"Reviewers Reviewed": John Davis and the Early American Literary Field

In Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America, John Davis mentions his first encounter with Charles Brockden Brown in the spring of 1800, where he finds the writer occupying "a dismal room in a dismal street" in New York. "I sought acquaintance with a man," Davis writes, "who had acquired so much intellectual renown. I found Brown quite in the costume of an author"—"a great coat and shoes down at the heels" (163). Having completed Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and most of Arthur Mervyn, Brown had certainly earned his costume. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Brown had become firmly and recognizably embedded in the burgeoning literary circles of New York and Philadelphia, a fact not to be missed by Davis, a fellow writer. Over a year after their first encounter, they meet again in Philadelphia, where Brown introduces Davis to members of the Tuesday Club (223), including Joseph Dennie, influential editor of The Port-Folio. This meeting is soon followed by Davis's visit to Asbury Dickins's bookstore and print shop, the "rendezvous of the Philadelphia sons of literature," where he meets the writers John Blair Linn and Charles Ingersoll, as well as "several reviewers" (225).

These accounts in Davis's Travels have given literary historians a tantalizing glimpse into early American literary life, particularly as it concerns the career of Brown. Yet what remains interesting about these encounters is the relative obscurity into which John Davis has fallen. While scholars have explored the career and works of Brown at length, Davis, a likewise prolific author, remains unknown to most scholars of American literary history.¹ We might better understand this disparity if we view the two writers in the light of early American print culture and authorship at the turn of the nineteenth century. Whereas Brown remained an insider in literary circles, Davis forever traveled along their margins, despite his own best efforts at inclusion.² As Davis recognized, literary success depended upon much more than one's authorial talents. Brown not only possessed appropriate literary skills, he argued, but, more important, the reputation as a writer ("so much intellectual renown"), complete with the appropriate "costume." The quest for a reputation like Brown's was continually at the forefront of Davis's mind, but as his actions illustrate, the conditions that determined authorship—those that gave Brown such "renown"—were much more complex than Davis may have realized.

In this essay, I explore Davis's attempts to position himself within the literary culture of New York City and Philadelphia to articulate the complex social conditions that defined early American authorship. Davis's varied attempts—and relative failure—to "succeed" as an author in the same manner as Brown offer us an insightful glimpse into the social and cultural struggles over literary authority in the early republic. These struggles, particularly as played out by and through Davis, reveal an understanding of authorship at a pivotal moment, one defined not only by an increasing number of American authors, but also by a comparable increase in intellectual discussions about this literature. As we will see, as Davis tried to navigate these characteristics and grasp the authority to define what was definitively literary and who was definitively an "author" (himself), his actions forced members of the literary community to respond and articulate their own criteria for the literary field, thereby setting in relief the complexity of these negotiations.

Davis's example therefore allows us to understand more clearly the conditions that defined early American authorship. Recently, scholars have identified an unstable relationship between the author and literary culture, especially by deemphasizing the former in the history of the latter. In her study of antebellum literature, for instance, Meredith McGill asserts that the prevalence of reprinting and literary reproductions challenges the centrality of the "author" in the literary history of the United States; literature of this era was therefore "defined by its exuberant understanding of culture as iteration and not origination" (4). Leon Jackson, Ronald Zboray, and Mary Saracino Zboray also argue that the vast amount of writing...