Late in the year 1653, but under date of 1654, Nathaniel Brooke, a London publisher, "at the Angel in Cornhill," brought out a small octavo book of two hundred and thirty-six pages, entitled A History of New-England, from the English planting I the Yeere 1652, etc. The title, inexact in any case, for the book is rather a history of Massachusetts

Than of all New England, was evidently affixed by the publisher. His advertisements show that at one time he thought of giving the book the title Historicall Relation of the First Planting of the English in New England in the Year 1628 to the Year 1653 and all the Materiall Passages happening there. But many reiterations in the text of the book show that the author’s own title for his production was that which appears in the running headlines of the printed book, and by which it has generally been known, The Wonder-working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England. The author’s name nowhere appears in the book.

Five years later the publisher took advantage of this latter fact, since the sale of the work had been so disappointing as to leave many copies on his hands, to utilize the sheets in another of his ventures. He had in hand a book entitled America Painted to the Life. Of the four parts of which he composed it, the first and fourth were apparently written by Ferdinando Gorges, Esquire, grandson of the celebrated patentee Sir Ferdinando Gorges, while the second was by that knight himself. Brooke impudently sandwiched-in the unsold sheets of Wonder-working Providence as Part III, "Written by Sir Ferdinando Gorges Knight (the grandfather), and "Publisht since his decease by his Grandchild Ferdinando Gorges Esquire, who hath much enlarged it and added severall accurate Descriptions of his owne."

The reader who has any remembrance of the relations between Sir Fernando Gorges and the Massachusetts colony, and of the diametrical difference between his state of mind and that which breathes through every page of the Wonder-Working Providence, will say that imposture could hardly be more shameless. The younger Gorges protested publicly.

The last statement is erroneous. So far as is known, no copies of the original book were issued with the author’s name. In New England it has been known for more than two hundred years that it was written by Captain Edward Johnson of Woburn, Massachusetts. The accurate Thomas Prince, in the preface to his Chronological History of New England (Boston, 1736), after speaking of the false attribution of the book to Gorges, says: "But the true Author was Mr. Johnson of Woburn in New England, as the late Judge Sewall assur’d me, as of a Thing familliarly known among the Fathers of the Massachusetts Colony." In Prince’s own copy of the Wonder-working Providence, now preserved in the library of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, is a manuscript note which is still more explicit.

Arriving in Massachusetts at the height of the Antinomian excitement, of which he gives a vivid though prejudiced account, Johnson threw himself heart and soul into the life of the colony and of its orthodox party. Settling in Charlestown, where we find him in 1638 in the possession of considerable land-grants, he found abundant opportunity for his active and optimistic spirit in the "wilderness work" of founding a new town, that porcess so typical in American history. The General Court in May, 1640, on the petition of charlestown made a grant, enlarged a few months later to four miles square, for a new town to the northward, called at first Charlestown Village, but after incorporation Woburn. Of this new town Johnson was the leading man. For thirty years, from its incorporation in 1642 to his death in 1672, he was almost constantly one of its "selectman" or executive committeemen, the captain of its trainband, its town clerk, and its representative in the General Court, and a great part of his time was given to its business. To his deep interest in its affairs we owe it that in Wonder-working Providence, book II, chapter XXVI., he gives and exceptionally full account of the successive steps in the founding of this new town and church – the appointing of a committee of seven by Charlestown, the committee’s careful scrutiny of would-be settlers, its arrangements for village sites and the allotment of outlying farming lands, the engaging of a minister, the fathering of a covenanted church, the minister’s ordination by the democratic methods of the new Congregationalism – an account so full and so interesting that it has been one of the classical passages for the student of the origins of town and church government in New England. At the first meeting of the persons chosen by the Charlestown church to manage the new settlement, Edward Johnson was chosen as their recorder or town clerk. Accordningly the first pages of the town records, preserved in a copy in his son

