Not because the tales and sketches of his second, “Old Manse,” period are greatly inferior to those of his original, elongated, and still somewhat murky “Salem” phase. But because the outlines of his life and literary interests are much clearer at this later moment; and because his thematic relation to the “transcendental” concerns of his Emerson-inspired 1840s is altogether manifest and plausible. Hawthorne republished and added to his miscellaneous Twice-told Tales in 1842 and again in 1851; but the story of his next significant literary venture is well and strategically told by the fully public and suitably arranged contents of his Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).

Nothing could be clearer, biographically, than the “break” in Hawthorne’s career just after the publication, finally, of a first collection. To be sure, many of his older interests continue through 1837 and 1838, with the latter year marked by the writing and publication of his four-part “Legends of the Province House,” only one of which (“Edward Randolph’s Portrait”) can be included in this volume. Unfortunately, as together those tales subject the ideology of the American Revolution to a degree of rhetorical and psychic scrutiny it has seldom received since; and further so, as their unrelenting irony all but makes up for the uncensored sentiment let loose in a fair number of domestic tales published at this time. But then a whole new range of contemporaneous—and strenuously intellectual—interests begins to develop.

Much of the worldly “intercourse” opened up by the Twice-told Tales requires no arcane research to discover. The signature of that work identified Hawthorne, as an author, to the notably intellectual Peabody sisters of Salem. To the least assertive of these sisters, Sophia, Hawthorne soon became engaged, even as the far more aggressive Elizabeth was working to advance his (perilous) claim to political patronage from the Jacksonian Democratic Party. Though the years 1839 and 1840 seem most clearly marked by the outpouring of love letters Hawthorne wrote to his fiancée while he held the uncongenial post of Customs Inspector for the Port of Boston, it is worth remembering that the first of Hawthorne’s extended works for children were also written at just this time; and that The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair (as this three-part history of Massachusetts was later to be entitled) offers a useful hint about the world Hawthorne had entered. Though the matter of the Puritans and of the Revolution was familiar and even backward-looking, the purpose was new, as Hawthorne clearly thought of his subtle but largely unironic re-retelling as a contribution to the reform of education, itself part of a larger “ferment” of protest which has seemed to define American social history in the 1840s. Evidently Hawthorne agreed with Horace Mann, the reformer about to marry yet another of the Peabody sisters, that it matters very much what children are given to read.

Other recognitions and agreements might not come so easily in Hawthorne’s new environment. Boston, including its intellectual suburbs of Unitarian Cambridge and Transcendental Concord, was a vastly wider, more vibrant and fluid world than Salem had ever been. Having invested many of his summers traveling around New England, and having pressed one of his tours as far as Detroit, Hawthorne was of course no Robin Molineux; he had even spent six months in 1836 in New England’s “metropolis,” editing the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. Such experiences could hardly fail to widen one’s horizon. But this was different. For Hawthorne was now, in fact if not by personal preference, a part of the political machine; like it or not, he had to socialize with Bancroft. And though he tried to stand aside from the current of transcendental Lectures and feminist Conversations, his new relations inevitably drew him in: Sophia was herself an ardent enthusiast of Emersonian idealism; and Elizabeth Peabody, who had been secretary to William Ellery Channing (Emerson’s Unitarian “bishop”) and then assistant at the notoriously experimental school of Bronson Alcott (Emerson’s Platonic “saint”), seemed to be at the center of everything connected with what people fell into calling “the Newness.” She even wrote some of the public relations material for Brook Farm, George Ripley’s transcendental commune at Roxbury, which she liked to describe as “Christ’s idea of society. ”

Abruptly enough, therefore, a studious, somewhat reclusive, and intensely shy young man and writer—younger in social experience than his thirty-five years—was set down in close proximity to the center of a self-conscious “Renaissance,” to which he would soon begin to make his own considerable contribution, but which was begun well before he arrived and would have been, even without his participation, one of the most significant intellectual and social awakenings in American history. Sooner or later our “moral historian” would have to estimate the mentality of his own generation of Transcendental Seekers, most of whom seemed more than a little puritanic still.

Yet it seems equally predictable that the public response did not come at once: over seventy tales and sketches had got themselves published by January 1839, but the new flood (of almost two dozen) does not begin until the middle of 1842. No doubt the unaccustomed routine of a Custom House was part of the reason for this long hiatus. So too the burden of physical labor Hawthorne exuberantly undertook when, unlike Emerson, he made himself a charter member of Brook Farm, in April 1841. Possibly sharing Ripley’s enthusiastic desire “to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists,” and certainly trying to establish a style of life that would permit an ill-paid author to support a wife, Hawthorne was nevertheless reporting by June that “this present life gives me an antipathy to pen and ink, even more than my Custom House experience did.” And though he continued in residence through the end of the year, his decision to leave is perfectly forecast in his observation that “a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dungheap ... as well as under a pile of money.” Equally relevant, however, is the available inference that it took Hawthorne a while to isolate his new center of thematic interest, that he in fact required the intellectual experience of Brook Farm to discover it.

Such is certainly the impression left by The Blithedale Romance, the most obvious and direct literary outcome of Hawthorne’s encounter with “the community” of Brook Farm. Though most criticism now rightly treats Miles Coverdale (the narrator of that later work) as an altogether ironic version of Hawthorne himself, it remains true that Coverdale redundantly speaks the sentiments of Hawthorne’s letters and notebooks from this period. And a significant stretch of intellectual biography seems plainly announced by Coverdale’s account of his initiation into the rhetoric of Newness:

 

I read interminably in Mr. Emerson’s Essays, the Dial, Carlyle’s works, George Sand’s romances, ... and other books which one or another of the brethren or sisterhood had brought with them. Agreeing in little else, most of these utterances were like the cry of some solitary sentinel, whose station was on the outposts of the advance-guard of human progression.... They were well adapted ... to pilgrims like ourselves, whose present bivouac was considerably farther into the waste of chaos than any mortal army of crusaders had ever marched before.

 

Not that the stay at Brook Farm absolutely originated Hawthorne’s experience of Emerson and his contemporaries, or that this brief list at all exhausts the extent of his eventual familiarity. Yet some deep structure of personal revelation seems abundantly clear: metaphorically, at least, it was indeed “but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.” And further, if more literally, we should be surprised if Hawthorne did not learn, from Ripley and others, the significant moral and literary history of their decision to begin human life anew.

Once again, however, it is the allusive texture of the tales themselves which best indicates Hawthorne’s newly updated thematic interest.