Poems and Essays by the Late Miss Bowdler.
Published for the Benefit
of the Orphan Asylum Society
[Philanthropy] Bowdler, Jane. Poems and Essays. By the Late Miss Bowdler. New York: Printed at the Office of the Economical School, 1811.
8vo.; contemporary ownership signature of Mrs. Martha Demarest four times on front pastedown; book plate of Edna and Arthur Rushmore, Harper and Brothers designer and founder of Golden Hind Press, with his ownership signature dated “Jan. ’04;” contemporary three-quarter calf over marbled boards; gilt decoration to spine; hinges fragile and partially detached; boards rubbed; mildly foxed.
First American edition “from the eleventh English edition,” published for the “Benefit of the Orphan Asylum Society, and Economical School, in New York,” which built one of the earliest orphan asylums in America. The Orphan Asylum Society was founded in March of 1806 by the noted educator and charitable worker Johanna Graham Bethune, and her mother, Isabella Graham, both of whom had helped to found the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children ten years earlier. The two assembled a group of twenty wealthy New York patrons to provide the initial funding for the Society, among them several prominent women whom they tapped for leadership positions, including Sarah Ogden Hoffman and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, the widow of Alexander Hamilton. The Society’s model – which included apprenticing its wards to tradesmen in the city, keeping them outfitted with clean clothes and linen, and strictly curbing physical punishment – was quickly replicated throughout the United States.
However, by 1810 the New York Evening Post was “sorry to observe that the institution is considerably in debt. The benevolent zeal of the disinterested conductors, has outrun their means” (quoted in Bremner, Children and Youth in America: 1600-1865, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, p 280). The present volume was brought out to help address the Society’s financial needs. A broadside prospectus titled Benevolent Purposes. Proposals for Republishing by Subscription, the Essays and Poems of Miss Jane Bowlder, for the benefit of the Orphan Asylum Society [...] cites the original circumstances of the book’s publication as justification: “The Work was printed at Bath (England) for the benefit of a Hospital in that city, and has already gone through eleven editions.” It then offers, as “sufficient recommendation for the work,” a letter of praise by a Dr. Beatie, which reads, in part, “the person who publishes [the Essays] does an important service to mankind.” Whatever the book’s revenues may have contributed to its turnaround, the Orphan Asylum Society of New York provided shelter and employment for hundreds of New York City children for decades to come, and Johanna Bethune continued to play a central role in its administration.
The prospectus also notes two states of the book, “elegantly bound and lettered at Two dollars, and in board at One Dollar and Fifty Cents,” the present copy being an example of the former. Early American Imprints, Second series; no. 22447. (See NAW I & II for Bethune and Graham. The prospectus is in the collection of the New York Historical Society.)
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Jane Bowdler (1743-1784) took to writing after losing her voice for a period of four years beginning in the late 1770s. Indeed she had suffered from intermittent illness after contracting smallpox in 1759 and spent the last decade of her life writing at her family home in Bath. Her illness plays a heavy role in her writing, from mentions in the introduction (“The Author of these Essays felt, with the keenest sensibility, the uncommon misfortune which condemned her for ten years, in the prime of life, to constantly increasing sufferings…”) to a separate essay on “The Duties and Advantages of Sickness,” in which she reflects, “At a time when, by pain and loss of speech, I am, in a great degree, rendered incapable of enjoying the pleasures of this world, called off fo
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