| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. By Peter Kafer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xxii, 249 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8122-3786-2.)
Peter Kafer's book draws on history and biography in ways that illuminate the life and writings of the early republic's most ambitious fiction writer. No one details Charles Brockden Brown's Quaker genealogy relative to Philadelphia and Pennsylvania history more accurately or in more depth. Likewise, Kafer's rendering of anti-Quaker riots, Whig mobs, and the "intra-Revolutionary struggle for control of post-war Pennsylvania" (p. 42) provides us with an invaluable account of the middle-of-the-night arrest and imprisonment by the Continental Congress's Committee on Spies of people it deemed "dangerous to the State" (p. 1). Kafer's inquiry into Brown's affiliation with the New York Friendly Club in the mid-1790s also yields rich insight into the presence of Godwinite radicalism and an "undoctrinaire federalism" and "commitment to 'free thought'" among some New York intellectuals (p. 74).	1
And that is Kafer's point—that as Brown's imagination matured, he resorted early and often to the memory of his own familial past and then to increasingly "local" material related to Pennsylvania history and postrevolutionary America (p. 94). The origin, in other words, of the American gothic, of novels such as Wieland (1798), is "the same place where the American Enlightenment attained its apogee, and where the United States of America was created: Revolutionary Philadelphia. At 117 South Second Street" (p. 129), where in 1777 Brown endured the "'violent'" arrest of his father (p. 35).	. . .

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