Charles Brockden Brown
Encyclopedia
Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American
novelist
, historian
, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars
as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper
. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genre
s (novels, short stories
, essay
s and periodical writings
of every sort, poetry
, historiography
, review
s) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture
and public sphere
of the era of the French Revolution
.
Quaker merchant family. His father Elijah Brown, originally from Chester County, Pennsylvania
, just southwest of Philadelphia, had a variable career primarily as a land-conveyancer
or agent in real estate transactions. The two oldest brothers, Joseph and James, and youngest brother Elijah, Jr., were import-export merchants and bought shares in re-export ventures as early as the 1780s. Brown became a reluctant partner of their short-lived family re-export firm, James Brown & Co., from late 1800 to the firm's dissolution during 1806. The third brother, Armitt, was a clerk in the early 1790s for the Treasury department and at the Bank of Pennsylvania
(for a time Armitt was a clerk with Alexander Hamilton), and later participated in the brothers' import-export firm. The family's mercantile background and experiences in the global trade and trade conflicts of the revolutionary era are relevant to Brown's writings insofar as he often explores issues connected to the period's culture of commerce
and the role that commerce plays in the historical transition from 18th-century civic republicanism
to 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism, capitalism
, and imperialism
.
Brown's family intended for him to become a lawyer
. After six years in Philadelphia at the law office of Alexander Wilcocks, he ended his law studies in 1793. He became part of a group of young, New York-based
intellectual
s who helped begin his literary career.
The New York group included a number of young male professionals who called themselves the Friendly Club (including Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith, Brown's closest friend during this period, and William Dunlap
), along with female friends and relatives who were interested in companionship and cultural-political conversation.
During most of the 1790s, Brown developed his literary ambitions in projects that often remained incomplete (for example the so-called "Henrietta Letters," transcribed in the Clark biography) and frequently used his correspondence with friends as a sort of laboratory for narrative experiments. His first publications appeared during the late 1780s (e.g. "The Rhapsodist" essay series from 1789), but generally he published little during this period. By 1798, however, these formative years gave way to a period of novel-writing during which Brown published the titles for which he is best known. In complex ways, these novels and the rest of Brown's career are informed by the progressive ideas he uses and develops from the period's British radical-democratic writers, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft
, William Godwin
, Thomas Holcroft
, and Robert Bage
. Brown was influenced by these writers and in turn exerted an influence on them and their younger studiers, for example in Godwin's later novels, or in the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley
and Mary Shelley
, who reread Brown as she wrote her novels Frankenstein
; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man
(1826).
In addition to his output of novels, Brown also became an editor during this period and, along with his friends in New York published and wrote many short articles and reviews for The Monthly Magazine and American Review from April 1799 to December 1800, as well as its short-lived successor, The American Review and Literary Journal (1801–1802). Finally, besides these two New York periodicals, Brown also published numerous fiction
al pieces, including the only surviving fragment of his first novel Sky-Walk
, in the Philadelphia-based Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence (1798–1799).
Brown's novels are often characterized simply as gothic fiction
, although the model he develops is far from the Gothic romance mode of writers such as Ann Radcliffe
. Brown's novels combine several revolutionary-era fiction subgenres with other types of late-Enlightenment scientific and medical knowledges. Most notably, they develop the British radical-democratic models of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Holcroft and combine these with elements of German "Schauer-romantik" gothic from Friedrich Schiller
, the enlightened sentimental fictions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
or Laurence Sterne
, women's domestic novels by writers such as Fanny Burney
or Hannah Webster Foster
, and other genres such as captivity narrative
. Brown builds plots around particular motifs such as sleepwalking
and religious mania, drawing on Enlightenment
-era medical writings by people such as Erasmus Darwin
.
