CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Thus far, no woman in the world has ever once spoken out her whole heart and her whole mind. The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of society throttles us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats!
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
ALL WOMEN, as authors, are feeble and tiresome,” Hawthorne bitterly exploded. “I wish they were forbidden to write, on having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster-shell.”
With more and more authors peddling their work, each claiming a readership that threatened his, Hawthorne directed his nasty outburst at the ink-stained Amazons who’d always upset him, now more than ever. There were three hundred thousand copies of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, circulating the first year of its publication, 1852; by comparison, The Scarlet Letter had sold barely seven thousand; the same was true of The Blithedale Romance.
The admission of women into men’s professions, particularly writing, was another instance of philanthropy run amok. “A false liberality which mistakes the strong division lines of Nature for arbitrary distinctions,” he’d written in “Mrs. Hutchinson,” “and a courtesy, which might polish criticism but should never soften it, have done their best to add a girlish feebleness to the tottering infancy of our literature.”
Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter, selling forty thousand copies in two months, triggered another blast. “America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women,” Hawthorne cried in 1855, “and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.” Better to stay in Liverpool, despite the reduction in revenue, than compete with women who wrote sentimental claptrap about current affairs. They’d trounce him, no question, which was no doubt another reason Hawthorne did not yet resign the consulship, as he often said he would.
Hawthorne’s anxiety about women writers—and writing generally—tangled him in a paradox. If his fiction did not sell, he was not an adequate provider; if it did, he was writing trash like Stowe and company, which not only violated his definition of romance, it linked him, once again, to the scribbling women he despised. Effete and unread; or popular and a female scribbler, which is to say hack: either way, he was the loser.
But Hawthorne’s prejudices were at least two-sided. Though he didn’t approve of women authors, he didn’t condescend to them either, and he made the same demands on them as he made on himself: “truth of detail,” combined with “a broader and higher truth.” Of course, a higher truth was exactly what Mrs. Stowe was after, only in her case she defined it as the higher truth of emancipation. Hawthorne’s aims were different. He said he wanted to keep politics out of art, even in Blithedale, a questionable position in this novel, as reviewers of it had been quick to point out—and a Whiggish one, in which the artist is a gentleman, not a politician. But the figure of the artist as uninvolved spectator still suited him.
Disappointed when he saw a group of pre-Raphaelite paintings, he complained that “with the most lifelike exhibition, there is no illusion.” Mimicry is not art, romance is: the imagination applied to the actual, transporting raw experience beyond itself. Thus defined, romance is a hedge against realism, abject, political, indecent realism, and just what he couldn’t stomach in Julia Ward Howe’s poems, Passion Flowers: “a whole history of domestic unhappiness,” Hawthorne cringed. “What a strange propensity it is in these scribbling women to make a show of their hearts, as well as their heads, upon your counter, for anybody to pry into that chooses!”
Or, to switch metaphors, the writer is something of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, his outer garment elegantly sewn, with sentences stitched into paragraphs, affected, quaint, a bit outdated and entirely masterful. But passion is a bodice ripper. The Scarlet Letter, as we have seen, is its best example, desire throbbing under the well-articulated surface, much like the anarchical heart that beats beneath Hester’s “A,” each indispensable to the other.
Hawthorne believed in privacy—no doubt about it—and self-control and discretion, but writing, really good writing, depends on the inmost me stealing forth like a bosom-serpent that crawls out of its hole. Hawthorne knew that. “Be true! Be true! Be true!” he admonishes at the end of TheScarlet Letter. All writers need be true, even women, who do write well when they “throw off the restraints of decency, and come before the public stark naked, as it were”—like Julia Howe. Hawthorne also appreciated Fanny Fern and her snappy satire of the publishing industry, Ruth Hall. “The woman writes as if the devil was in her,” Hawthorne praised Fern; “and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading.”
