26 “I do not know”: SH to AF, July 1863, BPL.
27 “It is a new”: “Septimius Norton,” in Elixir of Life, p. 295.
28 “Life, which seems”: “Septimius Norton,” in Elixir of Life, p. 330.
29 “The Present, the Immediate”: “To a Friend,” in OOH, p. 4. However, compare this rationalization to the observation in the chapter from The Marble Faun, “Fragmentary Sentences”: “In weaving these mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we undertake a task resembling, in its perplexity, that of gathering up and piecing together the fragments of a letter, which has been torn and scattered to the winds. Many words of deep significance—many entire sentences, and those possibly the most important ones—have flown too far, on the winged breeze, to be recovered.” See The Marble Faun, p. 929. Hawthorne’s outlook hadn’t changed, but his mood had.
30 “negative,” “I am afraid”: SH to AF, Oct. 11, 1863, BPL.
31 “Una thinks”: MM to Horace Mann Jr., May 15, 1864, Antioch.
32 “He thus had no”: Conway, Life of Hawthorne, p. 206.
33 “How Thoreau would scorn”: NH to JTF, Oct. 24, 1863, C XVIII, p. 605.
34 But as Fields pressed … Let’s just call: See JTF to NH, Oct. 28, 1863, in Austin, Fields of the Atlantic Monthly, p. 232; NH to JTF, Dec. 9, 1863, C XVIII, p. 619.
35 Sophia guessed … “bedevilment”: SH to AF, Nov. 29, 1863, BPL.
36 “I am amazed”: SH to UH, Dec. 19, 1863, Berg.
37 “He cannot bear”: SH to UH, Dec. 19, 1863, Berg.
38 “He is not a very manageable”: SH to HB, Apr. 5, 1864, BY.
39 “amid the sloth of age”: “The Dolliver Romance,” in Elixir of Life, p. 460.
40 “virgin bloom”; “forlorn widow”: Silsbee, A Half-Century in Salem, p. 37; “The Dolliver Romance,” in Elixir of Life, p. 457. In another example of correspondence, Dolliver’s great-granddaughter, Pansie, is likely named for Posy Loring, daughter of Dr. George B. Loring; later in the manuscript, Hawthorne calls her Posie. Moreover, that Dolliver’s grandson was a devoted horticulturist reminds the Hawthorne reader of his uncle Robert Manning; that Dolliver is a man of medicine, or tries to be, recalls Nathaniel Peabody, SH’s father.
41 So old Dolliver: Why does Dolliver persist in drinking his elixir? Hawthorne wasn’t sure, although he seems to have intended another satire of reform: his hero, in trying to eradicate poverty or slavery or war, “would have destroyed the whole economy of the world.” Or, Hawthorne continues, perhaps he just wanted to “see how the American Union was going to succeed.” See “The Dolliver Romance,” in Elixir of Life, “Study 2,” p. 532; “Study 5,” p. 537. The Centenary editors have approximated the date of composition of these fragments; “Study 2” can be internally dated July 22, 1863, or later, by the fragment in the Huntington Library.
42 “I wish, with all”: SH to HB, Apr. 5, 1864, BY.
43 “I am tired”; And what avails: NH to Donald Grant Mitchell, Jan. 16, 1864, C XVIII, p. 632; NH to HWL, Jan. 2, 1864, C XVIII, p. 626.
44 “two jovial Publishers”: HWL to JTF, in The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hilen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), vol. 4, p. 380.
45 Hawthorne sat gazing: AF, diary, Jan. 9, 1864, MHS.
46 “I cannot help thinking”: MM to Horace Mann Jr., [Mar. 1864], Antioch.
47 “This mode of death”: The House of the Seven Gables, p. 613.
48 “Say to the Public”: NH to JTF, Feb. 25, 1864, C XVIII, p. 640.
49 Hawthorne was too weak: Conway, Life of Hawthorne, p. 210. See also UH to EH, Mar. 20, 1864, Rosary Hill.
50 “I think we could bear”: MM to Horace Mann Jr., June 6, 1864, UVA; Yesterdays, p. 117.
