Figures of Authorship in Mathew Carey's Transatlantic Yellow Fever Pamphlets Author(s): Molly O'Hagan Hardy Source: Book History , 2014, Vol. 17 (2014), pp. 221-249 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43956355 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Book History This content downloaded from 203.29.107.54 on Fri, 01 Jan 2021 03:38:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Figures of Authorship in Mathew Carey's Transatlantic Yellow Fever Pamphlets Molly O 'Hagan Hardy When Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic of 1793 struck, striving printer and publisher Mathew Carey became self-appointed narrator of the epi- demic, reporting what he witnessed, remediating anecdotes, and including lists of the recently deceased in three editions he wrote and published in November of A Short Account of the Malignant Fever ; Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia , and a fourth edition in January of 1794. Arriving from Ireland less than a decade before and still struggling to make it as a bookseller and newspaper editor, Carey might have seemed an unlikely candidate for such a role, but he combined his expertise as an editor, a bookseller, a journalist, and a polemicist to produce a pamphlet that was both lauded and rebuked in its day.