A Rare Edition of Austen’s Emma

Two hundred years ago, Jane Austen’s novel Emma was first published in London in December 1815 (with the date 1816 appearing on the title page). Next year, in 1816, the prominent Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey decided to issue a reprinted, cheaper edition for the American market.

Only six copies are known to remain of this first Austen novel to be published in America—and one is here at Dartmouth! Although this copy has been at Rauner since it was donated in 1972 as part of a 601-item collection, its existence has been unknown to Austen scholars until now.

This Emma was owned by Jeremiah Smith (1759-1842), who served as chief justice of New Hampshire and, briefly, as governor of the state. Smith's copy of Emma conveys that he was both a careful and a curious reader. He kept track of when he bought the volumes, from whom, and what he paid.  He also wrote in notes, gleaned from periodicals and encyclopedias, about Austen, her life, and her works. (Emma, like all of Austen's novels published in her lifetime, did not identify her by name as its author.) Most delightfully, Smith evidently read Emma with pen in hand, correcting the printers' errors—which were many. That Smith's interest in and appreciation of Austen continued is clear from the presence in his collection of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park, all of which he subsequently purchased in English editions.

Like Smith's, each of the surviving copies of the Philadelphia Emma has its own stories to tell of owners and readers. The New York Society Library recently featured its copy, which is annotated in pencil by nineteenth-century readers, in an exhibition and blog post. Goucher College in Baltimore, where I teach, is preparing an open-access digital edition of our own well-traveled copy. Other copies are held at Winterthur Library, Beinecke Library, and King's College Library of the University of Cambridge. To see Dartmouth's copy, come to Rauner and ask for Smith J PZ3 .A93.

Posted for Juliette Wells, Associate Professor and Chair of English at Goucher College, editor of Emma for Penguin Classics (2015), and author of Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination (2011).