Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  In later years, Peabody conveniently forgot about Hawthorne’s government commission. To her, Washington was a death sentence, a sentiment that might explain her mixing up Hawthorne with the fateful Cilley duel. At the time of Cilley’s death, however, she didn’t even want Hawthorne to write a biographical sketch of Cilley, as O’Sullivan had requested, in the Democratic Review. His hands should be kept clean.

  Unfortunately, Julian Hawthorne took a fancy to Peabody’s story and trimmed it with a flourish of his own. When Hawthorne learned of Cilley’s death, wrote Julian, “he felt as if he were almost as much responsible for his friend’s death as with the man who shot him.” Of course, neither Peabody nor Julian Hawthorne would want to recall that, at the time, Hawthorne wanted to marry Mary Silsbee and needed to provide concretely for his future. That meant writing less and earning more. The rewards of Twice-told Tales had not been as remunerative as Hawthorne had hoped—quite the opposite—and though no announcement of an engagement had been made public, Hawthorne himself supposed Silsbee’s father “knew something of the affair, and sanctioned it.”

  With Cilley dead, Hawthorne had to busy himself with writing projects, much to Peabody’s delight. In March he was hoping to collaborate with Longfellow on a book of fairy tales “provided I have time—which seems more probable now than it did a few months since,” he wrote the poet. Their book might earn a “pleasant and peculiar kind of reputation,” he surmised—and “put money in our purses.” Henry Longfellow took a stage to “Sunday-looking” Salem and passed a friendly afternoon with Hawthorne at a local coffeehouse; and though their book never materialized, Longfellow noted that his new friend was not the reclusive owl he said he was. Hawthorne played rubbers of whist with Horace Conolly, his sister Louisa, Susanna Ingersoll (a second cousin), and the attorney David Roberts. At Roberts’s law office on Essex Street, he picked up the gossip, and when in Boston had researched family history with another cousin, Charles Andrew. At night he downed a glass of champagne with friends. “He is much of a lion here,” Longfellow commented in his journal, “sought after, fed, and expected to roar.”

  Hawthorne had entered Elizabeth Peabody’s life at a fortuitous time. The last few years had been difficult. As Bronson Alcott’s assistant in Boston at his progressive Temple School, she had worked tirelessly for no pay, and when she published a book about the unconventional school in 1835, a warehouse fire destroyed all the unsold copies, consuming her scant profits and leaving her in debt since an author was responsible for all unsold books. Then she argued with Alcott, and when her sister Sophia took Alcott’s side, she felt doubly betrayed, all the more so when Alcott, despite her objection, subsequently published the controversial Conversations with Children on the Gospels, which scandalized proper Bostonians with its allusions to sex and birth. But Peabody was loyal, always, and sacrificed her own pedagogical capital to defend Alcott. Meantime, though, she spent the rest of her emotional reserves worrying about two ill friends—one of them was Emerson’s brother Charles; both friends died.

  The appearance of handsome Nathaniel Hawthorne—his spirit unsoiled, his work fresh—rekindled Peabody’s considerable zest for uncommon projects and unusual people. And that he now wanted to write a children’s book was nothing she’d like better. (It must have seemed he was following her advice about a literary life actively connected to society.) So she immediately applied to Horace Mann, now secretary of Massachusetts’s new state board of education. If Mann wanted a series of library books for children, Hawthorne was the person for the job, for Hawthorne hoped to accomplish, as she told Mann, “one great moral enterprise as I think it & you will agree—to make an attempt at creating a new literature for the young.” But the author possessed no talent for negotiation, she sighed, hoping Mann might put in a word with the publisher Nahum Capen.

  “He [Hawthorne] says that were he embarked in this undertaking he should feel as if he had a right to live—he desired no higher vocation, he considered it the highest,” Peabody concluded her sales pitch. A right to live? Peabody’s hyperbole hits a mark; she knew that Hawthorne’s nagging sense of guilt partly derived from a sense of inadequacy. Twice-told Tales had not fulfilled any practical purpose; it hadn’t made any money.

