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Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nathaniel Hawthorne : novels
June Badeni on readings by 13-year-old Alice Thompson, as recorded in her notebook: 'She has been reading more of Scott and Dickens, is plunging through the novels of George Eliot... has sampled Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Thompson Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : [unknown]
'Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called "intellectual manna"... Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll's secularist propaganda, Emerson's "Self- Reliance" ("I felt I had been handed a golden birthright"), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch's Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud's "Psychoneurosis", Lafcadio "Hearn's Life and Literature", and Henri Bergson - his essay on laughter, of course... Chaplin also spent forty years reading (if not finishing) the three volumes of "The World as Will and Idea" by Schopenhauer, whose musings on suicide are echoed in Monsieur Verdoux'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Spencer Chaplin Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : The House of the Seven Gables
'Along with her old school books [Maud Montgomery] read whatever she could find both for pleasure and to learn from their authors how to improve her own writing: religious tracts, newspapers, the Godey's Lady's Book, Charles Dickens's "Pickwick Papers", Sir Walter Scott's novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables", Washington Irving's "The Sketch Book", and Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Maud Montgomery Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : unknown
Leon Edel, introducing Henry James's letters from 1869-70: " [James] traveled in 1869, reading Goethe, Stendhal, the President de Brosses and Hawthorne."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : The Scarlet Letter
'Began "The Scarlet Letter".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot and G.H. Lewes Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : unknown
'The house was behind the post office and below the town library, and in a few years not even the joys of guddling, girning and angling matched the boy's pleasure in Emerson, Hawthorne, Ambrose Pierce, Sidney Lanier and Mark Twain. Day after day... he carried a large washing basket up the stairs to fill it with books, choosing from upwards of twelve thousand volumes, then downstairs to sit for hours in corners absorbed in mental worlds beyond the narrow limits of Langholm.'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Christopher Grieve Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : The Scarlet Letter
'I wasted a great deal of time in wrong reading from eleven to fourteen, always hoping for the enjoyment which rarely came, but going on with surprising persistence. A sense of overpowering gloom is connected in my mind with Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris", which I read in English, and an impression of a livid brightness with "The Scarlet Letter"; but that is all. Of Carlyle's "French Revolution" all that remains is a sentence like a radiant hillside caught through a rift in a black cloud: the passage where he describes the high-shouldered ladies dancing with the gentlemen of the French Court on a bright summer evening, while outside the yellow cornfields stretched from end to end of France'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : Marble Faun, The
'Do [italics] you [end italics] know what Hawthorne's tale is about? [italics] I [end italics] do; and I think it will perplex the English public pretty considerably.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : Marble Faun, The
'['After Hawthorne's romance had come out she expresses to her friends her supposition that they will have read, as every one in England had, the "Cleopatra chapter", and assures them that she is proud of being able to say to people that she had been acquainted from the first with the statue commemmorated']' Letter reproduced in this edition from a printed source which gives this precis.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : "Drowne's Wooden Image" in The Boston Book, being Specimens of Metropolitan Literature
'By the way, we all admire _very greatly_ your beautiful little poem in the Boston Book. I dare say you don't care for the opinion of we three "weaker vessels" [i.e. De Quincey's three daughters], though Papa, like the dutiful parent he is, and though a "vain man", admits that our judgment in such matters is equal if not sometimes better than his. However in this case we one and all came separately to the conclusion that there was exquisite poetic grace and beauty in the lines. Who is the Poet you sent the mosses too [sic]? for we don't know one who has spoken of Venice that has been living since you could have written this. My sister Florence says that with one or two exceptions in the case of Longfellow and that most beautiful of writers Hawthorne, yours is nearly the only good thing in the book. I have not had time to look it over yet.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Florence De Quincey Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : Twice-Told Tales
'Your mention of Hawthorne puts me in mind to tell you what rabid [underlined] admirers we are of his [...] There is no prose write of the present day I have half the interest in I have in him, his style, in my mind is so beautifully refined and there is such exquisite pathos and quaint humour, and such an awfully [underlined] deep knowledge of human nature, not that hard unloving detestable, and, as it is purely one sided (or wrong [underlined] sided) false reading of it that one finds in Thackeray. He reminds me in many things of Charles Lamb, and of heaps of our rare old English humourists, with their deep pathetic nature--and one faculty he possesses beyond any writer I remember (not dramatic, for then I would certainly remember Shakespeare, and others on further though perhaps) viz. that of exciting you to the highest pitch without on any [underlined] occasion that I am aware of making you feel by his catastrophe ashamed of having been excited. What I mean is, if you have ever read it, such a case as occurs in the "Mysteries of Udolpho" where your disgust is beyond all expression on finding that all your fright about the ghostly creature that has haunted you throughout the volumes has been caused by a pitiful wax image! [...] And no Author I know does [underlined] try to work upon them [i.e. the passions] more, apparently with no [underlined] effort to himself. I cannot satisfy myself as to whether I like his sort of Essays contained in the twice told tales best, or his more finished works such as Blithedale romance. Every touch he adds to any character gives a higher interest to it, so that I should like the longer ones best, but there is a concentration of excellence in the shorter things and passages that strike, in force like daggers, in their beauty and truth, so that I generally end in liking that best which I have read last [...] There are beautiful passages in Longfellow, above all, as far as my knowledge goes in the Golden Legend, some of which in a single reading impressed themselves on my memory.'
