The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson

243 Pages·2008·11.42 MB·English

by  Edward Kimber

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gainshisfreedomandinrapidsuccessionbecomesasuccessfultrader,awarhero,anda
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friendtoslave,Indian,Quebecois,andEnglishmanalike.Stillengagingandreadable250
yearsafteritsoriginalpublication,Mr.Andersonoffersarichandvariedportrayalofthe
of Mr. Anderson
mid-eighteenth-centuryAtlanticworld.
Edward Kimber
ThisBroadvieweditionfeaturesanintroductionbybothaliteraryscholarandahistorian,
elaboratingonsignificantthemesinthenovel.Theappendicesincludeanextensiveselection
edited by ofdocuments—someunpublishedelsewhere—furthercontextualizingmanyofthosethemes,
includingslavery,Britishrepresentationsofcolonial
Matthew Mason and
America,andeighteenth-centuryBritishliterature’s
Nicholas Mason emphasisonsensibilityandthe“cultoffeeling.”
MatthewMasonandNicholasMasonareAssistantProfessor
ofHistoryandAssociateProfessorofEnglish,respectively,
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a-front.qxd 14/10/2008 4:26 PM Page 1
THE HISTORY OF
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES
OF MR. ANDERSON
A First Modern English Edition of
Les Évangiles des Quenouilles
broadview editions
series editor: L.W. Conolly
THEDISTAFFGOSPELS 1
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Miles Franklin,2 April 1898.Used by permission of the Mitchell
Library,State Library of New South Wales.
2 THEDISTAFFGOSPELS
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THE HISTORY OF
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES
OF MR. ANDERSON
Edward Kimber
Les Évangiles des Quenouilles
translated by Thomas K.Abbott
with revisions by Lara Denis
edited by Matthew Mason and Nicholas Mason
broadview editions
THEDISTAFFGOSPELS 3
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©2009 Matthew Mason and Nicholas Mason
All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,transmitted in
any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,or other-
wise,or stored in a retrieval system,without prior written consent of the publisher—
or in the case of photocopying,a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright
Licensing Agency),One Yonge Street,Suite 1900,Toronto,Ontario M5E 1E5—is an
infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Kimber,Edward,1719-1769
The history of the life and adventures of Mr.Anderson / Edward Kimber ;
edited by Matthew Mason and Nicholas Mason.
(Broadview editions)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-55111-703-4
I.Mason,Matthew. II. Mason,Nicholas,1970- III. Title. IV. Series.
PR3539.K57H58 2008 823′.6 C2008-905434-2
Broadview Editions
The Broadview Editions series represents the ever-changing canon of literature in
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Advisory editor for this volume:Martin R.Boyne
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a-front.qxd 14/10/2008 4:26 PM Page 5
Contents
Acknowledgements (cid:127) 7
Introduction (cid:127) 9
Edward Kimber:A Brief Chronology (cid:127) 35
Maps (cid:127) 37
1. Northwest Europe (cid:127) 37
2. Colonial America (cid:127) 38
3. The Chesapeake Region (cid:127) 39
ANote on Eighteenth-Century Currency (cid:127) 41
ANote on the Text (cid:127) 43
The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr.Anderson (cid:127) 45
Appendix A:Kimber’s Other Writings on North America and
Slavery (cid:127) 183
1. From A Relation,or Journal,of a Late Expedition to the Gates
of St.Augustine(1744) (cid:127) 183
2. “Fidenia:Or,the Explanation”(March 1744) (cid:127) 185
3. From “Itinerant Observations in America”(1745–46) (cid:127) 188
4. From “Itinerant Observations in America”(July
1746) (cid:127) 194
5. From The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson(1750) (cid:127) 196
Appendix B:British Attitudes Toward Colonial America (cid:127) 198
1. From Ebenezer Cook,The Sot-weed Factor(1708) (cid:127) 198
2. From Richard Steele,“The History of Inkle and
Yarico”(13 March 1711) (cid:127) 206
3. From Daniel Defoe,Moll Flanders(1722) (cid:127) 208
Appendix C:Slavery and Servitude (cid:127) 212
1. From James Revel,The Poor Unhappy Transported
Felon’s Sorrowful Account of His Fourteen Years
Transportation at Virginia in America(ca.1660–80) (cid:127) 212
2. From John Locke,“Of Slavery”(1690) (cid:127) 216
3. Mary Barber,“On Seeing the Captives,Lately
Redeem’d from Barbary by His Majesty”(1734) (cid:127) 217
4. From James Annesley,Memoirs of an Unfortunate
Young Nobleman,Return’d from a Thirteen Years
Slavery in America(1743) (cid:127) 219
5. From Malachy Postlethwayt,The African Trade,
the Great Support of the British Plantation Trade
in America(1745) (cid:127) 223
THEROMANCEOFASHOP 5
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Appendix D:Novels in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (cid:127) 226
1. From Lord Chesterfield,Letters Written by the Late
Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope,Earl of
Chesterfield,to His Son,Philip Stanhope,Esq.
(ca.1740) (cid:127) 226
