"Periodical Vistitations": Yellow Fever as Yellow Journalism in Chalres Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn

The evils of pestilence by which this city has lately been afflicted will probably form an æra in its history. The schemes of reformation and improvement to which they will give birth, or, if no effort of human wisdom can avail to avert the periodical visitations of this calamity, the change in manners and population which they will produce, will be, in the highest degree, memorable.¹

According to historians of American journalism, such as Jeffre Pasley and Carol Sue Humphrey, during the 1790s, which was a period of intense political debate, it became standard practice for American politicians to subsidize and manipulate newspapers.² As Humphrey puts it, "for almost everyone concerned, the primary purpose of the press in the 1790s was not to be nonpartisan and present 'the news,' but to support a political cause and strongly advocate one side of an issue while attacking the other side."³ The Federalists fiercely relied on newspapermen to brand the Republicans as traitors for their support of the French Revolution and opposition to various governmental policies. William Cobbett, editor of Porcupine's Gazette, led the attack against Thomas Jefferson, describing him as the "head of the frenchified faction in this country."⁴ Meanwhile, Jefferson solicited contributions and provided financial assistance to keep various Republican newspapers afloat, such as the Philadelphia Aurora, and, most importantly, he hired scandalmonger James T. Callender, who "fled Scotland in 1793 to avoid prosecution," to attack John Adams's character during the presidential election of 1800.⁵ Though the Federalists had already designed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to guard against "dangerous" foreign bodies and censor any "false, scandalous and malicious writing ... against the government of the United States" (that is, Republican media), Callender and other radical pamphleteers, journalists, and newspapermen, such as William Duane, editor of the Aurora, continued to publish criticism of the Adams administration. In effect, Callender's depiction of Adams in The Prospect before Us (1800) as possessing monarchical aspirations played a major role in Jefferson's winning the election.

With Philadelphia serving as central command post for this intersection of publishing and partisan politics, it hardly seems coincidental that Charles Brockden Brown, in his preface to Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800), refers to the yellow fever that plagued the city in 1793 as a "periodical visitation" (231). What with publication totals for novels and newspapers exploding in the 1790s (figures 1 and 2),⁶ and with the Federalists creating legislation to silence an increasingly "licentious" Republican media, it seems highly plausible that Brown intended the phrase—"periodical visitation"—as a pun, equating print culture with contagion. I shall argue that Brown apprehended with horror the virus-like, invisible agency of print, or the "impersonal writing" that, according to Michael Warner, provided the foundation for a "republican paradigm of public virtue."⁷ I will read Arthur Mervyn—Brown's "journal of the plague year"—as engaging in metaphorical terms Jefferson's backing and manipulation of the press to standardize, or "fix" as Elizabeth Eisenstein would say, his republican ideals.⁸ That Arthur must painstakingly disentangle his immediate self (essential character) from various "phantoms passing under his name" (mediated selves) speaks to the scandalmonger's cultural authority in late eighteenth-century America. And that he must do so in writing, through textual performance, speaks rather more generically to Americans' increasing investment of authority in mediated forms of public debate (newspaper politics).

Figure 1.

Philadelphia imprints by genre, 1781–1800

Figure 2.

Numbers of newspapers in circulation per city

Brown's novel is neatly divided into two seemingly disjunctive volumes, the first dealing almost entirely with the yellow fever epidemic and various instabilities of print culture (plagiarism, counterfeit, and forgery) and the second dealing with contrasting stabilities of body language (facial expression, gesture, and voice). The disjunction between the two volumes is at first somewhat troubling and suggests a failure on Brown's part to produce a coherent narrative.⁹ Critics are wont...