The English Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne

First published: 1870; 1941

Type of work: Journals

Critical Evaluation:

As a result of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s close friendship with President Franklin Pierce for whom he had written a successful campaign biography, he was appointed United States Consul to Liverpool in 1853. Hawthorne eagerly anticipated his first trip abroad, although he hated to leave his pleasant home in Concord.

During the years Hawthorne was in England, 1853-1858, he did no creative writing, largely because he was too busy with his duties as consul and also because he spent much time touring England, Scotland, and Wales. But he did keep an extensive notebook of his English sojourn, and this journal of 300,000 words, comprising seven manuscript volumes, is what has come down to us as THE ENGLISH NOTEBOOKS.

THE ENGLISH NOTEBOOKS has had a curious history. It was first published posthumously in 1870 as PASSAGES FROM THE ENGLISH NOTEBOOKS, edited by Hawthorne’s wife Sophia. But this edition was a bowdlerized version. To abide by standards of Victorian taste, Mrs. Hawthorne very carefully revised her husband’s manuscripts, superimposing an aura of decorum on the whole book. She made stylistic revisions, deleting colloquialisms or substituting genteel language for Hawthorne’s more commonplace terminology; she omitted passages in which mundane, unsavory, or crude subjects were treated; she withheld passages which were too harsh on England and on various English contemporaries of Hawthorne; and she struck out those which gave too personal an account of the Hawthorne family. Though Sophia’s version of the journals was better than nothing, obviously it cast deceptive shadows on the true personality of her husband.

It was not until the work of the late Randall Stewart that THE ENGLISH NOTEBOOKS was published in its authentic form. Stewart’s edition, made possible by infrared light as well as his own deft scholarly judgment, gives us Hawthorne’s own words and thereby not only gives us a more candid look at the author’s view of England and its people but also presents us with a Hawthorne who is more human, more worldly in interests—in short, more alive—than the rather stolid personage of Sophia’s rendition. The notebooks as edited by Stewart are now the standard edition.

The notebooks are not only a fascinating, detailed account of many aspects of England—its topography, the customs of its people, the splendors of its historic buildings—but also an important disclosure of a nineteenth century American’s feelings toward England. Hawthorne’s reaction to the mother country was in part unfavorable. As Professor Stewart points out in his introduction, such a bias was not uncommon among Americans of that day, for a strong patriotism augmented by the Revolution and the War of 1812 still lingered in this country. England was still something of a foe. Moreover, there was much supercilious criticism of America by the British in many English books and periodicals that criticized and satirized America and her customs. As a result, in the notebooks Hawthorne asserts America’s superiority over England whenever he can. He writes of the superiority of American women over their “gross” English counterparts; he praises the common American man for knowing more of political happenings than the English countryman; he even feels American natural scenery, though not as richly verdant as that in England, is superior. He rarely wearies of lightly scoffing at the diminutive lakes, rivers, and mountains he sees in England. And he notes the relative lack of brooks and streams in England as compared to those found in New England.

But there was also much about England that attracted Hawthorne. He loved the beauties of nature, such as the luxuriant hedge rows, and felt in some ways more akin to this mild, domesticated nature than to his own rugged New England terrain. His romantic appetite for old ruins in picturesque settings was also satisfied. Repeatedly he describes ivy-covered ruins and marvels over the hazy, antiquated atmosphere surrounding them. He also cherishes his visits to homes of famous deceased English authors.

The major attraction England held for Hawthorne, however, is less tangible than the others. Despite the statement he once made that New England was all his heart could hold, he was possessed by the haunting feeling of ancestral bondage to England. He had always had a keen sense of the past, a fact which is evident both in his fiction and in his inherent sense of guilt over the misguided role some of his ancestors had played in the Salem witchcraft trials. Being keenly conscious of ancestry and the past, Hawthorne felt that his going to England was in a way representative of the Hawthorne line returning to its original home, from which his forefathers had departed in 1635. The very thought of finding a gravestone there with his family name on it excited him. This theme of the ancestral tie appears throughout the notebooks and was later to be the subject of two of the fragmentary novels he left at his death. THE ANCESTRAL FOOTSTEP and DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET.