Of the seven novels extant, the first four to be published in book form (Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn) have received the lion's share of commentary
and attention. Because of their sensational violence, dramatic intensity, and intellectual complexity, these four novels are often referred to as the "gothic" or "Godwinian" novels. Stephen Calvert, which appeared only in serialized form and in the posthumous 1815 biography
, remained little-read until the end of the 20th century, but is notable as the first US novel to thematize
same-sex sexuality. Clara Howard and Jane Talbot have been regarded sometimes as relatively conventional
works distinct from the earlier novels because they have classic epistolary form and concern domestic issues that seem very different from the violence and sensationalism of the first four novels. Recent scholarship (since the 1980s), however, has largely revised this view and emphasizes the continuities and overall coherence of all seven novels understood as a loosely unified ensemble.
s Arthur Mervyn or Edgar Huntly) into situations of historical stress (like the Yellow Fever
epidemic of 1793 or settler
-Indian
violence on the Pennsylvania
frontier
after the Walking Purchase
) in such a way as educate his audience about virtuous behaviors and the historical causes and conditions of individual actions. In short, Brown uses his Wollstonecraftian-Godwinian models to develop political fiction that is intended to educate his readers and to take part in the ideological and cultural debates of his period. Brown's life-long support for feminism, for example, originates both from his Quaker background, and from his commitment to the late-Enlightenment ideals of the revolutionary era.
While crucial aspects of Brown's overall orientation and novelistic method are adapted from the British Wollstonecraftian-Godwinian writers, it is important to note that he was no mere imitator of his sources, but an independent thinker who advanced and refined their ideas and techniques as he adopted them. Brown shares with the British radical-democrats an emphasis on sociocultural determinism and on the use of literature as a medium for spreading progressive ideas. In addition, he shares with Godwin, in particular, the project of combining historical and fictional modes into a distinctive and progressive narrative
style designed to stimulate social awareness and action. But he advances their models, for example, by placing a new emphasis on the culture and contradictions of economic liberalism
and the world of commerce
, focusing on a crucial topic that his British novelistic sources minimized, but which would grow exponentially in importance throughout the post-revolutionary era. It is also significant that Brown examines issues associated with personal identity (race, gender
and sexuality
, etc.) in ways that the British radical-democratic novelists did not, primarily by associating them with larger issues of social and economic power in the new liberal order that was emerging at the turn of the 19th century. As Brown undicates in the "Walstein's School of History" essay, two primary topics of drama of his novelistic plots are "sex" (or gender relations) and "property" (or economic relations).
s arguing for the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory
and against the Embargo Act of 1807
. He edited and was primary contributor to two more magazines: The Literary Magazine and American Register (1803–1806), a miscellany on cultural and other topics (from geography
and medicine
to history
and aesthetics
) and The American Register and General Repository of History, Politics, and Science (1807–09). The latter is notable for the book-length "Annals of Europe and America," Brown's contemporary historical narrative of Napoleonic
geopolitics
. Brown continued to write fiction and experiment with other literary genres during this period, notably in the Historical Sketches, a group of historical fictions that were written between 1803 and 1807 but published only posthumously. These late experimental narratives show Brown exploring the interface of fiction and history at the end of the revolutionary era, at a moment that both follows the great Enlightenment historians (e.g., David Hume
, William Robertson
, Edward Gibbon
) and prefigures the emergence of the 19th-century historical romance
form in writers like Walter Scott
or James Fenimore Cooper
. He also published miscellaneous pieces in other Philadelphia newspapers and magazines of the 19th century including the Aurora and, in 1809, the Port-Folio
.
In addition to these pamphlets, magazines, and historical narratives, it is notable that Brown maintained his contacts with reformist and progressive individuals and institutions in 19th–century Philadelphia. Although it was never completed, Brown planned from 1803 to 1806, with close friend Thomas Pym Cope, to publish a "History of Slavery" using the records of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Benjamin Rush
recommended Brown in 1803 as an ideal author for a history of penal
reform in Philadelphia. Brown maintained a well-informed interest in these sorts of reformist institutions and since the early 1790s had regularly visited new, pioneering hospitals and prison
s (such as Philadelphia's Walnut Street Prison
or Pennsylvania Hospital
) with friends from his New York circle. In addition, he contracted to publish a major introduction to Geography during his last years, but the manuscript
is now lost. Politically, Brown has been an enigma, but more recent scholarship considers Brown as having, for instance, few or no associations with a Federalist political agenda and instead divorcing himself from the ideology of America as an exemplary nation, and desiring "political justice" on both sides of the Atlantic.
