“Periodical Visitations”:
Yellow Fever as Yellow Journalism
in Charles Brockden Brown’s
Arthur Mervyn
Louis Kirk McAuley
The evils of pestilence by which this city has lately been afflicted will probably
form an æra in its history. The schemes of reformation and improvement to
which they will give birth, or, if no effort of human wisdom can avail to avert the
periodical visitations of this calamity, the change in manners and population
which they will produce, will be, in the highest degree, memorable.
A
ccording to historians of American journalism, such as Jeffrey
Pasley and Carol Sue Humphrey, during the 1790s, which
was a period of intense political debate, it became standard practice
for American politicians to subsidize and manipulate newspapers.
As Humphrey puts it, “for almost everyone concerned, the primary
purpose of the press in the 1790s was not to be nonpartisan and
present ‘the news,’ but to support a political cause and strongly
advocate one side of an issue while attacking the other side.” The
Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Plague Year 1793 (1799–1800; New
York: Library of America, 1998), preface. References are to this edition.
For a discussion of this standard practice, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”:
Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2001), 48–195. References are to this edition. And see Carol Sue Humphrey, The Press of the
Young Republic, 1783–1833 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 41–69.
Humphrey, 51.
E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N 19, no. 3 (Spring 2007) © ECF 0840-6286
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Federalists fiercely relied on newspapermen to brand the Republicans
as traitors for their support of the French Revolution and opposition
to various governmental policies. William Cobbett, editor of Porcupine’s
Gazette , led the attack against Thomas Jefferson, describing him as
the “head of the frenchified faction in this country.” Meanwhile,
Jefferson solicited contributions and provided financial assistance to
keep various Republican newspapers afloat, such as the Philadelphia
Aurora , and, most importantly, he hired scandalmonger James T.
Callender, who “fled Scotland in 1793 to avoid prosecution,” to attack
John Adams’s character during the presidential election of 1800.
Though the Federalists had already designed the Alien and Sedition
Acts of 1798 to guard against “dangerous” foreign bodies and censor
any “false, scandalous and malicious writing ... against the government
of the United States” (that is, Republican media), Callender and
other radical pamphleteers, journalists, and newspapermen, such as
William Duane, editor of the Aurora , continued to publish criticism of
the Adams administration. In effect, Callender’s depiction of Adams
in The Prospect before Us (1800) as possessing monarchical aspirations
played a major role in Jefferson’s winning the election.
With Philadelphia serving as central command post for this inter­­
section of publishing and partisan politics, it hardly seems coinci­
dental that Charles Brockden Brown, in his preface to Arthur Mervyn
(1799–1800), refers to the yellow fever that plagued the city in 1793
as a “periodical visitation” (231). What with publication totals for
novels and newspapers exploding in the 1790s (figures 1 and 2),
and with the Federalists creating legislation to silence an increasingly
“licentious” Republican media, it seems highly plausible that Brown
intended the phrase — “periodical visitation” — as a pun, equating
print culture with contagion. I shall argue that Brown apprehended
with horror the virus-like, invisible agency of print, or the “impersonal
Cited in Humphrey, 58.
Humphrey, 65.
For figure 1, I am indebted to Rosalind Remer for compiling this information and cal­
culating the percentages of change. For a more complete list of imprints see Remer, Printers
and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 40. Remer’s source is the North American Imprints Program
Catalogue. The North American Imprints Program (naip) is a database maintained by the
American Antiquarian Society. For figure 2, I am indebted to Remer for translating this
information from Clarence Brigham’s massive bibliography of American newspapers into a
conveniently digestible format and for calculating the percentages of change. See Remer,
25. See also Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers 1690–1820,
2 vols. (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1947).
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
Genre
Novels
Plays
Bibles/psalms
Broadsides
Sermons
1781–90
14
21
45
305
56
1791–1800
62
72
87
566
102
309
Per cent change
342.86
242.86
93.33
85.57
82.14
Figure 1. Philadelphia imprints by genre, 1781–1800
City
Philadelphia
Boston
New York
Baltimore
1780–89
19
12
21
4
1790–1800
42
19
34
16
Per cent change
120
58
62
300
Figure 2. Numbers of newspapers in circulation per city
writing” that, according to Michael Warner, provided the foundation
for a “republican paradigm of public virtue.” I will read Arthur
Mervyn — Brown’s “journal of the plague year” — as engaging in
metaphorical terms Jefferson’s backing and manipulation of the
press to standardize, or “fix” as Elizabeth Eisen­stein would say, his
republican ideals. That Arthur must pain­stakingly disentangle his
immediate self (essential character) from various “phantoms passing
under his name” (mediated selves) speaks to the scandalmonger’s
cultural authority in late eighteenth-century America. And that he
must do so in writing, through textual performance, speaks rather
more generically to Americans’ increasing investment of authority
in mediated forms of public debate (newspaper politics).
Brown’s novel is neatly divided into two seemingly disjunctive
volumes, the first dealing almost entirely with the yellow fever
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 151. References are to this edition.
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural
Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), 1:71–88, 113–126. For a critical discussion of Eisenstein’s concept of “fixity,” see
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1998), 10–19.
310
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epidemic and various instabilities of print culture (plagiarism,
counterfeit, and forgery) and the second dealing with contrasting
stabilities of body language (facial expression, gesture, and voice).
The disjunction between the two volumes is at first somewhat trou­
bling and suggests a failure on Brown’s part to produce a coherent
narrative. Critics are wont to regard this disjunction as either a
flaw — Brown’s failure to pick up the story from where he left off on
10 February 1799 (according to Norman S. Grabo, the first volume
was published by Hugh Maxwell “sometime between 7 March and
21 May 1799,” and the second volume was published by George
F. Hopkins sometime between 4 July and 3 September 1800) — or
a reflection of Brown’s improvisational fictional method.10 For
example, Donald Ringe’s analysis of the novel wavers between these
two poles. According to Ringe, the novel “suffers more than do
Brown’s other novels from his practice of improvising” because it was
written in “at least three segments over a period of nearly two years.”
At the same time, Ringe insists that the “second part moves to a
conclusion that is demonstrably different from what Brown originally
intended.”11 Similarly, Cathy Davidson’s analysis of the novel focuses
on “two radically different stories.”12 Davidson emphasizes the appar­
ent disjunction as that which ultimately renders interpretation of the
whole novel practically impossible.
Perhaps Ringe’s and Davidson’s failure to appreciate Brown’s
improvisation (rhapsody) precludes the possibility of their reading
volume 2 of the novel properly, as an apt rejoinder to everything
that happens in volume 1. That is, as I see it, volume 2 does not
change direction, as Ringe suggests, so much as explore immediate
(rhapsodic) alternatives to the so-called “rotten diction”13 (corrupt
print culture) that is represented in volume 1. As a logical exten­
sion of the first volume, the second volume makes sense of the
novel’s purpose as a whole. It is possible to read volume 2 as the
For a brief history of the novel’s publication, see Donald Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown, rev.
ed. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 48–49.
10 Norman S. Grabo, “Historical Essay,” Arthur Mervyn, in The Novels and Related Works of
Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Sydney J. Krause et al., 6 vols. (Kent: Kent State University
Press, 1977–87), 3:453, 459–460.
11 Ringe, 49.
12 See Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 252.
13 Ralph Waldo Emerson, cited in Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature,
and the American Language, 1776–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
311
antidote to all that goes wrong in volume 1. In this respect, the
novel, to borrow Thomas Gustafson’s terminology, seeks to end
the “tyranny of Newspeak” — that which Gustafson describes as the
“deployment of doublespeak in the political discourse of the United
States” — inasmuch as volume 2 represents an attempt at remedying
the “errant flesh” — the “differences between word and deed, saying
and doing, letter and spirit” — that dominates volume 1.14 The plot
of volume 2 centres on Arthur’s having to repair the havoc wrought
by the novel’s con artist, Welbeck. Arthur must restore the money
that Welbeck acquires through theft and insurance fraud, and he
must take steps to disassociate his own socially responsible character
from Welbeck and his criminal schemes, crimes which always involve
some form of writing, whether it is changing the eight to eighteen
on three written bank notes or plagiarizing an Italian manuscript.
Thus, in this article I will read the yellow fever epidemic of 1793
depicted in Arthur Mervyn, which was published amid Jefferson’s
duplicitous campaign for the presidency of the United States, as a
metaphor of the impact of print upon the body politic.15 Moreover,
because Brown laboriously participated in the development of
America’s print culture and so keenly takes stock of the numerous
problems with professional authorship (both physiological and
psychological) in his private correspondence and various other pub­
lications, including “The Rhapsodist,” a series of four essays printed
in Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine (August–November
1789), I shall also focus on Brown’s assessment of the extent to which
authors’ personalities become altered through publication. The body
politic was not the only body affected by the publications boom in
America of the 1790s. As Brown’s personal experience suggests, the
very authors who supplied the literature for this boom were likewise
transformed in the act of producing so much writing. Brown’s
own declining health offers itself as a testament to the cumulative
physiological effects of writing upon the bodies of professional
authors.16 However, while writing evidently exacerbated Brown’s
14 Gustafson, 1, 3.
15 Jefferson referred to newspaper politics as the “terrorism of the day.” See Joseph J. Ellis,
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 229.
