In 1851, while he was in England, a second book appeared: Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. Published in Manchester, with an introduction by a local minister. Scholars who have examined both texts carefully note that this version is different in important ways — less oratorical, more personal, more directly aimed at the hypocrisies of a society that claimed Christian values while defending slavery. The voice is closer to Brown’s own, though the question of the authorship — he was dictating to an amanuensis whose identity is not established — remains part of the scholarly discussion.
The title’s claim, “Written by Himself,” sits in an interpretive zone that historians have navigated carefully. Brown could not write. The text was produced through some form of collaboration or transcription. What the title asserts is agency and ownership — this is my story, and I am its author — even when the mechanism of its production was necessarily collaborative.
Encyclopedia Virginia’s entry on the narratives notes that internal evidence in the 1851 text — events referenced, the absence of any mention of the panorama that Brown had been performing, the framing of certain situations as present rather than past — suggests the text was likely drafted in Boston in 1850 before the move to England, and may have been written substantially by an American collaborator. This does not erase Brown’s authorship in the broader sense, but it complicates the literal claim of “Written by Himself.” The scholarly conversation about slave narratives and the conditions under which they were produced has long grappled with exactly these questions.