  Lacking purpose—in the sense of moral purpose—is how Horace Mann read Hawthorne’s stories. Although Mann liked the style well enough, he found Hawthorne’s content pretty thin: “We want something graver and sterner even than those,—a development of duties in all the relation of life,” he condescended. “Such a story as the ‘Wedding Knell,’ wherefore is it and to what does it tend?”

  The gossips of Salem started to link Hawthorne to Elizabeth Peabody as well as to Mary Silsbee.

  No one knows for sure what Hawthorne felt for Peabody in these early days of their acquaintanceship. He was definitely gratified by her unalloyed enthusiasm for his writing, and the two of them did spend a good deal of time together. Beyond that, there is little information. It isn’t even known how Peabody looked as a young woman. Scattered correspondence indicates her sisters may have been prettier but not that she was unattractive or clumsy. A family silhouette supplies her with a cinched waist, a cap, and a book—nothing extraordinary—and a former student would remember her as slight and lovely, with fair hair and a glowing face. Of course, no silhouetted profile can peel away the dowdiness heaped upon her by years of caricature: Lizzie Peabody, the ungainly woman in a fuzzy cap who unwittingly crushes a litter of kittens when she sits upon them unawares.

  Boston scuttlebutt about Peabody and Hawthorne persisted for decades. Sarah Sturgis Shaw, a contemporary, was said to dislike Hawthorne “on acct of his engagement to Miss E. P. his sister in law.” Another woman vowed that “Sophia never knew of her sister’s engagement to N.H. but Hawthorne lived in terror lest E.P.P. should tell her.” But for many years male scholars recoiled in horror at such preposterous claims or the very idea that Hawthorne might have inclined in Peabody’s direction. “An engagement with Elizabeth there almost certainly was not,” Norman Holmes Pearson snarls, his syntax twisted by asperity.

  Peabody’s own romantic history is vague. She had suffered the affection of at least one suitor, whom she rejected, and she may have been infatuated with Horace Mann before she recognized that her sister Mary loved him. (“Everybody thought Miss Elizabeth Peabody was dead set on Horace Mann,” reminisced Rebecca Clark, their boardinghouse proprietress.) Before Mann entered her life, she’d seemed interested in Jared Sparks, but then Mary Silsbee caught his eye. And now Mary Silsbee was studying German with Hawthorne—Peabody herself had suggested he study the language—borrowing Peabody’s books to do so.

  There was an even more ominous development. Peabody’s brother, also named Nathaniel, having failed in several business ventures, recently lost the teaching post Peabody had arranged for him in Maine, where, poor and cold, he had to sell his furniture to keep his wife and child supplied with firewood. He looked to his parents for help, and they relied on their redoubtable daughter Elizabeth, regardless of the cost to her. For Elizabeth Peabody shouldered obligations. She agreed to help her brother set up a school in West Newton, Massachusetts, ten miles west of Boston. “Circumstances are such that there is no alternative,” sighed her sister Mary. In the spring of 1838, Peabody left Salem.

  Hawthorne and Peabody promised to write one another while apart on the condition that she burn his letters after reading them. But when Peabody rode out of Salem in the middle of April, she understood she’d sacrificed a very special tactical advantage—and not to Mary Silsbee. Many years later, Peabody still could see Hawthorne’s face the night he met her sister Sophia. “And afterwards,” said Peabody, “as we went on talking, she would interpose frequently a remark in her low sweet voice. Every time she did so, he looked at her with the same intentness of interest. I was struck with it, and painfully.”

  The languishing Sophia took morphine every morning, and though she might come downstairs when Mr. Hawthorne rang the bell, she declar
ed she never meant to have a husband. “Rather, I should say,” she pertly added, “I never intend any one shall have me for a wife.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Sister Years

  I have several bundles of love-letters, eloquently breathing an eternity of burning passion, which grew cold and perished, almost before the ink was dry.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Sister Years”

  THEY WERE AN evangelical lot, those Peabodys, especially the women. Poor in worldly goods, they suffered the New England addiction to pride and pedigree. Elizabeth Peabody’s mother, a woman of clear principle, conducted her life—and that of the family—as a narrative of vanished grandeur compensated by other, more spiritual wares.

