45 pages • 1 hour read
Charles Brockden BrownEdgar Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1799A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
At home, Edgar dreams of Waldegrave, and remembers that Mary asked him to transcribe Waldegrave’s letters for her. However, giving the entire transcription to Mary will reveal some of Waldegrave’s previously unknown set of anti-religious that Waldegrave later renounced. He had asked Edgar to destroy these letters, but Edgar wouldn’t. Believing Mary is “unaccustomed to metaphysical refinements” like “others of [her] sex” (133), Edgar resolves to only give her excerpts.
He looks for the letters in a secret compartment that he, like Clithero, constructed, but finds it empty. Edgar believes someone has stolen the letters. His uncle says he heard someone walking upstairs.
Edgar searches the attic room but doesn’t find the letters. After his two sisters wake, he questions them, but they haven’t seen the letters or a thief. Rather than admit he might also be a sleepwalker, Edgar suspects Clithero stole the letters and decides to find him.
Chapter 14 Summary
While looking at the moon, Edgar encounters a visitor named Weymouth, who was friends with Waldegrave. They sit by the fire and Weymouth asks about Waldegrave’s will. Edgar answers that Waldegrave had no will, but all his money, about $8,000, was left to his sister, Mary.
Weymouth notes that Waldegrave was a teacher at a “negro free-school” (141) and asks if he changed professions to obtain this money, to which Edgar replies the source of the income is a mystery. Weymouth explains that he saved up money and used it to invest in cargo, such as wine and asked Waldegrave to hold onto $7,500 for him while on a trip to sell his goods. Weymouth’s vessel was shipwrecked, cargo lost, and most of the crew drowned, but Weymouth was saved by fishermen. A traveling monk then took Weymouth to an island convent. He travelled from the Portuguese monastery in Oporto, to New York, and finally to Philadelphia where he learned of Waldegrave’s death, Mary, and Edgar Huntly. The Huntly family is from a “township” that neighbors his hometown.
Chapter 15 Summary
The dialogue between Edgar and Weymouth continues; there are no papers verifying Weymouth’s story, but Edgar offers to return the money and supplies Mary’s residence. He is certain that Mary will agree with the return.
Weymouth doubts that Mary will agree because he has no legal claim on the money but hopes that he can use the sum to help his father, and leaves to visit his nearby family home. Edgar feels like this interview “existed in a dream” and addresses Mary, certain she will “act justly” (150).
However, returning the money creates an “obstacle” for Mary and Edgar’s impending marriage because they are poor without Waldegrave’s inheritance.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Chapter 13 develops the connection between Clithero and Edgar; while he can’t admit it yet, Edgar is sleepwalking and hiding papers like his foil. Both men seek to bury flaws of their loved ones: Mrs. Lorimer and Waldegrave, respectively. Their waking selves can’t enact the desire for repression that their sleepwalking selves can.
In contrast to the letters and manuscript that will come to light later in the book, the papers surrounding the monetary transaction between Weymouth and Waldegrave are lost to the sea, and perhaps the post office, indefinitely. Even this plotline gets lost; Weymouth doesn’t appear again in the novel.
Weymouth does not have full control of the narrative like Edgar and Clithero—his backstory is in quoted dialogue. This sets him apart as a less developed character, but the monetary concerns that accompany his visit have a considerable impact on Edgar. Edgar, again foiling Clithero, has lost the prospect of marriage and acts even more rashly in the coming chapters than he does in the preceding ones.
The story Weymouth tells is similar to Antonio’s story in William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: essentially, venture capitalism. Losing cargo ships at sea is how Antonio ends up in debt to Shylock in the play and how Weymouth becomes destitute in this novel. There are elements of adventure fiction, as in Sarsefield’s story, but Weymouth’s tale is about personal investment rather than financial patronage.
This section foils Mrs. Lorimer and Mary through their epistolary presence. Mary is almost completely external to the narrative; she is the second person “thee,” “thy,” and “thou” directly addressed by Edgar, but the narrative does not include her letters. She is edited out in the same way Edgar plans to omit letters by Waldegrave in his transcription for Mary. Conversely, as seen in the previous chapters, the narrative includes a manuscript authored by Mrs. Lorimer
