Charles Brockden Brown Biography

http://brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/biography/


Take a look at this website to learn a bit more about the author of Wieland, I think his life puts the book into a historical context. Separation of religions in the colonies, the Revolutionary War and how that affected his life during and post war times. He was born in 1771, five years before the beginning of the war. He grew up in a time of rapidly changing socio-political entities in the world. If you don't have time to read through the entire biography this paragraph I think would make a decent discussion for a classroom setting.
"Love of debate may have prompted Brown's initial interest in the law, but the young intellectual soon became disillusioned. "[I] was perpetually encumbered with the rubbish of the law," he wrote to a friend, "and waded with laborious steps through its endless tautologies, its impertinent circuities, its lying assertions and hateful artifices".³ As representations of the law in his later fiction indicate, Brown viewed the law as a "tissue of shreds and remnants of a barbarous antiquity patched by the stupidity of modern workmen into new deformity" (Ormond 16). He was especially critical of the ways in which, even after the Revolution had attempted to dismantle the American class system, the Constitution had through its restricted franchise continued to limit women's, non-whites' and the poor's access to power and wealth. In 1793, the same year the French monarchy was abolished and political stability replaced by the Reign of Terror, Brown abandoned the law to attempt a life of letters."

Its interesting to notice his rejections of the law, and the similarities between Clara's father and his father, being in an extremist religious group for the time in history. Brown's father was a devout Quaker in the colonies and rejected the war resulting in an 8 month incarceration when Brown was young. I think knowing an author from a biographical standpoint can be useful for deciphering all the meaning behind a text. Or at least what situations lead them to write the novel, in this case I did a little more deep searching and the murders were based on actual events, which for me gives it more depth knowing that these atrocities happened to real people in the world and not too long ago. 
James Yates was the name of the man who originally committed the murders in 1781, when Brown was just 10 years old, this story was publicized heavily in the following months, and probably had some sort of impact on Brown, or enough that he remembered from the newspaper articles to write a novel dramatizing the events.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Yates_murders
Yates interestingly enough was part of another interesting sect religious group called the Shakers, The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing is a religious sect, also known as the Shakers, founded in the 18th century in England, having branched off from a Quaker community." Just thought this was some intriguing information that helped conceptualize the author in terms of his own life experience and how that shines through the literary work.