Search After Happiness, The: A Pastoral Drama.
Written By A Woman
Printed By A Woman
[Education]. (More, Hannah). The Search After Happiness: A Pastoral Drama. To which is added, Joseph Made Known To His Brethren: A Sacred Drama. Philadelphia: Printed [by Lydia R. Bailey] for Johnson and Warner, 1811.
12mo.; frontispiece; light dampstaining to some bottom edges; marginal chips to three pages; yellow flecked wrappers over paste board.
Later edition of this “improving pastoral play for girls’ schools…[which] celebrates women writers” (Yale Feminist Companion), printed by Lydia R. Bailey, one of the earliest female printers. More notes in her foreword, “It has been so hackneyed a practice for Authors to pretend, that imperfect copies of their works had crept abroad, that the Writer of the following Pastoral is almost ashamed to allege this, as the real cause of the present publication.” She reveals that she wrote the poem to recite and circulate among her young friends when she was 18 years old, and that “by this means, some mutilated copies were circulated, unknown to the Author, through many hands.” The first authorized edition of this verse play (Joseph is in prose) was published in 1773, years after its composition. With a frontispiece engraving, after Stothard’s original, by B. Tanner, a student of Peter Maverick and one of America’s premier early engravers upon steel and copper, producing engravings for book illustration, line and stipple portraits, scenes, and views, in Philadelphia from 1805 to 1845. This frontispiece, printed on a lighter weight stock than the rest of the volume, is evenly browned. A surprisingly good copy. Rosenbach, Early American Children’s Books, 442; Shaw & Shoemaker 23434.
In her dedication to Mrs. Gawtkin—presumably an early teacher—and in the preface, More reveals the purpose of The Search: “[T]he following little Poem turns chiefly on the danger of delay, or error, in the important article of Education…” She,
is sensible it has many imperfections, but if it may be happily instrumental in promoting a regard to Religion and Virtue in the minds of Young Persons, and afford them an innocent, and perhaps not altogether unuseful amusement in the exercise of recitation; the end for which it was original composed, and her utmost wish in its publication, will be fully answered.
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