[In the following essay, Walser traces the connections between Brown's The Power of Sympathy and two dramas, Occurrences of the Times and The Better Sort, concluding that the latter was probably written by Brown himself in order to vindicate his authorship of the novel.]

Former accounts of the first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy,¹ have not fully taken into account two peculiar dramatic pieces, Occurrences of the Times and The Better Sort, which have some connection with the novel. Both, it is true, have been briefly mentioned in relation to Brown; but it may be illuminating now to explore more thoroughly the known facts of their publication and the instances of their relevancy. The two pieces were issued in the fifth week following the appearance of the novel. Occurrences of the Times clears the previously unauthenticated story concerning the attempted suppression of the novel by the Perez Morton family; and The Better Sort, while providing no direct reference to the famous work, has patterns of similarity and would seem to have been written by Brown himself.

The notorious portions of The Power of Sympathy are confined to Letters XXI-XXIII,² in which are related the seduction of the unmarried Ophelia by her brother-in-law Martin, the subsequent outraged conduct of the father Shepherd, and finally the suicide of Ophelia. Brown drew the incident from a parallel case, the scandal of Boston at the time, in the influential Perez Morton household.³ Morton (Martin) had seduced Fanny Apthorp (Ophelia), the daughter of James Apthorp (Shepherd) and younger sister of Sarah Wentworth Morton (Mrs. Martin) and Charles Apthorp. The fame of Mrs. Morton as a writer and her connection with the scandal were responsible many years for attributing to her the authorship of the novel, though she would have been the last person to write it.

After Fanny's suicide in August, 1788, both Mortons and Apthorps wished to silence public talk; but in the following January, Charles Apthorp arrived from London and challenged Morton to a duel.⁴ With cowardly guile Morton avoided the contest. At the same time, rumors were current that a novel featuring the scandal was shortly forthcoming, and on January 22 The Power of Sympathy appeared.⁵ The whole disgraceful incident was again in the public eye. It is no surprise that Morton should wish to quash the book.⁶

A short dramatic satire based on the January events appeared a month later with the title Occurrences of the Times. Or, The Transactions of Four Days. Viz.—From Friday the 16th, to Monday the 19th January, 1789.⁷ In ten brief disconnected scenes, the events concerning the Mortons for these few days are scathingly portrayed, and Morton and his friends are shamelessly ridiculed. Though attention is centered on Morton's dastardly conduct in evading the duel with Charles Apthorp, five of the ten scenes mention the flurry about the expected novel.⁸ A copy of Occurrences of the Times in the Harvard College Library has, in contemporary handwriting, an identification of the “Dramatis Personae” with their real-life counterparts:

In the present paper, primary interest in the skit concerns those comments relating to Brown's The Power of Sympathy or The Triumph of Nature. The first mention comes from Debauchee, Sidney's Negro servant.

DEB.
O, Lord—O, Lord—shuch work—poor masser I pity him—He is swaring and taring, and says dam you madam to my misse, you are calm—and dare is, he says, a Nobel coming out nes week, cal'd the Trumpets of Nature, and he be dam'd if he don't blow ebery body's brains out. … And he says its a scrilous piece; and he will fascinate de man in de dark, and be de deth of him; and he says, dem dam'd puppys Tedy and Fum, de printers, have put a graf in de papers; and so we shall see it nes week. …
TIP.
You say, Deb. its the Trumpets of Natur.
DEB.
Yes, or de Scrimtons—I forgot wich. …(11)

In the next scene Positive, Sidney's friend, suggests that “some measures must be adopted to suppress the publication. …”¹² Later, in the first scene of Act II, Sidney says to Impartialist:

… I wish to consult you upon a damn'd scurrilous Performance, that I hear is now in the booksellers hands; I would fain suppress it, if possible; I have been to the Printers, and have given them a damn'd warm dose; but for fear it should not take effect, I wish to solicit your assistance, in tracing the author of this infernal book, and try what can be done with him; for by my maker I swear, some of us must die; I cannot support it Sir; only think of my situation; a family and connections that are dear to me; carry your ideas a little farther, and behold my son reading a book, where his father is branded with the opprobrious epithet of villain. …
IMP.
Well, Sir, I am willing to give you all the assistance in my power; though I don't see any probability of suppressing the publication. Is there any person in particular that you suspect for the author?
SID.
Yes, Sir,*****—I suspect him(13) to be the author, but wish to be convinced before I proceed to extremities. …(14)

Though Mrs. Sidney implored her husband to let the matter drop, Positive is dispatched to bring the printers to terms, while Sidney cries furiously that during his previous visit “the scoundrels had the assurance to tell me, with the most provoking calmness, that when the books were ready, I should have a set as soon as any gentleman in town.—Damn their impudence.”¹⁵ The play comes to an end before the results of Positive's negotiations are known.

Little doubt can remain, if one may judge from this contemporary account, that Perez Morton attempted to suppress the novel. Whether he succeeded completely, or only partially, cannot be determined; but it seems that he did not wholly carry out his plans. At any rate, Isaiah Thomas, the publisher, listed copies in his stock for 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1801. Three years after the date of publication, in 1792, Thomas sent two copies to Mathew Carey, the Philadelphia bookseller.¹⁶ And some dozen copies of the 1789 edition are now extant in American libraries.

Was Brown the author of Occurrences of the Times? Was this mocking farce the impish backfire of the young novelist? The little play is of such shoddy workmanship that it compares unfavorably even with the rather amateur efforts known to be from Brown's pen. True, it obviously screens the author of the “scurrilous Performance,” though his identity is known and his name is ingenuously suggested. But from what little we know of Brown, revenge and ill-nature—the tones underlying the piece—are hardly among his personal characteristics. The farce is more likely the work of one of Morton's many detractors. It might easily have been tossed off sheet by sheet while the printer was at work. Indeed, its slovenly incoherence indicates that it was.

Shortly thereafter Isaiah Thomas published The Better Sort: or, The Girl of Spirit. An Operatical, Comical Farce.¹⁷ This fifty-page play is a prose piece with eighteen songs and airs interspersed in the fashion of the modern musical comedy. The action takes place in the Boston mansion of Mr. and Mrs. Sententious, the latter a stupid parvenu who would emulate “the better sort” in society. The principal plot is a hackneyed story of Peter Lovemuch's efforts to marry off his daughter Mira, the “girl of spirit,” to a wealthy old miser. The play ends happily with the defeat of the elderly suitor and the betrothal of Mira to her faithful young Harry Truelove.

The Preface commends American readers for their reception of new works, then rebukes the sort of writer (clearly such a one as the author of Occurrences of the Times) who composes hastily for the momentary interests of the readers:

Sorry I am to add that this eager solicitude in a generous publick has oftentimes been ill requited; it has been requited with a farcical representation of a few heterogeneous incidents, thrown together with injudicious haste, and prompted solely by the lucre of gain—a few private anecdotes have been inserted in these pages, but without instruction, without even amusement for their aim, they have obtained, for the reason above cited, a temporary reception; but not deserving a repository in the library of Curiosity, or even in the memory of Slander, they have silently rolled down the stream of time into the dull lake of oblivion.¹⁸

The last lines of the Epilogue, reproduced on the title page, admonish caution:

          Perhaps there's some will say, “I'd give a guinea
To know who's Yorick, Flash, Sententious, Jenny.
Let's see the mangled characters that bleed—
Farce, and no Scandal, is a Farce indeed.”
Know, slander-loving readers, great and small,
We scorn on private characters to fall—
“They're Knights of the Shire, and represent you all.”(19)

Though the author thus warns against identification, a reader is quick to notice that the “fool of the play”²⁰ is a Yankee named Yorick, quite reminiscent of Perez Morton (Sidney). As his alter egos have done, he cowardly avoids a duel with Captain Flash, an English officer very like Charles Apthorp (Harcourt).

