Brown, William Hill (late Nov

Brown, William Hill (late Nov.? 1765-2 Sept. 1793), writer, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Gawen Brown, an English-born clockmaker of repute, and his third wife, Elizabeth Hill Adams. He attended a Boston boys' school and assisted in his father's shop during vacation periods. In his lifetime Brown's writings appeared under various initials or names such as "Pollio" or "Columbus." His work reveals a broad acquaintance with classical and British literature and a keen awareness of contemporary American writers. His first published poems were witty treatments of political topics. "Shays to Shattuck: An Epistle" (Massachusetts Centinel, 5 Sept. 1787), in the form of twenty-six tetrameter couplets and a closing triplet, is presented as a letter from Daniel Shays to his jailed colleague Job Shattuck, ruefully reflecting on their mistaken action in leading an armed uprising in western Massachusetts in 1786 to protest high taxation and subsequent mortgage foreclosures. Brown's "Yankee Song," celebrating Massachusetts's ratification of the federal Constitution, appeared in the Pennsylvania Mercury on 21 February 1788 and later that year was reprinted in the Massachusetts Centinel (Boston) and the Worcester Magazine. As part of an eight-page pamphlet published in New York City titled Four Excellent Songs, the poem was renamed "Yankee Doodle." One of the many versions of the marching song that had been popular since the American Revolution, it closes with a cheerful toast:

So here I end my fed'ral song/ Compos'd of thirteen verses./ May agriculture flourish long,/ And commerce fill our purses./ Yankee doodle, keep it up!/ Yankee doodle dandy . . .

In 1789 the two books published by Brown in his lifetime appeared anonymously; according to their title pages, both were "Printed at Boston by Isaiah Thomas and Company." The Power of Sympathy; or, The Triumph of Nature was announced in the Massachusetts Centinel as "the first American novel this day published." Although several other books have been proposed, the consensus of literary historians is that Brown's is indeed the first American novel. In the introduction to his definitive edition of The Power of Sympathy (1969), William S. Kable notes that "the novel is thoroughly American" and "the fictional world of the book is consistently that of the young Republic" (p. xiv). In the form of an epistolary novel, a popular genre of the time, The Power of Sympathy dramatizes the theme identified in the title by portraying a rake's pursuit of a woman who, unbeknownst to either of them, is his sister. They are intuitively drawn to each other, but once their blood relationship is revealed to them their love cannot be consummated. In deep despair, the sister pines away unto death; the brother then commits suicide, with his parting note placed beside a copy of the era's most sensational fictional account of self-destructive romantic love, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (originally published, in German, in 1774). As viewed by late twentieth-century feminist critics, the novel offers a significant portrayal of the vulnerability of women within a patriarchal society. According to Cathy N. Davidson, "The real model for this portion of the novel is not the already established epistolary novel but the even more established format of the collected sermons of some respected divine. . . . Side by side with the didactic epistles, however, are quite different letters which, taken together, give us a salacious, sexually charged novel" (pp. 98-99).

Brown's second book, a play titled The Better Sort; or, The Girl of Spirit: An Operatical, Comical Farce, could not be more different in kind and spirit. The speaker of the prologue assures the audience that the author, "a warm good fed'ralist at heart," believes "'tis vice awakes the muse's rage, / Her pow'rs satirick but reform the age." With its lighthearted satire presented in dialogue and in eighteen "airs, songs, duets, etc." sung to familiar tunes, the farce resembles the English playwright John Gay's enormously popular The Beggar's Opera (1724).

Brown next appeared in print as an essayist. In February 1790 the Massachusetts Magazine carried the first essay in a series called "The Reformer," and from September to December the semi-weekly Columbian Centinel published twenty-two "Yankee" essays by Brown. His last published essay appeared in North Carolina, where he had gone to visit his younger sister, Eliza, and her new husband at their plantation home near the town of Murfreesboro. Brown stayed on to study law under General William Richardson Davie in Halifax, a town in the vicinity. On 10 July 1793 the North-Carolina Journal (Halifax) carried an essay by "Columbus," a pen name of Brown. Simply titled "Education," the piece champions the University of North Carolina, which had been chartered in 1789 and was founded under Davie's guiding spirit. When an epidemic struck a month later, Brown died, probably of malaria, in Murfreesboro, North Carolina.

Brown's literary career entered a new phase after his death. His authorship of some pieces became publicly known; for instance, when reprinting "Shays to Shattuck" in the Massachusetts Mercury (13 Dec. 1797) the editor identified it as the work of "Mr. William Brown, a person who was much celebrated for poetic genius and general erudition." By that time Brown was recognized as a playwright as well, for his West Point Preserved; or, The Treason of Arnold: An Historical Tragedy in Five Acts had been performed seven times by professionals at Boston's Haymarket Theatre in April 1797 and had been favorably reviewed by critics. Thanks to members of Brown's family, works left in manuscript form, including verse fables and other poems, appeared in the Boston Magazine and the Emerald between 1805 and 1807. Brown's second novel, Ira and Isabella; or, The Natural Children: A Novel, Founded in Fiction, also was published in 1807, identified as "A Posthumous Work. By the late William H. Brown, of Boston." Robert D. Arner, noting its similarities with The Power of Sympathy, regards Ira and Isabella as "a hasty work instead of a deliberate parody" (p. 83), in which, however, the purported sibling relationship turns out happily not to be the case. In Anne Dalke's view, the title characters, both of them offspring of their fathers' illicit affairs, are allowed to marry "only because both are illegitimate and so unworthy of concern. They share the same lowly class" (p. 194).

No collection of the poems appeared until 1982, when Richard Walser published William Hill Brown: Selected Poems and Verse Fables, 1784-1793. Although the slender volume includes "only about half the poetry definitely identified as Brown's" (p. 85), it amply demonstrates that Brown was a versatile writer in love with his craft, at home in a variety of forms suited to the thoughtful or humorous subjects treated. Taken together with his novels, plays, and essays, they suggest that when he died Brown was a true man of letters in the making.

Bibliography
Some of Brown's letters are in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The text of West Point Preserved, said to have been published in 1797 and certainly produced in that year, has been lost. Good brief accounts of Brown's life are included in Kable's edition of The Power of Sympathy and Walser's Selected Poems. Robert D. Arner's illuminating essay on Brown in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 37 (1985) includes a useful selective bibliography. In Philenia: The Life and Works of Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Morton, 1759-1846 (written with Emily Pendleton, 1931), Milton Ellis first made his case against the possibility of Morton's authorship of The Power of Sympathy. He proposed Brown in "The Author of the First American Novel," American Literature 4 (1932-1933): 359-68. Brown's novels are considered in Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (1940, repr. 1977); Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; rev. ed., 1966); Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (1971); and in later studies influenced by feminist criticism, such as Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986), and Anne Dalke, "Original Vice: The Political Implications of Incest in the Early American Novel," Early American Literature 23 (1988): 188-201.

Vincent Freimarck

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