Brown went on to publish three additional, and very different, versions of the novel. The problem for scholars and students has always been which text to read. This digital edition of Clotel presents, for the first time together, the full extant texts of the four versions. These texts, with 618 pages in all, are fully imaged and coded and may be read individually or in parallel, allowing the user to explore the relationships among the various versions. Further functionality allows the reader to access complex historical collation. In addition to illuminating introductory essays, the editor has provided biographical, critical, and historical commentary as well as line-by-line annotations to all four texts.
Also included is the first reprinting of Miralda, published in installments in the weekly Anglo-African, an anti-slavery newspaper, in the four months before the American Civil War.