2. From Samuel Johnson,“Rambler No.4”(31 March
1750) (cid:127) 228
3. From Samuel Richardson,The History of Sir
Charles Grandison(1753–54) (cid:127) 233
Select Bibliography (cid:127) 239
6 CONTENTS
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Acknowledgements
The collaborative nature of producing this volume began but
hardly ended with our partnership as editors. We have many
people and institutions to thank for making this edition both pos-
sible and better than it would have been with only our efforts.We
assume,however,that no one will think for a moment of charg-
ing them with whatever errors or infelicities are here.
Brigham Young University offered invaluable support for us
both with this project.The English Department and the College
of Humanities provided funds for the maps and a graduate assis-
tant, Joshua Bullough, whose research skills and eye for detail
helped move the project along, particularly in its early stages.
Funding from the College of Family,Home,and Social Sciences
also helped pay for the maps, which faculty and staff in the
Department of Geography produced.
In addition to this institutional support,we have also benefited
from generous and thoughtful feedback from many students and
colleagues.The students in Nicholas’s fall 2004 course on eigh-
teenth-century British literature offered several valuable insights
on how this edition could prove most helpful to students.Jenny
Hale Pulsipher,Brett Rushforth,Matthew Wickman,and partic-
ipants in the Tenth Anniversary Conference of the Harvard
Atlantic Seminar provided useful comments on various drafts of
the introduction. Eric Slauter and Neil L.York offered not only
perceptive critiques but also references to vitally important
source material. Brett Rushforth helped enormously with the
identification of various places and names in the colonial border-
lands and French sections of the novel, Donald J. Harreld
referred us to the websites that helped us do the monetary con-
versions,and Anthony Jarrells helped track down bibliographical
information on Kimber’s London Magazine publications.Finally,
our gratitude goes out to previous scholars who have studied
Kimber and his works,particularly T.H.Breen,whose preface to
Tobacco Culture:The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the
Eve of Revolutionfirst introduced us to this novel.
This began as a family endeavor, and we owe much to our
familial relationships.As always, our spouses, children, and sib-
lings have been a great support. Most particularly, we wish to
thank our parents, Mike and LeAnn Mason, who raised us in a
home where reading, writing, and thinking reflectively about
both the past and present were not only encouraged but
modeled.To them we dedicate this volume.
THEHISTORYOFMR.ANDERSON 7
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8 INTRODUCTION
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Introduction
In the world of literary taxonomy, where one of the most basic
classificatory moves is to divide authors into “major” and
“minor”orders,a writer like Edward Kimber poses several chal-
lenges. To begin with, Kimber remains so obscure that even
dubbing him a “minor eighteenth-century novelist” might seem
overly generous. All of Kimber’s novels were published anony-
mously,and no one in his lifetime seems to have been particularly
concerned with discovering their authorship.It was not until the
1930s that Frank Gees Black and Sidney Kimber (the novelist’s
great-great-grandson) would identify Kimber as the author of
dozens of mid-eighteenth-century books, pamphlets, and maga-
zine contributions.1Their discovery, however, has done little to
attract new readers to Kimber’s novels,and even specialists in the
eighteenth-century novel can still pass an entire career without
either hearing of Kimber or reading his works.
Why Kimber has proven so persistently unknown is something
of a mystery.In terms of sheer productivity,he was quite remark-
able.Between 1750 and 1765,a period during which he worked
on dozens of side projects and was responsible (from 1755
onward) for editing the London Magazine,he was somehow able
to write eight novels,an output few of his peers could match.Far
from stillborn products of the press, Kimber’s novels tended to
circulate for several decades beyond their publication date. By
Black’s count, some 37 editions of his eight novels appeared
between 1750 and 1808, including several translations into
German and French.2 Perhaps most tellingly, in 1783, when
James Harrison compiled The Novelist’s Magazine,a series dedi-
cated to establishing a canon of classic British novels,he included
Kimber’s first novel, Joe Thompson (1750), alongside such land-
1 Sidney A.Kimber,“The ‘Relation of a Late Expedition to St.Augus-
tine,’With Biographical and Bibliographical Notes on Isaac and Edward
Kimber,”Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America28 (1934):
81–96;Frank Gees Black,“Edward Kimber:Anonymous Novelist of the
Mid-Eighteenth Century,”Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and
Literature17 (1935):27–42.
2 Black,“Edward Kimber,”27–28.
THEHISTORYOFMR.ANDERSON 9