NEW YORK — In the winter of 1789, around the time George Washington was elected the nation’s first president, a Boston-based printer quietly launched another American institution.
“The Power of Sympathy” by William Hill Brown, published anonymously by Isaiah Thomas & Company, is widely cited as something important: the first American novel.
Clocking in at nearly 100 pages, Brown’s narrative tells of two young New Englanders whose love affair ends abruptly and tragically when they discover a shocking secret that makes their relationship unbearable. The dedication page, addressed to the “Young Ladies of United Columbia” (United States), promised an exposition of the “fatal consequences of seduction” and a recipe for the “Economy of Human Life”.
Outside of Boston society, however, few would know or care whether “The Power of Sympathy” marked some kind of literary milestone.
“If you picked 10 random citizens, I doubt it would matter to any of them,” says David Lawrimore, an associate professor of English at the University of Idaho who has written frequently about ancient U.S. literature. “Most people weren’t thinking about the first American novel.”
With the subtitle “The triumph of nature. Founded in Truth”, Brown’s book is, in many ways, characteristic of the era, whether for its epistolary format, its Anglicized prose, its unidentified author or its pious message. But “The Power of Sympathy” also includes themes that reflect the aspirations and anxieties of a young country and that still resonate today.
Dana McClain, assistant professor of English at Holy Family University, notes that Brown was an avowed federalist who believed in a strong national government and shared his contemporaries’ concern for forging a stable republican citizenship. The letters in “The Power of Sympathy” include reflections on class, temperament and the differences between the North and South, notably the “aristocratic temperament” of Southern slave owners who threatened “domestic stillness”, as if anticipating the War Civil of the next century.
Like many other early American writers, fiction and nonfiction, Brown linked women’s behavior to the fate of society at large. The novel’s correspondents worry about the destabilizing “power” of “pleasure” and how female envy “floods the earth with a flood of scandals.” Virtue is compared to a “mighty river” that “fertilizes the country through which it passes and increases in magnitude and strength until it empties into the ocean.”
Brown also takes a detailed look at the ways in which novels can be a path to corruption or a vehicle for upliftment, reflecting current debates about banning and restricting books in schools and libraries.
“Most of the novels that flood our women’s libraries are built on a foundation not always based on strict morality and the pursuit of goals not always likely or laudable,” warns one of Brown’s characters. “Novels, not regulated by the chaste principles of true friendship, rational love and conjugal duty, seem to me totally inadequate for forming the minds of women, friends or wives.”
Brown was probably more interested in molding minds than literary glory. “The Great American Novel” is a favorite catchphrase, but it was only coined in the 1860s. During Brown’s lifetime, novels were a relatively rudimentary art form and were valued primarily for satire, light entertainment, or moral instruction. Few writers identified themselves as “novelists”: Brown was known as a poet, essayist, and opera composer.
Even he acknowledged the book’s inferior stature, writing in the novel’s preface: “This type of writing was not met with universal approval.”
“The Power of Sympathy” was commonly cited as the first American novel of the 1800s, but few bothered to debate it until the 20th century. Scholars then agreed that the honors should belong to the first written and published in the United States by an author born and still residing in the country.
These guidelines disqualified earlier works such as “The Life of Harriot Stuart” by Charlotte Ramsay Lennox and “Adventures of Alonso” by Thomas Atwood Digges. Another contender was “Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca,” a prose adventure by college students Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Philip Freneau, who went on to prominent public careers. Written around 1770, the manuscript was later considered lost and was not published in full until 1975.
Brown’s novel went unexamined for so long that it wasn’t until the late 19th century that the public discovered he had written it. Many gave credit to Boston poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, whose family suffered a scandal similar to that in “The Power of Sympathy.”
In 1894–95, Bostonian editor Arthur W. Brayley serialized the novel in his magazine, identifying Morton as the author. But after being contacted by Brown’s niece, Rebecca Vollentine Thompson, Brayley published a lengthy correction, titled “The True Author of the ‘Power of Sympathy’.”
Thompson herself added a preface to a 1900 reprint, noting that Brown was close to Morton’s family and claiming that the publication had been “suppressed” because Brown had revealed an “unfortunate scandal.”
The son of a watchmaker, Brown was a native of Boston, probably born in 1765. He was cultured, connected, culturally conservative, and politically minded; One of his first published writings was an unflattering poem about Daniel Shays, the namesake of the 1786-87 rebellion of impoverished Revolutionary War veterans in Massachusetts. Brown is also the author of several posthumous releases, including the play “The Betrayal of Arnold” and the novel “Ira and Isabella”.
His unofficial status as “America’s first novelist” did not lead to wider fame. The novel, currently in print in a 1996 Penguin Classics edition, remains of more interest to specialists and antiquarians than to general readers.
Brown was not yet 30 when he died in North Carolina in 1793 of what was believed to be malaria. He apparently never married or had children. No memorials or other historic sites are dedicated to him. No literary society was formed in his name.
His burial place is unknown.
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