Jennifer Harris (@mypbjam.bsky.social) and I are pleased to share the release of our @broadviewpress.bsky.social edition of William Hill Brown's THE POWER OF SYMPATHY (1789). Here's a short thread about the book, which its original printer, Isaiah Thomas, marketed as the first American novel. 🧵🗃️ - ThreadSky

waterman.bsky.social • 73 days ago

Jennifer Harris (@mypbjam.bsky.social) and I are pleased to share the release of our @broadviewpress.bsky.social edition of William Hill Brown's THE POWER OF SYMPATHY (1789). Here's a short thread about the book, which its original printer, Isaiah Thomas, marketed as the first American novel. 🧵🗃️

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melnickjeffrey1.bsky.social•73 days ago

Oh amazing!

waterman.bsky.social•73 days ago

Thanks! Long time coming.

melnickjeffrey1.bsky.social•73 days ago

I read it for my oral exams! Wild book

waterman.bsky.social•52 days ago

@boston1775.bsky.social Thanks for noting this on your site! I hope there's something fun for you in the intro/notes. Pretty sure we turned up a few things that hadn't been noticed before but would love to hear what you think.

boston1775.bsky.social•52 days ago

I’m looking forward to seeing the connections. Am I right that there’s a gap in the publishing schedule between Canadian and US availability?

waterman.bsky.social•52 days ago

I’m not sure. I’ve reached out to ask.

waterman.bsky.social•73 days ago

Published just months before the new US constitution went into effect, dedicated to "the Young Ladies of America," this seduction novel is often read as imagining the new nation into existence with its virtue already imperiled. It's a wild ride: incest, a Werther-like suicide, etc. Sneak peek:

waterman.bsky.social•73 days ago

"Founded in truth," the novel took up a sex scandal that had preoccupied Bostonians for months: a prominent lawyer, Perez Morton, had twice impregnated his young sister-in-law, Fanny Apthorp, before she took her own life the previous summer. Newspapers circulated her final letters through the fall.

waterman.bsky.social•73 days ago

Our edition includes a thorough account of the scandal, foregrounding its reception by young Americans who were peers of both Fanny Apthorp and the novelist, William Hill Brown. We use their accounts and other contemporary docs to ask: What did it feel like to be young in the wake of the Revolution?

waterman.bsky.social•73 days ago

In foregrounding the Morton scandals as a "truth" on which the novel was "founded," we're less presenting the case as determining the novel's final meanings and instead opening a discussion of the novel's cultural work. Why did young writers turn to the novel (and plays) to expose crimes like these?

waterman.bsky.social•73 days ago

We're less interested, too, in William Hill Brown's authorship than we are in his demographic. To Boston's 20-somethings, someone like Perez Morton, a decade older and a rising political star, presented as a failed Revolutionary patriarch, and the novel is littered with others like him.

waterman.bsky.social•73 days ago

We also examine how Thomas situated the book in a broader print sphere: related texts in his and others' newspapers; excerpts from the novel in his own Massachusetts Magazine; and multiple closet dramas also addressed the case (and previous scandals) in pamphlet form. We include two full plays:

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