Charles Brockden Brown, George Lippard, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Urban Underworld

This study aims to examine the Gothic representation of the city in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800), George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “He” (1926). Whereas Brown and Lippard employ rhetorical strategies typical of the European Gothic tradition for a critical exposé of the urban milieu of antebellum Philadelphia, Lovecraft evokes a preternatural topography comprised of underground passageways, secret halls and labyrinthine streets to reveal New York’s underbelly in the 1920s. Drawing on both the notion of spatial proximity (Luck 2014) and the reciprocal relationship between space, plot structure, and meaning, I argue that, although substantially different in style, philosophical subtext and social context, the depictions of urban spaces by the three authors share a profoundly anti-urban rhetoric, which, operating as a deforming lens, fragments the American city into a confusing network of horrors.