Charles Brockden Brown

Background

Charles Brockden Brown was born on January 17, 1771 and was the first person in the United States to make authorship his principal profession was descended from James Brown, a Quaker who came to America before William Penn. Charles Brockden Brown was the son of Elijah Brown, a merchant of Philadelphia, and his wife, Mary Armitt.

Education

At home and in the school of Robert Proud which Brown attended between the ages of eleven and sixteen, the boy gave himself up to violent reading in miscellaneous directions, and thereby got, in an ambitious, uncritical society, an early reputation for scholarship which then or later was never quite justified by the facts. Nor was he eager merely to read.

While still at school he produced versions of parts of the Bible and of Ossian, and planned three epics on the grandiose themes of Columbus, Pizarro, and Cortez--thus showing himself to be a contemporary of Joel Barlow and a forerunner of Irving and Prescott.

Career

Brown's earliest published work was a series of papers called "The Rhapsodist, " contributed to the Columbian Magazine, and devoted to glorifying the romantic revolutionary soul. Romance and revolution, however, did not constitute a career in the Philadelphia of the early republic. Brown was accordingly in 1787 apprenticed to Alexander Wilcocks, a Philadelphia lawyer.

What was perhaps more attractive, the law was generally thought of as a calling so close to literature that both might naturally be followed by the same man. Brown, along with his legal studies, still found time to speculate and debate, particularly at the meetings of the Belles Lettres Club which he and eight of his friends established for the improvement of their minds during the hours not claimed by the law.

Had he been, as his family hoped and expected, only an amateur in literature, Brown might have ridden his two horses at once. But he had in him too many of the instincts of a professional writer, and in 1793 gave up the law altogether, against the advice of his parents and his elder brothers who presumably saw themselves obliged to support him in his adventure. Authorship had hitherto occupied the major attention of few Americans and had provided a livelihood for none.

Brown, taking so precarious a step, must have seemed to sentence himself to be either a dilettante or a vagabond.

He did not become a vagabond. Instead, he only drifted back and forth between Philadelphia and New York, possibly for a time a teacher in his native town, but primarily reading and forming designs for masterpieces. What drew him to New York was less the chances which that town gave him for a literary career than the presence there of Elihu Hubbard Smith whom Brown had encountered as a medical student in Philadelphia and who in New York was somehow contriving to write verse and prose as well as heal the sick.

At Smith's house in Pine Street Brown met, along with others, Samuel Latham Mitchill, James Kent and William Dunlap, men of promise who belonged to the Friendly Society, a club which for Brown filled the place of the Belles Lettres Club in Philadelphia. His first visit to New York he apparently made in 1793, another certainly in 1795.

From 1798 to 1801 he lived there almost continuously. Without much question the Friendly Society furnished the most stimulating companionship of Brown's life. New York did for him what Philadelphia could not do.

Before undertaking a novel, however, the young philosopher wrote a treatise in dialogue on the rights of women. A part of the work was published in New York early in 1798, with the title Alcuin: A Dialogue, and with a note by Elihu Hubbard Smith; the remainder first appeared in the Dunlap Life five years after Brown had died. Because the original Alcuin is extremely rare, and has never been reprinted, most comments upon the treatise have gone on the assumption that the portion available in the Life is the same as that in the separate book.

This accident of bibliography has had few serious results, for Alcuin had no appreciable influence at the time and is not now important, though the curious will find in it various enlightened, if unexciting and undramatic, arguments for the equality of the sexes and the freedom of divorce. The admirer of Caleb Williams, not content with argument, next proceeded to fiction.

Toward the end of 1797 Brown wrote a romance presumably to be identified as the "Sky-Walk" which he announced in a letter to the Weekly Magazine (Philadelphia) of March 17, 1798, but of which the manuscript was lost before it could be published. Whatever his practise may have been, Brown's theory of fiction was impressive.

