Cheap Editions, Little Books, and Handsome Duodecimos: A Book History Approach to Antebellum Slave Narratives

Abstract

In this essay I look at three canonical antebellum slave narratives from a book-historical perspective – the narratives of James Williams (1838), Frederick Douglass (1845) and Solomon Northup (1853) – to show that despite similarities in terms of content, these works differed greatly in both formal and cultural terms. While Narrative of James Williams was published as a piece of antislavery propaganda and wholly embedded in abolitionist discourse, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was a much more personal literary endeavor which involved Douglass himself as well as informal abolitionist networks. Released a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the context of the “Uncle Tom mania” of the early 1850s, Twelve Years a Slave was, to a large extent, a commercial venture that capitalized on the latest literary trend. Each of these three narratives, therefore, occupied a different space in antebellum print culture. By examining how these texts were published and circulated, I show that generalizations about antebellum slave narratives – slave narratives as bestsellers, as directed toward a Northern white audience, as a distinct genre recognizable by all – distort the complex history of this literary tradition. I finally argue that acknowledging the heterogeneous nature of what we usually perceive as a homogeneous whole gives us a better sense of how these texts might have been variously received and consumed in the decades preceding the Civil War.