The Youth of Jefferson

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About this book

Williamsburg in 1764 is a small colonial capital with a college in it, and Cooke turns it into a stage for student mischief. Behind a barricaded door on Gloucester Street sits a sandy-haired young man called Sir Asinus, rusticated from William and Mary for saying the Established Church was a farce, hiding from the proctor and trading Latin puns with his lovesick friend Jacques about a girl Jacques has renamed Belle-bouche. Elsewhere a rich heiress who wishes she had been born a man puts on a suit of black, enrolls as the student Charles Hoffland, and befriends the poor law student she means to test. Cooke put no author name on the 1854 title page, then ended the book by printing Thomas Jefferson's own college letters, in case anyone had missed the joke.

About the author

John Esten Cooke

John Esten Cooke (1830-1886) was born in Winchester, Virginia, studied law with his father, and gave up a modest practice once his writing began to pay. The Virginia Comedians, an 1854 romance of the colonial Tidewater, made his name and is still reckoned his best work; he wrote 31 books in all.

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