I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
After writing about The Scarlet Letter yesterday, I’ve begun reading it. So why not continue to consider it for today’s Tuesday Book Club post?
Hawthorne’s emergence as a successful author
I like to learn a bit about the authors, philosophers, and other thinkers and writers I share about here. It gives some color to their work, and some context.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, but didn’t see significant success as a writer until the publishing of his novel The Scarlet Letter in 1850. One of the first mass-produced books in the United States, it became an instant bestseller, with 2,500 copies purchased in the first ten days.
Prior to completing the novel, Hawthorne had been writing for over 20 years. He had worked various jobs including, right before completing the novel, a government job at the Custom House where the U.S. Customs Services collected taxes on imported goods at the port of Salem. He lost this job in 1848 due to a change in presidntial administration; Hawthorne was a Democrat whereas the new president Zachary Taylor was a Whig. At this time, the spoils system a.k.a. a patronage system meant that government jobs were handed out to supporters, friends, and relatives. In 1883 the Pendleton Act was passed, and the spoils system was largely (but not entirely as we know!) replaced by a nonpartisam merit-based system.
Hawthorne was thus in his mid-forties when he found success as a writer. And he only did so because of a presidential election that didn’t go his way! He was not pleased by his dismissal and even wrote a letter of protest to the Boston Daily Advertiser.
The world is the luckier for that act of fate that removed him from his job. He hadn’t been able to write while working, telling the poet Longfellow:
I am trying to resume my pen … Whenever I sit alone, or walk alone, I find myself dreaming about stories, as of old; but these forenoons in the Custom House undo all that the afternoons and evenings have done. I should be happier if I could write. (From Edwin Haviland Miller’s biography of Hawthorne)
Reading of Hawthorne’s life inspires me to put more energy towards my own creative projects!
Hester is introduced, with her letter “a”
Hawthorne introduces Hester Prynne in Chapter 2 of The Scarlet Letter:
When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter “A.” It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.
Later, he continues:
And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out and made a halo of the misfortune and igmonimy in which she was enveloped. It may be true that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which dres all eyes and, as it were, transfigured the wearer—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time—was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
What beautiful writing and what a way to launch the story!