Tales for Fifteen

On 1 February 1823 Charles Wiley published in New York The Pioneers, a new book by the author of The Spy; by noon he had sold 3,500 copies—a record-making sale by the bookselling standards of the time. On 26 June, almost five months later, Wiley quietly offered, as we know from a notice in The Patriot, a New York newspaper, "Tales for Fifteen, or Imagination and Heart, an original work in one volume, by Jane Morgan, price 75c." The actual author was the author of The Spy; and the two stories, "Imagination" and "Heart," were obviously imitations of Mrs. Amelia Opie's popular moral tales, published, as the paper cover noted, when The Spy was in its fourth edition, The Pioneers in its third, and The Pilot in press. The sale was so small that only four copies are known to be extant. Why, one may ask, did James Cooper, who was in 1823 a writer of national and international reputation, publish this volume of imitative stories for adolescent girls, even though his identity was carefully concealed?

According to Cooper's own account, Tales for Fifteen was written and given to Charles Wiley as a gesture of friendship to help the publisher out of financial difficulties. This explanation was echoed by the novelist's daughter Susan in a letter reprinted from the Cooperstown Freeman's Journal in The Critic on 12 October 1889. It is true that Wiley was having financial troubles in 1823, and Cooper undoubtedly gave him the proceeds from Tales for Fifteen; but to suppose, as full acceptance of this explanation requires, that Cooper reverted, even momentarily, to the repudiated literary models of his first book Precaution after the phenomenal success of The Spy would be to infer in him an almost total want of critical judgment and common sense. The real explanation, which Cooper might have been embarrassed to furnish and which the chronology of publication has obscured, lies in a hitherto unsuspected phase of the curious story of Cooper's entrance to authorship.

Cooper wrote Andrew Thompson Goodrich, his first publisher, on 31 May 1820, that Precaution had been preceded by an experimental effort to write a short moral tale. Mrs. Opie's Simple Tales (1807) and Tales of Real Life (1813) would have been among the obvious models. Finding the tale "swell to a rather unwieldy size," Cooper explained, "I destroy'd the manuscript and changed it to a novel." Precaution, which was completed on 12 June 1820, was probably written within a month; and before the novel had begun its tortuous way through the press, Cooper commenced the writing of The Spy. By 28 June he had completed "about sixty pages," presumably manuscript pages; and as the writing proceeded and his enthusiasm for the new work mounted, his expectations for the success of Precaution diminished. He wrote Goodrich on 12 July: "The 'Spy' goes on slowly and will not be finish'd until late in the fall—I take more pains with it—as it is to be an American novel professedly." In fact, The Spy was completed only a short time before its publication in New York on 22 December 1821.