Beschreibung:

Three items: 1. Salisbury Monitor. Salisbury Mills, MA: George W. Wilson, February 15-May 17, 1838. Volume I, Numbers 1-14. 112 pp. Text in two columns. Folio double-sheets (9½ x 6½ inches). First leaf of no 1 torn diagonally and repaired and with signature excised from top margin. 2. Salisbury Daily Monitor. Salisbury Mills, MA: [O.S. Morse?], January 22-February 3, 1838. Volume I, Numbers 1-12. [48] pp. Text in two columns. Folio single-sheets (9½ x 6½ inches). 3. Reservoir of Science. Amesbury & Salisbury Mills: O.S. Morse, November 30, 1837-February 8, 1838. Volume I, Numbers 1-9. [36] pp. Text in two columns. Folio single-sheets (9½ x 6½ inches). Bound together in period half brown sheep over marbled boards. Some stray spots, faint foxing and toning. Binding worn. UNRECORDED PRINTINGS OF WHITTIER'S FAMOUS ABOLITIONIST POETRY, EDITED BY HIS BROTHER. A fascinating group of unrecorded regional newspapers from Salisbury Mills and Amesbury, Massachusetts. The first item is edited by Matthew Franklin Whittier, brother of John Greenleaf Whittier and includes early appearances of the latter's poems "The Cities of the Plain," "The Yankee Girl," "The Fountain," and "The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to Her Daughter Sold into Southern Bondage." The second newspaper, which preceded the first, provides no information about its staff, but does include a serialized publication of John Greenleaf Whittier's "Henry St. Clair" in two numbers. The third item seems to be a related publication. Though all of the newspapers have the same mixture of literature, news local and collected from other sources, and miscellaneous anecdotes, the satirical edge and Abolitionist bent of Franklin Whittier's writing in the Salisbury Monitor make this the most interesting of the three. None of these printings appears in Matthew Franklin Currier's magisterial bibliography of John Greenleaf Whittier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), nor his handful of biographies or published correspondence. These three publications are not recorded in any known institutional holdings, including the Union List of Serials. According to Vincent Golden of the American Antiquarian Society, there is an article in Boston's The Liberator on May 4, 1838, quoting an article from the Salisbury Monitor on an anti-dueling lecture which was also reprinted in The Emancipator, May 17, 1838, but this is the only identified reference to these publications. In the History of Amesbury, (Joseph Merrill, ed. 1880), the newspaper history notes that the publisher, John Caldwell, edited the News and Courier through January 4th, 1838, and later the Evening Transcript in 1839, with a gap that accounts for our unrecorded newspapers in between. The only scholarly study of his brother, by William Lloyd Griffin, "Matthew Franklin Whittier, "Ethan Spike",' New England Quarterly [Vol. 14, no. 1, Dec. 1941, pp 646-663], surmises that he might have worked at the Amesbury News and Courier in this period, as he asks his brother to send him papers at the News office. No one could have known he had actually succeeded to the office of Editor at the age of 26, prior to the appearance of these lost publications. Each of the Greenleaf Whittier poems are reprints, with "The Farewell," appearing on April 26, 1838, just over a month after its first appearance in The Pennsylvania Freeman on March 22, 1838. Greenleaf Whittier was the editor of the Freeman, and thus presumably sent his brother the fresh copy of his new and important abolitionist poem for reprint in the home newspaper immediately thereafter. The biographical lore has been that John Greenleaf and his brother were not close in their youth, but these publications may disabuse scholars of that prejudice. Matthew Franklin Whittier has enjoyed a minor role in American Literature for his later efforts under the pseudonym "Ethan Spike," a satirical series of tracts designed to conjure the voice of an ignorant slave-owner from New England, publis