"Reader, Be Assured, this Narrative is No Fiction": Harriot Jacobs and the Print History of Samuel Richardson's Pamela

Abstract: The aim of this article is to reconsider the vexed reception of Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as a book historical problem, and to bring to light Jacobs's own insights about the ways material texts operate under paradigms of white supremacy. This essay follows a long critical tradition of reading Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as an American revision of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, but rather than taking these similarities as evidence of the fictionality or illegitimacy of Jacobs's story, I contend that Jacobs's desire to testify to her real experiences is compatible with—and indeed powerfully amplifies—her interest in critiquing the novel genre's evolution out of the Richardsonian tradition and the material practices that enabled its dissemination. To the extent that Jacobs's memoir looks like a novel, it does so under the recognition that the shapes and surfaces, as well as the thematic investments, target audiences, social contexts, and media environments in which novels circulated were increasingly mutable.