Early Years, 1771–1795

This chapter surveys Charles Brockden Brown’s early biography into five sections. The first provides background on eighteenth-century Quaker history and culture in Philadelphia, including the unlawful arrest and banishment of Elijah Brown, Charles’s father. The second section reviews Brown’s youth, adolescence, and education. The third discusses his law apprenticeship from 1787 to 1793, a period during which he participated in literary clubs, experimented with writing, and developed meaningful friendships. His letters during these years show interest in a variety of moral issues and sometimes critique traditional tenets of Christianity. The fourth section discusses Brown’s early publications and his manuscript epistolary narratives. The final section focuses on the years 1793–1795, when Brown strengthened connections with the New York intellectual circle and distanced himself from his Philadelphia social network, culminating in a cogent rejection of Christianity.

Ormond; or, The Secret Witness

This chapter traces the critical history of Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or, The Secret Witness from its early reception as a formally flawed novel through more recent scholarship that reads the novel through the lenses of gender and sexuality, revolutionary politics, and the birth of Gothic fiction in America. However, by focusing on narratives of contagion and conspiracy in Ormond, this chapter also argues that scholars should embrace the novel’s transgressive form not as flawed but as a radical commentary on the possibility of political and biological indistinction. Set in a young nation besieged by pestilence and revolutionary ideals, Ormond invites readers to contemplate the impossibility of maintaining rigid physical (or ideational) boundaries in a transatlantic world bound together by bodies (and ideas) in perpetual contact.

Wieland; or, The Transformation of American Literary History

By considering the centrality of Wieland in the development of American literary history, this chapter moves to reaffirm its importance for students of US literature. The chapter begins by surveying the major editions of Wieland, from the first modern edition in 1926 through the scholarly editions in the early twenty-first century. In so doing, the chapter charts how scholars have often recursively positioned Wieland as a bellwether text in the formation of narratives about the development of American literary history, a practice that is often predicated on positioning the text as either the first or the first noteworthy early American novel. In tracing the evolution of the critical reception of the text, the chapter moves to underscore how Wieland’s enduring contribution to our understanding of the development of American literature and culture remains Brown’s insistence on the fallibility of isolationist narratives to register accurate genealogies or histories.

Brown Studies Now and in Transition

This chapter examines the state of the field of Charles Brockden Brown studies since 2000. Taking a thematic approach, I discuss four dominant strands in twenty-first-century criticism: geographies, medical humanities, economies, and aesthetics. These sections cover the scholarly debate over a transnational, imperial, or postcolonial Brown; consider the new ways in which early national medicine intersects with his fiction; chart the rise of market and class-based criticism; and discuss a return to formal concerns in light of the aesthetic or postcritique turn. The final section of this chapter looks ahead to emergent trends in future Brown scholarship in response to the previous decade’s work.

Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker Milieu

Charles Brockden Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker upbringing was one of many influences on his work. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia Quakers went from a dominant to a persecuted minority. Quaker treatment of Native American and Scots-Irish neighbors was the source of internal and external strife, especially in the aftermath of the Paxton Boys uprising. Aspects of this history can be discerned in Brown’s writing on Quakers. Brown directly discussed Quakers in a number of periodical pieces after 1800, and he made imaginative explorations of religious and Quaker issues in his novels Arthur Mervyn, Wieland, and, in particular, Edgar Huntly. While the mature Brown retained an acute sense of Quaker history and practice, he denied Quakers any particular regard or advocacy.

Brown’s Literary Afterlife

Charles Brockden Brown’s stature among elite writers in English during the Romantic era was significant from his death in 1810 until the late nineteenth century, though it was initially far more robust abroad than at home. In the United States during the first two decades after Brown’s death, his work tended to be treated with a certain critical condescension or outright neglect. Meanwhile, his major novels saw several reissues in England before 1820, during which time they drew the fascination and praise of now-canonical authors. In the end, with this mark made on transatlantic literary culture, an enriched understanding of Brown and his literary importance made the return trip, resulting in Brown’s elevated stature among later generations of American writers. This chapter moves back and forth across the Atlantic to reimagine the circulation of ideas, influences, and aesthetic norms that first framed Brown’s work for a transatlantic readership.

Brown’s Later Biographers and Reception, 1949–2000s

Biography and reception of Charles Brockden Brown since the mid-twentieth century was marked by efforts to canonize him and to recover primary and related texts. The first generation of this era typically practiced formalist readings and focused primarily on Brown’s first four novels. Often psychobiographical, these studies created a “Gothic” and proto-Romantic Brown. Later generations have expanded the canon to include Brown’s work over his lifetime, including the many genres he worked in; have practiced more cultural and poststructuralist methodologies with an eye to gender and sexuality, geography, race, and class; have placed Brown in a more global context; and have brought Brown studies into the era of digital humanities.

Brown, the Visual Arts, and Architecture

This chapter concerns Charles Brockden Brown’s engagement with the visual arts. It explores Brown’s early adaptations of contemporary aesthetic categories, tracing his transition between the neoclassical and early-Romantic movements in his journalistic essays as well as his four Gothic novels. These early aesthetic concerns are linked to discursive cultivations of the American landscape, variously connected to the period’s expanding interest in picturesque tourism and early American boosterism or to Brown’s interest in constructing the American landscape symbolically or allegorically by adapting the new vocabularies of the Gothic and picturesque to explore the tensions of settler-colonial spaces in the new nation. It also touches on Brown’s ongoing fascination with visionary architecture, providing an overview of his unpublished juvenile architectural drawings. Finally, it expands on Brown’s fascination with the social, symbolic, and economic functions of portraiture in his fiction, registering early American anxiety about identity.

Brown and the Novel in the Atlantic World

This chapter situates Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic and sentimental novels in relation to the broader culture of novelistic miscellany that proliferated before 1820. It considers Brown’s contributions to contemporary narrative theory, his revision of the political economy of sentimentalism and the Gothic, and the historical formalism of episodic and picaresque narratives. It offers an overview of contemporary debates about the moral value of novel reading and considers contemporary calls for a novelistic culture of literary nationalism in terms of a broader, circum-Atlantic system of literary transmission and adaptation. It offers a heuristic account of the social function of the episode or fragment in early American imaginative writings and considers how Brown theorizes his relationship to the generically variable, constitutively elliptical nature of early American literary production more generally.

Political Pamphlets

This chapter traces the critical history of Charles Brockden Brown’s political pamphlets of 1803 and 1809 from the dominant reception of them as evidence of Brown’s so-called spontaneous conversion to political conservatism and bourgeois perspectives. The two 1803 pamphlets, on the question of American invasion of New Orleans to prevent Napoleon from acquiring it, need to be contextualized within the overall environment for politically progressive writers in the circum-Atlantic world in a period of revanchist conservatism. The 1809 Address to the Congress has a different tone and perspective. In the absence of an unexpected discovery of Brown’s lost work, a two-volume treatise on geography, the 1809 Address can stand as the closest, least rhetorically ambiguous account of Brown’s outlook on politics.