3.10: Charles Willson Peale and William Hill Brown: the Curator and the Novelist of America’s Crucial Years

“Culture.”  It’s a word that means something different depending on who you ask; to some, it means an element that is “popular” and can serve as a common frame of reference for a large group of people.  To others, “culture” refers to how an individual lives their life based on a specific belief system that is similar to a larger group.  Both are correct, and both get to the heart of today’s episode as we explore the emergence of a new "American" culture.  On this episode of History: Beyond the Textbook, we’ll focus on  Charles Wilson Peale and William Hill Brown: the Curator and the Novelist of America’s Crucial Years.

*Note: some of this episode refers to some complex and emotional topics, so be advised.  A warning is provided at the start of the Act in which these issues are discussed.*

Key People
Charles Willson Peale
William Hill Brown

Key Events/Ideas
Publication of The Power of Sympathy
Opening of Philadelphia Museum

The third season of History: Beyond the Textbook focuses on the stories of individuals who shaped "America's Crucial Years" of 1783-1790, and runs from October 8-December 24. Catch up on Season One, "America's Colonial Era," and Season Two, "America's Revolution," wherever you listen to your podcasts!

Feel free to contact us with feedback or questions by clicking the "Send Us a Text" link or email us at: hbttpodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

“Culture.”  It’s a word that means something different depending on who you ask; to some, it means an element that is “popular” and can serve as a common frame of reference for a large group of people.  To others, “culture” refers to how an individual lives their life based on a specific belief system that is similar to a larger group.  Both are correct, and both get to the heart of today’s episode: in my first year of teaching, one of my colleagues posed the following question to me, “Why, in history classes, do we never really begin to cover culture until the 1920’s?  What was culture like during the Civil War, or the American Revolution?  Why is it something that seemingly appeared out of nowhere after World War I?”  I pondered this question, and realized that there was more than a grain of truth to what my colleague was asking: in history classes, we often think in a more “macro” way, meaning that we focus on items that pertain to the “big picture.”  You know…wars, politics, economics, and the individuals involved in these topics.  But how often do we dive into social history: how people lived, what day-to-day life was like, and perhaps those common frames of reference that were a big deal at the time, but have since faded away as time has gone on?  Some excel at teaching these points, some are deficient, while others incorporate them in spurts.  For our purposes, we spent season one establishing colonies, and all the messiness that accompanied it, we spent season two defeating England to gain political independence, and up to this point, we’ve attempted to solve the issues left over from that defeat of England; therefore, “incorporation” is our goal, and this episode will be our first on our final mini-arc of the season: continuity and change.  On this episode of History: Beyond the Textbook, we’ll focus on  Charles Willson Peale and William Hill Brown: the Curator and the Novelist of America’s Crucial Years.

Act I: Concepts of Culture
What exactly is “continuity and change?”  As an Advanced Placement World History teacher, this is one of the three “Historical Reasoning Processes” that is taught in any AP history course, including AP US History and AP European History.  The idea is to examine what stays the same during a time period, and what changes within that same period.  This concept applies to us today with regard to the emergence of an American culture following the American Revolution.

By and large, “popular” culture, usually called “pop culture,” involves elements of life that serve as escapism from our daily grind and are commonly known and understood by large segments of society.  Pop culture is different from what is called “folk” culture, which are behaviors and shared characteristics of a much smaller, usually rural, area.  In colonial America, a type of popular culture began to emerge in the mid-1700’s with several areas serving as conduits; the culprits, as always seems to be the case, were the steady increase in wages and free time.  Granted, life was still exceptionally hard, and its not as if most Americans were flush with wealth or an abundance of time, but they had at least enough purchasing power to begin focusing on non-essential items, as well as time to pursue leisure interests.  Card games appear to be a way that colonial Americans spent their leisure time as an early form of poker was common, as was my personal favorite: cribbage.  Billiards and backgammon became more popular with the upper classes, while the game of chance involved with dice was a popular choice among all classes.  We’ve covered the allure of literature several times on the podcast, but its worth noting that the printing press provided the means to recreate pamphlets and novels that were popular in England: in fact, for decades, that’s about all that was available for recreational reading in the colonies.  However, this changed as the colonial era wore on: recall that Mary Rowlandson created a new, and uniquely American, genre, the captivity narrative, when she published an account of her time as a prisoner of war during King Philip’s War.  Phillis Wheatly’s poems gave a voice to the Revolution, and upended the perceptions not only of women as authors, but of slaves as literary masterminds.  Although he was an Englishman, Thomas Paine stands as one of the most prominent examples of early American pop culture given that his pamphlet Common Sense went through 100,000 printings only two and a half months after it was first fired off the presses.  There are certainly others, such as the stylings of Mercy Otis Warren, but suffice to say that, by the end of the Revolution, in addition to their own political systems, Americans were comfortable reading works by their authors and craved more culture that they could claim as their own.

