James Paris du Plessis ( in Pithiviers, France in London) was a servant of the famous 17th-century English diarist

Samuel Pepys Samuel Pepys (; 23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an English diarist and naval administrator. He served as administrator of the Royal Navy and Member of Parliament and is most famous for the diary he kept for a decade. Pepys had no mariti ...

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Births: of Dwarfs, Sleepers, Giants, Strong Men, Hermaphrodites, Numerous Births, and Extreme Old Age, &c.", an unpublished manuscript he produced between 1730 and 1733 that is preserved in the British Library in London. 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", "A Woman with a Hog's Face", "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. 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. 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.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 201

Retrieved 22 September 2013.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Plessis, James Paris du 1660s births 1735 deaths English non-fiction writers English male non-fiction writers