At the same time, Brown did not mean to write for geniuses alone. With the principles of his art thus thought out and with his model chosen, Brown now plunged into the two fecund, nervous years which saw the composition of all his noteworthy books. Arthur Mervyn, begun in Philadelphia before the summer of 1798, was completed in New York, and was published in two parts in 1799 and 1800.

Wieland appeared in 1798, and Ormond and Edgar Huntly in 1799; only the less interesting Clara Howard and Jane Talbot have so late a date as 1801. Writing at such speed, Brown had little opportunity to grow in experience or to vary his materials. His novels all bear the marks of haste, immaturity, and Godwin.

Brown's indebtedness to Godwin is to be found chiefly in a fondness for the central situation of Caleb Williams: an innocent and more or less helpless youth in the grasp of a patron turned enemy. Arthur Mervyn, to take the clearest example, brings a young man from the country to Philadelphia, makes him blunder into the secret of a murder, and subjects him to crafty persecutions from the murderer.

In Ormond by a variation of the formula the victim is a woman, Constantia Dudley, pursued by the philosophical villain Ormond until she is obliged to kill him in self-defense.

Constantia was a favorite heroine of Shelley, to whom she seemed a perfect type of virtue harassed by evil men. But Brown's victims do not suffer the gradual, increasing agony of Godwin's, for the reason that Brown could not construct a plot as Godwin could. The disciple had neither the steady art nor the weighty conviction of the master.

Furthermore, American life, loose-knit and easygoing, afforded in Brown's decade an inadequate setting for a story of social persecution. The method which Brown derived from Godwin is less notable than the material which he took, at first hand, from native conditions. In 1793 he had fled with his family to the country to escape the epidemic of yellow fever which then visited Philadelphia; five years later, just after his arrival in New York, he had gone through a similar invasion of the plague which caused the death of his friend Smith.

His letters show how deeply he was moved by the only personal contact he ever had with such affairs of danger and terror as he ordinarily wrote about. Composing Ormond almost before the later epidemic had passed, Brown transferred his impressions from the New York of 1798 to the Philadelphia of 1793, as he did in Arthur Mervyn, perhaps for some gain in perspective; but in both he wrote with his eye on the fact as nowhere else in his books. With unsparing, not to say sickening, veracity, he represented the physical horrors of the plague, and he was even more veracious in his account of the mental and spiritual horrors which accompanied it.

So far as his knowledge and his prepossessions went, Brown succeeded in this experiment. But he knew little of the frontier and little of the Indians. He merely used a new setting for actions not strikingly unlike those in his Godwinian plots. Huntly is not a frontiersman; he is a sleep-walker, whose adventures might almost be his dreams. Of the Indians, the visible ones are none of them so memorable as the old woman called Queen Mab, who, never appearing in person, stands as a symbol of the vanquished race.

Possibly he had exhausted his creative vein. At any rate, he had modified his schemes for freedom. His novels earned him little money. The Monthly Magazine and American Review (New York), founded by the Friendly Society and edited chiefly by Brown from its hopeful beginnings in April 1799, came to a gloomy end in December 1800.

The next year he went back to Philadelphia, as if to signalize the return of a prodigal, and became a partner with two of his brothers in a mercantile house. At first it prospered, but losses at sea, due both to storms and to the French and British navies, brought this firm near bankruptcy in 1804 and forced it to dissolve in 1806. From 1807 till his death Brown traded independently on a small scale.

His writings during this latter period were almost wholly hack work. He edited and wrote for the Literary Magazine and American Register (1803 - 07), which a Philadelphia publisher had asked him to undertake, and the American Register or General Repository of History, Politics, and Science (1807 - 11).

In addition he translated Volney's Tableau under the title A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States (1804), wrote three pamphlets on political matters, and planned A System of General Geography which never got beyond the prospectus (1809). Writing, for Brown, was more than a career; it was an itch.

In his spare time he managed to edit and publish three short-lived literary magazines, but wrote no more novels.

He died at age 39 of tuberculosis.

