“We may take some credit for introducing Dr. Bird, the author of ‘Abdalla the Moor,’ (known in America as ‘Calavar,’) to the notice of the lovers of romantic literature; and we are happy to say, that the general opinion of the public, judging not solely from the sale of his works in our cheap form (which in itself is a good criterion), has stamped its approbation on our judgment, that as a writer both of novels and historical romance, he is inferior only to Sir Walter Scott.” —The Novel Newspaper, 1840.
Nick of the Woods, or The Jibbenainosay. A Tale of Kentucky. By the author of “Calavar,” “The Infidel,” &c. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1837.
“Judge Brackenridge was accounted a great wit in the days of Washington, whom he endeavored to entertain with his stories upon one occasion at a public dinner, but without effect, the Presidential decorum not relaxing a muscle; but at night when the Father of his Country was laid aside with the buff and blue, the humorist had the satisfaction of hearing the bottled-up laughter of the day explode with many a gurgle through the thin partition which separated their bed-rooms. Such was the prudence of Washington, and such the humor of Brackenridge.” (From a review pasted in an 1851 edition of Modern Chivalry.)
Brackenridge earns his place here with his Modern Chivalry, a rambling picaresque novel, of which the first part was published in 1792, earning it a place as the United States’ first important novel, and Pittsburgh a claim to being one of the few American cities with a literary culture more than two centuries old. The large number of editions by different publishers testifies to its early popularity.
Because of the desultory fashion in which the parts were published, and the discrepancies between the various editions, there may be gaps in this collection, which we hope to fill later.
Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago, and Teague O’Regan, His Servant. By H. H. Brackenridge. [Four volumes bound together.] Volumes I & II—Philadelphia: John McCulloch, 1792. Volume III—Pittsburgh: John Scull, 1793. Volume IV—Philadelphia: John McCulloch, 1797. —A very good scan at archive.org.
Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of a Captain, and Teague O’Regan, His Servant. By H. H. Brackenridge. Philadelphia, M. and J. Conrad, 1804. —At archive.org. Two volumes bound together. According to the title page, published simultaneously in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington City, Petersburg, and Norfolk, by various Conrad-related enterprises.
Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of a Captain and Teague O’Regan, His Servant. By H. H. Brackenridge, late a Judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, 1819. —Brackenridge continued to make additions until 1815, and this is at least one of the earliest complete editions.
A much better scan, in color, of this same edition at archive.org:
Modern Chivalry, or the Adventures of Captain Farrago and Teague O’Regan. By H. H. Brackenridge. Second edition since the author’s death, with a biographical notice, a critical disquisition on the work, and explanatory notes. With illustrations from original designs by Darley. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846. —An illustrated edition with amusing engravings and a very interesting introduction.
The same, Philadelphia: Getz & Buck, 1851.
Volumes I & II (bound together, at archive.org).
Adventures of Captain Farrago. Full of humorous scenes. By the Hon. H. H. Brackenridge. With original designs by Darley. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1856. —The first part of Modern Chivalry, Neatly printed and a good scan, but most of the illustrations are missing.
Major O’Regan’s Adventures. With forty-eight sketches and beautiful engravings from original designs by Darley. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1856. —The second part of Modern Chivalry.
In 1917, the Cambridge History of American Literature offered this summary of Brackenridge’s novel:
In 1792-3-7 Pennsylvania saw the publication, in four volumes, of the first part of the remarkable Modern Chivalry. The author, Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816), son of a poor Scotch immigrant, graduate of Princeton, tutor and licensed preacher, master of an academy in Maryland, editor of The United States Magazine in Philadelphia (1776), chaplain in the Revolutionary army, author of patriotic tragedies and pamphlets, and lawyer and judge in Pittsburg after 1781, brought to his work a culture and experience which gave his satiric picture of American life many of the features of truth. Farrago, the hero, is a new Don Quixote, his servant Teague a witless and grotesque Sancho Panza, but the chief follies of the book are found not in them but in the public which they encounter and which would gladly make Teague hero and office-holder. No man was a more convinced democrat than Brackenridge, but he was also solid, well-read, and deeply bored by fools who canted about free men and wise majorities. Against such cant and the excesses of political ambition he directed his chief satire, but he let few current fads and affectations go unwhipped. His book had an abundant popularity, especially along the frontier which it satirized. The second part (1804-5), ostensibly the chronicle of a new Western settlement, is almost a comic history of civilization in America. It is so badly constructed, however, and so often goes over ground well trodden in the earlier part as to be generally inferior to it in interest. Here Brackenridge deposited scraps of irony and censure which he had been producing since 1787, when he had set out to imitate Hudibras. His prose is better than his verse, plain and simple in style, by his own confession following that of Hume, Swift, and Fielding. Swift was his dearest master. Very curious, if hard to follow, are the successive revisions by which Brackenridge kept pace with new follies.