Brown died of tuberculosis
in Philadelphia on February 22, 1810, at the age of 39.
, Thomas Love Peacock
, John Keats
, and Walter Scott
. Among US writers, Margaret Fuller
, Edgar Allan Poe
, Nathaniel Hawthorne
, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
, and John Greenleaf Whittier
were notable in regarding Brown as a particularly influential and significant predecessor. Philadelphia novelist and journalist George Lippard
included a dedication to Brown in his 1845 bestseller The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall.
Brown was less widely read at the end of the 19th century, when prevailing Realist and Naturalist literary styles obscured most fiction of Brown's era. Literary-critical scholarship revived interest when American Studies
scholars like Vernon Louis Parrington
and Fred Lewis Pattee examined his works in the 1920s and subsequent decades. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, scholarly biographies and monograph
s began to appear on Brown. Major scholars such as Leslie Fiedler
, who discussed Brown in his landmark study Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), helped repopularize his work, although scholarly emphasis in the mid and late 20th century emphasized Brown's novels, largely ignoring his voluminous periodical writings, pamphlets, and historical narratives.
The contemporary era of interest in Brown begins with the publication of a modern scholarly edition of Brown's novels, the six-volume Kent State "Bicentennial Edition" that was organized by Sidney J. Krause and S.W. Reid and appeared from 1977 to 1987. During the same period, new but still incomplete attempts to publish a selection of non-novelistic writings were initiated by German scholar Alfred Weber. Since the 1980s, new scholarship on both Brown and the early national period, accompanied by new mass market editions of Brown's novels and increasing efforts to understand Brown's entire career, has transformed the understanding of Brown's writing and its place in US cultural history. Brown was regarded as a somewhat secondary novelist by scholars in the cold war
era who focused on normative
aesthetic criteria and tended to ignore the wide scope of his writings, but more recent and historically-oriented scholarship has reestablished Brown as a leading writer and intellectual of the late enlightenment and early republic
. At the beginning of the 21st century, Brown is widely acknowledged as a key figure in US literary history whose writings provide insight into the major ideological, intellectual, and artistic struggles and transformations of the Atlantic revolutionary era. A Charles Brockden Brown Society, founded in 2000, has regular conferences on the work of Brown and his contemporaries.
In 2009, The Library of America selected Brown’s essay “Somnambulism: A Fragment” for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub
.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
novelist
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
, historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars
Academia
Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...
as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo...
. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
s (novels, short stories
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
, essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
s and periodical writings
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
of every sort, poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
, review
Review
A review is an evaluation of a publication, a product or a service, such as a movie , video game, musical composition , book ; a piece of hardware like a car, home appliance, or computer; or an event or performance, such as a live music concert, a play, musical theater show or dance show...
s) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture
Print culture
Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One prominent scholar in the field is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted print culture, which appeared in Europe in the centuries after the advent of the Western printing-press , to scribal culture...
and public sphere
Public sphere
The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action...
of the era of the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
.
Early life
Brown was born on January 17, 1771, the fourth of five brothers and six surviving siblings total in a PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
Quaker merchant family. His father Elijah Brown, originally from Chester County, Pennsylvania
Chester County, Pennsylvania
-State parks:*French Creek State Park*Marsh Creek State Park*White Clay Creek Preserve-Demographics:As of the 2010 census, the county was 85.5% White, 6.1% Black or African American, 0.2% Native American or Alaskan Native, 3.9% Asian, 0.0% Native Hawaiian, 1.8% were two or more races, and 2.4% were...
, just southwest of Philadelphia, had a variable career primarily as a land-conveyancer
Conveyancer
In Commonwealth countries, a conveyancer is a specialist lawyer who specialises in the legal aspects of buying and selling real property, or conveyancing. A conveyancer can also be a solicitor, licensed conveyancer, or a fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives.In the United Kingdom,...
or agent in real estate transactions. The two oldest brothers, Joseph and James, and youngest brother Elijah, Jr., were import-export merchants and bought shares in re-export ventures as early as the 1780s. Brown became a reluctant partner of their short-lived family re-export firm, James Brown & Co., from late 1800 to the firm's dissolution during 1806. The third brother, Armitt, was a clerk in the early 1790s for the Treasury department and at the Bank of Pennsylvania
Bank of Pennsylvania
The Bank of Pennsylvania was established on July 17, 1780, by Philadelphia merchants to provide funds for the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War...
