Blithedale Revised: Nathaniel Hawthorne, E. P. Whipple, and the Author-Critic Feedback Loop

Abstract

On May 2, 1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne sent the completed manuscript of his new novel, a tale about a botched utopian scheme tentatively titled Hollingsworth: A Romance, to the rising critical talent Edwin Percy Whipple. Though Hawthorne was generally wary of critics, Whipple's reviews of Hawthorne's two previous novels in the popular Graham's Magazine had impressed Hawthorne so forcibly that before handing his new manuscript over to Ticknor and Fields, he sent it to Whipple for one last round of feedback. As Hawthorne quipped in the accompanying letter, Behold a huge bundle of scribble, which you have thoughtlessly promised to look over! If you find it beyond your powers, hand it over to Ticknor at once, and let him send it to the Devil; but before that happens, I should be glad to have it looked over by a keen, yet not unfriendly eye, like yours. Nobody has read it, except my wife; and her sympathy, though very gratifying, is a little too unreserved to afford me the advantages of criticism. After all, should you spy ever so many defects, I cannot promise to amend them; the hardens very soon after I pour it out of my melting-pot into the mould. (16:536) (1) Though Hawthorne could not promise to implement Whipple's proposed revisions, he was nonetheless anxious for his friend's opinion. And despite his avowed reticence to alter the metal once hardened, Hawthorne did make changes, and substantial ones at that. In the days that followed he altered significantly the text of what would become The Blithedale Romance. The precise nature of these changes challenges established accounts of the novel's textual history, in particular the notion now held as authoritative that Hawthorne added the final chapter, Miles Coverdale's Confession, in response to Whipple's feedback. Yet the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne, that most private of authors, solicited creative advice from Whipple in the first place also reveals the increasingly tangled relationship between authors and critics in antebellum America. Though Hawthorne's influence left a clear imprint on Melville's work, inscribed quite literally as it was in the dedication to Moby-Dick, it was not to Melville but rather to Whipple that Hawthorne turned for advice regarding his own writing. The two men in fact had much in common. Like Hawthorne, Whipple was from Salem and received a self-education of sorts from the Salem Athenaeum Library. As they grew older, both men spent the 1840s slowly building their reputations in and around Boston and eventually formed ties with Ticknor and Fields. Yet while Hawthorne's recognition came late, by 1850 Whipple was already the most respected critic in the country, as well as one of its most popular essayists (Fig. 1). Like Hawthorne's tales, Whipple's critical pieces were twice-told, appearing first in an array of prestigious periodicals before finding more permanent form in a series of collections, nearly all of which went through several editions. Between 1843, when an essay upon Thomas Babington Macaulay (to whom Whipple was frequently compared) appeared in the Boston Miscellany, and 1848, when his first collection, Essays and Reviews, was published, Whipple wrote a series of perceptive, temperate essays on subjects central to the nation's cultural development, from Rufus Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America and Daniel Neal's History of the Puritans to figures active in shaping that development, such as Daniel Webster and William Prescott. (2) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] His critical vision was equally judicious and comprehensive on foreign subjects, which he treated in essays upon topics ranging from Byron and Wordsworth, English poetry anthologies and Elizabethan dramatists, to American literature's arch-rival Sydney Smith, most notorious for his infamous barb, Who in the four quarters of the globe reads an American book? (3) Critics and criticism were also favorite subjects for Whipple and topics he treated extensively in essays upon not only Macaulay and Smith but also British critics as a whole, contemporary Shakespeare criticism, and Coleridge as philosophical critic. …