Three Americans on England

Abstract

Nathaniel Hawthorne was in England as Consul at Liverpool for four years, from 1853 to 1857, the time of the Crimean War. It stands to reason that his English Notebooks, kept with conscientious care and a trained eye for detail in observation, hold a great deal of interest as a faithful portrait of the Victorian age in its heyday by a very critical and curious observer. Yet it was only in the year of Pearl Harbor that a full and reliable text, edited from the manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library, was published in America.¹ After Hawthorne’s death Mrs. Hawthorne published a bowdlerised version of her own, dominated by her standards of Victorian decorum. The later editor claims that ‘out of the restored journals… a new Hawthorne will emerge: a more virile and a more human Hawthorne; a more alert and (in a worldly sense) a more intelligent Hawthorne, a Hawthorne less dreamy and less aloof than his biographers have represented him as being.’