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chapter four The Early American Magazine in the Nineteenth Century Brown, Rowson, and Irving I The parallels between Susanna Rowson’s and Charles Brockden Brown’s careers are worth considering. Before 1800, Rowson and Brown had secured their places as the two leading novelists of the early national period; after 1800 they both moved away from the novel and from their own literary fame. And for all the differences between their early novels, there are some notable similarities: Both were interested in transatlantic themes, and both saw their writings as serving a pedagogical function. They also shared concerns about the novel form itself, an ambivalence that is lost to history when we focus exclusively on their novel writing (and, in each case, too often on only one novel). Both wrote in a variety of forms: poems, essays, dialogues, geographies, histories, and political economy. And even within their novels themselves, there is a remarkable range of formal and generic approaches. Brown experimented with gothic and psychological fiction but also with epistolary forms and seduction plots. Rowson’s generic and formal experimentation in the novel is even more striking: Although she is associated most closely with Charlotte Temple, with its unified narrative voice and didactic address, in some ways Charlotte Temple is an exception in an exceptional career. It is indeed hard to find two books from among her many productions that closely resemble each other formally, from the Byzantine wanderings of The Inquisitor, the anti-novelistic structure of Mentoria, the sweeping historicism of Reuben and Rachel, or the epistolary sufferings of Sarah. Looking at Rowson’s career as a whole, only a handful of her many books are what should properly be considered novels. Here I refer not only to her schoolbooks (Youth’s First Step in Geography [1818] or Spelling Dictionary [1807]) or anthologies (A Present for Young Ladies [1818]) but also to several of the books often categorized as novels, including The Inquisitor (1788) and Mentoria (1791). The Inquisitor is narrated by a man who acquires a ring that allows him invisibly to visit his fellow citizens, encounters he describes in a series of“rambles, excursion, characters, and tales.”1 Mentoria even more aggressively refuses any novelistic plotting. The book begins with a series of letters from a governess of a boarding school to her former charges and then moves into a series of short stories. Like The Inquisitor, Mentoria’s structure bears much closer relation to the periodical form than to the novel. Mentoria writes letters to her former charges upon various subjects—filial duty, proper society—and highlights each one with an anecdote, a story designed to give force to the moral lesson. One story leads to another—stories within stories, letters within letters, until the conceit of Mentoria as letter writer gives way completely after a long epistolary story of Agnes, whose story, Rowson tells us in a footnote, is “authentic and not the offspring of fancy.”2 Rowson then immediately moves into a story of “Marian and Lydia,” which itself is composed of stories within stories. The book concludes with an “Essay on Female Education,” followed by two stories, an oriental tale about vanity entitled“Urganda & Fatima”and a moral essay on envy and gossip entitled “The Incendiary,” both of which, Rowson tells us, have “formerly appeared in a Magazine.”3 While the original source is not known, both appeared in the British periodical The Polite Repository or, Amusing Companion in 1791. In addition to these two (unattributed) tales, the first volume of The Polite Repository also featured Rowson’s poem “Lydia,” a selection from her first novel Victoria (1786), and a sketch from The Inquisitor, indicating Rowson’s close connections with the periodical community at the start of her career in Britain before moving to America two years later.4 The Inquisitor and Mentoria, meanwhile, soon became part of the great textual commons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, excerpted frequently on both sides of the Atlantic.5 It is the Rowson who wrote outside the novel, who resisted and even explicitly critiqued the novel, who remains to be recovered—not just for a fuller sense of Rowson’s career but also for a more accurate picture of the literary culture of the period, one that was far less invested in the novel than literary history might suggest. If many of Rowson’s books look somewhat motley and even formally unrecognizable to us today, it is because many of them were working...

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