio plays of Vic and Sade. At the Doubleday Book Shop on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Shepherd asked a clerk to help him locate the title, leading to a fruitless search that ended in an unpleasant exchange as the clerk produced one publisher’s list after another to prove that the book Shepherd sought did not exist. If it did, he insisted, then it would be on one of his lists. Annoyed by the officious clerk who gloried in lists and the certainties they seemed to offer, Shepherd stepped back out onto Fifth Avenue, vowing to shake the clerk’s faith in his lists. He began to conceive of one of the greatest literary hoaxes of all time—one he would pull off with the help of Elizabeth Chudleigh.
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Epilogue
Frederick R. Ewing [pseud.], I, Libertine (New York: Ballantine Books, 1956). Quotation is from the book cover.
John Wilcock, “The Village Square” in The Village Voice Reader (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 79.
Joyce Brabner, “I, Libertine: Making the List,” WBUR Online Arts (1 June 2002) http://publicbroadcasting,net/wbur/arts.
Claire Gervat, Elizabeth: The Scandalous Life of the Duchess of Kingston (London: Century, 2003), 246.
Stella Tillyard, “Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century London,” History Today 55 (2005): 24.
See Laurence Senelick, “Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 66–67;
Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 64;
Netta Murray Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes: Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 1998), 104;
Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992), 180.
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© 2007 Matthew J. Kinservik
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Kinservik, M.J. (2007). Epilogue. In: Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604803_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604803_14
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