Act Two: The Novelist
Our first example of this new “American” culture that marked a change from the past centers on the author of what is commonly acknowledged as America’s first novel: William Hill Brown, and his work, The Power of Sympathy.  Be advised: it covers mature themes and highly sensitive topics.

William Hill Brown was, like so many of the individuals we have covered, a Massachusetts man, and more specifically, was born in Boston in the same year that the Stamp Act was passed, 1765.  What do we know of his early life?  Very little; in fact, most accounts of his life focus solely on his writing, and The Power of Sympathy was published in 1789.  Officially speaking, this novel was titled The Power of Sympathy, or the Triumph of Nature: A Novel, and was published in two volumes by a former minuteman in Boston.  It was published in 1789, but the author remained anonymous until 1894: that’s right, Brown was not officially established as the author until over 100 years later.  This certainly begs the following: what was included in this novel that would have caused Brown to publish it without attaching his name?  To start with, when the book was advertised in a Boston newspaper, said advertisement claimed, “We are informed that one of the incidents upon which the Novel is founded, is drawn from a late unhappy suicide.  We shall probably soon be enabled to lay before our readers some account of so truly Novel a work, upon such interesting subjects.”  This was a very polite way of informing readers that this work was going to be “ripped from the headlines,” so to speak, although the incident which this account spoke of was widely known to all in Boston at the time.  The basics are as follows: Sarah Wentworth Apthrop was a poet who was married to Perez Morton, and her sister Frances Apthorp, known as “Fanny,” began an affair with Morton during a lengthy visit to her sister’s home.  The affair resulted in pregnancy, and upon leaving Boston in 1787 to deliver Morton’s baby…Fanny returned to the home to commence with said affair. It was certainly an unusual situation, one which James Apthorp, Sarah and Fanny’s father, fumed over.  Fanny would express serious remorse over the whole situation and the hurt she caused her sister, and she died of poisoning on August 28, 1788; Morton was exonerated of any wrongdoing due to his wide-reaching political connections.

So that’s the history, which is admittedly grim and unbelievably tragic.  What about the actual work of fiction?  What happened between the Apthorps and Morton became what might now be called “gossip,” or more formally, “tabloid journalism.”  Fanny wrote a series of letters to Morton prior to her unfortunate demise, and these letters were published in the Herald of Freedom not one month after her death.  Bostonians who wanted to try their hand at prose and capitalize on the hardships of the family published their own poems that alluded to this situation, one of which was actually called A Picture of Suicide.  In this context, William Hill Brown would write and publish The Power of Sympathy, and the narrative centered on Thomas Harrington and Harriot Fawcet, an engaged couple who come to discover that they are in fact half-siblings.  This revelation set off a chain of events that culminated Harriot’s decent into tuberculosis, from which she would not recover, and the suicide of Thomas once he learns of the loss of his forbidden love.  Ophelia, the sister of a woman that Harriet stayed with in Rhode Island, engaged in an affair with Harriet’s friend, and poisons herself when she becomes consumed with guilt and grief.  So in this, the first American novel, the themes of incest, suicide, and adultery are explored; heavy topics, to be sure, but topics that most likely would have been considered taboo for discussion one generation earlier.  Okay, it’s not as if they were acceptable for discussion at their publication, but a work of literature that was willing to openly reference these subjects signaled that Boston had come a long way from its Puritanical beginnings that we learned about back in Season 1.  The structure was that of an epistolary novel, which is a novel that takes the form of letters between characters, so both the plot and structure draw heavily from western literary influences: the plot in the form of Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, and the structure in the form of the dialogues that were so prevalent among Greek philosophers.  The reviews were...not good, and the sales were…even worse.  Apparently, readers expected that the “main event,” the tragedy of the main characters, would occur earlier in the novel.  And in a move that foreshadowed current debates about the accuracy of historical film and other pop culture, readers took umbrage with the fact that the poisoning of Ophelia, the character whose plot followed that of Fanny Apthorp, occurred in Rhode Island, not in Boston.  It wasn’t too long after its initial publication that references to The Power of Sympathy disappeared from Boston newspapers, and subsequently, from the public consciousness.