16 Various eighteenth-century physicians wrote about the ergonomics of professional author­
ship, including the Scottish physician George Cheyne. According to Cheyne, an author’s
fixed posture (sitting) inhibits circulation, weakens the stomach and lungs, and renders
one susceptible to consumption. Cheyne, Essay on Health and Long Life (1725; New York:
Edward Gillespy, 1813), 168.
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“con­sti­tutional tendency to consumption,”17 within his private
correspondence he pays most careful attention to the psychological
“chaos” that publication (authorial disembodiment) produces in
authors.18 And so, finally, I will briefly treat Brown’s analysis of what
it means to be an author interacting with the technology of writing at
this early stage in the United States’ development into what Warner
calls a Republic of Letters.
Since the Second World War, a number of valuable studies have
been conducted on the power of print — notably Harold Innis, The
Bias of Communication (1951); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
(1962); Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979);
and Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982). These works share at
least one basic assumption — namely, that writing is an alien force,
an agent of change that presses itself upon human epistemology,
cog­­ni­tion, behaviour, and social activity.19 These so-called “techno­
determinists” represent the technology of print as having what
Warner calls a “determining power of its own, independent from
the collective pur­poses, social organization, symbolic structure, and
practical labor in which it would be constituted” (7). Eisenstein
perceives in print the power to advance learning through what she
calls “typographical fixity,” the preservation and standardization of
knowledge through multiplication,20 while Ong regards writing as
autonomous discourse, “discourse which cannot be directly ques­
tioned or contested as oral speech can be because written dis­course
has been detached from its author.”21
17 William Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, Together with Selections from the Rarest of
his Printed Works, from his Original Letters, and from his Manuscripts before Unpublished, in Two
Volumes (Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1815), 93.
18 Tobias Smollett, “Proposals for Publishing Monthly, The Progress or Annals of Literature
and the Liberal Arts” (1755), cited in Lewis Knapp, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners
(1949; New York: Rusell and Russell, 1963), 171. Ringe refers to Brown’s “strange emotional
disorder” (7). For more on Brown’s physical and mental health, see Dunlap; and Paul Allen,
The Life of Charles Brockden Brown (Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975).
19 See also Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977); Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology,
Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
20 Eisenstein admits that “press variants multiplied rapidly and countless errata had to be
issued” throughout the early stages of the print revolution (The Printing Press, 80). Johns
provides a useful critique of her concept of “typographical fixity” by emphasizing the
poor standards for printing at this time and by taking careful stock of the differences that
existed between copies of the same book (10–19).
21 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982)
78. References are to this edition.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
313
The problem with Eisenstein’s definition of print as an “agent of
change” lay in its elimination of human agency, “whether the agency
be individual or collective,” from the scheme of print’s impact.22
Warner highlights this particular flaw of technodeterminism:
“Religion, science, capitalism, republicanism, and the like appear
insofar as they are affected by printing, not for the way they have
entered into the constitution and meaning of print in the first place.
The result is that enlightenment and democratization, instead of
being politically contested aspects of social organization, now appear
as the exfoliation of material technology” (6). Resisting the notion
that, as a material technology, print is endowed with an ahistorical
logic that necessarily effects democratization, Warner provides a
more cul­turally sensitive and historically contingent analysis of
the meaning of print’s proliferation in America than that which
has been offered by the technodeterminists listed above. Warner
juxtaposes John Adams’s conception of the power of print (the idea
that liberty of the press necessarily leads to liberal democracy, and
the production of a Habermasian public sphere of rational debate)
to the seventeenth-century Puritans’ application of print in the
main­tenance of social order (39).23 While Adams’s conception of
Puritan history holds “their freedom of inquiry and examination”24
as ultimately responsible for sowing the seeds of Republican
enlightenment, according to Warner there existed in seventeenthcentury New England such an “effective regime of censorship” (1)
that, as Grantland Rice points out, a number of political writings
had to be published in London to “circumvent the New England
theocracy’s tight control over the domestic printing trade.”25 Thus,
Warner begins by juxtaposing “Puritan­ism and Adams’ history
of Puritanism” (3) in order to demon­strate that the adaptation
of any technology is always determined by a variety of historical
contingencies: religious, cultural, economic, and political. Certainly
the American Revolution figures heavily into Adams’s sense that
literacy prefigures liberty. That is, because support of the Revolution
22 Eisenstein, The Printing Press, 6.
23 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
the Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (1962;
Cambridge: mit Press, 1999), 1–26.
24 John Adams, cited in Warner, 2.
25 Grantland S. Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997), 1. References are to this edition.
314
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was so effectively amassed through the publication of Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense (1776), Adams’s equation of liberty with freedom
of the press reflects, according to Warner, a particular historical
contingency. In this respect, Warner’s work “analyzes the immanent
meanings of writing and print in the culture of republican America
and the imperial context of enlightenment,” in order to raise the
question: “How was printing defined as a technology of publicity,
having an essentially civic and emancipatory character?” (9).
Warner’s insistence upon the cultural mediation of print is
certainly reflected in my decision to read Brown’s Arthur Mervyn
as a novel that engages a specific, historically contingent usage
of print: Jefferson’s covert subsidy of Republican newspapers to
manufacture public opinion, win the presidential election of 1800,
and establish order in a United States that was becoming increasingly
fragmented by partisan politics. However, the conclusions that I
draw here frequently contradict the claims made by Warner. For
example, Warner claims that Black illiteracy was the “condition of
a positive character of written discourse for whites” (12). Citing the
following passage from the Maryland doctor Alexander Hamilton’s
Itinerarium: Being a Narrative of a Journey from Annapolis, Maryland
to ... New Hampshire, from May to September 1744, in which “dialect
is perceived by Hamilton as a natural sign of servitude” (13),
Warner broadly claims (to some extent deviating from his otherwise
immanent analysis of the varying meanings of print) that white
Americans positively associated print with enlightenment and
political authority. Below is the passage in question:
before I came to New York Ferry I rid a by way, where in seven miles riding I
had 24 gates to open, Dromo, being about 20 paces before me, stopped at a
house, where, when I came up, I found him discoursing with a negro girl, who
spoke Dutch to him; “Dis de way to York?” says Dromo, “Yaw dat is Yarikee?” said
the wench, pointing to the steeples “what devil you say?” replies Dromo, “Yaw
mynheer,” said the wench, “damme’ you, what you say?” said Dromo again. “Yaw,
yaw,” said the girl, “You a damn black bitch” said Dromo, and so rid on.26
Undoubtedly, this passage pokes fun at the two slaves’ illiteracy and
thus implicitly serves to affirm Hamilton’s relative superiority and
26 Dr Alexander Hamilton, Hamilton’s Itinerarium: Being a Narrative of a Journey from Annapolis,
Maryland, through Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island,
Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, from May to September, 1744, ed. Albert Bushnell Hart
(St. Louis: W.K. Bixby, 1907), 52.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
315
freedom as both white and literate. Yet, as Warner himself admits,
not all white Americans were literate. Sometime before Dromo’s
encounter with the Dutch girl, Hamilton claims to have been
engaged in conversation with a Scotsman who “spoke such bad
English that I could scarce understand him.”27 James Merrell’s Into
the American Woods provides a sense of the extent to which colonial
America, and Pennsylvania in particular, was multilingual, so that
Hamilton’s reflection upon Dromo’s failure to communicate
with the Dutch girl need not be interpreted as an affirmation of
white supremacy, as it were.28 Rather, Hamilton’s anecdote, which
emphasizes the “heteroglossia” or linguistic diversity of colonial
America,29 presciently calls for the establishment of a national
language to facilitate social order.
While my intention in this article is not to dismiss altogether
Warner’s valuable analysis of the cultural mediation of print, I do
think it important to consider the potential further implications of,
say, Hamilton’s commentary upon English literacy and race relations
in America. What if one were to read Hamilton’s representation of
the dangers of dialect as calling for the creation of what Benedict
Anderson refers to as a “unified field of exchange”?30 The result would
be to grasp Hamilton’s latent nationalist conception of print language
as a medium that opposes heterogeneity, or erases individual dialect
in the interest of preserving national stability. In what follows, I shall
explore Charles Brockden Brown’s anxious appraisal of Americans’
increasing reliance upon what Warner describes as the impersonality
27 Hamilton, 40.
28 See James Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1999).
29 On heteroglossia, see M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 428.
30 Benedict Anderson uses the phrase “unified field of exchange” to describe the impact
of such national newspaper networks in terms of language standardization and the
development of national consciousness: “print-languages laid the bases for national
consciousness in three distinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of
exchange and com­munication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers
of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, and Spanishes, who might find it difficult
or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of
comprehending one another via print and paper. In the process, they gradually became
aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular languagefield, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged.
These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their
secular, particular, visible-invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.”
