Mr and Mrs Hawthorne play Hide the Owl

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 pictures could never match. Another was seeing the writing scratched on the window panes by Sophia with her diamond ring. 

"Man's accidents are GOD's purposes."
Underneath they have both signed their names. 

Hawthorne loved the way the Old Manse was distanced from the road, by a hundred yards or so. That made it more private than most houses, as he wrote in the chapter called The Old Manse, from Mosses from the Old Manse: "it had little in common with those ordinary abodes which stand so imminent upon the road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it were, into the domestic circle." 

It was the glorious, privileged intimacy of their new life together that the couple loved - after a long courtship in which Nathaniel had already called Sophia "wife" in anticipation of the great day when they would be married.

"In fairyland there is no measurement of time; and, in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of life's ocean, three years hastened away with a noiseless flight, as the breezy sunshine chases the cloud-shadows across the depths of a still valley."  From The Old Manse

Hawthorne writes that he was aware of being the first "lay occupant" of the house after a succession of ministers who had written thousands of sermons in it. He hoped to inherit some of their inspiration: "I resolved at least to achieve a novel that should evolve some deep lesson, and should possess physical substance enough to stand alone." 

Mosses from an Old Manse was not a novel but a collection of short stories previously published in magazines. Apart from the early novel Fanshawe, written when he was 24 (14 years before his marriage) and which he later tried to unpublish because he disliked it so much, Hawthorne's first novel The Scarlet Letter did not appear until 1850, five years after they had left the Old Manse. 

Behind the house is an orchard and beyond it, the Concord river. Hawthorne's description is still accurate: "it may well be called the Concord, - the river of peace and quietness; for it is certainly the most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered imperceptibly towards its eternity, - the sea. Positively I had lived three weeks beside it before it grew quite clear to my perception which way the current flowed." 

During their first winter at the Old Manse, the Hawthornes made use of the river in what must have been one of the most distinguished sporting events in American literary history: Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson went skating together. 

Apart from the joy of finding themselves married, the Hawthornes would remember their time at the Old Manse for the birth of their first child, Una, whose portrait hangs in the children's bedroom:

The writer was not making enough money to pay the rent at the Old Manse and in 1845, after being in arrears for several months, the Hawthornes left, to live with his family in his native Salem, north of Boston. 

By 1852, when the Hawthornes returned to Concord, they were able to buy a house, The Wayside, for $1500, including 9 acres of land. Two of his major work had by then been published: The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). But their first period at The Wayside was only a few months because the following summer, Hawthorne took up the position of American consul in Liverpool, only to return in 1860. At that time, he built the little turret room on the top for his study. 

The Wayside

As for the Old Manse, it was only in 1939 that it was acquired by a non-profit organisation dedicated to saving it as a memorial to its literary past. Luckily, previous occupants had not altered much since the Hawthornes' time: the graffiti on the window panes can be seen for real, along with Longfellow, on the excellent guided tour.