Was Brown the author of The Better Sort?²¹ Like The Power of Sympathy and Brown's story “Harriot” in the Massachusetts Magazine for January, it was published by Isaiah Thomas in early 1789. Its lines on Farce and Scandal indicate a concern with the misfortunes attending character-identification. The Prologue informs that its author, like Brown, is “a warm, good fed'ralist at heart.”²² Both The Power of Sympathy and The Better Sort are works with a moral purpose, the former to expose “the dangerous Consequences of Seduction,”²³ the latter to “improve your morals, more than win applause.”²⁴ Brown was interested in dramatic composition and wrote two plays, Penelope and West-Point Preserved. Finally, the copy in the Yale University Library has this inscription on the title page: “Catharine Byles, presented by Mr. Wm. H. Brown.”²⁵ Catharine Byles,²⁶ a sister of the second wife of Brown's father, was the author's favorite “relative,” his literary confidante, and the one for whom he would most likely have inscribed a copy of his little farce. If these premises are not conclusive, they at least point more in Brown's direction than in any other.

Notes

1. … or, The Triumph of Nature. Founded in Truth. 2 vols. (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789).

2. Ibid., I, 92-112.

3. Emily Pendleton and Milton Ellis, Philenia, The Life and Works of Sarah Wentworth Morton, 1759-1846 (Orono, Maine, 1931), pp. 32-39.

4. Ibid., p. 37.

5. Milton Ellis, “Bibliographical Note,” The Power of Sympathy, reproduced for the Facsimile Text Society (New York, 1937), p. [1].

6. Milton Ellis, “Brown, William Hill,” DAB, [Dictionary of American Biography] XXI, Supp. 1, 125.

7. … A Farce. In Two Acts. [Boston]: Printed [by Benjamin Russell] for the Purchasers. 23 pp. Advertised in the Massachusetts Centinel (Boston), Feb. 21, 1789, as “Just Published (Price 1s. 6.) And will be sold by E. Larkin, jun. at his Shop, No. 50, Cornhill.” A similar advertisement in the Centinel of Feb. 28 reports it is “now selling”; a list of the “Dramatis Personae” is added.

8. Pendleton and Ellis, op. cit., pp. 32, 38, relate Occurrences of the Times to the Morton scandal but do not remark on its connection with the publication of The Power of Sympathy.

9. Most of the bracketed information, including all the occupations and addresses, is further identification found in the unpublished notes compiled by the late Professor Milton Ellis in preparation for a biography of William Hill Brown. These notes, now deposited in The Library, University of Maine, Orono, provide no exposition of the problems presented in this paper.

10. Though listed in the “Dramatis Personae,” these characters never appear.

11. Occurrences of the Times, pp. 9-10.

12. Ibid., p. 11.

13. The five asterisks and the pronoun “him” certainly fit Brown. Milton Ellis, “The Author of the First American Novel,” American Literature, IV, 360 (Jan., 1933), lists this passage in his defense of Brown as the author of The Power of Sympathy.

14. Occurrences of the Times, pp. 13-14.

15. Ibid., p. 21.

16. Milton Ellis's unpublished notes.

17. Noticed in the Massachusetts Centinel of Feb. 25, 1789: “This Day Published, Price 1s. 6. And to be sold at 1. Thomas and co's Book-Store, No. 45, Newbury Street.” The names of the characters are added.

18. The Better Sort, pp. [iii]-iv.

19. Ibid., p. 50.

20. Ibid., p. [viii].

21. For a defense of Brown's authorship, see Item 172, Old and Rare Books Mainly of English and American Authors. Catalogue 346 (Boston: Goodspeed's Book Shop, [1941]).

22. The Better Sort, p. [v].

23. Brown, op. cit., I, vi.

24. The Better Sort, p. vii.

25. The card in the library catalogue at Yale lists Brown as the “attributed author.”

26. Richard Walser, “The North Carolina Sojourn of the First American Novelist,” North Carolina Historical Review, XXVIII, 139, 150-151, 154 (April, 1951).