Passages from the English Notebooks, Volume 1.
1875
This is Hawthorne uncaged from his fiction. Written during his years as American Consul in Liverpool, these notebooks reveal the private mind behind The Scarlet Letter, grappling with a foreign landscape and his own solitude. He walks through the English Lake District where Wordsworth still lives, crosses streams named in old poems, and sits in village churches feeling the weight of centuries. But the real terrain is internal: his homesickness for America, his sharp observations about English reserve versus American warmth, his encounters with visiting Yankees who want nothing but his company. The entries are often brief, sometimes luminous. Hawthorne notes the peculiar sadness of rain on mountains, the way mist softens rather than darkens the hills, the peculiar loneliness of being a stranger in a country that shares your language. This is not the allegorical Hawthorne of Salem and Boston, but something more fragile and human. Anyone who has ever been far from home, watching a foreign country through train windows and trying to make sense of it all, will recognize themselves here.
