Sign alphabet exhibition – The life and adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell

Although the exhibition is now over, I thought I would put up the last few items we had sent to be displayed on the blog.  A book that had to be omitted from the exhibition for reasons of space:

The life and adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell. In one volume. To which are added, The Dumb Philosopher, and everybody’s business is Nobody’s Business, [by Andrew Moreton]. Oxford: Printed by D.A. Talboys for Thomas Tegg… London. 1841. Attributed to Daniel Defoe

Duncan Campbell (c.1680–1730) was a Deaf soothsayer, who claimed to have been born in Lapland, probably to enhance his mystical credentials.  He was taught to read by a “learned divine of the University of Glasgow”, following the method of John Wallis.

The life and adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell has been frequently attributed to Daniel Defoe, “with little evidence […] but the views expressed on the supernatural in the work directly contradict arguments Defoe presents elsewhere, and Defoe is unlikely to have written for his enemy Edmund Curll.”  In fact the anonymous writer was probably William Bond, who then lived in the same house as Campbell in Exeter Court on the Strand.

A follow up to this book, Secret Memoirs of the Late Mr Duncan Campbell, appeared after he had died in 1732, clearly as a way of promoting Campbell’s wife’s business selling his talismans and potions.

 

T. F. Henderson, ‘Campbell, Duncan (c.1680–1730)’, rev. David Turner, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2005 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4494, accessed 13 June 2013]