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 genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and 1800s, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution.
[Early life and development: 1771-1798
Brown was born on January 17, 1771,[1] the fourth of five brothers and seven surviving siblings total in a Philadelphia Quaker merchant family. His father Elijah Brown, originally from Chester County, Pennsylvania, just southwest of Philadelphia, had an up-and-down 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 in their short-lived family re-export firm, James Brown & Co., from late 1800 to the firm's dissolution in 1806. The third brother, Armitt, was a clerk in the Treasury department and at the Bank of Pennsylvania (for a time Armitt was a clerk with Alexander Hamilton). 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 eighteenth-century civic republicanism to nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism, capitalism, and imperialism.
Although his family intended for him to become a lawyer, Brown gave up law in 1793 after a brief apprenticeship and moved toward a circle of young, New York-based intellectuals who helped launch 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 equally invested in progressive intellectual exchange and enlightened models for 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 in 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 burst of novel-writing during which Brown published the titles for which he is best known today. In complex ways, these novels and the rest of Brown's career are informed by the progressive ideas he draws on 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 followers, 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).
[edit] Novelistic phase: 1798-1801
During the novelistic phase that lasts from 1798 to late 1801, Brown published the Wollstonecraftian-feminist dialog Alcuin (1798), and seven subsequent novels. An additional novel was written, but was lost in series of mishaps and consequently never saw publication. The novels, in their order of publication, are:
Sky-Walk; or, The Man Unknown to Himself (completed by March 1798 and partially typeset, but subsequently lost and never published)
Wieland; or, the Transformation (September 1798)
Ormond; or, the Secret Witness (January, 1799)
a) Arthur 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 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)
In addition to this impressive output of novels, Brown also became an editor in this period and, along with his friends in the New York circle 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 fictional 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 medical writings by figures such as Erasmus Darwin.
Of the seven extant novels, 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 twentieth century, but is notable as the first US novel to thematize same-sex sexuality. Clara Howard and Jane Talbot have sometimes been regarded as relatively conventional works distinct from the earlier novels because they return to classic epistolary form and focus on domestic issues that, at first glance, seem far-removed from the more violent and sensational world 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.
Brown's reputation reached a relatively low ebb at the end of the nineteenth 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 monographs began to appear on Brown. Leading 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 this era focuses primarily on the novels and did little to increase understanding of Brown's voluminous periodical writings, pamphlets, or historical narratives.
The contemporary era of interest in Brown begins with the publication of a modern scholarly edition of Brown's novels, the 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 developed by German scholar Alfred Weber. Since the 1980s, an outpouring of 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 twenty-first century, Brown appears as a crucial figure whose writing provides rich insights into the major ideological, intellectual, and artistic struggles and transformations of the Atlantic revolutionary era. A Charles Brockden Brown Society, founded in 2000, holds regular conferences on the work of Brown and his contemporaries.
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