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TEXTUAL AFTERWORD

507

to the "Conclusion" of the two-part version of the autobiography, rather than have it
appear in chapter XIX with the Garfield eulogy. That "Conclusion" also gains
chapter status herein, but by a different means: the eulogy of Garfield appended in
chapter XIX by Sylvester Betts is moved to what was in 1881, and is now, the
appropriate location: the chronologically arranged "Appendix." Further, the
"Appendix" itself no longer follows the Second Part but the Third—the proper
placement at the end of a work such as Life and Times, as it was for the eight
addenda appearing in the "Appendix" that in 1855 closed My Bondage and My
Freedom.

An as radical editorial intervention considered was whether to do what would
be necessary to enable the "Conclusion" that became anachronistic in 1892 to make
better sense in light of the Third Part that follows it. The Third Part does lend itself
at its beginning to an enhancement of the coherence of the expanded version of the
autobiography, referring as it does to "the preceding chapters" having been
composed ten years earlier. Would that Douglass had revised the "Conclusion" to the
same effect. But it remains irrefutably and irremediably what it is, in no way
modified in 1892–95 to be anything other than the section in which Douglass ended
with a flourish the story of his life into 1881. The only discernible means of
eliminating the anachronism are either a large-scale emendation of the whole that
would prove more authorial than editorial in nature, or—even more a- or anti-
historical an exercise of license—the excision of the entire "Conclusion" from the
work. The editors have opted for neither action. The fact of the matter is that the
expanded version of Life and Times is, indeed, a two-part work to which a third was
attached without any modifications of the former being made to accommodate the
addition of the latter. Thus no emendations of the kind that might effect a
reconciliation between what precedes and follows the "Conclusion" appear in this
edition's "List of Emendations," and the "Conclusion" here remains the historical
oddity that it became in 1892.

Not recorded in the same list is the treatment of the illustrations that Douglass
succeeded in having omitted from a limited number of copies of the first American
edition. Honoring his repeated requests for their excision but acknowledging their
historical significance, this critical edition relegates them to the section in the
"Editorial Apparatus" titled "The Park Publishing Company Illustrations." The only
plate in the first American edition that retains its status as a part of the work intended
by its author—as stipulated in the publishing agreement with Sylvester M. Betts and
Thomas Belknap—is the 1881 steel-engraving portrait of Douglass that serves as
frontispiece.