Figures of Authorship in Mathew Carey’s Transatlantic Yellow Fever Pamphlets

Recently, Mathew Carey’s yellow fever pamphlet, which chronicles the plight of Philadelphians in the 1790s, has received considerable attention from scholars looking to understand civil, racial, and national identity in the first decade of the early Republic. Little attention has been paid to the English and Irish reprints of this pamphlet. The variants that appear in these reprints (including the Dublin edition that render Carey’s authorship anonymous and presents the pamphlet as the work of “an eminent physician”) reveal the multiple hands at work in remaking Carey’s pamphlet outside of Philadelphia, calling into questions assumptions about authorship and national identity in the age of revolution.