The Blind African Slave: Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace

A Note on the Text

A Note on the Text This edition follows the original 1810 edition. For the ease of the reader, I have silently corrected some of the obvious printing, punctuation, subject -verb agreement and spelling errors that appear to me to have no meaning or relation to either the conscious authorial intentions or the unconscious attitudes of Prentiss or Brace. For example, “accordding” is corrected to “according,” “preparitory” to “preparatory,” “monkies” to “monkeys ,” and so on. I have not corrected syntax or changed archaic or unusual spellings that Prentiss uses consistently (e.g., I have not replaced “Barbadoes ” with “Barbados” or “christian” with “Christian”). I have changed the archaic long “S” to the lowercase “s” in the manuscripts transcribed in the appendixes. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the spelling of proper names often was not standardized, and variations occur frequently even in official records. In The Blind African Slave, spellings of names depended not only on Brace’s memory, but also on Prentiss’s transcription of what he heard Brace say. When quoting from published sources, Prentiss spelled authors’ names inconsistently. In all cases, I have let proper names stand in Prentiss’s original spelling within the text of The Blind African Slave but have used a more standard spelling—that is to say, the variant found most often in external documents such as birth, marriage, and death records— in my introduction and annotations. 85 Title page of The Blind African Slave, 1821 edition. Crafts Family Papers, Special Collections, University of Vermont Library. ...