Hawthorne in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life,Drawn from Recollections,Interviews, and Memoirs by Family,Frie

[ Reminiscences of a Childhood in Concord in the 1840s] ( 1891)

[54] [Reminiscences of a Childhood in Concord in the 1840s] (1891) [Annie Sawyer Downs] Born in Manchester, New Hampshire, before 1840, Annie Sawyer Downs (ca. 1836–1901) settled with her family in Concord, where they stayed until 1852, when they moved to Haverhill, Massachusetts. Downs’s father, Dr. Benjamin Sawyer, practiced homeopathic medicine and occasionally treated Sophia Hawthorne and Lidian Emerson. Because Downs did not compose them until 1891, her reminiscences interweave distant childhood memories with facts and anecdotes that did not emerge until midcentury or later about relations among the Hawthornes, Margaret Fuller, the Alcotts, Henry Thoreau, and the Emersons. Like most nineteenth-century writers who commented on Concord’s attraction, Downs states that its idyllic atmosphere made “heroic examples” out of the everyday lives of these figures, but she is more unguarded in her enthusiasm than most, exclaiming that the mere mention of the figures’ names “bear[s] for me a conjuror’s spell” (103). At times, however, Downs assumes the role of smalltown gossip, as when she reports that “the Concord ladies” never appreciated Fuller’s modernity or “fine sentiments,” and quotes Thoreau’s unmarried Aunt Maria’s dismissal of Fuller’s charm: “All bosh, my dear! . . . [W]hen a woman does not know herself what she wants to say, how can she expect anybody else to find out?” (97). Similarly, though she reports the apocryphal tale about an exchange between Emerson and Thoreau during Henry’s famous night in jail—“Henry,” asked Emerson, “why are you here?” “Waldo,” replied Thoreau, “why are you not here?”—Downs says the community’s sympathy was not with either of them but with Sam Staples, “the irate sheriff who declared in season and out . . . that ‘he’d a let [Thoreau] stay until he got enough of it’” (100). . . . [T]o those acquainted with the circumstances, it does not appear surprising that so many remarkable persons were attracted to Concord,Massachusetts , between 1830 and 1880. The name of the town is itself significant of the character and aim of its founders. What appears to have been the most important factor in the fashioning of Concord character was the presence in the settlement from a very early period of an unusual number of books. The [54] [54] XZ Annie Sawyer Downs [55] fact that there were so many books is probably due to the liberal education and easy circumstances of the founders, and the wide and constant use of the books themselves, to the sheltered situation of the town, and that it never offered any inducements to trade or manufacturers. Mr. Hawthorne used to say Concord character was like the Concord river,—so slow that even Henry Thoreau never was quite certain it had any current! However that may be, it is undoubtedly true that there never has been in Concord any sympathy with the hurry, distraction, and never-ending whirl characterizing adjacent towns and cities.On the contrary,circumstances have always favored plain living,honest speech,and a singular quality of condition which may have existed in Utopia, but I know not where else. And what more could be desired to render a beautiful village fit residence for poets,orators,and genius generally than ...proximity to Boston and Harvard College, an appreciative constituency, a history of two hundred years, and numerous woods, fields, and thickets wherein to roam at will? Only one thing more, that this paradise should be inexpensive, even cheap, which was exactly what it was when in 1835 Ralph Waldo Emerson made his home in the “Old Manse,” which has been for more than a hundred years the harbor where the whole Emerson family have put in when they needed repairs in mind, body, or estate. . . . But when I first remember the Old Manse, Mr. Hawthorne, not Mr. Emerson , was living in it. . . . Hawthorne’s reason for coming to the Old Manse was very much what Emerson’s had been. He was just married, had nothing to live on, and desired a cheap rent as well as congenial society for his wife, himself being not only indifferent but intolerant of society. Margaret Fuller, the Channings, George William Curtis, the Thoreaus . . . and Alcotts were names I oftenest heard when a child. Another family exercised perhaps even more direct influence upon our own household. . . . This was the family of Mr. Minot Pratt, who had been among the most enthusiastic and persevering of the Brook Farm community, and who when forced to acquiesce in its abandonment, continued to practice through a...