A brief history of accounts of Duck’s death

The first public announcement of Duck’s death, carried in several London newspapers in early April 1756, makes no mention of suicide, and clearly attributes Duck’s death to ‘natural causes’, specifically the apoplectic seizures Duck had apparently suffered from for some time (Batt, 2020, p. 187). The report stipulated that ‘on Tuesday Morning the Rev. Mr. Duck, in his return from Bath, where he had been for the Recovery of his Health, died at Reading of an Apoplexy, being the third Time of that Distemper’s attacking him’ (General Evening Post, no. 3472). It appeared almost verbatim in at least three other London papers, and was picked up in due course by several provincials: the Ipswich Journal, the Derby Mercury, and the Kentish Post.³ Curiously, perhaps due to the ephemeral nature of the source, not one of the approximately three dozen biographical vignettes about Duck published since his death has mentioned this report, until Jennifer Batt’s account published in 2015.

Despite the wide distribution of this news, there is evidence that rumours Duck had died by suicide at Reading were circulating even before his body was found on 19 April 1756. In a letter to Samuel Richardson dated 15 April 1756, Thomas Edwards mentions Duck’s passing in a brief aside: ‘Poor Stephen Duck too! Lord, what is Man!’ (Richardson, p. 398). Richardson’s reply, dated 24 April 1756, four days after Duck’s burial at Sonning, echoes Edwards’s sentiments: ‘Poor Stephen Duck, as you say! I had a Value for him, and am much concerned at his unhappy Exit’ (p. 398). Though both men appear empathetic to Duck’s plight, they nevertheless allude to Duck’s death as a suicide, a narrative they seem to have accepted already. An additional epistolary comment on Duck’s death has survived in the published letters of the Revd John Mulso. In a letter addressed to his friend Gilbert White, Mulso is comparatively more explicit about Duck’s death-by-suicide: ‘There is an End of the Thresher’s Labours. Stephen Duck drowned himself at Reading on his way from Bath: No one can assign a Cause but sudden Lunacy’ (White, p. 107). Mulso’s letter, dated 23 April 1756, originated from Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey, some five miles north-east of Byfleet. As a local, he was positioned to hear and communicate the latest news; for example, Duck’s body being found four days earlier (which he alludes to in his opening line). Mulso’s comments are significant because he corroborates the initial newspaper report that Duck was returning home from Bath when he died, and he suggests a cause – ‘sudden Lunacy’ – that anticipates the coroner’s inquest verdict published in the Reading Mercury three days later.

Most of Duck’s early biographers would stick to the language of lunacy or melancholia to explain Duck’s apparent suicide; but many also saw fit to add their own prejudicial, moralising rhetoric into the mix, in effect turning Duck’s death into a didactic tale of class overreaching. The first published biographical account of Duck appeared in The New and General Biographical Dictionary in 1761. Although authorship remains unknown, this account is important because it contains specific details and motifs that will be repeated (or slightly modified) in dozens of accounts published well into the twentieth century. Duck’s first, anonymous biographer notes that, ‘falling at length into a low-spirited melancholy way, he flung himself into the Thames from a bridge near Reading, and was drowned. This unhappy accident, for he was perfectly lunatic, befell him some time in May or June 1756’ (New and General Biographical Dictionary, p. 236). Despite the shoddy research (Duck died at the end of March), this account established two important mainstays of the genre: speculation on Duck’s mental state at the time, and the location of his suicide. It also inaugurated the trend to moralise Duck’s death in explicitly classist terms: ‘if he had been suffered to pass the remainder of his life, after he had passed so much of it, in poverty and labour, he had not only missed the unhappy end he came to, but also been a stranger to many years of melancholy and misery, which preceded it’ (p. 236).

