14 
Indiana University Studies 
a novel in three small volumes, called The E migrants, which 
appeared in London in 1793. A Topographical Description, 
which was published before August,^' 1792, could not have 
been completed by Imlay more than a few months before its 
appearance, for the author devotes a part of the eleventh 
chapter to comment upon St. Clair’s defeat of November 4, 
1791, This chapter, like all the others except the tenth — 
and the omission of the heading ‘"Kentucky” from this chapter 
in both the first and the third editions seems not to be inten- 
tional — purports to have been written from Kentucky. That 
the book was, however, actually written, at least in large meas- 
ure and probably altogether, long after its author had left 
both Kentucky and America, is obvious if, as the court records 
show, Imlay left Kentucky late in 1785, and the continent of 
America at the end of the following year. Purely internal 
evidence is also against the claim that the work was written 
from Kentucky. What, for example, is to be said for the 
criticism of European manners, which occurs here (as also in 
The Emigrants), and, more particularly, for the prefatory 
apology for such criticism on the ground that the author, who 
had been “accustomed to that simplicity of manners natural 
to a people in a state of innocence”, must have been, upon 
arriving among the people of Europe, “powerfully stricken 
with the very great difference between the simplicity of the 
one, and what is called etiquette and good breeding in the 
other” It is also significant that in his Postscript, pub- 
lished in the second edition, the author prefaces a long letter 
from a friend describing the Indian campaigns of Scott and 
Wilkinson (June and August, 1791) with the admission that 
he himself was absent from the country at that time — a 
statement much more plausible than the contradictory claim 
that his account, in the original edition, of St. Clair’s defeat 
(November 4, 1791) was written from Kentucky. Further 
This woi'k, of which Richard Garnett saw only the imperfect copy in the British 
Museum, is, especially in the first edition, very rare. A number of copies have, how- 
evei, come to light. An excellent one is to be found in the Durrett Collection, Uni- 
versity of Chicago. 
The first edition was noticed in the Monthly Review for that month (VIII, 390-401). 
Later editions, it may be noted, contained additional materials, republished from John 
Filson and other writers on the Western country. The third edition is remarkable 
for the changes made in the. latter part of the preface ; and both the second and third 
editions contain a postscript apparently by Imlay but printed with the selections from 
other authors. 
London, 1792, p. iv. 