(for a time Armitt was a clerk with Alexander Hamilton), and later participated in the brothers' import-export firm. The family's mercantile background and experiences in the global trade and trade conflicts of the revolutionary era are relevant to Brown's writings insofar as he often explores issues connected to the period's culture of commerce
Commerce
While business refers to the value-creating activities of an organization for profit, commerce means the whole system of an economy that constitutes an environment for business. The system includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural, and technological systems that are in operation in any...
and the role that commerce plays in the historical transition from 18th-century civic republicanism
Republicanism
Republicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context...
to 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism, capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
, and imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
.
Brown's family intended for him to become a lawyer
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
. After six years in Philadelphia at the law office of Alexander Wilcocks, he ended his law studies in 1793. He became part of a group of young, New York-based
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
s who helped begin his literary career.
The New York group included a number of young male professionals who called themselves the Friendly Club (including Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith, Brown's closest friend during this period, and William Dunlap
William Dunlap
William Dunlap was a pioneer of the American theater. He was a producer, playwright, and actor, as well as a historian. He managed two of New York's earliest and most prominent theaters, the John Street Theatre and the Park Theatre...
), along with female friends and relatives who were interested in companionship and cultural-political conversation.
During most of the 1790s, Brown developed his literary ambitions in projects that often remained incomplete (for example the so-called "Henrietta Letters," transcribed in the Clark biography) and frequently used his correspondence with friends as a sort of laboratory for narrative experiments. His first publications appeared during the late 1780s (e.g. "The Rhapsodist" essay series from 1789), but generally he published little during this period. By 1798, however, these formative years gave way to a period of novel-writing during which Brown published the titles for which he is best known. In complex ways, these novels and the rest of Brown's career are informed by the progressive ideas he uses and develops from the period's British radical-democratic writers, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...
, William Godwin
William Godwin
William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism...
, Thomas Holcroft
Thomas Holcroft
Thomas Holcroft was an English dramatist and miscellaneous writer.-Early life:He was born in Orange Court, Leicester Fields, London. His father had a shoemaker's shop, and kept riding horses for hire; but having fallen into difficulties was reduced to the status of hawking peddler...
, and Robert Bage
Robert Bage
Robert Bage may refer to:* Robert Bage , English novelist* Edward Frederick Robert Bage , Australian explorer and soldier...
. Brown was influenced by these writers and in turn exerted an influence on them and their younger studiers, for example in Godwin's later novels, or in the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
and Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
, who reread Brown as she wrote her novels Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man
The Last Man
The Last Man is an apocalyptic science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, which was first published in 1826. The book tells of a future world that has been ravaged by a plague. The novel was harshly reviewed at the time, and was virtually unknown until a scholarly revival beginning in the 1960s...
(1826).
Novels
During the novelistic phase that lasts from 1798 until late 1801, Brown published the Wollstonecraftian-feminist dialog Alcuin (1798), and seven subsequent novels. An additional novel was written, but was lost by a series of mishaps and consequently never saw publication.In addition to his output of novels, Brown also became an editor during this period and, along with his friends in New York published and wrote many short articles and reviews for The Monthly Magazine and American Review from April 1799 to December 1800, as well as its short-lived successor, The American Review and Literary Journal (1801–1802). Finally, besides these two New York periodicals, Brown also published numerous fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
al pieces, including the only surviving fragment of his first novel Sky-Walk
Sky-Walk
Sky-Walk is the first completed novel by Charles Brockden Brown. It was started in 1797 and completed by March 1798, when an “Excerpt” was published in The Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence...
, in the Philadelphia-based Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence (1798–1799).
Brown's novels are often characterized simply as gothic fiction
Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...
