III. Reform Literature and Readership

The reprinting of reform genres helps isolate trends of reception among distinct readership groups, and the ways in which the newspaper acted as a regulatory medium in the nineteenth-century. Even while the newspaper had the power to democratize the flow of information, this democratizing power was subject to the same divisions of class, gender, and race that are present in much of nineteenth-century print culture. In a complementary vein,, we demonstrate how the Wright Collection, while among the most comprehensive archive of nineteenth-century American literature, reinscribes similar divisions. For instance, the inclusion of slave narratives—which are documentary in nature—in a collection of American fiction recontextualizes them through a white, middle-class lens, echoing the regulatory efforts of nineteenth-century newspaper editors who excerpted the words of black writers to both sensationalize them and fictionalize them. By examining the trajectory of the few slave narratives included in the Wright Collection, as well as the trajectory of more “blockbuster” hits like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we not only investigate the ways in which newspaper editors in the nineteenth-century held the violence of slave narratives at arm’s length but also how this attitude eventually trickled down to recontextualize these texts in twenty-first-century datasets such as Wright.

As an opening observation, we would note that slave narratives seem to be far less frequently reprinted in our newspaper corpus than a parallel genre, city mysteries, despite the genres sharing many features and readers during the period. The city-mystery has long been considered alongside slave narratives as sharing a common vocabulary of reform as well as sharing a similar type of immense popularity in the period.31 As Paul Erickson notes, while city-mysteries were primarily considered ephemeral works, George Lippard’s Quaker City “was the best-selling work of fiction in America before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and at least one of Justin Jones’ urban novellas, The Belle of Boston, was reported by a contemporary Bostonian to have sold at least twenty thousand copies.”32 Given that these two genres share much in common in terms of popularity and a shared vocabulary of reform, comparing the size of reprint clusters between the two starkly illustrates the paucity of attention given to slave narratives and other works by Black writers in the middle-class, white press. The reprint clusters associated with city-mystery writers such as George Thompson, while certainly not our biggest clusters, are substantially larger than any cluster we have for a slave narrative reprinting. Thompson’s reprint clusters often comprise 60–80 reprints, while the few clusters associated with slave narratives typically include fewer than 10.

While literary theorists have long since accepted that city-mysteries and slave narratives often borrowed language and tropes from one another, the larger number of reprints associated with the city-mysteries within Wright and the decided lack of reprints associated with the few slave narratives included in the same dataset is perplexing. As Ostrowski argues, “slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Henry Box Brown, and others, and fictional exposes of urban life, by authors such as George Lippard and George Thompson, enjoyed simultaneous and unprecedented popularity in the urban northeastern United States in the 1840s and 1850s.”33 Since we already know that the slave narrative was incredibly popular to nineteenth-century readers, we must then question why there are so few reprints and to what extent is this absence a result of flaws in Wright’s collection practices, gaps in our newspaper data, or a difference in uptake between readers consuming bound books versus ephemeral newspapers. By turning to specific examples of works by Black writers, which include both slave narratives and novels, as well as the trajectory of works written by white writers engaging taking on the personae of formerly enslaved people, we can begin to confront these absences.

No discussion of reprinted reform literature in nineteenth-century periodicals can ignore the pop-culture behemoth of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Nevertheless, we hope in this section to compare the circulation of that work to related forms of reform literature, such as the slave narrative and the city-mystery. We are less interested in how widely segments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were reprinted, or which specific excerpts from that novel were most frequently taken up, than we are in how the uptake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a narrative written by a white writer, can serve as a comparative baseline for analyzing the circulation of other reform literature, including narratives written by formerly enslaved people as a form of memoir. By examining novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin we can see how white abolitionist writers exploited the suffering of enslaved people in their novels and also occasionally sensationalized and recontextualized enslavement to reflect the tendency towards humor that we have seen in the fragments discussed earlier in this chapter.

As Corey Capers notes, “late colonial and early national newspapers and almanacs had frequently trafficked in jokes at the expense of African Americans.”34 However, Black Americans in both colonial and antebellum America “figured prominently in literary production both on the page (as writing subjects as well as subjects of writing) and off (as readers, editors, printers, engravers, compositors, papermakers, librarians, and so on).”35 That the hands of the Black compositor may have set the type of racist, ridiculing jokes at their expense demonstrates the larger instabilities of the middle-class, white newspaper, which often mediated the perspective and voices of Black writers in ways that uplifted the authority of white editors while simultaneously sensationalizing the narrative of the enslaved.