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed.
(London: Verso, 1991), 37–46.
316
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of print (38–42). As a result, the reading that I offer of Brown’s Arthur
Mervyn builds upon Rice’s scepticism concerning the “applicability
of the optimism of Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality
to the American case” and critical attunement to the “anxiousness
with which colonists greeted the rise and expansion of an indigenous
commercial print culture” (2–3).
Yellow Fever
As Yellow Fever swept through the city of Philadelphia in 1793,
the mayor, Matthew Clarkson, convened a group of medical
experts — Fellows of the College of Physicians — to analyse the
situation. The sixteen Fellows who attended the meeting, including
Benjamin Rush and William Currie, agreed that a “malignant disease
was abroad” in the city, but were at odds with respect to its origins
and how best to prevent it from spreading.31 Rush believed that
the fever was of local origin, the result of “vegetable putrefaction,”
specifically a shipment of rotting coffee that lay decomposing in a
heap on Ball’s Wharf and befouling the air of the city.32 Currie, on
the other hand, argued that the disease was contagious and had
been imported to Philadelphia in the form of human cargo. In his
“Impartial Review ... of Dr Rush’s ... Account of the Bilious Remitting
Yellow Fever” (1794), Currie claims to be able to trace the disease to
various “foreign bodies” lodging at Richard Dennie’s inn on Water
Street — either two French West Indians or the Parkinsons, an Irish
family recently emigrated from Dublin.33
Though both doctors failed to grasp the nature of the disease,
Currie’s diagnosis, in particular, neatly corresponds with Federalist
anxiety over the French Revolution and xenophobia regarding the
rising tide of exiles and refugees pouring into America from various
parts of the world. For example, the French West Indians who arrived
31 Cited in J.H. Powell, Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in
1793 (1949; New York: Time Life Books, 1965), 4.
32 Benjamin Rush, An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever; as it Appeared in the City of
Philadelphia, in the Year 1793 (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1794). See also Rush, An
Enquiry into the Origin of the Late Epidemic Fever in Philadelphia, in a Letter to Dr John Redman,
President of the College of Physicians (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1793), 3.
33 William Currie, An Impartial Review of That Part of Dr Rush’s Late Publication Entitled “An
Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever, as it Appeared in the City of Philadelphia in the Year
1793, which Treats of the Origins of the Disease,” in which His Opinion is Shewn to be Erroneous; the
Importation of the Disease Established; and the Wholesomeness of the City Vindicated (Philadelphia:
Thomas Dobson, 1794), 9.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
317
in Philadelphia in the summer of 1793 were refugees from a slave
uprising on the island of Saint Domingo. As J.H. Powell puts it, “whole
fleets of ships came in from the West Indies, discharging from their
crowded holds great hordes of refugees, white, black, mixed, from the
French island of Saint Domingo. Gaunt, hungry, sickly, they poured
into the city, bringing news of a great revolution in the sugar islands,
of a horrible carnage and slaughter, of the destruction of towns
and the ruin of merchant houses.”34 Given the global/trans­­atlantic
implications of the French Revolution, specifically its influence upon
political party conflicts in America and the West Indies, it is not too
surprising that Currie should associate yellow fever with French West
Indian refugees. Though his writings on the subject are all richly
detailed with citations of recognized experts — examples of other
outbreaks presumably traceable to importation — Currie, like most
other Fellows of the College of Physicians, had had little firsthand
experience of the disease. Thus, his “Description of the Malignant
Infectious Fever Prevailing at Present in Philadelphia,” which Thomas
Dobson published in 1793, seems to have been woven solely to satisfy
a political imperative: homeland security, to secure America through
greater policing of its national borders. Through Currie’s eyes, then,
“foreign bodies” were carriers of disease, threatening the stability of
Philadelphia from a physical, perhaps even pandemic standpoint.
Yellow Journalism
Brown’s oeuvre reflects a similar sort of xenophobia, or anxiety
over immigration to the United States. However, he does not regard
the stability of America as threatened so much by disease as by the
radical exchange of ideas: he fears the gradual in­fil­tra­tion of radical
exiles into Philadelphia, America’s cultural, economic, and political
capital and the command centre of public opinion. From Carwin, the
biloquist, to the “secret international political schemes” of Ormond
and Martinette de Beauvais, a cross-dressing freedom fighter, Brown’s
fiction constantly invokes, as Mary Chapman puts it, a “threat of
penetration,” specifically with regard to the influx of so-called
“freedom fighters,” radicals inspired by the French Revolution.35 In
34 Powell, 4.
35 Mary Chapman, introduction to Ormond; Or, The Secret Witness by Charles Brockden Brown
(Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1999), 9–31.
318
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certain cases, these “freedom fighters” were newspapermen, who had
been exiled from their own countries for printing and disseminating
political propaganda. As noted earlier, Callender fled Scotland to
avoid persecution. Similarly, the Irish-American William Duane fled
to America from England to avoid prosecution under the “Two Acts”
for his involvement with the London Corresponding Society, which
Pasley describes as a “working-class political club of the Paineite
radical persuasion that favored parliamentary reform and opposed
the war with revolutionary France” (181). This was after he was forced
to leave India for “advocating the cause of France” in his newspaper,
the Calcutta World (Pasley, 179). The threat of penetration occurs
in Mervyn at the ideological level, in terms of the news media’s
manipulation of public opinion.
In “Walstein’s School of History,” which Brown published in his
own Monthly Magazine and American Review (1799), one discovers,
under the guise of Olivio Ronsica, an intriguing summary of the
otherwise convoluted plot of volume 1 of Arthur Mervyn :
Olivio [Arthur] is a rustic youth, whom domestic equality, personal indepen­
dence, agricultural occupations, and studious habits, had endowed with a
strong mind, pure taste, and unaffected integrity. Domestic revolutions oblige
him to leave his father’s house in search of subsistence ... He bends his way
to Weimar [Philadelphia]. He is involved, by the artifices of others, and, in
consequence of his ignorance of mankind, in many perils and perplexities.
He forms a connec­tion with a man of a great and mixed, but, on the whole, a
vicious character [Welbeck].36
The plot of the novel is largely based on Arthur’s coming of age
in Philadelphia during the 1793 yellow fever outbreak. Naively
deter­mined to fend for himself in the marketplace of Philadelphia,
Arthur, a well-read country bumpkin, engages to work as a copyist for
Welbeck, who implicates him in a rich variety of crimes, including
forgery and imposture. I cite the above summary because Brown
describes Arthur’s decision to ex­change his natal soil, a small
farm in Chester County, for city life as the result of a “domestic
revolution.” Literally, the expression refers to the remarriage of
Arthur’s father and the conventional rise to familial prominence
36 Brown, “Walstein’s School of History” (August–September 1799), in The Rhapsodist and
Other Uncollected Writings by Charles Brocken Brown, ed. Harry R. Warfel (Delmar: Scholars’
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977), 154–55. References are to this edition.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
319
and power of an evil stepmother. From a metaphorical standpoint,
the phrase takes into account the development of a powerful new
industry in America: information processing. Arthur’s aspirations
represent a significant transformation in the material organization
of the United States. Unable to sustain himself in rural Pennsylvania,
he migrates to the city of Philadelphia where he expects to be able
to gain employment in a burgeoning business sector solely devoted
to the production and processing of words. Such a plot necessarily
engages the social con­se­quences of a technological revolution,
and anticipates the point that Manuel Castells makes that every
tech­­nological revolution ultimately effects a change in the social
organiz­ation. Castells writes: “Technological revolutions are made
up of innovations whose products are in fact processes ... Because
processes, unlike products, enter into all spheres of human activity,
their trans­formation ... leads to modification in the material basis of
the entire social organization.”37 In this respect, the novel is about
what it means to be professionally occupied processing words, and,
by implication, what it means to be a print culture: a society of word
processors.
This plot development, Arthur’s “career move,” figures heavily into
Warner’s reading of the novel as promoting republican publication,
as “figuring, in theme and fantasy, culturally dominant assumptions
and desires about the value of printed goods” (155). Yet Warner fails
to emphasize certain links between Arthur’s subsequent mis­fortunes
and the instabilities of print as mass media, ignoring the commercial
pressures that influence Arthur’s migration to the “diseased” city
of Philadelphia. Warner reads Arthur’s career move to the city as
primarily a product of his father’s foreign and tyrannical illiteracy.
That is, according to Warner’s reading, illiteracy is to blame for
Arthur’s father’s abuse of authority and falling victim to the wiles
of a grossly overindulgent woman, circumstances that result in
Arthur’s eviction. However, though Arthur is clearly at odds with his
overbearing stepmother, it is equally important that the elder Mervyn
simply cannot afford to keep Arthur on the farm: Mervyn’s father has
“full employment ... for all the profits on his ground,” and cannot
“bear the cost of [Arthur’s] maintenance” (249). The implication is
that the elder Mervyn’s inability to support Arthur reflects shifting
37 Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the
Urban-Regional Process (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 15.