But a proper lady keeps her clothes on, which is why she shouldn’t write. “It does seem to me to deprive women of all delicacy,” he repeated himself to Sophia; “it has pretty much such an effect on them as it would to walk abroad through the streets, physically stark naked.” Admiring Sophia’s travel journals, he stringently opposed their publication. “Neither she nor I would like to see her name on your list of female authors,” Hawthorne would tell Ticknor. Sophia went on record to agree. “I think it is designed by GOD that woman should always spiritually wear a veil, & not a coat & hat,” she tartly informed Elizabeth Peabody. When Una began to scribble stories—she said she must be a romance writer—Sophia specifically ignored them. “I have such an unmitigated horror of precocious female story tellers & poets,” she said, “—that in every way I pass over with indifference what she does in this way.”
Shielding her children from the steam pressure of modern life, Sophia plied them with dance and fencing lessons, and she offered French, geography, and music in small doses, rejecting the strenuous regime that had been forced on her. She pushed aside Mary’s objections. “My principle is not to wear out young twigs with hanging millstones on them.”
Nor did she want Una, in particular, to learn of slavery. “The repose of art is better for her now than the excitement of human wrongs and rights,” Sophia reprimanded Elizabeth, who sent letters stuffed with stories of abuse and degradation. Una obeyed her parents but despaired of her ignorance, and soon she was complaining of a pain in her head. Overprotected, melancholy, and approaching puberty, she thought she might be losing her mind.
“Life has never been light and joyous to her,” her father commented with regret and doubtless some recognition.
John O’Sullivan resided with his wife, mother, and sister-in-law in a grand house in one of Lisbon’s most desirable neighborhoods. He employed a staff of ten, rode in a carriage lined with cerulean damask, and frequently entertained royalty in the starched blue uniform he buttoned high, his white collar barely visible. His only ornament was the uniform’s gold buttons with the United States seal. He appeared at court with his family and their houseguest, Mrs. Hawthorne, whom he introduced to the king. She wore a violet brocade trimmed with lace and purple ribbons, and around her neck she tied a black velvet ribbon hung with a diamond pendant that twinkled in the light. Hawthorne had told her to spare no expense.
“Oh, my wife, I do want thee so intolerably,” he pined for Sophia. “Nothing else is real, except the bond between thee and me. The people around me are but shadows. I am myself but a shadow, till thou takest me in thy arms, and convertest me into substance.” Hawthorne as ghost: it was the familiar cry. And after Sophia sailed to Portugal, he tossed in his dreary bed at night, plagued by forebodings of desertion and death. “I have learned what the bitterness of exile is, in these days,” he confided to his journal as fall crept into winter, “and I never should have known it but for the absence of my wife.” When Sophia praised O’Sullivan as being as radiant as the sun, Hawthorne sullenly reminded his wife that he had a heart that burned hot for her.
“Heretofore,” he added glumly, “thou has had great reason to doubt it.”
Liverpool had taxed the marriage. Sophia had been miserable. Hawthorne did not write, travel, or come home for eight long hours a day, a separation Sophia detested, having married a man who, she’d thought, would stay close by her side. The rancid city had offered little in the way of amusement and even less in the fulfillment of expectations; at most, the Hawthornes had attended a couple of dinners and visited a couple of manorial homes. A talisman, the English porcelain they’d purchased had arrived in Massachusetts broken to bits. Sophia had been inconsolable. “What a millstone I was in England,” Sophia confessed from Portugal, “but with what divine patience you bore up beneath my weight.”
Lonely, guilt-ridden, and depressed, Hawthorne treated himself to a twenty-day vacation in London at the end of March. His cicerone was Fields’s friend Francis Bennoch, a merchant prince, generous and deferential without being obsequious, somewhat like Henry Bright though closer in age to Hawthorne. Born in Scotland in 1811, Bennoch cultivated literary or artistic people and, in the case of the painter Robert Haydon, helped support them financially. He also wrote a little poetry himself. Commuting each day from his suburban home to his wholesale silk and ribbon firm in London, he scribbled verses in the railroad carriage, oblivious to the clack and bounce. In 1841 he published a book of poems, The Storm and Other Poems. Wordsworth recommended against a literary career, but Bennoch hadn’t harbored any illusions about his talent. He remained a trader, a speculator, and a local politician, maintaining, as Hawthorne did not, an easy intercourse between art and economy—until his firm’s bankruptcy in 1857 indicated his talent did not lie in business either.
