Description

The Jennings Journals is an integration of two very different journals kept by Lizzie Borden’s lawyer, Andrew Jackson Jennings. The first one is composed of handwritten entries in a nearly alphabetical fashion. The entries consist of notes, newspaper clipping notations, and interviews conducted with the individuals included. The second journal is a collection of newspaper clippings from August 4 to August 11, 1892, all, of course, relating to the Borden murder case.

Edward Saunders Waring bequeathed the volumes to the Society, confident in our expertise in working with nineteenth-century documents, letters, and diaries. The work on the journals has taken ten years to complete.

The Jennings Journals is not a narrative retelling of the case but, rather a transcription of the documents in their original form, contributing unprecedented primary source material about the manner in which the defense team built their case.

The notes in the first journal were arranged somewhat alphabetically and appear in two different hands—Andrew J. Jennings and Arthur Sherman Phillips, a member of the defense team. Included in most of these entries are citations to portions of news reports located in a second journal, which are gathered by date and span the first eight days of the event, from August 4 to August 11, 1892.

Not only does this book contain the transcriptions of these notes in the order that they were included in the handwritten journal, but also includes the snippets of cross-referenced news reports that the lawyers felt important enough to note. In this way, the reader will have a cohesive read of both journals incorporated into one. Additional brief biographical narrative has been included by the editors, where appropriate and known, to place the person or event in historical context in connection to the case.

To further enhance the collection’s usefulness as a research tool, two extensive glossaries have been included. Containing biographical and historical information pertinent to the documents, they provide an important dimension to the collection.

This volume is, without doubt, the most significant collection of primary source material on the Borden case to be published since the Knowlton Papers in 1994.

Edited by Michael Martins, Dennis A. Binette, and Dr. Stefani Koorey.

Softcover, 514 pp., illustrated; $27.95