His mother belonged to an excellent family, the Mannings, of English stock, settled in Salem and Ipswich ever since 1680, and still well represented in the former place. She, too, was a very reserved person; had a stately, aristocratic manner; is remembered as possessing a peculiar and striking beauty. Her education was of that simple, austere, but judicious and perfected kind that—without taking any very wide range—gave to New England women in the earlier part of this century a sedate freedom and a cultivated judgment, which all the assumed improvements in pedagogy and the general relations of men and women since then have hardly surpassed. She was a pious woman, a sincere and devoted wife, a mother whose teachings could not fail to impress upon her children a bias towards the best things in life. Nathaniel's sister Elizabeth, although a recluse to the end of her days, and wholly unknown to the public, gave in her own case evidence indisputable of the fine influences which had moulded her own childhood and that of her brother. She showed a quiet, unspoiled, and ardent love of Nature, and was to the last not only an assiduous reader of books but also a very discriminating one. The range of her reading was very wide, but she never made any more display of it than Hawthorne did of his. An intuitive judgment of character was hers, which was really startling at times: merely from the perusal of a book or the inspection of a portrait, she would arrive at accurate estimates of character which revealed a power of facile and comprehensive insight; and her letters, even in old age, flowed spontaneously into utterance of the same finished kind that distinguished Nathaniel Hawthorne's epistolary style. How fresh and various, too, was her interest in the affairs of the world! For many years she had not gone farther from her secluded abode in a farm-house at Montserrat, than to Beverly or Salem; yet I remember that, only six months before her death, she wrote a letter to her niece, a large part of which was devoted to the campaign of the English in Egypt, then progressing: with a lively and clear comprehension she discussed the difficulties of the situation, and expressed the utmost concern for the success of the English army, at the same time that she laughed at herself for displaying, as an old woman, so much anxiety about the matter. Now, a mother who could bring up her daughter in such a way as to make all this possible and natural, must be given much credit for her share in developing an illustrious son. Let us not forget that it was to his mother that Goethe owed in good measure the foundation of his greatness. Mrs. Hathorne had large, very luminous gray eyes, which were reproduced in her son's; so that, on both sides, his parentage entitled him to the impressive personal appearance which distinguished him. In mature life he became somewhat estranged from her, but their mutual love was presumably suspended only for a time, and he was with her at her death, in 1849. She lived long enough to see him famous as the author of "Twice-Told Tales"; but "The Scarlet Letter" had not been written when she died.
She, as well as her husband, was one of a family of eight brothers and sisters; these were the children of Richard Manning. Two of the brothers, Richard and Robert, were living in Salem when she was left a widow; Robert being eminent in New England at that time as a horticulturist. She was without resources, other than her husband's earnings, and Robert undertook to provide for her. Accordingly, she removed with her young family to the Manning homestead on Herbert Street, the next street east of Union Street, where Nathaniel was born. This homestead stood upon a piece of land running through to Union Street, and adjoining the garden attached to Hawthorne's birthplace. At that time Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, a physician, occupied a house in a brick block on the opposite side of Union Street; and there in 1809, September 21st, was born his daughter, Sophia A. Peabody, who afterwards became Hawthorne's wife. Her birthplace, therefore, was but a few rods distant from that of her future husband. Sophia Peabody's eldest sister, Mary, who married Horace Mann, noted as an educator and an abolitionist, remembers the child Nathaniel, who was then about five years old. He used to make his appearance in the garden of the Herbert Street mansion, running and dancing about there at play, a vivacious, golden-haired boy. The next oldest sister, who was the first of this family to make the acquaintance of the young author some thirty years later on, was Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody, who has taken an important part in developing the Kindergarten in America. There were plenty of books in the Manning house, and Nathaniel very soon got at them. Among the authors whom he earliest came to know were Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson, and Rousseau. The "Castle of Indolence" was one of his favorite volumes. Subsequently, he read the whole of the "Newgate Calendar," and became intensely absorbed in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which undoubtedly left very deep impressions upon him, traceable in the various allusions to it scattered through his works. He also made himself familiar with Spenser's "Faërie Queen," Froissart's "Chronicles," and Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion."