51 He was wraithlike; At night: MM to Horace Mann Jr., June 6, 1864, UVA; AF, diary, Mar. 28, 1864, MHS, quoted in M. A. De Wolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields (New York: Arno Press, 1974), p. 63; see also Yesterdays, p. 117; AF, diary, Mar. 28, 1864, MHS.
52 Hawthorne, however, felt better: NH to RH, Apr. 3, 1864, Rosary Hill.
53 Later he conveyed: See James C. Derby, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1884), pp. 345–46; Howe, Memories of a Hostess, p. 64; Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher, pp. 312–31.
54 The gleam had gone: SH to AF, [Apr. 18, 1864], BPL.
55 Yet he managed … stipulated: After Hawthorne’s death, Sophia Hawthorne discovered the bequest. See SH to FP, [June 1864], NHHS. See also SH to EH, Feb. 9, 1869, PE.
56 Years later, Rose: Memories, p. 477.
57 This pleased Sophia; But Sophia naively: See The Journals of Bronson Alcott, p. 362; SH to AF, [Apr. 19, 1864], BPL.
58 “He has become”: MM to Horace Mann Jr., May 15, 1864, Antioch.
59 “If sometimes it impels”: “Septimius Norton,” in Elixir of Life, p. 241
60 “He had the choice”: “The Dolliver Romance,” in Elixir of Life, p. 241
61 “Think of the delight”: AF, Mar. 28, 1864, MHS; Howe, Memories of a Hostess, p. 63.
62 “Men die, finally”: “Septimius Norton,” in Elixir of Life, p. 322.
63 “His death was a mystery”: Franklin B. Sanborn, ms. dated Aug. 28, 1901, Concord Free Public Library.
64 “A man’s days”: Annie Sawyer Downs, “Mr. Hawthorne, Mr. Thoreau, Miss Alcott, Mr. Emerson, and Me,” ed. Walter Harding, American Heritage 30:1 (Dec. 1978), p. 99.
65 The morning of Hawthorne’s funeral: EPP to [Mary Pickman Loring], May 23, 1864, courtesy Kent Bicknell.
66 “like a snow image”: Memories, p. 478.
67 “My father did not”: Memories, pp. 480, 478.
68 They stopped by Charles Street: Yesterdays, p. 122.
69 In private, he said: See SH to JTF, May 21, 1864, BPL: “Will you be kind enough to refrain from saying a word to my sisters about what Mr. Hawthorne said of fear of not becoming able to—of not being himself as before because on any such suggestion I fear my sister would talk of it to others and inevitably exaggerate.… And you know his mind had not yet a shadow—Oh I wish Dr. Holmes would not say he feared it. Why not leave him intact as he is.”
70 But the shark’s tooth: Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Hawthorne,” Atlantic Monthly 14 (July 1864), pp. 98–101. AF, diary, May 11, 1864, MHS.
71 Pierce signed: From a photograph of the register, courtesy Kent Bicknell.
72 “Happy the man”: The Blithedale Romance, p. 667.
73 It would be a boon … “Not in my day”: To Horatio Bridge, Pierce confided that Hawthorne had grown so weak he decided he’d call Sophia and Una to come to Plymouth (Personal Recollections, p. 178), but he told Sarah Webster that “I was much impressed with the idea that his journey of life might terminate nearer the sea, which he so much loved, than Dixville Notch,” which suggests he knew Hawthorne was dying. See FP to Sarah Webster, Mar. 18, 1868, UVA.
74 After Hawthorne’s death: See FP to Sarah Webster, Mar. 18, 1868, UVA; see also SH to Anne O’Gara, Sept. 4, 1864, Bancroft; Yesterdays, p. 123; Personal Recollections, pp. 176–79: my account of Hawthorne’s last days is taken from these.
75 Later that day, May 19: Nichols, Franklin Pierce p. 525. I have not discovered Nichols’s source or found further corroboration of the story, but despite his scant notes, Nichols is reliable in all other instances and is likely reliable here.
76 “I need not tell you”: Personal Recollections, p. 179.
