Full Description
The 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.
Contents
Acknowledgements
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
Portland Inquirer, November 1854
Richard Hildreth's Boston Evening Telegraph, November 1854
Boston Courier, December 1854
Appendix B: Contemporary Response & Selected Reviews of Ida May
New York Independent, November 1854
The National Era, November 1854
The Liberator, November 1854
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