Close comparative study of the many biographical vignettes published after Duck’s death reveals several trends: most poach from previously published accounts, often using the same language or phrasing without quotation marks or citation; most resort to classist moralising to contextualise Duck’s supposed suicide; and many introduce unsubstantiated ‘facts’, presumably to justify yet another rendering of Duck’s story. The account provided in a ‘supplement’ to the first edition of Biographia Britannica (1766) copied the New and General’s account of Duck’s death largely verbatim (Biographia Britannica, p. 43). Two later accounts, in An Historical and Classical Dictionary (1776) and Encyclopaedia Britannica (1778), added new phrasing – ‘probably owing to his change in life, and cessation from his usual labor’ – condensed from the earlier New and General’s account to explain Duck’s melancholic state (Historical and Classical Dictionary; Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 2556). The worst of this classist editorialising, however, might well have been Ralph Heathcote’s statement excoriating Duck’s patrons: ‘By turning the laborious thresher into an inactive parson, they brought lunacy first and then suicide, upon a man, who might otherwise have enjoyed himself with two cows and a pig, and ended his days in serenity and ease’ (p. 38). Over time, some details given in these accounts seem more the whimsical products of the biographer’s imagination than anything else, as in Fredric Turner’s noting that

there appears to have been a settled strain of melancholy in his character which developed into religious mania. Early in 1756 he took a journey into Wiltshire, and visited the barn where he had worked years before, and on his way back he threw himself from a bridge, at or near Reading, and was drowned. (p. 424)

In Turner’s telling, Duck’s low spirits have morphed into a ‘religious mania’, and his trip to Bath is reconstructed (without a shred of evidence) as a return to his native Wiltshire, insinuating that the alienation Duck must have felt in doing so was a contributing factor to his suicide.

The one exception to these trends in the eighteenth century was Andrew Kippis’s effort to provide a new account of Duck for the second edition of Biographia Britannica (1793). Kippis served as ‘editor and prime mover’ for the project and was recognised as ‘the leading biographer of his day’ for his efforts (Ruston). Kippis personally undertook some local research at Reading that challenged the prevailing Thames narrative with an alternate location for Duck’s drowning (‘a trout stream which runs at the back of the Black-Lion Inn’), and he also tried to explode the classist nonsense that Duck’s melancholia was the inevitable result of his estrangement from the life of labour he was born to (p. 417). ‘To say that [Duck] endured many years of melancholy and misery before his death’, Kippis wrote, ‘seems to be asserted without a shadow of proof’ (p. 417).

But Kippis’s otherwise admirable revisionist vignette also had the unfortunate effect of confusing rather than clarifying the details of exactly where Duck drowned. Nevertheless, several prominent Duck biographers that followed Kippis acknowledged his work on this topic in different ways. Alexander Chalmers added the phrasing ‘or, as some say, into a trout stream’ to his description of Duck’s drowning (p. 391). Robert Southey opted to circumvent the location issue by simply reporting that Duck ‘threw himself into the water’ at Reading (p. 111). For his Dictionary of National Biography entry on Duck, Leslie Stephen sided with Kippis, naming him as his source but slightly misquoting the ‘trout stream’ story (1888). In revising Stephen’s account for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, William R. Jones avoided the location issue altogether, noting only that Duck ‘committed suicide by drowning’. As we shall see below, untangling the details of Kippis’s ‘trout stream’ story is essential for constructing a more detailed account of Duck’s movements in Reading on the day he died, and for building the case that Duck’s death may well have been accidental.

A suicide counter-narrative

Any effort to challenge the story that Duck took his own life at Reading by throwing himself from a bridge into the Thames must begin by taking seriously the aforementioned newspaper report that Duck ‘on Tuesday Morning […] in his return from Bath […] died at Reading of an Apoplexy, being the third Time of that Distemper’s attacking him’ (General Evening Post, no. 3472). Despite its publication in several London and provincial newspapers – not always the most reliable of print sources – there are elements that argue for its authenticity. The source of this report remains unknown, but it appears to derive from someone who had intimate knowledge of Duck’s travel plans (which can be corroborated) and his recent health history (which cannot). The report is explicit in noting that Duck was ‘return[ing] from Bath’ when he ‘died at Reading’, which turns out to be quite accurate, whatever the cause. Furthermore, it remains the best source we have for dating Duck’s death because the London newspaper reports were all published on Friday or Saturday, 2 or 3 April 1756, and so the ‘Tuesday Morning’ referred to would have been 30 March 1756.