Thus, THE ENGLISH NOTEBOOKS shows Hawthorne’s feelings toward England to be ambivalent. While criticizing many aspects of England, he also found much to admire in this land which held a mysterious claim on his affections.

Since Hawthorne made it a practice to make notebook entries of practically everything he noticed, it is impossible in a limited space to cover the wide range of material he included. But four major categories of his jottings may be distinguished and treated in some detail.

First, much of the notebooks is given over to detailed accounts of side trips which Hawthorne and his family took throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. There were the two visits to the Scottish Highlands, the leisurely tours of the Cumberland lake country, the excursions to such well-known attractions as Blenheim, and the frequent journeys to London. Second, and of necessity related to the first, there are many passages describing Hawthorne’s visits to homes of famous deceased authors, among them Shakespeare, Scott, Dr. Johnson, and Southey and also encounters with illustrious English personages still living. Many of the latter occasions were simply brief meetings; others developed into fast friendships. He saw Macaulay at a dinner and Disraeli at the House of Commons, and he observed Tennyson at an art exhibition at Old Trafford but was too shy to introduce himself to the redoubtable poet laureate. He became friends, however, with Leigh Hunt, a “beautiful and venerable” old man, and especially with Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Hawthornes’ friendship with the Brownings was to continue into their Italian days, from 1858 to 1860.

The third category of Hawthorne’s recordings in the notebooks is directly related to his published writings. Although he wrote no fiction during his years in England, he was laying the groundwork for later creative work. In the first place, his later collection of essays on England, OUR OLD HOME, borrowed heavily from his notebook entries. Such essays as “Leamington Spa,” “Lichfield and Uttoxeter,” and “Outside Glimpses of English Poverty” closely followed his notebook accounts.

Moreover, many of the observations recorded in the notebooks were later used in THE MARBLE FAUN and the fragmentary novels, THE ANCESTRAL FOOTSTEP, DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET, SEPTIMIUS FELTON, and THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE. For example, an attractive, exotic-looking Jewess Hawthorne observed at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in 1856 became the prototype for the enigmatic Miriam of THE MARBLE FAUN. An imprint in stone somewhat resembling a footprint at Smithell’s Hall, said to be that of a Protestant martyr who stamped his foot in protest against religious injustice during Bloody Mary’s reign, became the germ of THE ANCESTRAL FOOTSTEP. Fascinated by the way moss on English tombstones served to bring out the inscriptions and thereby prolong the memory of the deceased, Hawthorne used this phenomenon in both SEPTIMIUS FELTON and DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET. A venerable yew tree which Hawthorne observed in a churchyard at Eastham was later used in DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET as a symbol of the lingering influence of the past on the present. The luxuriant English gardens seemed to Hawthorne to tempt man to withdraw from life and seclude himself in their protective sanctuaries, an idea he later introduced into his unfinished novels. A rare flower, supposedly everlasting, presented to Sophia by a gardener at the hot houses at Eaton Hall became a symbol of earthly immortality in SEPTIMIUS FELTON and THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE. In short, the notebooks are a storehouse of raw materials which Hawthorne molded into characters, settings, plot elements, and symbols in his later fiction.

Finally, and perhaps ultimately most important, THE ENGLISH NOTEBOOKS reveals Hawthorne the man. Lurking in the shadows is Hawthorne the romancer; but in the limelight is the man who loved playing parlor games with his family on cold winter nights, who longed to smoke a cigar with Tennyson, who was simultaneously aroused and repulsed by the sensuous Jewess, who performed his mundane duties of the consulate with diligence yet weariness, and who was moved by the grandeur of English cathedrals but felt strong yearnings for the simpler church services of his Puritan heritage stirring within him. This is the Hawthorne who emerges from the notebooks, a rich portrait which belies the dated picture of him as a brooding, almost unworldy recluse.

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