"Being a healthy boy, with strong out-of-door instincts planted in him by inheritance from his sea-faring sire, it might have been that he would not have been brought so early to an intimacy with books, but for an accident similar to that which played a part in the boyhoods of Scott and Dickens. When he was nine years old, he was struck on the foot by a ball, and made seriously lame. The earliest fragment of his writing now extant is a letter to his uncle Robert Manning, at that time in Raymond, Maine, written from Salem, December 9, 1813. It announces that the foot is no better, and that a new doctor is to be sent for. 'Maybe,' the boy writes, 'he will do me some good, for Dr. B—— has not, and I don't know as Dr. K—— will.' He adds that it is now four weeks since he has been to school, 'and I don't know but it will be four weeks longer.'... But the trouble was destined to last much longer than even the young seer had projected his gaze. There was some threat of deformity, and it was not until he was nearly twelve that he became quite well. Meantime, his kind schoolmaster, Dr. Worcester, ... came to hear him his lessons at home. The good pedagogue does not figure after this in Hawthorne's history; but a copy of Worcester's Dictionary still exists and is in present use, which bears in a tremulous writing on the fly-leaf the legend: 'Nathaniel Hawthorne Esq., with the respects of J. E. Worcester.' For a long time, in the worst of his lameness, the gentle boy was forced to lie prostrate, and choosing the floor for his couch, he would read there all day long. He was extremely fond of cats—a taste which he kept through life; and during this illness, forced to odd resorts for amusement, he knitted a pair of socks for the cat who reigned in the household at the time. When tired of reading, he constructed houses of books for the same feline pet, building walls for her to leap, and perhaps erecting triumphal arches for her to pass under."[1]
The lexicographer, Dr. Worcester, was then living at Salem in charge of a school, which he kept for a few years; and it was with him that Hawthorne was carrying on his primary studies. He also went to dancing-school, was fond of fishing as well as of taking long walks, and doubtless engaged in the sundry occupations and sports, neither more nor less extraordinary than these, common to lads of his age. He already displayed a tendency towards dry humor. As he brought home from school frequent reports of having had a bout at fisticuffs with another pupil named John Knights, his sister Elizabeth asked him: "Why do you fight with John Knights so often?" "I can't help it," he answered: "John Knights is a boy of very quarrelsome disposition."
But all this time an interior growth, of which we can have no direct account, was proceeding in his mind. The loss of the father whom he had had so little chance to see and know and be fondled by, no doubt produced a profound effect upon him. While still a very young child he would rouse himself from long broodings, to exclaim with an impressive shaking of the head: "There, mother! I is going away to sea some time; and I'll never come back again!" The thought of that absent one, whose barque had glided out of Salem harbor bound upon a terrestrial voyage, but had carried him softly away to the unseen world, must have been incessantly with the boy; and it would naturally melt into what he heard of the strange, shadowy history of his ancestors, and mix itself with the ever-present hush of settled grief in his mother's dwelling, and blend with his unconscious observations of the old town in which he lived. Salem then was much younger in time, but much older to the eye, than it is now. In "Alice Doane's Appeal" he has sketched a rapid bird's-eye view of it as it appeared to him when he was a young man. Describing his approach with his sisters to Witch Hill, he says: "We ... began to ascend a hill which at a distance, by its dark slope and the even line of its summit, resembled a green rampart along the road; ... but, strange to tell, though the whole slope and summit were of a peculiarly deep green, scarce a blade of grass was visible from the base upward. This deceitful verdure was occasioned by a plentiful crop of 'wood-wax,' which wears the same dark and gloomy green throughout the summer, except at one short period, when it puts forth a profusion of yellow blossoms. At that season, to a distant spectator the hill appears absolutely overlaid with gold, or covered with a glory of sunshine even under a clouded sky." This wood-wax, it may be said, is a weed which grows nowhere but in Essex County, and, having been native in England, was undoubtedly brought over by the Pilgrims. He goes on: "There are few such prospects of town and village, woodland and cultivated field, steeples and country-seats, as we beheld from this unhappy spot.... Before us lay our native town, extending from the foot of the hill to the harbor, level as a chess-board, embraced by two arms of the sea, and filling the whole peninsula with a close assemblage of wooden roofs, overtopped by many a spire and intermixed with frequent heaps of verdure.... Retaining these portions of the scene, and also the peaceful glory and tender gloom of the declining sun, we threw in imagination a deep veil of forest over the land, and pictured a few scattered villages here and there and this old town itself a village, as when the prince of Hell bore sway there. The idea thus gained of its former aspect, its quaint edifices standing far apart with peaked roofs and projecting stories, and its single meeting-house pointing up a tall spire in the midst; the vision, in short, of the town in 1692, served to introduce a wondrous tale." There were in fact several old houses of the kind here described still extant during Hawthorne's boyhood, and he went every Sunday to service in the First Church, in whose congregation his forefathers had held a pew for a hundred and seventy years. It is easy to see how some of the materials for "The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Scarlet Letter" were already depositing themselves in the form of indelible recollections and suggestions taken from his surroundings.
