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Textual Afterword
A Critical Edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

JOSEPH R. MCELRATH, JR.
JESSE S. CRISLER

The editors of this volume assume that the reader of Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass is interested in its author's own account of his experiences and their
significance in American social and cultural history—as free as possible of
modifications made by others as they several times processed this autobiography for
publication during his lifetime. The editors also assume that this internationally
famous orator's "voice" —his word choices, phrasing, punctuation, and the like—is
preferable to those of contemporaries in the publishing industry whose diction and
stylistic traits displaced Douglas's in the multiple typesettings and printings
recorded in the "Descriptive Bibliography" section of this volume. Accordingly, this
critical edition proffers a reconstructed version of the work, the purpose of which is
to make available a text that represents both the content and form for which
Douglass himself was responsible as individual author.

As of Douglass's death on 20 February 1895, five major developments in the
work's history of textual transmission had occurred since 1881, when he first
prepared it for publication. The editors have taken into account each of these when
honoring his discernible intentions as to how the work ought to read.

1. Prepublication Alterations
On 7 April 1881 Douglass entered into an agreement with Thomas Belknap and
Sylvester M. Betts to write a "history of his life." Their trade and subscription sales
firm, the Park Publishing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, would publish it as a
book of "480 to 500 pages, 12 mo, each page to contain on an average of about four
hundred words."¹ This was the two-part version of Life and Times: not until 1892
did Douglass compose the third. The paucity of surviving correspondence having to
do with what transpired after April 1881 precludes determination of the date by
which the manuscript was in Betts's hands. But it is certain that well before 8
October, Douglass had delivered one that exceeded the minimum length specified in
the contract, for Betts wrote that day that the compositors had completed the
typesetting through the end of what became the penultimate chapter—the eighteenth
of the Second Part: "I enclose copy of the last part of the book, thus far set up, which
is the conclusion of the 482^d page."²

[footnote] 1. Letter of Agreement, 7 April 1881, Financial Papers File, reel 28, frame 421, FD Papers, DLC.
[footnote] 2. Sylvester M. Betts to Douglass, 8 October 1881, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frame 521,
FD Papers, DLC.

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