Charles Brockden Brown

  Charles Brockden Brown is credited with having developed the American gothic novel.  Born to his parents, Elijah and Mary Armit, on January 17, 1771 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Brown was one of seven children.  He loved his home and had good relationships with his family.  As a child Brown can be described as anxious, sensitive, intelligent and imaginative.  Brown was often sick in his childhood so he did not participate in many sports like the other children his age.  Instead he studied books, maps, prints and architecture.  Living in Philadelphia, Brown was raised a Quaker as a member of the Society of Friends of Truth. 

   Scholars recognize that Brown’s upbringing as a Quaker influenced him to form some of his opinions regarding pacifism and more importantly, women’s rights.  The Quakers were a peaceful community who preached against war, slavery, suicide and capital punishment.  Also, in the Society of Friends meetings women were treated almost as equals with men and often given the opportunities for speech and leading prayer.  Moreover, because Brown was born in 1771, he grew up during an extremely revolutionary period during which the American nationality began to emerge.

    Although it is unknown when Brown’s formal education began, the records show that Brown studied at the Friend’s Latin School between the ages of eleven and sixteen. During his time at this school, Brown developed a close relationship, which is revealed in his journals and letters, with the leader of the school, Robert Proud.  Proud taught him about various subjects, such as literature and science, and most significantly, about service to mankind.  After Brown stopped attending the Latin School, he kept in contact with Proud who attempted to break the Quaker prejudices against higher education.  However, Proud was unsuccessful and Brown did not attend the University of Pennsylvania despite its close proximity.  Instead he unwillingly entered the field of law and apprenticed for Alexander Wilcox, Esq.  Judging from a passage in his novel, Ormond, Brown may have viewed law as stiff and unfeeling.  After a few years of studying law, in 1793 Brown chose to give up law and become a writer.

    At a time in his life when Brown was separated from his family and friends, he fell in love for the first time.  He entered into a relationship with Henrietta G., a woman from Connecticut.  Henrietta, who was three years older than Brown, was well educated for a woman of the time period.  In this mutual friendship she taught him Italian and played the harpsichord for his lute and he taught her about the Classics.  He wrote a series of love letters to her, which were later published.  Brown proposed to Henrietta; however, she convinced him to wait. The main obstacle standing in the way of their marriage was religion.  Unlike Brown, Henrietta was not a Quaker and the Quakers did not look fondly upon marrying outside of their society. Because of their religious differences along with Brown’s indecision about his profession and his poor health, Henrietta left him and returned to Connecticut.  Without Henrietta, Brown became depressed to the point of insanity.  He mentions the idea of suicide in a letter to his friend Wilkins.

    However, after time passes, Brown managed to recover and devoted himself to his intellectual interests.  Always interested in philosophy and learning, Brown and his friends formed an intellectual group called the Friendly Club, which was mainly politically conservative, or “Federalist.”  The Friendly Club was a group of writers, physicians, ministers and lawyers who assembled to discuss politics, literature and science.  Noteworthy members of the group include Elihu Hubbard Smith and William Dunlap.  During the early-mid 1790s, Brown wrote letters and essays; however, by the late 1790s Brown put these smaller literary undertakings aside and began writing novels, the works for which he is most known and remembered. From 1798 to 1801, Brown published a Mary Wollstonecraft-inspired feminist dialogue, Alcuin, and seven novels, including the more well-known Wieland and Ormond.  Brown wrote gothic novels in which he blended science, nature and the supernatural to provoke the readers’ interest.  He often wrote about sleepwalking, ventriloquists and mental illness. At the time Brown began writing his novels, there were only four or five American novels, none of which were outstanding.  While he appreciated the excellence of English, French and German literature, Brown adapted the European writing styles to American people, places, events and culture to give this new country a new and unique writing style. For this reason he is credited as having developed the American gothic novel.

    The writings of William Godwin, another Romantic-era thinker, greatly influenced Brown’s writings and Brown’s writings likewise influenced some of Godwin’s.  The scholarly relationship between Godwin and Brown started with Brown’s father, Elijah Brown, who copied long passages from William Godwin’s Political Justice, dating from before Brown started writing novels.  Moreover Charles Brockden Brown showed his admiration for Godwin when he declared himself a Godwinian in October 1795 by referring to Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice as “my Oracle.”  Furthermore, the influence of Brown’s writing on Godwin’s can be easily seen.  Scholars assert that Godwin’s St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century shared many similarities with Brown’s Wieland, published a year earlier. 

    In the same way, the writings of William Godwin’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, influenced Brown.  His feminist dialogue, Alcuin, clearly shows Mary Wollstonecraft’s influence because when a shorter version of it appeared in the Weekly Magazine, it was entitled “Rights of Women,” which is the shortened title often used to describe Mary’s book on women’s rights published in 1792.  In Alcuin, Brown argued that marriage should be a friendship signified by a contract into which husband and wife enter as equals; Wollstonecraft asserted a similar point in her earlier book.

    In his personal life, Brown fell in and out of love often.  In November 1800 he met Elizabeth Linn, whom he married after a four-year courtship.  Their marriage may have been delayed because of Brown’s unstable financial situation and their religious differences.  Elizabeth Linn disappointed Brown often by not responding to his love letters to her regularly.  Together they had four children, one of whom lived to provide Brown with descendants.  Later, Brown returned to journalism and also became a literary critic and historian.  Always in poor health, Brown died in February 1810 at the age of thirty-nine. He was the first American to choose literature as a profession and the first to base his literature on American facts.  He brought the novel to America and created a new form of the gothic novel that is characteristically American.