Arranging a visit with the Hawthornes in Concord - photo 1

Arranging a visit with the Hawthornes in Concord

Lot 61
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Starting price
$ 15 000
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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Archive
ID 967628
Lot 61 | Arranging a visit with the Hawthornes in Concord
Estimate value
$ 15 000 – 25 000
Arranging a visit with the Hawthornes in Concord

Harriet Beecher Stowe, 22 June 1863

STOWE, Harriet Beecher (1811-1896). Autograph letter signed ("H.B. Stowe") to Sophia Hawthorne, Andover, 22 June 1863.



Thee pages, bifolium 180 x 117mm (typed identification at head of first page, mounting remants on verso of second leaf).



Harriet Beecher Stowe arranges a visit to Hawthorne's Concord home. A rare letter documenting the personal association between two literary giants, written a year before Nathaniel Hawthorne's death. "Mr. Stowe & I have long desired to renew our acquaintance with you, but Concord is rather too far off for a card-case call & this leads me to say that on Sunday next we shall pass your house on our way to a friends' with whom we pass Sunday, & we propose to ourselves then the pleasure of calling & seeing you & Mr. Hawthorne & your family once more —" Coyly expressing her commitment to the early summer visit, she adds: "Only, should there chance to be a driving snow storm we should perhaps not undertake the visit — & of course must lose the call. Your whole region is to me terra incognita known only in your husband's descriptions, so I ardently hope the sun may shine & the skies prove propitious. In such a case we hope to look in upon you, about two or three o'clock…"



It is unclear when the Stowes and Hawthornes first became personally acquainted, but the first encounter we have been able to trace occurred aboard the ship Europa, bound from England to Boston in June 1860 together with James T. Fields, Hawthorne's publisher, and his wife Annie. Whether it was their first encounter is unclear, but over the course of the voyage Stowe kept close company with Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, who had spent the previous three years touring France and Italy following the end of his stint as U.S. Consul in Liverpool. Years later Annie Fields recalled, "Mrs. Hawthorne, who was always the romancer in the conversation, filled the evening hours by weaving magic webs of her fancies, until we looked upon her as a second Scheherazade, and the day the head was to be cut off was the day we should come to shore. 'Oh,' said Hawthorne, 'I wish we might never get there.' But the good ship moved steadily as fate. Meanwhile, Mrs. Stowe often took her turn at entertaining the little group. She was seldom tired of relating stories of New England life and her early experiences. (See, Annie Fields, ed., Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1897, p. 282)



Beyond the present letter, Works documents only two other direct contacts between the two families. The first, in a 5 November 1860 letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Calvin E. Stowe in which he offers praise to Martha Tyler Gale's analysis of The Marble Faun. (18:344). And in 1863, Hawthorne wrote directly to Harriet Beecher Stowe thanking her for her comments on an article he had written and praising Stowe's critique: "A reply to the affectionate and Christian Address of many thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to their Sisters, the Women of the United States of America." Published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1863, Stowe accused English women of not doing more to push for an end to slavery. Hawthorne wrote, "If anything could make John Bull blush, I should think it might be that, but he is a hardened and villainous hypocrite. I always felt that he cared nothing for or against slavery, except as it gave him a vantage-ground on which to parade his own virtue and sneer at our iniquity." (18:515-516). There is also an indication that Stowe visited Hawthorne in the summer of 1862. And although the pair certainly admired each other's work, Stowe did harbor some reservation about Hawthorne's politics, asking James T. Fields on 3 November 1863, "'Do tell me if our friend Hawthorne praises that arch traitor [Franklin] Pierce in his preface & your loyal firm publishes it. I never read the preface & have not yet seen the book, but they say so here & I can scarcely believe it of you—if I can of him. I regret that I went to see him last summer—what! Patronise such a traitor to our faces!—I can scarce believe Annie knew you were out when you did it. But I haven't read it'" (ibid., 516).

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