 Robbins has written that Crafts may have read a serialized version of Dickens' novel in Frederick Douglass's Paper, which had a high circulation among fugitive slaves.Scholar Catherine Keyser has noted influences from Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" in Crafts' writing.In total, Gates and Robbins document that Crafts

echoes or lifts passages from a remarkably impressive range of English and American literature, including Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre," Walter Scott's "Rob Roy" and "Redgauntlet," Thomas Campbell's "Life and Letters," Dickens's "Old Curiosity Shop" and "Bleak House," Felicia Heman's poetry, John Gauden's "Discourse on Artificial Beauty," William Wirt's "Life of Patrick Henry," Shakespeare's "Macbeth" and "Antony and Cleopatra," Michel Chevalier's "Society, Manners and Politics in the United States" and Phillis Wheatley's "To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband," as well as Douglass's "Narrative" and Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."