Batt notes that Duck’s ‘surviving letters contain regular complaints about illnesses and afflictions ranging from colds to a bad back’, but nothing on the order of apoplexy, which was quite serious and largely impossible to treat at the time (2020, p. 187). By the mid- to late eighteenth century, ‘apoplexy was the term used to describe […] a sudden catastrophic event characterised by a loss of consciousness, movement and sensation. Many of the conditions that would have been described under the term apoplexy are incorporated into what is now referred to as stroke’ (Storey, p. 233). An apoplectic fit, then, was understood as a paralytic event of sudden onset, which raises the question: Did Duck fall into a body of water at Reading due to an apoplectic seizure? The initial newspaper report does not mention Duck drowning, but if its details about Duck’s recent history of apoplectic attacks are genuine, it is possible that Duck’s drowning was precipitated by his apoplexy. If there were witnesses to the event, Duck may have appeared to fling himself into the water of his own volition. Though we cannot know definitively what happened, the initial report of Duck’s death-by-apoplexy nevertheless suggests that his death-by-drowning might well have been accidental.

That Duck travelled to Bath seeking treatment for apoplexy makes good sense because Bath was easily accessible from his home in Surrey, and Duck’s longtime friend and patron, Dr William Oliver, was a prominent physician there. Oliver was known to have ‘a large practice in the middle of the [eighteenth] century’ at Bath (Murch, p. 22). Surviving letters also show that Duck had sought medical treatment from Oliver in 1740, and, in 1752, Duck wrote two letters to Oliver, one recommending a parishioner to Oliver’s care, followed by another thanking Oliver for accepting her (European Magazine, 27, 1795, p. 80; 28, 1795, p. 79). Duck’s plan may have been to see Oliver again as a patient himself, or perhaps Oliver recommended Duck to a colleague that specialized in the clinical treatment of apoplexy.

Duck’s return journey from Bath would have taken him on the recently turnpiked ‘northerly line’ of the Bath–London road that went through Chippenham and Calne before rejoining the southern route at Beckhampton, and continuing east toward Reading (Buchanan, pp. 82–3). We know he travelled this route because a contemporary, Revd Thomas Morell, noted in his commonplace book that Duck stopped at Calne, Wiltshire, to see old friends and neighbours from his native county and to preach a sermon (Batt, 2020, p. 188). Morell had been one of Duck’s most energetic antagonists in 1746 when they were both being considered for the curacy of St Anne’s Church at Kew, and, though their quarrel had cooled, Morell nevertheless notes that Duck met with a ‘contemptuous Reception’ from his audience in Calne (p. 188). Morell goes on to suggest that this experience was the underlying cause of Duck’s ‘fatal stop at Reading’ (p. 188). Most biographical accounts describe Duck as a popular preacher, but, even if this particular sermon did not go well, that alone hardly seems like a catalyst for self-murder.

Travelling east from Calne, Duck would have entered Reading from the south-west on Castle Street and then continued through town to the George Inn on Minster Street, the most prominent coaching inn in that part of town. Assuming that he did not travel by foot (which would be unusual for someone of his means and age, health issues notwithstanding), Duck would have changed coaches there to continue his journey to Byfleet, and so he probably had some time to stretch his legs or mill around in the vicinity of the George.⁴ However, it seems rather unlikely that Duck ventured on foot to the Caversham bridge, the only bridge over the Thames near Reading at that time, just over a mile north-west of the George.

The body of water nearest to the George was known as the Holy Brook, a partly man-made channel designed to divert water from the River Kennet – which diversifies as it enters Reading into a number of smaller streams – to power the Abbey Mill. It flows back into the Kennet beyond the mill, and the Kennet then flows directly into the Thames just below Reading. Period maps show that the George essentially backed right up to the Holy Brook, so it flowed mere steps away from where Duck would have alighted from the coach.

