Description
Book SynopsisThe sentimental antislavery novel Ida May appeared so like its predecessor in the genre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that for the month of November 1854 reviewers looked for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hand in the narrative. Ida May explores the “possibility” of white slavery from the safety of an exciting, romantic narrative; Ida is kidnapped on her fifth birthday from her white middle-class family in Pennsylvania, stained brown, and sold into slavery in the South. Traumatic amnesia brought about by a severe beating keeps her from knowing whom she really is, until after five years in slavery, her identity is recovered in a dramatic flash of recognition. To the abolitionists of the period, fictional narratives of white enslaved children offered a crucial possibility: to unsettle the legitimacy of a race-based system of enslavement.
The historical appendices to this Broadview Edition provide context for the novel’s reception, Pike’s racial politics, and the “problem” of white slavery in nineteenth-century abolitionist writing.
Trade Review“This welcome edition of Ida May: Story of Things Actual and Possible restores an unjustly forgotten abolitionist novel to wide availability. Ida May itself is a politically sophisticated and aesthetically intriguing work that both resonates with and departs from the better-known antislavery fictions of Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the mid-century ‘orphan novels’ of Maria Cummins, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Susan Warner, and others. Jessie Morgan-Owens’s research and editorial work expertly frame the novel’s historical and contemporary relevance, making it especially accessible and appealing for undergraduate and graduate courses on the US novel, American women’s writing, and transnational antislavery resistance literature.” — Martha Schoolman, Florida International University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
Mary Hayden Green Pike: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Ida May
Appendix A: “Who Wrote Ida May?” The Sentimental Antislavery Novel and Genre Formation
- William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post, November and December 1854
- Boston Daily Atlas, November 1854
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Portland Inquirer, November 1854
- Richard Hildreth’s Boston Evening Telegraph, November 1854
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Boston Courier, December 1854
Appendix B: Contemporary Response & Selected Reviews of Ida May
- New York Independent, November 1854
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The National Era, November 1854
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The Liberator, November 1854
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Frederick Douglass’ Paper, November 1854, January 1855
- Advertisements for Ida May
- Negative Reviews
- Southern Reviews
Appendix C: Contextual Documents on Kidnapping and the “Problem” of White Slavery
- “The Story of Ida May,” Boston Daily Atlas, December 1854
- From William Craft, Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom, 1860
- Lydia Maria Child, “Mary French and Susan Easton,” 1834
- From Francis Coburn Adams, Our World, The Slaveholder’s Daughter, 1855
- Charles Sumner, “Another Ida May,” Boston Telegraph, February 1855.
Appendix D: About the Author—Mary Hayden Green Pike’s Racial Politics
- Caroline F. Putnam, The Liberator, October 1859
- From Mary Hayden Green Pike, Caste: A Story of Republican Equality 1856
- Frederick A. Pike Congressional address, “Tax, Fight, Emancipate,” February, 1862
- Mary Hayden Green Pike, “John Brown in Prison,” c. 1859
Works Cited and Select Bibliography
