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or, Imagination and Heart
J >> James Fenimore Cooper (writing under the >> or, Imagination and HeartTales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart.
by James Fenimore Cooper (writing under the
pseudonym of "Jane Morgan")
{This text has been transcribed and annotated from
a facsimile of the original edition (New York: C.
Wiley, iv, 223 pp., 1823) by Hugh C. MacDougall,
Secretary of the James Fenimore Cooper Society
, who welcomes corrections or
emendations. Only a handful of copies of the
original edition have survived. The standard Cooper
bibliography makes brief mention of an edition
published in Guernsey, Maryland (n.d.), but I have
never seen any further reference to it. Forty years
ago a facsimile of the Wiley edition was published
(Delmar, NY: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints,
1959, reprinted 1977), with an introduction by
James Franklin Beard. At least one microfilm
version is also available, but "Tales for Fifteen"
remains one of James Fenimore Cooper's least read
and least known writings.}
{In 1840, when the Boston publisher George
Roberts asked Cooper for a contribution to a new
magazine, Cooper responded that he could reprint
"Tales for Fifteen" if he could find a copy--Cooper
himself didn't have one. Roberts found a copy in
New York, and "Imagination" was reprinted in his
"Boston Notion" (January 30, 1841), and in his
"Roberts' Semi-Monthly Magazine" (Boston,
February 1 and 15, 1841). Shortly thereafer, he also
reprinted "Heart", in the "Boston Notion" (March 13
and 20, 1841) and in "Roberts' Semi-Monthly
Magazine" (April 1 and 15, 1841).}
{George Roberts' reprint of "Imagination" was
pirated in England, and included in "Imagination; A
Tale for Young Women. With Other Tales by
American Authors" which also included "The Block-
House", by William Leggett and "The Country
Cousin". (London: John Cunningham, 72 pp., 1841
[Series: The Novel Newspaper, 143]) and (London:
N. Bruce, 72 pp., 1842 (Series: Standard Novels,
5]). It also appeared by itself as "Imagination: A
Tale for Young Women" (London: J. Clements, 31
pp., 1841 [for the Romanticist and Novelist's
Library]). There may well exist other pirated
periodical versions.}
{Introductory Note: "Tales for Fifteen" was
apparently written in 1821, when Cooper became
afflicted with writer's block while composing his
first best-selling novel, "The Spy". Cooper had
envisaged a series of five stories, to be called
"American Tales," and which were to deal
respectively with "Imagination", "Heart", "Matter",
"Manner", and "Matter and Manner". Only
"Imagination" was completed; the half-written
"Heart" was given a sudden and half-hearted
ending; Cooper later asserted that he had allowed
Charles Wiley to publish "Tales for Fifteen to help
him out of some financial difficulties. In a letter to
George Roberts in 1840, Cooper said of
"Imagination" that "this tale was written on rainy
day, half asleep and half awake, but I retain rather
a favorable impression of it."}
{"Imagination", remains an amusing and cleverly-
plotted story of a young girl whose imagination
gets the better of her, presumably because of
reading romantic novels. This, of course, was a
commonplace notion in the 1820s, except that
Cooper's heroine, misled by circumstances, comes
to believe that her romantic fantasies are
happening. This Don Quixote-like twist is less
common, though Jane Austen's famous "Northanger
Abbey" and Eaton Stannard Barrett's little-known
but very funny "The Heroine; or, Adventures of
Cherubina" (1813) fall within the genre. "Heart", a
slim (indeed, truncated) account of faithful love,
sinks into bathos; it is, perhaps, most interesting
for its opening scene of a blase New York City
crowd gathering around a fallen man -- and doing
nothing to help him.}
{Spelling and punctuation are as in the 1823
original, including inconsistent spellings (e.g.,
gaiety and gayety, Henly and Henley) except that,
because of the typographical limitations of the
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