In 1859, black activist Martin R. Delany published his only novel, Blake, or, The Huts of America, in serial form in the Anglo-African Magazine, from which chapters 1-23 and 28-30 have been found. The novel was published again in the Anglo-African Weekly from November 21, 1861, to April 26, 1862. When these issues were uncovered, they revealed chapters 24-27 and another 44 chapters. Floyd J. Miller's 1970 Beacon Press edition of Blake prints all 74 chapters, correcting punctuation and regularizing spelling and capitalization for the sake of clarity. Miller did not collate the two versions of chapters 1-23 and 28-30, working solely from the 1859 text for them and from the 1861-62 text for the other chapters. My purpose in conducting this collation is to see whether Delany revised his work between the 1859 and 1861 printings. Such revision may significantly inform our understanding of the novel.
The results of the collation are presented as a set of textual notes at the bottom of the text of each chapter. Each couple of variant readings is associated with a paragraph number where the variant is located in the text. I used the 1859 edition as the base text, with variants in the 1861-62 text recorded in the apparatus. Below, users will find links to the collated chapters. In the navigation bar, "Collation Procedures" discusses the methods I used to prepare the collations, and "Overview of Results" explains the types of variant readings which the collations have revealed.