By turning to specific examples of the few slave narratives that are collected in Wright, as well as their uptake in the white, middle-class press, we observe strategies white editors and newspaper readers employ to mediate and obscure the voices of Black Americans. One example of these strategies can be found in the reprinting—or, perhaps better, the avoidance of reprinting—of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Published in 1861, under the pseudonym Linda Brent, this narrative details Jacobs’ escape from slavery in North Carolina by hiding for months in the attic of her grandmother’s house. Our reprint-detection methods uncover only three clusters derived from this text. The first comprises a single instance, which isn’t a reprint of Jacobs’ text at all, but instead evidences Jacobs borrowing material from the newspaper and including it in her text. The anonymous epigraph on the title page of Jacob’s first edition is printed also in the January 1st, 1839 edition of The Anti-Slavery Examiner, as a quotation given by “a woman of North Carolina.” The second cluster including Jacob’s narrative contains only two reprints, which draw from the “Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders” section of the novel. One reprint, from the April 6th, 1861 edition of the Anti-slavery Bugle (Lisbon, Ohio) titles the article “SKETCHES OF SLAVEHOLDERS. A chapter from “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” edited by L. Maria Child.,” attributing the selection to Jacobs’ white editor rather than to Linda Brent, Jacobs’ pseudonym. The final cluster contains only two reprints of an excerpt from the narrative in which Jacobs is criticizing the passivity of Southern wives,36 both circulating in Australia. Significantly, these reprints are some of the only “genuine” clusters we have, in which the newspaper latches onto a substantial moment in the narrative rather than a biblical verse or epigraph.

Notably, both of these reprints shorten its title to “The Slave Girl” and include no authorial attribution. Even as an excerpt, however, there is little denying the subject of the piece and its relationship to the particular American institution of slavery, as well as how it calls out the complicit role of the Southern white woman in facilitating its permutations.

Knowing that slave narratives were popular reading in the nineteenth-century, how can it be that the only substantial reprints we find are either from the international press or are attributed to white editors? As Cohen argues in an investigation of slave narrative circulation in the nineteenth-century, part of what made slave narratives so popular was that they “were seen to possess unique claims on literary authenticity.”37 However, the value placed on the slave narrative’s claim to authenticity also meant that works suspected to be fabricated were met with distaste. Harriet Jacobs dealt with this backlash due to her use of pseudonyms in the narrative in order to protect her identity. Changing or censoring details was a common strategy of those who had escaped slavery to avoid recapture, but that survival strategy provoked unjust scrutiny from white editors and readers. Additionally, as in the case of Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Jacobs, “slave narratives were usually solicited, transcribed, or subjected to rigorous editing by white abolitionists, whose own literary tastes often eclipsed the voices of the former slaves.”38 While Black American slave narrative writers were often scrutinized for their authenticity, pseudo-slave narratives written by white authors were often exempt from this same surveillance, even though these narratives had virtually no claim to fact. While there was enormous backlash to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s position as a relatively well-respected white, northern woman ensured that she had the resources to publish a second book, the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in order to respond to criticism in a public-facing way, a privilege not often available to writers of color.

While we have previously addressed the practices of newspaper editors (mostly that they wished that the content of a newspaper be read as timely, tailored, and effective), narratives such as Incidents threaten this purpose and reveal how subaltern readers apprehended the informational flow of the newspaper in ways that contradicted editors’ intentions. As scholars such as Benjamin Fagan have argued, Jacobs draws particular attention to alternative uses for newspapers in the narrative itself. As Linda Brent plans to trick her former owner, Dr. Flint, into thinking that she has escaped to New York, she decides, in order to convince him that she is in New York, that “for once, the paper that systematically abuses the colored people, was made to render them a service.”39 As Fagan argues, “For Jacobs, the Herald has value precisely because some of its content is time less rather than time ly. Street names will not change overnight, so it makes no difference whether the Herald she acquires was printed last week or last year. At the same time, Jacobs can obtain the paper because its news is no longer new and therefore useless to its intended audience.”40 Jacobs is aware of the ways in which her reappropriation of the newspaper threatens the stable power of the white editor and Incidents as a narrative that stands to question the positions of power within the newspaper exists alongside—and in contradiction to—its lack of uptake in white-middle class newspapers. Because of the instability of both nineteenth-century American fiction as well as nineteenth-century newspapers, Jacobs can simultaneously be rejected from the white press and appropriate its material for her own purposes.

