Herman Melville in Pittsfield, Massachusetts: New England Tour #19

Herman Melville (1819—91) married Elizabeth Shaw in 1847, and in 1950 moved with his family to a farm in Pittsfield in the Berkshires, west Massachusetts, a town he was familar with through his uncle Thomas Melvill. He called it Arrowhead. He had had success with his novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which was very much inspired by his three-month stay on the Marquesas Islands after deserting the whaler Acushnet, on which he'd spent eighteen months in the early 1840s.

Melville began a brief friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he'd met on Monument Mountain* and who lived a few miles away in Lenox. Melville spent his most productive writing years at Arrowhead. Here he wrote Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), 'Bartleby the Scrivener' (1853), 'Benito Cereno' (1855), and The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). And of course Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), which he dedicated to Hawthorne. He told his friend Evert A. Duyckinck in December 1850 that life in the country was like being at sea, and that he felt his writing room was a ship's cabin. Arriving very shortly after the season, I was unable to see and photograph his desk.
 

Unfortunately, Melville's work at Pittsfield was unsuccessful and The Confidence-Man was his last novel. The family returned to New York in 1863. Throughout his life his writings only brought him $10,000. Now, of course, he is recognized as a great writer, and Moby-Dick is generally thought of as one of the greatest American novels.

*William Cullen Bryant wrote the poem 'Monument Mountain' about the legend of the name, concerning the love of an Indian maid for her cousin, which disgusted her elders because they considered it incestuous. She retreated into herself, shunned company and threw herself to her death from the rocks. They buried her on the southern slope and left a simple monument: a cairn to which anyone passing would silently add.

Famously, on 5 August 1850 a group of literary people went for a picnic on Monument Mountain, among them Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James T. Fields, Annie Fields, and Evert A. Duyckinck. After climbing to the top, there was a reading of Bryant's poem, they had lunch in the rocks, and they drank a great deal. The event is commemorated every year by a climb up the mountain.

Authors' Houses: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Alcotts in Concord, Massachusetts

The Old Manse on Monument Street, Concord, was built by Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather, Rev. William Emerson, in 1770. William's widow married Rev. Ezra Ripley, and Emerson stayed with his ageing step-grandfather at the Old Manse in 1834, where he wrote a draft of Nature, (1836), which set the foundations for transcendentalism.

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody and moved to the Old Manse, which was not in fact named 'The Old Manse' until Hawthorne  came along, and was where Thoreau had prepared the garden for the pair to move in.

Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).

Originally named 'Coolidge Castle' after the family that owned it from its construction in 1828, Ralph Waldo Emerson bought this house, at the junction of the Cambridge Turnpike and Lexington Road, in 1835: the tragic death of his wife Ellen at the age of twenty had left him wealthy, and after a period of turmoil (in which he left both the church and academia), he visited Europe and returned to New England with many new ideas, and to Concord in particular with a new wife - Lydia (he preferred 'Lidian'), née Jackson.

A number of notable people visited Emerson in this house, and a few stayed here for a short time - significantly Henry Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.

The utopian Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), the founder of the unfortunate Temple School in Boston and the father of Louisa May Alcott, moved to Concord. Aided by the ever-generous Emerson, the Alcotts purchased 'Hillside' in 1845, although Bronson's wife Abigail (usually called Abby) was unhappy with the move, and the family rented the home out and moved on in 1848.

In 1852, the Hawthornes moved back to Concord and purchased the house, renaming it 'The Wayside'. 

Harriett Mulford Stone Lothrop - mentioned in my Sleepy Hollow Cemetery post as the writer of the Five Little Peppers children's stories as 'Margaret Sidney' - and her daughter Margaret preserved The Wayside.

The Alcotts returned to Concord and bought Orchard House, next door to 'Wayside' (or 'Hillside' as Bronson still insisted in calling it) in 1857.  Louisa wrote Little Women here.

The Concord School of Philosophy is at the side of the house and was run by Bronson from 1880 until a short while before his death.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts

Most of the noted Concord writers are buried on Authors' Ridge, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, MA, which is about a half mile north out of downtown Concord on the west side of Bedford Road, and no doubt the highest area of the cemetery. Very unusual it must be to find such of cluster of famous people all in one spot. 