, although the model he develops is far from the Gothic romance mode of writers such as Ann Radcliffe
Ann Radcliffe
Anne Radcliffe was an English author, and considered the pioneer of the gothic novel . Her style is romantic in its vivid descriptions of landscapes, and long travel scenes, yet the Gothic element is obvious through her use of the supernatural...
. Brown's novels combine several revolutionary-era fiction subgenres with other types of late-Enlightenment scientific and medical knowledges. Most notably, they develop the British radical-democratic models of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Holcroft and combine these with elements of German "Schauer-romantik" gothic from Friedrich Schiller
Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life , Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...
, the enlightened sentimental fictions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
or Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
, women's domestic novels by writers such as Fanny Burney
Fanny Burney
Frances Burney , also known as Fanny Burney and, after her marriage, as Madame d’Arblay, was an English novelist, diarist and playwright. She was born in Lynn Regis, now King’s Lynn, England, on 13 June 1752, to musical historian Dr Charles Burney and Mrs Esther Sleepe Burney...
or Hannah Webster Foster
Hannah Webster Foster
Hannah Webster Foster was an American novelist.Her epistolary novel, The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton, was published anonymously in 1797. Although it sold well in the 1790s, it was not until 1866 that her name appeared on the title page...
, and other genres such as captivity narrative
Captivity narrative
Captivity narratives are stories of people captured by "uncivilized" enemies. The narratives often include a theme of redemption by faith in the face of the threats and temptations of an alien way of life. Barbary captivity narratives, stories of Englishmen captured by Barbary pirates, were popular...
. Brown builds plots around particular motifs such as sleepwalking
Sleepwalking
Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism, is a sleep disorder belonging to the parasomnia family. Sleepwalkers arise from the slow wave sleep stage in a state of low consciousness and perform activities that are usually performed during a state of full consciousness...
and religious mania, drawing on Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
-era medical writings by people such as Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin was an English physician who turned down George III's invitation to be a physician to the King. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave trade abolitionist,inventor and poet...
.
Of the seven novels extant, the first four to be published in book form (Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn) have received the lion's share of commentary
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
and attention. Because of their sensational violence, dramatic intensity, and intellectual complexity, these four novels are often referred to as the "gothic" or "Godwinian" novels. Stephen Calvert, which appeared only in serialized form and in the posthumous 1815 biography
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
, remained little-read until the end of the 20th century, but is notable as the first US novel to thematize
Theme (literature)
A theme is a broad, message, or moral of a story. The message may be about life, society, or human nature. Themes often explore timeless and universal ideas and are almost always implied rather than stated explicitly. Along with plot, character,...
same-sex sexuality. Clara Howard and Jane Talbot have been regarded sometimes as relatively conventional
Convention (norm)
A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms or criteria, often taking the form of a custom....
works distinct from the earlier novels because they have classic epistolary form and concern domestic issues that seem very different from the violence and sensationalism of the first four novels. Recent scholarship (since the 1980s), however, has largely revised this view and emphasizes the continuities and overall coherence of all seven novels understood as a loosely unified ensemble.
The history-fiction nexus
Brown articulates a well-defined technique and plan for his novel-writing in essays such as "Walstein's School of History" (1799) and "The Difference Between History and Romance" (1800). In these essays, he explains that his novels combine fiction and history to place ordinary individuals (like his novelistic protagonistProtagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
s Arthur Mervyn or Edgar Huntly) into situations of historical stress (like the Yellow Fever
Yellow fever
Yellow fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease. The virus is a 40 to 50 nm enveloped RNA virus with positive sense of the Flaviviridae family....
epidemic of 1793 or settler
Settler
A settler is a person who has migrated to an area and established permanent residence there, often to colonize the area. Settlers are generally people who take up residence on land and cultivate it, as opposed to nomads...
-Indian
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
violence on the Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
frontier
Frontier
A frontier is a political and geographical term referring to areas near or beyond a boundary. 'Frontier' was absorbed into English from French in the 15th century, with the meaning "borderland"--the region of a country that fronts on another country .The use of "frontier" to mean "a region at the...
after the Walking Purchase
Walking Purchase
The Walking Purchase was a purported 1737 agreement between the Penn family, the proprietors of Pennsylvania, and the Lenape . By it the Penn family and proprietors claimed an area of 1,200,000 acres and forced the Lenape to vacate it...
