Sarah Kemble Knight

Boston, 1666 - 1727, Norwalk, Connecticut

BiographyKnight, Sarah Kemble (19 Apr. 1666-25 Sept. 1727), diarist and businesswoman, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Thomas Kemble, a merchant, and Elizabeth Trerice. She married Richard Knight of Boston, of whom little is known, and had one child.

The Boston census in 1707 recorded that Sarah Knight, then a widow, headed her deceased father's Moon Street household and shop. She kept boarders and may also have taught school. Knowledgeable about law, she served as a copier of legal documents and witness to one hundred or more deeds. In 1704, she traveled to New York to settle a family estate, keeping a diary of her journey that was first published in 1825 in The Journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham. The diary remains an important source on social conditions in the early eighteenth century. Her trip was made on horseback, accompanying the post rider in stages, or with a local person who could direct her along the way. She crossed rivers in tippy canoes or over tottering bridges, and she stopped at inns usually memorable for unappetizing food, uncomfortable beds, and uncouth people. She also stayed at times with relatives or friends, such as the minister in New London, Connecticut, Gurdon Saltonstall, who treated her "very handsomely."

When her daughter Elizabeth married John Livingston in 1713 and moved to New London, Sarah Knight followed. She soon was operating a shop, a tavern, and an inn, and she engaged extensively in land speculation. She acquired Livingston lands, originally purchased from the Mohegan Indians, that her son-in-law had sold off and bought other property in partnership with Joseph Bradford, an eminent landholder. Joshua Hempstead, a versatile New Londoner, recorded in his diary that he surveyed her land, determined its boundaries, and wrote leases for her tenants. Her business activities got her into trouble on at least one occasion: in 1718 she was indicted and fined for selling alcohol to the Indians. Nevertheless, Knight was a respected member of the community and a pewholder in the Norwich Congregational church. After her death at her inn on the Norwich road, she was brought for burial to New London, where her gravestone still stands. Probate records valued her lands in Norwich at £210, and her farm, household goods, and personal effects in New London at £1850, an estate of considerable wealth.

Sarah Knight is best known today for her forty-page diary, which Theodore Dwight (1796-1866) published without revealing the name of the author. Soon after, the manuscript was accidentally destroyed. Readers at the time believed the journal was fictitious, or, if factual, the work of a man. Not until William R. Deane, in the June 1858 issue of Littel's Living Age, named Knight as the author did the diarist's true identity become known. Deane based his attribution on information forwarded to him by the historian Frances M. Caulkins, who had interviewed a descendent of the administratrix of Elizabeth Livingston's estate.

Some commentators have treated the diary primarily as a historical record and have identified locations that Knight described but left unnamed. For example, it was Haven's tavern, near North Kingston, Rhode Island, where revelers kept her awake by loudly debating the origins of the word "Narragansett"; it was Fisher's tavern, in Dedham, where frequenters ignored her questions because they were "tyed by the Lipps to a pewter engine" (drinking cup). Other scholars view the journal as an account of the frontier, calling it "a realistic picture of rural manners" or a description of "lubberland . . . the abode of rude leveling."

Recent analysis has been of the diary's literary merits, which are regarded as extraordinary. Critics have placed her journal in the picaresque tradition, characterized by episodes of travel, comments on morals and manners, and the use of comedy. Knight's figurative language has been compared positively with the humor of Mark Twain. One commentator argued that Sarah Knight wrote with Homer's Odyssey in mind; by treating her own journey in mock heroic fashion and portraying herself as an urbane Bostonian in rural Connecticut she represents the Greek among the barbarians. Another view emphasized the range of Knight's reading; the poetic portions of the journal indicate acquaintance with Dryden and his contemporaries, while other passages show familiarity with the Elizabethan romances of Parismus and the Knight of the Oracle. Also, Knight's satiric tone, tolerant amusement with herself and others, and reference to God as her "Great Benefactor" suggest that she was acquainted with works of the early Enlightenment. In general, commentators have noted that the journal reveals a mind characterized by wit, intelligence, and refreshing independence.

Bibliography
The original manuscript of the journal and the copy made of it by Theodore Dwight, Jr., for the 1825 edition are no longer extant. No other writings by Knight have yet been found. A manuscript collection of newspaper clippings, archival research notes, and genealogical data relating to Sarah Knight, prepared by William R. Deane, is held by the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston. There is no biography. Alan Margolies gives a history of the manuscript and its nineteenth-century editions in "The Editing and Publication of 'The Journal of Madam Knight,' " The Papers of The Bibliographical Society of America 58 (1964): 25-32. Commentary on the journal has been made by George Parker Winship, in The Journal of Madam Knight (1920), and Malcolm Freiberg, in The Journal of Madam Knight (1972). Literary criticism of the journal is found in the introduction to the annotated edition by Sargent Bush, Jr., in Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives, ed. William L. Andrews (1990); Ann Stanford, "Images of Women in Early American Literature," in What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature, ed. Marlene Springer (1977), pp. 184-210, and "Three Puritan Women: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, and Sarah Kemble Knight," in American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays, ed. Maurice Duke et al. (1983), pp. 3-20.

Barbara E. Lacey

Source:
Barbara E. Lacey. "Knight, Sarah Kemble";
http://www.anb.org/articles/01/01-00482.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Tue Jul 30 2013 14:51:13 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

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Last Updated8/7/24

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