Edgar huntly, p.1
Edgar Huntly, page 1
CONTENTS
Introduction by Norman S. Grabo
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Text
EDGAR HUNTLY
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
PENGUIN CLASSICS
EDGAR HUNTLY
OR, MEMOIRS OF A SLEEP - WALKER
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) was born to a merchant Quaker family in Philadelphia, and was educated at Robert Proud’s School. In his early twenties he committed himself to literature, and avidly read the latest models from England and Europe — especially Rousseau, Bage, Godwin, Southey, and Coleridge. By 1795 he was earnestly devoted to fiction; once engaged, he composed at breakneck pace, publishing between 1797 and 1802 seven romances, a long pro-feminist dialogue, and numerous sketches and tales. Four of those romances earned him the perhaps dubious title of the Father of the American Novel — Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (Part I, 1799; Part II, 1800), and between those two parts, Edgar Huntly (1799). All four are remarkably sophisticated moral, psychological, and political allegories that burned into the artistic consciousness of Poe, Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper, and Melville. By the 1820s, a decade after his death, he was ranked both in America and England with Washington Irving and Cooper as the embodiment of American literary genius, the first American writer successfully to bridge the gulf between entertainment and art in fiction.
Norman S. Grabo introduced and helped edit the authoritative edition of Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, and is the author of The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown and the first book-length study of America’s premier colonial poet, Edward Taylor. He writes widely on early American aesthetics, and is at present Chapman Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Tulsa.
Edgar Huntly
Or, Memoirs of a Sleep - Walker
Charles Brockden Brown
Edited with an Introduction
by Norman S. Grabo
PENGUIN BOOKS
INTRODUCTION
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN grew up in the Philadelphia that Benjamin Franklin built. The center of American politics, the capital of both state and nation, the city featured a public library, a couple of good schools, including Robert Proud’s Friends Grammar School, which Brown attended, the American Philosophical Society, a thriving university, several energetic newspapers and magazines, a mint, a paid police force, two banks, and a freshwater port that made it, even then, a marvel of commerce, both legal and illegal. The elegant State House sat like a jewel amid the simplicity of symmetrical residential and public buildings. The streets were aswarm with heroes. One could hear them hold forth in the State House Yard, watch General Washington exercise his horsemanship at Ricketts’ Circus, spy Tom Paine or Thomas Jefferson or John Adams strolling down to the City Tavern for dinner.
There is no reason to suppose that Brown, born in 1771, was any more conscious than other boys of politics and affairs of state. It is not likely that, as a boy of six, he was taken to hear independence proclaimed from the State House by Colonel John Nixon on July 8. But no matter how protected a Quaker upbringing he had, he could not have missed the formal parades, the city-wide bell ringing, the bonfires, the salute of cannon, the random firing of small arms, and the pyrotechnic displays. Philadelphia was large, but it was not that large. Nor can one imagine any reasonably alert twelve-year-old remaining long in ignorance of the stormy arrival in the middle of the night of General Washington’s aide-de-camp, Colonel David Humphreys, with the news of the great American victory at York-town in 1781. Later Humphreys would be admired by Brown as one of the Connecticut Wits whose poetry fired his own literary ambition, but at this stage he was merely an agent of the news of successful violence.
At the age of sixteen, Charles was apprenticed to the law firm of Alexander Wilcocks, when all the talk among attorneys had to be the hammering out of the Federal constitution at the State House, only a few blocks from where Brown lived with his family at 117 South Second Street. By then, law offices must have been filled with talk of this new instrument, the Constitution, designed to reconcile the natural inclination to self-interest with the equal but opposite social need for what was alleged to be the public weal. Natural and personal passion on one hand — the right to liberty — and on the other, social reason and order — the right to protection. Although the issue may have been argued directly under the young apprentice’s nose by the most gifted assemblage of political theorists in the history of America, it would not have appeared abstract to the young Quaker.
The Brown family had arrived in America even before William Penn — becoming a line of merchandisers and government functionaries. Great-uncle Charles Brogden, the first Registrar of Philadelphia, and the scrivener to whom Benjamin Franklin most often resorted when he wanted his schemes drawn into proper legal form, was the most conspicuous leaf on the family tree, though he seems to have sunk almost totally into oblivion. The family philosophy seems to have been, Lie low, Stay out of sight, Keep your mouth shut. Don’t make waves.
In the half-century before Charles’s birth, and well through his childhood, the intricacies of Provincial politics always seemed to put the Quakers in the uncomfortable middle. In one direction lay the self-protective Proprietaries — the Penn family. The Governor, selected by the Proprietaries but also serving the Crown, often found himself pulled impossibly between the two. And the elected Assembly — constituted of uncommitted Freemen, accommodating Quakers, and some not-so-accommodating Quietist Quakers — was pulled in yet other ways. Though internally at odds, the Assembly did unite against the Governor when he was perceived to be acting not as Royal agent but as the tool of the Proprietaries. Always, the issue was the budget. Who would pay for the erection and maintenance of the State House? Who would finance western exploration and the defense against greedy Virginians and Marylanders toward the Ohio? Who would outfit and support defense of the western frontier? Who would supply and quarter British troops after 1755 when they came to help defend western Pennsylvanians against the French in the wooded mountains?