EPILOGUE: THE PAINTED VEIL
1 “He peacefully closed”: The foregoing depends on MM to Horace Mann Jr., May 22, 1864, UVA; SH to Anne O’Gara, Sept. 4, 1864, Bancroft; EPP to Elizabeth Curson Hox
ie in The Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, p. 455; SH to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, May 19, 1867, Berg.
2 “Trifling details stood out”: JH, The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, ed. Edith Garrigues Hawthorne (New York: Macmillan, 1938), pp. 156–57.
3 “Sophia does not wish”: MM to Horace Mann Jr., May 22, 1864, UVA.
4 “cannot bear to think”: UH to James Freeman Clarke, [May 1864], MHS.
5 Sophia asked … Annie got: UH to AF, [May 1864], BPL.
6 “It looked like”: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 15, p. 59.
7 “We shall be alone”: [May 21, 1864], quoted in The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, p. 412.
8 Ebe Hawthorne was also: Sophia Hawthorne’s letter to EPP, May 25, 1864, Berg, has wrongly been interpreted to indicate that EPP did not attend the funeral; however, shortly after the funeral, SH described it to various persons in attendance, as if to offer them further consolation, which she clearly aims to do in the case of EPP. Moreover, in EPP to Samuel Foster Haven Jr., Elizabeth Peabody writes that she thought the funeral service lovely, adding that Emerson said “it did not sufficiently recognize the tragedy of his loss to our literature” (n.d., Haven Papers, AAS). Also EPP to Mary Loring, May 23, 1864, courtesy Kent Bicknell, makes her intention to attend the funeral clear.
9 He was the friend: MM to Horace Mann Jr., May 24, 1864, UVA.
10 Julian, his hand cold: SH to EPP, May 23, 1864, Berg.
11 Afterwards Sophia said: Louisa Alcott, diary, n.d., Houghton.
12 He died with one hundred twenty: Nathaniel Hawthorne, probate record 33844, Archives and Records, Supreme Judicial Court, Boston, Mass.
13 “I thought I could”: Memories, p. 456. The original letter contains slight variations. See RWE to SH, July 11 [1864], Morgan.
14 “tragic element”: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 15, pp. 59–60.
15 “I don’t think people”: James Russell Lowell to JTF, Sept. 7, 1868, Huntington.
16 “It was pleasant”: Conway, Autobiography, Memories, and Experiences, vol. 1, p. 386.
17 “We are always finding”: William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintances, ed. David Hiatt and Edwin Cady (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), p. 52.
18 “I never dared”: SH to unknown, [June? 1864?], Berg.
19 But not everyone: Charles King Newcomb, The Journals of Charles King Newcomb, ed. Judith Kennedy Johnson (Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1946), p. 151; Caroline Healey Dall, diary, June 3, 1864, MHS; Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, Sept. 6, 1864, bMS Am 1088.2, box 2, Houghton; The Selected Letters of Louisa Alcott, p. 321.
20 “There can be companionship”: George S. Hillard, “The English Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Atlantic Monthly 26:155 (Sept. 1870), p. 266.
21 “He was a man”: MM to Horace Mann Jr., May 22, 1864, UVA.
22 “Nobody would think”: NH to SH, Jan. 1, 1840, C XV, p. 395.
23 James T. Fields swiftly: Today Fields’s skill at making Hawthorne a “canonical” author is the subject of debate and concern, beginning with Jane Tompkins’s fine essay in Sensational Designs; see also Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). Partly as a consequence of Hawthorne’s undiminished popularity—his work has never suffered the eclipses that have occasionally shadowed Melville or James or Wharton—Hawthorne has become the canonical dead white male author that critics, particularly academic ones, love to hate, for his continuous popularity suggests, among other things, that his work confirms and constructs even while it undermines the “dominant ideologies” that presumably guarantee popularity.
24 “Is he human?”: Curtis, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” p. 354.
25 “What other man”: Curtis, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” p. 354.
26 “I said probably”: George William Curtis to Richard C. Manning, June 18, 1864, PE.
27 “His genius continually”: Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, Sept. 6, 1864, bMS Am 1088.2, box 2, Houghton.
Selected Bibliography
(Excluding archival or primary material and reviews listed in the Notes)
Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.
