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68 “with doves”: Sir Henry Layard to Miss Hosmer, London, June 27, 1860, in Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memories, ed. Cornelia Carr (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1912), pp. 159–60.
69 As a consequence: Sophia took offense at her sister Elizabeth’s suggestion that Sophia was Hilda: “Mr. Hawthorne had no idea of portraying me in Hilda,” she claimed, adding the inadvertently amusing comment that “whatever resemblance any one sees is accidental.” Evidently EPP had also wondered why Hilda hadn’t asked for more information about the murder. SH’s answer also reveals her disapproval of Miriam and partial exoneration of Donatello, which the novel does not share: “Hilda, having seen Miriam allow Donatello to drop the monk over the Tarpeian rock, had no need to make enquiries about it” (italics mine). See SH to EPP [spring 1860], Berg.
70 “like a sharp steel sword”: The Marble Faun, p. 906.
71 “a great horror”: “ideal which”: UH to EPP, Oct. 4, 1859, BY; SH to Anna Parsons, Sept. 26, 1854, Smith.
72 “if I had had”: Feb. 7, 1858, p. 59, and May 1, 1858, FIN, p. 195.
73 “I am a daughter,” “live and die”: The Marble Faun, pp. 1153, 1157.
74 “whatever precepts”: The Marble Faun, p. 1236.
75 “Hilda had a hopeful”: The Marble Faun, p. 1238.
76 Perhaps to fill: See, for instance, Leslie Stephen, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Cornhill Magazine 2 (Dec. 1872), p. 724.
77 The Westminster Review: ” Contemporary Literature/Belles Lettres: Transformation,’ Westminster Review 17 (Apr. 1860), p. 626.
78 Nonetheless, not even: The Centenary editors estimate each British printing at one thousand three-volume sets, and I’ve found nothing to contradict them, or to verify these numbers. See Claude M. Simpson, “Introduction” to The Marble Faun, C IV, p. xxix. Smith & Elder and Ticknor & Fields paid Hawthorne a royalty of 15 percent. Ticknor ordered eight thousand two-volume sets of the novel printed and advertised the number in several newspapers as if the sheer volume would increase sales, which it probably did. See also Rosemary Mims Fisk, “The Marble Faun and the English Copyright: The Smith, Elder Contract,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1995, pp. 263–75.
79 Pretty soon sightseers: See, for example, Susan Williams, “Manufacturing Intellectual Equipment: The Tauchnitz Edition of The Marble Faun,” in Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles, ed., Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 117–50. Published in England on February 28, 1860, Transformation appeared in three volumes and sold for slightly over three pounds. The Marble Faun appeared a week later in America with two volumes selling for $1.50.
80 Sophia curtly rapped: SH to Henry Fothergill Chorley, Mar. 5, 1860, C XVIII, pp. 238–39. For the Times review, “The Marble Faun, or The Romance of Monte Bene,” New York Times, Mar. 24, 1850, p. 3. The other reviews mentioned are cited in Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews, pp. 247–48.
81 “a want of finish”: [Henry Bright], “Transformation,” Examiner, Mar. 31, 1860, p. 197, quoted in Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews, p. 250.
82 Who was the man … Do they marry: SH to EPP, transcription and fragment, [1860], Berg.
83 “How easy it is”: NH to Henry Bright, Apr. 4, 1860, C XVIII, p. 259.
84 “was one of its essential”: NH to Francis Bennoch, Mar. 24, 1860, C XVIII, p. 251.
85 “not satisfactory”; “the actual experience”: “The Ancestral Footstep,” in American Claimant Manuscripts, p. 11; The Marble Faun, p. 1232.
86 “The charm lay”: The Marble Faun, p. 968.
87 “The very dust”: The Marble Faun, p. 937.
88 “In weaving”: The Marble Faun, p. 929.
89 “I really put”: NH to JTF, Apr. 26, 1860, C XVIII, p. 271
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: BETWEEN TWO COUNTRIES
1 “The sweetest thing”: NH to WDT, Feb. 10, 1860, C XVIII, p. 227.
2 “where there is no shadow”: The Marble Faun, p. 854.
