Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting the Early American Novel

What are the origins of the American novel? Does it begin with the imagination, when Europeans first began dreaming of life in the New World?¹ Does it begin with Daniel Defoe’s adventurers, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, and their literary progeny? Or does the novel need a material presence in the soil of the New World? Does it begin in 1789, with William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy?—which Isaiah Thomas, with shrewd prescience, marketed as the “first American novel.” Or does it begin even earlier, in 1742, with Benjamin Franklin’s first American edition of Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Pamela, published at his shop in Philadelphia? These are all arguable inception points for American fiction, grounded in particular kinds of historicist practices. But what if what we think we know about the material history of the novel in British America is wrong—or at least more complicated? What if we were able to push back by five decades the date of the first novel published in the American colonies and locate that first novel publication not in relatively liberal Pennsylvania, but at the height, and in the heart, of conservative Puritan Massachusetts? If the first novel published in the colonies was not a sentimental story about middling kinds of white people, as were Pamela and The Power of Sympathy, but rather a story about race, sex, violence, slavery, and colonialism, how would those facts change the stories we tell about the novel and early America?

We want to posit that origin stories matter: beginnings beget endings. They provide us with a frame of reference. They make certain kinds of texts and narratives legible, while suppressing other kinds of texts. By beginning with Pamela and The Power of Sympathy, we privilege the stories of middling white women, stories the majority of the academy has learned to feel comfortable with—and value—over the past thirty years. Pamela and The Power of Sympathy set us on a sentimental path, and everywhere we look, we see more of the same: Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, Kelroy, Dorval, Emily Hamilton, and The Female Quixote, all fixated on the marriage dilemmas of middling white men and women, a trope that emphasizes choice and the importance of consent. Marriage, as Jay Fliegelman, Jan Lewis, Nancy Cott, and others have noted, functioned as a convenient metaphor for voluntary association to symbolize the consent necessary for the functioning of a democratic republic.² While this kind of volunteerism is one strand of the literary history of early America, its dominance has occluded other equally resonant narratives.

If, instead of consent, we began our literary history of the novel in early America with a tale of coercion and violence, what other stories might become legible? That there is another intriguing contender for the first American novel is not a newly discovered fact so much as a newly recovered fact. Literary history is a continual process of forgetting and recovering. One such repeatedly recovered and forgotten text has been English politician Henry Neville’s (1620–94) The Isle of Pines, first published in London in 1668 and, it seems, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in that same year by Marmaduke Johnson. Although The Isle of Pines was well known to old-school bibliographers and continues to be of interest today to scholars of utopias and Robinsonades,³ it is not nearly so well known among early Americanists, especially those whose work focuses on the history of the novel. It does not figure at all in Lillie Deming Loshe’s The Early American Novel (1907), Carl Van Doren’s The American Novel (1921), Herbert Ross Brown’s The Sentimental Novel in America (1940), Henri Petter’s The Early American Novel (1971), Patricia Parker’s Early American Fiction: A Reference Guide (1984), Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986), Emory Elliott and Cathy Davidson’s The Columbia History of the American Novel (1991), Shirley Samuels’s Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American...