UnknownCentury: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret De Quincey
Nathaniel Hawthorne : Blithedale Romance
'Your mention of Hawthorne puts me in mind to tell you what rabid [underlined] admirers we are of his [...] There is no prose write of the present day I have half the interest in I have in him, his style, in my mind is so beautifully refined and there is such exquisite pathos and quaint humour, and such an awfully [underlined] deep knowledge of human nature, not that hard unloving detestable, and, as it is purely one sided (or wrong [underlined] sided) false reading of it that one finds in Thackeray. He reminds me in many things of Charles Lamb, and of heaps of our rare old English humourists, with their deep pathetic nature--and one faculty he possesses beyond any writer I remember (not dramatic, for then I would certainly remember Shakespeare, and others on further though perhaps) viz. that of exciting you to the highest pitch without on any [underlined] occasion that I am aware of making you feel by his catastrophe ashamed of having been excited. What I mean is, if you have ever read it, such a case as occurs in the "Mysteries of Udolpho" where your disgust is beyond all expression on finding that all your fright about the ghostly creature that has haunted you throughout the volumes has been caused by a pitiful wax image! [...] And no Author I know does [underlined] try to work upon them [i.e. the passions] more, apparently with no [underlined] effort to himself. I cannot satisfy myself as to whether I like his sort of Essays contained in the twice told tales best, or his more finished works such as Blithedale romance. Every touch he adds to any character gives a higher interest to it, so that I should like the longer ones best, but there is a concentration of excellence in the shorter things and passages that strike, in force like daggers, in their beauty and truth, so that I generally end in liking that best which I have read last [...] There are beautiful passages in Longfellow, above all, as far as my knowledge goes in the Golden Legend, some of which in a single reading impressed themselves on my memory.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret De Quincey Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : The House of Seven Gables
'The more I read of Mr. Hawthorne's writings the more intense does my admiration become. I read over the other day a part of his "House of the Seven Gables" and I don't remember any delineation of character under Shakespeare's that is to me so exquisitely fascinating as his of Phoebe, and it is the one I think, among all his characters which mark him most of all as a man of very great genius, for in the hands of any but such a man, instead of being as she is "A perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a spirit still and bright With something of an Angel light." she would have been a common place stupid creature who only was good because she had not will to be bad [...] The contrast too of the restless minded metaphysical Holgrave always searching into the cause of things, and his tremendous delight in watching the development of character are admirable [underlined]. This latter feature is I am sure a marking characteristic of Mr. Hawthorne's and I just wish to warn him that though I have in thought [underlined] quite an agonizing sympathy with him in it, yet when carried to such a pitch as he does in practice that he won't give a hand to a pair of poor lovers that have fallen into the gutter on a rainy night because his part is only to be a spectator. I have no patience with him, and beg to say if I catch him at anything like that I will commit an assault upon him as sure as fate. I should tell you, as more important than any thing that I can say on the subject, that for the first time Papa read "The House of the Seven Gables" a few days ago [...] he said that if anyone wished to give a very favorable notion to a non-German reader of Jean Paul Richter's style of thought and sentiment they could not do it more successfully than by pointing out many passages in it [i.e. the Hawthorne], and when I tell you that Papa admires him more than any Author of his class by far, and has often regretted our not being German scholars simply on his account you will have an idea....'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret De Quincey Print: Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne : The House of Seven Gables
'The more I read of Mr. Hawthorne's writings the more intense does my admiration become. I read over the other day a part of his "House of the Seven Gables" and I don't remember any delineation of character under Shakespeare's that is to me so exquisitely fascinating as his of Phoebe, and it is the one I think, among all his characters which mark him most of all as a man of very great genius, for in the hands of any but such a man, instead of being as she is "A perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a spirit still and bright With something of an Angel light." she would have been a common place stupid creature who only was good because she had not will to be bad [...] The contrast too of the restless minded metaphysical Holgrave always searching into the cause of things, and his tremendous delight in watching the development of character are admirable [underlined]. This latter feature is I am sure a marking characteristic of Mr. Hawthorne's and I just wish to warn him that though I have in thought [underlined] quite an agonizing sympathy with him in it, yet when carried to such a pitch as he does in practice that he won't give a hand to a pair of poor lovers that have fallen into the gutter on a rainy night because his part is only to be a spectator. I have no patience with him, and beg to say if I catch him at anything like that I will commit an assault upon him as sure as fate. I should tell you, as more important than any thing that I can say on the subject, that for the first time Papa read "The House of the Seven Gables" a few days ago [...] he said that if anyone wished to give a very favorable notion to a non-German reader of Jean Paul Richter's style of thought and sentiment they could not do it more successfully than by pointing out many passages in it [i.e. the Hawthorne], and when I tell you that Papa admires him more than any Author of his class by far, and has often regretted our not being German scholars simply on his account you will have an idea....'
