You don’t come across a lot of bankruptcy hearings in eighteenth-century novels. This is pretty easy to explain: they didn’t happen much. But they did happen, and I’m going to go into some depth about one early American novel that touches on the subject, in the process opening a window into the turbulent waters of debt, failure, and new beginnings. This novel is Arthur Mervyn, published in 1799 by Charles Brockden Brown. It’s a long, rambling novel that follows a young naif, Arthur, as he travels through turn-of-the-century America. The novel is most often remembered (when it is remembered) for its gothic descriptions of Philadelphia in the grip of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. Critics also like to discuss its unreliable narrative; it’s impossible to follow the turns of the plot, and the veracity of the first-person account is constantly challenged by other characters. However, I take the side of a small but longstanding critical cadre that believes Arthur Mervyn is best read as a tale of financial transactions. Specifically, I read it as a novel about debt.
The growth of a mercantile Atlantic economy through the eighteenth century caused a sea change in concepts of credit and risk, one so momentous that we continue to sort through its effects today. Borrowing and lending became depersonalized; debt shifted from a moral hazard to a cost of doing business, and a business in itself. Both the radically unstable narrative of the eponymous hero and the raging career of Welbeck, the villain, can be understood as critiques of the unmoored economy of speculation, in which fortunes were won and lost in what seemed then, before nanotrading, like the blink of an eye.
Charles Brockden Brown came from a commercial family, and makes clear throughout Arthur Mervyn that he has a professional’s knowledge of financial transactions and the consequences they can carry. (His father was once imprisoned for debt.) The novel teems with reversals of fortune: sudden plunges from middle-class respectability caused by bad banknotes or fraudulent insurance arrangements, as well as by disease, seduction, ill-will, or bad luck. Precarity is the background hum behind the novel’s picaresque plot. Time and time again, Arthur Mervyn finds himself without a penny or a crumb to his name, starting fresh. Yet, while his progress shines a light on the instability of personal finances in early America, Arthur himself remains optimistic, seemingly untouched by failure.