It shapes his Narrative, a biography which he published in 1847, and The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom, a play which he published in 1858. The close links between Clotel and the Narrative are reflected in the fact that the first fifty pages of the 1853 Clotel provide a shortened version of the Narrative. This gives both a context and an authentication for the novel. Brown insisted on the accuracy of his information about the workings of the internal slave trade between Virginia and New Orleans and of the Underground Railroad between the South and Canada. As the Narrative shows, Brown worked both as a guard for slave traders and as a conductor for fugitive slaves.
Later versions make the heroine merely the daughter of a Southern senator.
Commercially it certainly made sense for Brown to re-issue the novel when he returned to the United States. Publication in London provided him with no copyright in America. The first American version also represented in Hollywood terms a 'repurposing' of the property since Brown rewrote it in magazine serial form in 1860. A similar point could be made about the property's paperback reappearance in Redpath's dime-novel series in 1864. The ESE will list variations between versions, track changes between any two versions, and animate changes through all four versions.