Quakers of tender conscience thought it improper to provide for public defense either directly or indirectly; they were often reluctant to provide horses, wagons, rooms, food, or even their votes. They questioned whether they could conscientiously participate in government at all, or even avail themselves of the perquisites of organized society — such as the university (which may be why Charles never went to college). During the French and Indian War they tended to hang back, obstructing government policies by a combination of inertia and principle. During the Revolution, many Quakers did the same — even through the British occupation and devastation of Philadelphia in 1777. Of course the Quakers thought of themselves as neutrals; to the revolutionaries they were collaborationists or traitors.
In the half-century between 1730 and 1780, this was not simply a matter of energetic debate. Partisans took to the streets. If a merchant didn’t illuminate his windows in support of current political causes, those windows would be smashed, houses burned, people cuffed and sometimes shot. The streets may have been well lighted, but they were also riotous and dangerous. Through it all, the Browns survived, which means that Charles’s father, Elijah, must have been cautious enough to light candles when they were called for, no matter what stronger consciences may have done. If the sweet political rhetoric for liberty and democracy wafted from the State House toward the wharves and thus past the Brown residence, it bore with it to young Charles the sour smell of riot, excess, violence, fear, and death. And Brown would not forget.
He would come to see that the struggle of the infant republic to attain order without sacrificing individual liberty and character applied to individual experience as well. An allegorist by temperament as well as conviction, the young legal apprentice already believed that personal stories reflected or symbolized the larger social struggle around them. Letters to his young friends, especially Joseph Bringhurst and William W. Wilkins, and his keynote address to the Belles Lettres Club testify to his idealism and his literary ambition. But it seems that it was the disastrous and terrible yellow fever epidemic of 1793 that catalyzed his literary energies, just as it drove him out of Philadelphia, first to Hartford and then to New York. That epidemic, falling on a corrupt and venal community, brought into tense relief the testing of individual moral character in the breakdown of an ordered society. That, he said, was what he would depict.
Abandoning his law studies that same year, and frequently commuting between Philadelphia and New York, Brown came under the influence of the members of the Friendly Club — a collection of artists, playwrights, lawyers, and physicians — who encouraged his literary efforts and shared with him their interests in both physical and m
II
These major works have much in common. Each depends upon some abnormality that puts character to the test, introduced either by external circumstances or by inner weakness. Wieland rests upon the disconcerting intrusions of a ventriloquist or biloquist — a “double-tongued deceiver,” as Brown says — plus the horror of death by spontaneous combustion. Ormond and Arthur Mervyn both rely upon the effects of the yellow fever plague of 1793, although Ormond also introduces a master illusionist who is, moreover, a political idealist; Mervyn posits a curious and tactless virtue as devastating as the plague itself; and Edgar Huntly originates in the psychology of somnambulism. All four purport to be morally instructive, if not outright didactic. All concern young men or women at a point of achieving — or failing to achieve — personal and social maturity. All four exist in a rhetoric that seems to constitute a special conceptual place, a world that transcends class but that designates fictional worth. Each of the novels depends upon improbable coincidences of a sort that argues a purposeful universe whose workings are beyond normal human perceptions and understanding. And each novel is structured so as to collapse, to self-destruct somewhere along the telling — usually nearer the end than elsewhere. All four thus introduce narrative elements that undercut their apparently artless beginnings, undermining the reliability of their narrators, until we are made to realize the stories are as much about the telling as the told. And everywhere the stories present simultaneously puzzling and illuminating doubles, twins, look-alikes, and second selves.
Once all that is realized, however, certain significant differences among the novels emerge. Ormond and Arthur Mervyn are city stories, both set in 1793, mysteries of manners one might say, stagy productions consisting of conversations in parlors, jail cells, bedrooms, closets, public houses, shops, hospitals, brothels, and basements. They are basically drawing-room melodrama. Wieland, Brown’s first published novel, is probably the strictest in its actions, confined for the most part to neighboring country estates, in ample houses of whose architecture Brown is extremely conscious, but quite different from either the lavish city house of Welbeck or the squalid cottage of Constantia Dudley. Wieland’s main setting, Mettingen, on the banks of the Schuylkill, with Clara’s neighboring cottage, qualify it as suburban fiction — the city carefully placed in the fictional background, a source of surprising news and occasional escape, but never the generating locus of the action. Edgar Huntly, however, avoids the city almost entirely.