Julian Hawthorne remembered Bennoch as one of the best-looking men in England, his forehead steep, his brow bushy, and his “sparkling black eyes full of hearty sunshine and kindness.” (The description makes him sound like Hawthorne.) Rose Hawthorne recalled a short, fat man who sounded like a pack of chickens when he chuckled at his own jokes, which he often did. He was sitting in his London office in the early spring of 1856 when Hawthorne walked through the door, much changed since the two men had been introduced two years earlier. Bennoch hardly recognized him. He was heavier, his hairline had veered farther north, and the strands of hair around his ears shimmered with demonstrable silver. But the face retained its smoothness, the eyes their inward look.
“I never saw a man more miserable,” Bennoch recalled many years later; “he was hipped, depressed, and found fault with everything; London was detestable; it had but one merit—it was not so bad as Liverpool.” To prove Hawthorne wrong, Bennoch showed him the curiosities, like Barber Surgeon’s Hall and St. Giles Church in Cripplegate, and he stage-managed Hawthorne’s entrance into literary society, inviting him to a dinner at the Milton Club, where Hawthorne met the editor of the London Illustrated News, the songwriter Charles Mackay, and S. C. Hall, the editor of the Art Union Monthly Journal. After Hawthorne delivered a speech—he disliked public speaking but was rather good, provided he drank enough—he went to a supper party at the home of Eneas Dallas, editorial writer for the Times. “They have found me out,” Hawthorne reported to Sophia, “and I believe I should have engagements for every day, and two or three a day, if I staid here through the season.”
At Mackay’s invitation, Hawthorne met the writer Douglas Jerrold at the Reform Club, and at a dinner at the lord mayor’s arranged by Bennoch, Hawthorne sat mesmerized by the lord mayor’s beautiful sister-in-law until he was again called upon to speak. Afterwards he decided he’d made fool of himself: talking “in one’s cups” was a ridiculous custom. Bennoch also contrived a series of expeditions that included a military camp in Hampshire, a meal with the author Martin Tupper in Surrey, and in Hastings a meeting with Theodore Martin and his wife, the actress Helena Faucit. A botheration and a satisfaction, Hawthorne called the engagements, pleased with himself and hoping Sophia would be pleased—or envious.
Unperturbed by London’s literary establishment, as long as it excluded Tennyson, Thackeray, Eliot, and Dickens, Hawthorne relied completely on Bennoch for his entry into it. “If this man has not a heart, then no man ever had,” Hawthorne said. His feelings about Bennoch never changed, and Bennoch entered Hawthorne’s spangled pantheon—Bridge, Pierce, O’Sullivan, Fields—as a “friend whom I love as much as if I had know him for a life-time.”
Dissension, the pop of gunfire, and confused alarms that rose and fell: slavery’s fire bell clanged not just in the night but during the day, every day. Hawthorne was glad to be in England. “If anything could bring me back to America, this winter, it would undoubtedly be my zeal for the Anti-slavery cause,” he quipped dryly in December of 1855; “but my official engagements render it quite impossible to assist personally.”
Pierce’s presidency had been a sorry disaster, fiasco following abysmal fiasco. Particularly abominable was the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Introduced by Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas (partly because the senator hoped to maneuver a transcontinental railroad through his state), the bill allowed the inhabitants of the Nebraska territory, which included Kansas, their own referendum for or against slavery. In so doing, the bill effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and allowed slavery to extend its reach into territories previously considered untouchable. Charles Sumner condemned the bill as a slaveholders’ plot; Douglas retorted that Senator Sumner represented “the pure unadulterated representatives of Abolitionism, Free Soil-ism, and Niggerism.” William H. Seward, the savvy antislavery senator from New York, tried to outmaneuver Douglas by urging southern Whigs to demand total repeal of the compromise.
“I must say that the tone and standard of public morals at Washington are very, very low,” George Hillard, a Whig, glowered. “The antislavery Seward and the proslavery Douglas are alike calculating, ambitious, and time-serving.” The poet William Cullen Bryant, editor of the Democratic New York Evening Post, denounced the bill as despicable, and George Bancroft called “this cruel attempt to conquer Kansas into slavery … the worst thing ever projected in our history.” It passed in May of 1854 with Pierce’s blessing.