Adams, Richard P. “Hawthorne’s Provincial Tales.” New England Quarterly 30 (1957): 39–57.
Adkins, Nelson F. “The Early Projected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 39 (1945): 119–55.
———. “Notes on the Hawthorne Canon.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 60 (1966): 364–65.
Alcott, Bronson. The Journals of Bronson Alcott. Ed. Odell Shephard. Boston: Little Brown, 1938.
Alcott, Louisa May. Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Eds. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987.
Armstrong, Margaret. Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Pilgrim. New York: Macmillan, 1938.
Arvin, Newton. Hawthorne. Boston: Little, Brown, 1929.
Austin, James C. Fields of “The Atlantic Monthly”: Letters to an Editor, 1861–1870. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1953.
Bacon, Theodore. Delia Bacon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888.
Baker, Jean H. Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Baker, Paul R. The Fortunate Pilgrims: Americans in Italy, 1800–1864. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.
Bartlett, David W. The Life of General Franklin Pierce, of New-Hampshire, the Democratic President of the United States. Buffalo, N.Y.: G.H. Derby and Co., 1852.
Batchelor, George. “The Salem of Hawthorne’s Time.” Salem Gazette, March 11 and 18, 1887. Reprinted in Essex Institute Historical Collections 84 (January 1948): 64–9.
Baym, Nina. “Hawthorne and His Mother: A Biographical Speculation.” American Literature 54 (1982): 1–27.
———. The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976.
Bell, Millicent. Hawthorne’s View of the Artist. Albany, N.Y.: State University, 1962.
———. “The Marble Faun and the Waste of History.” Southern Review 35 (spring 1999): 354–70.
Bennoch, Francis. Poems, Lyrics, Songs and Sonnets. London: Hardwicke and Bogue, 1877.
———. “A Week’s Vagabondage with Nathaniel Hawthorne,” with introduction by T. A. J. Burnett. In The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1971, ed. C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. Englewood, Colo.: Microcard Editions, 1971.
Bensick, Carole Marie. La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in “Rappaccini’s Daughter. ” New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985.
Bentley, Nancy. The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Bentley, William. The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., 1784–1819. 4 vols. 1905. Reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Office of “The Scarlet Letter.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Bonham, Valerie. A Joyous Service: The Clewer Sisters & Their Work. Windsor, England: Valerie Bonham and the Community of St. John the Baptist, 1989.
Brancaccio, Patrick. “ ‘The Black Man’s Paradise’: Hawthorne’s Editing of the Journal of an African Cruiser.” New England Quarterly 53 (1980): 23–41.
———. “ ‘Chiefly About War-matters’: Hawthorne’s Reluctant Prophecy.” Essex Institute Historical Collections 118 (January 1982): 59–66.
Braude, Ann. Radical Sp
irits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
Bremer, Frederika. The Homes of the New World; Impressions of America. Trans. Mary Howitt. 2 vols. 1853. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968.
Bridge, Horatio. Journal of an African Cruiser. Ed. Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845.
Bright, Henry. Happy Country This America: The Travel Diary of Henry Arthur Bright. Ed. Anne Ehrenpreis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978.
Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993.
———. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Brooks, Van Wyck. The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958.
Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Cameron, Kenneth, ed. Hawthorne among His Contemporaries. Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental, 1968.
Cameron, Sharon. The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
Capper, Charles. Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Carton, Evan. Hawthorne’s Transformations. New York: Twayne, 1992.
———. The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Caspar, Scott. “The Two Lives of Franklin Pierce.” American Literary History 5 (summer 1993): 203–30.
Cather, Willa. Not under Forty. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.
Channing, William Ellery. Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. Boston: Charles Goodspeed, 1902.
Channing, William Henry. “Mosses from an Old Manse.” Harbinger 3 (June 27, 1846): 43–4.
Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America. Ed. Matthew Bruccoli. Columbus: Ohio State University, 1968.
Clark, C. E. Frazer, Jr. “ ‘The Interrupted Nuptials,’ A Question of Attribution.” In The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1971, ed. C. E. Frazer, Jr. Englewood, Colo.: Microcard Editions, 1971.
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