Artifact Inventories, Rhetorical Analyses, and much much more

I'm not very accustomed to blogging. So, I figure I will use this as a way to express my findings on Ormond by Charles Brockden Brown.

The first item on our list to better understand our text was to get a good sense of its publishing history. A trip online to WorldCat got a lot of the publishing information finished. I also was able to find the full text on the online resources using Evan's. All in all, the research wound up being fairly straightforward luckily. I've reprinted my work below:

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond, or, The Secret Witness. New York: Printed by G. Forman, for H. Caritat, 1799. Brown, Charles Brockden, and Mary Chapman. Ormond, or, The Secret Witness. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 1999.
Inventory question	Answer	Speculation: What might this information suggest about this novel? For example, what does the name of the printer tell you? What other kinds of texts did the printer publish?
1. When, where, and by whom was your text first printed?	1799, New York, George Forman for the bookseller Hocquet Caritat	Pre 1800s text printed in New York City, one of the leading cultural centers in the world.
2. How often was your text reprinted? List all of the reprints using MLA citation style. Do not confuse dates of publisher’s/printer’s birth and death with reprint dates.	See Attached Page 3	This text was reprinted fairly frequently. Suggesting it has maintained a certain degree of familiarity but not so much as to be considered a well known novel.
3. What was the actual size of your novel in inches or centimeters? (That is, consider it as a material object.) What information can you find about its physical presence? Do you think it was expensive or inexpensive?	16 cm. It had leather bindings and book plates as well. For it's time and length I would assume it was pretty expensive, certainly.	Book was most certainly expensive to own and as such was probably written for a more aristocratic crowd
4. View the original title page using the digital database or microfilm. What is included there?1 Transcribe the exact words of all of the information listed on the title page.	See attached Page 4
5. If there is more than one edition, compare the title pages. Note any differences here.	All full text documents found so far have been of the first edition.
6. What miscellaneous front matter exists? Describe it: Frontispiece Engravings Preface Dedication Other	Dedicated to I.E Rosenberg Brief introduction to the character of Ormond from what I assume to be a character introduced later in the novel.	The dedication was fairly standard. However, the characer piece following the dedication left me interested in who exactly was speaking their. And as I read through the novel, I'll be seeing just exactly who was speaking there.
7. How long is your novel? Is it broken into volumes and chapters or is it one big chunk? How many volumes and/or chapters? Is the print large and easy to read or dense, with many words on each page and lines close together.	338 pages. Broken into 29 chapters. The print, at least in the digital copy I have, does have a lot words per page but it's separated nicely and is quite readable
8. What back matter exists (following the end of the novel, usually signified by the word “finis”)? Sometimes lists of subscribers or other works from this printer or bookseller are mentioned here.	Errata is listed in the back matter of the text. It reads: Page 151, line 35, for votant read volant. 152, line 38, embrued for embued 280 line 20 Thornville for Ridgeley	Errata was printing mistakes from the original mauscript to the plates.
9. Given all of the above, what might you wish to include as you think about creating a virtual/physical site for your project (your blog)?	I definitely want to examine who is speaking in the page following the dedication. I have a lot of ideas going for the blog currently. Gothic themed related as this book certainly feels like it'll be tilting that way.

Question 2. Reprints.

Brown, Charles Brockden, and Mary Chapman. Ormond, or, The Secret Witness. Broadview literary texts. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 1999.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond, or, The Secret Witness. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1982.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond; Or The Secret Witness. New York: B. Franklin, 1970.

Brown, Charles Brockden, and Ernest Marchand. Ormond. New York: Hafner Pub. Co, 1962.

Brown, Charles Brockden, and Ernest Marchand. Ormond. New York: American Book Co, 1937.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond; or, The Secret Witness. Philadelphia: D. McKay, 1887.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond: Or, the Secret Witness. Philadelphia: Published by M. Polock, 1857.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond: Or, The Secret Witness. New York: W. Taylor, 1846.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond, or, The Secret Witness. London: Published by J. Cunningham, 1839.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond; Or, The Secret Witness. Boston: S.G. Goodrich, 1827.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond, or The Secret Witness. London: Henry Colburn, 1822.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond; Or, The Secret Witness. London: Reprinted for Henry Colburn, 1811.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond; or, The Secret Witness. London: Printed by Minerva-Press, for William Lane, 1800.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond; Or, The Secret Witness. New-York: Printed by G. Forman, for H. Caritat, 1799.