Sophia Hawthorne was among the minority who embraced, or said they did, an impartial view. “How insane all America seems to us about the Nebraska bill,” she disdainfully informed Mary Mann. Pierce had supported the bill to preserve the Union and maintain the sovereignty of states’ rights. To Mary Mann, the old saw was objectionable. But Sophia informed her sister with a certain contemptuousness that she knew certain “persons”—Hawthorne?—“angelic in goodness & humanity & of the purest motives, who agree with the advocates of this bill. Not because it promotes the extension of slavery—of course not,” she quickly added, “—but because they think it constitutional & right—& that it would be a ruinous precedent to legislate against it.” Mary assumed that Pierce had bamboozled Hawthorne once again.
While Sophia pretended equanimity, Hawthorne did not. “I find it impossible to read American newspapers (of whatever political party) without being ashamed of my country,” he groaned, protesting more than once that if it weren’t for his children, he’d never go back. In Boston federal marshals had nabbed the fugitive slave Anthony Burns, and when Theodore Parker condemned the arrest to a roaring crowd at Faneuil Hall, the crowd swooped down on the courthouse where Burns was being held. The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson butted its thick oak door with a wooden beam. He was clubbed. A shot rang out. A marshal’s deputy was stabbed to death. “Oh how much harm to the wretched slave, these crazy men do!” Sophia wailed. “Mr. Parker was far more the murderer of that officer than the man who shot him.”
The situation was even worse in Kansas. Proslavery men fought against the abolitionist recruits sent into the territory by New England emigrant aid societies, Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, according to Stephen Douglas. With Pierce and Douglas backing the proslavery regime, the antislavery Free-Soilers set up their own legislature, claiming that border Missourians—ruffians—were terrorizing voters and rigging the local elections. In the spring of 1856, a posse of proslavery men mobbed the Free-Soil town of Lawrence, Kansas, burned the hotel, sacked the governor’s house, and demolished two antislavery newspaper offices. Pierce’s friend Jefferson Davis, the secretary of war, dispatched federal troops to the territory. Kansas teetered on the brink of civil war.
In Washington, Sumner inveighed for two days against the crimes in Kansas, drubbing colleagues like South Carolina’s Andrew Butler, a man with chalk-white hair and genteel manners. Two days later, on May 22, Butler’s less dignified protégé, Congressman Preston Brooks, avenged the honor of his slandered kinsman and their state when he entered the Senate chamber, walked over to the wooden desk where Sumner sat, and whacked him senseless with a gutta-percha cane.
“To say the truth,” Hawthorne groaned again, “there is no inducement to return to our own country, where you seem to be on the point of beating one another’s brains out.”
Sophia came back to England on June 9, 1856, still coughing. Resuming life in Liverpool was out of the question, so the Hawthornes tumbled here and there—Blackheath, Southport, Old Trafford, Bath—in search of health, recreation, and some ineffable quality associated with home. It was impossible to find.
His family installed, for the moment, in a boardinghouse run by the parsimonious Mrs. Hume in Shirley, near Southampton, Hawthorne commuted to Liverpool. In July the Hawthornes took over the Bennochs’ place in Blackheath while the Bennochs vacationed in Germany. Blackheath was a pretty suburban enclave within easy reach of London, perfect for Sophia, so glad to be in range of “stupendous, grand London, the epitome of the world, the centre of all things,” that she ventured out at night in a low-cut blue silk carrying a portable respirator. She wanted to meet Jenny Lind.
The Bennoch place was too small for the family, but Hawthorne placed Una, Rose, and Rose’s nursemaid in rooms nearby and stayed in Blackheath as often as consular business allowed. Like Sophia, he took advantage of London, strolling its narrow streets, relaxed and happy, stopping for ice cream, breakfasting or eating lunch here and there with a small group of literati like Bennoch’s friend Monckton Milnes, Keats’s first biographer and an expert in autographs and pornography.
Shortly after moving to Blackheath, Hawthorne went to London to call on a countrywoman, Delia Bacon, at her lodging house on Spring Street, Hyde Park. As he stood in Miss Bacon’s third-floor parlor, he thumbed through books on a table, waiting for an elderly woman to appear. Later he remembered being agreeably disappointed. Miss Bacon was dark-haired, intelligent, demure, graceful. With that wild glint in her eye, she might even have been a Hester or a Zenobia. “Unquestionably, she was a monomaniac,” Hawthorne would write. He stayed an hour and rather liked her.
