Urban Illuminations in Ormond

Abstract

Abstract Concerned that the city’s water supply might have contributed to the devastating 1793 yellow fever outbreak, Philadelphia embarked on the nation’s first urban public works project, a waterworks that connected its citizens to one another even as it raised new fears about these links. Charles Brockden Brown dramatizes these fears in Ormond; his surprising connections to the waterworks shed new light on the novel and on the dirty work behind urban improvement. Chapter 4 explores whether a novel might play a role in shaping a city’s infrastructure. Five years after the 1793 epidemic, and after having suffered his own bout with yellow fever in New York, Brockden Brown published Ormond (1799), a novel that tracks its heroine Constantia’s emergence from enclosed domestic space to city streets of connection and contagion, characterized by deceptions, concealment, and architectural trompe l’oeil. Ormond straddles the worlds of the theatre and infrastructure, exposing a new urban ideology that covers the mechanics of urban engineering with illusionistic design, a dynamic especially visible in two Philadelphia buildings: Mathew Carey’s old haunt, the Chestnut Street Theatre, which Benjamin Henry Latrobe renovated between 1801 and 1805, and Latrobe’s neoclassical Centre Square pump house, which housed the steam engines that powered the city’s new municipal waterworks. In Ormond, urban connection takes on a threatening cast, but paradoxically offers the only hope for Philadelphia’s future. As he reflects on Philadelphia’s recovery, Brockden Brown reveals that the neighborliness the epidemic engenders is tenuous and fleeting.