eBookFirst Trade Paper Edition (First Trade Paper Edition)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
On his wedding day in 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne escorted his new wife, Sophia, to their first home, the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts. There, enriched by friendships with Thoreau and Emerson, he enjoyed an idyllic time. But three years later, unable to make enough money from his writing, he returned ingloriously, with his wife and infant daughter, to live in his mother’s home in Salem.
In 1853, Hawthorne moved back to Concord, now the renowned author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Eager to resume writing fiction at the scene of his earlier happiness, he assembled a biography of his college friend Franklin Pierce, who was running for president. When Pierce won the election, Hawthorne was appointed the lucrative post of consul in Liverpool.
Coming home from Europe in 1860, Hawthorne settled down in Concord once more. He tried to take up writing one last time, but deteriorating health found him withdrawing into private life. In Hawthorne in Concord, acclaimed historian Philip McFarland paints a revealing portrait of this well-loved American author during three distinct periods of his life, spent in the bucolic village of Concord, Massachusetts.
“I don’t know when I have read a book as satisfying as Hawthorne in Concord.” —David Herbert Donald
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555846886 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
WEDDING IN BOSTON
Both the groom and the bride were well past the bloom of their youth. Nathaniel Hawthorne had reached his late thirties, and Sophia Peabody was already thirty-two. Nor was it that either had been married before, the bride — sickly since infancy — never having expected to marry at all. As for the groom, others had assumed that he would have found a wife long before a certain summer day in July 1842. Years earlier, a college friend had made a bet to that effect and had done so very reasonably; for not only was the gentleman in the Peabodys' parlor this Saturday morning strikingly handsome. He was, as he himself might have put it, endowed as well "with the liveliest sensibility to feminine influence."
Nearly two decades earlier a classmate at Bowdoin, Jonathan Cilley, had made the bet about Hawthorne's marrying within a dozen years. In due time Cilley had written his friend jocularly: "Bridge informs me that 'you are about to publish a book, and are coming into repute as a writer very fast.'" This was in 1836. "I am gratified to hear it; but just now it would have pleased me more to have heard that you were about to become the author and father of a legitimate and well-begotten boy than book. What! suffer twelve years to pass away, and no wife, no children, to soothe your care, make you happy, and call you blessed. Why, in that time I have begotten sons and daughters to the number of half a dozen, more or less."
According to their friend Horatio Bridge, during the same long interval since leaving college Hawthorne had been writing, and through such effort was soon to be the author of a book. "I did not mistake your vein in that particular," Cilley had bantered his former classmate good-naturedly, "if I did in the line matrimonial. Damn that barrel of old Madeira; who cares if I have lost it! If only you and Frank Pierce and Joe Drummer and Sam Boyd and Bridge and Bill Hale were together with me, we would have a regular drunk, as my chum in college used to call it, on that same barrel of wine."
The collegians, once all chums together, were widely scattered now. Indeed, one of their number by Hawthorne's wedding morning in 1842 — and he the writer of this very letter — was already four years dead. "What sort of a book have you written, Hath?" the doomed Cilley had been led to wonder before bringing his letter to an end.
The book comprised sketches and tales that had appeared anonymously in various newspapers, magazines, and annuals over most of a decade, some of them collected and published finally in 1837, the year before Jonathan Cilley, by then a member of Congress, was murdered in a duel that left his wife and those sons and daughters to the number of half a dozen husbandless, fatherless. Hawthorne would be deeply affected by the news. Meanwhile, the book, Twice-Told Tales, had been published in March 1837, leading to its author's introduction before year's end to the Peabody family, neighbors in his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. A daughter in the family proved the belated choice of the handsome author for the wife who — fulfilling Cilley's hopes — might call him blessed and soothe his cares and make him happy.
The choice would have appeared imprudent for such purposes. The bride herself had doubted the wisdom of the union; her health remained too feeble to allow her to contemplate housework, and neither she nor her suitor had the means to set up a proper domestic establishment. Might they not better remain friends, she as his "sister," or the two of them no more than spiritual "husband" and "wife"? For his part, Hawthorne, though thoroughly in love, had nonetheless delayed for months and months telling his family of his secret engagement to Miss Peabody, who, as the summer of 1842 approached and the date was reset for their wedding, was increasingly tormented with bouts of her sometimes excruciating invalidism.
