ARCHY MOORE,
The White Slave,
OR, MEMOIRS OF A FUGITIVE.
WITH A NEW HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION,
Written for this edition by the distinguished author, and unfolding the origin, history and characteristics of this remarkable work.
One vol., 430 pp. 12mo., 8 Illustrations, Price $1 25.
OPINIONS OF REVIEWERS.
Have you yourself read Archy Moore? If you have, why don't you bestow upon it hearty, fervent, overwhelming praise? Why, my dear friend, it is a wonderful book! People of the dullest minds and wildest sympathies, are thrilled by it, as if their benumbed fingers had touched an electric chain. Independent of the sound, consistent principles of freedom which beam on every page, there is a remarkable degree of intellectual vigor and dramatic talent exhibited in the power of language, the choice of circumstances, the combination of events, and the shading of character. Every sentence shows intimate knowledge of the local peculiarities of the south, both in the respect of nature and society.—Lydia Maria Child.
This book, which is very well written, is full of continuous interest, and the adventures, though many of them are startling and exciting, do not run out of the range of probability. It has been translated into French, German and Italian.—N. Y. Times.
Mr. Hildreth describes southern scenes with all the graphic force of an artist, and all the minutiæ of the more ordinary visiter. What he draws with his pen, he fairly brings before the eye of the reader; the consequence is, that nothing is left to perfect the latter's acquaintance with scenes from which he is far removed, but an actual visit to them. The aim of the writer, in sending this work before the public, is suggested by its title. It is an illustration of southern slavery in all its phases and bearings; and apparently a stronger condemnation of the system we never read, than in Mr. Hildreth's pages. Selecting the narrative form for the medium of the homily he seeks to read, the facts he gives, and the conclusions he arrives at, come to us in threefold force, from their unexpectedness, and their apparently natural sequence. Archy Moore is destined to have an extensive circulation.—Dispatch.
This work was published many years ago, under a different title, and was the first issue of the Uncle Tom school of literature. At that time it went begging in vain through New York and Boston for a publisher, and finally the author got it printed himself by the city printer of Boston, who put his name to it as publisher. It was afterward printed in England and France, and translated into the principal languages of Europe. It is now revised, enlarged, republished, and the authorship avowed. It is an ably written and interesting work.—U. S. Journal.
Fiction never performs a nobler office than when she acts as the handmaid of truth. It is in this capacity that her assistance has been invoked by the author of the work before us, and so well is the task accomplished, that we can scarcely persuade ourselves, as we turn over the deeply interesting pages, that we are perusing a narrative of fictitious wrongs and sufferings. Let not the reader suppose, from what we have said, that this is a mere novel. The incidents which diversify this narrative, may have had no real existence in the exact connection and relation in which they are linked together in the story, and the characters may have no prototypes in all their individual features; but we have too much reason to know that such incidents and such characters are too abundantly supplied at the south to require that the novelist should draw very largely on his invention.
The story is written in the style of an autobiography, and with such an air of verisimilitude, that the reader cannot avoid the impression that the task of fiction has been merely to arrange the materials supplied by truth.—Plaindealer.
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