History of Plymouth Plantation

The census attribution — 'Little, Brown (for the Massachusetts Historical Society)' as the true first — is imprecise and is corrected here. Precedence runs to the Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 4th series, vol. III (Boston, 1856); the Little, Brown volume of the same year is the separate reissue, and says so on its title page. Both are 1856 and both are collected, but a copy sold as 'the true first' should be the Collections appearance. There is no UK, foreign-language or earlier edition to weigh: the work is in English and had never been printed. The manuscript, written 1630-51, disappeared from Boston around the British evacuation in 1776 and was identified in 1855 in the Bishop of London's library at Fulham Palace after a citation to the 'Fulham MS History' in Samuel Wilberforce's 1844 history was noticed in a Boston bookshop; Deane edited not from the manuscript, which was not returned, but from a copy secured from London. Sources consulted differ on whether that copy was a manuscript transcript or a photographic facsimile, so the point is left open.