A systematic attempt to discover from internal evidence the date which Captain Johnson wrote Wonder-working Providence, shows that it was not all the product of one time. Various passages would seem to show that it was written, not only after the deaths of Winthrop and Shepard in March and August, 1649 (?,?9,?,), but also after the fourth election of Dudley as governor in May, 1650 (?9), yet before the third election of Endicott in May, 1651 (p. ?9). Also the reference on p. ?9 to Boston’s soon-defeated hopes of being made a city would seem to fix the date between June, 1650, and May, 1651, is recorded, and the account on p. ?9 of the Harvard Commencement of August 12, 1651, and the graduation of Seaborn Cotton, compels a later date, though on p. 63 the latter is referred to as still "a young student in a Colledge." The truth no doubt is, that the book was mostly written in 1650, or before May of the next year, but that additions and amendments were made later in 1651. The numerous descriptions given of the various towns seem to refer to their condition at about that date.

So came into existence the first published history of Massachusetts, a book which, whatever its shortcomings, represented the honest attempt of a Puritan man of affairs to set forth to his fellow-Englishmen the first twenty-three years’ history of the great Puritan colony. A book on that subject, we may be sure, met a real want in the Puritan England of 1653 and 1654, although in the changed atmosphere of 1659 Nathaniel Brooke might find it slow of sale. But, printed as it was with the author three thousand miles away, it appeared with many typographical defects, and with vagaries of punctuation which must have made many passages difficult of comprehension even at the time of its appearance, and are still greater hindrances now. Printer’s punctuation, executed under such circumstances, cannot be regarded as sacred. The editor {[Jameson]} of the present volume has by no means attempted to systematize the punctuation; even a pointing that may appear eccentric has in most cases not been altered if after all it leaves the sense clear. But where a stupid compositor has given to the punctuation of the original a form which perverts or obscures the sense, yet the meaning intended is to an experienced eye perfectly clear, the needful alteration has been made without compunction. A good example occurs in the beginning of chapter XX. Of the first book, where the author is made to say that Boston is "invironed with the Brinish flouds, saving one small Istmos, which gives free accesse to the Neighbour Townes; by Land on the South side, on the North west, and North East, two constant Faires are kept for daily traffique thereunto." Since "Faires" is obviously a misprint for "Ferries," to retain a punctuation which represent two ferries as operating in three different directions, and one of them by land, would be a Chinese fidelity {apologies for Jameson’ prejudiced provincialism} fidelity for which the editor sees no occasion. Printing "Faires" but adding "Ferries" in square brackets, he silently alters the reading above to "Istmos, which gives free accesse to the Neighbour Townes by Land on the South side; on the North west," etc. But such alterations of punctuation have not been made save where the sense is indubitable. Brooke’s printer’s italics have been deemed no more sacred that his punctuation.

With whatever helps an editor may supply, the Wonder-working Providence remains hard reading. Though the author can tell plain facts in a plain way when he chooses to do so, and gives us many valuable details respecting business matters, his enthusiasm for the great cause of militant Puritanism frequently leads him astray into rhetorical flights which, though often vigorous and imaginative, are turgid, bombastic, and tedious. Hardest of all to peruse are the labored verses which, with excellent motives and a pathetic patience, he has hammered out whenever he had felt that an eminent leader in the upbuilding of his Zion calls for especial commemoration. Yet the prose style has picturesque imagination and a certain manly vigor, and though the diction of the rhetorical passages is all borrowed from the one Book the author knew well, a diction borrowed from that source will never wholly lack beauty and elevation. Even among the verses, one may discriminate. There are worse verses than those in the ninth chapter of the third book, beginning,

Johnson’s habit of "dropping into poetry" has been so much commented on by those who have in any way written of him, that it is natural to ask the question what models he followed, in the three varieties of metre which we see in his work. On this point the editor has consulted his friend Professor R. E. Neil Dodge, of the University of Wisconsin, an accomplished student of Elizabethan verse. Of the metre of which Johnson’s first two "poems," those in honor of Cradock and Endicott, are specimens, he says: "The measure as a whole, the fourteen-syllable couplet (‘fourteeners’ or, more learnedly ‘septenars’), would in its general swing be familiar to every good Puritan in the metrical Psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins, e.g., Ps. xxii :

Sometimes, by rhyming the half-lines, these versifiers make of the original couplet a fully rhymed quatrain, e.g., Ps. XCV.:

The double ending is rare in these Psalms, as is also internal rhyme except in the quatrain arrangement given above. See, however, Ps. xxii, stanza 21"

The particular arrangement of internal, or sectional, rhymes which you say is characteristic of his verse may be found in Tottel’s Miscellany (v. Arber’s English Reprints), a book very popular with the Elizabethans under its title of Songs and Sonnets, which Master Slender wished he had with him when he set eyes on Mistress Anne Page (Merry Wives of Windsor); see p. 62 of Arber’s edition.

