The Siblys of London

Book excerpt: Ebenezer Sibly was a quack doctor, plagiarist, and masonic ritualist in late eighteenth-century London; his brother Manoah was a respectable accountant and pastor who ministered to his congregation without pay for fifty years. Drawing on such sources as ratebooks and pollbooks, personal letters and published sermons, burial registers and horoscopes, Susan Sommers has woven together an engaging microhistory that offers useful revisions to existing scholarly accounts of brothers Ebenezer and Manoah, while locating the entire Sibly family in the esoteric byways of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.