6 - Charles Brockden Brown

Summary

In 1789, when he was just eighteen, Charles Brockden Brown published a poem in honor of Benjamin Franklin, only to find that an erring printer, “from zeal or ignorance, or perhaps from both, substituted the name of Washington.” The blunder, Brown relates in his journal, converted the Republic's military savior into a mere philosopher and “made the subject ridiculous. Every word of this clumsy panegyric was a direct slander upon Washington, and so it was regarded at the time.”

This early incident from Brown's career can be read as a parable of his difficulties in trying to become a self-supporting author – a Franklin of letters – in a society dominated by republican ideals. Multiple lines connect the nation's first “canonical” novelist to the self-made Philadelphia printer who delighted in novels and adopted a female persona in his earliest publication. Like Franklin's Autobiography, Brown's fictions declare themselves to be acts of writing and hence products of print culture in contrast to the oral modes that previously held sway in America. In Brown's hands, the native novel realizes its identity as a middle-class genre overtly concerned with social mobility and individual self-fulfillment. A recurrent motif in his work, as in Franklin's, is sympathy for women and for the liberal project of female rights. Determined to treat literature as an occupation, not a gentlemanly pastime, Brown struggled to achieve independence by his pen. He was defeated in this goal most obviously because of his society's inability to support a class of professional authors, an understandable deficiency in a predominantly agricultural people. But beyond this, Brown's ambitions as a novelist foundered because he was reconceptualizing his medium as a private rather than a civic form. And in 1800, the public-spirited and corporate orientation of American culture still outweighed its individualistic side: the spirit of Washington overshadowed that of Franklin.