Achievements

• Charles Reynolds Brown is regarded as America's first professional author. Brown's first book is his most famous: "Wieland" (1798), a tale about an evil ventriloquist who, by impersonating a supernatural being, persuades the hero to kill his wife and children. Following in quick succession were the Gothic novels "Ormund" (1799), "Arthur Mervyn" (two parts, 1799 and 1800), "Jane Talbot" (1801), "Edgar Huntley" (1801), and "Clara Howard" (1801). All were very popular and some were reprinted in England, giving the author an international reputation. Brown is considered the most important writer of American fiction before James Fenimore Cooper ("The Last of the Mohicans"). 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 Hazlitt, Thomas Love Peacock, John Keats, and Walter Scott. Among American 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.

Works

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  • Ormond; or, the Secret Witness: With Related Texts (Hackett Classics)

    ( As it tells the story of Constantia Dudley, from her fa...)

  • Ormond or the Secret Witness/Clara Howard or the Enthusiasm of Love (The Works of Charles Brockden Brown Series)

    (Review "In her marvelous new edition of Ormond, Mary Chap...)

  • Ormond or the Secret Witness Complete

    (This collection of literature attempts to compile many of...)

  • Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (Penguin Classics)

    (A terrifying account of the fallibility of the human mind...)

  • Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, With Related Texts

    ( In addition to the definitive UVA text of Brown's semin...)

  • Wieland; or The Transformation: with Related Texts (Hackett Classics)

    ( Wieland; or The Transformation (1798) ties revolutionar...)

  • Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (Penguin Classics)

    (One of the first American Gothic novels, Edgar Huntly (17...)

  • The Collected Works of Charles Brockden Brown (Civitas Library Classics)

    (THE COLLECTED WORKS OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN includes si...)

  • Wieland: Or The Transformation An American Tale

    (Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale, usuall...)

  • Arthur Mervyn : or, memoirs of the year 1793. By: Charles Brockden Brown: It was one of Brown's more popular novels, and is in many ways ... dark, gothic style and subject matter.

    (Arthur Mervyn is a novel written by Charles Brockden Brow...)

  • The Novels Of Charles Brockden Brown: Arthur Mervyn, Or, Memoirs Of The Year 1793...

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Arthur Mervyn Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793
  • Wieland: Or, The Transformation : with a Memoir of the Author
  • Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (Penguin Classics) by Charles Brockden Brown (1991-02-01)
  • Wieland: or, the Transformation, an American Tale
  • Charles Brockden Brown : Three Gothic Novels : Wieland / Arthur Mervyn / Edgar Huntly (Library of America)
  • Jane Talbot

Politics

Politically inclined to the party of Jefferson, Brown had by 1795 already come to accept most of the radical doctrines current in the United States, but he owed his special impetus to William Godwin, in whose Caleb Williams (1794) he saw "transcendant merits. "

Views

Always what interested Brown was the tormented states of mind which he studied in his characters. This clearly appears in his most compact, most reflective, and most powerful novel, Wieland. Its plot was founded upon the deeds of an actual religious fanatic of Tomhannock, New York, who in a mad vision had heard himself commanded to destroy all his idols, and had murdered his wife and children with ferocious brutality. With this theme Brown involved the story of a trouble-breeding ventriloquist, in order to make the mysterious voices credible.

As ventriloquism itself was mysterious in 1798, the solution of the plot probably did not then seem so trivial as it now seems. And Brown did not rely too much upon his trivial solution. He saw, perhaps better than he understood, that the essential mystery in Carwin was not his ventriloquism, but the driving spirit of malice which forced him to meddle in other people's lives without really intending to do harm. Moreover, the murderer, though stung into activity by the voices which he hears, would of course not have acted but for the depths of frenzy already sleeping in his nature.

For Brown, who after all was only twenty-seven when he wrote Wieland, such cases of speculative pathology were more real, or at least more arousing, than any of the customary aspects of behavior which he might have chosen to represent. Maturity did not turn the novelist to another reality in fiction, for after this short burst Brown wrote no more novels.

