The Novel

by Steven Moore

  8 Elias’s 1941 essay “The First American Novel” is reprinted in McMahon’s 1943 edition of Alonso.

  9 Page viii; the novel itself will be cited by chapter. “The” was added to the front of the title in this 1976 edition.

  10 Pope, “First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated,” l. 150. Perrin supplies a few footnotes (though not here), but a better-annotated edition of this allusive novel is needed.

  11 See Brady and Handler for a discussion of the Barbados chapters and whether the author actually visited there.

  12 Letter 12 in Kable’s scholarly edition, hereafter cited by letter (except for his introduction).

  13 Werther is also a prop in one of the suicide scenes in The Hapless Orphan (1793), a lurid, anonymous, American epistolary novel set at Princeton, suggesting Goethe’s novel was as popular in the U.S. as in England and Europe.

  14 From his obituary, reprinted in Kable’s introduction, xxx. Brown had recently turned 23 when his novel appeared, and died at 27.

  15 Because of its status as the first American novel, this slight novel has received a heavy amount of critical commentary; for an informative reading of both Brown’s novel and the the debate over the concept of “the first American novel,” see chapter 5 of Cathy Davidson’s magisterial Revolution of the Word. Both novel and concept are investigated in another wide-ranging study of this period, The Early American Novel by Henri Petter, who includes a 60-page appendix in which he plot-summarizes virtually every American novel published between 1775 and 1820. In his opinion, only three novels published during this period “emerge slightly above the contemporary average”: Hannah Foster’s Coquette (1797), Rebecca Rush’s Kelroy (1812), and John Neal’s Keep Cool (1817), which does indeed sound pretty cool.

  16 The first nine letters were serialized in the Columbian Magazine (1787–88); two more letters were added to the second edition of 1796 edition, updating the story to include the French Revolution and other recent events. The novel will be cited by letter number.

  17 Originally it was entitled Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, but it was renamed Charlotte Temple beginning with the third American edition of 1797. As its cheerleading critics are fond of repeating, it went through at least 160 editions before the Civil War, as though popularity had anything to do with literary achievement.

  18 Of the 10 novels Rowson wrote—Charlotte Temple was her fourth—the most ambitious is Reuben and Rachel (1798), a multigenerational historical novel that implies Americans are the literal descendants of Christopher Columbus, a paternity not all of us would want to claim. It too was aimed at young readers, Rowson tells us her in her preface, in the hope of arousing “a curiosity that might lead them to the attentive perusal of history in general, but more especially the history of their native country.” Her target demographic would have been better served by The Foresters.

  19 Letter 19 in the Broadview edition, hereafter cited by letter.

  20 1.2; here Tyler imitates 17th-century orthography, an example of the parodic showpieces common to Menippean satire.

  21 See Pangborn for a thorough reading of this scene and its implications.

  22 Tyler left unfinished a second novel entitled The Bay Boy in which Underhill provides a more detailed account of growing up in New England. What survives is quite entertaining, and it’s a pity he didn’t complete it. The novel is previewed in 1.16 of The Algerine Captive, the chapter with the epigraph from Tristram Shandy.

  23 Why Brown abandoned the law is made clear by a paralegal in one of his novels: “He was perpetually encumbered with the rubbish of the law, and waded with laborious steps through its endless tautologies, its impertinent circuities, its lying assertions, and hateful artifices. . . . It was one tedious round of scrawling and jargon; a tissue made up of the shreds and remnants of barbarous antiquity, polluted with the rust of ages, and patched by the stupidity of modern workmen into new deformity” (Ormond, chap. 2).

  24 Chap. 16 in Three Gothic Novels, where Wieland occupies pp. 1–227. This 900-page volume, first published in 1998, gathers three of Brown’s four major novels (Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly); the fourth (Ormond) would have pushed the page-count only up to around 1,150 pages, well below the 1,500-page average of the earliest volumes in the Library of America. It has been distressing over the years to watch them shrink in size (while the prices increase).

