Feb 27, 2007 - Sale 2105

Sale 2105 - Lot 53

Price Realized: $ 4,560
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,500 - $ 8,500
AN EXTRAORDINARY ENGRAVED PROSPECTUS FOR A "PENNY DREADFUL" (CRIME.) Miss Harrington's Affecting Narrative of the Barbarous Treatment Inflicted in the Months of May and June last, upon Two Unfortunate Females! Who on the evening of the 12th of May were seized by Two Runaway Blacks, and secretly conveyed to the gloomy recess of an uninhabited forest . . . Engraved woodcut broadside prospectus for a supposedly true account of an abduction, 18x11 7/8 inches; several early paper repairs to the reverse; two small pieces of cloth tape affixed to the reverse; one inch chip from top right corner, and 1x1/4 inch chip from bottom right margin neither affecting text or image; paper lightly darkened. [New York, 1841-42]
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Additional Details

Prospectus for a narrative of an abduction and presumed rape of two white women by two runaway slaves. The crime is said to have taken place in Concordia, Louisiana, and the narrative to have come from the pen of the younger of the two women, aged 16. The blacks were accused of murdering the older woman's husband in the course of the abduction. They were beaten and subject to "severe flagellation." At one point their captors tied them to trees and "fired at them with their rifles, not only for their amusement, but to try their skill as marksmen." The imprecations of a young "mulatto [sic] girl" who accompanied the runaways saved the women from death. The prospectus assures us that the mulatto girl "has been very deservedly rewarded," and Enoch, the older of the two blacks received the punishment "which his fiendlike behavior so justly merited." He was burned at the stake. A smaller woodcut vignette at the bottom of this broadside shows him being consumed in flames.
We could find no reference to this prospectus. OCLC locates 7 copies of the first edition of the Narrative from 1842, and three copies of a second [?] edition from 1844.