320
ECF 19:3
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American values: a revolution towards com­mercial enterprise and
away from agriculture. To some extent this domestic revolution
coincides with the impact that William J. Gilmore describes, in
Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life , as print’s role in transforming the
“material and cultural bases of daily rural existence” in the Upper
Connecticut River Valley.38
Moreover, it is extremely important that the elder Mervyn is not
ambiguously foreign and illiterate but specifically Scottish and
illiterate. The emigration of Arthur’s peasant father to America
resonates with the Highland clearances of the late eighteenth
century. In his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), Samuel
Johnson similarly describes the influence of commercial pressures
emanating from the Lowland cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh in
terms of fragmenting traditional loyalties, or fomenting a domestic
revolution that would ultimately result in the dismantling of the
Highlanders’ clan system. He writes: “Since the islanders, no longer
content to live, have learned the desire of growing rich, an ancient
dependant is in danger of giving way to a higher bidder, at the
expense of domestic dignity and hereditary power.”39 Johnson’s
observation reflects a historical circumstance that T.M. Devine refers
to as the “subordination of the human factor to the new needs of
productive efficiency.”40 Devine’s idea of subordination brings into
focus the breakup of the traditional township or baile, the multiple
tenant farms that had “formed the basic communities of Gaeldom
from time immemorial.”41 According to Devine, rentals jumped
dramatically in the 1760s, sometimes as much as 45 per cent. “The
raising of the rents to this extent,” writes Devine, “demonstrated that
the Highland elites were now subordinating their lands to market
production and new commercial imperatives, and a revolution in the
attitude to and function of the land took place”: whole communities
evacuated to make way for the agribusiness of strangers, individual
farmers intent on farming for profit not subsistence.42 Additionally,
38 William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New
England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 1.
39 Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Mary Lascelles (1775; New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 86.
40 T.M. Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 35.
41 Devine, 33.
42 Devine, 33.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
321
the stage was set for large-scale sheep farming that, as Nancy Dorian
notes, “represented ... a new way to derive profit from what was
essentially a rather infertile and resource-poor region of the British
Isles,” and resulted in the displacement of vast numbers of Highland
Scots.43 In short, commercial pressures forced Highland Scots to
consider emigration to America as a viable solution to their economic
despair. Indeed, land agents presented so mesmerizing a portrait of
the American dream that common Highlanders rendered destitute
by their landlords’ disavowal of traditional agricultural practices sold
their belongings to set sail for America collectively.44 With tacksmen
working alongside ship captains to arrange for the transportation
of whole shiploads of people, J.M. Bumsted claims, the movement
resembled a formal protest.45 The commercialization of Scotland, as
described by Johnson, Devine, and Bumsted, is reflected in Arthur
Mervyn in terms not only of the emigration of Arthur’s father to
America, but also of Arthur’s exchange of the plough for the pen.
Arthur’s move to Philadelphia represents a “subordination of the
human factor [family] to the new needs of productive efficiency.”
The “Chaos of Publication”
That Arthur’s career move ultimately entangles him in the
“chaos of publication”46 reflects Brown’s anxious appraisal of this
“domestic revolution” (The Rhapsodist, 154). Brown perceives in
the overwhelming circulation of written language a mode of social
control to be distinguished from the cultivation of social responsibility
vis-à-vis the spectacular realm of bodily expression. Near the end of
the novel, for instance, Arthur expounds upon Benjamin Franklin’s
rational understanding of writ­ing as that which teaches “method and
arrangement of thought,” and compares the pen to a penitentiary,
designed to reform the wilderness of thought: “The pen is a pacifyer.
It checks the mind’s career; it circumscribes her wanderings. It traces
43 Nancy Dorian, Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 39.
44 For an example of the propaganda that was published in Scotland to encourage migration
to America, see Governor George Johnstone’s report identifying the “advantages of settling
in West Florida,” which was published in the Scots Magazine . Johnstone, “Affairs in North
America,” Scots Magazine (February 1765).
45 See J.M. Bumsted, The People’s Clearance: Highland Emigration to British North America, 1770–
1815 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), 2.
46 Smollett, cited in Knapp, 171.
322
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Genre
Newspaper issues
Government printing
Sermons
Almanacs
Poetry
Booksellers’ advertisements
Juvenile/schoolbooks
All other
Percentage of total publication
79.6
5.8
2.6
1.6
1.5
1.0
0.9
7.1
Figure 3. Leading genres in America, 1640–1790
out, and compels us to adhere to one path” (605). Arthur’s analysis
here calls into focus a historical circumstance of the late 1790s: the
newspaper’s monopolization of public opinion. The newspaper’s
overwhelming dominance at this stage in American literary history
to some extent explains the early American novelist’s reliance upon
the news media for subject matter. Consider that Charles Brockden
Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798) draws
upon an authentic case of mass murder. In 1781, a farmer living in
New York State — John Yates — “killed his wife and four children in
a fit of religious mania.”47 The story was published in the New York
Weekly Magazine, 20 and 27 July 1796. Such “extra-textual references”
reveal what Davidson claims to be the American novel’s debt to
street literature (crime confessions and captivity narratives),48 as well
as the anxiety that Rice describes as accompanying the novel’s rise in
America (170). The novelty of the American novel is revealed in data
compiled by Hugh Amory; see figure 3 above.49
According to Pasley, a side effect of the Sedition Act was the
development of a vast national Republican newspaper network,
with William Duane, Irish exile and editor of Philadelphia’s Aurora,
as acting head (176–95). Arthur’s comment may be alluding to
47 See “An Account of a Murder Committed by Mr. J—— Y——, Upon his Family, in
December,” New York Times Weekly Magazine; or, Miscellaneous Repository (20 July 1796), 2, 55.
48 See Davidson , 3–54.
49 Hugh Amory’s figures derive from the naip. See appendix 1 in A History of the Book in
American, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 512.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
323
Federalist censorship — the Adams administration had designed
the Sedition Act (written legislation) to pacify or silence rebellious
Republican propaganda — but is more likely alluding to the monopo­
lization and syndication of information circulating within American
newspapers.50 Articles published within newspapers subsidized by
power­ful politi­cians, including Duane’s Aurora, were often copied
into other newspapers, creating a main­stream of homogeneous/
duplicate information. That politicians subsidized newspapers to
manipulate the syndication of information in the United States
reveals the limitations of Jürgen Habermas’s work — the point
being that America, perhaps unlike England, seems never to have
experienced (at least not in the eighteenth century) the sort of
liberally democratic public sphere that Habermas regards as the
product of a privately realized print culture, a print culture that
was owned and operated by private citizens.51 The sheer difficulty
of maintaining a newspaper in eighteenth-century America, and the
financial backing that was received by politicians and elite members
of American society, refute Habermas’s and others’ attempts to
endow private citizens with total control over the content of such
publications and readers with considerable authority in determining
the nature of the periodicals which they consumed voraciously.52
The case of William Duane resonates profoundly with the develop­
ment of Brown’s fiction. Notorious for throwing his voice, utilizing
the media to widely disseminate political propaganda, Duane, an
Irish exile (not unlike like Brown’s Carwin, the biloquist), built for
himself a reputation as a radical in America by publishing under
the pseudonym of Jasper Dwight a scathing criticism of George
Wash­ington’s character. Given the extraordinary popularity of
Wash­ington, Duane’s plunge (however pseudonymous) into the
scandalous waters of newspaper politics was bold indeed, especially
for someone seeking sanctuary in the United States, and was tremen­
dously successful in capturing the attention of the Republicans, to
the extent that, in 1798, as a result of Benjamin Franklin Bache’s
death from yellow fever that same year, he was willed control of
50 See David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fates: The Making of American Nationalism,
1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 53–107.
51 See Habermas, 1–26.
52 David Paul du Nord shares Habermas’s optimism with regard to the authority of readers.
See du Nord, “A Republican Literature: Magazine Reading and Readers in Late Eigh­
teenth-Century New York,” in Reading in America, ed. Cathy Davidson (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989), 114–39.
324
ECF 19:3
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Bache’s Philadelphia newspaper, the Aurora. As editor of the
Aurora, Duane continued to publish both pseudonymous and
anonymous “seditious” attacks against the Federalists, significantly
contributing to Jefferson’s defeat of Adams in the election of 1800.
Moreover, Duane developed the Aurora into Jefferson’s ideal of a
national Republican newspaper, a centralized institution through
which to manufacture public opinion. According to the Connecticut
Courant, “whatever appeared in [the Aurora] was faithfully copied
into [other newspapers] ... and in this way ... a perfect union of
opinion was established ... this [the Aurora] was the heart, the seat of
life. From thence the blood flowed to the extremities by a sure and
rapid circulation” (Pasley, 188). Duane’s influence — a reflection of
Jefferson’s “backing” — rested on the authority that other Republican
editors invested in the Aurora. Thus, Duane’s con­tributions lay in
coordinating the efforts of the Republican Party and in creating a
national newspaper network to manipulate public opinion.