) in such a way as educate his audience about virtuous behaviors and the historical causes and conditions of individual actions. In short, Brown uses his Wollstonecraftian-Godwinian models to develop political fiction that is intended to educate his readers and to take part in the ideological and cultural debates of his period. Brown's life-long support for feminism, for example, originates both from his Quaker background, and from his commitment to the late-Enlightenment ideals of the revolutionary era.
While crucial aspects of Brown's overall orientation and novelistic method are adapted from the British Wollstonecraftian-Godwinian writers, it is important to note that he was no mere imitator of his sources, but an independent thinker who advanced and refined their ideas and techniques as he adopted them. Brown shares with the British radical-democrats an emphasis on sociocultural determinism and on the use of literature as a medium for spreading progressive ideas. In addition, he shares with Godwin, in particular, the project of combining historical and fictional modes into a distinctive and progressive narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
style designed to stimulate social awareness and action. But he advances their models, for example, by placing a new emphasis on the culture and contradictions of economic liberalism
Economic liberalism
Economic liberalism is the ideological belief in giving all people economic freedom, and as such granting people with more basis to control their own lives and make their own mistakes. It is an economic philosophy that supports and promotes individual liberty and choice in economic matters and...
and the world of commerce
Commerce
While business refers to the value-creating activities of an organization for profit, commerce means the whole system of an economy that constitutes an environment for business. The system includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural, and technological systems that are in operation in any...
, focusing on a crucial topic that his British novelistic sources minimized, but which would grow exponentially in importance throughout the post-revolutionary era. It is also significant that Brown examines issues associated with personal identity (race, gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
and sexuality
Human sexuality
Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...
, etc.) in ways that the British radical-democratic novelists did not, primarily by associating them with larger issues of social and economic power in the new liberal order that was emerging at the turn of the 19th century. As Brown undicates in the "Walstein's School of History" essay, two primary topics of drama of his novelistic plots are "sex" (or gender relations) and "property" (or economic relations).
Later life and writings
After 1801 Brown continued to publish prolifically. He authored several important political pamphletPamphlet
A pamphlet is an unbound booklet . It may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths , or it may consist of a few pages that are folded in half and saddle stapled at the crease to make a simple book...
s arguing for the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory
Louisiana Territory
The Territory of Louisiana or Louisiana Territory was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from July 4, 1805 until June 4, 1812, when it was renamed to Missouri Territory...
and against the Embargo Act of 1807
Embargo Act of 1807
The Embargo Act of 1807 and the subsequent Nonintercourse Acts were American laws restricting American ships from engaging in foreign trade between the years of 1807 and 1812. The Acts were diplomatic responses by presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison designed to protect American interests...
. He edited and was primary contributor to two more magazines: The Literary Magazine and American Register (1803–1806), a miscellany on cultural and other topics (from geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
and medicine
Medicine
Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....
to history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
and aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
) and The American Register and General Repository of History, Politics, and Science (1807–09). The latter is notable for the book-length "Annals of Europe and America," Brown's contemporary historical narrative of Napoleonic
Napoleon I of France
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
geopolitics
Geopolitics
Geopolitics, from Greek Γη and Πολιτική in broad terms, is a theory that describes the relation between politics and territory whether on local or international scale....
. Brown continued to write fiction and experiment with other literary genres during this period, notably in the Historical Sketches, a group of historical fictions that were written between 1803 and 1807 but published only posthumously. These late experimental narratives show Brown exploring the interface of fiction and history at the end of the revolutionary era, at a moment that both follows the great Enlightenment historians (e.g., David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
, William Robertson
William Robertson (historian)
William Robertson FRSE FSA was a Scottish historian, minister of religion, and Principal of the University of Edinburgh...
, Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon was an English historian and Member of Parliament...
) and prefigures the emergence of the 19th-century historical romance
Romance (genre)
As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
form in writers like Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
or James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo...
