Up-Country Letters - photo 1
Up-Country Letters - photo 2

Up-Country Letters

Starting price
$ 100
Auction dateClassic
16.06.2023 10:00UTC -04:00
Auctioneer
CHRISTIE'S
Event location
USA, New York
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ID 967512
Lot 312 | Up-Country Letters
HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel (1804-1864). Autograph letter signed ("Nath: Hawthorne"), Brunswick, 7 January 1854 [to Henry Arthur Bright]. Tipped into: [MANSFIELD, William Lewis.] Up-Country Letters. New York: Appleton, 1852.

Wonderful Hawthorne letter reflecting on the reception of American literature in England, tipped into a first edition copy of the book which he is highly recommending: his friend Mansfield's Up-Country Letters. In late 1849, William Lewis Mansfield of Cohoes, New York, sent the manuscript of his poem “The Morning Watch” to Nathaniel Hawthorne for his critique, and Hawthorne, then finishing The Scarlet Letter, responded thoughtfully in several letters and accepted much-needed compensation. Mansfield’s work was published by George P. Putnam in 1850. Hawthorne declined further money but accepted bottles of champagne in Lenox. Similarly, in late 1850 or early 1851, Mansfield submitted his epistolary manuscript “Up-Country Letters” to Hawthorne for his judgment, and Sophia reported that her husband, who was finishing another book (The House of the Seven Gables), was “much pleased” with his correspondent’s new project, finding it “true & graphic” (Harold Blodgett, “Hawthorne as Poetry Critic: Six Unpublished Letters to Lewis Mansfield,” American Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2 [1940]: 184).

Mansfield’s sometimes-musing, sometimes-bemused letters included a graceful acknowledgment of “the deep mosses of Hawthorne”—presumably the 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. Mentioning first the bobolinks that he had seen out the window, Mansfield then considered Hawthorne’s “deep mosses” “like-beautiful things” (57-58). Hawthorne later referred to Up-Country Letters when visiting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Blodgett 175) and asked William D. Ticknor to send a copy of the book to writer and politician Richard Monckton Milnes. The January 7, 1854, manuscript letter tipped into this volume is to Hawthorne’s close friend in Liverpool, Henry A. Bright. It expands revealingly on Hawthorne’s view of Mansfield’s volume: “I send an American book—‘Up-Country Letters’—which I beg you to read & hope you will like it. It would gratify me much if you would talk about it, or write about it, and get it into some degree of notice in this country. England, within two or three years past, has read & praised a hundred American books that do not deserve it half so well; but I somewhat question whether the English mind is not rather too bluff and beef-y to appreciate the peculiar charm of these letters. Yet we have produced nothing more original, nor more genuine.”

Letter: 1 1/4 pages, 12mo, rectos only, conjoined leaves (tiny fold tear). Published, CE 17:163. Volume: 12mo (180 x 120mm). Engraved frontispiece and additional title. Later 19th century calf (spine browned and chipped, some wear to edges). Provenance: Sotheby's New York, 26 June 2000, lot 189.
Artist:Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864)
Place of origin:USA
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16.06.2023
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