Nathaniel Hawthorne
subject: Nathaniel Hawthorne
description: Salem-born author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) lived in Concord at three different periods of his life—from 1842 to 1845, from 1852 to 1853, and from 1860 until his death in 1864. On July 9, 1842, Hawthorne married Sophia Amelia Peabody in Boston and brought her to the Manse in Concord to live. At the urging of Elizabeth Hoar and Emerson, he had rented the old house, which stood vacant following the death in 1841 of Ezra Ripley. Before the newlyweds moved in, Elizabeth Hoar and Cynthia Thoreau (Henry’s mother) prepared the house for their arrival. The Hawthornes were blissfully happy in the Manse. They delighted in the beauty of the Concord landscape and in the amusements it offered. Una, the first of their three children, was born here in 1844. Moreover, although shy, Hawthorne enjoyed the company of Thoreau, Ellery Channing, and other local residents, and of visitors as well. Emerson and Hawthorne did not readily warm up to one another. The two were temperamentally and intellectually dissimilar. Hawthorne’s reticence made him difficult to get to know. Furthermore, Emerson did not particularly admire Hawthorne’s writing, which he felt lacked substance, going so far as to describe it in one journal entry as “not good for anything.” For his part, Hawthorne was impatient with the mystical vagueness of Transcendentalism and its chief proponent. He wrote in his journal on August 15, 1842 of Emerson as “the mystic, stretching his hand out of cloud-land, in vain search for something real … a great searcher for facts; but they seem to melt away and become unsubstantial in his grasp.” In an effort to break down the barriers that hindered their friendship, Emerson asked Hawthorne to make a two-day walking trip to the Shaker village in Harvard, Massachusetts, in October of 1842. If forging a close relationship was the object of the excursion, it was a failure. However, it did provide an opportunity for the two to come to a better understanding of one another. Despite Emers…
creator: Mayall
publisher: Concord Free Public Library
date: 1860
rights: All materials courtesy of the William Munroe Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library