Tales for Fifteen

❖

James Fenimore Cooper

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 <jfcooper@wpe.com>, 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 Gutenberg system, the few words italicized in the original are represented by ALL CAPITALS. Annotations by the transcriber are enclosed in {curly brackets}. A very few obvious typographical errors have been marked by {sic}.}