The Holy Brook appears to have been one of the most dangerous waterways in England in this period with regard to drowning fatalities. One local historian points out that by 1817, at least ‘101 children drowned in [the Brook] within memory of people alive in that year’ (Hinton, p. 133). The Reading Mercury often carried news of these drownings, which included reports involving many adult victims as well. For example, ‘Mary, wife of William Ross […] accidentally drowned in the Holy Brook’, and ‘Joel Assington, a private in the 10th or Prince of Wales’s reg. of light dragoons, fell into the Holy-Brook stream, near the Saracen’s Head inn, and was drowned’ (Reading Mercury, 22 July 1793; 22 December 1800). Because the Holy Brook served as a source of clean fresh water for Reading residents, designated ‘dipping places’ not only allowed easy access to the stream but also created more opportunities for accidental drowning. Some recorded drownings are specific about this context: ‘Mary Ann Hearn about nineteen years of age’, a servant, fell in and drowned while procuring water for her work at one such dipping place, and James Boggs fell in and perished while ‘attempting to drink out of the Holy-brook stream’ (Reading Mercury, 21 April 1855 and 9 May 1796). The rapid flow of the stream made it particularly deadly and difficult either to rescue those that fell in, or to recover their bodies post-mortem. A report of a five-year-old girl’s death notes that she fell into the Holy Brook

in Castle-street […] and was carried as far as Duke-street, before [her body] could be got out. The methods recommended by the Humane Society, for the recovery of drowned persons, were made use of for above an hour, but the bruises the child had received by the violence with which [she] was carried by the stream, rendered them of no effect. (Reading Mercury, 8 May 1786)

Most bodies were recovered at the Abbey Mill sluices; however, it was in fact possible that an adult body could make it past the mill and enter the Kennet. This was the case with one Sarah Brown who apparently fell into the Holy Brook at King’s Road and was ‘taken down by the stream through the works of the Abbey Mill, by which means the contusions as appeared on the body were occasioned’ (Reading Mercury, 22 November 1845). Her body was recovered the next day in the Kennet. Despite this long history of what often appear to be preventable tragedies, the Holy Brook remained largely unfenced well into the nineteenth century as pleas ‘to protect the public from the danger’ posed by the Holy Brook were still being made in the 1840s (Reading Mercury, 11 February 1843).

Kippis’s revisionist account of Duck’s death in fact places Duck very near to the Holy Brook. In keeping with his ‘passion for comprehensiveness’, Kippis expanded the single paragraph afforded to Duck in the first edition of Biographia Britannica (1766) to four full pages (Nichol, p. 290). On the subject of Duck’s death, Kippis wrote:

Mr. Duck, after continuing rector of Byfleet somewhat more than four years, fell into a dejection of spirits, and, in a fit of insanity arising from the disorder, drowned himself at Reading in Berkshire. The accounts before me say, that he flung himself into the Thames, from a bridge near that town but this was not the case. I know, from particular enquiry made near the time, that he was drowned in a trout stream which runs at the back of the Black-Lion Inn, at Reading; and I have seen the very spot where he met with his unhappy fate. The event took place between the thirtieth of March and the second of April, 1756. (Biographia Britannica, p. 417)

Kippis’s ‘particular enquiry’ was presumably undertaken with the help of a local person (or persons) with knowledge of ‘the very spot’ where Duck drowned. While Kippis does not question Duck’s death as a suicide, he does categorically dismiss the ‘flung himself into the Thames’ narrative, and substitutes for that tradition a narrative that has flummoxed more than one modern scholar since (myself included).

The main problem one immediately runs up against in trying to corroborate Kippis’s account is that there is no extant record of a ‘Black-Lion Inn’ in Reading until the 1820s, and even then, the establishment was located at the corner of West and Broad streets, some four blocks to the north of the Holy Brook and other streams of the diversified Kennet (Dearing et al., p. 219). The coaching inn that Kippis should have named in his account is the George, but he was likely confused by seeing the names ‘Black Lion’ and ‘George Inn’ alongside each other as coaches were named at the time according to their end-point destinations.⁵

Advertising in the Reading Mercury reveals that ‘Reading Post-Coaches set off every morning from the George Inn’ with the route terminus being the ‘Black Lion’ located at ‘Water-Lane, Fleet-Street, London’ (Reading Mercury, 4 October 1790). The coach Kippis arrived in Reading on would have been labelled ‘George Inn’, but for whatever reason – confusion at the time, or misremembering details when he later came to write up Duck’s new Biographia Britannica entry – Kippis failed to keep these coaching inn names straight.