Question 4 Title Page

ORMOND;

or the

SECRET WITNESS

By the Author of Wieland; or the

transformation

New-York: Printed by G. Forman for H.Caritat

-1799-

The second major research project was with a Rhetorical Analysis. A surprising amount of research went into this trying to find out who the dedication was towards. I have also reprinted it for my readers edification.

Reading just the first page alone of Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond left me with enough questions to keep me intrigued for the entirety of the novel. Primarily, I was most fascinated by the dedication to an I.E. Rosenberg and spent an ample, perhaps overly so, amount of time researching exactly who it was. What gripped me most was how textually based the dedication was. The dedication begins, “You are anxious to obtain some knowledge of the history of Constantia Dudley. I am well acquainted with your motives, and that they justify your curiosity” (1). The entire novel then is written for this I.E. Rosenberg and subsequently becomes a key aspect in understanding the tone and audience of which the implied author of Brown's is narrating this tale.

The text seems to be an “origin” story of where the aforementioned Constantia Dudley's life will be revealed to I.E. Rosenberg through a series of pertinent events in her life. At first, before my research was conducted, I did not know quite what to make of this. Oftentimes, dedications were used, “For the dedicatee's protection against anticipated criticism...or seeking help to get a work published, or a cash reward or a post in the dedicatee's gift” (Green 10). So, knowing the reputation that Brockden Brown has from discussions with my fellow scholars, I had assumed that this was set up to protect Brown's reputation in case there was some controversial events throughout the book and that he had wrote this text to explain it to I.E Rosenberg. However, my research lead me to Thomas A. Foster's

Long Before Stonewall where my questions were answered. I.E. Rosenberg is actually a fictional character from the text itself, a potential suitor for Constantia and the writer of that dedication is Sophia, Constantia's caretaker. What this reveals to us is that Sophia has been Brown's implied author throughout the text and it is only much later on that this narrative device is revealed to the reader (Shapiro).

The initial first proper chapter details the circumstances of Constantia's family lineage. Her father, Stephen, was a gifted artist but due to circumstances beyond his control had to take over his father's apothecary shop in order to provide for his wife and daughter. One day a young man named Craig solicited work at Stephen Dudley's shop and was taken in as an apprentice. Stephen and Craig's relationship grew to where he Craig became his partner in business. Stephen soon stepped aside to let the eager and vigorous young Craig work until the astonishing occurred. Craig was an impostor, all the stories about sisters and a mother back home he was supporting was completely fabricated. When confronted about his lies, he flees the Dudley's home and takes with him an enormous sum that leaves them in irreconcilable debt. Brown's implied author states these events very matter-of-factly, as noted when the narration mentions the eventual fate of Stephen Dudley:

It was his lot to fall into the grasp of men, who squared their actions by no other standard than law, and who esteemed every claim to be inexorably just, that could plead the sanction. They did not indeed throw him into prison. When they had despoiled him of every remnant of his property, they deemed themselves entitled to his gratitude for leaving his person unmolested. (19)

It is interesting how little Brown notes of the actual readership, framing the entire story within a letter or expose that Sophia is writing to Rosenberg. There are no illustrations, no actual dedications to whom the book was inspired by or written for. The entire novel is framed within these events being real and having been borne witness to by Sophia. Further examination of this text and its later chapters have me intrigued to find out exactly what happens and why this biography of Constantia, and what that has to do with the titular Ormond and the felonious Craig, was written.

Works Cited

Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond or the Secret Witness. New-York: Printed by G. Forman, for H. Caritat., 1799.

Green, I. M. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Shapiro, Stephen. “In a French Position: Radical Pornography and Homoerotic Society in Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond or the Secret Witness Foster, Thomas A. Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 357-384.