Delia Bacon was in England intending to prove that William Shakespeare—the ignorant groom—had not authored the plays attributed to him, which were in fact composed by a consortium of revolutionaries including Francis Bacon (no relation) who larded the texts with their secret, seditious codes.
“I want some literary counsel,” she had written Hawthorne the preceding May, “and such as no Englishman of letters is able to give me.” Thomas Carlyle was sympathetic but ineffectual, so she turned to the American consul in Liverpool—what else should a literary man be doing in official office if not assist a fellow author—and asked him to evaluate a portion of her manuscript.
He said he would, warning her that he didn’t share her point of view. “But I feel that you have done a thing that ought to be reverenced,” he replied graciously, “in devoting yourself so entirely to this object, whatever it be, and whether right or wrong, and by so doing, you have acquired some of the privileges of an inspired person and a prophetess.” Though Delia Bacon was just the sort of scribbling woman Hawthorne could esteem—all the more since she wrote nonfiction—it’s not clear how much about her he already knew: born on the American frontier in 1811; placed in a foster home in Connecticut; a student of Catharine Beecher’s estimable Female Seminary, where she professed her faith; a teacher and a onetime playwright. In 1831 she had submitted a story, “Love’s Martyr,” for the Philadelphia Saturday Courier’s literary prize that beat out a tale by Edgar Allan Poe. That was the year she published her own version of American history in Tales of the Puritans, influenced, as Hawthorne had been, by John Neal. Then malaria left her with the scourge of all intellectual women, delicate health.
In 1845 she met with more bad luck. Courted by Alexander MacWhorter, a Yale theology student ten years her junior, Bacon accepted his proposal of marriage. MacWhorter, “too weak to bear the ridicule,” scoffed Harriet Beecher Stowe, “of marrying a woman older than himself,” quickly withdrew the offer. That was a disappointment Bacon could bear. His distributing her love letters among his friends was a humiliation her brother simply had to avenge. Ignoring his sister’s embarrassment, Leonard Bacon, the pastor of the First Congregational Church, pit himself against the divines at Yale College by publicly accusing MacWhorter of personal misconduct. The subsequent ecclesiastical trial acquitted him by a vote of 24 to 23, a victory for Yale College more than for MacWhorter, whom the tribunal reprimanded. It also tacitly acknowledged his guilt, warning him not to try the same stunt again.
That wasn’t all. Another defender of Bacon, Catharine Beecher, took up the pen for her in a book entitled Truth Stranger Than Fiction, its title yet another humiliation.
Bacon wasn’t licked. She moved to Boston, where she lectured on history to men as different as George Hillard and William Henry Channing. They loved her. A respected woman in the mold of Margaret Fuller—minus Fuller’s off-putting conceit and her feminism—she devoted herself to genius not her own, namely, whoever it was that wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Convinced more than ever of the hoax, Bacon enlisted the queen of causes, Elizabeth Peabody, and Peabody conveyed her to Emerson. Emerson consented to act as Bacon’s agent and passed her on to Hawthorne, then packing for Liverpool. Hawthorne wasn’t interested.
No matter; Bacon showed up in London herself, financed by a wealthy lawyer enthralled with her theory. Iconoclasm was contagious, especially among Americans who didn’t mind toppling a British giant, or letting a crackpot woman try. “Delia Bacon, with genius but mad,” was, according to Emerson, one of the two greatest originals “America has yielded in ten years.” The other was Walt Whitman.
In stodgy London, Bacon attracted supporters like Carlyle, but book publishers were not as amused as he. She canvassed the magazines and with Emerson’s help placed a feisty article, “William Shakespeare and His Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them,” in the January 1856 issue of Putnam’s Monthly, but despite strong sales, the magazine declined to print her next article. It wanted hard evidence. Bacon was discouraged. And when Emerson lost three of the articles she sent him, she began to doubt his loyalty to the cause. That’s when she wrote to the American consul.
