History and Place in the Nineteenth Century: Irving and Hawthorne in Westminster Abbey

Through their reflections on Westminster Abbey, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne explore questions about the place of an American author on the world stage. Irving’s positions the past as subservient to the present, probably as a result of America’s newly re-established independence from the mother country after the War of 1812. Hawthorne’s sketches on English life, on the other hand, depict the past not as fading into oblivion but as immortal, a stance that perhaps reflects America’s struggle for self-redefinition in the face of the national dissolutionment threatened by the approaching civil war. For Hawthorne, and in part for Irving as well, Old England is the seedbed of New England—a place in which an American can more fully comprehend his or her own place in the world. For both authors, the past as represented by Westminster Abbey is a productive and interactive site of literary appreciation, development, participation, and critique.