This Day in Literary History (Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” Published)

March 16, 1850—Nathaniel Hawthorne, born on the Fourth of July, became the first author of a truly great novel with an American setting and themes with The Scarlet Letter, which was published on this date by William D. Ticknor & Co. (later renamed Ticknor & Fields).

His classic—expanded, at the suggestion of his publisher, from a short story into longer form—described one quintessentially American dilemma—the conflict between community mores and individual freedom—and was written in the face of another with particular relevance today: how to make money when you’ve lost your job.

Unlike 21st-century Americans, Hawthorne did not lose his job because of lying, cheating Wall Street types but because of lying, cheating political hacks. True, he wasn’t the convivial type in his post at the Salem Customs House. 

But, as Louise Hall Tharp noted in The Peabody Sisters of Salem, Hawthorne was innocent of unsubstantiated complaints used to oust him from his job: that he preferred fellow Democrats to Whigs; that his writings were overtly political; and even that he had been “loafing around with hard drinkers.”

Remarkably, the loss of employment freed Hawthorne to pursue his bliss. In six weeks, wearing what wife Sophia called the “shining look” he had in the throes of creative inspiration, he had crafted a “romance” (a term he preferred to “novel”) carefully plotted, deep with psychological overtones, and pointing the way toward a different form of national fiction that exchanged the simple form of allegory for the more ambiguous but richer mode of symbolism.

In the last decade, I’ve visited two Massachusetts sites associated with Hawthorne: the “Old Manse” in Concord, occupied by him and Sophia right after they were married, and the “House of the Seven Gables” in Salem, the inspiration for his follow-up to The Scarlet Letter.

Hawthorne was never really at home anywhere, though. In Concord, he was ideologically unsuited to the Transcendentalist impulse of fellow residents Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott.

And Salem may have been where Hawthorne was born, where he worked (at the Customs House, in the late 1840s) and where the Puritan ancestors who haunted his imagination (including one of the hanging judges of the Witchcraft Trials) had settled. 

But the novelist wanted to be rid of it at all costs. "I detest this town so much that I hate to go into the streets or to have the people see me,” he wrote.

That’s the kind of Gloomy Gus the melancholic writer was. Why was he so sensitive about having “the people see me”? 

A large proportion of those people, I gather, were women so startled by his good looks that they had to restrain themselves from openly staring. I can just hear all my male readers saying, “I don’t understand—what’s the problem with that?”

A college professor of mine who taught Hawthorne in an American literature class posted in his office a cartoon that depicted a crowd of Puritan women with dour faces and scarlet A’s on the breasts of their gowns—except for one female at the center, smelling broadly. She had an A+.

The humor aside, The Scarlet Letter features one of the most vibrant heroines in our entire national canon. In the triangle involving Hester Prynne, her lover, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, and her husband Roger Chillingworth, Hester alone emerges as persistently resilient, brave and unrevengeful.

In her collective biography of the Concord literati, American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever offers up editor and pioneering feminist Margaret Fuller as a possible model for Hester. 

Both women were outsiders because of scandalous affairs that produced children out of wedlock, but by the time he wrote his novel Hawthorne looked on Fuller with a good less sympathy than he did his fictional heroine.

A character is often far more an admixture of different real-life elements than biographers might admit. For certain aspects of Hester’s persona—her deep and abiding passion, her selflessness, the sense of initiative that sustains a sensitive, haunted lover—Hawthorne need have looked no further than Sophia.

This talented artist from a progressive family devoted herself to Hawthorne's needs and those of their three children. No better example can be found than in her reaction to her husband’s dismissal from his job.

Sophia more than fulfilled Nathaniel’s expectation that she would take the bad news “better than a man.” 

Once he finished telling her, according to Tharp, she opened up a drawer in her desk and presented him with $150, which she had managed to save through creating lamp shades and fire screens. She assured him that additional household economies she would practice would keep them going.

And so it occurred. Hawthorne was able to concentrate on a work that sold out its first-edition run of 2,500 copies in a mere two weeks, and that remains an indispensable text on the morally murky American past, with sins—sexuality that creates individual chaos, vengefulness and hypocrisy in the larger community—difficult, perhaps impossible, to expiate.