Act III: The Curator
We’ve got the origins of the “Novelist” in our take on a changing and emerging American culture…but what about the “Curator?”  What’s interesting about Charles Willson Peale is that collecting artifacts and opening up his own museum is probably not what he is most known for.  Born a Marylander in 1741, Peale has an interesting backstory: simultaneously, he was swept up in the Revolutionary zeal of his era and he cultivated his talent for the arts. As a young man, he spent seven years plying his trade as a saddle maker in Annapolis, but it became clear that he had an aptitude for painting, and more specifically, painting portraits.  He began his artistic career in the colonies and would learn from renowned artist John Singleton Copley, and he studied in England for three years under Benjamin West, returning in the same year that the Boston Massacre occurred, 1770.  Eventually, Willson would relocate to the de facto capital of the colonies, Philadelphia, the city with which he is most closely associated, completing this move in 1775.  In Philadelphia, he not only participated in combat as a member of the militia, but Peale began his work painting portraits of some of America’s most prominent Revolutionary figures.  The image of George Washington in his military uniform leaning up against a cannon?  That was Peale.  His clientele included several individuals that we have directly studied on the podcast: the aforementioned George Washington, Martha Washington, Robert Morris, Benjamin Lincoln, and even Joseph Brant.  This is just the tip of the iceberg, but he was the “go-to” man for any emerging American elite who wanted their likeness preserved for posterity.  If Charles Willson Peale did nothing else in his lifetime, these portraits certainly would constitute a stellar career.

However, we have given Peale the title of “Curator” for this episode, so we’ll shift our focus to his opening of, and efforts to expand, his museum in Philadelphia.  The origins of this institution go back to the aftermath of the British evacuation of Philadelphia in 1778 in anticipation of their “Southern Strategy.”  As Patriot forces began to make their way back to the city, Peale found himself in demand as an artist; this also explains why there is a bit of a gap between his more significant works, and why there is a lull between 1777 and 1778.  These works of art were stored in his painting room, which attracted a significant amount of attention, enough so that he decided to build a separate gallery that would be open to the public and attached to his house.  The Independent Gazetteer announced the opening of the gallery in November 1782, and personal records indicate that all manner of Philadelphia elite and foreign visitors came to grace the halls of the early museum.  Peale also kept his eye on a bigger prize and would come to view this as a business venture, one that would allow him to build an income that could sustain his large family. The paintings are what originally drew in the visitors, but on the suggestion of a brother-in-law, he sought to expand with exhibits that featured additional items that could potentially increase his payout.  What’s interesting is that another museum of what would now be called “natural history” already existed in Philadelphia: it was the brainchild of the Swiss-born Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, an accomplished individual whose resume reads eerily similar to that of Willson.  He became a member of the American Philosophical Society, just like Willson, painted portraits, and was a staunch supporter of the rebel cause during the war.  His museum, which he appropriately called “American Museum,” opened in 1782 and contained what were referred to as “curiosities.”  Basically, it was a structure that housed items that he had collected over the years and was open to the public; there wasn’t much “formality” to it, and upon his death in 1784, his assets were liquidated. This explains why we remember Peale’s museum, and not so much Simitiere’s, although name recognition might have something to do with it.

It was an uphill battle from the start as Simitiere’s foot traffic was an indication that there might not be much financial success in this venture, yet Charles Willson Peale strove to make it happen.  If we are to point to the genesis of the actual museum, it would be summer of 1784 and the suggestion of the previously referred-to brother-in-law, Colonel Nathaniel Ramsay.  Peale’s reputation as an artist was renowned across the pond as well as in America, so he was hired to sketch the bones of a mammoth so they could be studied by a German scholar.  Ramsay believed that to see a drawing was one thing, but to see physical items, like actual mammoth bones, was something altogether different.  He was quoted as saying, “Doubtless indeed there are many men like myself who would prefer seeing such articles of curiosity than any painting whatever…” and that he “would have gone 20 miles to behold such a collection.”  The seed was planted, and Peale began his acquisition of artifacts and curiosities the first of which was a paddle fish from the Alleghany River.  He continued to collect items over the succeeding two years, and on July 18, 1786, he placed an advertisement for his museum in the Pennsylvania Packet, claiming “The Public he hopes will thereby be gratified in the sight of many of the Wonderful Works of Nature which are now closed but seldom seen.”  In addition to his paintings, he sought to refine his taxidermy skills to provide glimpses of animals, and received a pheasant from George Washington.  He would even keep his exhibit of “Moving Pictures” from London open through the Constitutional Convention, although this would soon be converted into a room that displayed more “natural” historical elements.  Peale sought to keep American artifacts on the western side of the Atlantic to preserve American culture, and his Philadelphia Museum was his way of doing so.