3 “How could he say”: MM to SH, [Mar.] 1860, Antioch. Among the many fine books about the American political situation during Hawthorne’s years abroad, I have found particularly helpful David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960); David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995); Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York: Viking, 1942); Eric L. McKitrick, Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, vol. i, The Improvised War, 1861–1862 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959); Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1987); Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998); and David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
4 “I wholly and utterly”: SH to EPP, June 4, 1857, Berg.
5 “Because I suggested”: SH to MM, Sept. [between Sept. 20 and Sept. 26] 1857, Berg.
6 “no purpose”: Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858 (New York: Library of America, 1989), p. 521.
7 “You surely must know”: SH to EPP, June 4, 1857, Berg.
8 “You always speak”; “My husband”: SH to MM, Sept. [between Sept. 20 and Sept. 26] 1857, Berg; SH to EPP, [1857], Berg.
9 “I have read”: SH to EPP, [1859–60], Berg.
10 “No doubt it seems”: NH to EPP, Aug. 13, 1857, C XVIII, p. 89.
11 “We go all wrong”: The Marble Faun, p. 1050.
12 “Vengeance and beneficence”: NH to EPP, Oct. 8, 1857, C XVIII, p. 116.
13 “The good of others”: NH to EPP, Oct. 8, 1857, CXXIII, p. 465.
14 “We human beings”: SH to EPP, [1859–60], Berg.
15 “a transcendentalist above all”: Henry David Thoreau, Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 115. In 1862 Thoreau sent an essay called “The Higher Law” to James Fields for publication in the Atlantic Monthly. Understanding its political import, Fields suggested the title be changed to “Life Without Principle”; Thoreau complied. Particularly fine on Thoreau is Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986). For an excellent account of abolitionism’s debt to transcendentalism, see Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns.
16 “I think him equal”: May 8, 1859, The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1938), p. 316.
17 “will make the gallows”: Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), p. 402.
18 “Nobody was ever”: “Chiefly About War Matters,” in Miscellaneous Prose and Verse, CXXIII, p. 427. Actually, the essay makes clear that “nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his martyrdom fairly, and took it firmly” (pp. 427–28).
19 There, he’d write: HWL, Oct. 27, 1860, journal, MS Am 1340(209), Houghton.
20 “I should like to sail”: Yesterdays, p. 92. They disembarked from Liverpool, where the Hawthornes had again taken lodgings at Mrs. Blodget’s. Prior to departure they’d been stopping at Bath, partly for SH’s health and partly so that Hawthorne could avail himself of London social life and of Bennoch one last time.
21 “I fear I have lost”: NH to WDT, Jan. 26, 1860, C XVIII, p. 217.
22 “I am really”: NH to JTF, Feb. 3, 1859, C XVIII, p. 95.
24 “Surely, the bright”: Feb. 18, 1860, EN, vol. 2, p. 463; see SH to Elizabeth Hoar, Apr. 15, 1860, Antioch.
25 “It is the school-boy’s”: See HWL, journal, June 30, 1860, MS Am 1340(209), Houghton.
26 “It is an excellent”: NH to Henry Bright, Dec. 17, 1869, C XVIII, p. 355.
27 “even if a Democrat”: quoted in Edward W. Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club, p. 215.
28 “He has the look”: Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), p. 208.
29 “Beyond a general dislike”: NH to Horatio Woodman, Nov. 5, 1860, C XVIII, p. 336.
30 “He is used”: James Russell Lowell to Grace Norton, misdated June 12, 1860, in The Letters of James Russell Lowell, vol. 1, p. 303.
31 Hawthorne responded: When James Roberts Gilmore solicited a story for the Knickerbocker Magazine, Hawthorne resorted to his standard excuse, that his stories were too monotonous for serialization. He added that he needed the income from English copyrights that would be denied him should he publish serially in an American magazine. See NH to James Roberts Gilmore, Oct. 16, 1860, C XVIII, p. 331.
32 “I am very anxious”: JTF to SH, Nov. 25, 1859, Berg. On Fields’s encouragement of female writers, see, for instance, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), pp. 146–47.
33 “You forget”: SH to JTF, Nov. 28, 1859, BPL.
34 “Perhaps I may”; “I don’t know”: NH to JTF, Nov. 28, 1859, and NH to Francis Bennoch, Nov. 29, 1859, C XVIII, pp. 203–4.