Slave narratives “serve a dual function as documentary evidence for the peril and brutality of life under slavery and as an index of the writer’s freedom,”41 but this documentary evidence was only allowed to circulate through the mediation and approval of white readers and editors. Secondly, this documentary evidence is only available for computational research when it is collected into datasets like Wright. While the Wright Collection notably fails to include works by nineteenth-century Black writers such as Martin Delany, Frank Webb, Julia Collins, or Hannah Crafts, there are other texts whose trajectory echoes Incidents’s in salient ways. While Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig is included in the Wright Collection, for example, our algorithm cannot detect any reprints within our newspaper database. This absence echoes Eric Gardner’s scholarship on the lack of traction that Wilson’s narrative had in Northern abolitionist circles, possibly because the subject of the novel—which focuses on the horrific abuse of a Black indentured servant by her Northern mistress—problematizes the ideal of the North as a magical safe haven from the “shadows of slavery.”42

Similarly, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, which is regarded as the first novel written and published by a Black writer, appears in only five reprint clusters, all of which gather around articles printed before Brown’s novel was published, indicating that they were borrowed from the newspaper and repurposed by Brown rather than the other way around, much as Lara Langer Cohen describes in her analysis of the novel’s use of excerpts43. Ultimately, this means that we detect zero reprints of Clotel itself. Just as Our Nig represented a threat to Northern idealization, Clotel, which focuses on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ children, threatened the idealized story of American nation-building. The fact that Clotel was published in Europe and addresses America’s inability to confront its own racism further antagonizes American abolitionists since “immediate abolition had always insisted that the solution to slavery must be located within the nation rather than outside of it.”44 While there are likely many reasons why neither of these texts have any discernible traction in the newspapers we have access to—at least through the particular computational methods we have employed—that they challenged the idealizations of Northern abolitionists in similar ways seems to us significant. A paucity of newspaper reprints illustrates how white newspaper readers and editors struggled to maintain authority and power in a time where their influence over paper (paper identification, freedom papers, books) was being questioned. This same struggle for power over paper and its circulation is evidenced even when these texts are rendered digitally.

Another text in the Wright Collection whose trajectory in the press compares usefully to Incidents is Solomon Northup’s 1853 Twelve Years a Slave, which details his kidnap and sale into Southern slavery. We have identified five reprinting clusters including this narrative, with the largest comprising thirty-five reprints. Of the five clusters, only one excerpts Northup’s text itself, rather than an advertisement from the novel’s paratext. This one reprinting of the text, itself, however, is itself an advertisement: a letter, included in the novel, that Northup sent to his friends in the North as a part of a larger plot summary intended to sell the text. This excerpt-cum-summary, titled “The Kidnapping Case,” appears once, in The National Era. In addition to advertisements in England and Tasmania (following a similar trend to Incidents) we have also located advertisements in places such as Ohio and Iowa (which were both free states by the 1850s when Northup’s narrative was published) as well as numerous advertisements in The National Era and Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Existing scholarship already evidences Douglass’ frequent promotion of Northup’s narrative: “Douglass emphasized Northup’s success by reprinting at steady intervals extensive puffs from Northup’s publishers trumpeting its successful circulation across a wide geographic space.”45 The trajectory of this text in the newspaper echoes the ways in which Incidents was pushed to European newspapers or papers in the West.

Like Incidents, the reprinting history of Twelve Years a Slave appears to largely comprise a few occurrences in Black newspapers on the east coast (in which only Northup’s narrative is advertised), some international attention, and limited reprinting in newspapers from free states in the midwest. The lack of “viral” traction for either of these texts in white newspapers suggests that slave narratives, when told by a formerly enslaved person, could not be so easily repackaged and distributed to white audiences in the newspaper as serial, sentimental, and morally driven novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The sexual violence and brutal torture that are laid bare in both texts are only able to be digested by the white, middle-class newspaper reader if it can be talked about as an issue happening “over there.” The international printings and printings in the midwest region of the United States suggest that the violence of slavery can only be observed by the white, middle-class at a distance—held at arms length rather than held close to the eye like the small type of the newspaper requires. Even if both of these texts had slightly more traction in abolitionist circles in book-form, like we have discussed earlier in the chapter, when only book-readers are given access to the text, entire populations of readers are left out.

We can also compare the circulation of slave narratives with that of “pro-slavery” texts, as well as texts that promoted the deportation of enslaved Black Americans to Liberia. While these texts also do not circulate as often as a blockbuster like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we do find significantly more reprints from them than from Incidents or Twelve Years, with reprint numbers occurring more frequently in the range of thirty to sixty reprints on average. Perhaps this perceived traction is due to the sheer quantity of such texts in the Wright collection,—a significant observation in and of itself. Novels such as Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, or, Southern Life As It Is by Mary Henderson Eastman and Liberia, or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments by Sarah Hale both reflect the “slavery at a distance” theme that unite the reprintings of Incidents and Twelve Years a Slave. When white Americans aren’t actively trying to deny the violence of slavery and the fact that, as Saidiya Hartman states, “to be a slave is to be under the brutal power and authority of another,”46 they promote the mass expulsion of Black Americans to another continent.

