Gothic literature that made Quaker City quake

In the sallow afterglow of E. A. Poe's Jan. 19 bicentennial birthday, in the dim reaches of the centuries-old Library Company - where readers still nod over brittle pages as Poe once did - lie tales of murder and blood and horrors, stories crafted here, in the Quaker City, the city of gentility, peace, and ghastly death.

Here, in exhibition cases still as open tombs, the shroud has been slipped from a dark Philadelphia.

"Philadelphia Gothic: Murders, Mysteries, Monsters, & Mayhem," an exhibition on view at the Library Company, 1314 Locust St., from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. weekdays through April 14, is a reminder that shadows veil the face of the City of Brotherly Love, like tangles of poisonous weeds.

Highlighting the work of three writers who influenced Poe and numerous other artists down to the present day, "Philadelphia Gothic" considers the origins and persistence of the unspeakable and demonstrates that Philadelphia culture, almost from its very beginnings, gave itself up to the siren song of the depraved and debauched.

Still, "I don't think there's anything evil in Philadelphia," said Neil Fitzgerald, literary historian and guest curator of the exhibition. "Philadelphia harbored a lot of eccentrics, from Dr. Rosenbach to Dr. Barnes," he said. "It was so cosmopolitan it had room for this stuff, and nobody else did."

(Fitzgerald, 60, now lives in Arizona but came to the city to do postgraduate work in American studies at the University of Pennsylvania.)

Charles Brockden Brown, generally believed to be America's first professional man of letters, burst on the literary scene a decade after the signing of the Constitution. Publication of his first novel, Wieland; or, the Transformation, caused a sensation in 1798, and without question Wieland is the progenitor of weird Philadelphia.

The novel opens on an estate above the Schuylkill, where the eponymous hero's pious father prays fervently - and then spontaneously bursts into an infernal bonfire. Wieland, believing the voice thrown by an evil ventriloquist to be the voice of God, then proceeds to murder his wife and children before eventually committing suicide.

Thus was Philadelphia's literary life launched from Brown's home at 122-24 S. 11th St. (now part of a Midtown II bar and restaurant).

Brown, who went on to write several other novels, including Arthur Mervyn (1799), set during the city's devastating 1793 yellow fever epidemic, had a tremendous influence on his contemporaries and subsequent generations of American writers, inspiring both Hawthorne and Poe and setting the table quite neatly for such current writers as Stephen King.

Philadelphian writers Robert Montgomery Bird and George Lippard, also featured at the Library Company, owed a great debt to Brown. Bird's truly strange novel Sheppard Lee (1836) featured a title character able, at the moment of death, to propel his spirit into another's body, achieving a kind of transportable immortality. His final incarnation, as an African American slave, stuck in the imagination of Harriet Beecher Stowe as she mapped out her Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Lippard, a fantastically prolific and imaginative writer who lived on North Sixth Street, produced the equally weird and successful The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall in 1844. In this feast of the bizarre, the elite of Philadelphia - Lippard coined the term "the Quaker City" and cooked up much of the mythology that surrounds the Liberty Bell - spent their nights engaged in carousing and unspeakable acts, often at the direction of Devil-Bug, a twisted Cyclopian wizard dubbed "perhaps the most gleefully evil, sadistic character in American literature" by historian David Reynolds.

The Library Company evokes these writers - as well as their influence on Poe - through a selection of rare first editions, contemporary reviews, oil portraits, and engravings. (Edward Pettit, the La Salle University teacher more commonly known as "the Philly Poe Guy," will speak at the Library Company on Thursday at 5:30 p.m.)

Fitzgerald, the curator - who has collected much material related to the featured writers, some of which is on display - said most people were aware of the literary tradition associated with Boston: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists.

Far fewer know about Philadelphia's deep association with gothic America.

"I wanted people to know," he said.

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