  She never forgot girlhood days passed at her grandfather’s home, Friendship Hall, an American palace of three stories with fireplaces big as bedrooms, solid mahogany floors, and banisters richly carved on both the front and back stairs. It stood far back from the road, and one approached it with reverence—as her youngest daughter Sophia later did—passing under a canopy of oak and elm. Like the orchard to the side of the house, these trees had been planted by Sophia’s grandfather Palmer, General Joseph Palmer. But the general had also cultivated the enmity of John Hancock, who confiscated Friendship Hall after the Revolution and sent the Palmers packing.

  His daughter, Elizabeth Palmer, preferred not to recall being cast out of Friendship Hall, and the days that followed, scrubbing floors, keeping school, or selling dry goods to contribute whatever she could to line the family purse. When she married Nathaniel Peabody, the son of an unlettered New England farmer, she took refuge in his ancestry, his forebears having touched American soil in 1635. Better yet, the “Peabodie Race,” claimed daughter Sophia, reached directly to the ancient British monarch, Queen Boadicea.

  The couple’s first child, Elizabeth, named for her mother, was born in 1804, the same year as Hawthorne. Mary Peabody arrived two years later, in 1806, and Sophia three years after that, on September 21, 1809. Then came the boys: Nathaniel in 1811, George in 1813, and in 1815 Wellington, so called after the English victor at Waterloo. In 1819 Mrs. Peabody bore her last child, Catherine, who lived only seven weeks.

  A benevolent despot, Mrs. Peabody was a believer in high thinking, good breeding, and her own holy self, which readied her for the Unitarians and, later, the transcendentalists. Men, however, were something of a trial. Peabody males had no luck. When Mrs. Peabody met her gentle husband, he was an innocuous teacher of Latin at Phillips Andover Academy. Shortly thereafter he switched careers, studying medicine in Cambridgeport, presumably at his wife’s insistence, and subsequently practiced the savage art of dentistry in Salem and Lynn, Massachusetts, until 1820, when the family headed to rural Lancaster. Dr. Peabody turned farmer, also without success. The Peabodys went back to Salem in 1823, and Dr. Peabody returned to teeth.

  In like fashion, the Peabody boys never secured a spot in the world. The youngest, Wellington, was smart and handsome and like his elder brothers troubled, though he managed at least to leave Harvard with a certificate of creditable standing. Debt-ridden, he signed on to a New Bedford whaler—some say that Mrs. Peabody made him go—but jumped ship in Peru, beaten and starved. “It is dreadful not to be loved,” observed Sophia, obliquely referring to Wellington, who died from yellow fever, contracted at a New Orleans hospital where he’d been nursing the sick. He was twenty-one. Next in line, George Peabody had sallied far and wide seeking he knew not what—escape, probably—until spinal meningitis sent him home in agony. It killed him in 1839. He was twenty-four. That left Nathaniel Peabody, never successful at much of anything: a failure and the heir of failure, as one chronicler bluntly said.

  Not so Mrs. Peabody, and not her daughters. A former preceptress at the North Andover Academy for Girls, Mrs. Peabody continued to teach in Lancaster, where she pressed the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth into service, assigning her the instruction of Sophia, which, in a sense, was like giving her a child of her own. Elizabeth diligently played surrogate mother. A bookish and watery-eyed teenager in need of spectacles, approval, and a crusade, she ministered to Sophia’s mental improvement even after moving to the grand city of Boston in 1822 to rustle up money for her brothers’ education.

  Opening her own school in Boston, Elizabeth blossomed. She was attending lectures and sermons, dancing, reading French and German, and studying Greek with Ralph Waldo Emerson. And she continued to harangue Sophia with interminable advice. “I wish you now to read only those poets with whom no one has found fault & which are perfectly moral,” she counseled, warning against the likes of Byron until impressionable Sophia’s mind was “more fully stor’d than yours is, with classical recollections.”

  Sophia fended Elizabeth off by pleading a chronic headache. Her head began to pound sometime between the infant Catherine’s death, when Sophia was ten, and the onset of her menstruation, when she was about twelve or thirteen. The throbbing increased when Elizabeth, teaching in Maine in 1823, asked the fourteen-year-old Sophia to be her assistant. Sophia demurred. “They would think perhaps ‘Surely she must be a prodigy—if she sends for her so young’ and then they will find out to the contrary,” she cried, her head an anvil of pain. She was free.

