The Portable Hawthorne

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

 

I - THE TALES 1830-1852

EDITOR’S NOTE

MY KINSMAN, MAJOR MOLINEUX 1832

ROGER MALVIN’S BURIAL 1832

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 1835

THE MINISTER’S BLACK VEIL - A PARABLE 1836

THE MAN OF ADAMANT - AN APOLOGUE 1837

THE BIRTH-MARK 1843

RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER - FROM THE WRITINGS OF AUBÉPINE 1844

PREFACES - FROM “THE old MANSE” 1846

TO TWICE-TOLD TALES 1851

TO THE SNOW-IMAGE 1852 - To Horatio Bridge, Esq., U.S.N.

 

II - THE SCARLET LETTER 1850

EDITOR’S NOTE

I - THE PRISON-DOOR

II - THE MARKET-PLACE

III - THE RECOGNITION

IV - THE INTERVIEW

V - HESTER AT HER NEEDLE

VI - PEARL

VII - THE GOVERNOR’S HALL

VIII - THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER

IX - THE LEECH

X - THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT

XI - THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

XII - THE MINISTER’S VIGIL

XIII - ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER

XIV - HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN

XV - HESTER AND PEARL

XVI - A FOREST WALK

XVII - THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER

XVIII - A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE

XIX - THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE

XX - THE MINISTER IN A MAZE

XXI - THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY

XXII - THE PROCESSION

XXIII - THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER

XXIV - CONCLUSION

 

III - THE PUBLISHED ROMANCES 1851-1860

EDITOR’S NOTE

FROM THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES 1851

FROM THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE 1852

FROM THE MARBLE FAUN 1860

 

IV - THE EUROPEAN JOURNALS 1853-1860

EDITOR’S NOTE

FROM THE ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND ITALIAN JOURNALS

 

V - THE LAST YEARS 1860-1864

EDITOR’S NOTE

PASSAGES FROM THE LETTERS AND THE UNFINISHED ROMANCES

 

Suggestions for Further Reading

001

THE PORTABLE HAWTHORNE

Best known today for his enigmatic tales and the short novel called The Scarlet Letter, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was born in Salem, Massachusetts, at the dawn of the nineteenth century. After graduating from Bowdoin College, in 1825, he published his first romance, Fanshawe, and, when that failed, turned to writing short stories and prose sketches that, over the next two decades, gradually made him known in America and England. The Scarlet Letter appeared in 1850, followed soon after by The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, each of which increased his international renown. The next seven years he spent with his family in Europe, first as U.S. consul in Liverpool, then as a resident tourist on the Continent. Just prior to the publication of The Marble Faun, his last completed romance, he returned to his home in Concord, Massachusetts, where he spent the remaining four years of his life preparing excerpts from his English journals for publication while trying, unsuccessfully, to finish two more romances, based in part on his years in Europe. After a period of declining health, he died before his sixtieth birthday, while traveling in New Hampshire with his old college friend Franklin Pierce.

 

WILLIAM c. SPENGEMANN is the Hale Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of English Emeritus at Dartmouth College. His books include Mark Twain and the Backwoods Angel, The Adventurous Muse, The Forms of Autobiography, A Mirror for Americanists, and A New World of Words. He is also the editor of three Penguin Classics: Henry James’s The American, Herman Melville’s Pierre, and, with Jessica F. Roberts, Nineteenth Century American Poetry.

002

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This edition first published in Penguin Books 2005

 

 

Selection, introduction and notes copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2005

All rights reserved

 

The text of the selections in this book is that established by The Centenary Edition of the Works of
Nathaniel Hawthorne published by the Ohio State University Center for Textual Studies and Ohio State
University Press. The selections are from the volumes entitled The Scarlet Letter, The House of the
Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe, The Marble Faun, The American Notebooks,
Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales, The American
Claimant Manuscripts, The French and Italian Notebooks, The Letters 1857-1864, The English
Notebooks 1853-1856, and The English Notebooks 1856-1860. Copyright © 1962, 1964, 1965,
1968, 1972, 1974, 1977, 1980, 1987, 1997 by Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved.

 

Illustrations from Portraits of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Rita K. Gollin,
Northern Illinois University Press, 1983.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864.
[Selections. 2005]
The portable Hawthorne / edited with an introduction by William C. Spengemann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

eISBN : 978-1-101-01042-6

I. Spengemann, William C. II. Title.

 

PS1852.S66 2005
813’.3—dc22 2004065791

 

 

 

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Introduction

Hawthorne’s autobiographical preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, ambiguously subtitled “The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with His Abode,” opens with the following paragraph:

Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone, (the gate itself having fallen from its hinges, at some unknown epoch,) we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of black-ash trees. It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral procession of the venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned from that gate-way towards the village burying-ground. The wheel-track, leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three vagrant cows, and an old white horse, who had his own living to pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows, that lay half-asleep between the door of the house and the public highway, were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which, the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material world. Certainly it had little in common with those ordinary abodes, which stand so imminent upon the road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it were, into the domestic circle.