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Figures of Authorship in Mathew Carey's Transatlantic Yellow Fever Pamphlets Author(S): Molly O'hagan Hardy Source: Book History , 2014, Vol

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Figures of Authorship in Mathew Carey's Transatlantic Yellow Fever Pamphlets Author(S): Molly O'hagan Hardy Source: Book History , 2014, Vol 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. Recently, Carey's pamphlet has received considerable attention from scholars looking to understand civil, racial, and national identity in the first decade of the early Republic, but little attention has been paid to the London and Dublin reprints of this pamphlet.1 The variants that appear in these reprints reveal the multiple hands at work in remaking Carey's pam- phlet outside of Philadelphia, and this transatlantic network calls into ques- tion teleological formulations that situate his pamphlet as key in the making of national identity. It certainly plays a central role in the formation of U.S. cultural history, and by examining the international iterations of Carey's Short Account of the Malignant Fever , we learn it was also engaged in a transatlantic radicalism permeating the 1790s, a radicalism that exceeded national designations. In what follows, I trace the pamphlet across the At- lantic, first to London and then to Dublin in an effort to define that radical- ism and its relationship to the construction of authorship in the period. In the late eighteenth century, reprints of British works flooded the Unit- ed States's markets, but reprinting in the other direction was far less com- mon. Scholarship in the last century has largely ignored instances of such 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 222 Book History after William Cairns completed his two-volume British Criticisms of Ameri- can Writings, 1783-181 j in 1928. Cairns reports that with few exceptions, American-authored works did little to strike "the [British] popular fancy."2 And even when an American text was reprinted abroad, Cairns concludes more often than not "the American volume had been handed to the printer for copy without a glance."3 So, when changes do occur to an American volume, what are we to make of them? Editorial remixing and remaking of American texts offer insights into different models of authorship at work in the Anglo-Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century. A book history approach to Carey's pamphlets makes it possible to perceive transatlantic networks that are both deeply enmeshed in and also transcend temporal and spatial particularities.4 Tracing the pamphlet's transatlantic circulation reveals how Carey, as author, was shaped by forces outside the U.S. and how his pamphlet was likewise reshaped outside of national boundaries. My analysis considers reprints to understand Carey and the networks of radicalism forged in the transatlantic world of the 1790s, moving from a U.S. edition to its reprinting in England and Ireland. Specifically, changes to Carey's pamphlet in London and then in Dublin reflect the types of sov- ereignty and authority that a complicated transatlantic figure like Carey at once claimed and had bestowed upon him in different locations in the period. In the U.S., he claimed sole and proprietary authorship of his pam- phlet, rather than awaiting the joint publication that he was to author with other members of The Civic Relief Committee. The first London publish- ers of the pamphlet, Darton and Harvey, mimic Carey's model of author as compiler in the creation of their own edition, while Joseph Johnson, a prominent publisher of medical texts, presumably published an unmediated reprint for a second time in London because of its potential interest to the medical community. A year later, Dublin publisher, J. Rice, also marketed the pamphlet as a medical text, and perhaps because of Carey's pernicious experiments with authorship as a young man in Dublin a decade before or perhaps because of Carey's brother William Paulet Carey's recent oppro- brium, Rice disguises the pamphlet as the work of an "eminent physician of Philadelphia." Through a look at the transatlantic iterations of Carey's pamphlet, I recast it as an international publishing event, thereby revealing the situational politics at work in constructing authorship in the late eigh- teenth century.5 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 Yellow Fever Pamphlets 223 Models of Citizenship In his youth in Dublin, Carey learned of the power, potentially precarious and profitable, that came with claiming ownership of the products of one's intellectual labor. English regulation of the press in its closest colony offers many examples of the penal appropriation associated with authorship in the early modern period.6 At the age of nineteen, Carey wrote The Urgent Necessity (1779), a virulent attack on Ireland's Penal Laws. Though The Ur- gent Necessity was, according to Carey, "wholly inoffensive," the advertise- ment for it "caused considerable alarm" from both the Catholic Church and the Castle in Ireland.7 He begins his advertisement "To the Roman Catholics of Ireland" with a prescient comparison, "At a Time when America by a desperate Effort, has nearly emancipated herself from Slavery," and ends it with utter vitriol, "To gain, for this Country, a REAL, durable Peace, unattainable between TYRANTS and SLAVES, has been his [the author's] sole inducement to this undertaking."8 Carey's invective not only angered the Protestant ruling class, but also the very people whose plight he hoped to expose. The most influential Catholics of the day, including the Arch- bishop of Dublin and Lord Kenmore, wanted "to make fair weather with the government, and to clear themselves of any participation in the seditious publication," and they therefore "denounced the obnoxious advertisement in strong terms," offering a reward of 40 pounds for discovery of its author and engaging lawyers to carry out prosecution when the culprit was found.9 To avoid capture, Carey was sent to Paris by his father. In about 1782, Carey returned to Dublin where he became conductor of the Freeman's Journal , the most radical newspaper of the day. Some two years later, Carey started his own newspaper, the Volunteer's Journal , an equally antiestablishment venue. Carey's inflammatory rhetoric in his news- paper meant that, once again, according to British officials in Ireland, he had to be contained. In his attacks on Chancellor of the Exchequer John Foster, Carey addressed the heart of the local resistance to English domination, and in so doing, he identified that which the Irish should be fighting. He published these vitriols anonymously, however, and by never "authoring" any texts, Carey eludes the responsibilities of ownership, so that it looks as if anyone could be writing these pieces and that there is no constraint on who says what. Carey's words were understood as pernicious, and so Carey set out for a place where such censures were not in place, where he could own his authorship both for the public good and to secure himself a profit. Carey's attack on Foster was a turning point in print culture in Ireland, one 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 224 Book History that set the stage for the turbulence that resulted in the Rebellion of 1798. Foster's swift reaction to Carey's newspaper established the precedent that the administration could henceforth use the courts as a weapon to frighten the press. Newspaper editors became more cautious about criticizing the government, a fact that the return of Carey's pamphlet more than a decade later illustrates.10 Though Carey's printed words would return to Ireland, he never would. In fact, he did not even stay in Dublin long enough to see the changes he wrought. Fearing for his safety, Carey disguised himself as a woman and fled to Philadelphia, arriving on November 1, 17 84. 11 The author who had evaded authorities by escaping to Paris, who had hid out in his friends' bookshops in Dublin, and who had dressed as a woman to board a ship for Philadelphia undetected, could, in the new setting of Phila- delphia, now lay claim to his voice in the hopes of serving the public good.
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