. He also published miscellaneous pieces in other Philadelphia newspapers and magazines of the 19th century including the Aurora and, in 1809, the Port-Folio
Port Folio (magazine)
Port Folio was a Philadelphia literary and political magazine, published 1801-1812 by Joseph Dennie and Asbury Dickens. Dennie wrote under the pen name of Oliver Oldschool. Many other contributors to the magazine wrote under pseudonyms, including members of the Federalist Party...
.
In addition to these pamphlets, magazines, and historical narratives, it is notable that Brown maintained his contacts with reformist and progressive individuals and institutions in 19th–century Philadelphia. Although it was never completed, Brown planned from 1803 to 1806, with close friend Thomas Pym Cope, to publish a "History of Slavery" using the records of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Rush was a Founding Father of the United States. Rush lived in the state of Pennsylvania and was a physician, writer, educator, humanitarian and a Christian Universalist, as well as the founder of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania....
recommended Brown in 1803 as an ideal author for a history of penal
Penal colony
A penal colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general populace by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory...
reform in Philadelphia. Brown maintained a well-informed interest in these sorts of reformist institutions and since the early 1790s had regularly visited new, pioneering hospitals and prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...
s (such as Philadelphia's Walnut Street Prison
Walnut Street Prison
Walnut Street Prison founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1790 is considered the first American penitentiary, if not the first in the world. The word "penitentiary" came from the Pennsylvania Quakers and their belief in penitence and self-examination as a means to salvation...
or Pennsylvania Hospital
Pennsylvania Hospital
Pennsylvania Hospital is a hospital in Center City, Philadelphia, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania Health System . Founded on May 11, 1751 by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Bond, it was the first hospital in the United States...
) with friends from his New York circle. In addition, he contracted to publish a major introduction to Geography during his last years, but the manuscript
Manuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
is now lost. Politically, Brown has been an enigma, but more recent scholarship considers Brown as having, for instance, few or no associations with a Federalist political agenda and instead divorcing himself from the ideology of America as an exemplary nation, and desiring "political justice" on both sides of the Atlantic.
Brown died of tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
in Philadelphia on February 22, 1810, at the age of 39.
Reception history and critical reputation
Although Brown's writings did not achieve immediate commercial success, he was republished in both the U.S. and England throughout the romantic era and developed a widespread and influential reputation as a "writer's writer." New editions of his works were published and reviewed widely in North America and England during the 1820s, for example, when Brown's novels were also published in combined editions with those of Schiller and Mary Shelley. His novels were the first U.S. novels translated into other European languages: Ormond was published in German (where it was attributed to Godwin) during 1803, and a French version of Wieland appeared in 1808. An abridged version of William Dunlap's posthumous 1815 biography of him was also reprinted in England in 1822. The most important group of writers influenced by Brown during this period was the Godwin-Shelley circle mentioned above, but Brown was read and recommended by many other major British writers of this era, notably William HazlittWilliam Hazlitt
William Hazlitt was an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, and as a grammarian and philosopher. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. Yet his work is...
, Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Love Peacock was an English satirist and author.Peacock was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and they influenced each other's work...
, John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
, and Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
. Among US writers, Margaret Fuller
Margaret Fuller
Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, commonly known as Margaret Fuller, was an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism...
, Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...
, and John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier was an influential American Quaker poet and ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. He is usually listed as one of the Fireside Poets...
were notable in regarding Brown as a particularly influential and significant predecessor. Philadelphia novelist and journalist George Lippard
George Lippard
George Lippard was a 19th-century American novelist, journalist, playwright, social activist, and labor organizer. Nearly forgotten today, he was one of the most widely-read authors in antebellum America. A friend of Edgar Allan Poe, Lippard advocated a socialist political philosophy and sought...
included a dedication to Brown in his 1845 bestseller The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall.