Even so, in the midst of a wet yesterday the groom had at last taken the decisive step of approaching the reverend brother of Sophia's friend Sarah Clarke. "My dear Sir," he had written, "Though personally a stranger to you, I am about to request of you the greatest favor which I can receive from any man. I am to be married to Miss Sophia Peabody tomorrow, and it is our mutual desire that you should perform the ceremony. Unless it should be decidedly a rainy day, a carriage will call for you at half past eleven oclock in the forenoon."
Accordingly, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, then in his early thirties, arrived the next morning, July 9, 1842, at West Street between Tremont and Washington, just off the Common. Much of that area, now aggressively commercial in the heart of Boston, was residential then. In one such brick home, No. 13, celebrants had been rejoicing to see the sun pierce morning clouds, so that the wedding at noon was conducted in sunlight, happily enough, although the simplest of ceremonies sparsely attended. Only members of the bride's family were on hand, and the Reverend Mr. Clarke, of course, along with his sister Sarah as friend of Sophia's, a servant, and one other friend. "There were present," as the bride recorded later in her journal, "beside the family Cornelia and Sarah and the cook Bridget."
The groom's family did not attend. After the ceremony, the new Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne boarded a carriage bound northwest into the countryside, toward the village of Concord some fifteen miles away. And it was a miracle. "Dear, dear Mother," the ecstatic bride wrote back to Boston the following day, "Every step the horses took, I felt better and not in the least tired. I was not tired at the tavern and not tired when I arrived. My husband looked upon me as upon a mirage which would suddenly disappear. It seemed miraculous that I was so well." Sophia's health, which had caused her agony as far back in the past as her teething days, was all at once blissfully untroublesome. In her new role the bride felt wonderful — woke next morning feeling wonderful still, though hardly more so than did the groom. Hawthorne found time that same Sunday, on the first full day of married life, to inform his younger sister of what had lately transpired. "The execution took place yesterday," he wrote Louisa at the family home in Salem. "We made a christian end, and came straight to Paradise, where we abide at this present writing. We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point. Sophia is very well, and sends her love."
A weekly newspaper published in the couple's new home of Concord may help us retrieve the Hawthornes' wedding day. Crisp on the eve of the Boston wedding, the first of the four pages of the Concord Freeman for July 8, 1842, entertains its readers with a fictional tale, as anonymous tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne had earlier entertained readers of a similar newspaper in Salem. This present story, in the column farthest left, is entitled "The Night-Shriek," by one Charles Ollier, coolly lifted from an English periodical, Bentley's Miscellany: culture pirated from eastward overseas. At the same time, on the same front page appears a glance at the vast West, still hardly known, with an account of how North American Indians tame wild horses and buffalo calves. Included as well on page 1 are the text of President Tyler's veto of the Provisional Tariff Bill, dated June 29, and a report of a "Dreadful Storm in Philadelphia last evening," shared with Concord readers from Saturday's Philadelphia Inquirer (so the newsworthy storm in those more leisurely times had raged last Friday a week ago): "The rain poured down in torrents, the lightning flashed, and the thunder pealed in the most terrific manner."
Page 2 of the Freeman gives news of the arrival of the steamship Caledonia at Boston from Liverpool the previous Tuesday morning. The vessel had brought forty passengers and the London and Liverpool papers to June 19 — three weeks old by then. From the pages of the latter, readers in Concord were to learn that the youth John Francis had been tried for high treason in London on Friday, June 17, for shooting at the queen; Francis was found guilty on two of three counts. "The prisoner, who was dreadfully affected, was sentenced in the usual form, to be hanged, drawn and quartered." Meanwhile, people in Cork, Limerick, and Ennis had rioted because of the high price of potatoes; four to five thousand miners had been thrown out of work in Truro; and at the Cheltenham Sessions, George Jacob Holyoke had been fined £100 for giving a lecture in which he denied the existence of God.