  Sophia worshipped Elizabeth, or thought she did. “I thank you very much my dearest Sister for you [sic] excellent advice and the kindness and anxiety you manifest for my happiness,” she fawned. “—I am sure I shall improve and answer your highest expectations.” She obediently checked off her literary progress—Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Gibbon, and Johnson—as well as her studies in astronomy, Latin, and chemistry. But soon she slid a murderous fantasy or two within the treacle. “I have often told you I believe that I never felt as if I could wish to live a moment after you were dead,” she wrote, “—I have thought of this so much that I have dreamed of your death an hundred times with every particular circumstance.”

  Sophia was willful and insecure, and she resented both her elder sisters. Mary was pretty, Elizabeth smart. “Your loveliness all through our growing up together never one moment made me feel the contrast of my plainness,” Sophia would confide to Mary. “But to your confidence, I never aspired,” she continued, “—Elizabeth was the intimate friend, I felt, & that seemed right & fitting—I never contrasted myself with her any more than my face with yours.” However, Sophia staked out a territory of her own: goodness. “Surely there never could have been a purer—more unselfish love than mine for you,” she informed Mary with a tinge of sanctimony. “I did not even think whether you loved me in return.”

  Trim and tasteful, brows arched, face round, and brown hair flecked with a jovial red, Sophia Peabody walked across Boston Common boldly carrying a broom; she didn’t care who saw her. She rather hoped they did. Unlike Elizabeth or Mary, who battled social injustice, Sophia rebelled on a smaller scale: she was a defiant conformist who questioned not the conditions of society, as her sisters did, but their right to do so. And she considered herself one of the less fortunate about whom Mary and Elizabeth should care. They did. They doused her with leeches, ether, mercury, and carbonate of iron and colchicum. Dr. Peabody blistered her. When the clank of knives and forks sent Sophia rushing upstairs, she ate alone and unperturbed, and when the family moved back to Boston in 1828, to spare her further discomfort they applied to the governor of Massachusetts to forbid the firing of cannons on the Common on the Fourth of July. The cannons boomed, but the governor aimed them toward the river.

  The physician, Walter Channing, cousin to the famous minister, prescribed arsenic, extending a long career of addiction, according to Elizabeth, which first started when her father administered narcotics to relieve Sophia (and her mother) from the screech of teething. The addiction ended, or was curtailed, when the Peabodys switched to homeopathy to purge themselves of poison. But to Mrs. Peabody, her husband and his elixirs were superfluous. “I only fear he does not sufficiently realize her trials, or the danger of her complaint,” she told Mary.
Only she grasped Sophia’s condition, and as a consequence could not bear to let her baby daughter out of her sight. “Home is best,” declared Mrs. Peabody.

  Thus stultified, Sophia took to the couch like a female Job. She struck visitors as perfectly well unless they stayed too long, and then she’d fall back onto the sofa, explaining how much her charade had cost her. “I still keep just above, so that every one says ‘How well you look!’ and while I can keep up the struggle successfully I care not—I feel that every separate [sic] pain is an instrument for good.” Suffering was morally magnificent.

  And her headaches had provided her with a vocation. She began to draw. Elizabeth—always generous, always meddlesome—suggested Sophia try oils and offered to supply both paints and lessons. Since art relieved her headaches without diverting too much attention from them, Sophia studied with the illustrator Francis Graeter and then with Thomas Doughty and Chester Harding, who painted her portrait in 1830. Elizabeth also introduced Sophia to the renowned Washington Allston, who deigned to inspect Sophia’s work. “Superior to what I expected,” he judged it. He proffered good advice: copy nature, not the work of other artists. Sophia demurred, calculating her talent and her personality in far different—but equally observant—terms. “I am rather a planet that shines by borrowed light,” she said.

  Painting and pain vied for Sophia’s attention, and after 1830, when her doctor pronounced her free of any illness but the habit of being sick, her family decided to ship her off to Cuba, hoping to cure her there. Elizabeth and Mary had convinced their mother that Sophia would bloom in citrus groves, and as a matter of fact, with Elizabeth pushing her to churn out some lithographs for a book of “Grecian Theology and Mythology,” Sophia was glad to go.