“If you really think that I can promote your object, tell me definitely how, and try me,” Hawthorne responded; “and if I can say a true word to yourself about the work, it shall certainly be said; or if I can aid, personally, or through any connections in London, in bringing the book before the public, it shall be done.” He sent ten pounds.
He did find her book remarkable, if only for its nutty logic. “It is a very singular phenomenon,” he later concluded; “a system of philosophy growing up in this woman’s mind without her volition—contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her volition—and substituting itself in the place of everything that originally grew there.” Motivated by his long-standing rivalry with Emerson as well as Bacon herself, he approached several London publishers.
Eager to get on with it, Bacon moved to Stratford, convinced that she should clinch her case by opening Shakespeare’s tomb, where she figured she might find the documents Francis Bacon had buried there. She stole into the Holy Trinity Church one evening, a candle and a lamp in her hand, and sat by Shakespeare’s grave but did nothing until the oil in her lamp burned low and she fumbled out of the church. Sophia Hawthorne was crestfallen. Bacon’s quixotic enterprise ended with a whimper.
Disappointed with herself, Bacon railed at Hawthorne. He had betrayed her, she believed, just like all the rest, when he said she should accept money from her brother Leonard; how dare he think she’d take anything from a nonbeliever? Insulted by Hawthorne’s suggestion, she had to accept another five pounds—filthy lucre—from him. Bewildered and a bit offended himself, Hawthorne pledged to continue to help her publish her book. “The more absurdly she behaves,” he confided to Bennoch, whom he had enlisted as intermediary, “the more need of somebody to help her.”
Hawthorne would neither cast Bacon off nor take credit when he secured a publishing contract from Parker and Son. Nor would he balk at assuming financial responsibility for her book, which Parker required as a condition. (To cover his investment, Hawthorne demanded that Ticknor bring out half the agreed-on copies—five hundred in all—doubtless hoping to offset inevitable losses.) He also consented to write a preface for the book, another crucial item for the negotiations with Parker. “How funny, that I should come in front of the stage-curtain, escorting this Bedlamite!” he said to Bennoch.
But his attention, like his affection, was divided. With the Bennochs re-occupying their house in the fall, the Hawthornes had to pitch their tent elsewhere. “It is a strange, vagabond, gypsey sort of life, this that we are leading; and I know not whether we shall finally be spoilt for any other,” Hawthorne reflected wistfully. The wind howled bleakly as he and his family resettled in the coastal resort of Southport, twenty miles north of Liverpool, where Sophia could inhale ripe, salty air and Hawthorne travel home by rail each night from the office.
Their rooms at 15 Brunswick Terrace faced the great promenade and the sea, and Sophia was comfortable for a while in their two shabby floors. Small donkey carts pulled her over the beach, and the saltwater baths subdued her dry cough. It then started to rain. Melville came and went in the drizzle en route to the Holy Land in search of succor. His literary ebullience soured by failure, Melville dimly hoped Hawthorne might help place his new book, The Confidence-Man. “He certainly is much overshadowed since I saw him last,” Hawthorne observed somewhat regretfully, inviting him to Southport, where he stayed for three days. Temporarily warmed by reminiscence, cigars, and a tumbler of ale, the two men sat and talked, not quite comfortable in a hollow among the hills. “If he were a religious man,” Hawthorne astutely observed in his journal, “he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”
A few days later, he took Melville to Chester and they walked along the wall, ate veal pies in a confectioner’s shop, toured the cathedral. They puffed on cigars and drank stout at the Yacht Inn, where they were shown the window on which Jonathan Swift had etched a screed against the clergy with the diamond of his ring. Melville had a good time.
But the flowers of friendship had faded. Melville was no longer young and hopeful, an acolyte in love.
Melville stowed his trunk at the consulate and sailed a few days later with only a carpet bag. “I do not know a more independent personage,” commented Hawthorne with elegiac affection. The two men saw each other once more, when Melville claimed his trunk. Hawthorne did not record the final meeting.
In a matter of weeks the Hawthornes were restless. Southport was seedier than they thought, the surrounding countryside marshy and flat, and Sophia was bored. Elizabeth had offered to come to England to help out, but Sophia said she’d hate such “an utterly stupid, uninteresting, lonely place, where there is no society, no life, no storied memories, & no scenery.” Hawthorne would nod. “Our life here has been a blank,” he groused, astray and adrift.