The clusters including Hale’s novel are mostly excerpts she collected into her book, much like Twain discussed above, but it is notable that they were nearly all published on behalf of the “American Society for the Colonizing the Free People of Colour.” The largest cluster from Eastman’s novel—which comprises seventy-four reprints—is an excerpt reading, “there is no evidence in all the valley of the Nile that the negro race ever attained a higher degree of civilization than is at present exhibited in Congo and Ashantee. I mention this, not from any feeling hostile to that race, but simply to controvert an opinion very prevalent in some parts of the United States.”47 Significantly, many of the reprints of both of these texts occur in Virginia, Washington D.C., New York, Mississppi, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, etc. which were all states actively involved in the debate over slavery, unlike some of the other reprints we have discussed in this section which largely occur in areas of the country less directly involved in the same debates.

The reprinting trends in the texts that we have identified in this section illustrate both the biases inherent in nineteenth-century newspaper editing as well as those of contemporary database formation. The newspaper corpus we use to trace the fragmentation of novels through the press excludes much of the black press and other forms of Black American periodical culture. Additionally, the Wright Collection reflects twentieth-century collecting biases. Thus the noted absence of Black American voices in our results is not a merely accidental. Deciding, for example, to include a documentary slave narrative in a collection marked as fiction—and alongside sensationalist, pro-slavery texts—is not a neutral decision and should not be treated as such. When all these texts are collected and registered under the same genre of “fiction” it both recontextualizes them for a reader as well as impacts the ability of computational analysis to distinguish between the two. The opacity of our datasets without a doubt has implications for our results that must be acknowledged.

We do not suggest any overarching, conspiratory reasons for why these texts traveled through the newspaper in the ways we have identified, because to do so would flatten the complexities of Black literature and writing in the nineteenth-century. We do point to overarching, systemic reasons while our collections are fragmentary in these specific ways, and why computational analyses reflect and even amplify those oversights. To not address these clear patters would repeat historical violence that nineteenth-century writers, readers, and activists committed against Black writers. As Lauren Klein writes, “the digital humanities, when confronted with the unique demands of the archive of slavery, instead requires a rethinking of what it truly means to know” (Klein 665). Part of this reconsideration of knowing require we not ignore the people for whom newspapers perpetuated violence while praising the democratizing power of its volatility.

As Eric Gardner notes, the black periodical press “was the central publication outlet for many black writers—and especially for texts that were not slave narratives” and that most nineteenth-century black writers were “thinking about periodical publication as often (or more often) than book publication.”48 The absence of the black press from our database of newspapers, as well as the lack of reprints that we have been able to locate for texts written by Black writers who are included in Wright speaks to the exclusivity of the cultural privileges of white nationalism. The dominance of white nationalism in general, and in the nineteenth-century in particular, meant that even objects with seeming neutrality such as paper were used to surveil and govern Black Americans. While we do not offer any singular rationale or prescription for why the Black texts in Wright seem to have attained little traction in the white, middle-class press (even in abolitionist papers) there are some thematic similarities in the trajectories of these texts which speak to the ways in which nineteenth-century white citizens governed, edited, mediated, censored, and otherwise controlled many texts written by Black writers—even through a medium as volatile and difficult to control as the newspaper.

We have previously discussed in this chapter how the newspaper acted as a regulatory medium of white, middle-class ideology. The ability of the newspaper to police and surveil writing and its movement across the nation was a system that white editors and writers, alike, participated in and even depended on. There were many writers and editors who attempted, at varying levels of success, to control the circulation of information through the newspaper. However, the newspaper’s ability to circulate information freely was double-edged, both increasing access to textual media for many people barred from literary culture while ensuring that a singular editor or writer never had full authority over how a text would circulate. Nineteenth-century periodical circulation is rife with simultaneous truths: it is simultaneously the case that the newspaper made literature widely available to people across the United States while at the same time gatekeeping, through collective attention or inattention, what kinds of literature were reprintable. Similarly, it is simultaneously true that each of the reprinted texts that we have identified in this chapter are linked by an “original” copy while at the same time, the messiness of literary text networks in the nineteenth-century make identifying the beginning of a particular network not only difficult, but not entirely productive.