Brown and the Woldwinites

The Woldwinites, the group of British writers centered around Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, were a key influence on Charles Brockden Brown’s writing. From them, he drew a coherent set of political and artistic ideas concerning fiction writing. This chapter outlines the major aspects of that influence. Brown read the Woldwinites in the context of the Friendly Club circle with his fellow club members Elihu Hubbard Smith and William Dunlap. By the mid-1790s, Brown had adopted Woldwinite fiction as a model for his own and espoused well-known Woldwinite tenets such as the duty to struggle for justice, deference to general utility, and reliance on patience and time to generate change. Brown adopted a more nuanced account of Godwin’s views of marriage after the appearance of the latter’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft and articulated a systematic critique of the excessive sensibility often associated with Wollstonecraft in his novels and essays.

Brown’s Early Biographers and Reception, 1815–1940s

The biography of Charles Brockden Brown continued to be of literary and scholarly interest after his death in 1810 and into the twentieth century. William Dunlap, one of Brown’s closest friends, extended an earlier aborted attempt at a biography of Brown and published his two-volume Life of Charles Brockden Brown in 1815. Dunlap provided the biographical basis for numerous essays and sketches that periodically remembered Brown’s life and work and sustained public interest in the author. Few new details of Brown’s biography surfaced over the years, so these recurrences of brief literary biographies serve as an evolving record of Brown’s literary reception across changes in public and artistic tastes. Through the first half of the twentieth century, Daniel Edwards Kennedy compiled a six-hundred-thousand-word biography of Brown but left it, at his death in 1960, incomplete and unpublished. Subsequent scholars, however, have benefited from additional biographical details that Kennedy’s researches uncovered.