Charles Brockden Brown

Novelist

• Born: January 17, 1771
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: February 22, 1810
• Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

American novelist

Biography

Charles Brockden Brown is given credit for being the first American to earn a living as a professional author, although he did so for only a few years of his life. He was born into a Philadelphia Quaker family, and even as a youngster he read voluminously. Because of his constant reading, he earned a reputation as a scholar and genius in Philadelphia. Early in life, too, he began to write, planning three epic poems on explorers Christopher Columbus, Francisco Pizarro, and Hernán Cortés, all notably American rather than European themes. His first published work, “The Rhapsodist” (1789), a glorification of the romantic rebel, appeared in The Columbian Magazine, a Philadelphia publication.

Despite his literary bent, Brown’s family insisted that he study law in 1787, but in 1793 he announced that he would henceforth be a professional writer. After several visits to New York, Brown took up residence in that city, where he found, especially in the Friendly Society, the stimulation he needed as a writer. Brown was an ardent admirer of the British radical William Godwin, who was also a novelist, and Brown’s writing reflects that enthusiasm, as in Alcuin: A Dialogue, which is really a treatise on the rights of women, though it uses elements of fiction to carry the message. Following that work, Brown turned to writing fiction that can be called novels, but in which he hoped to teach as well as entertain. Writing at a furious rate, he wrote and published six novels within four years. Wieland, which many regard as his best work, is based on an actual murder case in Pennsylvania. The book is a study in religious psychosis, with the novelty of ventriloquism added. The story is melodramatic and uses many of the devices of the English gothic fiction of the time, but it is original in that it uses American materials and presents a serious study of a human mind under pressures it does not understand.

In a later novel, Arthur Mervyn, Brown makes use of native materials. In 1793, he and his family, along with hundreds of others, had fled Philadelphia to escape an epidemic of yellow fever. In 1789, another epidemic of the same disease in New York had killed his close friend, Elihu Hubbard Smith. Arthur Mervyn is a highly realistic account of the horrors of such a scourge, describing the effects of the Philadelphia epidemic in a manner comparable to Daniel Defoe’s description of the London plague of 1665 in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). In other novels, Brown also made use of American subject matter. He introduced American Indians and the frontier into the American novel in Edgar Huntley. Unfortunately, Brown knew little about American Indians or the frontier and was unable to present them very realistically. The outstanding characteristic of the novel, as in Wieland, is the presentation of a human mind in torment.

There is no doubt that Brown’s novels were influenced by European fiction. Scholars generally consider the first American novel to be William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, which appeared less than a decade before Wieland. Brown’s significance stems from the fact that he was willing to use native materials and themes in his work. Too often critics have overemphasized the similarity between Brown’s work and that of Godwin, without giving credit to the American for his originality.

Despite his output of fiction between 1798 and 1801, Brown made too little money to support himself as a professional author. To supplement his income, he edited the Monthly Magazine and North American Review from 1799 to 1800. When the magazine failed, he returned to Philadelphia in 1801 and became a partner in his brothers’ mercantile firm. In 1804, he married Elizabeth Linn, and they had four children. Following the failure of the family firm in 1806, Brown became an independent merchant. During the last three years of his life, he continued to write, but he produced mostly hack work for various periodicals.

Bibliography

Allen, Paul. The Late Charles Brockden Brown. Edited by Robert E. Hemenway and Joseph Katz. Columbia, S.C.: J. Faust, 1976. Begun in the early nineteenth century, this biography was later expanded upon by William Dunlap. Despite some inaccuracies, this work became the basis for subsequent studies.

Axelrod, Alan. Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Study of Brown’s work focuses primarily on four novels: Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Barnard, Philip, Stephen Shapiro, and Mark L. Kamrath, eds. Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. Collection of thirteen essays addresses various aspects of Brown’s works, placing them within the context of the political and ideological issues of his time. Among the topics discussed are the culture of the Enlightenment and questions of gender and sexuality.

Christopherson, Bill. The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Chapter 2 provides a good discussion of the American romance, and separate chapters are devoted to Brown’s novels Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly.

Clark, David L. Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America. 1952. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1966. Still one of the most complete books on Brown available. Combines biography, criticism, and liberal quotations from Brown’s papers. Some of Brown’s letters were published for the first time in the original edition of this work.

Clemit, Pamela. The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Discusses the influence of British novelist William Godwin on Brown, examining elements of the Godwinian novel in Wieland. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Grabo, Norman S. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Scholarly yet easy-to-read analysis of Brown’s major fiction focuses on the psychology of the characters and what they reveal about Brown’s own mind.

Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown’s Gendered Economics of Virtue. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Contains chapters on economics and gender issues in the 1790’s and separate chapters on each of Brown’s major novels. Includes detailed notes and a bibliography.

Kafer, Peter. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Focuses on Wieland in explaining how Brown adapted the European gothic novel into a purely American genre. Describes the social and political influences on Brown’s work.

Ringe, Donald A. Charles Brockden Brown. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Contains some of the most helpful criticism of Brown’s works to be found. Discusses each of the novels and provides a chronology of Brown’s life and writings. Includes an annotated bibliography.

Rosenthal, Bernard, ed. Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. A valuable collection of original essays by various scholars, this volume opens with a summary of criticism on Brown up to 1980. The first section contains a good selection of early reviews; the second section, containing contemporary articles, includes essays on Brown’s lesser-known novels as well as major works.

Watts, Steven. The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Discusses Brown’s work from the perspective of the emergence of a capitalistic culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Addresses the author’s major novels as well as his essays, private correspondence, and other materials.