He continues to be occasionally read for his intrinsic merits--for the somber intensity which, given a chance with any but superficial readers, outweighs his shambling structure and his verbose, stilted language. Like Poe and Hawthorne, whom he in several respects anticipates, Brown had a personal acquaintance with the dark moods which he enlarged and projected in his novels.

He had an eager intellectual curiosity which gives his work, even at its most naïve, a certain air of range and significance. It is now useless to debate whether, in more favorable circumstances, he might have done more and better work. Writers must be judged by the books they write, not by the books they might have written.

The sole evidence that his imagination still worked in him is the story that he wrote two acts of a tragedy for John Bernard, and, told that the play would not act, burned the manuscript and kept the ashes in a snuff-box. Romance had been only a chapter in Brown's life, and it belonged primarily to New York. The later Philadelphia chapter was plain prose. Brown's place in literary history is not altogether due to the fact that he was the first American who tried to live by his pen or even that he was the first American novelist who won an international hearing.

Nevertheless, it is difficult not to feel that a community both more critical and more responsive than the United States was at the end of the eighteenth century might have enabled Brown to husband and direct his powers to greater advantage. As it was, he first squandered his strength and then failed to regain it. Authorship was a profession which, as matters stood, he had to pay an extravagant price to enter.

Quotations: "The value of such works, " he told the readers of the Weekly Magazine, "lies without doubt in their moral tendency. . The world is governed, not by the simpleton, but by the men of soaring passions and intellectual energy. By the display of such only can we hope to enchain the attention and ravish the souls of those who study and reflect. "

He held that the same novel which could stir thinkers by its ideas might capture ordinary people with its plot--or, in his own less simple words, that "a contexture of facts capable of suspending the faculties of every soul in curiosity, may be joined with depth of views into human nature and all the subtleties of reasoning. "

Less successful than his handling of the plague was his handling of the frontier in Edgar Huntly. American novelists, he said in his preface, ought no longer to make use of "puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras. . The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness, are far more suitable. "

"This employment, " he told a friend, "was just as necessary to my mind as sustenance to my frame. It was synonymous with a vital function. . Had I been exiled to Kamschatka, I must have written as a mental necessity, and in it I have still found my highest enjoyment".

Membership

He was a member of the Friendly Society.

Personality

Born into a family in good standing and in fair circumstances, he had at the outset such advantages as the time and place could offer him, except the advantage of robust health. However, whether because his being frail made him studious or his being studious made him frail, at least he was both frail and studious.

Quotes from others about the person

• The law, in the words of Brown's first biographer, "to a mind so ardent in the pursuit of information, opened a wide and inexhaustible field for indulgence. It is withal, in this country, one of the roads to opulence, and the most certain path to political importance and fame".

Connections

Though a busy journalist, Charles Reynolds Brown could not by his pen alone support the wife, Elizabeth Linn of New York, whom he had married in November 1804, and the four children born to them.

Father:

Elijah Brown

merchant

Mother:

Mary Armitt Brown

1739–1825

friends:

Samuel Latham Mitchill

James Kent William Dunlap

Wife:

Elizabeth Linn Brown

1775–1834

Friend:

Thomas Pym Cope

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.

colleague:

Alexander Wilcocks

Son:

Charles Brockden Brown

1804–1871

Brother:

Armitt Brown

1768–1815

References

• Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly: The American Individual in an Age of Transition
• Charles Brockden Brown: A Study of Early American Fiction
• The Historicism of Charles Brockden Brown: Radical History and the Early Republic
• Major Works of Charles Brockden Brown
• Memoirs of Charles Brockden Brown: The American Novelist, Author of Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn &c. : With Selections from His Original Letters and Miscellaneous Writings
• Charles Brockden Brown and the Literary Magazine: Cultural Journalism in the Early American Republic
• Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale
• Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, And Sexuality In The Early Republic
• Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings