The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850Smyth, Albert Henry
History
The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850
Smyth, Albert Henry
American periodicals -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
In 1806 Brown began to edit and John Conrad to publish the _American
Register_. It contained abstracts of laws and public proceedings,
reviews of literature and of foreign and domestic scientific
intelligence, American and foreign State papers, etc. After five volumes
had been published, Charles Brockden Brown died in his house at Eleventh
and George Streets, on the 19th of February, 1810. It was in this house,
which was _not_ upon the east side of Eleventh Street, as Neal asserted
in _Blackwood's Magazine_, nor was it "a low, squalid, two-story house,"
that Thomas Sully saw him, and said: "I saw him a little before his
death. I had never known him--never heard of him--never read any of his
works. He was in a deep decline. It was in the month of November--our
Indian summer, when the air is full of smoke. Passing a window one day,
I was caught by the sight of a man with a remarkable physiognomy,
writing at a table in a dark room. The sun shone directly upon his head.
I never shall forget it. The dead leaves were falling then--it was
Charles Brockden Brown."
Of the obscure ground in which the body of this literary pioneer was
laid George Lippard wrote in the _Nineteenth Century_ (p. 27):
"The time has come when the authors of America, the men who view with
pride the growth of a pure and elevated National literature, should go
to the Quaker graveyard and bear the bones of Brockden Brown to that
Laurel Hill which he loved in his boyhood; yes, let the remains of the
martyr author sleep beneath the shadow of some dark pine, whose
evergreen boughs, swaying to the winter wind, bend over the rugged cliff
and sweep the waters of the Schuylkill as it rolls on amid its hilly
shores, like an image of the rest which awaits the blessed in a better
world. Then a solitary column of white marble, rising like a form of
snow among the green boughs, shall record the neglect and woe and glory
of the author's life, in a single name--Charles Brockden Brown."
"Wieland," the most powerful of Brown's novels, was published in
Philadelphia in 1798. It was followed by "Ormond, or the Secret Witness"
(1799), "Arthur Mervyn" (1799), "Edgar Huntley, or the Memoirs of a
Sleep-Walker" (1801), "Clara Howard" and "Jane Talbot" (1801). All these
romances dealt with sombre and mysterious or terrible subjects.
"Wieland" was a story of monstrous crime occasioned through the agency
of ventriloquism. "Arthur Mervyn" contained vivid descriptions of the
yellow fever pestilence in Philadelphia in 1793. "Edgar Huntley"
followed the fortunes of a somnambulist in the mountain fastnesses of
Western Pennsylvania.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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