Brown was less widely read at the end of the 19th century, when prevailing Realist and Naturalist literary styles obscured most fiction of Brown's era. Literary-critical scholarship revived interest when American Studies
American studies
American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the United States. It traditionally incorporates the study of history, literature, and critical theory, but also includes fields as diverse as law, art, the media, film, religious studies, urban...
scholars like Vernon Louis Parrington
Vernon Louis Parrington
Vernon Louis Parrington was an American historian and football coach. His liberal interpretation of American history was highly influential in the 1920s to 1940s, when it fell out of favor.-Career:...
and Fred Lewis Pattee examined his works in the 1920s and subsequent decades. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, scholarly biographies and monograph
Monograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
s began to appear on Brown. Major scholars such as Leslie Fiedler
Leslie Fiedler
Leslie Aaron Fiedler was a Jewish-American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work also involves application of psychological theories to American literature. He was in practical terms one of the early postmodernist critics working...
, who discussed Brown in his landmark study Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), helped repopularize his work, although scholarly emphasis in the mid and late 20th century emphasized Brown's novels, largely ignoring his voluminous periodical writings, pamphlets, and historical narratives.
The contemporary era of interest in Brown begins with the publication of a modern scholarly edition of Brown's novels, the six-volume Kent State "Bicentennial Edition" that was organized by Sidney J. Krause and S.W. Reid and appeared from 1977 to 1987. During the same period, new but still incomplete attempts to publish a selection of non-novelistic writings were initiated by German scholar Alfred Weber. Since the 1980s, new scholarship on both Brown and the early national period, accompanied by new mass market editions of Brown's novels and increasing efforts to understand Brown's entire career, has transformed the understanding of Brown's writing and its place in US cultural history. Brown was regarded as a somewhat secondary novelist by scholars in the cold war
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
era who focused on normative
Norm (sociology)
Social norms are the accepted behaviors within a society or group. This sociological and social psychological term has been defined as "the rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. These rules may be explicit or implicit...
aesthetic criteria and tended to ignore the wide scope of his writings, but more recent and historically-oriented scholarship has reestablished Brown as a leading writer and intellectual of the late enlightenment and early republic
Republic
A republic is a form of government in which the people, or some significant portion of them, have supreme control over the government and where offices of state are elected or chosen by elected people. In modern times, a common simplified definition of a republic is a government where the head of...
. At the beginning of the 21st century, Brown is widely acknowledged as a key figure in US literary history whose writings provide insight into the major ideological, intellectual, and artistic struggles and transformations of the Atlantic revolutionary era. A Charles Brockden Brown Society, founded in 2000, has regular conferences on the work of Brown and his contemporaries.
In 2009, The Library of America selected Brown’s essay “Somnambulism: A Fragment” for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub
Peter Straub
Peter Francis Straub is an American author and poet, most famous for his work in the horror genre. His horror fiction has received numerous literary honors such as the Bram Stoker Award, World Fantasy Award, and International Horror Guild Award, placing him among the most-honored horror authors in...
.
Brown's novels
- Sky-Walk; or, The Man Unknown to HimselfSky-WalkSky-Walk is the first completed novel by Charles Brockden Brown. It was started in 1797 and completed by March 1798, when an “Excerpt” was published in The Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence...
(completed by March 1798 and partially typeset, but subsequently lost and never published) - Wieland; or, the TransformationWieland (novel)Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale, usually simply called Wieland, is the first major work by Charles Brockden Brown. First published in 1798, it distinguishes the true beginning of his career as a writer. Wieland is the first - and most famous - American Gothic novel. It has often...
(September 1798) - Ormond; or, the Secret Witness (January, 1799)
- a) Arthur MervynArthur MervynArthur Mervyn is a novel written by Charles Brockden Brown and published in 1799. It was one of Brown's more popular novels, and is in many ways representative of Brown's dark, gothic style and subject matter.-Meeting Mervyn:...
; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (May 1799) - Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (August 1799)
- Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (serialized from June 1799 to June 1800)
- b) Arthur MervynArthur MervynArthur Mervyn is a novel written by Charles Brockden Brown and published in 1799. It was one of Brown's more popular novels, and is in many ways representative of Brown's dark, gothic style and subject matter.-Meeting Mervyn:...
; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, Second Part (September 1800) - Clara Howard; In a Series of Letters (June 1801)
- Jane Talbot; A Novel (December 1801)
Further reading
- Clark, David Lee. Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1952.
- Kafer, Peter. Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
- Warfel, Harry R. Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist. Gainesville FL: University of Florida Press, 1949.
- Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro, eds. Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004.