[Amelia].

Abstract

Amelia: or the Faithless Briton, labeled “An Original Novel, Founded Upon Recent Facts,” first appeared in The Columbian Magazine in late 1787.1 The magazine, published from Philadelphia, was among the most prominent and ornate of the period: issues regularly included engravings, contemporary music, and essays, poetry, and fiction by eminent writers of the time. The physician Benjamin Rush published a series of essays on contemporary social issues, including slavery, in the 1787 numbers, and Jeremy Belknap serialized The Foresters, an allegorical novel about US independence, in its pages as well. Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson, Francis Hopkinson, and John Trumbull published poetry in its pages, Charles Brockden Brown’s essay series “The Rhapsodist” appeared there in 1789, and a number of new works by American authors—Royall Tyler’s play “The Contrast,” Noah Webster’s collected essays, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, for example— were reviewed in its pages. Prominent nonfiction works—biographical sketches by Belknap, an early history of the American Revolution, an early biography of Benjamin Franklin—appeared therein as well, though fiction always figures prominently. Edward Pitcher’s bibliography of magazine fiction lists several works of fiction, much original, in virtually every issue before the magazine folded in 1792.2 When Amelia appeared, it did so alongside the oriental tale “The Complaint of Iman” and an installment of The Foresters, and beside essays on “religion in general,” the development of the arts in ancient Egypt, vision’s relation to passion, Quebec, and the Canary Islands. Amelia was successful and popular enough to enjoy multiple reprinting, including in The Massachusetts Magazine in 1789, The New-York