Susan Mitchell Sommers Thomas Dunckerley and English Freemasonry

Annotation

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.