The American Museum

The Autobiography of Mathew Carey

The autobiography of Mathew Carey consists of his reply, in the form of twenty-six letters, to a request from Park Benjamin, editor of the New-England Magazine, to submit an autobiographical sketch for publication. Mr. Benjamin printed these letters in thirteen editions of the magazine in 1833 and 1834. The links [below] to each of the letters include the volume, issue, month, and year of publication in the New-England Magazine. The American Museum will republish one or several of Mr. Carey's letters each month, and the respective links to the letters will become active as they appear.

My spell-checking program suggests corrected spellings for various words used by Mr. Carey: teazing, duelling, enterprize, centinel, renegadoes, instalment, cullibility, millenium, deposite, debateable, majesy [which may simply be a typesetter's error, as it is spelt with a 't' in other places in the work], behoves, phrensy, sun-rise and sun-set, despatches, connexion, visiters, offence, unfrequent, Pittsburg, marquess, judgement, indorser, pennyless, rivalship, unpractised, risque [for 'risk'], villany, villanous, Leipsic, defence, deceptious, wilfully, harrassing, calibre, counsellors, aesophagus, sombre, nought, and moulded. I did not consider "correcting" them.

I believe there are a few incorrect letters in foreign and dead-language words used in quotations by Mr. Carey. The New-England Magazine text has, for example, c'etoit, in the phrase c'etoit une autre affaire, where c'etait is the only sensible contraction. Similarly, the magazine text shows cudum, in the phrase Fiat justitia, ruat cudum, rendering it meaningless, and where caelum is the classic standard.

Mr. Carey appended footnotes to some of his Letters. In order to render this present text as clean as possible, I have placed Carey's footnotes in brackets in the body of the text at points immediately or soon after the notations.* [*Like this.] My annotations appear in double brackets, [[like this]].

George L. McDowell

• INTRODUCTION
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• AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MATHEW CAREY

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