Passages from the English Notebooks, Complete
1870
Passages from the English Notebooks, Complete
1870
This is Hawthorne unfiltered. The private notebooks he never intended for publication reveal a writer far removed from the polished allegories that made him famous. Here is the man behind The Scarlet Letter, recording his years as American consul in Liverpool with the same searching eye but without the constraints of fiction. We watch him navigate fog-bound English mornings, encounter Dickens at a dinner party, wander through slums that shatter his romantic notions of the mother country, and marvel at Englishwomen who dance on riverboats with an abandon that would shame their American counterparts. The entries span 1853 to 1860, capturing Hawthorne's evolution from hopeful expatriate to homesick observer of a society both familiar and deeply strange. He records the poverty and the pageantry, the muddy streets and the ancient cathedrals, the English reserve that alternately frustrates and fascinates him. These are not the polished tales of Salem and Boston, but something rawer: the daily reckoning of an American intelligence meeting England face to face. For Hawthorne devotees, these pages offer the closest thing to hearing him speak aloud.
