Nathaniel Hawthorne

Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is best known today for his novel The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. Nathaniel was born in Salem, Massachusetts to a family who traced their ancestry back to English emigrants who left Wiltshire in 1630, and the pilgrim fathers held a fascination for him all his life. He determined at an early age that a career as an author was the only one open to him, since (as he wrote to his mother) ‘I do not want to be a doctor and live by men’s diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels’. In 1842 he married Sophia Peabody and settled at Concord in Massachusetts, where he wrote The House of the Seven Gables and Tanglewood Tales, and where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau completed a distinguished literary neighbourhood. Nathaniel and Sophia had three children together.

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Good Morning, Mr Horse by Nathaniel Hawthorne

A young Nathaniel Hawthorne recalls a confidential conversation with a tired old horse.

On June 1st, 1816, Robert Hawthorne presented his nephew Nathaniel, a month shy of his twelfth birthday, with a diary ‘with the advice that he write out his thoughts, some every day, in as good words as he can’. It was in this diary that Nathaniel recalled running across an underfed working horse, agonisingly forced to listen as his master ground delicious corn at nearby Dingley mill.

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