The Thoreau plot contains - along with Henry David Thoreau - the remains of Henry David Thoreau's pencil maker father John Thoreau (1787-1858), his wife Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau (1787-1872), his brother John Thoreau Jr (1816-42), and his younger sister Sophia E. Thoreau (1819-76).

It's not difficult to spot the grave of the most noted Thoreau.

And right opposite is the grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Hawthorne plot.

'SOPHIA

WIFE OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

BORN IN SALEM MASSACHUSETTS

DIED IN LONDON

JANUARY TWENTY-FIRST 1871

BURIED IN KENSAL GREEN

REINTERRED HERE JUNE 2006'

Emerson's huge slab of granite.

'RALPH WALDO

EMERSON

BORN IN BOSTON MAY 1803

DIED IN CONCORD APRIL 27 1882

THE PASSIVE MASTER LENT HIS HAND

TO THE VAST SOUL THAT O'ER HIM PLANNED'

The above two-line quotation is from Emerson's poem 'The Problem'.

'LIDIAN

Wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Wife of Charles & Lucy (Cotton) Jackson.

Born on 20th September 1802, close by

Plymouth Rock, as she loved to remember.

Died November 30th 1892 in Concord.'

Emerson's second wife (see post above).

'HARRIETT MILFORD STONE LOTHROP

MARGARET SIDNEY

THE CREATOR OF THE FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS

ALWAYS A LOVER OF AND WORKER FOR CHILDREN'

Lothrop (1844-1924) - as 'Margaret Sidney' (see the post above) - wrote children's stories.

As this marker states, Lothrop was the founder of the Children of the American Revolution. Had the marker not been there, it would have been difficult to find the grave.

The Alcott family plot.

Louisa May Alcott.

Edmund Hosmer (1798-1881) was a Concord farmer who was a friend of Emerson and Thoreau who was associated with the Transcendentalists and had helped Thoreau in the construction of his cabin.

'EPHRIAM WALES BULL

THE ORIGINATOR OF THE CONCORD GRAPE

BORN IN BOSTON MAR 4 1806

DIED IN CONCORD SEPT 26 1806

HE SOWED OTHERS REAPED'

Presumably the final line refers to the fact that Bull, a neighbor of Bronson Alcott's - thanks to Thomas Jefferson -  was unable to patent his invention, so lost out big time. The story of this is in an essay in Paul Collins's Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck (London: Picador, 2001).

'ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1804-1894

A TEACHER OF THREE GENERATIONS OF CHILDREN,

AND THE FOUNDER OF KINDERGARTEN IN AMERICA.

EVERY HUMAN CAUSE HAD HER SYMPATHY.

AND MANY HER ACTIVE AID.'

Sophia Hawthorne's sister is buried far from Authors' Ridge.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Salem, Massachusetts

Emily A. Murphy's Nathaniel Hawthorne's Salem: A Walking Tour of Literary Salem in the Early Nineteenth Century (Salem, MA: National Park Service/Salem National Historic Site, 2007) is an invaluable guide. The post below contains what I consider to be the most interesting features in it, and most of the time I've summarized Murphy's comments under my own photos.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was born at 27 Union Street to Captain Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Clarke Manning. It was moved in 1958 to its present location, at the side of the House of Seven Gables, at 57 Turner Street.

In 1808 Captain Hathorne died of yellow fever in Surinam. Elizabeth moved with her children - Nathaniel and his two sisters Elizabeth and Louisa - back to the home of her childhood at 10½-12 Herbert Street, the Manning House. Nathaniel moved from there for four years while attending Bowdoin College, and another four years when his family moved to North Salem, but apart from that this is where he lived between 1808 and 1840. Many of his early stories were written here, the place he term 'Castle Dismal'.

The Brown Building on the corner of Union and Essex streets, where Dr Nathaniel Peabody and his wife moved in 1810 with their daughters Elizabeth Palmer, Mary, and Sophia, who was one year old. The eldest daughter remembered seeing 'a little boy with clustering locks' playing in the nearby Manning garden, and many years later she would be his sister-in-law:

'Sophia Peabody Hawthorne

1809-1871

artist, journalist

travel writer, and

wife of

Salem's famous author

Nathaniel Hawthorne,

lived here in the

Brown Building

during her

early childhood.'