Massachusetts Travel Journal—Day Two (Minute Man National Park and Concord)

Breathless traveling from one end of this blustery, gray day to the other for me. After being fortified for the day by a great breakfast at my Lexington B&B, I headed toward Minute Man National Historical Park. This was what I had wanted to see the most yesterday anyway, and I felt as if I hadn’t even scratched the surface of this subject. I didn’t realize how right I was.

But first, a word of caution. For any prospective historical travelers reading this, make sure you understand that, if you hope to see certain sites associated with literary figures here, you do so before the end of October. Both the Ralph Waldo Emerson House and The Wayside—an establishment associated with three different Concord literary figures (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Lothrop/Margaret Sidney)—were closed for the season.

At some point, maybe later in the year, I’ll write about the two literary homes I did get to see—Orchard House, the home of the Alcott family for 20 years, and Hawthorne’s Old Manse. But for now, I’m going to concentrate on the sites associated with the Battles of Lexington and Concord that occurred on April 19, 1775.

Minute Man Park sprawls across several towns—Lexington, Lincoln (where the Visitors Center is located), and Concord. It’s fitting because, as Longfellow’s poem about Paul Revere’s ride indicates, the alarm was spread “to every Middlesex village and farm.”

Nowadays, historians decry Longfellow for taking poetic license. (One instance was “One if by land, two if by sea”—the signal was not meant for Revere, but was devised by him for others.) But when it comes to myth, everybody’s gotten into the act, from both sides of the historical spectrum. From the far right, the Militia Movement made its impact felt with the ghastly Oklahoma City bombing; from the far left, Michael Moore diminished any effectiveness he might have made in his case against George W. Bush by calling Iraqi insurgents/terrorists “the Revolution, the Minutemen.”

But visiting the park made me aware that there are two other ways that the events of Lexington and Concord can speak to us. One is the issue of intelligence gathering and dissemination; the other, how news is reported of atrocities.

If there’s one thing that the last decade has demonstrated to Americans, it’s the extreme inadequacy of our intelligence system. At the dawn of the American Revolution, the British and Americans struggled to set up their own networks, with varying degrees of success.

British General Thomas Gage sought to make use of several relatives of his American-born wife, Margaret, as well as a source far more insidious because he was so highly placed: Dr. Benjamin Church, a member of the patriot inner circle. After all that effort, however, everything came to naught. As Lt. Frederick MacKenzie of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers noted afterward: “The fact is, General Gage…had no conception the Rebels would oppose the King’s troops in the manner that they did.”

(Incidentally, MacKenzie is a fascinating study in his own right. The son of a Dublin merchant, he had received his first commission 20 years before. He drew the only contemporaneous map of the day’s events, and the diary he assiduously kept has likewise served historians trying to make sense of this chaotic day.)

One colonist who fared far better than Gage in creating an intelligence system was Dr. Joseph Warren. What a loss when this patriot was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. In the period leading up to the war, he had been one of the most intelligent, energetic and resourceful members of the Committees of Correspondence. He showed his talents anew in the 48 hours before that fateful day of April 19, 1775.

From an informer, Warren got wind that Gage was planning a raid on the rebel supplies in Concord. He immediately made plans to alert the two leading radicals, Samuel Adams and John Hancock. He sent William Dawes on one long, primarily land-based route, going through Brookline and Roxbury—but, because that route involved so much danger, he dispatched a second messenger, Paul Revere, going by boat until he mounted a waiting horse.

Both Dawes and Revere made it to Lexington, but it took a third rider—yet another surgeon, Samuel Prescott—to make it to Concord. Ten redcoats came upon the trio, around 1:30 am. Dawes wheeled around and got back to Lexington; Revere was detained by the British before being released without his horse; Prescott—who had been out courting a lady when he bumped into Revere and agreed to help out—got the news to the colonists in Concord.)

And now, about the atrocity stories.

Whoever fires the first shot in a war usually gets the onus for whatever happens next. (That’s why Abraham Lincoln was so careful to maneuver the South into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter.) Warren wanted to make sure that the news spread instantly about the British firing first.

The trouble was that at Lexington, people are still not sure who fired first. At North Bridge in Concord, at least one jumpy British soldier let loose with his rifle, against express orders not to shoot. Then all hell broke loose.

To spread news of the atrocities, Dr. Warren made sure riders were spreading the word as far as New York and Boston within 48 hours of the event, and that his version of the events (the British fired first, without provocation, in both instances) reached London on a fast ship, the Quero, by May 29—two weeks before General Gage’s account reached England.