The 1816 Philadelphia Emma: A Forgotten Edition and Its Readers

Abstract

2016 MARKS THE BICENTENNIAL of not one but two noteworthy first editions of Jane Austen's novel Emma. 1816 appears on the title pages of both John Murray's London Emma, which was actually released in late December 1815, and a Philadelphia edition published by "M. CAREY." Known today chiefly to book historians and serious literary collectors, the 1816 Philadelphia Emma was the first Austen novel published in America and the only one printed in the United States during her lifetime (1775-1817). This earliest American edition of an Austen novel made little impact in its own time. Far from inaugurating Austen's transatlantic fame, the reprinted Emma did not inspire any contemporary U.S. publisher to issue further American editions of her novels to compete with expensive imported English editions. Indeed, the 1816 Philadelphia Emma remained the only American printing of Austen's works until a complete set of her novels was issued in 1832--1833, again in Philadelphia, by the firm of Carey & Lea. (1) What's more, the very existence of this earliest American publication of Austen failed to be remembered. Geoffrey Keynes's Jane Austen: A Bibliography (1,929), the first catalogue of historic editions of Austen's novels, included no mention of the 1816' Philadelphia Emma. David Gilson's A Bibliography of Jane Austen (1982) restored this first American edition to the historical record, together with descriptions of the very few copies known to survive---just four, by the time of his 2002 "Jane Austen's 'Emma' in America." In that article, Gilson compared in some detail the text of the first London and Philadelphia editions. Yet he left unanswered many crucial questions about the latter's origins and reception. I have identified two copies of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma unknown to Gilson, bringing the total of confirmed copies to six. (For a descriptive list--what book historians call a census--see the Appendix.) Five copies are held in American college, university, research, or private membership libraries: at Goucher, Yale, the New York Society Library, Dartmouth, and Winterthur. One is in England, at King's College, Cambridge. In numerical terms, this first American edition of Emma is significantly more rare than either Shakespeare's first Folio, of which there are 235 known copies and counting (Smith), or the Hay Psalm Book, the first book printed in the American colonies, of which eleven copies remain ("Census"). Notably, the 1816 Philadelphia Emma is not in the collections of the most distinguished libraries in the English-speaking world, including the Library of Congress and Oxford's Bodleian. Why have so few copies of this first American printing of Austen survived? Why, how, and exactly when in 1816 did the Philadelphia Emma come to be? How many copies of it were printed? What did its first readers think of it? Pursuing these questions has taken me to libraries and archives on both sides of the Atlantic.' (2) Through studying the copies themselves, the personal papers of known original owners, publishers' records, and newspaper advertisements--sources that, in nearly every case, have never been published or digitized--I have uncovered stories about the people who first printed, published, sold, bought, and read Austen's novels in North America, well before she became a household name. Throughout my efforts at literary detection, I have been reminded of the wonderful essay "Emma Considered as a Detective Story," in which the late, great English crime novelist P. D. James approached Emma as a mystery, the forerunner of her own genre. The clues with which I have worked, however, lie not in Austen's words but rather in traces left by her publishers and readers: evidence in print, in manuscript, and in the physical form of books. Because the 1816 Philadelphia Emma was once forgotten, and because so little has been known about it for so long even after its rediscovery, it was a thrill to me in my archival research every time I saw the word "Emma" appear. …