News from nearer home appears elsewhere in the Freeman: of a robbery in Dracut, of a murder in the public square in Nashville, and of the death by lightning in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, of a lovely young woman of eighteen. Mr. Lauriat made a beautiful balloon ascension from Taft's garden at Chelsea on Monday, descending safely in Lynn. And the Louisville Sun shares particulars of a duel, growing out of a love affair, "fought near that city between two boys of the ages of fifteen and thirteen! Upon their return home they were greeted with a sound spanking from their mothers for being out without permission — an excellent medicine for unruly children."
The times were different from ours. On the national scene, the paper reports that Secretary of State Webster and Lord Ashburton were about to sign a treaty that would settle the border between Maine and New Brunswick. Here in Concord, meanwhile, the criminal court was keeping busy; in a flawed world that much abides. On page 3 we learn of a larceny, of assault and battery, of highway robbery, and of a barn burning for which the young perpetrator will spend three years incarcerated. A shopbreaker in Waltham can ponder four years behind bars. Sarah Anne Willson of Lowell, having concealed the death of a child, is committed to the common jail for three months. Joseph Bulgar, guilty of lascivious cohabitation in the same town, has been sentenced to a year in state prison; and for the like offense Lucy Terrier of Lowell will spend six months in the House of Correction.
Burgeoning criminality in those nearby mill towns might have been read as a sign of change. But Concord itself appeared unalterable on the Saturday afternoon that was the Hawthornes' wedding day, a sleepy agricultural village of seventeen hundred souls with a history that reached back more than two hundred years already, back far before the birth of the Republic sixty-six years ago, back to the very settlement of New England.
Hawthorne had informed his sister in Salem that the bridal couple, having made a Christian end at their wedding, came straight to paradise. Paradise in this instance took the form of a clapboard house on the northwest edge of Concord, which Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne laid claim to as tenants at about five on the afternoon of their wedding day. It stood, as it stands still, at the far end of a drive reaching to derelict gateposts at the public road; in view from the road were an old horse and a couple of cows munching the overgrown grass. Poplar trees lined the rutted avenue, the house at the end of the shaded path long faded from its original white to a sober grayish hue. A vegetable garden had been planted in the side yard to the left; an apple orchard was visible out back between the house and a little river a short walk away. Around the place sprawled shadows that lay glimmering between the front door and the highway, the light somehow creating an effect, it seemed to the groom, of a spot not quite belonging to the material world.
Set off in its accessible seclusion, this gray-hued paradise rose two stories to an attic under a gambrel roof. At its entrance, the wedding couple were stepping beyond the doorway into a hall that ran front to back, and into rooms filled with flowers that a neighbor had furnished in welcome. A lone servant girl was there to greet them as well: Sarah, still in her teens, whom the bride's eldest sister in Boston had provided to assist her with the unfamiliar matrimonial responsibilities that loomed. One such early chore was the wedding dinner. But the servant couldn't cook in that antiquated kitchen, didn't know how. Dinner accordingly was hours late, so that the first purchase needed would be an up-to-date stove to cook on.
Yet none of that mattered. Three years before, an enamored Hawthorne had written (in the ardent language of nineteenth-century love, which seems musty now, though it was fresh enough then): "Oh, beloved, if we had but a cottage, somewhere beyond the sway of the East Wind, yet within the limits of New-England, where we could be always together, and have a place to be in —" What more could the lovers want? "Nothing — save daily bread, (or rather bread and milk; for I think I should adopt your diet) and clean white apparel every day for mine unspotted Dove. Then ... I could not be other than good and happy, when your kiss would sanctify me at all my outgoings and incomings, and when I should rest nightly in your arms."
The tardiness of dinner would have mattered scarcely at all that wondrous first evening, the two at last in their cottage long dreamed of, after their dinner retired at last in each other's arms. A month later, Hawthorne would return to dwell on the joys of their first intimacy — joys derived from a different kind of feasting — as he set down words for only Sophia to read. Would that she might allow him, he wrote, to record "the ethereal dainties" that a kind heaven had furnished the bridal couple on their magical day of arrival here! "Never, surely, was such food heard of on earth."