Oppressed by her great sorrow, his mother had shut herself away, after her husband's death, from all society except that of her immediate relatives. This was perhaps not a very extraordinary circumstance, nor one that need be construed as denoting a morbid disposition; but it was one which must have distinctly affected the tone of her son's meditations. In 1818, when he was fourteen years old, she retired to a still deeper seclusion, in Maine; but the occasion of this was simply that her brother Robert, having purchased the seven-mile-square township of Raymond, in that State, had built a house there, intending to found a new home. The year that Hawthorne passed in that spot, amid the breezy life of the forest, fishing and shooting, watching the traits and customs of lumber-men and country-folk, and drinking in the tonic of a companionship with untamed nature, was to him a happy and profitable one. "We are all very well," he wrote thence to his Uncle Robert, in May, 1819: "The fences are all finished, and the garden is laid out and planted.... I have shot a partridge and a henhawk, and caught eighteen large trout out of our brook. I am sorry you intend to send me to school again." He had been to the place before, probably for short visits, when his Uncle Richard was staying there, and his memories of it were always agreeable ones. To Mr. James T. Fields, he said in 1863: "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits of solitude." "During the moonlight nights of winter he would skate until midnight all alone upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself far away from his home and weary with the exercise of skating, he would sometimes take refuge in a log-cabin, where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. He would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring up. 'Ah,' he said, 'how well I recall the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed through the woods of Maine!'"[2]
Hawthorne at this time had an intention of following the example of his father and grandfather, and going to sea; but this was frustrated by the course of events. His mother, it is probable, would strongly have objected to it. In a boyish journal kept while he was at Raymond he mentions a gentleman having come with a boat to take one or two persons out on "the Great Pond," and adds: "He was kind enough to say that I might go (with my mother's consent), which she gave after much coaxing. Since the loss of my father she dreads to have any one belonging to her go upon the water." And again: "A young man named Henry Jackson, Jr., was drowned two days ago, up in Crooked River.... I read one of the Psalms to my mother this morning, and it plainly declares twenty-six times that 'God's mercy endureth forever.'... Mother is sad; says she shall not consent any more to my swimming in the mill-pond with the boys, fearing that in sport my mouth might get kicked open, and then sorrow for a dead son be added to that for a dead father, which she says would break her heart. I love to swim, but I shall not disobey my mother." This same journal, which seems to have laid the basis of his life-long habit of keeping note-books, was begun at the suggestion of Mr. Richard Manning, who gave him a blank-book, with advice that he should use it for recording his thoughts, "as the best means of his securing for mature years command of thought and language." In it were made a number of entries which testify plainly to his keenness of observation both of people and scenery, to his sense of humor and his shrewdness. Here are a few:—
"Swapped pocket-knives with Robinson Cook yesterday. Jacob Dingley says that he cheated me, but I think not, for I cut a fishing-pole this morning and did it well; besides, he is a Quaker, and they never cheat."
"This morning the bucket got off the chain, and dropped back into the well. I wanted to go down on the stones and get it. Mother would not consent, for fear the well might cave in, but hired Samuel Shaw to go down. In the goodness of her heart, she thought the son of old Mrs. Shaw not quite so good as the son of the Widow Hathorne."