“Disorders of the Circulating Medium”: Hawthorne’s Early Children’s Literature

Grandfather with his grandchildren Laurence, Charley, Alice, and Clara. From the frontispiece to True Stories from History and Biography, vol. 12 of Hawthorne’s Works (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868).

Writing to Hawthorne’s former publisher James T. Fields on 26 December 1870, Elizabeth Hawthorne recalled one of her brother’s more interesting “peculiarities.” Although he had access to the Salem Athenaeum through his aunt’s library card, Hawthorne would never visit the library himself, “nor look over the catalogue to select a book, nor indeed do anything but find fault with it; so that it was left entirely to [his sister] to provide him with reading.”¹ His attitude toward that institution may have struck Elizabeth as “peculiar” given what she knew of his professional aims as an aspiring author: the antebellum literary profession was thriving in part because libraries and other institutions were helping to circulate texts to large, eager readerships. It may have also struck her as strange given her knowledge of his reading habits; we have well-preserved library records and the recollections of his sister to tell us he was an extraordinarily voracious reader (with a hunger for histories and biographies, as well as a penchant for novels) who made good use—albeit at one remove—of his local library’s resources.²

It is tempting to read Hawthorne’s reaction to the athenaeum as a discomfort with book-lending establishments more generally, as a response to the “bibliomania” sweeping the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.³ Suggesting a problem with which he would struggle throughout his early career, such establishments helped to promote, even as they were instituted to organize and control, the circulation of an overwhelming quantity of printed material. As a writer still unsure of his place in the market, Hawthorne may have seen the sheer number of available texts as a threat to his chances for literary success: the phenomena on which the antebellum author’s profession had hope of thriving—the widespread distribution and consumption of literary texts—paradoxically threatened to alienate him from consumers, inhibiting his quest for an audience.

It was at this time of heightened anxiety about the literary market—amid growing concerns about his reputation and financial security, not to mention his engagement to Sophia Peabody in 1839—that Hawthorne turned to children’s literature, a popular genre with a fast-growing market in America, as a potential remedy for his troubles. In fact, one useful way to read his early career is to view it as a series of frustrated efforts to transform himself from a poorly paid, anonymous magazine “scribbler” into a full-fledged professional author through writings increasingly directed at children. It was a chance not only to prove himself by committing to what many believed was a great moral undertaking of the age but also to attract an enthusiastic audience of reformers, parents, and children willing to support such books. What Hawthorne initially saw in children’s literature was a medium in which he might stand out, using it to reshape, at as early an age as possible, the literary tastes he believed were leading adult readers to look elsewhere for their amusement.

While Hawthorne was a prolific children’s author—dedicating himself to juvenile literature in 1839–44 and returning to it again in 1851, penning in the process several book collections as well as magazine sketches—comparatively little critical attention has directed itself to this part of his career. Traditionally, literary scholars have dismissed Hawthorne’s forays into children’s writing as an anomaly, an embarrassing detour in the oeuvre of an otherwise “serious” artist. For instance, one of the introductions in the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne’s writings argues that his children’s sketches are examples of “the lovingly sentimental hackwork that from the outset he was willing to undertake in order to make his way as writer.”⁴ A smaller number of critics, however, have resisted the a priori conflation of juvenile [End...