35 Bronson Alcott raced over: See UH to MM, [Aug.] 1860, Antioch; Bronson Alcott, journals, Sat., [late July] 1860, *59M-308(30), Houghton.
36 “doing exactly”: MM to Miss Rawlins Pickman, July 10, 1860, Antioch.
37 “Mrs. H is as sentimental”: Quoted in Marjorie Worthington, Miss Alcott of Concord (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 109–10.
38 When the cook: MM to Miss Rawlins Pickman, July 10, 1860, Antioch.
39 “Una is a stout”: Quoted in Worthington, Miss Alcott of Concord, pp. 109–10.
40 “bad for her darling son”: Franklin B. Sanborn to Eleanor R. Larrison, Mar. 29, 1907, Autograph File, Houghton.
41 Emerson asked: See SH to EPP, [1861], Berg.
42 “Her Byronic papa”: The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), p. 57. Eventually NH’s friend George Bradford was hired to instruct Una, and Rose, at the age of ten, was sent to Concord’s East Quarter Public School. See UH to EH, June 5, 1861, BY.
43 And she’d be in Salem: UH to Richard Manning, July 20, 1860, PE.
44 Poor Una, screaming: SH to unknown recipient [AF?], [1860], Berg.
45 “His spirits”: SH to unknown recipient [AF?], [1860], Berg; SH to EPP, [early 1861], Berg.
46 Mrs. Rollins attributed: NH to FP, Oct. 9, 1860, C XVIII, p. 327.
47 “I lose England”: NH to Francis Bennoch, Dec. 17, 1860, C XVIII, p. 352.
48 Defeated, Una attended: Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, vol. 2, p. 524.
49 Weekdays, she mended: AF, diary, July 31, 1863, MHS.
50 Sophia recorded: See SH, diary, 1861, Bancroft.
51 “as if he feared”: Bronson Alcott, diary, Feb. 2, 1861, Houghton, quoted in The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1938), p. 335.
52 “He seems not at home”: Bronson Alcott, diary, Feb. 2, 1861, Houghton, quoted in The Journals of Bronson Alcott, p. 335.
53 “unconquerable interest”: “Etherege,” in American Claimant Manuscripts, p. 124. As the Centenary editors make clear, there are two sets of unfinished manuscripts dealing with the American claimant, likely composed during late 1860/early 1861, when Hawthorne took occupancy of his tower. For identification purposes, the first manuscript, concentrating mostly on the English chapters of the romance, is called “Etherege,” after the main character. The second manuscript, called “Grimshawe,” seems to me a reworking of the earlier manuscript. See also “Historical Introduction” to American Claimant Manuscripts, pp. 491–506. Moreover, since the Centenary editors have pieced together the various fragments in ways I find reliable, I will advert to their volume, with the caveat that the textual evidence does not make clear what Hawthorne composed when. However, I do find that the references in “Grimshawe” to war and politics reflect the events of the winter and spring of 1861. See also Edward H. Davidson, Hawthorne’s Last Phase (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 1–71.
54 “hereditary connections”: “Etherege,” in American Claimant Manuscripts, p. 136.
55 “Oh home, my home”: The rightful heir of the estate is an old pensioner who dwells in the hospital where Etherege is taken after the lord of Braithwaite Hall attempts to murder him.
56 “Is there going to be”: NH to WDT, Dec. 7, 1860, C XVIII, p. 342.
57 “Secession of the North”: HWL, journal, Dec. 3, 1860, MS Am 1340(209), Houghton.
58 “this wicked & crazy”: John O’Sullivan to FP, Feb. 7, 1861, LC.
59 “It was the imbecility”: New York Herald, Apr. 30, 1861, p. 1.
60 “how little I care”: NH to Henry Bright, Dec. 17, 1860, C XVIII, p. 355.
61 “How can you feel”: “Etherege,” in American Claimant Manuscripts, p. 162.
62 “There is still a want”: “Etherege,” in American Claimant Manuscripts, pp. 115, 198–99, 219, 265.
63 And both of them are Hawthorne: NH mentions the story of Wakefield as he puzzles out one of his characters, the doctor’s confidential servant, who intends to do mischief to the Braithwaite family. See “Etherege,” in American Claimant Manuscripts, p. 327.