  25 Brown calls him a “biloquist,” one who can speak with two different voices, and began a sequel to Wieland about him that he never finished (which is included in some editions of Wieland, but not the Library of America). Carvin is obviously a figure for the writer—Brown “impersonates” Clara’s voice throughout the novel—but he is also the “mysterious stranger” that intervenes in so many American fictions, from Twain’s novella of that name to Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic. On this motif, see Roy R. Male’s Enter, Mysterious Stranger: American Cloistral Fiction (Norman: U Oklahoma P, 1979), who discusses Wieland briefly on p. 11.

  26 Dated 24 October 1795, quoted in Rosenthal’s introduction to Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, 12.

  27 The Apparition in the Glass, 36–37; Christophersen quotes from Weldon’s 1984 essay on p. 184n10.

  28 Chap. 2 in the Hackett edition of Ormond, hereafter cited by chapter. This edition conveniently includes the novella Alcuin as well, complementing Ormond’s treatment of women’s issues.

  29 Quoted by Christophersen, 63.

  30 On the up side, Constantia encouraged me to learn how to make a “hasty pudding”: boil two cups of water while mixing ½ cup of yellow corn meal into a cup of cold water. Add mix to boiling water, reduce heat, and stir frequently for 10–15 minutes. Pour onto a plate and allow to set for 10 minutes, then garnish with honey and/or cinnamon.

  31 Some of these contradictions may have been unintended by Brown. As with his other novels, he wrote this one quickly and in-between other literary projects, and he may be confessing to his improvisational approach to writing when Mervyn praises a pianist who plays without a score: “though her bass might be preconcerted, it was plain that her right-hand notes were momentary and spontaneous inspirations” (1.5). See Christophersen for a clever reading of this passage, in which he suggests Mervyn learns from this piano recital to be ambidextrous when confronting life’s challenges (93–95).

  32 Brown complicates the standard Edenic country/hellish city dichotomy with instances of corruption in the country and benevolence in the city.

  33 Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 139, 152. In modern terms, “republican”=Democrat, and Federalist=Republican.

  34 From his perceptive essay in Rosenthal’s Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, 160. But he doesn’t seem to realize Dr. Stevens is only teasing Mervyn when he describes his fiancée in derogatory terms, as Mervyn indicates: “Pray, my friend, said I anxiously, jest not” (2.24).

  35 Chap. 23 in the Library of America edition, where Edgar Huntly occupies pp. 639–898; hereafter cited by chapter.

  36 In his original preface to his second novel, The Spy (1821), Cooper acknowledges Brown was the first American novelist “of any celebrity” to set a story on the American frontier, but he dismisses Edgar Huntly as unrealistic, which is accurate: it is unreal, mythic, allegorical, Gothic, nightmarish—all reasons why it is read (and written about) more often today than The Spy.

  37 Another book published at this time, The Female Review by Herman Mann (1797), features a woman who disguises herself as a man to fight in the Revolutionary War, but since it’s more a sensationalized biography of a real person than a novel, I decided to skip it.

  38 In their introduction to the Oxford edition I’ve been citing, Nienkamp and Collins note that three-term Senator Tenney “opposed on every single vote the election of Jefferson as president. He also voted for the continuation of the Alien and Sedition Act, used to suppress political dissent during the Federalist era” (xxvi). There’s every indication Tabitha Tenney shared her husband’s views.

  39 Page 476 i
n White’s definitive edition. The 800-page figure I mentioned earlier refers to Claude Newlin’s 1937 edition, which until recently was the only complete edition available. By using a large format and a tiny point size, the White edition crammed the novel into 535 pages. I’m citing it by page number rather than by volume/chapter because Brackenridge’s system of chapter enumeration is too idiosyncratic, not to mention inconsistent: part 2 jumps from volume 2 to 4, and in volume 4 there are two chapter 15s—perhaps an homage to Tristram Shandy, which Modern Chivalry resembles in a number of ways.

  40 Then again, truth is stranger than fiction: on the same day I read Brackenridge’s account of the election of a monkey and a dog to political office, I learned that a small town in Alaska elected a cat named Stubbs to be mayor 15 years earlier, because its citizens “didn’t like the mayoral candidates” on the slate then: see (with the inevitable pun) “Alaska Town: Feline Mayor Is the Cat’s Pajamas,” New York Times, 14 July 2012.

  41 White defines “shrouded engrossing” as “the practice of manipulating the market by buying large quantities of a commodity to raise the price.” As I said, nothing’s changed.

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