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 Emerson’s opinion of Hawthorne’s work, between leaving the Manse in 1845 and returning to Concord in 1852, Hawthorne finally achieved recognition as a major American author. Until 1850, he had served a long, slow literary apprenticeship and made a modest reputation based on stories first published in gift books and periodicals and then collected in book form. His situation changed radically when Ticknor, Reed and Fields (later Ticknor and Fields)—America’s foremost literary publishers—added him to their stable of New England authors. With the publication of The Scarlet Letter, his first romance, in 1850, they became his primary publishers. Early in June of 1852, Hawthorne moved his family back to Concord, where he and Sophia had bought and refurbished the Alcotts’ first house on Lexington Road. Formerly called Hillside, the house was renamed the Wayside. In 1852, Franklin Pierce, the Democratic nominee for the presidency and Hawthorne’s friend from Bowdoin College days, asked Hawthorne to write a campaign biography. Hawthorne complied. Pierce won the election in November, 1852, opening up the possibility of political appointment for Hawthorne. The Senate confirmed Pierce’s appointment of Hawthorne to the American consulship at Liverpool on March 26, 1853. This post was particularly attractive because it offered the greatest financial remuneration of all the offices that Pierce might have bestowed—a benefit that Hawthorne acknowledged without embarrassment. Hawthorne’s campaign biography of Pierce and subsequent involvement in Pierce’s administration disturbed Emerson and others in Concord who objected to the slavery interests with which Pierce was allied. Hawthorne died in May of 1864. Although repelled by Hawthorne’s personal and political loyalty to Franklin Pierce, Emerson served as a pallbearer at his funeral on May 23rd. In the journal entry for the following day, he revealed sorrow over never having gotten close enough to Hawthorne truly to appreciate him: “I have found in his death a surprise and a disappointment. I thought him a greater man than any of his works betray, that there was still a great deal of work in him, and that he might one day show a purer power … It would have been a happiness, doubtless to both of us, to have come into habits of unreserved intercourse. It was easy to talk with him … only, he said so little, that I talked too much … Now it appears that I waited too long. Lately, he had removed himself the more by the indignation his perverse politics and unfortunate friendship for that paltry Franklin Pierce awaked,—though it rather moved pity for Hawthorne, and the assured belief that he would outlive it, and come out right at last.”
All materials courtesy of the William Munroe Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library