This situation was Vice President Jefferson’s ideal. Jefferson had
been soliciting contributions to Republican newspapers like Duane’s
for years because he firmly believed in the newspaper’s capacity to steer
public opinion down the right path. For example, he wrote to James
Madison in 1799: “A piece in Bache’s paper ... has had the greatest
effect ... The public sentiment being now on the creen [careen], and
many heavy circumstances about to fall into the Republican scale, we
are sensible that this summer is the season for systematic energies
and sacrifices. The engine is the press. Every man must lay his purse
and his pen under contribution.”53 Here Jefferson acknowl­edges the
newspaper’s purpose to be the management of public sentiment, the
horror of which later reveals itself when President Jefferson changes
his tune to consider the inevitability of that manage­ment becoming
corrupt, such that “a few prosecutions of the most prominent
offenders would have wholesome effect.”54 Shortly after becoming
president of the United States and the subject of such “licentious”
newspaper articles as Callender’s disclosure of Jefferson’s alleged
affair with Sally Hemmings in the Recorder , Jefferson came to the
following conclusion: “nothing can now be believed which is seen
in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put in that
53 Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 19 February 1799, in The Papers of James Madison,
Congressional Series, ed. William T. Hutchinson et al., 17 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962–77; Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977–91), 17:225–26.
54 Jefferson to Thomas McKean, 19 February 1803, cited in Pasley, 265.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
325
polluted vehicle.”55 A similar sentiment is echoed in Brown’s own
letter to his brother, James, dated 4 September 1798, nine months
prior to the publication of the first volume of Arthur Meryvn in
May 1799. Coincidentally, Brown wrote this letter from New York,
where an outbreak of yellow fever had infected Elihu Hubbard Smith.
Writing to reassure his brother of the improbability of his contracting
the fever, Brown exhibits the unreliability of information circulating
in the press: “When did you learn to rely on rumor and newspaper
information? As to the state of this city, you might naturally suspect that
it would be misrepresented and exaggerated.”56 Brown’s comment,
in addition to acknowledging the public’s fascination with the fever
(the yellow fever memoir, such as Matthew Carey’s “Short Account of
the Malignant Fever” [1794], was an extraordinarily popular genre of
macabre literature) acknowledges the dishonesty of newspapermen.
Yet despite the evident unreliability of “newspaper information,”
Jefferson actively supported the development of such a “unified field
of exchange.”57 Though he boasted that it was his policy never to
write for a news­paper, Jefferson hired figures, such as Callender, to
pen libels against Federalist opponents. And he used his wealth and
considerable influence to help Republican newspapermen, such as
William Duane, remain afloat in the precarious realm of newspaper
publishing.58 For instance, in 1797 Jefferson actively sought sub­
scriptions to support Republican newspapers, including Bache’s
Aurora, writing to Madison, “we should really exert ourselves to
procure them, for if these papers fall, republicanism will be entirely
brow beaten.”59 He even attempted to raise money from office-holders
to support the creation and development of a Republican newspaper
that would circulate nationwide, outward from the capital.60
55 Jefferson to John Norvell, 14 June 1807, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester
Ford, 10 vols. (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892–99), 9:73. For a discussion
of Jefferson’s illicit relationship with Sally Hemmings and its impact upon Brown’s Gothic
imagination, see Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of the American
Gothic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), xx–xxi.
56 Brown to James Brown, 4 September 1798, cited in Dunlap, 4. Gustafson lists Brown as
one of the American writers in post-Revolutionary America who “invited their readers to
discover for themselves the unreliability of narrators and repre­senta­tion itself” (33).
57 See Anderson, 37–46.
58 Pasley provides a sense of how difficult it was for a newspaperman to remain afloat, from a
financial standpoint, in the late eighteenth century (48–78).
59 Jefferson to James Madison, 26 April 1798, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P.
Boyd et al., 60 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 17:120–21.
60 Jefferson writes, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government
without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment
to prefer the latter.” Jefferson to Carrington, 16 January 1787, in Papers, 11:49.
326
ECF 19:3
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Yellow Fever as Yellow Journalism
Such a newspaper network strongly resembles the web of intrigue
woven by Welbeck throughout volume 1 of Brown’s Mervyn, the
expansion of which reaches its limit when Arthur discovers the
purportedly forged banknotes sealed between the pages of an
Italian manuscript that Welbeck intends to publish. Since Welbeck
intends to capitalize upon the beauty of this manuscript by pub­
lishing it under his own name, the manuscript, with banknotes
sealed between its pages, represents a convenient symbol of print
capitalism. At the very least, Arthur’s discovery provides some
indication of Welbeck’s materialistic ambitions.
Due to the insolvency of his father (a trader at Liverpool), Welbeck
enters adult life desperately (disingenuously) seeking financial
gain through “dissimulation and falsehood” (307). Eventually,
Welbeck’s fortune arrives in the form of a Frenchman with yellow
fever, whom he, in an uncharacteristic act of generosity, attempts
to rehabilitate. The French­man dies, but not without entrusting
Welbeck to deliver $20,000 worth of banknotes (profit from planting
on the island of Guadeloupe) and Vincentio Lodi’s manuscript (a
memoir of the Ducal house of Visconti) to Lodi’s daughter living
in Philadelphia. Surprisingly, Welbeck develops a connection with
Lodi’s daughter, Clemenza, but rather than return the money, he
seizes the opportunity to engage several other businessmen, including
Thetford and Jamieson, in a new scheme involving the dispatch of a
cargo ship to the West Indies, which, according to “old Thetford,” is
“taken and condemned, for a clause which rendered the insurance
ineffectual” (450). Welbeck’s scheme here consists of defrauding
the two business­men of $3,000 each through an authorial sleight of
hand, that is, by changing the eight on three banknotes to eighteen.
It is of utmost importance that Welbeck relies on “four strokes of the
pen” to realize his most effective scheme. Wortley describes the trans­
action as: “That hoary dealer in suspicions was persuaded to put his
hand to three notes for eight hundred dollars each. The eight was
then dexterously prolonged into eighteen; they were duly deposited
in time and place, and the next day Welbeck was credited fifty-three
hundred and seventy-three, which an hour after, were told out to his
messenger ... Jamieson, who deals in the same stuff with Thetford,
was outwitted in the same manner, to the same amount, and on the
same day” (435). To some extent the stuff in which both Jamieson and
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
327
Thetford deal has no material basis or “stuffing”: Wortley explains
that both employ money “not as the medium of traffic, but as in
itself a commodity” (434). Thus, like Welbeck, they deal in figments
of the imagination: credit or simply banknotes, which, in addition
to being products of print culture, possess only imaginary exchange
value. Moreover, Welbeck uses his “secret resources” (307) to fund
the cargo ship scheme and thus establish a line of credit with the
two businessmen, whom he in turn bankrupts on the basis of that
credit. Welbeck constructs a fortune out of thin air, the same air that
Rush believed was “befouled” by a cargo of rotting coffee that had
been shipped to Philadelphia from the West Indies.61 (Both focus on
the corruption of commercial exchanges between the United States
and the West Indies.) And he manages to destroy the fortunes of
Thetford and Jamieson with only “four strokes of the pen.”
Finally, Welbeck’s principal association with Arthur is based upon a
scheme to defraud the literary marketplace. Recognizing the literary
value of Lodi’s Italian manuscript, Welbeck determines to publish a
translation, and he intends to profit by taking credit for the work.
The potential success of such a scheme relies almost solely on the
autonomy of written discourse, or that which Ong refers to as the
irrefutability of texts (79). In this case, Lodi’s literal death is practically
synonymous with Welbeck’s figurative death as the disembodied
author of this manuscript intended for publication. The potential
success of Welbeck’s scheme is based on an author’s inaccessibility
presenting itself as an obstacle to critics. Like James Macpherson,
who purposefully refused to provide Samuel Johnson with a copy of
the so-called original manuscripts of ancient Gaelic poetry that he
claimed to have translated as The Poems of Ossian (1760–63), Welbeck
shrouds himself in obscurity throughout the novel.62 Welbeck even
fakes his own drowning in the Schuykill river to render tests of truth
practically impossible. Thus, the literal death of Lodi affords Welbeck
with an opportunity to capitalize on authorial disembodiment or, to
borrow Roland Barthes’s terminology, the death of authorship.
Clearly Welbeck values authorial disembodiment as a form of
nearly foolproof imposture. Yet in an effort to maintain an even
61 Rush, An Enquiry, 6.
62 Peter T. Murphy describes Macpherson’s “translation” as shrouded in “highland mist.”
Murphy, Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 33.
328
ECF 19:3
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more shadowy relation to the published final product, Welbeck
employs Arthur as a copyist to deflect any and all public notice of his
role in orchestrating the fraud. He intends to use Arthur as a screen
to obscure his relation to the audience. In a sense, Welbeck’s scheme
works because Arthur is thenceforth obligated to disentangle himself
from a web of intrigue: Arthur becomes the object of considerable
public scrutiny while Welbeck continues to go unnoticed. And so, the
metaphor of contagion on one level refers to Arthur’s employment as
Welbeck’s copyist, the fact that Arthur is transformed, via association,
into an evil figment of people’s imagination. Welbeck’s remove from
the public sphere as a “disembodied” author accords neatly with
Currie’s contagionist recommendation that to avoid contracting
yellow fever one must not personally interact with foreign bodies,
strangers in the street, fellow inhabitants of the city of Philadelphia.
