Today’s Almanac March 15, 2010-Part 1
Hawthorne about the time of his marriage to Sophia Peabody.
On March 16, 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, widely regarded as the first great American novel was published. Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, a member of an old family that, much to his chagrin and embracement, included one of the judges of the Salem Witch Trials. He later added a w to the spelling of the family name in a vain attempt to disguise the connection. After his sea captain father died when he was two, his family was fostered with wealthy local relatives who saw that the boy was educated Bowden College in Maine, which aspired to be the Harvard of the North and which was considerably cheaper than the Harvard of Massachusetts. Among his classmates were lifelong friends Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce. A shy and brooding young man, but strikingly handsome, he wished only to write. A Democrat in ultra Whig Massachusetts he was able to secure political appointments at the Boston Custom House to support him as he wrote. He published an undistinguished first novel anonymously and sold short stories to various literary magazines while boarding His first collection of short stories Twice-Told Tales drew local interest in Boston. He began to move in the intellectual orbit of the emerging Transcendentalists. He courted Elizabeth, the eldest of the brilliant Peabody Sisters, but to everyone’s surprise, especially the heart broken Elizabeth, proposed to her frail sister Sophia, an artist. The Peabodys were always in a condition of dire genteel poverty. Hawthorne decided to raise money for his marriage by investing a $1000 and joining the Brook Farm community. He was put in charge of the manure pile. It was not a happy experience and he soon departed, but burlesqued the community later in his Blithedale Romance. The couple married in 1842 anyway and moved to the epicenter of Transcendental life, Concord where they lived for three years in The Old Manse, latter the home of Longfellow. While there he completed a second story collection Mosses from an Old Manse The couple were madly in love and devoted to each other. In 1846 with the return of the Democrats to power in Washington, Hawthorne got the lucrative appointment as Inspector of Revenue at the Port of Salem. The move back to his-and Sophia’s-home town was a mixed blessing. On one hand his growing family was secure. On the other hand the dreary duties of the custom house sapped his energy for writing. But he did have time to explore the legacy of Puritan morality. When the Whig’s return ousted him from his position, he turned those musings into The Scarlet Letter. The shocking tale of the noble but fallen Hester Prynne and the tormented Rev. Dimmsdale, as sexually predatory preacher who is the cause of Hester’s shame, was a literary sensation and one of the first American best sellers. More than 2,500 copies flew off of bookstore shelves in the first ten days. Hawthorne moved his family to a farm house near Lenox in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts to dedicate himself to writing. While there he met and became fast friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and Herman Melville, to whom he became a mentor. During these years he completed The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and his collection of classic mythology for children, The Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. Summers in the mountains were pleasant but winters brutal and lonely. The family moved once again, this time back to Concord into the old home of Branson Alcott where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were neighbors and close friends. He named the house The Wayside. He also found time to complete a campaign biography for old pal Franklin Pierce. When Pierce won the Presidency, Hawthorne was rewarded with appointment as United States Consul in Liverpool. After his appointment lapsed with the Pierce administration Hawthorne and Sophie made the grand tour of Europe before returning to Concord and the Wayside. He completed and published the Marble Faun in 1860 and was working sporadically on several other romances. But Hawthorne’s health was failing. In 1864 Pierce took him back to the Berkshires to restore his health. Hawthorne died there with his old friend at his bedside at Plymouth, New Hampshire on May 18, 1864. At his funeral in Concord Longfellow, Emerson, Alcott, and Holmes were among his pallbearers. Sophia died in London seven years later. In 2006 her remains and those of their daughter Una were relocated to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord and laid next to Hawthorn’s.