CHAPTER 2THE MANSE AND HISTORIC CONCORD
This new tenant would make the house where he and his wife had moved on their wedding day famous around the world. To be sure, the Old Manse, as he called it, was not really a manse at all, not a domicile that the village church had provided its minister. Rather, it was a private residence where, before the Hawthornes moved in, ministers had happened to live from the beginning. The previous owner had lived in the place for over sixty years, during which time a new kitchen had turned antique and old Dr. Ripley (not always old, it is true, as Hawthorne himself would muse about it) was "gradually getting wrinkles and gray hairs, and looking more and more the picture of winter." Until last fall, when after having for so long reliably baptized, married, and buried the members of his Concord flock, the pastor in his nineties, his own time come, had finally left them. The Reverend Ezra Ripley had died downstairs in the front room early on Tuesday morning, September 21, 1841, by then having so long and with such anxious tenderness watched over his parishioners that he had made himself, as one who knew him noted, "universally respected and loved by the old and young."
Now strangers had moved into the late parson's home, secular tenants from Boston, a bridal couple. "I wish I could give a description of our house," the groom recorded soon after his and Sophia's arrival there, "for it really has a character of its own — which is more than can be said of most edifices in these days." When Hawthorne had first seen the place, on a visit with his betrothed early in May, eight or nine weeks before the wedding, it had looked as it had during Dr. Ripley's lifetime, showing the disarray and dust of sixty years of occupancy. But through busy days around the wedding, gloomy dilapidation had been transformed into what was now a comfortable modern residence. Dr. Ripley's bedroom on the ground floor had been turned into a parlor; "and by the aid of cheerful paint and paper, a gladsome carpet, pictures and engravings, new furniture, bijouterie, and a daily supply of flowers, it has become," according to this grateful newlywed, "one of the prettiest and pleasantest rooms in the whole world. The shade of our departed host will never haunt it," so cheerily unecclesiastical was the renovated atmosphere.
Behind the parlor, looking out over orchard, meadow, and river, lay the bright room where husband and wife were taking their meals. We may, incidentally, see all of this still, may stand in the little room with its window facing north toward the adjoining fields, its two windows on the adjacent wall looking west over the orchard and the river at its edge. Across a hallway is the kitchen, no longer quite as it was when those nineteenth-century tenants with their new stove put it to use. But the hallway survives intact in its generous dimensions downstairs and up, "occupying more space," as Hawthorne noted, "than is ever devoted to such a purpose, in modern times. This feature contributes to give the whole house an airy, roomy, and convenient appearance; we can breathe the freer for the sake of this broad passage-way."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hawthorne in Concord"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Philip McFarland.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
THE FORTIES: LEARNING TO BE HAPPY,
1. Wedding in Boston,
2. The Manse and Historic Concord,
3. An End to Solitude,
4. Concord in the Forties,
5. Visitors at the Manse,
6. Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau,
7. Hawthorne and Emerson Together,
8. First Fall at the Manse,
9. Hawthorne's Writing,
10. Two More Weddings,
11. Rural Utopias,
12. Seeking a Livelihood,
13. Una,
14. Women in the Nineteenth Century,
15. The Nation Beyond Concord,
16. Leaving the Old Manse,
THE FIFTIES: WE ARE POLITICIANS NOW,
17. The Wayside,
18. Return to Concord,
19. Concord in the Fifties,
20. Two Novels,
21. Hawthorne and Slavery,
22. Death by Water,
23. Creating a Life,
24. Days at the Wayside,
25. To Washington,
26. Departure for Europe,
THE SIXTIES: SUCH A SAD PREDICAMENT,
27. Once More to Concord,
28. Altering the Wayside,
29. Concord in the Sixties,
30. Secession,
31. Patriotic Americans,
32. In the Sky Parlor,
33. Touring with Ticknor,
34. War Matters,
35. Family Matters,
36. Our Old Home,
37. Last Travels,
38. Release,
NOTES,
WORKS CITED,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INDEX,