In the winter of 1857, thieves broke into their house, taking nothing more than a few silver cups, a spoon, a shoulder of mutton, and Hawthorne’s topcoat and boots. A few days later two men were arrested while pawning Hawthorne’s clothes. “I rather wished them to escape,” he remarked.
Escape was on his mind. On February 13, 1857, he resigned as consul, effective six months later on the last day of August. He’d have spent four years in office, which is what he’d intended, his purse not bursting but full enough so that he could head with clear conscience for Italy, where the exchange rate happened to be quite good.
Franklin Pierce sought and lost the Democratic Party nomination for president to James Buchanan, who ran against a splintered Whig Party. A remnant of the Whigs rallied around Millard Fillmore on the anti-Catholic, nativist American Party ticket; the rest went over to John C. Frémont and the newly organized Republicans, an amalgam of Conscience Whigs and disgruntled Democrats all galvanized by Pierce’s failed Kansas policy. “Free Speech, Free Press, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont, and Victory,” their slogan ran.
Whether or not Frémont won, observed Evert Duyckinck, “the moral victory at any rate will be for Free Soil.”
But since Pierce’s political life was over, so was Hawthorne’s.
Hawthorne was lying when he said the whole thing mattered little to him. He detested both the Free-Soilers who abandoned the Democratic Party and the proslavery forces of its southern wing. “For the sake of novelty, and to put down the Southerners,” he rasped to Ticknor, “I should like well enough to try Frémont; but it would be a dangerous experiment for the country.” And Sophia believed the white supremacist propaganda about the slave rebellions Frémont’s election would indubitably incite “because the negroes received an idea or instruction that he would aid them with an army.”
Buchanan won. “The country will stand, & … Mr. Buchanan will be wise & strong,” Sophia consoled Mary Mann.
With Pierce leaving office and his own departure imminent, Hawthorne felt far less compunction about dodging consular business, which meant he could gratify pleasures long deferred. He and Sophia and Julian traipsed through Yorkshire at Easter time, to Lincolnshire and New-stead Abbey in May, to Glasgow and Dumbarton Castle and Loch Lomand and Edinburgh in the summer. (Cranky with so much sightseeing, Una was left behind with Rose and a servant.) At the end of July, the entire family quit Southport, renting rooms near Victoria Station in Old Trafford, outside of Manchester, so Hawthorne could finish out his term while the rest of the family explored Prince Albert’s exhibition of British art in the immense hymn to iron and glass erected for the occasion.
Hawthorne also quit himself of Bacon, having finished the preface to her book. “No man or woman has ever thought or written more sincerely than the author of this book,” he wrote, damning Bacon’s undertaking with half praise. She wanted him to rewrite his lukewarm endorsement; Hawthorne refused, and Bacon’s publisher reneged. Bennoch saved the day, coaxing Groombridge and Sons, publisher of the Westminster Review, to bring out Bacon’s tome, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, in the spring of 1857. Hawthorne paid twenty-five pounds toward advertising.
The press savaged the book as wild and silly and dull, and Hawthorne’s preface was taken to be ironical. “I do not repent what I have done,” he had written Ticknor. Without Shakespeare, Bacon’s paranoia lost its object. She stopped eating, dressing, and changing the linens on her bed. The mayor of Stratford contacted Hawthorne, as American consul, and Hawthorne wrote to Leonard Bacon, paid her bills, and arranged a September passage back to America. By then Bacon, completely mad, had to be committed to a private sanatorium.
Hawthorne would salute Delia Bacon. “I fell under Miss Bacon’s most severe and passionate displeasure, and was cast off by her in the twinkling of an eye,” he later recalled, carefully choosing his words. “It was a misfortune to which her friends were always particularly liable; but I think that none of them ever loved, or even respected, her most ingenuous and noble, but likewise most sensitive and tumultuous character, the less for it.”
So much for female authorship: it seemed a cruel object lesson, even for a sensitive writer who cast off his own tumultuous women, like Zenobia, in the twinkling of an eye.