Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times

Written by: Lydia Maria Child
Edited by: Tiffany Potter

Publication Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9781554816446 / 1554816440
280 pages; 5½" x 8½"

Lydia Maria Child (1802–80) was one of nineteenth-century America’s most influential writers and activists. Throughout her life, she deployed her pen on behalf of an array of causes that included abolitionism, women’s rights, the equality of religions, and justice for Native Americans. Child launched her career in 1824, at the age of twenty-two, with her novel Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times. Set during the first years of Puritan settlement in New England, the novel dramatizes the religious disputes that roiled the early colonies; it also portrays—and mythologizes—the relations between the colonists and the local Native Americans, especially through its depiction of a marriage between its Wampanoag title character and a young English colonist, Mary Conant. Hobomok’s rendering of an interracial marriage garnered considerable controversy upon its publication, and the novel helped usher in a wave of novelistic explorations of early American history, and particularly of the role of Indigenous people in it. Today, Hobomok commands interest as a crucial contribution to this project of national mythmaking in early nineteenth-century American literature, as well as the first work by a major but still often underappreciated nineteenth-century woman writer.

This first new edition of Hobomok in nearly four decades includes the annotated text of the novel as well as an introduction that traces Child’s career and outlines the novel’s engagement with colonial New England history, the religious debates the novel stages, and the way it mythologizes Indigenous figures and Indigenous–settler relations. The edition also features a rich array of contextual materials, including letters by Child, early reviews, and other documentation of the novel’s creation and reception; accounts of colonial New England from the time in which the novel is set; Indigenous accounts of the history of the region; examples of Native American writing and of other narratives about Native Americans from the period of the novel’s composition; and examples of Child’s later activist writing.

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Lydia Maria Child
Hobomok

Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times. By an American.

In Context

Hobomok: Inspiration, Creation, and Reception

from John Gorham Palfrey, “Yamoyden, a Tale of the Wars of King Philip, in Six Cantos,” The North American Review (April 1821)

Letters

from Lydia Maria Child to Convers Francis, 5 June 1817 and 3 February 1819
from Lydia Maria Child to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, undated, c. 1846

Reviews

from The North American Review (July 1824)
from The Boston Weekly Magazine, Devoted to Polite Literature, Useful Science, Biography and Dramatic Criticism (18 September 1824)
from The National Gazette and Literary Register (23 April 1825)
from The North American Review (1825)

Colonial Accounts of the Plymouth Colony at Patuxet

from Edward Winslow and William Bradford, A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation… (1622)
from Edward Winslow, Good News from New-England (1624)
from Susanna Bell, Legacy of a Dying Mother (1673)

Indigenous Historical Accounts of the Dawnland

from David Cusick, Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1826)
from William Apess, Eulogy of King Philip (1836)
from William Apess, “The Experience of Sally George,” The Experiences of Five Christian Indians… (1833)

Indigenous Voices and Fictions of Indigeneity in Child’s Literary Moment

Indigenous Literary Voices of the 1820s

Bamewawagzhikaquay (Jane Johnston Schoolcraft), “Invocation…” (1827)
Bamewawagzhikaquay (Jane Johnston Schoolcraft), “On Leaving my Children…” (1839)
Henry Schoolcraft, “Free Translation” of “On Leaving my Children” (1851)
William Walker Jr., “Oh Give Me Back My Bended Bow” (1882; written 1820s)

Narratives of Indigeneity in the 1820s

from James E. Seaver, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824)
from Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, or Early Times in Massachusetts (1827)

Child’s Activism

from Lydia Maria Child, The First Settlers of New-England… (1829)
from Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal for the Indians (1868)
from Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833)
from Lydia Maria Child, The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act (1860)
from Lydia Maria Child, “Woman’s Rights,” Letters from New-York, Letter 34 (1843)

Tiffany Potter is Professor of Teaching in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Her previous books include Broadview editions of Oroonoko and (with Willow White) A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.