Posted 14 November 2005

In this attractive volume, Richard Newman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. publish Henry Box Brown’s revision of his extraordinary narrative for the first time in the US.  Newman’s introduction offers illustrated historical and biographical context that makes it an ideal introduction to the genre at A-level.  He reminds us of Gates’s theory that slave narratives were simultaneously unreliable, secretive (except for this one), a literature of resistance and the means to establishing a public, historical self for America’s black population.

Henry Box Brown achieved phenomenal renown for his spectacular escape from slavery in Virginia by posting himself to Philadelphia in a wooden box.  His reception among Northern Abolitionists led to the publication of the original narrative by Charles Stearns (Brown was illiterate) and lecture tours in both America and England.  Controversy followed swiftly.  Stearn’s overblown rhetoric helped anti-Abolitionists cast doubt on the veracity of this and all slave narratives, yet Brown was castigated by Frederick Douglass for revealing his escape route, thus closing it down to other slaves.  Doubts grew about Brown’s motives, which looked suspiciously like the establishment of a personal, rather than a racial, self (he made no attempt, for example, to retrieve his lost family still in slavery).

This volume publishes for the first time in the US the version of the narrative that Brown published in Manchester in 1851, having stripped out much of Stearns’ rhetoric.  Such a momentous and overdue event is reflected in this edition’s high production values but there are nevertheless a startling number of misprints, some so intriguing that only the absence of a footnote suggests they have no historical significance.  Newman provides little new information about Brown himself and leaves many questions hanging in the air, even challenging the reader to pick up the research baton (for example, Brown’s unaccountable disappearance from the public eye in England or, intriguingly, Wales).  The original narrative was published in the same year as Brown’s escape in March 1849.  In October, two of his accomplices were arrested organising an identical escape, but which of those events came first Newman does not specify and so Douglass’s objections are left untested.  As an A-Level text and a springboard for further research, this volume will prove a solid addition to the bookshelf, but those seeking deeper insight into the genre of slave narratives will find it elsewhere in the library.

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