Grandfather's Chair: Hawthorne's "Deeper History" of New England

The way in which adults conceived of childhood altered radically during the first half of the nineteenth century. Romantic ideas about the child's divine innocence permeated Transcendentalist thought, educational reform, the Sunday School movement, the growth of pediatrics, and the spawning of a new secular literature for and about children. The Calvinist notion of infant damnation was finally discarded, and gentler discipline was advocated in the child-rearing manuals, now addressed to mothers, which proliferated after 1830. Reflecting on this shift in sentiment occurring in his own generation, Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted "a witty physician" who lamented that "it was a misfortune to have been born when children were nothing and to live until men were nothing" (Cable 101).

Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings for children, published from 1835 to 1853, reflect the contradictions of this ferment. Ranging from history and geography to biography, mythology, and the Sunday School tract, his writing for the young spans the two decades of his evolution into a major literary artist and is representative of every aspect of this growing literature in antebellum America. His first juvenile book, a collaboration with his sister Elizabeth on the Universal History (1837) for Samuel Goodrich's Peter Parley series, was undertaken out of need and shows a willingness to accommodate what he perceived as an established market. Hawthorne continued to write for children, however, not only because it promised financial return but also because he took them seriously, saw this writing as a way to advance his career, and intended to make his mark on an expanding body of literature. In his preface to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852), still in paperback today, he expressed pleasure in having avoided writing "downward" to children, affirming his belief that they "possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high, in imagination or feeling" (7: 4).

Gloria Erlich has noted that Hawthorne's early sense of displacement—he was orphaned at four when his father died at sea and the parental home was lost—is reflected in his literary concern with origins, childhood, and the past. Always attracted to the minds of children, he places these figures at the center of many of his domestic essays, tales, late romances, and juvenile works. Remembered as a doting parent by his children, he recorded vicissitudes of the nursery in The American Notebooks, where he declared that "it is with children as Mr Emerson . . . says it is with nature. . . . The best manifestations of them must take you at unawares" (8: 409). But while Hawthorne shows a romantic understanding of childhood as a visionary or privileged state, he also confounded the sentimental pieties of his day. The wild and prescient Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, drawn from the problematic, even frightening, experience of watching his first-born Una, conjures up the complexity of his view: "I now and then catch a glimpse of her, in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil" (8: 430-31). He never shared his wife's rhapsodic faith in the perfection of their offspring, but had a haunted regard of this "elfish and angelic child" and, like Wordsworth, saw in children's imaginative quickness and reflective insight the deepest powers of the literary artist.

No work reveals the complexity of his attitude more fully than The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair (1851), a pioneering example of historical nonfiction for children which was originally published in 1841 by Elizabeth Peabody as three brief volumes: Grandfather's Chair, Famous Old People, and Liberty Tree.¹ Framed by a narrative in which Grandfather tells four Hawthorne grandchildren the adventures of the old English chair on which he sits, The Whole History traces the founding of Massachusetts from the Puritan settlement of Salem and Boston through the Revolutionary era. The "substantial and homely reality" of Grandfather's fireside chair unifies these "true stories," since individuals associated with the founding of the republic ranging from Anne Hutchinson to George Washington are somehow made to sit in, own, or act within...