The goal of the Yale University Press edition of Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave is to provide readers for the first time with a definitive critical text of this historically important work. While a few other editions of Douglass’s novella have been reprinted in modern times, none of their texts of The Heroic Slave have been guided by the principles of textual editing. Other editions have reproduced an electronic facsimile or have reset the text of one of the work’s three earliest printings. Such an “uncritical” preparation of a text overlooks the corruptions of the author’s intentions by contemporary copy editors, compositors, or bookbinders. It also ignores any “authoritative” corrections or revisions that Douglass might have instructed for later printings of his work. Instead, our goal for this edition is to recover and reproduce a text that accurately reflects Douglass’s intentions for The Heroic Slave.
The first step in our work on The Heroic Slave was to discover as much as possible about its publication history. Our research uncovered three potentially authoritative texts for the novella: the first edition of Autographs for Freedom, published in late December 1852 (copyrighted 1853) by the Boston firm of John P. Jewett; the second, printed serially in Frederick Douglass’ Paper on 4, 11, 18, and 25 March 1853; and the third, a British edition of Autographs for Freedom, published by the London firm of Low, Son & Company and John Cassell later in the spring of 1853.
4. The Heroic Slave, in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 March 1853. Widener Library, Harvard University.
Based on our critical reading and the collation of potentially authoritative texts of The Heroic Slave, and on an analysis of external evidence, the editors selected the Boston edition of Autographs for Freedom as the copy-text to be critically edited. The present text was reproduced as carefully as possible from its original published source, and then checked against the two subsequent versions. The editors strove to preserve the distinctive features, dubbed “accidentals” by textual scholars, of the work that Douglass intended to make available to his readers, so the original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, and other distinctive stylistic usages are reproduced here, although the possibility exists that many such features were introduced by a copy editor or compositor. The editors then compared or collated these three texts and compiled a list of variations in the texts.
Since the editors’ goal was to provide the text of The Heroic Slave as Douglass intended it for his 1853 readers, we made only twenty-seven alterations, or emendations, to the original Boston-published Autographs for Freedom text. Most were intended to correct errors made by the original compositors and were based on intensive study of the subsequent two authoritative texts of the novella. A smaller number of our emendations are what textual editors call “substantives”: changes of capitalization, punctuation, or spelling to correct grammatical errors that, the editors believe, Douglass could not have intended, because they produce confusion or provide misinformation. Where possible, Douglass’s usage elsewhere in the novella or his other contemporary writings guided such emendations. For a detailed discussion of textual issues in The Heroic Slave,” see the forthcoming volume Other Writings in the Yale University Press Frederick Douglass Papers.