He also failed to name the ‘trout stream’ that he stood near, but circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that this was the Holy Brook. Kippis’s description that the stream in question ran ‘at the back of the Black-Lion Inn’, matches exactly the geography of the George Inn in relation to the Holy Brook, then as now. In addition, the Holy Brook is consistently referred to in local newspaper accounts of drownings as a ‘stream’ and the Kennet was known in the period for its trout fisheries. Kippis’s language, though ostensibly vague, therefore contains its own internal coherence. More recently, Adam Sowan, a local Reading author who produced a short history and guide to the Holy Brook, briefly mentions Duck’s death noting that the ‘trout stream’ in question ‘is assumed to have been our Brook’ (p. 31). Though Kippis’s account does clarify the body of water Duck very likely drowned in, he appears unaware of the initial newspaper reports describing Duck’s apoplexy and offers no challenge to the prevailing suicide narrative, simply repeating the accepted wisdom by the 1790s that Duck ‘drowned himself at Reading’.

Once Duck’s body passed through the Abbey Mill works, possibly aided by an increased flow due to rain in the area on the day he drowned, his path to the lock and weir barrier at Sonning might have been impeded by a variety of naturally occurring obstacles such as trees, reed beds, and islands, as well as artificial ones, like sunken barges or boats. April 1756 was also one of the wettest months recorded between 1727 and 1931 (Nicholas and Glasspoole, p. 301); the London Magazine recorded eighteen days of rain in London out of the first twenty-one days of the month (April 1756, p. 200). This much rain would certainly have made the waterways around Reading turgid and increased the silt content enough to make it difficult if not impossible to see a body submerged in the water. Not surprisingly, there are accounts of drowning victims remaining in the rivers near Reading for weeks. One newspaper report stated that the coroner ‘deposed that the body [of Robert Batten] was in a shocking state of putrefaction, and must have been in the water for several weeks’ (Reading Mercury, 10 November 1838).

Duck’s body was found and removed from the Thames at Sonning on 19 April 1756, and one local historian has recently opined that Duck’s ‘body could not have arrived at a better place’, as he was buried in consecrated ground the following evening in St Andrew’s churchyard with the help of an independently minded vicar, Revd Thomas Hubbard (Peters, p. 17). No doubt an empathetic vicar helped in this situation, but it was also the case that cultural attitudes toward suicide were changing in the last half of the eighteenth century. In their ground-breaking study of suicide in early modern England, Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy have shown that, by the end of the eighteenth century, ‘judicial and ecclesiastical severity gave way to official leniency and public sympathy for most people who killed themselves’ as ‘felo de se verdicts had become as rare as non compos mentis ones had been two centuries earlier’ (1991, p. 109).

Duck and his family certainly benefited from these changing attitudes. English common law at the time stipulated that, in the event of a felo de se verdict, all of a suicide’s moveable property was forfeited to the crown, often severely damaging the family’s economic standing. In Duck’s case, the lunacy verdict protected his wealth but had one unfortunate ramification. Duck’s recently recovered probate will, executed on 30 July 1754, makes clear Duck’s intentions regarding the disbursement of his wealth and goods, and details his personal burial wishes. The fact that Duck’s will was administered on 5 June 1756, and his ‘Goods Chattels and Credits’ distributed to his surviving children speaks to a more humane, progressive culture developing around suicide in England in the mid- to late century period. But Duck also wanted, in his own words, ‘to be buried according to the Custom of the Church of England in the north side of the Chancel at Byfleet as cheap as decently may be’.⁶ Sadly, even in more lenient times, the lunacy verdict still carried with it the stain of suicide, and so Duck could not be buried in his own church.

