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Please note that this digital resource is now being published by the Electronic Imprint of Virginia University Press, contact details are as follows:

Mark Saunders (click here to email)

Assistant Director/Marketing & Sales

Manager, Electronic Imprint

University of Virginia Press

Box 400318

Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318

Telephone: +001 434 924-6064

www.ei.virginia.edu

or:

Jason Coleman (click here to email)

This electronic text project is sponsored by the Collegium for African American Research, the Du Bois Institute of Harvard University, Munster University, and King Alfred's College, Winchester

General Editors: 
Professor Maria Diedrich, Munster University
Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Harvard University
Professor Christopher Mulvey, King Alfred's College, Winchester

"The Clotel problem is easily stated. Clotel's author, William Wells Brown, published the novel Clotel in four different versions between 1853 and 1867. It appeared in 1853 as Clotel; or the President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. It appeared in 1860 as Miralda, or The Beautiful Quadroon: A Romance of American Slavery Founded on Fact. It appeared in 1864 as Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States. And finally, it appeared in 1867 as Clotelle; or the Colored Heroine. A Tale of the Southern States. These versions are sufficiently different to raise issues of textual identity and of publishing practicality."
Christopher Mulvey

Why should we be interested in Clotel? Well, its theme is the fate of the black children of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, and it is traditionally taken to be the first published African American novel. It first appeared in London in 1853. It is not the first African American novel published in the United States (that title goes to Harriet E Wilson's Our Nig, published in 1859), but Clotel as a first African American novel is sufficiently prominent to attract attention, and William Wells Brown as a self-taught and self-liberated slave in the mould of Frederick Douglass is sufficiently significant to warrant study.

Theoretical and practical questions concerning variant texts are regularly raised in relation to the editing of Shakespeare's King Lear and Wordsworth' s Prelude for example, both of which texts exist in radically different versions. They are questions just as easily raised in the case of Brown and Clotel though they are less commonly asked. Clotel is a highly unusual case among early African American novels. Of the first one hundred, only a very few exist in more than one form, and single copy novels do not give rise to the kind of textual, bibliographical, and editorial problems usually associated with establishing a true or authoritative text. For Clotel there are no manuscripts, corrections, proofs, or second editions. But we do have those four versions, and they mean that the first African American novel exists in four different ways.

Structurally, the plot remains the same: the black slave child's attempts to escape from the home of the white slaver father. This mythos is not only found in the versions that Brown produced of Clotel; it also extended to a wider range of his material. It shapes his Narrative, a biography which he published in 1847, and The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom, a play which he published in 1858. The close links between Clotel and the Narrative are reflected in the fact that the first fifty pages of the 1853 Clotel provide a shortened version of the Narrative. This gives both a context and an authentication for the novel. Brown insisted on the accuracy of his information about the workings of the internal slave trade between Virginia and New Orleans and of the Underground Railroad between the South and Canada. As the Narrative shows, Brown worked both as a guard for slave traders and as a conductor for fugitive slaves.
The earliest edition is the most politically explicit, reflected in the fact that Brown makes Thomas Jefferson the heroine's father, justifying the title: Clotel; or the President's Daughter. Later versions make the heroine merely the daughter of a Southern senator. These later versions are American versions, and Brown (or his publishers) may have thought it expedient to remove direct criticism of Jefferson. Commercially it certainly made sense for Brown to re-issue the novel when he returned to the United States. Publication in London provided him with no copyright in America. The first American version also represented in Hollywood terms a 'repurposing' of the property since Brown rewrote it in magazine serial form in 1860. A similar point could be made about the property's paperback reappearance in Redpath's dime-novel series in 1864.

The Clotel ESE will present the four versions of the text, 1853, 1860, 1864, and 1867, in parallel on a website. The ESE will list variations between versions, track changes between any two versions, and animate changes through all four versions. The editions can be searched, manipulated, compared, considered, contrasted and historically collated An introductory essay, extensive notes, illustrations and complete image files of the four versions and other works by Brown will further increase the value of this resource.