Currie’s advice — retreat into the country, avoid all “intercourse” and
any thing which has come into contact with the infected — resonates
with Welbeck’s remove from public scrutiny (he transacts business
in absentia) and Jefferson’s duplicitous rela­tionship to the press.
Currie’s advice reflects Brown’s anxious appraisal of the dangers of
print capitalism: “It is well known that all who shut themselves up in
their houses, retired into the country, and shunned every substance
which had been in contact with or near to those actually infected;
and that every one who observed these pre­cautions, though daily
abroad in the open streets and markets, escaped the disease, as was
also the case with the prisoners in the jail ... where strict attention
was paid to avoid all intercourse with the infected.”63 Coincidentally,
Jefferson maintained a similarly safe distance from the press. Though
he subsidized various Republican newspapers, and thus was able to
control much of the information that circulated among Americans,
he apparently never wrote one article. Observing precautions simi­
lar to those recommended by Currie, Jefferson managed to escape
prosecution under the Sedition Act. Callender was charged with
sedition for disseminating scandalous information about President
Adams, not Jefferson, who pretended ignorance of the whole
affair, even after, as Joseph J. Ellis points out, Callender “published
incriminating letters, proving his complicity.”64
63 Currie, 10.
64 Ellis, Founding Brothers, 198.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
329
Jefferson’s successful, duplicitous campaign for the presidency
is, from a metaphorical standpoint, the plague that Brown’s novel
engages. This shift in the practice of American politics — which
might be referred to as the politician’s disembodiment — is curiously
reinforced by Jefferson’s occupation of the White House in 1801. The
relocation of the national capital from the densely populated Quaker
city of Philadelphia to the relatively invisible District of Columbia,
an empty space of Chesapeake marshland infested with mosquitoes,
not only emphasizes the politician’s remove from the people of
America, but also resonates with Currie’s advice to the inhabitants of
Philadelphia during the epidemic of 1793: retire into the country, and,
by all means, avoid intercourse with the infected. For, as one visitor to
Washington DC in 1801 noted, emphasizing a sense of the alienation,
“instead of splendid edifices you can see nothing but cornfields, and
plains, dry canals and dirty marshes, where frogs make love in a most
sonorous and exquisite strain” (the unfinished Capital Building was
the only public building standing in 1801).65
Brown’s novel reflects what Rice refers to as the “anxiousness with
which colonists greeted the rise and expansion of an indigenous
commercial print culture” (2). In the following passage, Arthur’s
assessment of the fever’s impact upon the city can be read as an
apocalyptic vision of a public sphere as constituted through media
controlled by venture-oriented professionals, self-reliant business­
men, and crooked politicians: “The market-place, and each side
of this magnificent avenue were illuminated, as before, by lamps;
but between the verge of Schuykill and the heart of the city, I met
not more than a dozen figures; and these were ghost-like, wrapt in
cloaks, from behind which they cast upon me glances of wonder
and suspicion” (356). This passage metaphorically appraises the
impact of print capitalism on the city. That is, the cloaks worn by
Philadelphians to avoid infection can be read as metaphors of
authorial disembodiment, so that, radically, the picture that Arthur
paints of Philadelphia is neither the moral nor the sentimental
metropolis described by Adam Smith, but rather a ghost town of
sorts.66 In Brown’s novel, anonymity is almost always productive of
65 Cited in Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Vintage, 1998),
204.
66 I refer to Adam Smith’s overvaluation of anonymity in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
Unlike Brown, Smith seems to think that anonymity is productive of social order on the
330
ECF 19:3
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chaos. The cloaks worn by the residents of Philadelphia for protection
against infection are synonymous with the plague and the cloaks of
anonymity that newspaper editors typically offered contributors to
purportedly preserve the liberty of the press. The ghostlike figure
interacts with his or her fellow citizens through various mediums
(that is, without body or in a state of quarantine), and glances of
wonder that are cast upon Arthur for his failure to “disembody,” or
wrap himself in a cloak, reflect the cultural authority that Americans
invested in newspaper politics at the turn of the century. His very
material presence in the public sphere is regarded as surprising.
Moreover, Arthur’s criticism in volume 2, that books “allow no
questions; offer no further explanations ... and talk to us from behind
a screen” (619) neatly anticipates Ong’s notion of the autonomy of
written discourse. That is, the impersonality of writing is what makes
it, as a technology, utterly irresponsible. Though every orator is under
obligation to respond to audience demands (an orator exists under
accusation), “there is no way,” writes Ong, “directly to refute a text ...
A text stating what the whole world knows is false will state falsehood
forever, so long as the text exists. Texts are inherently contumacious”
(79). This is one reason why Arthur is compelled to burn the sup­
posedly forged banknotes that he discovers in Lodi’s manuscript;
he intends to decisively draw Welbeck’s career of con artistry to a
close — to completely disentangle print and capitalism. Moreover,
the autonomy of written discourse similarly explains the impact of
Callender’s yellow journalism. Callender certainly understood that
he might be indicted under the Sedition Act, prosecuted, sued,
fined, forced into hiding, and even brutally beaten by gangs of
Federalist soldiers for vehemently attacking the US Government in
writing. However, he must also have understood the newspaper to be
a remarkably autonomous vehicle, in the Ong-ian sense that I have
highlighted above. Published words can take on a life of their own
which makes them practically irrefutable. Callender’s words might
basis that one is likely to assume “more tranquility” before a stranger than a family member
or friend. He writes: “We expect less sympathy from a common acquaintance than a friend;
we cannot open to the former all those little circumstances which we can unfold to the
latter: we assume, therefore, more tranquility before him ... We expect still less sympathy
from an assembly of strangers, and we assume, therefore, still more tranquility before
them, and always endeavor to bring down our passion to that pitch, which the particular
company we are in may be expected to go along with.” Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 23.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
331
even have gained strength through his indictment and physical
removal from the public sphere.
Impersonality
Throughout volume 1, then, Brown focuses almost exclusively on
Arthur’s various entanglements in the “mercantile anxieties and
revolutions” of Philadelphia, with the con artist Welbeck serving
as the symbolic centre of a highly unstable public sphere ruled by
various sorts of media, including newspapers, novels, and banknotes.
In volume 2, however, Brown’s attention turns to the medium of
body language to assert its value in forging stable social bonds. For
example, body language exercises “a sort of electrical sym­pathy”
(569) over Arthur during his meetings with Ascha Fielding, whom
he eventually engages to marry: the two are described as seeming
to “understand each other without the aid of words” (635), but
“with gestures, actions, looks, in which [Arthur] felt as if [his]
whole soul was visible” (590). Body language also forms the basis of
Arthur’s most provocative assertion regarding America’s booming
print culture. The overwhelming conclusion that he draws near the
end of volume 2 is that books fail to cultivate socially responsible
beings. Echoing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s nightmarish treatment of
the theatre in his Lettre à M. d’Alembert (1758), Arthur suggests that
books, because of their impersonality, threaten the very social fabric
of human intercourse: “Books are cold, jejune, vexations in their spar­
ing­ness of information at one time, and their impertinent loquacity
at another. Besides, all they chuse to give, they give at once; they
allow no questions; offer no further explanations, and bend not to
the caprices of our curiosity. They talk to us behind a screen. Their
tone is lifeless and monotonous. They charm not our attention by
mute significances of gesture and looks. They spread no light upon
their meaning by cadences and emphasis and pause” (619).67 This
passage represents Arthur as distancing himself from precisely the
sort of “impersonal writing” that, as Warner points out, provided the
67 Ringe notes that Brown was “strongly influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and had
planned a work of fiction, ‘The Story of Julius,’ in imitation of him” (4). For more on
the influence of Rousseau on Brown, see Herbert Brown, “Charles Brockden Brown’s
‘The Story of Julius’: Rousseau and Richardson ‘Improved,’” in Essays Mostly on Periodical
Publishing in America, ed. James Woodress (Durham: Duke University Press, 1973), 35–53.
332
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foundation for a “republican paradigm of public virtue” (151). Here
we have an Arthur who is by no means an exemplar of republican
literacy, as Warner suggests, but rather someone whose sentiments
eerily foreshadow Ong’s treatment of writing as “autonomous”
discourse, “discourse which cannot be directly questioned or
contested” (78). Arthur’s analysis that books “talk to us behind a
screen” (619) anticipates Ong’s description of the text’s irrefutability,
and, aptly, throughout volume 1 Arthur suffers precisely as a result of
various false rumours circulating in print.