But did Duck actually die by suicide? It would seem that everybody at the time thought so, and few Duck biographers have spent much effort challenging that orthodoxy since. However, one anonymous biographer writing in the mid-nineteenth century offers a simple – but nonetheless compelling – challenge to the suicide narrative:

If poet had ever reason to be happy and satisfied with his lot it was [Duck … He] was a man of literary taste and habits, and he was placed in a situation in which he could indulge them – there was nothing hazardous in placing him in such a situation, and according to any theory of probabilities he should have been the last man to have committed suicide. (Anon., 1860, pp. 40, 42)

Here Duck is recognised as a ‘poet’, and his right to a literary life is validated, whatever his class origins. Indeed, Duck had just published a successful poem, Caesar’s Camp: or St. George’s Hill in 1755, which received positive notice in the Monthly Review (p. 159). Duck was also generally known to have been a popular preacher and, though his third wife (Elizabeth) had died in 1749, he seems to have been living a contented life among his parishioners and friends in Byfleet. There is nothing in the surviving historical record to suggest that he was suffering from the psychological effects of deracination that so many biographers have ascribed to him. In fact, one of the surprises of Duck’s probate will is that he still owned valuable ‘Implements of Husbandry’ that he may well have had occasion to use as his ecclesiastical living included roughly thirty acres of arable glebe lands, which, along with the fact that he was still indulging his poetical talents and socialising with friends like Joseph Spence, paints a rich picture of Duck’s life at Byfleet in the years leading up to his death.⁷

If the Thames suicide narrative does not add up, then how did Duck die that day in Reading? Given all of the above, I think it is quite plausible that Duck fell into the Holy Brook and drowned, most likely as a result of an apoplectic attack. The initial newspaper report on Duck’s death is explicit in noting that he had survived two earlier bouts of apoplexy, and that he suffered a third attack at Reading ‘in his Return from Bath’. We know today that having one stroke significantly increases the chances of having another, typically more severe, occurrence. Duck’s third stroke, then, would likely have been strong enough to incapacitate him, and if he was standing anywhere near the Holy Brook, he might easily have tumbled into the fast-moving stream. It is also possible that Duck might have simply slipped or otherwise accidentally fallen into the Holy Brook and succumbed to the violence of the swollen waters.

In either scenario, melancholy, depression, sudden lunacy, or temporary insanity, had nothing to do with Duck’s death. Nobody at the time seems to have considered a physical, rather than a psychological, cause for Duck’s sudden fall into the water. But that would be in keeping with a cultural shift toward the secularisation and ‘medicalization of suicide’ in the eighteenth century in which ‘melancholy, lunacy, and delirium’ take centre stage in explaining why people ended their own lives (MacDonald, 1989, pp. 69, 85). The coroner most likely responsible for overseeing Duck’s inquest, William Prince, a Reading apothecary whose jurisdiction included Sonning, could not possibly have diagnosed apoplexy as a contributing factor to Duck’s drowning – even if he had the medical knowledge to do so – due to the putrefied state of Duck’s body after three weeks in the water. There was, therefore, no available physical evidence to support an accidental death verdict, but that may well be the most accurate conclusion to draw now in light of Duck’s history of apoplexy, among other factors. The George Inn was a busy place and so the evidence required to support a lunacy verdict would have been more readily available, likely sourced from at least one witness’s (mis)interpretation of what they saw. That, mixed with people’s expectations or presumptions about the negative effects of Duck’s social dislocation and class overreaching on his psyche, would certainly have been enough to keep the death-by-suicide narrative circulating at the time – and beyond.