The variety next seen, in the verses on Higginson, is the elegiac quatrain, that of Gray’s Elegy. It had been used, says, Professor Dodge, by Wyatt, Surrey, Sir John Davies, and Spenser (Colin Clout’s Come Home Again). All the verses in the book are in one of these two measures, except the poem alluded to above, beginning,

and that with which the volume closes. Of this six-line stanza, Professor Dodge says that it is "used by Spenser in January and December of the Shepherd’s Calendar, in The Tears of the Muses, and elsewhere. It is to be found also in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, in Drayton’s Legend of Gaveston and in several of his Ecologues, in fact in poetry about 1600 very often." He adds"

However crabbed the style of the Wonder-working Providence, he that reads it through will be profited. It is little to say that it is the first published history of New England, and the most important work on its history brought out before Cotton Mather’s Magnalia (1702). This is only to say that Winthrop’s Journal did not see the light of publication till 1790, nor Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation till 1856. The Wonder-working Providence is far from ranking in the same class with those incomparable narratives. It is the work of a much inferior mind; it is disfigured, as may be seen from the foot-notes of the present {[Jameson’s]} edition, by many errors and inaccuracies; and the thought and arrangement are often sadly confused. Yet it gives us, what neither Bradford nor Winthrop could supply, the history, or at any rate the essential spirit, of the Massachusetts colony depicted from the point of view of the rank and file.

The original edition of the Wonder-working Providence is now a rare book, not to be obtained for less than a hundred dollars. There are copies, however, in the British Museum, the Boston Public Library, the Woburn Public Library, the Congregational Library in Boston, those of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the American Antiquarian Society, and Brown University, the John Carter Brown Library, the Pequot Library, that of the State of New York in Albany, the Lenox Branch of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the libraries of Mr. E.E. Ayer, the late Mr. E.D. Church, and the late Mr. L.Z. Leiter. The copy in the Woburn Public Library, which formerly belonged to Dr. Abiel Holmes (and was "bought in London in the year 1810 for 7 s. sterling"), has, pasted on the inside of the cover, an advertisement clipped from a newspaper, unknown but of date between 1736 and 1762, in which John Draper, the Boston printer, proposes the reprinting of the work by subscriptions; but it was not done. In 1814-1819 the Massachusetts Historical Society reprinted it in portions scattered through volumes Il., III., IV., VII., and VIII. Of its second series of Collections, volumes reprinted in 1846 and 1826. The text was seen through the press by the accurate James Savage, but there were no annotations. In 1867 a reprint, almost a fac-simile, was brought out in a small edition of 260 copies by Dr. William F. Poole. This also was without annotations, but it has a long introduction on Johnson and his work which is a model of thorough investigation, and to which all subsequent writers who have touched on Johnson, including the present editor, have been deeply indebted. The present is the first edition supplied with foot-notes, which the seems particularly to require.

And now, you, my honoured Countrey-men, who have with indefatigable paines, and expence of a great part of your Estates, furthered this blessed work: Behold how the Lord of Hosts hath carried it on in despight of all opposition from his and their enemies, in planting of his Churches in this New World, with the excellent frame of their Government, both civil and military, already established; but why stop I you at the Threshold? go in, and seriously consider this The Wonder-working Providence of Sions Saviour. In the perusing of which, if thou receivest profit or delight, and God may have glory thereby, he hath attained the end that he aimed at, and full satisfaction for all his paynes, who heartily wishes thee all the good, both of this life, and a better life, in him who is a Christians all in all.