Hawthorne's "New Literature for the Young"

Abstract

Hawthorne's "New Literature for the Young" Elizabeth Goodenough (bio) Hawthorne's Literature for Children, by Laura Laffrado. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Published between 1835 and 1853, Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings for children are representative of every kind of literature for the young that burgeoned in antebellum America. In forms as diverse as history and fairy tale, biographical sketch and Sunday school tract, geography and myth, these writings span the two decades of Hawthorne's emergence as a major literary artist. Nevertheless, because they were considered hackwork, students of Hawthorne have neglected them until recently. Calvin Schorer's unpublished dissertation (University of Chicago, 1948) remained the only extended examination of this material until Nina Baym included it in The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (1982) and Frederick Newberry devoted a chapter of Hawthorne's Divided Loyalties (1987) to The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair (1851). Of this now forgotten New England history, Baym startled Hawthorne scholars by claiming that the author "had never been in firmer control of matter and manner than in this series," then praised A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852) as "his most complex and successful framed narrative." Because Hawthorne adapted the first classical myths for children into English and is often credited with inaugurating the American literary focus on the child in "The Gentle Boy" (1832), a book-length study of all his writings for and about children is long overdue. Laura Laffrado's Hawthorne's Literature for Children fills a significant gap simply by calling attention to what a rich field of inquiry Hawthorne's six books for children represent. Surveying The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair (originally published in 1841 as three brief volumes: Grandfather's Chair, Liberty Tree, and Famous Old People), Biographical Stories for Children (1842), A Wonder-Book (1851), and Tanglewood Tales (1853) in four chapters, Laffrado points out that all of his juvenile works are collections. She examines his use of the framed narrative as a way of lending adhesion to these [End Page 183] texts, emphasizing that through fictive narrators like Grandfather, Mr. Temple, and Eustace Bright the author systematically distances himself from the stories that he tells. Arguing that in writing for children Hawthorne "is attempting to establish a certain mode of discourse, a way in which he can write confidently" (3), she sees him escaping financial insecurity and his struggles as a writer, "his own daily reality and personal history" (8), through three auctorial personas who differ from him in age, status, and experience. In the fireside storytelling of Grandfather's Chair Laffrado presents him experimenting with what he called "neutral territory," described a decade later in the preface to The Scarlet Letter as "somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other" (7). Adducing this unusual domain, which Hawthorne later attested was congenial to the romance writer's work, Laffrado finds a plausible formula for explaining the success of both the Whole History and A Wonder-Book. Laffrado's biographical framework thus relates the production of children's books to the familiar contours of Hawthorne's career—a protracted and solitary apprenticeship, a burst of creative power, then a sudden, painful decline. The sunny pastoralism of A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys is inevitably associated with the golden age of Hawthorne's personal and professional life, and the discussion of Tanglewood Tales, the final product of the author's two most prolific years, offers some biographical facts to suggest why Hawthorne's vision had soured so dramatically in a sequel written only eighteen months after the first book of myths. It is less clear, however, in chapter 2 why Biographical Stories for Children, written within a year of the Whole History, remained unfinished and is so inferior a work. Why, for example, does Laffrado liken Hawthorne in 1841, returning from Brook Farm eager to marry Sophia Peabody, to Edward Temple, suddenly "confined in misery-inducing circumstances," blindfolded in a darkened room (42)? Although her secondary sources are meticulously documented, primary research materials—family journals and letters, The American Notebooks—might have added fresh...