Revisiting Thomas Dunckerley's biography proves surprising not only for what it reveals about Dunckerley's hidden history, but also for what it suggests about changes in how late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Anglo-American society conceived of what we might mistakenly believe rather static concepts: personal identity, the stability of social status, what it means to be a hero and, most relevant to this study, what constitutes a proper biography. To most attentive readers, it would seem Dunckerley's complete life history has been known since shortly after his death in 1795, and was definitively restated in 1891 by Henry Sadler. However, the craft of biography has long been tricky. In Western history, if a figure was significant enough to commission or inspire a biography, circumstances typically guaranteed that the result would be neither reliable nor unbiased. Think, for example, of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, or Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, both of which deviate considerably from modern standards of scholarship and objectivity – that simply was not their intent. Dependent on scientific requirements for documentary evidence, scholarly method and at least a modicum of objectivity, modern academic biographies are a fairly recent innovation and represent a significant shift away from the traditional purposes and methodology of the genre. Thus it is not surprising that we find none of the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century lives of Dunckerley conforms to today's standards of ‘good biography’, not even Sadler's.