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[1] [Reminiscences of My Brother from His Childhood through the 1830s] (1870–1871) Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne (1802–1883), Nathaniel’s older sister, was his closest companion and confidante during their childhood in Salem and adolescentyearsinRaymondandSebagoLake ,Maine,andshehelpedhimreadforcollege prior to his admission to Bowdoin. An extremely well-read person, she later supported Nathaniel during his editorship of the American Magazine of Useful andEntertainingKnowledgein1836bysubmittingpiecesforpublication,andshe collaboratedwithhimonPeterParley’sUniversalHistory,ontheBasisofGeography in1836and1837.WritinginNathanielHawthorneandHisWife(1884),hernephew Julian remembered her as his father’s literary conscience but acknowledged the reclusive disposition that, inherited from their mother, she shared with her brother, in contrast to their younger sister Louisa’s sociability: [F]rom an exaggerated . . . Hindoo-like construction of . . . seclusion[, their] mother] . . . withdrew entirely from society. . . . Such behavior . . . could not fail to have its effect on the children. They had no opportunity to know what social intercourse meant; their peculiarities and eccentricities were . . . negatively encouraged. . . . It is saying much for the sanity and healthfulness of [their] minds . . . that their loneliness distorted their judgment . . . so little as it did. Elizabeth . . . [had] an understanding in many respects as commanding and penetrating as that of her famous brother; a cold, clear, dispassionate common-sense, softened by a touch of humor. . . . “The only thing I fear,” her brother once said, “is the ridicule of Elizabeth.” As for Louisa, . . . she was more commonplace than [either] of them; a pleasant, refined, sensible, feminine personage, with considerable innate sociability. (1:4–5) Elizabeth composed the epistolary reminiscences that follow at the request of James T. Fields, who liberally drew details about her brother’s early life from them for his “Our Whispering Gallery” series on Hawthorne in the Atlantic Monthly (1871). The value of all her letters at the time was that they provided early personal information her brother had been unwilling to share even with XZ hawthorne in his own time [2] intimates such as Fields. Here Fields learned, for instance, that Hawthorne relished crime stories and was especially fond of the Newgate Calendar; delighted in reading through cookbooks for old New England recipes; wanted to join as its resident historian Charles Wilkes’s 1830s–1840s naval expedition through the Pacific, to Antarctica, and along the American northwest coast; and extended his loyalty to college friends such as George B. Cheever, whom he visited in jail after Cheever was flogged and sued for libel over a temperance tract he published in 1835. Fields incorporated in his text the two letters Elizabeth enclosed with her letter of 13 December 1870; they deal with Hawthorne’s travels with Uncle Samuel Manning through New Hampshire, where they stopped in Farmington and at the Shaker village in Canterbury. Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne to James T. Fields, 12? December 1870 My dear Mr Fields The reason I did not write to you immediately is that I sprained my right wrist, a fortnight ago, in getting out of a wagon in the evening; I can hardly hold a pen yet. In some Portland[, Maine,] newspapers, within a year, some communications , relative to my brother, and purporting to be written by friends of his have appeared. I have not seen any of them, therefore I do not know how much credit they are entitled to. But my cousin Richard C. Manning told me some things that were in them which had been told to him, for he had not seen them himself. One was a letter from an early acquaintance, who had been my brother’s companion in many rambles and fishing excursions, and afterwards met him in Europe,where,my brother said that he had hardly been more charmed than when, so many years ago, they sat “looking over Thomas Pond at the slopes of Rattlesnake Mountain”or something to that effect .I believe that to be true,because I remember the place,which was one of his favorites.Perhaps you have seen those newspapers.You know my brother was once an inhabitant of Maine, though but for a short time, except as a student . We lived in Raymond, on one side of the Sebago, then a Pond, now a Lake.We spent one summer there when he was twelve years old,and became permanent residents two years after. It did him a great deal of good, in many ways. It was a new place, with few inhabitants, far away “from churches and schools,”so of course he was taught nothing; but he became a good shot,and Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne [3] an excellent fisherman...

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