The opinion of ex-president John Quincy Adams will interest readers of Brackenridge. When Wilson McCandless of Pittsburgh sent him a copy of a new edition of Modern Chivalry, Adams replied with this letter:
I cannot lose a moment before acknowledging the receipt of your letter of the 29th ult., and of the valuable present which accompanies it—the two volumes of the new edition of Judge H. H. Brackenridge’s ‘Modern Chivalry, or the Adventures of Captain Farrago and Teague O’Regan.’ My visit to Pittsburgh in 1843, and my intercourse with yourself, with the citizens of that place and Allegheny, at that time, afford me some of the most pleasing recollections of my life, grateful recollections of my obligations to yourself and them.
I had read the first part of Modern Chivalry and formed a pleasant acquaintance with Captain Farrago and his man Teague, at their first appearance more than half a century since, and they had then excited much of my attention as illustrations of life and manners peculiar to the times and localities, not entirely effaced when I became more familiarly acquainted with them, by this visit to the latter.
Captain Farrago and Teague O’Regan are legitimate descendants, on one side from the La Mancha and his squire Sancho, on the other, from Sir Hudibras and his man Ralph, and if not primitive conceptions themselves, are at least as lineal in their descent as the pious Æneas from the impetuous and vindictive son of Pelias.
The reappearance of this work, as a second edition, since the author’s death, more than half a century after its first publication, well warrants the prediction that it will last beyond the period fixed by the ancient statutes, for the canonization of poets, a full century. I shall read it over again, I have no doubt, with a refreshing revival of the pleasure with which I greeted it on its first appearance; and if this expression of my opinion can give any satisfaction to the remaining relatives of Judge Brackenridge, or to yourself, it is entirely at your disposal, being with a vivid sense and grateful remembrance of your kindness, and that of my fellow-citizens of Pittsburgh and Allegheny.
“Charles Brockden Brown, the pioneer in this department [romantic fiction] of our literature, was a gentle, unobtrusive enthusiast, whose weak frame was shattered and wrecked by the too powerful pulsations of his heart. He was no misanthrope, but the larger portion of his life, though it was passed in cities, was that of a recluse. He lived in an ideal and had little sympathy with the actual world. He had more genius than talent, and more imagination than fancy. It has been said that he outraged the laws of art by gross improbabilities and inconsistencies, but the most incredible of his incidents had parallels in true history, and the metaphysical unity and consistency of his novels are apparent to all readers familiar with psychological phenomena. His works, generally written with great rapidity, are incomplete, and deficient in method. He disregarded rules, and cared little for criticism. But his style was clear and nervous, with little ornament, free of affectations, and indicated a singular sincerity and depth of feeling.”
—Rufus Wilmot Griswold, The Prose Writers of America, 1849. A comprehensive treatment of Brown and his novels is here, later in the same book.
A life of Charles Brockden Brown by the great historian William H. Prescott.
A book-length study of Brown: Charles Brockden Brown: A Study of Early American Fiction. By Martin S. Vilas, A.M. Burlington; Free Press Association, 1904.
☛In the 1820s there was a revival of interest in Brown on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time, British magazines were discovering American literature in general.
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine on Charles Brockden Brown, part of a series on American writers.
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. By the author of Arthur Mervyn, Wieland,—Ormond, &c. Philadelphia: Printed by H. Maxwell, 1799.
[Vol. III]. —This volume is not to be found in any of the usual places; it is missing from the library that provided the other two. We shall have to turn to the London edition below for the end of the story.
Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. A novel. In three volumes. By C. B. Brown. London, 1803.
Jane Talbot. By Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: S. G. Goodrich, 1827.
Ormond; or the Secret Witness. By Charles Brockden Brown. Boston, 1827.
Wieland, or the Transformation, an American Tale. By B. C. [sic] Brown. London, 1811.
The Power of Sympathy: or, the Triumph of Nature. Founded in Truth. Boston, 1894. —A reprint of the first and only edition from 1789. In the reprint, the anonymous novel is attributed to “Mrs. Perez Morton (Sarah Wentworth Apthorp),” but apparently modern critical scholarship universally attributes it to William Hill Brown. Both volumes are included in this scan. If this novel had made any impression, it might have displaced Modern Chivalry as the first important American novel; but in fact nearly every copy was destroyed, so that almost no one read it until 1894.