Author: Brown, Charles
Biography:
BROWN, Charles (fl 1799)
The author of Inkle and Yarico (1799) is identified as the American novelist Charles Brockden Brown in ESTC and the Northwestern University library catalogue; Northwestern holds the only known surviving copy. Almost undoubtedly the poem is not by Brockden Brown who was living in New York and establishing himself as a novelist in 1799. Inkle and Yarico is dedicated to Elizabeth, Duchess of Beaufort (died Apr. 1799), and likely the author was English. The Northwestern copy has a manuscript inscription: “From the Author Chas. Br. with his Compts.” A review in GM states that the author is a “medical professor and writer.” Nothing more is known. (GM 85 [1799], 312; Frank Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid [1999], 303)