(Charteris, Francis) | A raw account of sexual assault and harassment

(Charteris, Francis)

Some Authentick Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Ch[arteris], Rape-Master-General of Great Britain. By an Impartial Hand. London: Printed and Sold by the Booksellers of London and Westminster; and at the Several Pamphlet-Shops, 1730

8vo (191 x 114 mm). Title-page cut round and laid down, I2 supplied in manuscript, I3 guarded, lacks I4 blank. Contempoary calf, later brown endpapers; somewhat worn, upper joint cracked.  

First and only edition. Colonel Francis Charteris (1675–1732), was a Scottish soldier and adventurer who earned his fortune through gambling and the South Sea Bubble. Nicknamed the "Rape-Master-General," Charteris would send his minions out to procure women for him to have sex with, under the pretense of hiring them as house servants. In 1730, he was convicted of raping a servant, one Anne Bond, and was sentenced to death. He was subsequently pardoned and died of natural causes in 1732. Before expiring, he was said to have offered £150,000 to anybody who could prove to him that there was no hell. 

He was much despised throughout the countryside for his sexual excesses, and during his burial, his coffin was vandalized and dead cats thrown into his grave. Charteris was the inspiration for characters in William Hogarth's works, A Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress (where he is depicted as a fat lecher in the first engraving), and in the novel Fanny Hill. He was condemned by Alexander Pope in his Moral Essay III, written in 1733. 

REFERENCE:

ESTC T73618