Transatlantic Tales

Salem, Massachusetts is a smallish coastal town about 15 miles north of Boston. Until the start of the nineteenth century it rivalled Boston in international trade and whaling but when ships got bigger and needed more depth of water, Salem lost out while Boston, whose harbour happened to be deeper, continued to grow. Today Salem is pleasantly reminiscent of its past, with the old Customs House where Nathaniel Hawthorne worked for a while still overlooking the wharfs. Plenty of original clapboard houses line the old streets, some with notices marking the residences of whaling captains who used to occupy them. Nathaniel Hawthorne statue on Hawthorne Blvd., just south of the Hawthorne Hotel, Salem Apart from being the site of the infamous witch trials of the late seventeenth century, Salem mostly celebrates its past through Hawthorne. He was born here and lived in the town at several important points in his life, including when writing his most famous novel,  The Scarlet Letter, whic...

  I know everything is bigger in America, but I hadn't expected Walden Pond to be  that  big. Surely that's a lake by anybody's standards?  It's only a short drive, about two miles, out of Concord, Massachusetts. There's plenty of parking. But you're in for a shock if you're not local: drivers of car with non-Massachusetts licence plates have to pay $30 to park (otherwise $8). We'd rented our car in New York and it had Florida plates. The woman in the information centre told me the charge is pretty normal for Massachusetts. There are plenty of beaches where the out-of-state cars cost $40, she said. We'd come to find out about Henry David Thoreau's simple life in the woods, where he stayed for just over two years in a cabin he'd built with the help of his friends. To rub salt in the parking charge wound, the first exhibit we see in the visitor centre is Thoreau's accounts for building the cabin: total cost $28.12. We should have walked, li...

We are invited to sit in a wooden building that was built in the nineteenth century as a schoolhouse by Bronson Alcott, next to his family's home in Concord, Massachusetts. It is dark and the fierce air conditioning makes it extremely cold. There are only about six of us tourists, all wearing masks, as instructed. On a screen a video is running. It looks like it's from an old VHS tape. An actress is playing the part of Louisa May Alcott, Bronson's most famous daughter, the author of Little Women (1868). First she is 'being interviewed', quite convincingly, with her answers presumably compiled from things she wrote. Then she starts talking directly to the camera and clearly not using Alcott's own words, as she's saying things like "so I expect you want to see upstairs? Come on then, follow me and we'll have a look." It's a bit over-friendly and over-performed. She tours every room in the house. My wife and I look at each other, puzzled, and...

The day Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody were married in 1842, they moved in to a rented house, the Old Manse, about half a mile outside the small town of Concord, Massachusetts.  It's a house with an extraordinary literary history: built for Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather, and lived in by him and visited by Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, its top floor study contained both Hawthorne's writing desk (below), from which he wrote the stories in Mosses from an Old Manse  and the chair in which Emerson wrote his Nature . The house was also occupied by Longfellow. Not the poet, but the stuffed owl in a glass case that was a permanent resident, whom Hawthorne had named after his former college room-mate. Sophia hated Longfellow and used to hide him somewhere different every time her husband left the house. Seeing Longfellow in his case and Hawthorne's writing desk were a couple of the special pleasures of visiting the Old Manse - things which reading or pictu...

If you check in to a hotel and find a free glossy magazine in your room, you probably don't expect much - just pages of ads for local businesses separated by a few flimsy articles hyping those same advertisers.  Not so in Concord, Massachusetts.  Discover Concord magazine is more like an academic journal - although it's also very readable. It's full of interesting, original articles about the history of the town, especially its literary history. Some of the articles even have footnotes! So, there's an interview with an ornithology professor about connections between Henry David Thoreau, nature conservancy and human rights; a local author writes about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody's honeymoon at the Old Manse, on the outskirts of Concord; there's a piece about Louisa May Alcott enthusiasts; and there's the story behind a new statue of Elizabeth Freeman, who won her liberation from slavery in court in Sheffield, Massachusetts in 1781. There's eve...

In the second half of the nineteenth century the city known for having the highest per capita income in the United States was not New York, Philadelphia or Chicago, but Hartford, capitol of Connecticut. Its money came from insurance, banking, railroads (five of which converged on it) and manufacturing - including the Colt gun company. You can still see evidence of the wealth in the rows of jaw-droppingly massive houses that almost put Beverly Hills to shame.  The 'highest income per capita' line was well-known but may not have been strictly true. A reporter with an interest in the city's prosperity originated the claim in 1876 in a cover story for Scribner's magazine, without any reliable figures to back it.  True or only almost true, Hartford was a prosperous place in 1874 when Mark Twain - or, by his real name, Sam Clemens - and his wife Olivia Langdon commissioned and built the house which is today restored to how it was during their 17 year tenure. It was probably ...

My British phone is only intermittently willing to give American directions when plugged into the hire car's GPS.  That's actually less helpful than refusing altogether if you are counting on it to get you somewhere on time.  Our tour of the Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut must have already started while I was still standing on a street corner scribbling down directions from a kind stranger on a piece of paper. Then a roadblock meant her directions couldn't be followed anyway so we abandoned the car in front of a row of shops and ran the final few blocks, turning up stressed and sweaty.  "Hello, are you Charles?" was the greeting from a friendly man with a lanyard round his neck.  "Yes, sorry we're late." "I'm Tom". His lanyard called him Thomas and I assumed he knew my name because we were the only people booked on the tour who hadn't turned up. But he went on.  "We know each other. I'm Tom Lee." Good God! Tom L...

Washington Irving liked to blur fact and fiction so he would have appreciated the confusing mix of history and legend that can be found today just to the north of the (real) town of Sleepy Hollow, New York - a seventeenth century name which was around long before he wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in 1820. If you park just south of the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, you can walk to it along the main road, across a bridge with a sign telling you that "The Headless Horseman Bridge ...formerly spanned this stream at this spot." Really? But wasn't the headless horseman Irving's invention? Well, nothing is exactly clear and in the story, Irving surrounds the tale with extra layers of uncertainty. Most readers will have encountered it as the work not of Irving himself but of "Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.", the fictitious author of his Sketchbook, in which Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle are the most famous chapters.  But this particular story is not even supposedly by ...

Tarrytown is a prosperous suburb of New York City, only twenty five miles from Times Square though it feels much further.  Here Washington Irving lived out his prosperous later years in a home called Sunnyside that he'd built overlooking the Hudson River as it flows south to the city.  The Hudson is unusually wide at Tarrytown, up to three miles across, for a ten mile stretch called the Tappan Zee, Tappan being an old Native American word possibly meaning cold water and Zee being the Dutch for sea. Indeed, the explorer Henry Hudson, sailed up the river that was later named after him, hoping that the width of the Tappan Zee promised a sea ahead that would lead to his finding the north west passage. Instead, it ended in a small lake below Mount Marcy, the highest point in New York State. Irving valued the Dutch settler heritage of the area. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1818), his own invention disguised as local folklore from the area's eighteenth century past, was among the mo...