Charles Brockden Brown and the Pleasures of "Unsanctified Imagination," 1787-1793

C HARLES Brockden Brown wrote strange novels. It was strange too that he wrote novels at all, for Pennsylvania Quakers such as he were not supposed to indulge in fiction, much less write it. Stranger still, while none of his novels is explicitly about Quakers, all four of his major novels are first and foremost explorations of his Pennsylvania Quaker world. They are Quaker texts, but in disguise. This article focuses on the six-year period during which Brown taught himself how to write fiction. In I787, Charles Brown was a somewhat sickly sixteen-year-old graduate of Robert Proud's Friends' Latin School. His mother was the devout daughter of a well-to-do family of Quaker artisans; his father was a disowned but still ardent Quaker and a ne'er-do-well Philadelphia merchant whose career had hit rock bottom three years earlier when he was imprisoned for debt. Under the circumstances, the family wanted Charles to pursue a remunerative career in law. By I793, however, the young man had successfully escaped that fate and begun a series of fiction experiments that would culminate, in I798, in his sudden advent as the young republic's most prodigious novelist.1 The irony of Brown's achievement is that the further he distanced himself from the truth dictates of the Philadelphia Meeting and the

Aesthetics · Art · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment

• ‘What they Seek for is in Themselves’

  Open Access•J Peacock•Quaker Studies•2008

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