James Annesley

James Annesley (1715 – 5 January 1760) was an Irishman with a claim to the title Earl of Anglesey, one of the wealthiest estates in Ireland. The dispute between Annesley and his uncle Richard Annesley was infamous in its time, but his story is perhaps best known today as a possible inspiration for the 19th-century novel Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson and other works. He served throughout the campaign against Cartagena, Colombia, but saw no action.

Some records indicate that on 14 September 1751, at Bidborough, Kent, James Annesley had married Margaret I'Anson, and they had had a son and a daughter.

Historiography The Annesley case attracted enormous interest in both Dublin and London. Abridged trial reports appeared in daily newspapers and periodicals, such as the Gentleman's Magazine, and 15 separate accounts of the trial were printed.

Fictionalised accounts circulated in literature during and soon after the events. Eliza Haywood's novel Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (1743) was published before the major trial, and narrates a wildly inaccurate imagining of James' life in the American Colonies. In Tobias Smollett's novel Peregrine Pickle (1751), Smollett says he was a surgeon's mate in the Royal Navy contemporaneous with James Annesley's tenure in the same. It is stated that the story of James Annesley inspired Sir Walter Scott in writing Guy Mannering (1815), though the author never claimed such directly. It is claimed that Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson was inspired by the events of James Annesley's life. In 2014, David Marlett published a historical novel based on the life of James Annesley, Fortunate Son: A Novel of the Greatest Trial in Irish History.

There have been a number of nonfiction works on the subject including Charles Reade's The Wandering Heir (1872).

In 2010 A. Roger Ekirch published Birthright: The True Story That Inspired Kidnapped, a biography of James Annesley. Ekirch wrote that, while historians had long dismissed many details of Annesley's story as fiction, She also mentioned the case in passing in her note to her "Dr. Johnson" detective story "The Lost Heir" published in The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector, though the plot of the story is based chiefly on the later Tichbourne case.

Kidnapped A. Roger Ekirch and others have argued that the novel Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson was inspired by the story of James Annesley. They point to similarities such as an uncle kidnapping a fatherless and rightful heir at a young age and shipping him to the colonies, and the heir then returning and claiming his birthright from the villainous uncle. As Ekirch writes:

It is inconceivable that Stevenson, a voracious reader of legal history, was unfamiliar with the saga of James Annesley, which by the time of Kidnapped’s publication in 1886 had already influenced four other 19th-century novels, most famously Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) and Charles Reade’s The Wandering Heir (1873). but this does not preclude there having been more than one influence on Kidnapped.