The Quakerism of Charles Brockden Brown

THE QUAKERISM OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN Richard P. Moses* The natural starting point for any consideration of Charles Brockden Brown is to reaffirm his role in American letters—as author of one of America's first novels (Wieland in 1798) and as America's probable first professional writer and editor who tried to support himself by writing. But it is disconcerting that in critical writing about him, Charles Brockden Brown the person remains shadowy. ' Critical comment about the ideas in his writing is abundant, but the source of the ideas, his personality, his upbringing, are a maze of confusion. One major area that writers have not penetrated is Brown's relations with the Society of Friends. In 1940 Howard Hintz of Long Island University, a New York Friend, said that critics had failed to see the significance of the Quaker influence on Quaker writers, including CBB, because they were unfamiliar with 18th Century Quakerism.2 More recent historical studies on the Society of Friends in this period may show directions for careful exploration toward better understanding CBB and his writing. This article attempts to suggest some of the specific areas where misunderstandings have occurred, what the Quaker influences were on Brown, and how his disownment in 1805 was only the end point of a series of events which began twenty years before. There are four Post World War II full-length works, two of them biographies, which deal with CBB's background, and none of them addresses his Quaker roots. Alan Axelrod, writing in 1983, includes good critical comment on Brown the author but little on Brown the Quaker.1 Dennis Lee Clark's biography, published in 1952, errs *Richard Moses, retired printing executive, is a graduate student in the English Department at Temple University. 1 . Depending on context, references to "CBB" and to "Brown" refer to Charles Brockden Brown. References to other members of the Brown family use the full name. 2.Howard W. Hintz. The Quaker Influence in American Literature (New York: Revell, 1940, and Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1970), pp. 34-40. 3.Alan Axelrod. Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983), p. xi. 12 The Quakerism Of Charles Brockden Brown13 seriously in reporting CBB's Quakerism and his family's position in the Quaker community in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.4 Harry R. Warfel's readable biography written in 1949 also misconstrues CBB's Quaker relationships, though he carefully traces Brown's intellectual development.5 And in 1978 an unpublished dissertation on CBB by Kenneth Kinslow picks up errors of fact and interpretation, but also misinterprets Philadelphia Quakerism of this period in analyzing Brown's literary product.6 Thus these works tend to confirm Howard Hintz' concern for better appreciation of Quaker authors' backgrounds. Axelrod visually and metaphorically highlights this confusion where he opens his Introduction with John Neal's 1824 description of CBB as tall, sallow, with straight black hair, melancholy, brokenhearted , consumptive, wandering alone and lonely through the streets.7 And on the next page is an equally vivid description by John Bernard portraying Brown as short and dumpy, with light eyes, sandy hair, glowing in the "light ofbenevolence," but clearly showing his poor health.8 Axelrod goes on to say that Neal never met Brown while Bernard did, and that Brown's active life with his many friends gives better credence to Bernard's description. Confirming Bernard's picture is a miniature from the Bettman Archives used as a frontispiece showing a smiling, curly-headed, glowing CBB. Neal's fanciful sketch is closer to the classic American frontiersman of the early 1800s than to the sophisticated man of ideas that CBB really was. Clark suggests that CBB grew up in a background of humiliation for his family's Quaker opposition to the Revolution and that his father was an unsuccessful small business man.9 And he makes no reference to Brown's father's exile to Virginia in 1777, nor does he indicate CBB's age at the end of the war, twelve and one-half, an unlikely age to be humiliated by pacifism. Nor did CBB discuss the Friends' peace testimony at any time...