Sending the final installment of The Scarlet Letter - photo 1
Sending the final installment of The Scarlet Letter - photo 2
Sending the final installment of The Scarlet Letter - photo 3

Sending the final installment of The Scarlet Letter

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$ 50 000
Auction dateClassic
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -04:00
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CHRISTIE'S
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ID 967643
Lot 87 | Sending the final installment of The Scarlet Letter
Sending the final installment of The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 4 February 1850

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel (1804-1864). Autograph letter signed ("Nathl Hawthorne") to James T. Fields, Salem, 4 February 1850.



One page, bifolium, 191 x 123mm (right margin of second leaf affixed to a larger sheet bearing three additional letters including the poet R.S. Stoddard).



"Thank God, it is off my mind!"



Sending the final installment of The Scarlet Letter to his publisher. A highly important letter to his publisher, James T. Fields, marking the completion of Hawthorne's best-known work: "I send you the remainder of the Scarlet Letter, and hope you will like it as well [as] the preceding part. Thank God, it is off my mind! My next story shall not be such a h[e]ll-fired one. Yet I deserve some credit for refraining from making this half so ugly as I might. I likewise send a title-page and table of contents. I suppose the printers will begin each chapter on a separate page. I shall be glad when it is through the press; but, on the whole, do not much care about the book's coming out before I get away from Salem. It will give me rather more local celebrity than I desire; nevertheless, it is of very little consequence either way."



Hawthorne and Fields first met in November 1848, when the young editor sought to convince the author to sign on with the publisher Ticknor, Reed & Fields. His efforts were rewarded the following year when Fields managed to gain physical possession of the incomplete manuscript for The Scarlet Letter during a visit to Salem. On 15 January 1850, Hawthorne sent Fields the majority of the final manuscript, save for "three chapters still to be written..." (CE, 26:305). He had intended that the story be the first of several to be published together in a single volume, fearing that his tale would prove "too sombre," and that it would "weary very many people, and disgust some…" Writing to Fields two weeks before the present letter, he wondered if it was "safe, then, to stake the fate of the book entirely on this one chance?" He left the ultimate decision to Fields, conceding that he "should not be sorry to have you decide for the separate publication" (20 Jan. 1850, CE, 26:307).



Hawthorne also expressed concern about his own reputation in Salem; his semi-autobiographical introduction to The Scarlet Letter, "In the Custom-House," while providing an elegant segue into the larger narrative, also served as an attack on those who ousted him from his position as surveyor of the ports of Salem and Beverly. A lifelong Democrat, Hawthorne found himself unemployed by the incoming administration of Zachary Taylor in 1849 who replaced him with a loyal Whig appointee. But the ouster compelled Hawthorne out of sheer necessity to renew his literary focus—resulting in this landmark work that marked the start of his most productive period as an author.



This is the only letter from Hawthorne to his publisher concerning the production of The Scarlet Letter that we locate in private ownership. The only other known extant letters Hawthorne wrote to Fields on this subject (according to CE and other sources) are in institutional holdings: including the New York Public Library (8 January 1859), Harvard (15 January 1850), Yale (20 January 1850, draft), and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (7 March 1850). Not published in The Centenary Edition the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Provenance: Sotheby's, New York, 10 December 2010, lot 40.

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