Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Notebooks are part diary, part depositary of ideas for future fiction. He also uses them to flex his writerly muscles in describing day-to-day observations. And they provide, inadvertently, the equivalent of a mobile phone location tracker when he refers to places where he was living or visiting.
The notebooks span the years 1835 to 1853 but are far from comprehensive - with no entries for the years 1845 to 1849. Sometimes several entries are only days apart and about the same location. It's as if he's trying to fix a place on paper and that no particular entry satisfies him so he must try again by adding more detail or improving his previous work:
Blue Hill in Milton, at the distance of several miles, actually glistens with rich, dark light, -no, not glistens, nor gleams -but perhaps to say glows subduedly will be a truer expression for it.
Earlier in the same entry, he puts it more generally:
No language can give an idea of the beauty and glory of the trees, just at this moment. It would be easy, by a process of word-daubing, to set down a confused group of gorgeous colors, like a bunch of tangled skeins of bright silk; but there is nothing of the reality in the glare which would thus be produced.
Many travel books from this time were called ‘sketchbooks’ and Hawthorne’s “word-daubing” shows that the metaphor was taken as an almost literal description of what writing could achieve.
For all their limitations, the notebooks give us an idea of where Hawthorne was during the years they were written - not so much because he recorded a place name along with the date of each entry, although he sometimes did that, but because of places mentioned.
Here I have plotted the places on a map and coloured them according to the year in which they were mentioned (click on map to go to its URL).
The black circles represent places where Hawthorne lived. The pins are places he mentions in entries, categorised by years in different colours. Each year can be displayed or hidden with the tick boxes to the left of the map.
Each pin includes the quotation in which that place is mentioned, if you click on it. For some, Google has helpfully added a photograph.
In summary, here is what the map reveals about where Hawthorne travelled in different years. Since there were dramatically different amounts written in each year, as a rough guide I have included the number of pages each year occupies in my edition of the notebooks:
1835 (9 pages) Around Salem, where he was born and was still living, aged 31. He had only published his first novel, Fanshawe, anonymously, seven years earlier, but wanted to disown it.
1836 (11 pages) Lived for eight months in Boston, editing The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. But there are only two notebook entries for the year and no references to Boston or environs. The only place reference is to Danvers, a village five miles from Salem (so I have included it in the 1835 places as it was written from Union Street, Salem).
1837 (47 pages) This year’s locations are distinctive for including many in Maine, where Hawthorne stayed with his friend Horatio Bridge, at Bridges’ parents’ home in Augusta. Locations also in Salem and Boston. First edition of Twice Told Tales published in the spring.
1838 (69 pages) A year of travels, particularly in Western Massachusetts, producing more locations than any other year. Lived temporarily in North Adams. (The home in Lenox, nearby, was only occupied later, in 1850, when he was married.)
1839 (3 pages) Engaged to marry Sophia Peabody this year and in January, started work at the Boston Custom House. Minimal notebook writing, most of which is the recording of random ideas for future fiction. Only location reference is to Long Wharf, Boston (which I have included in 1840’s list).
1840 (9 pages) Lived and worked in Boston. Also lived at the Union Street family home in Salem.
1841 (41 pages) Lived at the experiment community Brook Farm in West Roxbury, a few miles South of Boston. Left it, disillusioned, in November.
1842 (34 pages) Nathaniel and Sophia were married on July 9 and moved into The Old Manse, Concord. Locations are around Concord, and from a two day walking trip with Emerson to villages about 15 miles to its West.
1843 (23 pages) Continuing domestic life at The Old Manse, with visits to Boston and Salem. Almost no location references.
1844 (6 pages) living at Concord, with visits to Boston and Salem. No new locations.
No notebook entries for 1845 to 1849.
1850 (30 pages) Moved to Lenox, Western Massachusetts - first entry from Lenox is on July 14. Several earlier entries with Boston locations.
1851 (8 pages) Living in Lenox. In November, moved to West Newton, nearby. No new locations.
1852 (26 pages) The year is notable for a trip to the Isle of Shoals, off the Maine and New Hampshire coast, in August, without his family, which produced detailed descriptions of the small islands and their communities. Otherwise, a busy year with landmarks that are not mentioned in the notebooks: publication of his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, ahead of his election to the presidency, publication of The Blithedale Romance and purchase of The Wayside at Concord.
1853 (1 page) Only two short entries this year, from Concord. In July, the family moved to England for Hawthorne to take up his job as the American consul in Liverpool, where he began his English notebooks.
The map reveals the extent of Hawthorne's travels during these years. In Britain, and then Europe in the following years, he was to travel longer distances. Even in England and Scotland, distances were more than he experienced in the American notebook years. If you superimpose a map of the UK onto my map of notebook locations, lining Salem up with London, Hawthorne's visit to Maine would have been roughly the equivalent of a trip to the north of East Anglia and Western Massachusetts is as far away as Bristol and Dorset:
For all their unsystematic recording of Hawthorne’s life - and perhaps we shouldn't complain about that since these are not journals or diaries - the notebooks provide plenty of detail about his movements over the years.
They also reveal when he chose to write and about what. Many of the entries are simply aide memoires, recording germs of possible ideas for stories. In the descriptive entries, we see him honing his craft as a writer, challenging himself to, for instance, describe exactly the imprint of a foot on sand:
In some places your footstep is perfectly implanted, showing the whole shape, and the square toe, and every nail in the heel of your boot. Elsewhere, the impression is imperfect, and even when you stamp, you cannot imprint the whole. As you tread, a dry spot flashes around your step, and grows moist as you lift your foot again.
In the notebooks then, Hawthorne has left us a vivid, close-up guide to his New England – guaranteed to enhance the enjoyment of today’s visitors, who can travel ‘with’ Hawthorne though his home states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
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