"Fated to perish by consumption": The political economy of Arthur Mervyn

Studies in American Fiction

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 3-20

  Ostrowski, Carl ^a  

^a MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949771564     PISSN: 00918083     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/saf.2004.0000     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 397
2. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds documents Brown's encounter with Wealth of Nations in Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown's Gendered Economics of Virtue (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1997), 73. Study of political economy was standard in preparing for a career in the law
3. After applauding Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr.'s decision to study law, Thomas Jefferson recommended several books, the first of which was Smith's Wealth of Nations. Jefferson said that on the subject of political economy it was "the best book extant." To Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., May 30, 1790, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 16, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), 449
4. Charles Brockden Brown, Three Gothic Novels (New York: Library of America, 1998), 231; hereafter cited parenthetically
5. James H. Justus, "Arthur Mervyn, American," American Literature 42 (1970), 315
6. Steven Watts reads the novel in this context, asserting that critical disagreement about how to judge the title character stems from Brown's own conflicted response to "social disarray, institutional failure, and personal incoherence in late eighteenth-century America." The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), 115. However, as my essay will show, I think Brown is much more critical of emergent market capitalism than Watts implies
7. Joseph J. Ellis offers a concise explanation of Hamilton's funding plan and its attendant injustices in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 55-56
8. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 113-14
9. The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush; His "Travels Through Life" Together with His "Commonplace Book" for 1789-1813, ed. George W. Corner (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), 200
10. Alexander Hamilton to George Washington, August 18, 1792, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 12, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967), 247
11. Jefferson to David Humphreys, August 23, 1791, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 22, ed. Charles T. Cullen (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), 62
12. "Memoranda of Conversations with the President," March 1, 1792, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 23, ed. Charles T. Cullen (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), 186
13. Jefferson to Henry Remsen, April 14, 1792, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 23, 425-26
14. I focus this attention on the negative connotations of the word speculation in the 1790s in order to counter Elizabeth Hinds's recent reading of the novel, which emphasizes the speculator as a positive character who "invests faithfully, [and] trusts his association with a public world of trade to merit him returns on his investment" (Hinds, Private Property, 71). This understanding of the term seems to me at odds with the view of speculators widely held in the United States in Brown's era
15. Callender, Sedgwick & Co., or a Key to the Six Per Cent Cabinet (1798)
16. Quoted in Charles Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Macmillan Company, 1949), 212
17. Charles Brockden Brown, "On the State of American Literature," The Monthly Magazine and American Review 1, no. 1 (April 1799), 15
18. According to biographer Harry Warfel, one of the topics Brown discussed with the Society for the Attainment of Useful Knowledge was "Are Speculations in the Public Funds Injurious?" Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (1949; New York: Octagon Books, 1974), 35
19. The three major works setting forth the so-called "classical republican synthesis" are Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967)
20. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787(1969; Chapel Hill: The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998)
21. and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Synthesis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975). Though it is generally agreed that in the course of the nineteenth century the ideology of classical republicanism was supplanted by a cultural faith in economic liberalism, in the 1790s these two ways of seeing the world co-existed. As Wood writes in his preface to the 1998 edition of his work, "Republicanism was indeed gradually transformed into something we call liberalism, but in subtle and complicated ways that kept many republican sentiments alive" (xii)
22. Critical consensus has not been reached on how to interpret the main character. On critical disagreement over the novel, Cathy Davidson writes that "the critical reception of Arthur Mervyn is as labyrinthine and contradictory as anything in a Gothic novel." Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 240
23. John R. Nelson, Jr., Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789-1812 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 102
24. The Writings of Albert Gallatin, vol. 3, ed. Henry Adams (New York: Antiquarian Press, 1960), 146-47
25. Brown's meeting with Gallatin is recorded in Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown, 98
26. Hinds, Private Property, 85
27. That Brown saw novel writing as a way of bettering the republic is clear from his prefaces. For example, in the preface to Arthur Mervyn he says by way of justifying the ensuing narrative that "it is every one's duty to profit by all opportunities of inculcating on mankind the lessons of justice and humanity" (231)
28. Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), 155
29. An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Benjamin Johnson, 1793), 19-20
30. An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Termination, 21
31. The most famous example of this reaction is Percy Shelley, who, according to Leslie Fiedler, was "infuriated" by Mervyn's marriage. Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 152
32. Emory Elliott writes that "Arthur's self-centered rejection of Eliza serves as another clue to the dubious nature of his character." Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic 1725-1810 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 245
33. Several critics have noted this connection. Arthur Kimball writes that "in Arthur Mervyn the chief germ is money, and Welbeck plots continually to get it." Rational Fictions: A Study of Charles Brockden Brown (McMinnville, Oreg: Linfield Research Institute, 1968), 176
34. Alan Axelrod claims that the novel is "a vision of dis-ease of civilization in the New World. Brown . . . created in his most detailed portrait of an American city a plague-smitten, apocalyptic vision of an antiutopia, in which the only real sources of social relationship lie in a monetary system liable to counterfeiting and imposture." Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1983), 159
35. To Van Staphorst & Hubbard, March 27, 1797, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 29, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2002), 329
36. The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, ed. Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 331
37. Mathew Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (4th ed., 1794; New York: Arno Press, 1970), 9-10
38. Smith described the invisible hand in this way: "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it" ( Wealth of Nations, 423)
39. Hamilton to Washington, August 18, 1792, op. cit., 257
40. As evidence of Brown's Jeffersonian sympathies in the late 1790s one might adduce the fact that he sent a copy of the novel Wieland to Thomas Jefferson, writing on December 25, 1798: "In thus transmitting my book to you, I tacitly acknowledge my belief that it is capable of affording you pleasure and of entitling the writer to some portion of your good opinion" (quoted in Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown, 112). During Jefferson's presidency, however, and after he had renounced his own body of fictional writing, Brown became a Federalist and wrote political pamphlets criticizing Jefferson's policies
41. Jane Tompkins writes that in Arthur Mervyn "the main character, insofar as he can be distinguished from other characters, sets forth the ground rules which everyone in the society must obey if the social order is to survive." Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 67
42. Similarly, Michael Warner argues strongly against finding any irony in Brown's treatment of the title character (Letters of the Republic, 153)
43. And Elizabeth Hinds sees nothing amiss in Arthur's pursuit of wealth along Smithian lines, arguing that Arthur is "virtuous to begin with" and that "his virtue . . . joins forces with a will-to-wealth to the end of a specifically capitalist success" (Private Property, 69)