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Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography
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Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne
1804-1864
ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS
William Hathorne, the ancestor of America's
greatest prose writer, sailed at the age of twenty-three from England on
the ship Arbella with John Winthrop, and finally settled at
Salem, Massachusetts. He brought with him a copy of Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia, a very unusual book for the library of a New England Puritan.
John Hathorne, a son of the first settler, was a judge of the poor
creatures who were put to death as witches at Salem in 1692. The great
romance writer says that this ancestor "made himself so conspicuous in the
martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left
a stain upon him. ...I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby
take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by
them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the
race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and
henceforth removed." Tradition says that the husband of one of the tortured
victims appealed to God to avenge her sufferings and murder. Probably the
ancestral curse hanging over The House of the Seven Gables would not have
been so vividly conceived, if such a curse had not been traditional in the
Hawthorne family.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the sixth in descent from the first New England
ancestor, and the first of his family to add a "w" to his name, was born in
Salem in 1804. His father, a sea captain, died of a fever at a foreign port
in 1808. Hawthorne's mother was twenty-seven years old at this time, and
for forty years after this sad event, she usually took her meals in her own
room away from her three children. Everybody in that household became
accustomed to loneliness. At the age of fourteen, the boy went to live for
a while on the shore of Sebago Lake, Maine. "I lived in Maine," he said,
"like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was
there I got my cursed habits of solitude." Shyness and aversion to meeting
people became marked characteristics.
His solitariness predisposed him to reading, and we are told that Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress and Shakespeare's plays were special favorites.
Spenser's Faerie Queene was the first book that he bought with his own
money. Bunyan and Spenser probably fostered his love of the allegorical
method of presenting truth, a method that is in evidence in the bulk of
Hawthorne's work. He even called his daughter Una, after one of Spenser's
allegorical heroines, and, following the suggestion in the _Faerie Queene_,
gave the name of "Lion" to the large cat that came to her as a playmate.
At the age of seventeen, Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College, Maine, where he
met such students as Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, and Horatio Bridge, in
after years a naval officer, who published in 1893 a delightful volume
called Personal Reminiscences of Nathaniel Hawthorne. These friends
changed the course of Hawthorne's life. In his dedication of The Snow
Image to Bridge in 1850, Hawthorne says, "If anybody is responsible for my
being at this day an author, it is yourself."
LITERARY APPRENTICESHIP
After leaving college, Milton spent nearly six
years in studious retirement; but Hawthorne after graduating at Bowdoin, in
1825, passed in seclusion at Salem a period twice as long. Here he lived
the life of a recluse, frequently postponing his walks until after dark. He
was busy serving his apprenticeship as an author. In 1828 he paid one
hundred dollars for the publication of Fanshawe, an unsuccessful short
romance. In mortification he burned the unsold copies, and his rejected
short stories often shared the same fate. He was so depressed that in 1836
his friend Bridge went quietly to a publisher and by guaranteeing him
against loss induced him to bring out Hawthorne's volume entitled
Twice-Told Tales.
The Peabodys of Salem then invited the author to their home, where he met
the artistic Miss Sophia Peabody, who made an illustration for his fine
historical story, The Gentle Boy. Of her he wrote, "She is a flower to be
worn in no man's bosom, but was lent from Heaven to show the possibilities
of the human soul." We find that not long after he wrote in his American
Note-Books:
"All that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a
dream,--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,--then we begin
to be,--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity."
He was thinking of Sophia Peabody's creative touch, for he had become
engaged to her.
Fired with the ambition of making enough money to enable him to marry, he
secured a subordinate position in the Boston customhouse, from which the
spoils system was soon responsible for his discharge. He then invested in
Brook Farm a thousand dollars which he had saved, thinking that this would
prove a home to which he could bring his future wife and combine work and
writing in an ideal way. A year's trial of this life convinced him of his
mistake. He was then thirty eight, and much poorer for his last experiment;
but he withdrew and in a few months married Miss Peabody and took her to
live in the famous Old Manse at Concord. The first entry in his American
Note-Books after this transforming event is:
"And what is there to write about? Happiness has no succession of events,
because it is a part of eternity, and we have been living in eternity
ever since we came to this old manse. Like Enoch we seem to have been
translated to the other state of being, without having passed through
death."
The history of American literature can record no happier marriage and no
more idyllic life than this couple lived for nearly four years in the Old
Manse. While residing here, Hawthorne wrote another volume, known as
Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The only serpent to enter that Eden was
poverty. Hawthorne's pen could not support his family. He found himself in
debt before he had finished his fourth year in Concord. Moncure D. Conway,
writing Hawthorne's Life in 1890, the year before American authors were
protected by international copyright, says, "In no case has literature,
pure and simple, ever supported an American author, unless, possibly, if he
were a bachelor." Hawthorne's college friends, Bridge and Pierce, came to
his assistance, and used their influence with President Polk to secure for
Hawthorne the position of surveyor of customs at Salem, with a yearly
salary of twelve hundred dollars.
HIS PRIME AND LATER YEARS
He kept his position as head customs officer at
Salem for three years. Soon after President Taylor was inaugurated in 1849,
the spoils system again secured Hawthorne's removal. When he came home
dejected with this news, his wife smiled and said, "Oh, then you can write
your book!" The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, was the result. The
publisher printed five thousand copies, all that he had ever expected to
sell, and then ordered the type to be distributed at once. Finding in ten
days, however, that every copy had been sold, he gave the order to have the
type reset and permanent plates made. Hawthorne had at last, at the age of
forty-six, become one of the greatest writers of English prose romance.
From this time he wrote but few short tales.
He left Salem in the year of the publication of The Scarlet Letter, never
again to return to it as a place of residence, although his pen continued
to help immortalize his birthplace.
In 1852 he bought of Bronson Alcott in Concord a house since known as the
"Wayside." This was to be Hawthorne's American home during his remaining
years. Here he had a tower room so constructed as to be well-nigh
inaccessible to visitors, and he also had a romantic study bower built in
the pine trees on a hill back of his house.
His college friend, Pierce, was inaugurated President of the United States
in 1853, and he appointed Hawthorne consul at Liverpool. This consulship
then netted the holder between $5000 and $7000 a year. After nearly four
years' service in this position, he resigned and traveled in Europe with
his family. They lived in Rome sufficiently long for him to absorb the
local color for his romance of The Marble Faun. He remained abroad for
seven years. The record of his travels and impressions may be found in his
_English Note-Books_ and in his French and Italian Note-Books. Our Old
Home, a volume based on his English Note-Books, is a more finished
account of his thoughts and experiences in England.
In 1860 he returned quietly to his Concord home. His health was failing,
but he promised to write for the Atlantic Monthly another romance, called
The Dolliver Romance. This, however, was never finished, and The Marble
Faun remains the last of his great romances. His health continued to fail,
and in May, 1864, Pierce, thinking that a trip might prove beneficial,
started with him on a journey to the White Mountains. Hawthorne retired for
the night at the hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and the next morning
Pierce found that Hawthorne's wish of dying unawares in his sleep had been
gratified. He had passed away before the completion of his fifty-ninth
year. He was buried underneath the pines in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery at
Concord. His classmate, Longfellow, wrote:
"There in seclusion and remote from men,
The wizard hand lies cold."
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