Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

Shelley himself recognized his obligations to Brown; and it is to be remembered that Brown himself was evidently familiar with Godwin's philosophical writings and with Caleb Williams, and that he may have drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft his advanced views as to the rights and education of women, a subject on which his first book, Alcuin, provided the earliest American protest. Undoubtedly his tales furnished a point of transition from Mrs. Radcliffe, of whom he disapproved, to the modern novel of realism, although his immediate influence and, so to speak, his stage properties, can hardly be traced later than the remarkable tale, also by a Philadelphian, called Stanley; or the man of the world, the scene of which was laid in America, though it was first published in 1839 in London. This book was attributed, from its profuse literary material, to Edward Everett, but was soon understood to be the work of a young man of twenty-one, Horace Binney