Brown is also particularly interested in the impact that the act of
writing has on the continuity of one’s psychic sequences. Below is
an excerpt from a letter that he wrote at an early age, regarding the
effect that writing had upon his intimate friend and fellow student of
law, William W. Wilkins. Brown’s fascination lay in Wilkins’s apparent
split personality, the radical contrast between his “actual deportment,
and any notion of that deportment to be collected by a stranger from
his letters.”68 Meditating upon Wilkins’s transformation, Brown draws
the following profoundly technodeterministic conclusion, that there
is an inherent relationship between writing and imposture. And
imposture is not necessarily what an author does with the medium,
but rather what the medium does to an author: the technology of
writing foments a revolution in self. He writes: “His letters to me
are as confidential as letters can be, yet they form a picture totally
the reverse of his conversation, and his conduct ... In this there
was nothing that deserved to be called affectation and hypocrisy
... His tongue and his pen, his actions and his written speculations
were as opposite to each other as the poles.”69 Because he insists
that Wilkins’s masquerade is entirely unpretentious — that is, not
the result of “affectation or hypocrisy” — Brown’s comment calls
into focus Clifford Siskin’s sense of writing as “something other,
something to which people must adapt, something that can, in a
sense, be done to them.”70 Furthermore, Brown’s curiosity about
this relatively harmless instance of writing’s restructuring Wilkins’s
consciousness translates into widespread panic when it comes to
his contemplating the impact of a publishing industry boom upon
68 Allen, 43.
69 Allen, 43.
70 Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 31.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
333
traditional standards of social responsibility, notoriously dramatized
in the seemingly ethereal figure of Mervyn’s antagonist, Welbeck.
Rhapsody
My reading of the novel has yet to consider Brown’s significant role
in the establishment of American literature: he spent the bulk of
his life contributing to the print culture that, as I argue above, he
associated with Americans’ declining sense of social responsibility.71
Brown’s immersion in this early print culture of the United States
has been seized upon by critics, such as Warner, as an indication of
his commitment to the realization of a “republican literature, in
which publication and the public sphere remain identical” (176).
Because my reading completely opposes this view, in what follows
I attempt to address any lingering complications having to do with
Brown’s professional authorship, and, at the same time, demonstrate
that Brown felt deeply anxious about his participation in a public
sphere that was fast becoming equated with publication. He took
steps to remedy this anxiety by making various of his publications
adhere to the principles of conversation and public speaking.
Christopher Looby refers to this sort of extra-literary material as
the “grain of the voice.”72
Several complications need to be ironed out in support of
my reading. The first is that the fictional excuse for the novel’s
existence has as much to do with Mrs Wentworth’s “strange” request
that Arthur write a meticulously detailed narrative of his life as with
Stevens’s claim, that writing is the most legitimate form of discourse.
Ostensibly, the bulk of the novel is supposed to have been written
by Stevens, who was prompted to “so wearisome an undertaking”
because he “suspected that it might be necessary to the safety of
[Arthur’s] reputation and ... life, from the consequences of [his]
connection with Welbeck” (603). Warner emphasizes Stevens’s sense
that Meryvn should provide a written account of his experiences
to disentangle himself from Welbeck’s web of intrigue. Warner
interprets Stevens’s logic as having “grand implications for the
71 The fact that Brown might literally be called a “periodical visitor” has been elaborated upon
by Michael Cody in Charles Brockden Brown and the Literary Magazine: Cultural Journalism in
the Early American Republic (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004), 1–35.
72 See Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United
States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3.
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written context of the novel.” He writes: “Telling the story orally,
Stevens implies, did not satisfactorily justify Mervyn because that
narration was not sufficiently public” (168).
Perhaps Warner’s emphasis is misplaced. Perhaps the emphasis
ought not to be laid on the “culturally dominant assumption” (155)
that, from a legal standpoint, oral testimony cannot be trusted (an
assumption that is not necessarily Republican but, as Alexander
Welsh points out, a product of the witchcraft trials of Salem and
the colonial experience).73 Stevens’s sense is that Arthur must be
reinvented in literature to secure his acceptance within Republican
society. But Arthur’s narrative subverts this imperative. For while
Stevens’s production of Arthur’s narrative may reflect “culturally
dominant assumptions and desires about the value of printed
goods” (Warner, 155), the moral of Arthur’s experience is radically
other­wise: through Welbeck, Arthur learns to associate print with
criminal behaviour.
Though Arthur makes the important point that “time” has
“annihilated” the danger of his being prosecuted as an accomplice
of Welbeck, that “Wortley has been won by [his] behavior” (604),
including the body language he uses in recollecting his past,
Stevens’s insistence that Arthur provide a written account of his
actions nonetheless reveals the considerable status of written
documents in the early American republic. That is, though America
may have been “spoken into being,” as Looby argues,74 the actual
power of public debate was beginning to give way to the monopoly
of newspaper politics, as demonstrated by the Philadelphia Aurora ’s
(Duane’s newspaper) central command of [re]public[an] opinion.
Thus, the radical work of Brown’s novel lay in devoting the bulk of
volume 1 to a revelation of the young Republic’s emergent reliance
upon a medium that fosters psychical discontinuity and that which
Gustafson refers to as the “doublespeak” of political discourse.75
The horror, of course, lay in Brown’s establishing the nation’s over­
whelm­ing trust in such media, the majority’s “blind confidence” in
such men as Jefferson, who, according to Ellis, impulsively invented
and embraced seductive fictions.76
73 Alexander Welsh, “Evidence of Things Not Seen: Justice Stephen and Bishop Butler,”
Representations no. 22 (Spring 1988): 60–88.
74 Looby, 4.
75 Gustafson, 1.
76 Ellis, American Sphinx, 38.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
335
The second complication has largely to do with Brown’s living by
the medium that the novel so radically undermines. Brown’s venture
into the publishing industry (novels and periodicals) cannot be
explained without the benefit of a beautiful paradox or two. Perhaps
Brown was magnificently obsessed with the technology of writing
(perversely drawn to an occupation that ultimately aggravated his
apparent “constitutional tendency” to consumption).77 That he
seems to be engaging in an attack on print culture while simul­
taneously depending upon the literary market for his own sub­
sistence cannot be convincingly explained. I have attempted in
this article to demonstrate, through my reading of one novel, the
extent of Brown’s anxiety regarding the social consequences of a
technological revolution in America. That is, in spite of his own
apparent venture-oriented forays in the realm of publishing (Brown
can literally be called a periodical visitor),78 it is evident through
various of his editorial statements that he felt deeply anxious about
occupying the role of a disembodied author and imagined authority.
Brown’s anxiety was such that he actually attempted to remedy the
professional author’s impersonality and make the medium of print
conform to the rules of spoken discourse.
At the outset of “The Rhapsodist” series of essays, Brown rejects
the authorial “privilege” of anonymity on the basis that “no situa­
tion whatsoever, will justify a man in uttering a falsehood” (The
Rhapsodist, 1). Because he considers “falsehood and dissimulation”
to be the blackest of crimes, Brown makes it his policy to “give the
reader some acquaintance” with his person. “It is not my intention
to be totally concealed from view,” writes Brown: “I shall, from time
to time, as occasion requires, give such useful hints, and seasonable
information of the family, age, and pursuits of the author, as I doubt
not, will fully gratify the inquisitive disposition of the reader” (The
Rhapsodist, 1). Brown’s conception of a confident exchange between
reader and author necessitates a visual reference. His disclosure
of personal informa­tion is intended to provide the reader with a
visual image, presumably as an attempt to overcome the psychical
discontinuity of writing. The final paragraph of “Rhapsodist No. 1”
is even more explicit in terms of Brown’s objective to subvert the
77 See Dunlap, 93.
78 Brown served as editor and wrote anonymously for the Monthly Magazine, and American
Review (1799–1800) and the Literary Magazine, and American Register (1803–8).
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disembodiment of written discourse. Brown describes the rhapsodist’s
role in terms of piercing the mask of authorship, as an attempt to
make writing resemble speech: “A rhapsodist is one who delivers the
sentiments suggested by the moment in artless and unpremeditated
language ... He pours forth the effusions of a sprightly fancy, and
describes the devious wanderings of a quick but thoughtful mind ... In
short, he will write as he speaks, and converse with his reader not as an
author but as a man” (The Rhapsodist, 1). Here, in 1789, on the eve of
the rancorous newspaper politics of the late 1790s, Brown’s primary
concern is with the technology of writing and psychical dis­continuity.
Rather than adapt to the technology of writing, the Rhapsodist
is determined to make writing conform to the free flow of his own
“sprightly fancy.” That is, Brown’s overarching concern lay in providing
the reader with visual references and concrete details relating to the
Rhapsodist’s life, which also provided the reader with an intimate
sense of the Rhapsodist’s personality and linguistic presence.79
Various scholars, including Rice, consider the early American novel
to be especially punctuated with a variety of reality effects that mimic
“interpersonal communication” (170).80 According to Rice, the
“novel in the American context arose ... as the literary means of last
resort for a tradition of civic authorship facing the vicissitudes posed
by the dawning of the age of economic liberalism and mechanical
reproduction.” He writes: “Whereas authorship and books had
been for centuries defined in political terms as public ‘actions,’
they were, in the last years of the eighteenth century, increasingly
considered in economic terms autonomously as private ‘things,’ or
property. As a result ... the twinned tales of virtue and seduction,
fidelity and coquetry ... remain as symptomatic artifacts attesting to
a very real loss of political agency as a tradition of civic authorship
was reconfigured by the new demands of a market society” (155–56).
