The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson

In 1754 the British adventurer, compiler, and novelist Edward Kimber published The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson. Rooted in a tale Kimber heard while exploring the Atlantic seaboard, Mr. Anderson is the novelist’s transatlantic tale of slavery, Indian relations, and frontier life. Having been kidnapped in England, transported across the Middle Passage, and sold to a brutal Maryland planter as a white slave, Tom Anderson gains his freedom and in rapid succession becomes a successful trader, a war hero, and a friend to slave, Indian, Quebecois, and Englishman alike. Still engaging 250 years after its original publication, Mr. Anderson offers a rich and varied portrayal of the mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic world. This Broadview edition features an introduction by both a literary scholar and a historian, elaborating on significant themes in the novel. The appendices include an extensive selection of documents—some unpublished elsewhere—further contextualizing many of those themes, including slavery, British representations of colonial America, and eighteenth-century British literature’s emphasis on sensibility and the “cult of feeling.”