Before this, though, Nathaniel and his younger sister Louisa often went to a house in Turner Street that originally belonged to the Turner family, but which their cousin Susan Ingersoll had inherited. Three of the gables of this house had been removed, and Susan is said to have shown Hawthorne the missing gable marks in the attic. Hence the inspiration for Hawthorne's major novel, The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

 From the Brown House, the Peabodys moved to 54 Charter Street in 1835, and it was there that Dr Peabody's daughter Elizabeth Palmer Peabody - who was very involved with the intellectual life of the area - invited Hawthorne, whose Twice Told Tales (1837) had recently been published. It was there that Hawthorne fell in love with Sophia, and married her five years later.

But to return to Hawthorne's interest in graveyards which I mentioned here, right next to the Peabodys' home was Old Burying Point Cemetery, where a number of Hathornes lay. Hawthorne was most interested in the gravestone of his great-great-grandfather, Colonel John Hathorne, who was a judge during the Salem witch trials. It is unknown if this connection is the reason why Hawthorne added the 'w' to his name.

Another of the graves that interested Hawthorne was that of Cotton Mather's younger brother Nathaniel, who died at the age of 19.  Toward the end of his first novel - Fanshawe (1828) - Hawthorne writes:

'[Fanshawe's] passage [to the grave] was consequently rapid, terminating just as he reached his twentieth year. His fellow-students erected to his memory a monument of rough-hewn granite, with a white marble slab for the inscription. This was borrowed from the grave of Nathanael Mather, whom, in his almost insane eagerness for knowledge, and in his early death, Fanshawe resembled.'

The full text of Fanshawe is here.

Hawthorne was nominated Surveyor of the Port of Salem by friends in the Democratic Party, a post he would retain for a little under four years. He was dismissed after the Whig Zachary Taylor was elected president, and a vicious smear campaign began against Hawthorne. As Hawthorne had (on the orders of Washington) written (but not delivered) letters of dismissal for inspectors who hadn't contributed to the Democratic party, and as he had given more work to Democrats, his fate was inevitable.  

Salem remembers its famous son with great pride. In Essex Street is the Old Town Pump Memorial Fountain, which is on the site of the town pump, which Hawthorne made the narrator of one of his short stories:

'SALEM TOWN PUMP FOUNTAIN

'THIS IS THE SITE OF THE

ORIGINAL SALEM SPRING,

LATER THE LOCATION FOR

THE TOWN PUMP

IMMORTALIZED BY

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

IN HIS FIRST BOOK

"TWICE TOLD TALES."
THIS FOUNTAIN IS HERE

AT THE SUGGESTION OF

THE TOWN PUMP ITSELF,

IN "A RILL FROM

THE TOWN PUMP."

The town pump's words:

"And when I shall have decayed likemy predecessors, then, if you revere my memory, let a marble fountain richly sculptured take my place upon this spot. Such monuments should be erected everywhere and inscribed with the names of the distinguished champions of my cause.'

First book? What of Fanshawe? Well, Hawthorne paid for the publication himself, but later disowned it, and his widow Sophia denied its existence too despite all evidence to the contrary, so it seems that the pump is speaking with Hawthorne's voice too.

A close-up of the impressive work.

And on Hawthorne Boulevard is a large statue of the man.

This was sculpted in 1916 by Bela Pratt, who also sculpted the William Everett Hale statue in the Public Garden in Boston. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne and the King's Chapel Burying Ground, Boston, Massachusetts

King's Chapel Burying Ground is on Tremont Street, downtown Boston, the city's oldest cemetery. Nathaniel Hawthorne used to enjoy walking around cemetries, and this is was one of them. Legend has it that the above gravestone, of Elizabeth Pain, who died in 1704, inspired Hawthorne's Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, because of the (tenuous) resemblance of the symbol at the top left to the letter 'A'.

Certainly, the closing paragraph of the novel seems to suggest something of this, even if the colors are incorrect:

'So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the
scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tomb-stone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate - as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport - there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:
"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"'