James Paris du Plessis

James Paris du Plessis (born c. 1666 Pithiviers, France; died c. 1735 London) was a servant of the famous 17th-century English diarist Samuel Pepys and the author of “A Short History of Human Prodigies, and Monstrous Births: of Dwarfs, Sleepers, Giants, Strong Men, Hermaphrodites, Numerous Births, and Extreme Old Age, &c.”, an unpublished manuscript he produced between 1730 and 1733 that is preserved in the British Library in London.[1]

Du Plessis' bizarre 320-page manuscript is illustrated with hand-coloured drawings by the author himself. These include "John Grimes, a Dwarf", "Two Sisters conjoined", "A Woman Seven foot High",[2] "A Woman with a Hog's Face",[3] "A Spotted Negro Prince" and "The Monstrous Tartar". The section headed "A Wild Girl found Near Chalons in Champagne" contains the earliest-known report in English of Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc, the famous feral child of 18th-century France.[4] Shortly before his death, Du Plessis offered the manuscript and its illustrations to Sir Hans Sloane and they became part of Sloane's foundation collection of the British Museum.[5][6]

According to the novelist Charles Dickens, Du Plessis' fascination with human strangeness and prodigies of all kinds began in his youth when he dug up the body of a stillborn two-headed child, a cousin, in the garden of his family home at Pithiviers in north-central France.[7][8]

References
  1. British Library Sloane MS 5246 (text) and Sloane MS 3253 (illustrations). Retrieved 22 September 2013.
  2. Sarah Carson, "Coleraine 400's 7ft celebrity travelled the world", Coleraine Borough Council, Northern Ireland, 18 June 2013. Retrieved 22 September 2013.
  3. Jan Bondeson, The Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square & Other Medical Marvels (Stroud, Tempus Publishing, 2006), pp. 74–75.
  4. http://www.marie-angelique.com/sources. Retrieved 22 September 2013.
  5. "Letter to Sir Hans Sloane from the Compiler [James Paris du Plessis]", Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys (6 volumes, London, Bickers and Son, 1879), volume 6, pp. 258–259 . Retrieved 22 September 2013.
  6. William Evans Burton, "Scissibles. From the Blank Book of a Bibliographer", Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (Philadelphia), volume I, no. 3, September 1837, p. 211. Retrieved 22 September 2013.
  7. Charles Dickens, "A Prodigy Hunter", All the Year Round, volume VI, 28 December 1861, pp. 331–336. Retrieved 29 September 2013.
  8. Surekha Davies, "Monsters Incorporated: Framing Anatomical Difference in Early Modern England", abstract of paper delivered to the 126th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Chicago, 8 January 2012. Retrieved 22 September 2013.
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