Huntly Farm is located somewhere in the environs of the Forks of the Delaware, presumably in the Lehigh Valley. The time is 1787, and the event that seems to excite the central action is an apparently unprovoked, long-delayed act of vengeance by a small group of Delaware Indians under the suggestion of an ancient squaw-sachem known only as Old Deb or Queen Mab. For the first time the significant action is out-of-doors, while being simultaneously intensely psychological. A look at a 1794 map of Philadelphia shows no more than ten blocks of developed real estate between the Delaware River and the Schuylkill. A mile’s walk would have taken Brown from his Second Street address to Broad Street, beyond which lay only scattered buildings until one reached the Schuylkill. Brown was a dedicated walker, for whom escape into the “country” would have been an easy and regular excursion. Like Brown, Mervyn and Huntly are also tireless walkers. But while Brown uses Mervyn’s visits between country and city to contrast the moral and physical foibles of both kinds of life, he has another purpose in mind in Edgar Huntly, and displaces the action far out of the city, to the wild countryside somewhere near Easton.
Brown takes care to blur exact locations in Edgar Huntly. Easton itself is never mentioned, yet it hovers about the events of the story in a significant way, for it was there, between 1756 and 1758, that the government of Pennsylvania entered into a peace treaty with the Delaware or Lenni-Lenape Indians. The purpose was to blunt the alliance between the Iroquois and the French, whose attacks from the stronghold of Fort Duquesne had reached as far east as modern Harrisburg, less than a hundred miles from Philadelphia. The sachem Teedyuscung purported to speak for the entire Six Nations, just as Governor Denny claimed to represent the British Crown. With the defeat of the French at Port Duquesne in 1758, the Indians had to rethink their French alliance and at some level to accept ultimate English victory and the inevitable settlement of Europeans across the mountains and along the upper Ohio. Already a good deal of quasi-legal squatting and settlement had gone on all along the eastern side of the mountains, and particularly in the Lehigh Valley, the result of the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737, by which the Delaware were outfoxed into surrendering more than twice the territory they had had in mind to the Pennsylvania Proprietaries. This is the origin of the displacement of Queen Mab’s cohort, and the source of their bitter resentment against the white invaders. Although it was not stressed during the 1758 negotiations at Easton, nobody doubted that the land grab of 1737 weighed heavily on the minds of both whites and Indians. So when Brown conflates the two episodes, he is right in spirit if not entirely in fact.
If Queen Mab, or Old Deb (a name indicating she may have been a Christianized Indian), is a foreign presence in the otherwise sophisticated society around Huntly Farm, she is also in many ways central to the action and meaning of this book. About the time Brown finished Edgar Huntly, and before embarking on Part II of Arthur Mervyn — that is, sometime during the summer of 1799 — he forced himself to state what he regarded as the purpose and chief concern of fiction, presumably shaping a modest theory from his own writing experience since 1795. That statement was published in the September 1799 issue of his Monthly Magazine, under the title “Walstein’s School of History: From the German of Krants of Gotha.” Brown argues that fiction is a perfected form of history, best told as the autobiography of a character worthy of interest and attention. Fictitious history is thus moral, elevating, and even openly didactic. It explores human character by allowing the memoirist to recount his own motivations, so as to reveal the springs of actions as well as their consequences. It may be about ordinary — as differentiated from prominent or great — men and women, by appealing to the two basic areas of moral testing for ordinary readers — the areas of sex and money. Brown preferred to describe them as property and marriage, the issues that resonate through all his long fiction. Here is where Queen Mab fits into Edgar Huntly — as a symbol of property lost and family resentment.
Edgar understands the Delaware language. No matter how implausible the claim — and there is no evidence that Brown himself could speak or understand the language — it is absolutely appropriate to the symbolism and the logic of Brown’s tale, for in deeper ways than he knows, Edgar understands, sympathizes, and joins with Old Deb’s dislocation, her resentment, her loss, and perhaps even her vengeance. To everyone else, Old Deb is simply an eccentric Delaware hanger-on whose queenly demands could be easily tolerated by affluent settlers. But Edgar, in condescending acknowledgment of her regal and imperial demands, mockingly dubs her “Queen Mab,” an epithet his readers would immediately recognize as Mercutio’s “faeries’ midwife,” who gallops over the noses of those asleep, awakening their dreams, arousing their desires, rewarding by night what the daylight world withholds. Edgar’s Queen Mab is the presiding Genius of the night, the queen of nightmares, the involuntary directress of somnambulists.
When it is finally explained that Old Deb had unleashed her silent, brutal kinsmen to lash out randomly against anyone they encountered, and that they were responsible for the murder of Edgar’s friend Waldegrave, that explanation at a literal level seems contrived and unsatisfactory. It is, after all, the murder of Waldegrave that first excites Edgar’s curiosity and sends him in pursuit of the guilt-ridden Clithero. By making Edgar “understand” Deb’s language, which is essentially the language of resentful action, Brown makes him unwittingly complicit in the murder of Waldegrave. But by portraying Mab both as the queen of desire and as a symbol of the national nightmare of dispossession, Brown also invites us to consider why and in what way Edgar may be seen as actually desiring Waldegrave’s death.
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