Act IV: Advancing American Culture
First up, we’ll take a moment to explore the effects of the writing of William Hill Brown.  Recall that The Power of Sympathy was published anonymously due to the novel’s subject matter, and it would be another century before he was finally given credit for his work.  So, who was commonly believed to be the author at the time?  Sarah Wentworth Apthorp, the sister of Fanny and husband of Perez Morton, was a poet who wrote under the pseudonym “Philenia.  Given her in-depth knowledge of what occurred because she lived it, many assumed that she was the one who wrote it.  However, at least one story that has been passed down indicates that the Apthorp matriarch suspected that the 24-year old Brown was the true author; she corresponded with his mother and asked, “Why did Willie do such a thing when we were such good friends,” meaning the two women.  Alas, it would take until 1894 for full credit to kick in via a letter from William Hill Brown’s niece to a Boston editor correctly identified his authorship.  So, what is the actual legacy of The Power of Sympathy?  That would depend on who you ask.  Some take the historical view that, as an avowed Federalist, Brown was attempting to publicize what he considered to be the proper moral behavior in the new republic, although this notion has been disputed.  Some feel that, as we’ve alluded to, his words were more of an expression of behaviors that were considered fine to read about, and perhaps fine to gossip about in hushed whispers, but unacceptable to engage in.  As to his fame and fortune?  Well, he achieved neither of these.  Four years after the initial publication of The Power of Sympathy, William Hill Brown died in North Carolina in 1793 of what is commonly believed to be malaria; so, the life of a man whose first published work was a poem that insulted Daniel Shays of “Shays’ Rebellion” fame had ended before he reached 30 years of age, but scores of Americans would continue to write and refine what became known as “American literature” and move towards enhancing another aspect of American popular culture.

And what of Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum?  It opened in 1786, and he would formally retire from his role as de facto curator in 1810 at age 68.  In between, he built up his collection, even formally retiring from his work as an artist in 1794 to pursue his dream.  One could purchase admission to the museum for one shilling per visit, or one dollar for a year-long pass, but significant profits from these admissions would not really kick in until the early 1800’s.  This place had all manner of items: large animals such as bison, elk, bears, and llamas, and over 1,000 birds as well.  And it wasn’t just land and sky that got all of the attention: the Marine Room included a hammerhead shark, along with additional fish. Granted, not every animal was alive…but some were, and that added to the appeal.  Peale eve included a wax figure of himself in life-size form, fooling many guests.  Always one to understand the importance of publicity, Peale took out numerous ads in American publications in an attempt to entice visitors to the Philadelphia Museum; in 1790, he even offered to provide free admission to children under 10 on the condition that one of their parents went with them, so he recognized that selling his destination as inherently educational may also pay dividends.  The first real big-ticket item that Peale displayed was a Mastodon fossil; that’s correct…a fossil of an actual mastodon.  Peale received word of the discovery on a farm along the Hudson River in New York state, and he personally travelled to the residence of Mr. Masten to barter for the opportunity to purchase the bones.  The agreed upon price was $200 for the bones that had already been excavated, and $100 for the exclusive rights to excavate the rest.  Mr. Masten left $300 richer, which shakes out to about $7,500 at the time of this recording, and Peale left with an exhibit that he charged an additional $.50 to see on top of the usual $.25 admission fee.  Its towering appearance served as a visual display of the awe and grandeur that Peale sought to inspire in his audience, and thus, the residents of the new American republic.

So what is the legacy of the Philadelphia Museum?  Partially, it’s one of failure.  Failure because it was shuttered about two decades after the death of its founder, but also failure due to his inability to gain federal funding for his work.  To be fair, Peale sought to put an “American” spin on the concept of the museum; in Europe, museums were often subsidized or outright run by national governments and the collections were kept hidden in places that were only accessible to the wealthy and connected.  Peale displayed all of his treasures in the open so everyone could enjoy and learn from them, almost as if he was democratizing the museum process.  He did seek to replicate the European notion of state support, drawing upon examples such as the Royal Society in England as a model for state endorsement of institutions of the arts and sciences.  His efforts to elicit such support go back to 1792 when a committee that included Alexander Hamilton began to brainstorm ways to make this a reality.  Apparently, foreign visitors lamented the lack of Federal funding, with one claiming that he was shocked that a venue such as the Philadelphia museum wasn’t considered a national institution.  These efforts, including a direct appeal to then-President Thomas Jefferson, went nowhere, perhaps because the endorsement of any type of private institution by the federal government, no matter how noble, was viewed as a violation of the republican principles on which America was expected to adhere to in the wake of the Revolution.  So in a sense, failure…but two of his sons would open museums of their own, one in Baltimore and one in New York.  All three, however, would ultimately close, and while this may reek of failure, the specimens and artifacts were purchased by a salesman and showman named P.T. Barnum.  Along with William Hill Brown, Peale’s “master work” may seem like it was unsuccessful, but it laid the groundwork for a new type of “American culture,” so even though change may not always be remembered, the foundations which they built remain.

Next week, we address American slavery during the Crucial Years under the banner of “Continuity and Change.”  For this topic, we look at siblings whose lives are intertwined with that of Thomas Jefferson: in our next episode of History: Beyond the Textbook, we look at Sally and James Hemmings, and the shifting dynamics of American slavery.