Hawthorne's Children

The Spring 2010 special edition of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review brings together ten new essays that engage with the pedagogical, historical, racial, political, and gender issues of Hawthorne's works for children. They also address questions of authorial intention, Hawthorne's public and private lives, and the ever-shifting place of children's literature in popular and academic culture. This collection is a valuable addition to the growing body of critical work focusing on Hawthorne's writings in this genre, a subject that previously claimed only one published booklength study, Laura Laffrado's 1992 Hawthorne's Literature for Children.

Laffrado provides the collection's second essay, "Hawthorne 2.0," a critical history of Hawthorne's works for children. I mention her contribution first because it contextualizes the collection as a whole. While Monika M. Elbert's introductory essay, "From the Editor's Gable," provides insight into how Hawthorne's children's works were received by critics and reviewers of his own day, as well as describing the concerns of the new essays, Laffrado details the developments and shifts in literary criticism that led to the possibility of a special issue on these writings. She traces criticism of Hawthorne's children's works from their positive reviews upon publication, to the mid-twentieth century's neglect of them as "subliterary" (32), to the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries' growing interest in them, to future directions for research made possible by the increased "digitized availability" of the works (42). Laffrado notes that the continued revision of the American literary canon allowed Hawthorne's children's works to move "from the places that they had long occupied on the margins toward the center of academic considerations" (36). She also observes that while earlier criticism "reflected a perceived requirement to appraise the literary value of the children's works," recent critical responses "rightly eschew such obligatory evaluations" (36). For instance, previous critics often used Hawthorne's description of writing children's books as "drudgery" as proof that the works held little claim to serious scholarship. Laffrado deals with the "drudgery" quote in a footnote, and suggests that this and other similar remarks may have been somewhat "overread as a result of their neat fit with academic biases of the time regarding chidlren's works" (43).

Before Laffrado traces the history of critical responses to Hawthorne's works for children, the collection's first essay, Patricia D. Valenti's "'None but Imaginative Authority': Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Progress of Nineteenth-Century (Juvenile) Literature in America," traces the production of the works themselves. Valenti addresses the whole range of Hawthorne's children's works and divides their production into three distinct periods which mark shifts in cultural and personal attitudes about children and literature. The first period (1835-37) is characterized by the constraints of genre conventions and market concerns (see his "dry-as-dust" [2] contributions to Samuel Goodrich's popular Peter Parley series). The second (1840-42) sees the production of Hawthorne's historical tales (the Grandfather's Chair series and Biographical Stories), which transgress conventional genre boundaries by their combination of imagination and history, as well as their theories of children and pedagogy as influenced by Hawthorne's personal associations with the Peabody sisters and other Transcendentalists. The third period (1850-53) finds Hawthorne established as both author and family man. These professional and personal positions of "establishment," Valenti argues, allow him the freedom to compose his mythological tales (A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys and its sequel Tanglewood Tales) within "a literary context of his own making, not one imposed upon him by the conventions of a genre or the expectations of a culture or the demands of the marketplace" (13). Valenti's overview of Hawthorne's whole career as a children's writer is a useful beginning to the collection, which goes on to examine individual works or specific themes in a range of his works. The essay also prefigures—with its use of letters, journal entries, and the presence of...