Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker Milieu

Charles Brockden Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker upbringing was one of many influences on his work. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia Quakers went from a dominant to a persecuted minority. Quaker treatment of Native American and Scots-Irish neighbors was the source of internal and external strife, especially in the aftermath of the Paxton Boys uprising. Aspects of this history can be discerned in Brown’s writing on Quakers. Brown directly discussed Quakers in a number of periodical pieces after 1800, and he made imaginative explorations of religious and Quaker issues in his novels Arthur Mervyn, Wieland, and, in particular, Edgar Huntly. While the mature Brown retained an acute sense of Quaker history and practice, he denied Quakers any particular regard or advocacy.