Rice considers the popularity of certain realistic literary forms that
mimic “interpersonal communication” to be reflections of the anxiety
79 Such rhapsody laid the foundation for Brown’s fictional method. For more on Brown’s
improvisation, see Ringe and Dunlap. I disagree with Ringe’s assessment, that the seeming
lack of coherence in Brown’s novels is a flaw or the accidental product of his improvisational
fictional method. As I see it, the appearance of incoherence is precisely the point of Brown’s
rhapsody. It is a reflection of his various attempts to both subvert writing’s arrangement of
human thought and reveal the reality of human cognition as chaotic. It is a reflection of
his various attempts to make writing resemble speech.
80 For more on this subject, see Looby; and Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson,
Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
337
which American authors experienced writing to an “anonymous and
distant reading public” (170). Such literary forms as the epistolary
novel, suggests Rice, “stand as a testimony to the efforts of authors to
reassert the imperatives of communication and participation in an
age which ushered in what N.N. Feltes has called ‘the commodity of
the text’” (Rice, 171).
Through personal disclosure and by making writing resemble
speech, Brown’s Rhapsodist reflects the anxiety that Rice describes.
Consider the remarkably different attitude of Joseph Addison’s
“panoptical” voyeuristic Spectator. Though Addison begins Specta­tor
no. 1 (1 March 1711) with the pretension of personal disclosure, the
subsequent bio­graphical material is so nondescript that he actually
conceals more of himself than he discloses. Most importantly, the
Spectator prefers anonymity because he cannot bear to interact with
any other body immediately: “I must keep to myself, an Account
of my Name, my Age, and my Lodgings ... I cannot yet come to a
Resolution of com­municating them to the Publick. They would
indeed draw me out of that Obscurity which I enjoy’d for many Years,
and expose me in publick Places to several Salutes and Civilities,
which have been always very disagreeable to me; for the greatest Pain
I can suffer, is the being talked to, and being stared at.”81 Because
the Spectator is described as somebody who likes to watch others
but cannot stand being watched and does not care to participate
in con­versation (previous to the above passage he claims not to be
able to remember ever having “spoken three Sentences together in
[his] whole life”), Addison’s purpose in Spectator no. 1 cannot be to
establish a connection with readers, but rather to distinguish himself
from the rest of “Mankind”: “In short, where-ever I see a Cluster of
People I always mix with them, tho’ I never open my Lips but in my
own Club. Thus, I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind,
than as one of the Species.”82 Whereas the Spectator’s alien penchant
for silent observation lends itself to authorial disembodiment,
Brown anxiously strives to remedy that gap between authors and
readers through rhapsody — by making the Rhapsodist both visually
and linguistically present. He attempts to embody the author of this
short work through a sequence of personal disclosures, to make the
81 Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator , 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:5–6.
82 Spectator, 1:2, 4.
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man as much the object of readers’ attentions as the doctrine itself.
This is a radical twist, especially given the extent to which anonymity
had become associated with freedom of the American press, and the
disinterested impersonality that, as Warner suggests, had developed
into a paradigm of republican virtue. Consider, for example, the
introduction of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776): “Who the
author of this production is, is wholly unnecessary to the public, as
the object for attention is the doctrine itself, not the man. Yet it may
not be unnecessary to say, that he is unconnected with any party, and
under no sort of influence public or private, but the influence of
reason and principle.”83 Clearly, anonymity enables Paine to remain
dissociated from any political party, to remain a disinterested party,
concerned only with the general good of the community, and leaves
readers to believe that the views expressed in the pamphlet might
well be those of any civic-minded person living in America — hence,
the paradigm of Republican virtue. Self-effacement, in this regard,
transforms the author into a heterogeneous nobody, a generic rep­
resentative of the community at large. Thus, the most powerful use
that Paine makes of anonymity is his deceiving readers into believing
that the author is an utterly objective observer. That the author has
chosen anonymity implies a lack of self-interest and focuses readers’
attentions on the doctrine itself.
However, Paine’s insistence that he is not “inflaming or exag­
gerating matters” but presenting only the simple facts as though he
were an objective reporter conceals various of his own manipula­tive
devices under the rubric of granting readers an opportunity to think
and feel for themselves. Prompting readers to think on their own
is itself a manipulative ploy, for it creates an illusion of freedom of
thought and obscures Paine’s agency. But, most importantly, Paine
is not presently available to readers for questioning; that is, as an
author he is not subject to audience response. By contrast, as editor
of the Literary Magazine and American Register (1803), Brown offers to
disclose his name to anybody who “chooses to ask,” and he is willing
to be interrogated by readers.84 Moreover, in 1803, Brown’s attention
turns to the corruption of the publishing industry, or the synergy
83 Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac
Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1987), 66.
84 Brown, “The Editors’ Address to the Public,” Literary Magazine, and American Register
(1803–7) (1 October 1803), 1. References are to this edition.
YELLOW FEVER AS YELLOW JOURNALISM
339
that was forming between venture-oriented editors and duplicitous
politicians. The following is an excerpt from his “editor’s address” in
the publication’s first number:
The world, by which I mean the few hundred persons who concern themselves
about this work, will naturally inquire who it is who thus addresses them. “This
is somewhat more than a point of idle curiosity,” my reader will say, “for, from
my knowledge of the man must I infer how far he will be able or willing to
fulfill his promises. Besides, it is of great importance to know, whether his
sentiments on certain subjects, be agreeable or not to my own. In politics,
for example, he may be a malcontent: in religion an heretic. He may be an
ardent advocate for all that I abhor, or he may be a celebrated champion
of my favourite opinions. It is evident that these particulars must dictate the
treatment you receive from me, and make me either your friend or enemy:
your patron or your persecutor. Besides, I am anxious for some personal
knowledge of you that I may judge of your literary merits. You may, possibly
be one of these, who came hither from the old-world to seek your fortune;
who have handled the pen as others handled the awl or the needle: that is,
for the sake of a livelihood: and who therefore, are willing to work on any
kind of cloth or leather and to any model that may be in demand. You may,
in the course of your trade, have accommodated yourself to twenty different
fashions, and have served twenty classes of customers, have copied at one time,
a Parisian; at another, a London fashion: and have truckled to the humours,
now of a precise enthusiast, and now of a smart freethinker.
“’Tis of no manner of importance what creed you may publicly profess on
this occasion, or on what side, religious or political, you may declare yourself
enlisted. To judge of the value or sincerity of these professions: to form some
notion how far you will faithfully or skillfully perform your part, I must know
your character. By that knowledge, I shall regulate myself with more certainty
than by any anonymous declaration you may think proper to make.” (1)
In the preceding passage, Brown provides the reader with an over­
whelming list of the professional author’s slippery impersonality . First,
the precarious nature of Brown’s prose captures the very instability
of print culture, or rather aspires to represent a hermeneutics of
suspicion: that is, he offers the passage as a literal representation of
the anxiety experienced by a scrupulous reader in search of reliable
information. The search is supposed to end with the disclosure of
one’s character, which, however ironically, cannot be represented.
Second, Brown directly references the corruption of the industry.
The venture-oriented publisher, to quote Benjamin Franklin, con­
ceives of the newspaper as “like a Stage Coach in which any who
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would pay had a right to a Place.”85 Ultimately, then, Brown’s editorial
statement of 1803 confronts the “chaos of publication,” or, through
critical disclosure, struggles to stabilize an otherwise unstable
medium. Brown’s claim that “this project is not a mercenary one”
(1) recalls Arthur’s climactic disentangling of print and capitalism in
volume 1: the burning of the potentially counterfeit banknotes that
he discovers sealed within the pages of Lodi’s Italian manuscript.
My reading of Arthur Mervyn as riddled with anxiety about what
it means to be a society of word processors (anxiety which figures
in Brown’s equation of yellow fever with yellow journalism) is cor­
roborated by the rhapsody of the above passages. Brown’s own
anxiety about publication and his nostalgic attachment to oral
culture is revealed through his various attempts to make writing
resemble speech. Such anxiety not only reinforces Siskin’s notions
about the “shock that accompanied [print’s] initial spread in
Britain,”86 but also lends a great deal of credence to Rice’s very similar
sense of the “anxiousness with which colonists greeted the rise and
expansion of an indigenous commercial print culture” (2–3). And,
finally, Brown’s response to this anxiety — rhapsody — nostalgically
recalls the cultural authority of spoken language as defined by the
transatlantic religious revivals of the 1740s: the Great Awakening.
The University of Oklahoma
85 Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Kenneth Silverman (New
York: Penguin, 1986), 165.
86 Siskin, 19–20.