Comparing the response to Duck’s death with that of his friend Joseph Spence twelve years later offers an instructive example of the power of class prejudice at mid-century. Spence was the person most responsible for Duck’s entrance into London literary society in the 1730s, and later he was instrumental in securing Duck his living at Byfleet. Spence had retired to Byfleet himself in 1749, so patron and protégé became neighbours a few years later and were much in each other’s company (Wright, p. 119). But twelve years after Duck’s death, on 20 August 1768, Spence was found dead, lying face down in a shallow body of water in his extensive gardens. Rumours that Spence, like Duck, had died by suicide quickly began to circulate. And, also like Duck, Spence was known to have suffered from apoplexy ‘for several years’, so his friends, especially Bishop Robert Lowth and Dr James Ridley, ‘took pains to contradict’ the suicide rumours (p. 174). Their efforts proved successful for, three days after Spence’s death, the coroner’s inquest apparently brought back a verdict of accidental death.⁸ There is, as yet, no extant evidence of Duck’s Byfleet friends, especially Spence and Lord Lincoln, making a similar effort to challenge the story that Duck had died by suicide. Perhaps the lack of witnesses and the shallowness of the water made Spence’s case easier to adjudicate, but nevertheless, in the court of public opinion Spence was a gentleman, and Duck – no matter how far he had come – was not. Even in death Duck could not escape the long reach of his class origins.

Notes

1. 1.  The coroner’s report itself has apparently not survived; this remains the best evidence we have that a coroner’s inquest did take place, as it should have, once Duck’s body was recovered.

2. 2.  Royal Berkshire Archive, Sonning parish register D/P113/1/2. The date discrepancy can be attributed to the burial, which took place the evening of 20 April 1756, being recorded the next day.

3. 3.  Batt notes that the announcement of Duck’s death appeared in the Public Advertiser, 2 April 1756, the Whitehall Evening Post, 1–3 April 1756, and the London Evening Post, 1–3 April 1756. It was also carried by another London paper, the General Evening Post, no. 3472, and the Ipswich Journal, no. 896, Saturday, 3 April 1756, the Derby Mercury, vol. 25, no. 3, Friday, 2 April – Friday 9 April 1756, and the Kentish Post, or Canterbury News-Letter, no. 4005, Saturday 3 April – Wednesday 7 April 1756.

4. 4.  Given his age and health issues, it is also unlikely Duck would have travelled by horse. But even if he did, the George Inn would still have been the most convenient place in Reading for him to stop to rest and water his horse on his way back to Byfleet.

5. 5.  Gillian Clark, Reading local historian and author of Down by the River: The Thames and Kennet in Reading (2009), provided invaluable assistance in clarifying the details of Kippis’s revisionist account. I remain grateful for her scholarly generosity and expertise.

6. 6.  Duck’s probate will is now available on The National Archives website; see PROB 11/823/280. Transcription mine.

7. 7.  ‘Glebe lands’ typically comprised a significant part of the living for rectors in the Anglican church at that time and were often used for agricultural purposes. My acreage estimate is based on a transcription of a 1635 document, ‘A Presentment of the Glebe Land belonging unto the Rectorie and Parsonage of Byfleet’, shared with me by the Byfleet Heritage Society.

8. 8.  Wright mentions that ‘a coroner’s inquest was held on August 23’ but does not provide the official verdict (p. 175). If, as Wright suggests, ‘suicide was not suggested at the inquest’, then the verdict would almost certainly have been accidental death by drowning (p. 247, 130n).

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• Sowan, Adam, The Holy Brook or the Granator’s Tale, Map and Guide (Reading: Two Rivers Press, 2003).
• Stephen, Leslie, ‘Duck, Stephen (1705–1756)’, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 16 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1888).
• Storey, Catherine E., ‘Apoplexy: Changing Concepts in the Eighteenth Century’, in Harry Whitaker et al. (eds), Brain, Mind, and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience (New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 2007).
• Turner, Fredric, ‘Concerning Stephen Duck, Sometime Rector of Byfleet, and Joseph Spence, His Friend’, Surrey Magazine (March 1901).
• White, Rashleigh Holt (ed.), The Letters to Gilbert White of Selborne from His intimate Friend and Contemporary the Rev. John Mulso (London: R.H. Porter, [1907]).
• Wright, Austin, Joseph Spence: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950).

Periodicals

• European Magazine, 27 (February 1795); vol. 28 (August 1795).
• General Evening Post, no. 3472, Thursday 1 April – Saturday 3 April 1756.
• London Magazine, vol. 25 (April 1756).
• Monthly Review, vol. 12 (February 1755).
• Reading Mercury.