64 “I want you to be”: Grimshawe,” in American Claimant Manuscripts, p. 476. This version of his story seems, at the outset, more polished than earlier ones. It reads far more smoothly than “Etherege,” and though Hawthorne makes notations to himself, he does not break the narrative to do so. Rather, he reminds himself where to fill out his story, as if planning to copy this draft of it into another and perhaps final one, with certain descriptions added.
65 “quiet recess”: “Grimshawe,” in American Claimant Manuscripts, p. 470.
66 On Saturday, April 13: SH, diary, Apr. 13, 1861, Berg.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE SMELL OF GUNPOWDER
1 “My literary success”: NH to JTF, Feb. 27, 1861, C XVIII, p. 365.
2 “the example par excellence”: Poe, “Tale-Writing: Nathaniel Hawthorne,” p. 252.
3 “I am sensible”: NH to JTF, Jan. 30, 1863, C XVIII, p. 533.
4 “He always, I believe”: Ellery Channing to Ellen Channing, Oct. 30, 1851, MHS.
5 “The war continues”: NH to WDT, May 16, 1861, C XVIII, p. 379.
6 “what we are fighting”: NH to HB, May 26, 1861, C XVIII, p. 381.
7 “We seem to have little”: NH to Francis Bennoch, [circa July 1861], C XVIII, p. 388.
8 “I wish they would”: NH to WDT, May 26, 1861, C XVIII, p. 382.
9 “all we ought”: NH to HB, Oct. 12, 1861, C XVIII, p. 412.
10 “Every man of you”: NH to Henry Bright, Nov. 14, 1861, C XVIII, p. 421.
11 “If this is the literary tone”: See The Life of Lord Houghton, ed. T. Wemyss Reid (New York: Cassell, 1891), vol. 2, p. 76.
12 Hawthorne sent him: “Near Oxford” appeared in the October 1861 Atlantic 8, pp. 385–97, and his “Pilgrimage to Old Boston” appeared in the January 1862 Atlantic 9, pp. 88–101; JTF to NH, July 24, 1862, in Austin, Fields of the Atlantic Monthly,
p. 220.
13 “He allowed the photographer”: SH to JTF, Jan. 1, 1862, BPL.
14 “I have no features”: SH to AF, Dec. 8, 1861, BPL.
15 “He says this”: Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), p. 262.
16 “take an antagonist”: “Chiefly About War Matters,” in Miscellaneous Prose and Verse, C XXIII, pp. 412–13.
17 Next day, Hawthorne: See Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher, pp. 258–82; N. P. Willis, (New York) Home Journal, Mar. 29 and Apr. 12, 1862.
18 “Set men face to face”: “Chiefly About War Matters,” in Miscellaneous Prose and Verse, C XXIII, p. 421. Hawthorne kept a travel journal, drawing on it for “Chiefly About War Matters” and “Northern Volunteers: From a Journal.” See, for example, UH to EH, Mar. 16, 1862, Rosary Hill, where Una Hawthorne mentions her father’s journal. Doubtless it was later destroyed, probably by him; in any event, I unfortunately have found no trace of it. Meantime, after years of neglect, his “Chiefly About War Matters” essay has sparked some response; see, for instance, Patrick Brancaccio, “ ‘Chiefly About War-matters’: Hawthorne’s Reluctant Prophecy,” in Essex Institute Historical Collections, 118 (Jan. 1982), pp. 59–66; Thomas R. Moore. “Hawthorne as Essayist in ‘Chiefly About War Matters,’ ” American Transcendental Quarterly 6 (1992), pp. 263–78; Grace Smith, “ ‘Chiefly About War Matters’: Hawthorne’s Swift Judgment of Lincoln,” American Transcendental Quarterly 15 (June 2001), pp. 149–52; or Nancy Bentley’s proleptic, wide-ranging discussion in The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 36–45. Hawthorne’s racism is the focus of Jean Fagan Yellin’s censorious “Hawthorne and the American National Sin,” in Daniel Peck, ed., The Green American Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 75–97, but she does not address “Chiefly About War Matters” here or in her subsequent revisions of the essay, published in Larry J. Reynolds, A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000). Thus, Daniel Aaron remains the best interpreter of Hawthorne and the Civil War. See Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), chap. 3.