The Courtesies of Authorship: Hannah Adams and Authorial Ethics in the Early Republic

Abstract

In 1814, twenty-five years after Isaiah Thomas printed the first indigenous American novel and five years before Washington Irving proved that professional literary in America was viable, John Lowell published an anonymous review of a text just as significant the early history of in America, Jedidiah Morse's An Appeal the Publick (1814). (1) A polemical log of his long-running debate with historian Hannah Adams over publishing rights and authorial ethics, Morse's account prompted Lowell concede that the right of is one of those ill-defined properties, which in all countries, leaves room for controversy (28). It is this nebulous right of authorship that particularly interests me here, because even with the recent rich work on women's and on the early printing/publishing industry, significant work remains be on non-literary women authors' interactions with early American print culture and the ways in which these authors steered its development. (2) I argue that the authorial career of the colonial and religious historian Hannah Adams (1755-1831) indicated the ethical problems created by the confluence of the emergent publishing industry and the rise of professional women authors. In doing so, I focus on what Charles Brockden Brown christened the of national transactions, the public print sphere, and the way Adams's name circulated within it (446). (3) Indeed, this realm seemed make the successes and failures of women authors a public issue, an obsession Adams recognized and lamented, so much so that her 1832 memoir, although perhaps one of the most revealing records of the early American authorial consciousness, is deficient in many details concerning her long authorial career. The Ladies Magazine said much the same: She must have had much more tell of the history of her mind, its struggles, and trials, and triumphs, and the effect of all these in forming her character--but her humble opinion of herself, induced her attach less importance trifling details than her readers would have done (Literary Notices 238). What little Adams did offer was carefully understated and oblique; at her most vituperative she is still vague, as when she writes that her exposed her to the censure, or ridicule of those, whose ideas on the subject are derived from the varying modes of fashion, and not from the unchanging laws of moral rectitude (Adams and Lee 33). In viewing Adams through these memoirs but also through prefaces and public records that pertain her work, we discover an exquisite illustration of an authorial identity at once independent and dependent, intellectual and popular, gendered and ungendered, righteous and immoral, aggressive and reticent--an early author struggling with the ethical polemics inherent professional and its relationship the print market. At stake in this analysis is not just a glimpse of woman's professional in its formative stages but, more broadly, an awareness of an early version of the authorial self and its relationship the market famously present in later antebellum literary writers. In the record of Adams's vocational life, we see the ancestor of Fanny Fern's regular business woman, Ruth Hall, and, in another sense, an early incarnation of Emily Dickinson's lament that Publication--is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man (Fern 223; Dickinson 544). As one reviewer noted, Adams's career exposed before any other the peculiar of a female presenting herself as the of and the assertor [sic] of literary claims (Literary Notices 239). In my first two sections I explore this peculiar trial by dividing Adams into the two selves most early professional writers had occupy: businessperson and writer. The former is practical and measured, dealing with the uncertain business of early American print culture; she is the maker of bargains in the print sphere. …