From the Periodical Archives: "The Scribbler," by Charles Brockden Brown
The biographers of America's first professional author, Charles Brockden Brown, all tell pretty much the same story. Repeatedly they consider the ten years that followed Brown's turn away from the novels with which he is most closely associated, and they see only apostasy, martyrdom, or diminishing creative vision. By turning increasingly in the years after 1801 to periodical projects, pamphlets, and sketches—forms largely illegible to the dominant concerns of American literary history—Brown made a radical change of gears that has been most often read as a failure and retreat. In recent years, of course, this narrative has been challenged by a range of early American and periodical scholars, and the ongoing recovery work of the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition <http://www.brockdenbrown.ucf.edu> promises to further complicate the story of Brown's late career. As a contribution to this larger revisionist project, we are pleased to reprint here a "lost" periodical serial by Brown: "The Scribbler."
"The Scribbler" was a title Brown had used a few times in print, including at the very end of his career in an essay series for the Port Folio in 1809, in which he combined new materials with some gleanings from his own earlier periodical projects. 1 And at the other end of his career, there is strong evidence to suggest that Brown is the author of the 1791 "Scribbler" in the New York Magazine, two years after he made his authorial debut as "The Rhapsodist" in the Columbian Magazine. As a title (and nom de plum), "The Scribbler" serves to mark the very beginning and end of Brown's career.
"The Scribbler" we are reprinting here, however, is a different text entirely. Where exactly it falls in Brown's career remains a mystery. This story was unpublished until after Brown's death, when William Dunlap, Brown's first biographer, included it as a fragment in the second volume of his 1815 biography. 2 In 1822, a year that witnessed a [End Page 219] brief resurgence of interest in Brown's career, The Ladies' Literary Cabinet published another version of "The Scribbler," which is the text reprinted here. At first glance, the Cabinet's version of "The Scribbler" is identical to that which Dunlap included in his supplementary materials. As in Dunlap's version, here a poor young man introduces himself to his readers, defines himself as a "scribbler," discusses the pleasures he takes in writing, and struggles with his conflicting desires for anonymity and publicity—the latter motivated primarily by financial pressures and the need for recompense for his labors. In Dunlap's version, the text ends after a brief debate between the Scribbler and his sister Jane as to whether he should interrupt his work to accompany her on a walk, to which he finally agrees.
Given this summary of the Dunlap version of the text, it is not surprising that this fragment has excited almost no critical attention in Brown scholarship. In addition, it has a decidedly unfinished and disjointed feel, as if it were missing transitions that might explain how we get, for instance, from a discussion of how, on his sister's behalf, he would willingly "beg from door to door" to, in the next sentence, "Why truly, sister, I have no objection," a statement that turns out to refer to the aforementioned stroll. All of which makes the Cabinet's reprinting of the piece seven years later more surprising.
The Ladies' Literary Cabinet version of the text is different from the Dunlap fragment both in length and in format. The 1822 "Scribbler" is divided into serial installments, and this structure makes legible the missing transitions in Dunlap's text. And here the text is reordered, such that the debate about the walk precedes the meditations on the state of the Scribbler's...
