He attends his mother’s death. The Scarlet Letter, with “The Custom House” as a preface, is published. NH moves his family to Lenox, Massachusetts. There he meets Herman Melville, who soon reviews Mosses for Literary World. Two of his children’s books are reissued under a new title.

1851 NH publishes the third edition of Twice-told Tales, with a preface; The House of the Seven Gables; The Snow-Image and Other Twice-told Tales, dedicated to Horatio Bridge; and A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys. Melville dedicates Moby-Dick to NH. After the birth of their third child, Rose, the Hawthornes move yet again, to West Newton, Massachusetts.

1852 NH publishes The Blithedale Romance, set at Brook Farm, and a campaign biography of his Bowdoin classmate Franklin Pierce, soon to be elected president of the United States. NH’s younger sister, Louisa, is killed in a steamboat accident. The Hawthornes buy their first home, in Concord, Massachusetts, and move in.

1853 NH publishes Tanglewood Tales for children. He is appointed U.S. consul in Liverpool.

1853-57 NH begins the journals he will keep throughout his stay in Europe. He travels widely in Britain during times away from the Consulate. Sophia spends months in Portugal and Madeira for her health. Mosses from an Old Manse is reissued in an expanded edition, in 1854. NH is visited by Melville, on his way to and from the Holy Land.

1858-59 Having resigned as consul, NH travels with his family to France, Italy, and Switzerland, staying for more than a year in Rome and Florence, where he meets expatriate American artists, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and William Cullen Bryant. Begins a romance set in England, then drops it to begin The Marble Faun. Una is dangerously ill with malaria.

1859-60 NH returns to England, where he finishes The Marble Faun before sailing for America.

1860-62 Back at the Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts, he resumes work on his English romance but abandons it after two more drafts to start another, on the elixir of life, which he also abandons. He visits Washington, D.C., and Civil War battlefields in Virginia. “Chiefly About War Matters” is published in Atlantic Monthly.

1863 NH publishes Our Old Home, a collection of revised portions of his English journals, dedicated to Franklin Pierce, now in political disgrace for his attempts to avert the Civil War.

1864 NH’s declining health prevents further work on “The Elixir of Life.” After his death, during a tour of New Hampshire with Pierce, a portion of that unfinished romance appears in Atlantic Monthly entitled “Scenes from ‘The Dolliver Romance.’ ”

I

THE TALES 1830-1852

EDITOR’S NOTE

When Fanshawe failed to satisfy either the public or himself, Hawthorne turned to writing short pieces for magazines. His reasons for this change in literary form were partly commercial. In a publishing market glutted with pirated English novels, the periodicals offered an unknown American writer a more likely medium of exposure and source of income.

At the same time, Hawthorne’s motives for the switch seem to have been artistic. Fanshawe had shown the “man of society” to be reluctant or unable to tell stories of a sort Hawthorne felt increasingly driven to write: stories seeking answers to moral problems, instead of illustrating foregone conclusions. His public voice could say, either openly or disguised in metaphors, things familiar and agreeable to both the speaker and his audience. But only the “talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart” could look deeply into his imaginings in hopes of discovering there what one of his characters calls “some master-thought, that should guide me through this labyrinth of life, teaching me wherefore I was born, and how to do my task on earth, and what is death.” Let the “man of society” entertain and instruct the public with sketches and allegories; the “secluded man,” conversing with himself, would seek, “with an emblematic divining-rod . . . for emblematic gold—that is for Truth—for what of Heaven is left on earth.”

Whether because that divining rod was the wrong tool for the job or because no such Truth exists to be discovered, none of Hawthorne’s tales quite succeeds in this sublime artistic undertaking. In almost every case, the tales leave their protagonists alone and unhappy for having made a choice that seemingly would have left them no better off had they chosen otherwise. Would Robin have succeeded in his quest for the help of his kinsman Major Molineux had he believed the major’s seductive housekeeper instead of “shrewdly” running away? Would Dorcas have married Reuben Bourne if he had immediately dispelled her mistaken notion of him as a hero? Should young Goodman Brown have remarried Faith at the devil’s altar instead of remaining forever estranged from her? Parson Hooper and Richard Digby spurn the women who love them. Would they have done better to abandon their self-isolating quests? Should Aylmer and Giovanni have accepted their tainted loved ones as is, at the cost of accepting what Georgiana’s bloody hand and Beatrice’s poisonous breath seem to portend?

Each of these tales ends with something that sounds like a moral lesson the story was written to illustrate. Never, though, do these explanations answer the many questions the stories raise. Who is that unnamed stranger who joins Robin at the end of the story to witness the disgrace of Major Molineux and deliver the moral? How, exactly, will killing his son enable Reuben Bourne to tell Dorcas the truth at long last? Is it better to accept and display one’s secret sins, as Parson Hooper does, or to deny them, as Goodman Brown must? Who is the villain, Rappaccini for his “experiment” or Baglioni for his meddling?

Hawthorne’s tales have often been admired for their proto-modernist ambiguities, and they might well no longer be read were they as easily understood as the sketches or as readily decoded as the allegories. Ambiguity, however, is the last thing Hawthorne wanted.